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As always, this is the thread in which one can post reactions to any film released this year that doesn't already have a thread created for it; if enough posts accumulate in a bipartisan manner for the same film, a new thread might be created — if a filibuster-proof majority of moderators are willing to do so and the CriterionForum Budget Office decrees that the new thread is deficit neutral. Please limit yourself to one film per post — even if that means a few consecutive posts after a day-long trip to the multiplex — as the mods have hard enough jobs already without having to try to split your 1,000-word treatise defining "disasteurism" in the context of Roland Emmerich's Moonfall and Michael Bay's Ambulance into two different threads. Everyone and anyone is encouraged to offer their thoughts on any 2022 release that provokes a reaction, whether it's a hidden art house gem or the 53rd entry in a big budget franchise.

While it is an indisputable fact that change is scary and bad, I'm going to try something a little different this year: instead of a throwing together a big snarky list of possible projects that may be coming out in 2022 — one that just rehashes more comprehensive lists like Playlist's 100 Most Anticipated Films of 2022 or David Hudson's list from Criterion.com, and would almost certainly include a ton of films that were originally pegged to be released over the previous two years and/or may not actually come out this year — I'm going to briefly touch on the handful of films I'm personally most excited or curious about. I encourage you to do the same as we slog through the first days of the new year... and if no one bites, we'll go back to the big snarky list next year.

DarkImbecile's Most Anticipated of 2022:

Honorable Mention for a Movie That People Will Actually See: Avatar 2 (James Cameron) — Of all the many, many big-budget blockbuster franchise features set to be released this year, this is the one I'm most curious about (apologies to Mission: Impossible 7). Cameron has consistently managed to find new and interesting ways to make his spectacles feel truly eventful and groundbreaking at the time, whether that translates into quality and cultural staying power (Aliens and T2: Judgement Day) or more ephemeral objects that nevertheless run circles around almost every other mega-budget release these days (True Lies and, uh, Avatar). Whether it'll actually be any good, I have no idea, but it's highly unlikely that it won't be worth talking about either way.

10.) Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg) — Cronenberg going back to the horror well with Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, and Kristen Stewart? Say no more.

9.) Babylon (Damien Chazelle) — Surprisingly, there are still some memberships available in the official club of people who thought First Man was one of the best films of 2018! I continue to find it remarkable that lame controversies about jazz, flags, and botched awards ceremonies dominate nearly every discussion of one of the most talented young directors making movies for adults in the studio system, and am already steeling myself for the cinephilic discourse around his new film's representation of early Hollywood — but none of that dampens my excitement to see what Chazelle does with the era and stars Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie.

8.) Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook) — The Criterion Channel's recent New Korean Cinema collection spurred me to go beyond the handful of Park's films I had seen, and the combination of his deft formal touch and palpable enthusiasm for subverting narrative and genre expectations made his one of the more exciting and fun set of films I've discovered of late. What sounds like a twisty murder mystery featuring Tang Wei (Lust, Caution) seems ripe for his sensibility.

7.) Women Talking (Sarah Polley) & Men (Alex Garland) — I'm going to cheat here and include two seemingly very different projects from acclaimed directors — one a drama centered around abuse allegations in a closed-off Mennonite colony and the other a secretive high-concept genre film — because as much as I like the auteurs involved, the main attraction for me in both is Jessie Buckley, who has consistently been my favorite part of small indies (Beast), stacked ensembles (The Lost Daughter), and high-concept headfucks (I'm Thinking of Ending Things). These movies will probably both be good, and Buckley will probably be one of the primary reasons.

6.) Triangle of Sadness (Ruben Östlund) — Like several others here, I loved Östlund's Palme-winning The Square, and all indications are his expertise at delivering the comedy of discomfort will be on full display in his latest, which is apparently set on a yacht in the world of modeling. Hopefully this will be at Cannes and the other festivals this year.

5.) The Northman (Robert Eggers) — Eggers has made two of the best period genre films of the 21st century — largely because of the incredible depth of detail in the language and design he infuses into those films — and I'm fervently hoping he's able to maintain that precision of vision, as well as his willingness to follow that vision in weird and unsettling directions, at a larger scale for this Viking epic.

4.) Bardo (or False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths) (Alejandro González Iñárritu) — Another divisive filmmaker whose work I find consistently compelling and occasionally great, Iñárritu has returned to Mexico to make a dark Spanish-language comedy with no major international stars. From the handful of set photos floating around, it appears that Iñárritu is still doing something ambitious and visually dynamic (which cinematographer Darius Khondji should help deliver), but it'll be interesting to see if he goes for something less kinetic and more philosophical than his last couple of films.

