Author: jose

A surprise feature film is a bit of a contradiction in terms, but it does sometimes happen, with Beyonce’s brilliant anthology “Lemonade” constituting the richest and most fully realized example. Travis Scott‘s “Circus Maximus,” which showed in AMC Theaters as part of a special arrangement with the chain, isn’t in the same weight class. On the qualitative scale of movies that were created mainly to advertise an album of new songs, it’s probably closer to the Beatles’ slapped-together movie “Magical Mystery Tour,” which was broadcast in the United Kingdom on the day after Christmas, 1967; suffice to say that if you’ve never heard of it, there’s a reason. On the other hand, the “Magical Mystery Tour” did give the world the title track and the “All You Need is Love” video, and there’s a case to be made that the mere existence of an odd and basically uncategorizable film like this should be supported and encouraged just because it’s so different from what usually plays in chain theaters.

“Circus Maximus” is credited as having been written and directed by Travis Scott, but it’s an anthology comprised of work by a lot of other directors, including Harmony Korine, Nicolas Winding Refn, Gaspar Noe, and Kahlil Joseph, and you sort of have to guess who directed what until the end credits. By the time you read this, the film will likely no longer be available in theaters, though it’s possible that it could reappear as a one-off curiousity or midnight movie. 

The movie begins with a science-fiction-y scene of Scott grappling with a squid-like monster which might represent his own demons (or responsibilities, or both), then eases us into an epic journey montage, with Scott crossing various terrains as if he’s en route to drop a cursed ring into Mt. Doom. His ultimate destination, however, turns out to be the home of a guru-like figure played by producer Rick Rubin. The film periodically returns to their conversations, turning them into a framing device of sorts. The conversations border on incoherent—the discussions about connecting people’s energies and not allowing them to be broken sounds like something a musician would say on a press junket when he’s high and not mad at anybody. These talks are shot with an oval-shaped matte around the image that alternately suggests that the speakers are being surveilled through binoculars or watched by a cyclops (sometimes the image “blinks”). 

What follows is a series of music videos, essentially, some better than others, including one shot in Ghana with seemingly hundreds of extras, a sequence directed by Refn in which Scott speeds in a taxi at high speed at night by a creepy crash test dummy driver while calmly smoking weed; “Modern Jam,” a dance floor fantasia co-produced by Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo; and a segment where Scott takes part in a human pyramid in a packed stadium. 

Scott must know he’s courting trouble with crowd imagery—eight fans were crushed at one of his 2021 concerts at Houston’s Astroworld, though a Texas grand jury subsequently declined to indict Scott or anyone else associated with the event. It’s also possible that the beast that embraces Scott in the opening is his guilt, fear of consequences, or something along those lines. But the movie is cryptic or coy about such things. While this is as it should be, in what is basically an experimental film, more clarity of purpose (as in “Gimme Shelter,” the Maysles’ Brothers documentary of the Rolling Stones’ disaster at Altamont) might’ve made the material land harder.

Surely not coincidentally, the music videos fall into two categories, crowd or no crowd. The bulk of the film is a concert done without fans, repeating a lot of the same tracks showcased in the music video portion of the film, and unfolding entirely in the eponymous chariot racing stadium in Rome, which also happens to be the site of the single worst disaster in the history of spectator sports: over 1000 people were killed when the venue’s upper tier collapsed. Scott performs mostly solo, although he’s joined at various points by such collaborators as The Weeknd and Swae Lee, The collaborators make their approach from the outer edges of the stadium and are tracked to the center area, often without cuts. 

Korine appears to be the person in charge of most of the “concert for nobody” sequences. Like the rest of the movie, this footage is shot on 35mm film, an increasingly rare format, and a lot of it was done from the top of a large crane, which allows for fast sweeping movements that are coded as “epic.” Unfortunately, a lot of this footage is too darkly lit, to the point where you can barely see the performers. And there are also moments where it seems like the camera crew either missed whatever moment or composition they were supposed to be capturing or didn’t know what they were supposed to be focusing on. There’s not much memorable choreography to speak of; much of it is more like bouncing, and the more memorable gestures (such as Scott climbing the huge wall of speakers behind him and perching atop it like Batman) are repeated, which lessens their impact. 

Scott is a powerful presence when he’s walking through landscapes and very effective in music videos where he’s silhouetted or wreathed in smoke and strobe lights, but he’s a distant and often cold presence otherwise, especially in conversation scenes with Rubin. He is generally withholding when he’s on-camera, which spells doom for a performer who doesn’t have what could be called, for lack of a better phrase, a film persona (as Prince did). The guest performers generally make a stronger impression even though their screen time is comparatively brief, especially The Weeknd, who has a bit of Mick Jagger’s insouciance (he’s far more charismatic here than he was on HBO’s awful “The Idol“). This is a curiosity and a career footnote more than a substantial freestanding film achievement, which is too bad. It’s more a notion for a work of art than a work of art, and you can’t expect people to pay $25 (the cost of a special engagement ticket opening weekend) for a notion.

In theaters now.

Though it may not be en vogue to say it, some narratives seem hardwired into our collective unconscious mind, and we have an attachment to them almost as vital as our need for water. We might not often invoke her name, but the Cinderella Narrative is at the root of much of our narrative culture. Another omnipresent story is that of David and Goliath. In fictional filmmaking, this story is inescapable, but it has a powerful hold on non-fiction film as well. 

