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SHORT TAKES: “Predator: Badlands,” “Year 10”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 16, 2026| Leave a Comment »

Elle Fanning

“PREDATOR: BADLANDS” My rating: B- (Hulu)

107 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Having expanded the “Predator” franchise with “Prey” (set among 17th-century Native Americans) and “Predator: Killer of Killers” (an animated omnibus of yarns about predators visiting various cultures) , director Dan Trachtenberg swings for the outfield wall with “Predator: Badlands.”

Imagine your standard issue buddy movie — think “48 Hours” — as an interspecies dramedy.  

Our Nick Nolte character is Dek, a member of the Yaujta race, a warlike bunch who make “Star Trek’s” Klingons look like Teletubbies. Dek is considered the runt of his predator  clan; to prove his worth he decides to travel to the “death planet” Genna, where even the grass can kill you.  His goal is to be the first to bring back the head of the Kalisk, a fearsome creature that has killed every Yaujta warrior who dared confront it.

The Eddie Murphy character is Thia (Elle Fanning), a humanoid robot who lost her legs in an encounter with the Kalisk.  Thia is chatty, ironic, whimsical — everything the grunting, brusque Dek is not.  But she knows the territory and Dek is smart enough to use Thia as a navigational tool and survivalist encyclopedia. He carries her around like a talkative backpack.

There are plenty of encounters with Genna’s deadly life forms.  Along the way the grumpy Dek and Thia become friends of a sort.  They become a trio when they’re adopted by a vaguely simian creature Thia names Bud.

Trachtenberg and co-writers Patrick Aison and Jim Thomas carve out some new ground here while cross referencing other movies and franchises.  For starters, we’re meant to experience the story from the Predator’s point of view. Usually, of course, the Predator is the bad guy.

But Dek can talk (his voice is provided by Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi; his physical form apparently is all computer-generated).  We can understand him thanks to subtitles.

And then there’s Thia’s origin story.  She was sent to Gemma with dozens of other humanoid robots as a project of the  Weyland-Yutani Corporation, the villlainous entity of the “Alien” franchise.

Actually Fanning gets two roles here…as the goofy Thia and as her ruthless no-nonsense “sister,” Tessa.  The rest of the robots are all played by Cameron Brown, which makes for some head-messing moments when Dek squares off against dozens of enemies, all of whom share the same face.

I found “Predator: Badlands” intermittently amusing and enjoyed the way the yarn expands the whole Predator/Alien mythology. But like just about every action movie, the final third is devoted to a massive fight sequence. I found my interest waning with the repetitive mayhem.

Still, geeks of the franchise will be in Yaujta heaven with this one.

Alexander Anderson

“YEAR 10” My rating: B- (Prime)

96 minutes | No MPAA rating

The Brit “Year 10” is a pretty good example of imagination trumping a nearly non-existent budget.

Writer/director Ben Codger’s post-apocalyptic drama takes place in the woods (not much required in the way of sets) and features a cast of unknowns.

What really makes “Year 10” memorable is that not one word is spoken in the entire film.  Whether the muteness exhibited by the charactrers is the result of some environmental disaster or a survival technique is never explained, but the result is a movie that works entirely on the images it delivers.

Alexander Anderson plays Charger (we only know his name from the credits) who lives in a camoflaged hut with an old man (Ellis Jones) and a young woman (Emma Cole) who may be his lover.

As the film starts the girl is suffering from a wound that might kill her.  Charger goes out scrounging for antibiotics, a dangerous quest since the woods are patrolled by members of a cannibal gang.

This is, of course, essentially the same world depicted by Cormac McCarthy in his Pulitzer-winning novel The Road. Well, if you’re gonna steal, steal from the best.

I found “Year 10” surprisingly involving. I was especially taken with the film’s heavy, the cannibal leader (Luke Massy), a sort of unstoppable malevolent force.

| Robert W. Butler

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SHORT TAKES:  “Secret Mall Apartment,”  “The Rip,” “Smashing Machine”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 29, 2026| Leave a Comment »

Michael Townsend in a recreation of the secret mall apartment

“SECRET MALL APARTMENT” My rating: B+(Netflix)

92 minutes | No MPAA rating

It starts as a quirky news story, the sort of thing morning talk show hosts chat about between the really depressing news items.

