Girl-next-door Kathy Bauer was simply not meant for a life of marriage to a gangster, and as one of the few voices of reason in The Bikeriders, it is apparent that she was never going to shed her outsider status. Still, her wide-eyed innocence is no match for Benny’s rugged good looks, cool swagger, and romantic persistence, seeing him patiently wait outside her house all night until her boyfriend packs up and leaves out of frustration. The peril that comes with his membership in the Vandals Motorcycle Club is inconsequential – he is the type of man she never believed she would date, yet who has somehow tapped into a deep, primal lust for danger.
At first glance, it appears that this is Jeff Nichols’ take on an S.E. Hinton novel, exploring the nuances of 1960s greaser subculture with equal parts sensitivity and scepticism. Theirs is a community that looks out for its own people, fostering a rare kind of male bonding that cannot be found in mainstream society, even as they put up tough facades. The framing device which keeps returning to photojournalist Danny Lyon’s interviews lends itself far more to distant rumination than immersion though, and covers a greater span of time than Hinton’s coming-of-age stories. These are not teenagers railing against a conservative older generation, but adults realising that their glory days are slowly seeping away, while younger gangsters emerging in the scene threaten to push them out.
If that wasn’t enough to separate The Bikeriders from Hinton’s work, then the busy Chicago setting takes this story far away from the small-town decay of Tulsa, Oklahoma, being notably marked by an array of glaring vocal transformations. While Austin Butler slips easily into a Midwestern dialect and Tom Hardy mumbles his way through a nasally Marlon Brando impression, Jodie Comer fully adopts a Fargo-style accent, imitating the real Kathy from the historic photobook upon which the film is based. Her role as narrator across eight years of a tumultuous marriage fully justifies this daring commitment – in those stretches where she is present only through voiceover, it is evident that she is a misfit among misfits.
It would take someone who has never seen Goodfellas to miss the endless allusions to Martin Scorsese’s gangster epic here, with this narration being just the first of many. When we are first introduced to Benny in a brawl, the freeze frame which lands half a second before a shovel strikes the back of his head heavily evokes our first meeting with Henry Hill, and our sudden launch into a pop-rock soundtrack and voiceover only confirms the parallel. Following a jump back to the early days of Kathy and Benny’s relationship, the camera floats around a hazy bar as she lists the names of his biker friends, before the narrative eventually catches back up to the opening scene and reveals its dangerous consequences.
That The Bikeriders treads dangerously close to being derivative of a far greater influence is no reason to disregard what is otherwise an admirable film though, standing well on its own merits. Nichols shows flashes of visual inspiration around the motorcycles themselves, turning them into icons of liberation cruising along in slow-motion and piercing the darkness with bleary headlights, while the patterned period décor of Kathy’s home frequently grounds us in a far humbler, more ordinary life. The cast he gathers here including Michael Shannon and Norman Reedus also fills out the ensemble with magnetic personalities, building a lively community within the Vandals that will inevitably fall to its own recklessness.
For some members, the end arrives with a devastating motorcycle accident, while Kathy’s patience runs out after a harrowing sexual assault at a party. Most of all though, it is simply the nature of a culture that constantly renews itself that threatens to end the “golden age of motorcycles,” supplanting these middle-aged men with younger, cockier replacements. Beyond this fraternity at least, there is another type of freedom to be sought which tears away the stoic front of the strongest man, letting them finally express their stifled anguish and shame. Those who live fast and die young may be immortalised in The Bikeriders, but perhaps the true winners are those who live long enough to find their own peace, holding gratefully onto what little they have left.
The concept of self is “a construct, an act, an illusion,” college professor Gary Johnson informs his students in the opening act of Hit Man. One could almost imagine this passage being spoken by any number of other Richard Linklater characters being carried away by their own intellectualism, though unlike those haughty young adults, Gary does not believe he has anything to prove. Instead, this lecture serves as meta-commentary, woven through a montage introducing the characters he adopts in his second job. As an undercover police contractor, Gary uses his extraordinary skills of deception to convince would-be criminals that he is an assassin for hire, before unleashing the full force of the law.
The attention to detail that Gary applies to these sting operations go beyond merely fulfilling his duty. He relishes the challenge of truly fooling others, tailoring fresh hitman personas to each client who comes his way. Patrick Bateman-style psychopaths in business suits, creepy Russian mobsters with crooked smiles, gun-toting rednecks lusting for violence – Linklater swiftly moves through every archetype in the book, studying the rapport that Gary builds with his clientele before cutting to their guilty mugshots. Each job is his chance to become someone else, constantly shedding his dweeby professor image until even he begins to question whether that is merely another act in his extensive repertoire.
It is a tough sell for Glen Powell to play so drastically against type, though like Gary, he is clearly having fun adopting the idiosyncrasies of each hitman character. Perhaps his ill fit in this role is also partially the point, as when he takes on the persona of suave hitman Ron to charm his newest client Madison, Powell immediately falls back into the charismatic leading man archetype that he has built his career upon thus far. His spur of the moment decision to sway Madison away from killing her abusive husband is the first small rebellion to foreshadow the rise of the aloof, rule-breaking Ron, who certainly at least feels a lot more in tune with Powell’s natural talents than Gary’s self-conscious mannerisms. The chemistry that Ron has with Madison is instant, and so it isn’t hard to see why Gary betrays his better instincts to pursue a dangerous romance with this woman who believes he is totally different person.