3.) Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese) — I mean, obviously. But also: One of my favorite elements of The Irishman was Scorsese's interest in using American history as a tool to contrast what kind of country this really is with what it perceives itself to be, and this story is ripe for opportunities to continue to do so.

2.) Disappointment Blvd. (Ari Aster) — I love just about everything Ari Aster has done thus far in his career — from delightfully deranged shorts to the one-two punch of Hereditary/Midsommar — so his new film was always going to be high on any list like this one for me. The prospect of his working with Joaquin Phoenix on something outside the horror genre (though apparently still demented and unsettling, as one would hope) only further heightens my expectations, even if I doubt reports that it will end up being a four-hour epic.

1.) Blonde (Andrew Dominik) — The mere combination of Dominik and Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe had me very excited for this when it looked like it was aiming for the festival circuit last year, but after the film was pulled at the last minute from a Venice premiere, Dominik seemingly won a standoff with Netflix to retain his cut — including graphic sexual content and Dominik's typical mass-audience-alienating aesthetic. Fascinated to see what Dominik and de Armas have done with an iconic personage, especially now that it's clear they swung for the fences.

I tried to include only films I was reasonably confident would be released in 2022 (hence the absence of fingers-crossed projects from Malick, Glazer, Fincher, Wes Anderson, and many others), but even with that caveat there were literally dozens of other films that could have been on this list — many I was unaware of before reading the Playlist compilation linked above. I highly recommend digging into it to stoke your excitement for the year in cinema, and sharing those that do so.

I think the Wes Anderson seems 100% certain it’ll be ready at least for the Fall fests if not Cannes - I don’t think he’d be going into production on his follow up to that one in the spring as has been indicated if it would delay post work for this film.

He was still shooting in the fall, so Cannes seems like a quick turnaround, but here’s hoping you’re right!

If it affects your desire to see Mission: Impossible 7 DarkImbecile apparently last Summer a train stunt for the film was shot in my local area! (In Stoney Middleton, which is close to the original plague village of Eyam) Which goes to prove the old adage (that I have just made up) that once you have visited the Peak District there remains nothing else left to do on Earth except to shoot yourself into space in a rocket!

That series has become the most dependable and fun big-budget action franchise around, so the latest entry already had my curiosity, but now it has my attention

I'm the right age to have a fair amount of nostalgia for the first two Scream movies, which managed to carry off fairly well what turns out to be a difficult balancing act of commenting on its genre while also being a solid example of it; as the later sequels and nearly all of the wave of ripoffs demonstrate, it's remarkably easy to make something superficially and unimaginatively 'meta' while utterly failing at the basics of executing a minimally watchable slasher.

In that respect, this new Scream — there's a halfway convincing reason it's not titled Scream 5, despite being a direct sequel to the previous movies — does a passable enough job of reheating the old recipes, but I think the general critical acceptance of the movie is rooted in appreciation for its

Spoiler

mockery of toxic fandoms

more than its mediocre execution as a horror film. While it's better than the most recent entries, any hope that this Scream could somehow match the grim hipness of the '90s originals fades pretty quickly when the few deviations and subversions of the original films' formula run into the need to archly cover the same well-trod ground, and it becomes clear that any cleverness brought to this entry won't extend to taking it anywhere truly new and interesting.

The new cast of knife-fodder teens are the usual blend of forgettable and attractive, and the returning original cast members are game enough — Neve Campbell in particular does an admirable job of exuding the kind of weariness with knife-wielding serial killers one might expect from someone in her character's situation — but that's not quite enough to overcome the feeling that whatever scraps left to be mined from this franchise probably aren't worth the effort anymore.

Aubrey Plaza is an actress I've regularly liked in various roles when I've seen her work, but also one I've always seen as a performer who leverages her natural charm and talent to give variations on the same character each time out to varying degrees of success. So I was very pleasantly surprised that her performance in John Patton Ford's Emily the Criminal is truly transformative, to the extent that there are moments where her demeanor and physicality are unrecognizable; her character's only-occasionally-suppressed anger and dissatisfaction with the options she's offered by the social and economic structures of modern American life are palpable and ever-present, and her unwillingness to be led quietly down the slaughterhouse chute to a life of usurious interest payments and exploited labor make this low-budget crime thriller more compelling than its component parts would be without her.

Patton Ford ably lends the scuzzier parts of Los Angeles an anxious tension with an often handheld but never overly affected camera and what seemed to be mostly natural lighting, while his script convincingly establishes the motivation for Emily's steadily escalating involvement with the world of low-level organized crime without ever juicing the action or suspense to a level inconsistent with the realism the rest of the film has established. The relative restraint with which the plot is executed appropriately keeps the focus on Plaza and the character she and Patton Ford have created while never dragging or feeling padded out. Unlike some of the other films at Sundance this year, one gets the sense that the genre elements of Emily the Criminal are actually essential to the execution of the tightly focused character study — and not just a way to get what would otherwise be a straight drama the financing and attention that flows more easily to something with tacked-on horror or crime elements.