The big difference is that in non-fiction, the outcome is not always predetermined. The stone might miss Goliath’s temple. So the focus shifts to why David decided to pick up his sling, even if his aim may, in the end, falter. 

This applies to the new documentary “Bobi Wine: The People’s President,” directed by Christopher Sharp and Moses Bwayo. Sharp is a second-generation Ugandan-born Englishman, and Bwayo, who also serves as one of the film’s cinematographers, is Ugandan. For five years, including inevitably the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, they shadowed and filmed the unlikely rise of Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu to a place of prominence in Ugandan politics. Kyagulanyi, performing under the name Bobi Wine, is a pop musician whose music (a blend of reggae, dancehall, and Ugandan kidandali) has made him a big name. However, Bobi Wine risks it all when he decides to enter politics, taking a seat in the Ugandan Parliament before deciding to run for president.

The incumbent is Yoweri Museveni, a septuagenarian war hero who took up arms against the infamous Ugandan dictator Idi Amin only to become a de facto dictator himself after losing a presidential election and launching a civil war to take power. Museveni has ruled Uganda since 1986. 

The filmmakers construct this documentary as a first-person account of Wine and his formidable wife, Barbie. Their unlikely courtship—a good girl from a middle-class family falling for a musician from the streets with no family to speak of—feels like something out of Old Hollywood. The differences between the two are the secret to this dynamic union, and Wine would probably have never transitioned from pop idol to statesman without her influence and counsel.

All dictators are, to some degree, creatures of the media, and every strongman’s worst nightmare is being challenged by a beloved entertainer. Museveni is threatened by Wine and uses his army and police to go to war with Wine’s National Unity Platform opposition party. Wine is arrested and brutalized, which temporarily forces him into exile as he tries to raise international awareness of Museveni’s abuse of power. 

The documentary balances footage from the news (both Ugandan media and from abroad) with their footage from inside Wine’s inner circle to the violent clashes between Wine’s supporters and the army. The film is in many ways a spiritual sibling to Marshall Curry’s 2005 Oscar-nominated documentary “Street Fight,” which tells the story of (now-) U.S. Senator Cory Booker’s first failed attempt to become the Mayor of Newark as his campaign is smothered by incumbent Sharpe James who ruled Newark in ways strikingly similar to Museveni. 

The differences between “Street Fight” and “Bobi Wine” are telling. Curry narrates the former doc and provides valuable insight into the history of Newark and how Sharpe James went from being part of the post-Civil Rights reformer wave to betraying all the ideals of that movement. Sharp and Bwayo let Bobi and Barbi tell their own story, which is currently one of the preferred modes of non-fiction film storytelling. Wine does convey that Museveni was once his hero, but because the documentary chooses a more participatory-observational approach, we miss a lot of important Ugandan history that provides much-needed context so that we can understand what taking Museveni on means. 

What Sharp and Bwayo do manage to capture in vivid detail is Uganda itself from the high energy of the capital city Kampala to the lush beauty of the northern country. The beauty of the land clashes dramatically with the ugliness of the presidential campaign, which Museveni turns into a civil war in all but name to retain power at any cost. Needless to say, the documentary arrives at a moment when strongman politics are ascending worldwide, even in American national politics.

It will only take a few seconds on Google to tell you how this election ends, but what only the film can do is show you how Bobi Wine evolves into a powerful spokesman for democratic values as he tries to save Uganda from autocracy. This film will undoubtedly inspire others to stand up like Bobi and Barbie, even though “Bobi Wine” is also clear about the cost of putting a stone in your sling. 

Now playing in theaters. 

In the lyrical film “War Pony”–an evocative tale of recurrent tribulation and dogged community spirit–Native strivers and hustlers roam the brutal clime of the Pine Ridge Reservation in search of a life raft to another day. To understand the plight affecting those Oglala Lakota and Sicangu Lakota citizens of the Oglala Sioux Tribe and Rosebud Sioux Tribe, one must first be aware of the broken treaties that lead to their contemporary settlement and the tribal sovereignty that now governs these areas.

Up until “Reservation Dogs” and “Wild Indian,” Chris Eyre’s “Smoke Signals” was a notable exception as a mainstream work by Indigenous creatives. On the flip side, there are also innumerable examples of white folk exploiting Indigenous culture for either economic or artistic gain. With two white filmmakers helming “War Pony,” it would appear, at first blush, that another outsider’s conception of Indigenous history is in the cards. 

Co-directors Gina Gammell and Riley Keough want to avoid such perceptions. Their film is a collaborative effort that began while Riley was filming “American Honey.” There she met two extras, the eventual co-writers of “War Pony,” Bill Reddy and Franklin Sioux Bob, who shared their Rez stories. These conversations would eventually inspire the trio and Gammell to compose their feature. The fruits of their exchange bear an immersive, albeit deeply cliched, collision between magic and neorealism. 

The electrifying first-time actor Jojo Bapteise Whiting stars as Bill, a 23-year-old swaggering striver with a baby momma, two young children, and zero career prospects. He pulls a few tricks and hustles when he learns his baby momma, presently in jail, needs $400 for bail. First, he buys a poodle from a shady character hoping to breed the dog for big money. Then he attempts to pawn his car and his PS4. But he makes his firmest bid toward upward mobility when he sees Tim (Sprague Hollander), marooned with his pickup truck at the side of a dirt road. 