Hit Man is not so much a drift away from Linklater’s indie character dramas than it is a commercial diversion, joining his list of more straightforward comedies including School of Rock and Bernie. He revels in the black humour here, exposing Gary’s disturbingly intimate knowledge of how to dispose a body, as well as his playfully insensitive attitude towards matters of life and death. That much at least he has in common with Ron, leading to risky, even violent behaviour when his new relationship is complicated by Madison’s jealous husband Ray, as well as rival police contractor Jasper.
The name of Gary’s cats Id and Ego are no doubt a glaring clue to the psychological drama that lies beneath Linklater’s comedy, eventually rendered explicit in our protagonist’s class on Freudian psychoanalytic theory and its parallel editing with an impassioned sex scene. These lectures essentially become formal markers of Gary’s development, touching on some of history’s greatest thinkers until he inevitably arrives at the nihilistic philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. “The truth is created through the integration of different points of view, and there are no absolutes, either moral or epistemological,” he ponders aloud to his students.
“If the universe is not fixed, then neither are you, and you really can become a different and hopefully, better person.”
The question of where Gary ends and where Ron begins is essentially meaningless in Hit Man. There is freedom to be found in recognising the artifice of each persona one presents to the world, abandoning hope of true self-discovery, and thus adopting whatever identity allows a life of passion and abandon. Linklater is not blind to the darkness that lies in this existentialist outlook, sinking Gary/Ron ever further into an amoral void where good and evil are equally unrewarded and unpunished, yet Hit Man’s resolution would not be nearly as bleak if the dubious journey there weren’t also so recklessly enticing.
The first layer of irony that surfaces in Angela’s job of casting workplace accident victims for an ‘occupational health and safety’ video arrives with understated derision. Contrary to the claims of the corporation commissioning this project, many of their personal anecdotes directly implicate their own employer. For the company, this culpability is irrelevant – it is much easier to feed them scripted lines advocating for their colleagues to wear proper safety equipment, implying that they are the ones at fault. But really, how would a helmet have saved the fatigued, overworked woman who slipped off a walkway, broke her spine, and ended up in a wheelchair?
The second layer of irony that Radu Jude weaves into his black anti-capitalist comedy Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World comes through its overarching portrait of the woman tasked with capturing these stories, quietly suffering under similar conditions as she drives across Bucharest from one location to the next. Angela is no doubt aware of these parallels as she reaches out with compassion to the people she is filming, but at the end of the day she is just another employee who must adhere to the company’s strict guidelines and hustle culture. If she must miss out on a break to get the work done, then so be it. If the executive should insincerely wish that she isn’t working extra hours to complete this project, then she is to meet them with an equally disingenuous response.
“Oh no, for this one no, of course not! Only eight hours, don’t worry.”
In both her job and her professional attitude, Angela is reluctantly complicit in upholding the company’s façade of accountability, while she and the rest of Europe’s working class continue to be exploited by the out-of-touch elite. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World may be set in the modern day, but as far as Jude is concerned this is simply the progression of a slow, cumbersome apocalypse, with the title itself being attributed to a man who witnessed some of the twentieth century’s greatest atrocities firsthand. Polish Jewish poet Stanisław Jerzy Lec foresaw the fall of humanity arrive not through earth-shattering destruction, but rather the creeping dystopia of the banal, herding the middle and working classes into unending routines of mindless frustration.
The arthouse influence of Jim Jarmusch’s deadpan humour, measured repetition, and solemn greyscale photography is considerable here, as Jude commits Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World to a minimalist formal structure that finds absurdism in the mundane. His shots are largely static and last several minutes at a time, sitting in the passenger seat of Angela’s car as she throws insults at other drivers and blares music to keep herself awake. Outside the window, blurs of Bucharest’s fountains, railways, and shops are intermittently brought to a complete standstill by traffic jams, while Jude’s jump cuts underscore the mind-numbing gaps of time that lie between one point of absolute inertia and the next.
Jude’s ambitious attempt at building out the form of his piece into a sprawling indictment of the daily grind becomes a little messier when his focus shifts from away Angela, cutting in clips from a 1982 Romanian film following a taxi driver with the same name. Their routines vaguely line up, and the parallels he is drawing between their struggles are clear, though without a real arc these segments become unnecessary in this nearly three-hour film. The freeze frames and jerky slow-motion he applies to cutaways of the city’s crowds are a little more formally sound, though Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is often at its strongest when it is studying our primary subject as a low-ranking subordinate of the corporate world.
After all, Angela is not some oblivious drone existing only to serve her superiors. She clings to her individuality with coarse defiance, making the time to balance her own ‘art’ with her work duties. Most obvious and obnoxious of all are those TikTok videos she films as her chauvinist alter ego, Bobita Ewing – a vulgar pickup artist who apparently spends his life partying and travelling the world. In these segments, Jude’s cinematography briefly breaks out into low-res colour, applying a crudely unconvincing filter that gives her a beard, bald head, and monobrow.
Bobita is a blatant parody of every ‘alpha male’ influencer online who spews misogynistic trash to his followers, and even name-drops Andrew Tate as one of his friends. Angela may only be performing this persona in jest, but this is still her channel through which she is able to let loose the rage she cannot express at work, and as such she has few inhibitions about who sees it. “I’m just making fun of things. So I don’t go crazy,” she plainly justifies to her disapproving mother, and when she noisily records one video in a public bathroom, Jude’s wide shot amusingly catches another woman nervously peek her head around the corner to catch sight of this bizarre act.