In 2007 it was reported that the operators of the Providence Place Mall in Providence, R.I., had discovered a secret apartment in an unoccupied corner of the building.  For four years several local artists had been using it as a sort of clubhouse, occasionally spending the night in the unheated, unairconditioned space.  They had surreptitiously filled the area with thrift-shop furniture, a TV and a PlayStation.

From that tantalizing revelation filmmaker Jeremy Workman has fashioned a documentary that slowly expands to embrace not just the story of the secret apartment but an entire world view.

“Secret Mall Apartment” begins with the building of the mall in 1999.  Thie project encroached on the old buildings that provided studios and living space for local artists (Providence, home of the Rhode Island School of Design, evidently is rich with bohemian types). 

From the beginning the project rubbed many the wrong way.  The effort at gentrification not only displaced citizens, but once completed it was obvious that Providence Place was aimed at the well-heeled, not the struggling locals. And it was a death knell for area mom-and-pop retail outlets.

Curious about this leviathan of caste-conscious capitalism in their midst, eight artists from the neighborhood began exploring the imposing edifice.  Their leader was Michael Townsend, a red-haired string bean who first discovered the secret space and, ironically, became the only one of the squatters who faced criminal charges once the apartment was discovered. (In fact, Townsend refused to divulge the identities of his fellows; this film is the first time they have publicly acknowledged their participation.)

The key word here is “artist.” From the outset Townsend and his buds viewed their invasion of the mall as a sort of performance art — art that quietly defied the voracious system that had disrupted their community.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about all this is that the participants routinely recorded their activities with cheap video cameras purchased at the mall’s Radio Shack.  We can see them in action, struggling to move heavy furniture through crawl spaces and up steep ladders, even building a cinderblock wall (with mysterious locked door) to keep out intruders.

Of course their activities were secret, and some of their capers (like smuggling several tons of construction materials into the building while avoiding mall security) defy comprehension.  But it’s all here on scratchy videotape.

There’s more.  Townsend emerges as a sort of community-minded artist-as-angel.  Even while hanging out at the mall he created his own art form, using colored rolls of masking tape to make playful murals on the walls of a children’s hospital. In time the kids would make their own murals…which could be removed without damaging the paint job.

Very cool. In fact, Townsend turned his masking tape art  into a small business. His attitude permeates the film…playful, modest, unstoppably creative. Nevertheless, he’s been banned from the mall for life.

But here’s the cherry on the sundae:  “Secret Mall Apartment” played for a full year in the Providence Place Cinema inside the mall.

What goes around…

Ben Affleck, Matt Damon

THE RIP” My rating: C+(Netflix)
113 minutes | MPAA rating: R


“The Rip” is half a good movie…the first half.


The setup of Joe Carnahan’s thriller finds a unit of Miami cops mourning a fellow officer killed in what looks like a gangland hit.  Now they respond to a tip about strange goings on at a local house.


Members of the team (Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Steven Yeun, Teyana Taylor, Catalina Sandino Moreno) find the place occupied by a young Hispanic woman (Sasha Calle) who claims to be preparing the house — her late grandmother’s — for sale.


Except that hidden in a  wall the team finds several million dollars in cash.  Clearly the local cartel has been using the place as a sort of safety deposit box.


And then they notice that all the other homes on the street appear to be unoccupied. Creepy.


Protocol requires that the money be counted on the premises…which means the bunch must spend several hours thumbing through stacks of money, all the while awaiting the arrival of well-armed sicarios.  Why doesn’t the team leader (Damon) call for reinforcements?


This is where “The Rip” goes out of control. The screenplay by Carnahan and Michael McGrale postulates that any one of the team may be a traitor.  In fact, there’s a possibility that someone high in the force’s chain of  command may be pulling the strings. No one can be trusted.


The film’s opening moments are an intriguing melding of world-weariness and growing tension.  With the discovery of the cash you can feel the noose tightening. 


But little by little “The Rip” devolves into a b-the-numbers action flick.  The cast is strong, but they’re at the mercy of the material.