Even if limited focus and ambition keep this from reaching heights beyond those attainable by a very solidly executed B-movie, I really appreciated the clarity and tightness of the writing and direction and what to me felt like a big step forward for a simmering, sexy, driven Plaza.

I'll join the many among those who have seen it to reductively note that Goran Stolevski's You Won't Be Alone is basically what you might expect to get if Terrence Malick was convinced to direct a low-budget Macedonian folk horror, and while I spent the first 20+ minutes feeling pretty skeptical of this particular mashing of style and subject matter, I guess I'm enough of a sucker for philosophical voiceovers and handsome photography of people interacting with nature that this one eventually won me over to its side.

Stolevski's depiction of Macedonian witchcraft is distinct enough in its often bloody workings to be interesting for its regional specificity alone, but the film really starts to connect once the main character — a young woman who has been hidden from the world her entire childhood — is given the power to assume the form of other people and animals. Her ability to explore the world and the people of the rural, medieval Balkans from different perspectives — combined with the stunted syntax she has to articulate these experiences in voiceover — result in an affecting, tragic examination of the conflict between the roles we may want and those that are forced upon us.

This conceit delivers enough on an emotional and conceptual level to overcome some uneven execution — especially early on and in some visual effects sequences — and Sara Klimoska, Noomi Rapace, and Alice Englert give particularly good performances. This one has already locked in distribution, a trailer, and a release date this April, and I suspect it will be worth checking out even if you're not quite as susceptible to Malickisms as I am; I'm also curious to see whether Focus can pull an A24-style trick to market it in such a way that it draws some general audiences in addition to what will almost certainly be a more receptive arthouse crowd.

As much as I enjoy the relative restraint and the more deliberate pace of indie horror that gets the 'elevated' label these days, sometimes I just want something that embraces the genre and allows itself to be unabashedly gross and gruesome, so it was fun that the one Sundance Midnight feature I managed to catch was Hanna Bergholm's Hatching, a Finnish fairy tale centered around a really great performance from Siiri Solalinna as a young teen dealing with an oppressive mommy-blogging parent, puberty, jealousy, and the complications that ensue when she brings home and cares for a giant egg from the woods.

Regarding Solalinna's performance (major spoilers better left unread if your have any interest in catching this):

Spoiler

She does double duty as an innocent young girl on the cusp of puberty and as the later iterations of what hatches from the egg as it transitions from a giant, gooey, skeletal-looking human-bird hybrid to a more aggressive, self-destructive, and impulsive teen version of herself, and she so effectively changes her physicality and facial expressivity between roles that I'd bet a large percentage of viewers won't realize that she's playing both roles, or will at least have to check the credits to confirm. It's a really striking how successfully she pulls off a very difficult split performance on which the success of the entire movie hinges, especially since this appears to be her first and only credited role; one hopes the Scandinavian film industry pays attention.

While some of the characterizations can be a bit broad — especially when it comes to Sophia Hekkilä's cartoonishly self-involved mother — and some of the editing feels a bit choppy, particularly early on, the central allegory and some strong creature effects should be enough to carry a receptive horror audience through to the bloody end. Warning for the queasy: this film pushes its metaphorical treatment of

Spoiler

a particular eating disorder

to such delightfully gross extremes that my usually stoic viewing partner was repeatedly cringing and covering his face for those scenes. As is often the case with films that end up pushed into this category, I can't pretend this is anything truly great (outside of the central performance), but it's plenty fun enough to recommend, particularly for horror fans; looks like IFC Midnight will be releasing it in April (that trailer's pretty spoilery, FYI).

Uh, Moonfall sounds like quite a trip!

Despite being heavily indebted to the work of Yorgos Lanthimos, Riley Stearns' sci-fi adjacent black comedy Dual ends up having enough interesting ideas — and, maybe more importantly, being funny enough — to keep it from being written off as merely derivative of that style. Karen Gillan plays both Sarah and Sarah's Double, a clone generated by a company offering dying people a chance to leave behind a reasonable enough facsimile of themselves to keep their loved ones from missing them too much; by the time

Spoiler

Sarah's diagnosis changes, there's already conflict brewing between the original and what everyone else in her life seems to view as her 'better' self. Unfortunately, the government requires that there not be more than one of each person — because that would be absurd — but also grants legal recognition to clones who have established themselves as individuals, which means, of course, that the two Sarahs must fight a televised duel to the death to determine which one has the right to live.