The small detours that Angela makes throughout the day on an already-tight schedule further develop the non-conformist side of her character, especially as she winds up on a film set and finds a kindred spirit in Uwe Boll, notorious director of bad movies. Together, they rail against the limitations that the establishment imposes on creativity, though Jude remains cynically aware of the tasteless, unsophisticated art they are essentially arguing for. When Angela later finds the chance to furtively meet up with her boyfriend during work hours, the two make love in her car, which later forces her to comically cover the stains he left on her dress with an airport pickup sign as she meets a high-profile client. On a more sombre note, she even finds herself at one point contending with a hotel chain that is exhuming her grandparents’ bodies due to a land dispute, adding to the pile of unnecessary stresses wreaked by corporate domination.
With additional references to Queen Elizabeth’s passing, the war in Ukraine, and American gun control, Jude very gradually expands Bucharest’s localised decay into a global dystopia that is pervasively documented in every form of modern media. Angela is unavoidably attached to her iPhone, using it to record videos for both work and leisure that capture different angles of society’s deterioration, just as the taxi driver interludes represent it through the artifice of cinema.
Ultimately though, it is the final act of Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World where Jude’s media collage delivers its strongest blow, baring the microaggressions of corporate exploitation for all to see in a static, unbroken 35-minute shot inspired by Michael Haneke’s own surveillance-like photography. This is the culmination of all Angela’s hard work, with wheelchair bound Ovidiu Buca and his family being chosen to star in the work safety video, while the factory where his accident took place looms large in the background. It matters little that he might have been spared this fate had the metal barrier which knocked him into a coma been made from a lighter material, or at least been visibly marked so that the driver who sent it flying had seen it to begin with. Once again, the blame is laid at his feet. Never mind that the incident took place after work hours as he was heading home – he should have been wearing a safety helmet.
Together, the talent and crew suffer through take upon take, with the director making tiny tweaks each time. To avoid giving ammunition to the “enemies,” the incriminating bar must be moved out of the background, and Ovidiu’s mother must hold his hand at a key point to force a bit of sympathy. Behind the scenes, this film shoot quickly evolves into a mock courtroom drama with Ovidiu’s actual lawsuit against the company at stake, but of course none of this is to be shown in the final product. A ‘creative’ stroke of genius sees them pivot towards copying Bob Dylan’s music video for ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, with Ovidiu holding up giant, green cue cards to the camera so the editor can insert whatever words they like. “I hope they won’t write anything that might hurt us,” Ovidiu’s mother voices as they wrap shooting, though the director’s words of assurance couldn’t be emptier.
And of course, Angela is still there through it all, recording her Bobita videos without a care for which bystanders may be unnerved by her offensive monologues. The switch to colour in this section also reveals her glittery dress in full, inconsequentially rebelling against the culture of corporate conformity that has a stranglehold over every other aspect of her working life. These dramatic expressions of identity are amusingly trivial, not quite earning Angela our sympathy so much as demonstrating how feeble they are in the grand scheme of civilisation’s dreary downfall. Jude’s narrative may be tightly confined to a single working day, and yet the dismal landscape that Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World stitches together from media fragments stretches far beyond the city of Bucharest, helplessly watching the slow, mechanical grind of modern civilisation into a never-ending traffic jam.
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is currently streaming on Mubi.
It isn’t that Japanese toilet cleaner Hiriyama is discontent with his janitorial duties in Perfect Days, nor that his lowly status at the bottom of Tokyo’s working class is eroding his spirit. If anything, his methodical repetition of the same procedures from day-to-day is a soothing meditation, finding fulfilment in the conscientious act itself rather than the end goal. It is fortunate too that this motivation is so self-sustaining, given that these toilets are almost immediately soiled by the public the moment they are cleaned. There is little external gratification to be found in this line of work, and thus Hiriyama’s Zen-like mindset breeds an appreciation for its small, unassuming details, from his car playlist of classic rock to the trees he photographs in his lunch break.
Still, there is something missing here, gradually revealing itself as time stretches on without him speaking a single word. Hiriyama may be the loneliest man in Tokyo, only ever interacting with his capricious younger colleague who talks enough for them both, and the regulars at the public bath and restaurant that he visits at the end of each workday. He is a man comfortably bound by tradition, yet mildly perturbed by those unpredictable disruptions which throw off his perfectly balanced schedule. At least by minimising the influence of external factors, he can maintain that peaceful equilibrium in his life, even if it means never truly understanding the happiness that comes through sharing it with others.
Formal rigour in the construction of Hiriyama’s routine – spraying his pot plants each morning, photographing trees on lunch breaks, visiting the bathhouse after work, reading before bed – each detail revealing a bit more about his intricate character.
It has been some time since Wim Wenders has directed a film that has emerged from Cannes Film Festival with such high acclaim, and while Perfect Days does not quite reach the cinematic heights of his work in the 80s, it is compellingly consistent with his pensive elevations of mundanity. Where Wings of Desire flitted between stream-of-consciousness voiceovers from the minds of ordinary people though, Perfect Days denies us any verbal entry into Hiriyama’s inner world, leaving us only to gage his character through Kōji Yakusho’s largely silent performance and Wenders’ rigorous narrative structure.
Hiriyama dwells at the bottom of society in a rundown apartment block, and wears a uniform emblazoned with the company title ‘The Tokyo Toilet,’ though he does not find humiliation or degradation in his status. This lifestyle suits him perfectly.