Emily Blunt, Dwayne Johnson

“THE SMASHING MACHINE” My rating: B- (HBO Max)
123 minuts | MPAA rating: R


Dwayne Johnson gives what may be a career-high performance in Benny Safdie’s “The Smashing Machine.”


As real life UFC fighter Mark Kerr, the Rock is practically unrecognizable beneath prosthetics and wig.  He seems to effortlessly slip into the persona of a reasonably decent guy who is undone by frustrated ambitions and addiction.


Johnson’s nuanced, pain-wracked perf is only one surprise in “Smashing Machine.” The other is real life UFC star Ryan Bader, astonishingly good as Kerr’s training partner and probable future opponent Mark Coleman.


And then there’s Emily Blunt.  I’m a huge fan, but here she plays Kerr’s on-again, off-again girlfriend Dawn. Talk about a toxic relationship!!  Any film that can make me hate Emily Blunt has much to answer for. Despite the movie’s strong  points, I was left with a bitter taste in my mouth.


| Robert W. Butler

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SHORT TAKES: “Roofman,” “Eden”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 2, 2026| Leave a Comment »

“ROOFMAN” My rating: B-(Prime, Paramount)

126 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Given its near-fantastical premise and a goofy poster I was expecting “Roofman” to be a lighthearted romp.

Uh, nope.

The latest from director Derek Cianfrance (“Blue Valentine,” “The Place Between the Pines”) is a true-crime yarn whose overarching emotion is one of loss. 

Jeffrey Manchester (portrayed by Channing Tatum) was a former soldier who used his military training to launch an unusual criminal career.  His modus operandi was to break through the roof of a fast food restaurant under cover of darkness, hide in the restroom and then emerge after the employees had arrived.  Although he carried a gun Manchester was unfailingly polite, even apologetic for any trauma he was putting his victims through.

The judge wasn’t impressed by his good manners.  The “Roofman” was sentenced to nearly 40 years in prison. Perhaps even worse, Manchester’s wife divorced him and refused to let his two beloved little girls even visit.

 It took him a few years to hatch an escape plan; eventually Manchester broke out and took up residence in the unoccupied areas of a big box toy store in North Carolina.

Surviving on  a diet of candy swiped at night when nobody was around, Manchester soon had the whole place wired with cameras and monitors so the he could watch everything that was happening from his hidey hole between the walls.  

He eavesdropped on the employees, quickly concluding that the store manager (Peter Dinklage) was a dick. And Roofman was so impressed with the sideline philanthropic  work of just-divorced employee Leigh Wainscott (a superb Kirsten Dunst) that he donated a whole mess of toys (stolen, obviously) to her favored charity.

Channing Tatum, Kirsten Dunst

A romance springs up between Manchester — who passes himself off as some kind of federal cop doing top secret work — and Leigh.  And why not…this guy is charming, funny, considerate, and manages to bewitch not only Leigh’s impressionable young daughter but also her surly teenager. He even goes to church with them like the good family man he’s desperate to be.

Of course it cannot last. Slowly the noose of justice is tightening.

The screenplay by Cianfrance and Kirt Gunn is less caper flick than character study.  You can’t help liking Jeffrey Manchester, but his unthinking acceptance of criminality and  the emotional wreckage he’s likely to leave behind are more than a little worrisome.  Tatum nicely limns both sides of his personality.

The real revelation here is Dunst, who gives a heartbreaking perf as a woman who thinks that at long last the right man has come along.  An Oscar nomination is not out of the question.

“Roofman” features a whole bunch of heavy hitters in its supporting cast — LaKeith Stanfield, Emory Cohen, Juno Temple, Uzo Aruba and Ben Mendelsohn — but Tatum and Dunst are front and center giving the yarn its emotional oomph.

Jude Law, Vanessa Kirby

“EDEN” My rating: C (Netflix)

129 minutes | MPAA: R

There’s undoubtedly a good movie to be made from the mad story of Friedrich Ritter, but “Eden” isn’t it.

The latest from Ron Howard examines one of the weirder utopian experiments of the last century.

In 1929 German physician Friedrich Ritter traveled with his mistress Dore Strauch to the uninhabited island of Floreana in the Galapagos. His idea was to reinvent civilization on a small scale, drawing as inspiration Nietzsche’s notion of the Superman.