Though Tim is married, he often fools around with Indigenous women. He has one in his truck. He elicits an agreement for Bill: In return for taking the woman home, he’ll give Bill the $400 he needs and a job at Tim’s turkey farm. The opportunity is a hustle that Bill hopes will grant him stability. 

Ladainian Crazy Thunder also stars as Matho, a troubled 12-year-old kid living with an abusive drug-dealing father whose life seems to be hitting all the worst potholes. Matho and Bill aren’t directly related, not on familial grounds, but they are direct foils. Their divergent arcs, occurring in two different spaces on the Rez, convey the beginning of a cycle and the result of one. As Matho shifts from temporary homes to squatting in derelict buildings, from taking beatings to dealing drugs, from one flawed parental figure to another, you get the sense these are all obstacles Bill must have hit long ago. 

Sometimes the editing between their narratives can be sporadic, leaving the impression that you’re watching two movies rather than two intertwining stories. Toward the end of the film, their eventual meeting veers toward predictability, even if I did appreciate the quiet staging and the soothing balm it provides.

“War Pony” has a cathartic transcendence when it engages with the tight bonds that form the community. A prominent instance occurs during a funeral when a convoy of cars swerves in snake-like unison as the plains landscape stretches behind them. Another happens at the end when the filmmakers combine the images of buffalo (the animal magically springs from nowhere) and turkeys for an anarchistic redistribution of resources, a kind of retribution for the appropriation that continues today. 

And yet these scenes are few and far between in a movie that solely prizes trauma. At this point, it’s become a cudgel to accuse a film of being a shallow endeavor because it litigates the stories of a people through its possible horrific reality. Some lives are inherently disturbing. And it can be superficial to ask for nice bows to be affixed to tragic stories, particularly if they’re drawing on real-life experiences. But it’s not just the inner-city milieu of “War Pony” that recalls some of the cliches common to Black gangster dramas of the 1990s. It’s also the film’s inability to convey an existence outside of unwed mothers, apathetic parents, and brutal socioeconomic disparity that leaves one wanting. 

Maybe that’s just the reality of Reddy and Sioux Bob’s community and the plethora of first-time extras and actors drawn from the area. From an outsider’s perspective, however, as poetic and otherworldly as “War Pony” can be, the reality of its people never feels real. 

Now playing in theaters. 

Sophie Kargman’s “Susie Searches” is a movie in search of its audience. The story follows Susie (Kiersey Clemons), a plucky misfit college student who runs her own largely unnoticed true crime podcast between classes and works at an on-campus burger joint. She’s got a knack for solving mysteries, or so she tells us. At first glance, this movie feels like it’s made for a younger audience. The dialogue is cute and bouncy but simplistic. The other characters are fairly silly caricatures, from Susie’s weird boss Edgar (Ken Marino), her dismissive coworker Jillian (Rachel Sennott), and the bumbling cops led by Sheriff Loggins (Jim Gaffigan). But “Susie Searches” is no “Nancy Drew” or “Harriet the Spy.” The movie has a twist that pulls it off-course, leaving more questions than answers. Is it still fun for younger audiences if the plot takes such a sharp dark turn? Is it fun for anyone? 

Co-written by Kargman and William Day Frank, “Susie Searches” starts strong but loses its way after our heroine solves her biggest case yet: the disappearance of local campus heartthrob Jesse Wilcox (Alex Wolff), a meditation YouTube star whose good looks and kind words make him a favorite of just about everyone he meets. Before the case, we see that Susie does not enjoy such adoration. She’s lonely and rejected by classmates, caring for her ailing mother by herself, working hard on a podcast practically no one listens to, and stops by the sheriff’s office to help but is mostly brushed off. 

When Susie solves the case, her world changes. She becomes famous overnight, and how people talk to her also changes. The dean of her college glowingly refers to her as his star pupil as he readies her for the cameras. She nervously smiles as reporters (all in the worst stock impersonations of how journalists behave) ask her questions about how she rescued Jesse from an unknown kidnapper. But the bubbly, feel-good underdog feelings are short-lived. This mostly happens within the first half hour of the movie’s brief runtime, leaving the rest to flounder through the idea that maybe Susie isn’t everything she seems. 

Kargman’s feature debut expands on her 2020 short “Susie Searches,” in which she played the braces-clad aspiring sleuth. However, what might have made a strong premise for a short does not translate to a foolproof feature. As a director, she plays with other thriller visuals—like freeze frames, intense close-ups, and split diopter shots—increasing their use towards the climactic end. But it feels at odds with the tone of the movie’s first third, that of a young detective solving her first big mystery. It’s as if the two parts have been Frankensteined together, and it doesn’t work. 

As Susie, Clemons does her best with the conflicting material, swinging from an all-smiles people pleaser, a determined podcaster narrating her latest theories, to a panicked-stricken observer. For the most part, the rest of the cast is one-note despite their talents. Wolff plays his character as cute and charming, leaning on Susie after his rescue and as the mystery grows more sinister. Gaffigan’s sheriff reluctantly opens up to Susie and seems incompetent until a pivotal moment. Sennott is unfortunately shortchanged in her part as Susie’s disgruntled coworker. Marino’s arc is even more inexplicable, almost like a role that would get made fun of on “Party Down.” 