It is especially in the latter that this minimalist meditation attains impressive formal rigour, thoroughly setting up Hiriyama’s routine on the first day that we spend with him, and then repeating it with minor variations. By the time the second day arrives, we can virtually predict each beat with reliable accuracy – the way he folds up his floor mattress, his spraying of his pot plants each morning, and even his daily purchase of coffee from the same vending machine outside his rundown flat. The restrooms that he visits daily become his domains, each standing out in ordinary parks as architectural marvels, such as one brutalist structure made up of harsh angles and another with colourfully transparent walls that turn opaque when locked. Though Hiriyama can see straight through when it is unoccupied, he nevertheless knocks on its doors before entering, if for no other reason than to carry out his habitual duty.
Wenders clearly relished location scouting, picking out some of the most architecturally unique public toilets in Tokyo.
Over time, the patterns which emerge in these recurring actions, location, and shots imbue Perfect Days with a formal precision evoking Yasujirō Ozu’s sensitive domestic dramas. Unfortunately, Ozu’s dedication to carefully arranging the frame does not quite carry through in the same way here – an unusual oversight for Wenders whose previous films have featured the sort of austere photography that would have strengthened Perfect Days’ exacting focus. Perhaps the greatest flashes of style here arrive in the hazy, greyscale dreams which structurally divide one day from the next, weaving in abstract visions of Hiriyama’s waking life through a series of long dissolves. Trees, shadows, wheels, and pedestrians call upon recent memories with gentle repose, while very occasionally we catch glimpses of familiar faces that have taken root deep in his subconscious.
Wenders continues to weave his fantastic form through the hazy, greyscale dreams that visit Hiriyama each night, dividing one day from the next. These are surreal, visual breaks from the naturalism of the piece, peering deeper into his mind.
Quite prominent among these illusory nighttime visitors is Hiryama’s niece Niko, who unexpectedly turns up at his apartment building one evening to stay with him. Whatever trouble has been unfolding at home is none of his business, especially given the clearly estranged relationship he has with his upper-middle class sister, Keiko. Hiriyama desperately tries to maintain a semblance of routine through her passive disruptions, yet her insistence on joining him at work forces him to share his meditation with someone else for the first time, and very gradually we witness a wondrous evolution take place in this relationship. Not only does Hiriyama speak, but through this connection he even relishes his usual habits even more – photographing the trees on his old film camera while Niko does so own her phone for instance, and riding bikes on the weekend through the streets of Tokyo.
Niko comes as an unexpected but necessary saving grace, revealing the joy that can be found in sharing quiet meditations with others.
When the time comes for Keiko to take her back home, Hiriyama is quietly distraught. Perhaps not only due to the tender relationship that has been snatched from him, but Keiko’s visit has also instigated a confrontation with his own selfish habit of isolating himself from others. From this perspective, Hiriyama’s meditative lifestyle may be little more than an escape from the pressures of a complicated world, which when faced head-on send him falling back on unhealthy habits.
Still, journeying outside one’s comfort zone is an adventure that inevitably entails stumbles and bounding leaps, both equally disturbing the precarious routine that Hiriyama has carefully cultivated. With the decision to boldly initiate social contact comes a spiritual rejuvenation that work alone cannot fulfil, no matter how relaxing its gentle rhythms and cadences may be. That Wenders weaves these so smoothly into the rigorous narrative structure of Perfect Days is not only a testament to his own formal attentiveness, but also consolidates communality and introspection with prudent devotion, inviting audiences into a deep reverie of collective contemplation.
The classic tale of knights and beasts that opens Nimona is like many we have heard before, telling of the legendary heroine Gloreth who vanquished a Great Black Monster and built a fortified wall to protect the kingdom after her death. The series of illustrated tapestries depicting this conflict in the prologue effectively solidify it as historical fact within this fantasy world, offering the city a sense of identity, culture, and purpose, and further justifying the traditions that have persevered for one thousand years. As such, the futuristic, medieval kingdom where Nimona’s main storyline picks up is built on a foundation of distant mythology, and it is here where directors Nick Bruno and Troy Quane playfully subvert the genre to consider the nature of prejudices unquestioningly passed from one generation to the next.
While Pixar has been struggling to deliver a certified hit ever since its success with Soul in 2020, other animation studios such as Sony Pictures and even Nickelodeon Movies have swept in with a partial return to 2D stylisations, though this alone has not compensated for the deficit in cinematic fables targeted at children. Nimona may be the closest any recent film has gotten to recapturing the magic of 2000s-era Pixar storytelling, revitalising familiar archetypes through the fresh, imaginative setting of a medieval kingdom located in the distant future. The clean geometric shapes drawn through sets and character designs effectively mimic the prologue’s tapestry style art, but are also imbued with a neo-futurist liveliness that thrusts the aesthetic forward in time, dynamically reflecting the anachronistic paradox of the clashing eras.
Of course, much of this energy comes down to the character of Nimona herself, a mysterious shapeshifter who has sought out fugitive Sir Ballister Boldheart. Mischievous, impulsive, and ready to pick a fight with anyone upholding the status quo, she believes she has found an ally in the knight framed for the murder of Queen Valerin, and quickly dubs herself his villainous sidekick. Her backstory is kept deliberately ambiguous, though Bruno and Quane relish animating pieces of it upon the tiled walls of a subway station, creatively developing their tapestry-style illustrations into a more modern, urban art.