For the first couple of years Ritter and Strauch (portrayed in the film by Jude Law and Vanessa Kirby) got by mostly on supplies periodically dropped off by cargo vessels; Ritter devoted his days to typing out a manifesto summing up his ideas. Today we’d call him a crackpot.

As long as it was just the two of them their little settlement seemed copacetic enough.  And then they got visitors. Murder and mayhem ensued,

Howard and Noah Pink’s screenplay begins with the unannounced arrival of Heinz Wittmer and his wife Margret (Daniel Bruhl, Sydney Sweeney).  Inspired by sensational news reports of Ritter’s experiment, Wittmer quit his civil service job, sold everything, and shipped off with his young bride to Galapagos.

Daniel Bruhl, Sydney Sweeney

They get a chilly welcome from the arrogant Ritter, who resents the intrusion and leaves them on their own to negotiate the rigors of island life (marauding boars, unproductive soil, very little water). Against the odds, the Wittmers hang in there.  If they’re not thriving, at least they figured out how to survive.

Enter Baroness Eloise von Wagner (Ana de Armas), a party girl who arrives with three sex-slave boytoys and a mad idea to build a luxury resort in Ritter’s little realm.  She  is arrogant and entitled, uses sex as a coercive force and isn’t above stealing food and supplies from her neighbors.

The minute the Baroness arrives the movie goes off the rails. One can’t entirely blame De Armas, who has shown her chops in films as varied as “Blonde” and “Knives Out.” As written, the character is almost comically stupid and throughly maddening…I’m not sure any actress could pull it off.  

The real surprise here is Sweeney, who leaves her sex-kitten image far behind to play a rather plain and unsophisticated hausfrau who must deal with everything from giving birth alone to fighting off a pack of dogs. Turns out she’s got game (both the character and the actress).

“Eden” looks good (the cinematographer is Mathias Herndl) and there are some moments of involving physical action, but far from making a big statement the film seems satisfied with silliness.

| Robert W. Butler

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SHORT TAKES: “Sorry, Baby,” “Nobody 2,” “Ballad of a Small Player”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 16, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Naomi Ackie, Eva Victor

“SORRY, BABY”  My rating: A- (HBO Max)

103 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Every once in a while you encounter a film so achingly on target that you instinctively realize that it had to be torn from someone’s personal experience.

So it is with “Sorry, Baby,” Eva Victor’s hauntingly beautiful film about the aftermath of a sexual assault.

The words “sexual assault” will be enough to scare off many viewers.  But while Victor’s semi-autobiographical film (she wrote, directed and stars in it) addresses trauma, it’s more about the healing aftermath.

It starts unremarkably enough with our protagonist, Agnes (Victor), being visited by her old college roommate, Lydia (Naomi Ackie).  They’re several years out of school, but while Lydia has moved to the big city and settled down (she’s gay,  not that it’s a big deal) Agnes has hung around their New England college town.  In fact, she’s now a bigwig in the English Department.

These opening scenes radiate the easy familiarity of old friends reconnecting. But soon the talk drifts back to their senior year and an unpleasant incident. In a flashback we view Agnes’ interaction with Decker (Louis Cancelmi), one of her professors.  He seems like a standup guy…until he isn’t.

Victor wisely refrains from showing the assault.  Instead we get a long shot of the teacher’s home, where the two are meeting to discuss her thesis. Agnes goes inside, and the unmoving camera records the home’s facade as the sun dims, night falls, and lights go on inside. Apparently several hours have passed before Agnes stumbles out, walks to her car and drives away in a fog of humiliation and disbelief.

In a balancing act for the ages, Victor seasons this traumatic incident with satiric flashes.  When she meets with school officials to discuss the incident, she’s told that it’s not their problem.  Decker turned in his resignation just before the assault.  This news is delivered by a couple of women administrators whose clumsy efforts at sympathy are undermined by their panicked sense of institutional preservation.

“Sorry, Baby” rises and falls with Victor’s performance.  Her Agnes is tall, gawky and unremarkable (though, weirdly enough, by film’s end I saw her as beautiful).  She’s intellectually solid but emotionally tentative.  She often masks her feelings with oddball comments and an ironic aura.