Part of the novelty of “Susie Searches” lies in how it reflects the growing popularity of true crime podcasts. In June, the Pew Research Center confirmed what many listeners of true crime podcasts already knew: it’s the most popular podcast genre, and the majority of the audience are women, at a rate of almost 2-to-1. The third season of “Only Murders in the Building,” which uses a podcast in its first season to explore crimes in an apartment building in New York City, premieres next month. Numerous shows and docu-series have spun off of popular podcast series or even launched with an accompanying podcast for further listening. Although “Susie Searches” incorporates much of the language and tropes you’d hear in just about any scripted true crime podcast, it doesn’t seem to take kindly to the form itself. It takes a more cynical view of how those shows have influenced their hosts’ mind, possibly even condemning them for what happens. It’s as if the script views her passion project as a gateway to bad behavior, which adds to the feeling of disconnect from the first leg of the movie. If “Susie Searches” wanted to critique the true-crime podcast trend, it could have done so more directly. For now, we have a movie at odds with itself and its main character.

Now playing in theaters. 

I’m really not trying to make a cute play on words by calling “Sympathy for the Devil” godawful.

Directed by Yuval Adler from a script by Luke Paradise and co-produced by star Nicolas Cage, who’s once again leaning hard into his “throwing garbage against the wall to see if it sticks” mode of accepting projects, this is kinda-sorta what they call in the theater a “two-hander,” one in which the beleaguered Ordinary Dude played by Joel Kinnaman runs afoul of a maniacal evildoer taking him on the opposite of a joy ride, at gunpoint, out of Las Vegas and into the unknown. 

We learn right off the bat that Kinnaman’s character, unnamed at this point—he’ll get two names later, but family members call him David—is about to be a father. He’s driving to a hospital to be with his wife after he’s dropped off his adorable tow-headed little fella. In a parking garage, though, is a guy with deep scarlet hair, a demonic goatee, and a revolver—that’s Cage (did you guess?), whose character is also unnamed. (He plays “The Passenger,” you see, and this lack-of-nomenclature gambit can work if the movie is good enough—see Walter Hill’s “The Driver”—but feels pretentious when the movie is, well, this.)

The problem we have right from the get-go is that neither of these personages gives the viewer much to care about. Sure, Kinnaman’s about to be a dad for the second time, but we know plenty of bad and indifferent folks who are fathers. As for Cage’s character, he’s not a character at all. He’s a Nic Cage mood ring designed to allow Nic Cage to do all sorts of wacky Nic Cage stuff. He sweats. He bugs out his eyes. He grins maniacally. He yells. He shrieks. He puts Alicia Bridges’ “I Love the Nightlife” on the jukebox at a diner he’s about to shoot up and dances to the song while bellowing the lyrics. At this point in the movie, about 52 minutes in, I figured I should be earning combat pay for continuing to watch.

Is there a plot? Well, yes. Cage’s character insists he knows David from long ago. Given the actions he describes—criminal bookkeeping, insanity, murder, lots of shady underworld figures—it sounds like that “long ago” was maybe the 1995 Sundance Film Festival, where lots of would-be Tarantino clones were thriving.

When the narrative isn’t tiring us, Cage talks about what his revolver will do to Kinnaman if and when he shoots him in the face or the back of the head. Does the verbal description of getting shot in the head or face make the prospective shooting victim more fearful than the mere presence of a gun pointed at those areas? So this movie believes. Although this may be more a matter of filling up time, giving Cage “provocative” things to say in this pointless exercise. Maybe during one of his drafts, screenwriter Paradise figured out he was leaning on the device pretty hard because there’s a line late in the film where the character refers to the habit. Cage also says things like, “The truth is rarely plain and never simple,” and he shows a lot of nerve when he upbraids Kinnaman’s character for his “cliched” family story.

This is not, I should clarify, strictly a two-hander. There’s a cop, guess what happens to him, and there are diner staffers and customers. Guess what happens to them. “We still have miles to go before we sleep,” Cage’s ostensible Devil says early in the movie. And indeed, it does feel endless.

Now playing in theaters. 

On its surface, “The Beasts,” an atmospheric Spanish true-crime thriller, seems like a bleak parable. A pair of outsiders, inspired by real-life Dutch eco-farmers Margo and Martin Verfondern, find themselves trapped in a heated dispute with their provincial Galician neighbors.

The aggrieved farmer Xan (Luis Zahera) and his skittish brother Loren (Diego Anido) resent the non-native couple, Olga and Antoine (Marina Foïs and Denis Ménochet), for preventing the sale of their land to a wind turbine company. So Olga pleads with Antoine to avoid (or at least stop covertly filming) an increasingly combative Xan. That’s easier said than done for Antoine, given both Xan and Lorenzo’s aggressive and antagonistic behavior. The resulting conflict also seems fairly straightforward: while Xan resents Antoine beyond reason, Antoine refuses to abandon his land.

Thankfully, co-writer/director Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s focus on Antoine and Xan’s emotionally charged stalemate keeps “The Beasts” from devolving into yet another quasi-artful and pseudo-moral genre movie that pits intolerant bumpkins against ignorant city-slickers.

Mood trumps morality in “The Beasts,” partly because Sorogoyen, in collaboration with director of photography Alejandro de Pablo, art director Jose Tirado, and sound designer Fabiola Ordoyo (among others), focuses on the stale air and the dead leaves that cling to the almost deceased Castilian village of Quinela de Barjas, about a 35-minute drive from the nearest inhabited city.