Like Nimona, Ballister has previously been ostracised for his commoner background, despite proving his capability in serving the kingdom and joining the Institute for Elite Knights. Rather than lashing out in bitter revenge though, he is simply determined to uncover the identity of the Queen’s true killer and prove his innocence – even if Nimona’s troublemaking tactics tend to have the opposite effect. Rather than trying to counteract society’s negative, fear-driven opinions of her, she has chosen to become the terrifying monster they believe her to be, and sow chaos wherever she goes.
Given Ballister’s relationship with fellow knight Sir Ambrosius Goldenloin, the queer subtext of Nimona only barely lingers beneath the surface, criticising the prejudice directed towards those who live outside heteronormative conventions. The myths passed down from ancestors to their descendants as cautionary tales are the same as those which reinforce outdated beliefs, and so only when their origins are challenged can society identify where its true corruption may lie.
Many of the twists in Nimona can be spotted from a mile off, and yet in true Pixar fashion they nevertheless go right for the heartstrings and tug on them with gentle sorrow, eventually uniting its well-earned emotional climax with apocalyptic medieval action. Despite sharing common ground as outsiders, Ballister and Nimona possess entirely different attitudes around dealing with their alienation, and it is in the equal, compassionate understanding of both that this film develops a surprising complexity. By undermining the very basis of archaic narrative traditions and demolishing the walls they build around our worldview, Nimona recognises the freedom that lies in open-minded acceptance, and reshapes them into a historic allegory for a new age.
The opening minutes of Evil Dead Rise may land us right in the middle of another ‘cabin in the woods’ horror story, complete with naïve college friends and a gruesome lakeside struggle, but director Lee Cronin veers wildly away from this classic setting once his prologue has wrapped. Instead, this reinvigoration of Sam Raimi’s franchise unexpectedly takes us to a Los Angeles apartment building, where families and neighbours unknowingly reside over an old, forgotten chamber. Only when an earthquake shakes its foundations is the entrance uncovered, inviting siblings Danny and Bridget to investigate the strange vinyl records and skinbound tome that contain frightening records of demonic possession. From there, the hellish Deadites which tormented Ash Williams through three movies and a television series are unleashed, mutilating the intimate bonds of a young, single-parent family.
So strong is Cronin’s standalone narrative in Evil Dead Rise that the bookends vaguely linking it back to the series’ roots are entirely redundant, holding little weight or relevance to the rest of the film. There are no Bruce Campbell appearances pandering to fan nostalgia, save for a voice cameo on one of the phonograph records, nor any attempts to recapture Raimi’s brand of comedy-horror slapstick. Cronin instead brings a refreshing creativity to the intellectual property, stripping back the camp humour and laying into the terror of seeing one’s mother transform into a hideous creature, unbound by maternal instincts of love and protection.
Therein lies the power of Cronin’s allegory in Evil Dead Rise, slowly twisting the image of a loving family into that of dysfunctional, abusive household. Ellie is the main drawcard here as the first to be turned, possessed by the grinning, deep-voiced Deadite who understands exactly what combination of gaslighting, love bombing, and guilt tripping gets under the children’s skins. She is the dark shadow of motherhood in demonic form, relishing her freedom from the “parasites” who drain her energy, while seeking to inflict a physical and psychological pain on them that will raise them in her malevolent likeness. Once that line is crossed, this Deadite effectively creates a family of her own, evolving into a Lovecraftian monster that manifests Cronin’s subtext as grotesque, disfigured body horror.
Outside of the possessed Ellie though, another mother figure begins to emerge as her direct inverse. Beth is her slightly more alternative sister whose job as a band roadie has kept her distant from family life, and yet who is now forced to reckon with her own maternal instincts upon discovering her unplanned pregnancy. With Danny, Bridget, and Kassie’s loving mother gone and their absent father firmly out of the picture, Beth recognises the void that has suddenly opened in their lives, and the part she must play in filling that as tensions rise. Evil Dead Rises is not subtle with its symbolism, but by the time it is representing Beth’s escape from a blood-filled elevator as an abortion and directly referencing The Shining, the expectation of restraint has long-gone. Even in Cronin’s capable hands, the Evil Dead series works best as an exercise in visual sensationalism, provoking a visceral disgust towards the breakdown of close relationships.
As a director of piercing cinematic style, it is tough to deny Cronin’s talents here too. Besides the ghastly makeup, gory practical effects, and point-of-view tracking shots which Raimi had already set a standard for, Cronin brings his own repertoire of techniques to the table, drawing inspiration from Roman Polanski’s Apartment trilogy by capitalising on the claustrophobic urban setting. In the dim, blue wash of a flickering emergency lights, the camera slowly dollies down a corridor of bloody bodies, and peephole shots break the fourth wall as Ellie’s pale face stares at us through fish-eye lenses.
Perhaps most inspired of all though is the array of split diopter shots where Brian de Palma’s influence can be felt, tightly framing crucial details such as Kassie’s doll or a set of keys on one side of the frame, while building suspense against the actors staged in canted angles behind. Cronin employs each with discerning purpose throughout Evil Dead Rise, turning homely, domestic spaces into battlefields of violent abuse and paranoid mistrust. Only when the mother’s place is restored can innocence finally be saved from the Deadites’ chaos, as Cronin shrewdly pivots the horror of Raimi’s extravagant creation into a hideous perversion of the family unit, threatening the foundations of a stable, nurturing society.
Evil Dead Rise is currently streaming on Netflix and Binge, is available to rent on Apple TV, YouTube, and Amazon Video, and the physical media available to purchase on Amazon.