Not that she doesn’t get some solid help from the other players.  Ackie is the best friend everyone wishes they had.  Lucas Hedges shines as the vaguely nerdy neighbor with whom the post-assault Agnes has a sweetly goofy love affair.  And veteran actor John Carroll Lynch nearly steals the film as a  sandwich shop operator who takes a grieving Agnes (whom he has never met before) under his caring wing.

The world can be cruel.  But simple decency  goes a long way.

Bob Odenkirk

“NOBODY 2” My rating: C+(Peacock)

89 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“Nobody” (2021) was an unexpected sleeper, a hyperviolent, darkly funny yarn about a nondescript family man (Bob Odenkirk) whose secret job is that of assassin.

Now we’ve got a second installment and it’s pretty much the same thing all over again…minus the sense of discovery that made the first film so enjoyable.

Imagine “National Lampoon’s Vacation” mated with “Pulp Fiction.”  Odenkirk’s Hutch Mansell takes the family (Connie Nielsen is the Missus) to the cheesy amusement park he enjoyed as a boy.  

Except he finds the place now is a front for a drug operation run by a sociopathic grand dame (Sharon Stone) and administered by a corrupt local sheriff (John Ortiz).

Much mayhem ensues.  

Except this time the brew of comedy and over-the-top violence falls to the law of diminishing returns.  (Although I did enjoy the addition of Christopher Lloyd as Hutch’s father, himself a retired black ops type.)

Colin Farrell

“BALLAD OF A SMALL PLAYER” My rating: B (Netflix)

101 minutes | MPAA rating 

“The Banshees of Inisherin.” “Sugar.” “The Penguin.”

Yeah, Colin Farrell has been on a roll. And it continues  (sort of) with “Ballad of a Small Player,” which works a bit too hard to breathe new life into the gambler-at-the-end-of-his-luck yarn.

Farrell is Lord Doyle, a polished gent who floats through the casinos of neon-lit Macau as if he owns the joints. He sophisticated, generous, impeccably dressed.

It’s all a sham.  In truth he’s a common hustler who’s developed an impressive fictional character. Lord Doyle (he’s not a lord and Doyle is not his actual name) is so good at role playing that he has credit at all the tables.

That is, until his losses get so big that they can no longer be ignored. 

Scripted by Rowan Joffe and Lawrence Osborne and directed by Edward Berger (“All Quiet on the Western Front,” “Conclave”), “Ballad…” attempts to make up for a lack of originality (really, it’s just another movie about a desperate gambling addict searching for a big score) with a heightened visual sense and an almost operatic sense of melodrama.

But it’s worth sticking with to watch Farrell navigate Lord Doyle’s existential dilemma. Toss in Tilda Swinton as a comically stuffy investigator hot on his trail and Fala Chen as the casino hostess who provides  a love interest, and you’ve got a good-looking if not terribly deep outing.

| Robert W. Butler

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SHORT TAKES: “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” “Nouvelle Vague”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 9, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Rose Byrne

“IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU” My rating: B (PPV on various services)

113 minutes | MPAA rating: R

The first thing you see in Mary Bronstein’s “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” is a looming closeup of Rose Byrne’s face.  Her character, Linda, is being mom shamed by an unseen woman — some sort of physician — about her handing of her young daughter’s medical situation.

Just a few seconds of staring into Linda’s eyes betrays an ever-changing wash of emotions.  Defiance, aquiescence, guilt, cajoling, panic…Linda’s on a feeling-fueled roller coaster.  She’s trying to hold it together, but her desperation is everywhere creeping through.

Things just go downhill from there.

“If I Had Legs…” features a great performance from Byrne. It is also a thoroughly unpleasant experience.  

Unpleasant because Linda is circling the drain and hasn’t the strength to pull herself out.

Here’s her situation: Her daughter (voiced by Delaney Quinn, who is never fully seen) has an eating disorder so dangerous that she’s being fed through a tube inserted into her abdomen.

Linda must try to get the kid to eat real food while hooking her up nightly to a feeding machine.  She’s got no help in dealing with her whining, manipulative offspring because her husband is away for several weeks on business (Christian Slater provides his voice in mansplaining phone conversations).