A half-stifling and half-enchanting air of stagnation only deepens the characters’ petulant, self-serving dialogue, not to mention their predictably fruitless and perpetually escalating tit-for-tat fighting. Many filmmakers are praised for making their location-shot settings the real stars of their movies. “The Beasts” wouldn’t be half as compelling if its creators didn’t draw so much out of their movie’s desolate and beautiful ghost town.

Sorogoyen was smart to emphasize, both in his movie and an interview in the movie’s press notes, that “The Beasts” only uses real events as a starting point. Because while the grievances that define both Antoine and Xan may be topical, neither character is much more compelling. Rather, “The Beasts” is arresting because of its creators’ stylized vision of reality. Some long takes present time in a naturalistic way, and some indoor scenes use natural-looking light to deepen our appreciation of what Quinela de Barjas looks and sounds like. These fairly standard filmmaking techniques also redirect our attention to the oppressive stillness that surrounds Antoine and Xan. Sorogoyen’s characters repeatedly bump into each other and just as often butt heads, despite tentative and often sincere-looking offers to hear each other out. By focusing on the impenetrable gloom surrounding Antoine, Xan, and their respective partners, Sorogoyen makes “The Beasts” more about the tragic inevitability of his protagonists’ dispute than whatever they say they’re fighting for.

“The Beasts” also deserves praise for its ensemble cast’s uniformly strong performances, especially since neither Ménochet nor Anido have had much experience as professional movie actors. Sorogoyen and de Pablo’s camera moves with purpose, leaving viewers with the impression that we’re either trailing after Antoine and Xan or looking up with them as they struggle to anticipate whatever’s about to happen. They retrace their steps slowly, sometimes even literally uphill, or balance and shift on their back feet, waiting for something they’re sure is coming but still can’t fully prepare for. That’s a nightmarish headspace, the kind that great horror movies thrive on.

“The Beasts” is ultimately a parable about neighbors who keep looking at each other, with anger and sadness, for an impossible miracle. They sort of get one, but it provides no relief. Sorogoyen, who co-wrote “The Beasts” with Isabel Peña, breaks his story into two uneven halves, the second of which shifts the plot’s focus away from Antoine and onto Olga and Marie (Marie Colomb), their frustrated daughter. A seemingly inevitable plot twist necessitates this narrative break, but even then, the movie is more about the sheer intensity of its characters’ emotional deadlock. “Nobody cares about the truth,” Marie says, and she’s right, of course. Olga is also right when she tells Marie, “You don’t understand,” because Marie has not lived in Quinela de Barjas for as long as she has, so she hasn’t taken in as much dead, comforting air as her mother.

Sorogoyen and Peña may ultimately lead us, alongside their characters, to a pious, anticlimactic finale, but it’s almost hard to care, given how real Antoine and Xan’s world seems. The toxic air surrounding these two characters does not clear by the movie’s end; it accretes and suffocates everyone who breathes it. Antoine and Xan’s dispute is, therefore, less about turf or hurt feelings than how the world looks when you’re waiting for the worst to happen. It does, and it’s as obvious and upsetting as it needs to be. “The Beasts” may not be realistic, but it is genuinely eerie.

Now playing in theaters. 

Danny and Michael Philippou’s “Talk to Me” cleverly imagines a deadly craze that would easily sweep a generation—this horror movie’s plausibility is one of the freakiest things about it. The social media-feeding frenzy involves spiritual possession, made possible by grasping a ceramic-encased severed hand graffitied with names and symbols that suggest a long line of previous owners. Aussie teens like Mia (Sophie Wilde), Jade (Alexandra Jensen), and eventually Jade’s younger brother Riley (Joe Bird) are the latest players in such a game, which has them seeing dead people and giving them access to their tied-up bodies for 90 seconds, tops. When the spirits are “let in,” the teens suddenly shoot backward in a chair (the camera jolting back with them, the sound mix dropping out), and their pupils burst into a deep black. They shiver, choke, and asphyxiate as if they are gonna die. Meanwhile, their giddy friends surround them, filming. What a rush, as a YouTuber probably once said about eating Tide pods.  

It’s a brilliant device for a modern horror story (Daley Pearson is credited as the concept’s creator), and a franchise waiting to happen (in the case of horror, that often means a fruitful idea is intact, like when “Final Destination,” “The Purge,” and “Saw” first debuted.) “Talk to Me” could easily lead to a higher body count or a more directly spooky story in its sequels. But the game begins small here with a sincere pitch that aims for the gut—this first installment is about watching someone be possessed by horrible ideas of grief, and the damage their decisions inflict on their loved ones. 

There are rules for how this dance with death can be done “safely,” and in a snappy montage that mixes partying with possessive play, we get a great sense of what extreme fun it can be for Mia, her friends, and the hand’s current owners, Hayley (Zoe Terakes) and Joss (Chris Alosio). But everything shifts in a nifty, nasty instant when one of the spirits that overtakes young Riley turns out to be Mia’s mother who died by suicide two years previous. Or at least the spirit claims to be. A freaked-out Mia forces this one communication with the dead to go on too long, putting Riley in a coma with many self-inflicted gashes on their head, an attempt by the spirit to kill his soul and fully control his body. 