The film nicely balances a melancholic tone with outright laugh-out-loud humor — as with my favorite moments,

Spoiler

a dvd lent to Sarah and a scene involving a crossbow and a dog

— and the world Stearns creates is full of absurd bureaucracy, social awkwardness, and an ultimately grim view on the likelihood of escaping your basic tendencies. Gillan carries her roles well, as does Aaron Paul in a supporting role as a personal trainer trying to prepare Sarah for the resolution to her situation; their deadpan, emotionless line delivery will feel familiar to those who are familiar with Lanthimos' direction, but fits well enough in the cold, pitiless world Stearns is presenting to feel justified.

Despite feeling that this was pretty good overall, I do have one question about the film's conclusion that doesn't make sense to me, which may be an unfortunate function of watching too many movie back-to back-to-back. Since this was purchased in one of Sundance's larger deals, I assume it will be widely available enough soon for someone to offer some insight:

Major spoilers

Why would the double's plan — which Sarah's boyfriend and mother are aware of and supporting — be to pretend to be the original Sarah? It seems to unnecessarily complicate things when she could have easily arrived at the duel as the double, be declared the winner, and take over the life she wanted without having to fake anything.

For a good while Moonfall seemed like the generic, bombastic, semi-conspiratorial disaster film that Emmerich apparently likes to make (I say apparently because I've only seen Universal Soldier and White House Down, which are some of his less ambitious films — no chance of Earth's destroyal in either, as far as I can remember), but at one point it takes a turn that's a bit more entertainingly wild than the film had been before that.

Spoiler

Essentially we understand that not only is the Moon a megastructure (the characters even go inside it and see the cogs in the machine) but also a sentient one, whose mind consists of the combined consciousness of its creators — human ancestors far more technologically advanced that we could ever hope to be that were destroyed by the AI they created, which became intelligent and now wants to destroy the last remaining Moon so that life can't begin anew after humans go extinct. I can't really tell if Emmerich decided to go a bit crazier for this film or if some of his previous efforts are also quite out there, but this definitely goes deeper than the simple Moon is falling plot I expected.

Also it has lots of characters and many of them have their own separate plot points — Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson and John Bradley go to the Moon and that's roughly half of the film's second part; on Earth Berry's ex-husband has to convince the military to hold off on shooting nukes toward the Moon and the main characters' children have to get to a base (and find Michael Peña and his family) but are constantly interrupted by a gang of thiefs.

Considering all that (and the fact that the film isn't particularly short) it's kind of strange how rushed the beginning and ending feel — once the revelation that the Moon is out of orbit suddenly happens, there's almost no room to breathe before all the action begins. I'd say that the action is roughly equal parts sort of fun and boring, but at a point the film definitely gets exhausting.

The most interesting part to me is what the reactions the film will elicit not in terms of action or entertainment, but sort of... politically, I suppose. The film's most important character — a staggering genius that immediately corrects the math of some of the world's best scientists and turns out to have been correct about basically everything concerning the Moon — is a huge conspiracy theorist that claims to be a doctor and holds meetings attended by hippie stoners and old MAGA types. Not only does he directly save the world by sacrificing himself (and becoming a part of the Moon), but the mission takes place only because important people finally start believing him. In this day and age conspiracy theorists are very much frowned upon — and not without good reason — but here we have a film that clearly supports those people (though perhaps that's common with Roland, most explicitly in that Shakespeare film). Not something that bothered me, but something I thought about while watching.

I didn't outright dislike any of the Sundance films I managed to catch, but most settled in the netherworld between 'fine' and 'good' — too many worthwhile ideas and stylistic choices to be entirely dismissed, but too inconsistent in execution to recommend without qualification. Miriamo Diallo's Master falls solidly in that middling space: crammed with observations about the oppressive weight of American history on the backs of those trying to realize its most idealized promises, but also halfheartedly committed to a horror element that doesn't quite gel.

Regina Hall stars as the titular 'Master' at an elite northeastern college — the first African-American to hold the position — who is confronted with reminders large and small of the institutional entrenchment of whiteness; Zoe Renee does very strong work as a freshman similarly struggling with the school's past and present treatment of students of color. That history of hostility is personified in the form of a malevolent witch that supposedly stalks the campus, and the imagery associated with the horror elements of the film veers from effective and symbolically meaningful to cliched and tonally inconsistent with the rest of the film; you can almost imagine the development meeting where Diallo was pushed to "make it scarier" to secure financing.

The most interesting and provocative element of the film is

Spoiler

Amber Gray's professor, who is heavily telegraphed as being a Rachel Dolezal-type racial imposter (though Diallo adds just enough ambiguity to leave it open to interpretation) and who adopts the language and posture of anti-racism in a way that adds to the discomfort and alienation of both main characters. A visual cue in our last glimpse of the character hints at a potent metaphor: a fundamentally racist society that adopts just enough of a facade of diversity and inclusion to deflect more direct challenges and keep the core structure of white supremacy intact.