The point of no-return for novelist Monk Ellison has long passed by the time he winds up on a literary judging panel trying to expose the stupidity of his own anonymous parody book. The idea for ‘Fuck’ struck one night after a string of frustrating experiences with white publishers looking for a more racial perspective in his writing, as well as those Black authors who cater to their expectations, and so the sudden influx of serious critical praise towards his novel is equal parts revealing and frustrating.
Complicating matters even further is the character he has invented for his pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, an offensively crude ex-convict on the run from the police who has since become widely celebrated in the public eye. Meanwhile, Monk and his intellectual, non-racial novels continue to fly under the radar – and so when he finds himself on that panel listening to his fellow judges exalt ‘Fuck’ as a raw, honest piece of African American literature, Cord Jefferson does not pass up the chance to deconstruct the uncomfortable absurdity of the entire situation.
With this social criticism set as its base argument, American Fiction’s sharp-edged screenplay continues to wield an impressive self-awareness of its own premise, satirising the liberal elite and their attempts to assuage their white guilt by gleefully consuming what Monk calls “Black trauma porn.” When Monk finally gets a chance to sit down with the only other African American judge on this literary panel, Sintara Golden, our expectations have been thoroughly set him up to tear apart her wildly successful and indulgently racial book ‘We’s Lives in Da Ghetto,’ and yet what follows unexpectedly turns a mirror back on our own smug cynicism.
The first subversion of the scene comes when Sintara agrees with Monk that ‘Fuck’ is inauthentically pandering – “The kind of book that critics call important and necessary but not well-written.” His relief to finally hear a voice of reason leads to confusion when he asks how she can then persist in her career of frivolously humouring white audiences, to which her manner suddenly hardens. Much of her writing was drawn directly from interview transcripts and comes from hours of research, she tells him. Besides, he hasn’t even read her book, and she’s not to blame if readers happen to form stereotypes from genuine artistic expression. What justification does he have to criticise the hard work of others and accuse them of phoniness, simply because he has never shared their experiences?
The biting punchline to the entire affair comes shortly after when the rest of the panellists reconvene to finally decide the winner of the literary prize, and it is no surprise that Monk and Sintara’s opinions are passed over in favour of the white majority who adore ‘Fuck.’ Of course, in a moment of self-congratulatory praise, one of the white judges can’t help but miss the irony of the entire farce either.
“It’s not just that it’s so affecting. I just think it’s essential to listen to Black voices right now.”
The balancing act of comedy and drama that Jefferson pulls off all through American Fiction is expertly executed, though the contribution of Jeffrey Wright’s performance to this symmetry should not be overlooked. As valid as Monk’s point is about the state of racial sensitivity in America’s creative arts industry, his own intellectual arrogance frequently seeps through, distancing even his new girlfriend Coraline when she admits to liking ‘Fuck’ without realising he wrote it.
This second narrative thread that revolves around Monk’s romantic and family life draws that line down the middle of the film even further, but most importantly Jefferson also cleverly uses it as a self-aware response to its other, more satirical half. As Monk navigates complications around his sister’s sudden passing, his brother’s wild lifestyle, and his mother’s degenerative dementia, Jefferson reveals dimensions to his life that only ever tangentially interact with his race.
Not that the readers who fawn over ‘Fuck’ would ever appreciate such personal, non-race related stories, should he ever choose to weave them into his fiction. Monk is a difficult man who is familiar with many different types of grief and often falls to his own hubris, and yet for the sake of American consumers these complex characteristics must be flattened into a single identity apparently shared by all people of his colour. American Fiction’s metafictional epilogue only serves to underscore the artificial manipulation of these voices by executives, filtering itself through different genre lenses until it too submits with comical self-awareness to a marketable tragedy, not unlike the inverted, faux-happy ending of Robert Altman’s The Player. Even as Jefferson levels critiques at the publishers, critics, and audiences who twist his artistic expression to their liking, he realises that their naïvely simplistic takes are inescapable, ultimately submitting American Fiction itself to the very subject of its cleverly inspired interrogations before anyone else can get there first.
In a cheap Helsinki supermarket, shelf stacker Ansa is let go for stealing expired food to supplement her meagre pay. Not too far away in the same city, depressed labourer Holappa is fired for drinking on the job, and booted from the shipping container dormitory that he shares with his blue-collar coworkers. There is no melodrama or heightened emotion surrounding these narrative beats in Fallen Leaves. They are facts of life, as fixed and unchangeable as those radio reports tracking Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which constantly cast their relatively low-stakes problems against a backdrop of largescale warfare.
Still, Aki Kaurismäki remains sympathetic to those whose struggles are not notable enough to be broadcast internationally. The sickness that suffocates Ukraine similarly seeps over the Russian border into Finland, gripping its people in a constant state of unease with endless stories of death and destruction. The formal rigour of this news report motif is undeniable, using sheer repetition to grind us down into the same weary resignation that these characters have long inhabited, while occasionally breaking the dourness with beats of Kaurismäki’s trademark deadpan. When Ansa turns the radio on to set a romantic mood during her first proper date with Holappa, the grim Ukraine report that she tunes into instead makes for a darkly funny punchline, paying off on a long setup of news announcements begging to find some light in the mundane gloom.
Kaurismäki is a formalist above all else, and that is rarely so evident as it is in his use of the repeated radio reports on the Russo-Ukrainian War, constantly minimising the day-to-day problems experienced by Ansa and Holappa.