The second half of “Talk to Me” suffers from being yet another recent horror movie built on the trauma of loss, but it gets a special amount of layers from Sophie Wilde’s excellent performance. It’s not just about Mia trying to hold onto contact with her mother, but her need to not lose her new family, that of Jade, Riley, and their protective mother Sue (played with dry toughness by Miranda Otto) in the process. We ache for Mia to be OK, especially since she’s such a bright personality—her constant yellow wardrobe always pops, and she has sweet scenes with Riley, like when the Philippous hard-cut to them early on bursting out Sia’s “Chandelier” during a night-time car ride. Wilde exemplifies a feverish, youthful need to balance both the pains of the past and a jeopardized future, and by trying to hack the hand’s magic, she isolates herself from reality in the process. “Talk to Me” could have been more rote without such voluminous work, but Wilde’s tragic interpretation—her big-screen debut—is one for the horror movie history books. 

The Philippous rarely show us the TikToks or Snapchats that document these possessions, but we don’t need to see them: these freaky scenarios play out exactly as they might in real life, with writers Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman allowing teens to be teens. When everything starts to fall apart—and souls are on the line—the characters just become more stubborn, their desperation making things worse and even more dangerous. “Talk to Me” has the bare wisdom of a coming-of-age tale, and while it conjures a few excellent moments of guffawing disbelief from the audience, it never talks down to the audience it wants to reflect. The Philippous’ filmmaking comes from YouTube (known there as RackaRacka), and their eye for this psychology is more savvy than it is cynical. 

A good deal of nasty fun is scattered throughout “Talk to Me,” especially for fans of well-made blood-dribbling head wounds, sound design that makes you wince without relying on jump scares, and a tone that doesn’t play nice. Plus, the movie’s playful possession scenes get better and better (the movie’s young cast is impressive wriggling in those chairs, even if the possession make-up style looks familiar to so many other movies). But “Talk to Me” can bank too much of its quality on simply being a good pitch best fulfilled later—it’s hard not to see its gripping opening scene of terror, a one-shot through an unrelated, crowded party, as an isolated red herring not followed through by the rest of the film. The movie’s overall restraint is admirable, and best felt in the numerous moments when the camera holds on someone’s scared face, so we can build dread about what ghoul they are looking at. But “Talk to Me” risks holding back too much despite its excellent concept’s promise. 

Whether or not we get more rounds with this hand of fate, “Talk to Me” lingers as a striking and confident directorial debut from the Philippous, whose penchant for hyper-active YouTube fight and prank vids is mostly evident in this movie’s emotional carnage. With such a playful send-up on a possession story, the Philippous have successfully crossed over into feature filmmaking, but it will take a little more genre ingenuity for us to keep talking about them. 

Now playing in theaters. 

Midnight blues melt into velvety blacks, punctuated by motel signs, gleaming lonely neon sometimes blurred by rain or snow on the windshield. These aren’t national chain motels. You have to get off the interstate to find them. An old guy behind the front desk hands out the room keys and makes friendly banter. He doesn’t find it odd when a customer pulls up at midnight and rings the doorbell. People are on the move in this massive country, to parts known and unknown. They need a warm bed for the night, maybe a friendly face so the road won’t feel so lonely. Inside the chilly room, pink neon floods through the window.

These are some of the images in Morrisa Maltz’s stunning narrative debut “The Unknown Country,” a lyrical and poetic journey, as well as an actual journey, from the snowy wastes of South Dakota’s Badlands to the humid nights of the Lone Star State. Lily Gladstone plays Tana, an Indigenous woman setting out for Texas after her grandmother’s death. The story isn’t “filled in” until later, but the details are almost unnecessary. It is enough to know that Tana is grieving her grandmother and missing what she never had, a sense of an extended community. She drives across the great plains of America, visiting her Oglala Lakota family, people she hasn’t seen in a long time, attending her cousin’s wedding, stopping off in motels, and meeting people along the way. She’s alert to danger when necessary, and for Native women traveling alone, it’s always necessary. But Tana is also open to friendliness and kindness, as shown in a sequence in Texas when she meets a group of people at an outdoor bar and ends up hanging out with them all night, having carefree fun. It’s not an accident that “The Unknown Country” moves from the cold north to the warm south. It’s a process of healing and integration for Tana, who has felt disconnected from her family and, by extension, her entire community. 

In the corporate world, there’s a concept called “touchpoints,” places where a customer interacts with the company. On a human level, “touchpoints” are those random moments where a stranger becomes a friend, where a person behind a convenience store counter makes it a point to connect with a customer, not because they want anything, but because connection with humans is where it’s at. So much of our world seems now designed to help us avoid as many “touchpoints” as possible. “The Unknown Country” shows us what we’re missing.

Maltz uses her background in documentary to create a fluid hybrid of a film, where real people tell their stories in voiceover, people whom Tana meets once before moving on: a cheerful waitress (Pam Richter) committed to giving her customers a happy memory (the film is dedicated to her), a convenience store clerk (Dale Toller) who makes the reticent Tana crack a smile, and shares in voiceover his long-held dream of meeting a man named Cole … and damned if it didn’t come to pass! There are more voices: a man who walked away from a successful engineering career to run a motel with his wife, a dance hall owner in Texas who bought the place so that 90-year-old Flo, a local legend, has a place to dance every night. These voices, homey and intimate, fill the air as Tana drives. There are other voices, too, on the radio. The contrast couldn’t be starker: the voices of real people doing their best and the people on air, perpetuating division and conflict. Post-2016 reality doesn’t even need to be acknowledged outright. It’s in the oxygen.