If Diallo is given the chance to more directly tackle those kind of ideas outside the bounds of a genre in which she seems only inconsistently invested, it's easy to see how she might build upon the parts of Master that are genuinely unsettling and disconcerting to make something that far surpasses it.

DarkImbecile wrote: Sat Jan 29, 2022 1:44 am

domino harvey wrote: Sat Jan 29, 2022 1:33 am Navalny by all accounts is the film we’ll be hearing the most about in the coming year, for anyone prioritizing

I’ll write that up soon, but I don’t know that there’s actually that much new in it; it’s dramatic, especially if you didn’t really follow the events as they happened over the last couple years, but not as groundbreaking as you might hope from a project that was kept secret until the day before it premiered. Looks like it’ll be unfortunately topical over the next six weeks in particular, of course…

Just to add a bit to this: Daniel Roher's Navalny is noteworthy for the way it puts a face and a personality to a man most Americans couldn't pick out of a lineup even if they knew who he was from following the news; the drama of Navalny's opposition to a dangerous autocracy, his near-fatal poisoning, and his return to Russia knowing he'd be imprisoned is definitely heightened after seeing him interact with his family and hearing him explain his willingness to risk his life defying Putin. But beyond a general (and generally understandable) revulsion at the murderous criminality of the 21st century Kremlin, the doc just skims over what Navalny believes and what he wants for Russia.

It's not entirely fair to criticize a documentary for not breaking news, but nearly all of the dramatic 'revelations' in the film were already widely reported in the global press, most notably the

Spoilers for Front Page News from 2020

phone call on which Navalny wheedles details from a member of the assassination team that tried to murder him.

As amazing as that scene is, it was just as amazing 18 months ago when it first happened, and it feels like some of the critical and audience response to the movie is inextricable from their own lack of awareness of this situation as it was unfolding. That's not their fault, but to have some larger, lasting significance beyond compiling and summarizing news reports, a film like this needs to offer some new information or perspective to those already aware of the story, and I'm not sure the brief bits of behind the scenes and interview footage Roher adds to the mix are enough to totally clear that bar.

What comes closest is the footage of Navalny preparing for and taking the return flight to Moscow, willingly re-entering the den of the lion that nearly killed him, but even here I was left with more questions than clarity about how he and his family felt about the goals and inevitable outcome of this return trip, both at the time and now that it seems there won't be any kind of popular response strong enough to free him from prison. The film also has its subject directly address his flirtation with the hard right in Russia, but not in a way that feels particularly satisfactory or enlightening. Ultimately, this is worth watching, especially if you're unfamiliar with the details, but not necessarily worthy of the elated response out of its Sundance screenings.

I considered trying to see Nikyata Jusu's Nanny early in the festival, but was somewhat deterred by mixed reviews following the premiere; after winning the US Dramatic Competition, it jumped back onto the list of priorities, and I have to say the Sundance jury did a better job evaluating this than the critics I was following.

More horror-adjacent than an actual genre piece, Jusu's film is centered on Anna Diop's Aisha, a Senegalese immigrant in New York serving as a nanny for a bougie white family and saving to bring her young son from Dakar after having been separated from him for a year. She's finding her place in the immigrant community at the same time as she's growing closer to Sinqua Walls' absurdly charming Malik, a doorman in the building where she works, but as tensions rise with her employers (including a tightly wound Michelle Monaghan, always a welcome presence), Aisha's sense that something is deeply wrong begins to loosen her hold on reality.

Where Nanny ends up in terms of plot isn't exactly surprising (and the resolution after a climactic revelation feels a little too abrupt), but what makes it work from moment to moment is Jusu's knack for character detail, immersion in cultural specificity, and notable command of the visuals; the film is both narratively and stylistically rooted in diasporic culture, with discussions of the possible motivations of mythic demigods taking place against compositions vibrant with color in a way that felt remarkably refreshing. The score and sound design are similarly strong and connected to the filmmakers' roots (Jusu is Sierra Leonean-American, and Diop was born in Senegal). There are some obvious comparisons to made between this and Miriama Diallo's fellow Sundance entry Master, which also used supernatural elements to examine the alienated Black experience in America, and which I think maybe had more complex insights but would've benefitted from the tighter focus Jusu brings to this film in delivering them.

Finally, I'd note that Diop's performance is very strong, more than capably navigating a script that requires her to waver between defiant strength and unmoored anxiety from scene to scene; she's strikingly beautiful, visually arresting in a classic movie star way, and I'd love to see her in more leading roles if this does well on the independent scene.