This is the glimmer of hope that Kaurismäki keeps alive throughout Fallen Leaves, despite the many good reasons these lovers are given to disregard it. At first, it is shyness that maintains a distance between Ansa and Holappa at the karaoke bar where their friends strike up conversation, leaving them to simply make eye contact across the room. Their second encounter at a tram stop where Holappa has passed out is only tangential, only seeing him wake up a few seconds after Ansa has boarded, and from there fate continues to make an enemy of their potential romance.
A string of unlucky coincidences and missed connections keep Ansa and Holappa apart for a long time, and continue to haunt them even once they finally meet.
When Ansa and Holappa finally do make it to a first date, an ill-timed gust of wind blows her phone number out of his hand and delays their reconnection, though Kaurismäki is not one to let them off so lightly without any blame either. Holappa’s alcoholism can take full credit for their eventual breakup, yet this also in turn spurs him to conquer his addiction. Even as bad luck and personal flaws continue to rear their head, perseverance keeps love alive, forging unlikely bonds in a world where random misfortune is the only escape from soul-crushing tedium.
Visually, this optimism frequently manifests as vibrant interior décor decorated with bold primary colours, like a Rainer Werner Fassbinder melodrama minus the expressive performances. Kaurismäki lets his framing speak for his characters where they are otherwise incapable, in one instance shooting Holappa with a yellow shirt and Ansa with a red blouse on either side of a dinner table, and then uniting their respective colours through an arrangement of flowers in the middle. Conversely, the distance between them is emphasised when they sit on either side of a red couch in awkward silence, imprinted against the blue wall of Ansa’s apartment.
Kaurismäki colours and blocking are minimalist but powerful, conveying rich character dynamics in the absence of expressive dialogue.
Quite significantly, the image of modern-day Finland that Kaurismäki constructs around these lovers is also one that is strained by a lingering Communist influence from the nation’s most powerful neighbour, imbuing Fallen Leaves’ setting with a timeless, retro quality. Though set in 2024, Ansa and Holappa are entwined in a mesh of eras – radios haven’t quite been replaced with televisions yet, mobile phones are notably primitive, and the movie posters that decorate theatres and bars advertise the 1960s works of Godard, Visconti, and Bresson.
This world of downtown Helsinki is trapped in a mix of past eras, splashing backdrops of classic movie posters up on walls as backdrops.
When our protagonists do finally enter a cinema, the screening of The Dead Don’t Die is notably out-of-place in Fallen Leaves as one of the few modern movie references, and yet it also falls in line with Kaurismäki’s admiration for the deadpan comedy of Jim Jarmusch. Not only is The Dead Don’t Die an odd choice as a lesser film in Jarmusch’s career, but the absurd comparison drawn by two other cinemagoers to Diary of a Country Priest and Bande à Part underscores the scene’s offbeat incongruency even further, with Ansa’s straight-faced review that she’s “never laughed so much” completing the hilariously ironic sentiment.
None of this dissonance is without purpose in Kaurismäki’s rigidly minimalist world though, locating Ansa and Holappa in a culture that cannot quite figure out its own identity. It is no wonder that every interaction in Fallen Leaves is so burdened with awkward uncertainty, moving conversations forward at a cumbersome pace. When pressed as to why he drinks, Holappa explains it is because he is depressed, and when asked why he is depressed, he links it back to his drinking. Circular reasoning leads to loops of self-degradation in these characters’ lonely lives, and so when Ansa realises that Holappa isn’t ready to break out of the miasma with her, she seeks comfort in the innocence of a stray, abandoned dog.
Fassbinder-like visuals with the vivid colours and framing, though Kaurismäki’s deadpan comedy couldn’t be further from Fassbinder’s melodrama.
These lovers may be set back by their own flaws, but the greater cosmic joke being played on them can’t be ignored, testing their willingness to fight for a sincere, patient love. That Ansa and Holappa both remain totally unaware of each other’s names right to the romantic, Chaplinesque end of Fallen Leaves speaks eloquently to their incredible will and intuition, rejecting their lonely destinies seemingly written out for them and fighting for their right to happiness. When the potential for authentic, selfless love is discovered in a world as unpredictably offbeat as Kaurismäki’s, the power to nourish it lies solely with those at its centre, stubbornly overcoming whatever fated obstacles may seek to challenge their most basic human need.
It is not enough for a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie to pay homage to the outcasts of society merely by adapting the comic books series’ basic narrative conventions. It takes an anarchic rejuvenation of the medium itself for Mutant Mayhem to embrace the Turtles’ upbeat spirit of rebellion, veering wildly away from the trend of hyperrealist 3D animation that has seen Disney’s visual creativity dwindle in recent years. Sony’s Spider-Verse series can be largely credited for leading the way here, inventively blending computer and traditional animation to create dynamic illustrations that could be ripped straight out of graphic novels, and yet at the same time Mutant Mayhem may also be the first to follow in its footsteps without falling under its shadow.
It is the grungy imperfections rather than any aesthetic sophistication which gives Jeff Rowe’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles adaptation such a tactile quality, emulating the sort of colourful scrawls that could be found in a teenager’s sketchbook. Rough doodles are scribbled all through the streets and sewers of New York City, roughly forming a not-quite-perfectly round moon and chugging out squiggles from the exhaust pipes of shabby cars, while murky hues and toxic neons illuminate the urban scenery with a radioactive ambience. The visual compositions themselves are far beyond worthy of a school project too – there are frames in Mutant Mayhem worthy of a pop art exhibition, drenching the city with noir-like shadows even as our heroic quartet light them up with their buoyant humour.