The film was collectively conceived and written by Gladstone, Maltz, editor Vanara Taing, and Lainey Bearkiller Shangreaux, who appears in the film (and also produced). Gladstone interacts with people playing either a version of themselves or themselves outright. When Tana stops off to visit her cousin (Lainey Shangreaux), she is instantly welcomed by her estranged family. The Shangreauxs are still connected with reservation life (the “rez”), but Tana, from an urban environment, lacks that connection, maybe even shies from it. Tana attends Lainey and Devin’s wedding and plays with their child Jasmine (“Jazzy”), a lively girl who loves dancing and being silly. Lainey tells her story in voiceover, her teenage Romeo and Juliet romance with Devin, sneaking out of windows to see each other, getting pregnant so they had to be together. When Devin says his wedding vows, tears are on his face. These are all incredibly touching scenes, and Gladstone easily immerses herself in this family, smoking butts with her cousin outside and drinking beers in a local pub. She feels welcome, but she also feels her outsider status. Tana stares at a picture of her grandmother, taken in 1940 while on a similar road trip. What was her life like? What can be learned? How can she grieve?

There’s a key scene when Lainey and Tana go visit Lainey’s grandfather, brother to Tana’s grandmother. He and Tana walk through the winter twilight, and he senses, as wise, experienced people often do, Tana’s unanswered questions and her need to know her grandmother, to understand. He gives her a suitcase filled with her grandmother’s possessions. A cotton housedress. A photo. These prompt more questions than answers, pushing Tana on in her quest.

Andrew Hajek’s cinematography is awash in colors and sensitive to the nuances of light: cold or deep, harsh or soft. Lens flares are almost a cliche, but not how they’re used here. Light melts or refracts. Those dark blues and floating neon signs, the “O” of MOTEL reflected in the windshield, the monochromatic snowy landscape, and the deep colors of a windy twilight in the middle of nowhere, all this gives “The Unknown Country” an amazing tactile quality. You don’t watch the movie. You experience it through your senses.

Kelly Reichardt’s “Certain Women” was peopled with giant names: Laura Dern, Michelle Williams, Kristen Stewart. But Lily Gladstone, as the farmhand taking night classes, was the standout. Staring at her sleep-deprived teacher (Stewart) in the front of the classroom after riding her horse to class and sharing a coffee at a late-night diner … Gladstone gives a nearly wordless performance (as she does here, too), but Gladstone doesn’t need words. It’s all on her face. In “Certain Women,” her face told of a kind of yearning, the romantic nature hidden beneath the surface of a hearty woman who works with her hands. It’s so exciting to see her here, too. She doesn’t speak much, but her energy differs greatly from “Certain Women.” Her character here is shyer, and less confident, and her thawing out takes a little longer. It will be even more exciting to see Gladstone in Martin Scorsese’s upcoming “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

The ending scene doesn’t quite land, although the cathartic intention is apparent. What matters is Gladstone’s face, taking in the world around her and all those voices, telling us who they are, what they’ve been through. In the corner of a family photo hanging on the wall of the Shangreaux home is a small piece of paper with a quote from poet Mary Oliver:

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

It’s really the only question.

Now playing in theaters. 

Imaginatively edited, sexually explicit, and filled with eloquent and often boisterous individuals of a sort who rarely get to claim a spotlight in documentaries, the trans sex worker portrait “Kokomo City” is a blast of creative freedom in an increasingly corporatized period of nonfiction filmmaking. It focuses on four trans women, Koko Da Doll, Daniella Carter, Liyah Mitchell and Dominique Silver, interviewing them in their own homes and ordinary public spaces—sometimes glammed up, but more often with little makeup. The black and white imagery links it to a rich mid-century tradition of American documentaries (typified by films like the Maysles Brothers’ “Salesman” and Shirley Clarke’s “Portrait of Jason”) that focused on personalities and aimed for a fly-on-the-wall feeling. But the structure and editing have a punk rock midnight-movie energy, taking pride in flagrantly ignoring the (purely theoretical!) documentary filmmaking handbook of do’s and don’ts. The cheeky-blasé subtext is: If you don’t like what we’re doing, go watch a different movie.

“Kokomo City” is shot and cut by D. Smith, a Black, trans, Grammy-nominated producer who worked with Lil Wayne, Keri Hilson, and Katy Perry. Smith was ostracized by the music industry after coming out in 2014 and appeared on season five of “Love & Hip-Hop: Atlanta,” a gig that she now regrets because of how she tried to stand out by (she says) somewhat caricaturing herself. She was also homeless for a while. This movie is a reclamation, a reinvention, and a return. It’s bursting with energy, it’s all over the place, and there are times when it sorta trips over its ambition. But it’s hard to pinpoint, in some faux-objective sense, what does or doesn’t “work,” because it isn’t trying to satisfy any criteria but its own. The whole thing is uncoupled from mainstream/”normie” life and bourgeois concepts of propriety, much like the New York- and Atlanta-based people it depicts. 

The opening scene is an extemporaneous monologue about a sex worker taking a gun away from a client, intercut with hyperbolic recreations that have an almost Pop Art goofiness (like slapstick comedy scenes in a Baz Luhrmann flick). The monologue is filmed handheld and zoomed-in from several feet away from speaker, who is sometimes partly obscured by a doorframe. The framing makes the audience feel it has been granted privileged access to insider knowledge. This feeling persists all the way through through a politically incendiary closing montage with full-frontal nudity, filmed and cut in a way that makes it feel like a 1990s MTV video that MTV would have never dared broadcast. There are partial dramatizations of the subjects’ experiences on the job (some of which feature graphic sex scenes with cartoonishly loud sound effects) and low-key, no-fuss hangout scenes where you get to see intimate moments of a more mundane sort (grooming in a bathroom mirror, canoodling on a couch). Smith uses wall-to-wall underscoring in some scenes, a la Spike Lee, lending gritty documentary material a touch of Old Hollywood grandiosity. 