Pavel wrote: Tue Feb 01, 2022 2:43 pm For a good while Moonfall seemed like the generic, bombastic, semi-conspiratorial disaster film that Emmerich apparently likes to make (I say apparently because I've only seen Universal Soldier and White House Down, which are some of his less ambitious films — no chance of Earth's destroyal in either, as far as I can remember), but at one point it takes a turn that's a bit more entertainingly wild than the film had been before that.

Spoiler

Essentially we understand that not only is the Moon a megastructure (the characters even go inside it and see the cogs in the machine) but also a sentient one, whose mind consists of the combined consciousness of its creators — human ancestors far more technologically advanced that we could ever hope to be that were destroyed by the AI they created, which became intelligent and now wants to destroy the last remaining Moon so that life can't begin anew after humans go extinct. I can't really tell if Emmerich decided to go a bit crazier for this film or if some of his previous efforts are also quite out there, but this definitely goes deeper than the simple Moon is falling plot I expected.

Also it has lots of characters and many of them have their own separate plot points — Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson and John Bradley go to the Moon and that's roughly half of the film's second part; on Earth Berry's ex-husband has to convince the military to hold off on shooting nukes toward the Moon and the main characters' children have to get to a base (and find Michael Peña and his family) but are constantly interrupted by a gang of thiefs.

Considering all that (and the fact that the film isn't particularly short) it's kind of strange how rushed the beginning and ending feel — once the revelation that the Moon is out of orbit suddenly happens, there's almost no room to breathe before all the action begins. I'd say that the action is roughly equal parts sort of fun and boring, but at a point the film definitely gets exhausting.

The most interesting part to me is what the reactions the film will elicit not in terms of action or entertainment, but sort of... politically, I suppose. The film's most important character — a staggering genius that immediately corrects the math of some of the world's best scientists and turns out to have been correct about basically everything concerning the Moon — is a huge conspiracy theorist that claims to be a doctor and holds meetings attended by hippie stoners and old MAGA types. Not only does he directly save the world by sacrificing himself (and becoming a part of the Moon), but the mission takes place only because important people finally start believing him. In this day and age conspiracy theorists are very much frowned upon — and not without good reason — but here we have a film that clearly supports those people (though perhaps that's common with Roland, most explicitly in that Shakespeare film). Not something that bothered me, but something I thought about while watching.

I'm looking forward to this as I kind of loved the craziness of 2012, and this seems like that only on a much wider scale! For context 2012 is the film which features the blunt characterisation of the main character's daughter being embarrassed at having to wear nappies at an older age because she wets the bed, only to find a form of catharsis by experiencing various legitimately pants-wetting situations firsthand and eventually the entire Earth wetting itself in a giant tidal wave, leading to this astonishing final line! (Which is second in 'awkward uplifting disaster movie lines' only to the "Look, everyone's the same colour!" line about the firefighters covered in ash at the end of Volcano!)

If you've ever used one of those gravity wells at a museum — a large circular funnel where you roll in a quarter along the outer edge and watch as it spirals into the center, slowly at first, and then faster and faster in smaller and smaller circuits until the chaotically spinning coin suddenly disappears into the dark — you have a sense of what it's like to watch Abi Damaris Corbin's 892: a sense of morose inevitability pervades the film as a desperate man creates a desperate situation that only devolves as more and more people and institutions are pulled into the orbit of his actions.

Winner of a Special U.S. Dramatic Jury Award for Best Ensemble Cast at Sundance, Corbin's feature debut (based on a real incident from 2017) stars a committed, intense John Bodega as Brian Brown-Easley, a Marine veteran who walks into an Atlanta bank, declares that he has a bomb, and demands resolution to his dispute with the local Veterans Affairs office. Nicole Beharie as the branch manager and Michael K. Williams in his final role as a hostage negotiator are the most notable members of the rest of the cast, but it's ultimately very much Boyega's film, as he has to sell the erratic, emotional moments alongside quieter moments with his daughter and estranged wife, coming across as genuinely unstable but also fundamentally decent.

The narrative keeps itself tightly focused as a tense character study, but what's happening on the fringes of the main action delivers the most compelling point:

Spoiler

we see over and over again how this individual's life is disregarded, exploited, and ultimately devalued by a militarized police force, a callous and unresponsive bureaucracy, and a media less interested in structural problems than sensationalism. As it becomes clear what Brown-Easley wants and how little it would take to satisfy his grievance, the rigid inability of all these institutional actors — even when populated with decent individuals — to do the simplest, most basic things to save a man's life instead of playing their assigned roles to the bitter end feels more deeply tragic than mental illness or any of the other factors leading to this event.

Ultimately, there's not many surprises or unexpected wrinkles to this from a narrative perspective, but it stuck with me more than I anticipated immediately after it ended, largely due to how deftly Corbin and her co-writer Kwame Kwei-Armah illustrate the true hopelessness of this man's situation in the social structure into which we've encased (entombed?) ourselves. 892 works fairly well as drama, but far more incisively and memorably as social commentary; curious to see whether Corbin's interests lie more with the former or the latter in her future work.