Jeff Rowe owes a debt to David Fincher in his ambient visual creation of New York City, but the jagged doodles and scribbles drawn all through his mise-en-scène also make for an entirely fresh animation style.The palette of radioactive neon colours formally align with Rowe’s mutant characters, taking a note out of the Spider-Verse animation playbook.
With Rowe applying a jerky frame rate as well, action scenes are imbued with a scratchy kineticism that only emphasises the eccentric mannerisms of humans and mutants alike, all of whom are designed as idiosyncratic caricatures. For brothers Donatello, Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael though, this unseemliness is the source of both great pride and insecurity, thus forming the foundation of a coming-of-age tale which underlies Mutant Mayhem’s superhero antics.
Quite crucially, this version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles casts relatively unknown teenagers as its four leads for the first time in the franchise’s history, even while the rest of the cast is filled with big names such as Ice Cube, Jackie Chan, and Paul Rudd. Rather than recording their lines separately, Micah Abbey, Shamon Brown Jr., Nicolas Cantu, and Brady Noon were able to build camaraderie in the studio together, as their voice performance overlap and improvise to reveal an authentically juvenile innocence.
The action is playfully jerky with the low frame rate, and the voice acting is impressive among the teenager voice artists who improvised during recordings together in a single studio.
As a result, the Turtles’ exclusion from the human world is made all the more heartbreaking. A simple desire to be part of an accepting crowd is seemingly at the core of their journeys, and yet when they meet a gang of similarly mutated creatures led by supervillain Superfly and are enthusiastically welcomed into their plans for world domination, they must inevitably reassess their priorities. Even if they are to save humanity from enslavement, they will still likely be treated with disdain and horror, but this doesn’t make their efforts any less righteous.
There are illustrations here that could be found in a teenager’s sketchbook, roughly composing graphic images from freehand scrawls and grungy imperections.
No doubt their new human friend April has something to do with this moral enlightenment among the Turtles, becoming a bridge between society and its outsiders who she finds surprisingly common ground with. As Mutant Mayhem approaches its magnificent kaiju-inspired showdown, Rowe weaves her journey in with several other loose narrative threads, perhaps only neglecting the subplot concerning evil scientist Cynthia Utrom who is more than likely being kept for a potential sequel. This formal weakness is minor though, especially when it is drowned out by such astounding creativity and rich character work. Any version of Mutant Mayhem that might have conformed to the 3D animation standards of the past thirty or so years would simply not carry the same sense of thrilling defiance as this, as from its heart of revolt spills a world of good-natured humour and turbulence, vividly drawn with all the chaotic passion of adolescence.
The very concept of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pays homage to Japanese media in many ways, but the kaiju-inspired finale makes for an especially strong narrative climax.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is currently available to rent or buy on Apple TV, YouTube, and Amazon Video, and physical media copies are available on Amazon.
There is nothing remotely suspicious about the lifestyles of real estate power couple Will and Summer. Nor is there any visible reason why anyone would want to take Summer’s life, leaving her body in a home that they had been showing to potential customers. The two certainly have their enemies, including a few former landowners whose properties they had forcibly bought, but then what wealthy professionals haven’t antagonised a few people on their way up the ladder of success?
Under Grant Singer’s methodical direction, the following investigation carefully unravels a simple murder into a conspiracy that sprawls across the Maine property market, through its illegal drug trade, and into the heart of the police force. Truth is slippery in this moody procedural, as suspects and detectives alike chillingly shed their skins to reveal their true natures, giving metaphoric significance to the title Reptile.
Besides Will’s discovery of Summer’s brutalised corpse in the opening minutes, Singer chooses to filter much of his narrative through the perspective of Detective Tom Nichols, played with haunted cynicism by Benicio del Toro. It isn’t uncommon in his precinct for police officers to casually joke about abusing their power, and even he barely blinks when such remarks are made. Only when he is awarded the Medal of Valor and a large sum of money for inadvertently killing a seemingly guilty suspect that the strings of corruption start to become visible, tempting him to look upward and determine who is in control.
Everywhere we look in Reptile, humanity’s malevolent disregard of life is effectively institutionalised through both private and public enterprises, pointing to a significant narrative influence from David Fincher’s like-minded crime films. The comparison is only reinforced by the echoes of his moody visual style in Singer’s dim yellow lighting, dark silhouettes, and meticulous framing through corridors and doorways, binding grimy downtown bars and upmarket houses together in a shady atmosphere of pervasive mistrust. The camera pans and dollies through these spaces with cautious anticipation too, subtly mounting the tension of Tom’s investigation, and patiently waiting for some cathartic release that we are often denied.
Even by the end of Reptile, many of the puzzle pieces we are handed don’t slot so neatly into the broader picture. Instead, Singer urges a certain level of detective work from the viewer to determine mysteries such as the strand of blonde hair found at the crime scene, which apparently comes from a wig, and the guilt of Summer’s ex-husband Sam whose semen was found in her body. The ambiguity that surrounds the case makes it all too easy to suspect the scorned, lower-class people who Will and Summer have manipulated, and yet it is difficult to ignore the chilling aloofness of those whose souls we assume to be as spotless as their reputations. Like some cold-blooded creature of deceit, anyone who can afford a front of respectability in Reptile also has the ability to emotionally detach from their malicious actions, giving us very good reason to question the motives of anyone privileged enough to have plenty to lose.