These markedly different bits sit next to each other in linear sequence, as in an anthology film comprised of short subjects. The movie is not interested in easing viewers out of one mode and into the next. The result feels not only justified but aesthetically right. The common element joining the subjects’ stories is a shared belief, rooted in experience, that most of the world ignores, exploits, or violently persecutes them (one section mourns trans women murdered by clients). So it makes sense that “Kokomo City” wouldn’t trouble itself with questions of appropriateness raised by anyone, even viewers from within the community who might object to how Smith puts certain body parts on display.

The film is aware of outsiders looking in and sometimes addresses them directly. But the material also looks inward at the Black and trans community and the places where it intersects—especially the bedroom. The film’s title is an allusion to blues singer Kokomo Arnold, whose “Sissy Man” includes the lines, “I woke up this mornin’ with my pork grindin’ business in my hand/Lord, if you can’t send me no woman, please send me some sissy man.” The interviewees are understanding yet critical of “trade”—the sullen, straight-acting men, married and single, who bottom with them in secret. “Gay panic” is often used as a defense by clients who know full well what they snuck out and slunk around to get, who cannot reconcile their public-facing macho presentation with the vulnerability and desires that they show behind closed doors, and lie, ghost, or lash out to protect their own illusions. “They wanna see a pretty-ass girl with a big d—,” Koko says. This past April, a few months after “Kokomo City” won awards on the festival circuit, Koko was murdered in Atlanta. 

Despite the often harsh realities of the life it captures, “Kokomo City” is a fundamentally warm and embracing work. It sets its own boundaries and finds peace within them. The loose-limbed, free-flowing approach to the stories lets each speaker become the star of whatever scene they happen to inhabit. Smith told The Guardian that one of her filmmaking influences was 2016’s “Joker,” especially the scenes that showed the title character living the daily grind without makeup. “I just wanted to re-create the narrative of what trans women truly are,” she said. “We’re human, and this is what we look like. We look like you, we’re fun, and we’re vulnerable like you, and we want love like you.” 

From the original ride to now-three of film adaptations, Disney’s Haunted Mansion is properly cemented into the company’s spooky canon. This installment is in line behind 2003’s nostalgic Eddie Murphy chapter and 2021’s Muppets edition. Justin Simien (“Dear White People,” “Bad Hair”) directs this return to a Black-led live-action iteration of the story. 

The simple plot lends to simple execution across the board. Single mother Gabbie (Rosario Dawson) has moved into the antique house of her dreams with her nine-year-old son Travis (Chase Dillon). But not long after stepping into the home, they become blatantly aware of the spirited tenants occupying the creepy abode. Enlisting the help of grieving astrophysicist Ben (LaKeith Stanfield), priest Father Kent (Owen Wilson), medium Harriet (Tiffany Haddish), and haunted house expert Professor Bruce Davis (Danny DeVito), the gang hopes to put their heads together to rid the house of its supernatural tormentors.

“Haunted Mansion” is star-studded but shoddy at best. Despite the talent of writer Katie Dippold (“The Heat” “Parks and Recreation”), the script’s punchlines are forced and flat. Everyone is doled their share of one-liners, but Wilson and Haddish carry most of the weight. While Wilson often runs dry, Haddish delivers in her classic tone and cadence, executing flimsy jokes to her best ability. The script does toe the line of Disney’s boundaries, tossing in some light innuendos in a somewhat concerted effort to draw in more mature audiences.

Simien’s film does display its fun-loving origins in how the house can transform into a surrealist landscape. Halls that never end, ceilings that extend into impossibility, gargoyles, hidden rooms, and the ever-so-classic ghost-inhabited portraits recall nostalgia for the film’s classic Gothicism. “Haunted Mansion” boasts a handful of playful chases and spooky sequences, but they’re fleeting and soon bring us back to the film’s stuttering pace. It’s hard to find any true tension in “Haunted Mansion” until the climactic faceoff in the third act. 

Perhaps the greatest letdown of Simien’s movie is how little the cast delivers. The ensemble is brimming with lively, prolific candidates, yet the script hardly seems to keep this in mind. Their talents are either underused or misdirected. Stanfield’s Ben mourns the loss of his wife, his grief becoming a cornerstone of the story. Yet while we’ve seen Stanfield display emotional depth in other roles, every tearful moment feels like a soap opera, not on account of sentiment, but performance. There’s a sense of watered-down contrivance across the board. The forced, postured will-they won’t-they romance between Stanfield and Dawson showcases this also. And with seasoned comedic actors in Wilson, DeVito, and Haddish, too few of their comedy efforts actually hit. 

“Haunted Mansion” is constructed with the familiar bricks of a Gothic tale, down to the theme of grief that runs throughout. There’s a thoughtful examination of how grief makes us vulnerable while also being able to harness the power of that love to connect with one another and appreciate the lives we lead. There’s also value for family audiences in the nostalgic spookiness that rides along the surface. But with a repeated sourness in the film’s comedic efforts and a tragically misused ensemble, “Haunted Mansion” misses the chance to become a Halloween classic. 

In theaters now.