Munich: The Edge of War (Christian Schwochow) Solid, old-fashioned spy thriller set around the Munich conference. Our hero is Chamberlain's private secretary who gets drawn into a plot by his former friend from Oxford who is now a translator in the German government. There's a certain pleasure to be had in such well-crafted, if slightly stolid, entertainment which despite being a German / UK co-production with cast members from both countries, escapes being an 80s / 90s style Europudding. It's arguably (if interestingly) soft on Chamberlain - the most interesting parts of the film for me, not least because of an excellent performance by Jeremy Irons.

I went to see Michał Węgrzyn's Gierek with reasonably keen anticipation, as the other five biopics of major European politicians from the 1970s/80s that I've seen have mostly been pretty good. The Iron Lady (2011) was the weakest, thanks to the bizarre decision to make a film about Margaret Thatcher as bland and inoffensive as possible, but Wałęsa: Man of Hope (2013) and Havel (2020) were both solid, intelligent and absorbing, The Last Mitterrand (2005) teasing and witty, and Il Divo (2008) flat-out extraordinary.

Sadly, Gierek is down there with The Iron Lady, a plodding hagiography about Edward of that ilk, who ran Poland from 1970 to 1980, both entering and leaving power thanks to controversial events in the Gdańsk shipyard (the "black Thursday" massacre of December 1970; the strikes and the rise of Solidarity in the summer of 1980). The film's thesis appears to be "yes, while Gierek undoubtedly did max out Poland's credit card in trying to turbocharge the economy, his plan would definitely have worked if he hadn't been brought down by an evil Machiavellian cabal", which historians of the era have already given the side-eye towards, and I don't know why the members of the cabal in question were given different names, especially since "General Roztocki" (Antoni Pawlicki) is so obviously Wojciech Jaruzelski that it's hilarious (although not quite as hilarious for British viewers as his equally marked resemblance to Boris Johnson's disaffected former aide Dominic Cummings, in both appearance and behaviour). Everyone concerned is now dead, so libel laws shouldn't apply unless Poland's are also posthumous.

And despite a 140-minute running time, it weirdly glosses over quite a few key details, most notably the circumstances of Gierek's fall - Lech Wałęsa isn't depicted and is only referred to briefly in passing, and unless the subtitles missed the context (highly possible; they were pretty sloppy), the word "solidarity" only appears as the literal term, not the capitalised name of the trade union that definitively proved that "People's Poland" was in reality anything but. It's a shame, because there's a lot of really fascinating history here that the film doesn't really tackle, possibly because it would have forced them to offer a far more nuanced portrait of its subject. Lead actor Michał Koterski is the son of scabrous satirist Marek Koterski, and the film could honestly have done with more of his dad's input than merely fathering Michał back in 1979.

I managed to get some time to go to the movies tonight, thinking I'd check out the black-and-white version of Nightmare Alley since this was its last night playing in my area; unfortunately (little did I know how unfortunately), I got the time wrong and missed that showing. Not one to give up on a night at the multiplex, I scanned the rest of what was offered and had to pick one of three movies I knew would likely be varying degrees of bad: Moonfall, Death on the Nile, and Blacklight. The Emmerich movie was the latest start time and over two hours long, so I scratched that one off first. I'm still pissed at Branagh for Belfast and am busy cultivating an active distaste for Gal Gadot, so I rejected Nile. Which left me with a Liam Neeson action vehicle I did not know existed a month ago, directed by Mark Williams, who I did not know existed before I looked the film up in the lobby earlier tonight. This was probably going to be bad, but a) short(er) than the other options and b) hopefully the kind of bad that goes down easily with some explosions and car chases. Maybe it would even meet the baseline level of technical competence on display in Neeson's movies with Jaume Collet-Serra or have some wacky twist I could make fun of here!

As you can probably guess: I chose poorly.

No joke: Mark Williams' Blacklight — in which Liam Neeson plays a contractor who works directly for the director of the FBI as an expert in extracting deep undercover agents, and who stumbles on a secret murder team that has assassinated a painful AOC stand-in, then teams up with a truly terrible reporter for the world's worst news outlet to reveal the truth — is one of the ~10 worst movies I have ever seen. I've suffered through direct-to-video late-career Steven Seagal movies that were better than this — and that comparison springs to mind because, like those movies, this film has to resort to the same type of painfully sad techniques to distract the audience and dance around the nearly 70-year-old Neeson's inability to do basically anything required of an actor in a movie. Not in an action movie — in a feature film that involves a character that isn't bedridden or wheelchair-bound. It is genuinely cringe-inducing to watch Neeson try to do anything as strenuous as maintain a brisk walk — I'm near certain his character is shot in the leg at one point just to give a plausible reason for his general immobility. His performance is similarly feeble, just a rote rehash of his gruff post-Taken persona delivered with about 30% of the commitment you'd expect from Bruce Willis in one of his one-day walk-on roles in a Redbox special.

And get this: Neeson is far and away the best part of the movie! His level of energy and talent blows everyone else in the cast off the screen! Even the girl playing Neeson's four-year-old granddaughter gives a bad performance — even if you grade on a curve for a four-year-old! It feels like bullying to even name the other performers associated with this film, but on the other hand, the uniformity of awful performances almost statistically cannot be their fault; I refuse to believe that any random selection of twenty of the bottom 10% of professional film actors would do this poorly if literally handed the script each morning, given cameras, and asked to figure it out on their own.

Aside from the obvious misdirection provided to actors, Williams has also produced an almost unbelievably ugly, poorly composed, and actively irritating visual experience: for example, Neeson's character suffers from moderate-to-severe OCD for no real reason, so of course the film uses an obnoxious frame skip and recentering of the image to illustrate this condition any time he thinks hard about something. Luckily for anyone who might be irritated by this entirely pointless visual cue, I would estimate it's only used somewhere between three and five dozen times in 110 minutes, so no worries there. In general, trying to guess from scene to scene whether the filmmakers will have a grasp of basic film techniques thought to have been conquered decades ago — ranging in difficulty from filming a conversation in a moving car to transitioning between camera angles in the same scene — is far and away the most suspenseful thing about the entire film.

Another of the funniest parts of the entire experience is that — aside from a scattering of low-resolution drone footage shots — not a single attempt is made to hide the fact that the film was not shot in Washington, DC (where almost the entirety of the film takes place) or even in the US (where the entirety of the film takes place). In fact, one of the other recurring visual motifs is the presence of American flags randomly attached to vehicles and walls, in a painful attempt to distract the audience from how unlike the Beltway urban Australia is.

I haven't even gotten to the script yet, which manages to so wildly misunderstand basic concepts about how law enforcement, the news media, and the federal government work that it had to have been written by people with no direct personal experience of American society, and who some time earlier had read one (1) article about COINTELPRO but then lost that article and couldn't find it again during the writing process. This would explain why they fill out the running time with the mind-numbingly banal family subplot involving Neeson attempting to connect with his semi-estranged daughter and granddaughter, who are (rightly!) reluctant to be around a man who is somehow so compulsively detail-oriented and paranoid that he teaches his preschool-age granddaughter how to establish a perimeter and identify exit strategies, but also can't remember to pick her up from school or go to her play.

As worm-ridden cherries on top of this shit sundae, Blacklight also features the single lamest action ending I've ever seen, the most terrible "reading a news report to summarize how things turned out" scene ever written and acted, and one of the worst closing credit songs I've ever heard (by this C-grade Imagine Dragons impersonator) — all packed into the last five minutes. Surely all this sloppiness and contempt for the audience is understandable, you might argue, as this is an extremely low-budget attempt to wring a little more cash from Neeson's late-career action persona... but it's not! The budget being reported for this movie is $43 million, which I can only explain as outright embezzlement and/or money laundering. I genuinely hope that's the case, because if I knew for sure that this film was a cover for criminal activity, I could at least respect it for having been successful at something. Truly atrocious to a degree you'd have to see to believe, but that I sincerely hope no one else ever will.

Okay, but other than that you'd agree that it's the best film of the year, right?

I will admit, it is currently in my top 15 of 2022

I worry that maybe in my eagerness to insult this movie I’m overselling it as some kind of Cats-like train wreck so packed with hilariously awful choices you could get high and enjoy it. Instead, it’s the kind of thing that makes you deeply sad — for yourself, for anyone with the misfortune to have their real name attached to the movie, and for this medium generally. The baseline level of creativity and competence on display is so low that it would never bother to do something wacky or even unintentionally entertaining: there is literally not one moment of this film you have not seen elsewhere already, but in those other cases it was done by people who, you know, cared even a little bit.

The King of Wuxia, a 220-minute documentary about King Hu fronted by Shih Chun and interviewing more than 40 collaborators, critics, fans, etc., recently premiered as part of a very good-looking retrospective of Taiwanese wuxia films. No idea how this could be released since it's probably too long to be an extra, but hopefully it becomes available somehow.

Second Run, I think your name is being called.

Neil LaBute has quietly made his first film in seven years, titled House of Darkness and starring Justin Long and Kate Bosworth, which is being described as a chamber-piece meets #metoo horror film, in the vein of Promising Young Woman (or In the Company of Men "flipped" as this Variety review suggests)