Linda and the child move to a transient motel after a leaky pipe causes the ceiling of the family’s apartment to cave in. The crew hired to remediate the black mold and make repairs are doing a lousy job— when they bother to show up at all.

Things are no better on the work front.  Linda is a psychoanalyst (talk about a case of “physician, heal thyself”!). Her clients include a postpartum-plagued  young mother (Danielle Macdonald) who abandons her baby, expecting Linda to care for it,  and a demanding young man (Daniel Zolghadri) who has the hots for his shrink.

Linda is herself undergoing therapy from a colleague (Conan O’Brien, solid) who is clearly bored with sessions that have become a repetitive emotional merry-go-round.

In fact, Linda has taken the plunge from merely  miserable to self-destructive.  She’s hitting the bottle and often abandons her sleeping child to engage in misadventures with a fellow resident of the motel (A$AP Rocky).

To emphasize Linda’s isolation, writer/director Bronstein rarely lets Byrne share the frame with a fellow actor. 

And then there’s the question of how much of what we see is actually happening and how much is the product of Linda’s overworked nervous system.  For instance, what’s with the eerie dots of light that swarm like fireflies in the black hole of her ceiling? 

Bottom line: I’m in awe of Byrne’s work here.  It’s Oscar-level and then some.

But the film itself is tough going.

Zoey Deutch, Guillaume Marbeck
“NOUVELLE VAGUE” My rating: B (Netflix)

106 minutes } MPAA rating: R

I thoroughly  enjoyed Richard Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague,” his recreation of the 1959 making of  “Breathless,” the French independent film that introduced a whole new  cinematic vocabulary and launched the directing career of Jean-Luc Godard. 

But I wonder… will anyone who is not already a hard-core film geek, who had not seen “Breathless” repeatedly, who is unaware of Godard’s influence…will anyone else understand or appreciate it?

Well, screw ‘em. “Breathless” is a film fanatic’s wet dream, a story of an outsider who makes an end run around movie conventions and created one of the seminal works of the 20th century. 

Linklater’s approach is both reverent and impish…he understands what made “Breathless” work and tries to apply the same ethos to “Nouvelle Vague,” even to the point of using the same film frame ratio and grainy  black-and-white  palette that Godard emplioyed.

Guillaume Marbeck is absolutely spot on as Godard, the cryptic film critic who wants to make his own movies.  Godard is plenty weird (he wears sunglasses 24/7 and appears to live in his own world) but he somehow manages to inspire a company of young moviemakers to break all the rules to create a masterpiece on a starvation budget.

Aubry Dullin plays Jean-Paul Belmondo, the young Gallic boxer/actor who would become an international star as a result of ”Breathless.” He doesn’t look all that much like Belmondo (whose nose was one of a kind) but he nails the body language and languid/sexy humor.

Zoey Deutch, on the other hand, is a dead ringer for American actress Jean Seberg, who was highjacked into doing the film and, despite numerous attempts to bail from the production, gave a career-defining performance.

Of the supporting perfs I was taken with Matthieu Penchant’s Raoul Coutard, the cinematographer who shot scenes on the streets of Paris while hidden in a handcart, and Bruno Dreyfurst as Georges de Beauregard, the exasperated producer who nevertheless stuck with Godard to make history.

“Nouvelle Vague” (the title translates as “New Wave” and refers to the generation of young French filmmakers that  included giants like Truffaut, Chabrol, Rivette and Rohmer)  oozes  youthful exuberance and intellectual precocity.  It’s both lighthearted romp and a serious appreciation of an important moment in cinema history.

In other words, it’s a lot of fun.

| Robert W. Butler

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“THE LIFE OF CHUCK”: Dancing at the end of the world

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 2, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Tom Hiddleston

“THE LIFE OF CHUCK” My rating: A-(Various PPV platforms)

111 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Mike Flanagan’s “The Life of Chuck” provides the 10 most joyful minutes of cinema I’ve seen in all of 2025.

Which is not bad for a movie that starts out depicting the end of the world.

“…Chuck” is a departure for writer/director Flanagan, possibly our best dispenser of supernatural horror (“The Haunting of Hill House,” “Midnight Mass,” both Netflix miniseries); but then it is based on what is probably the most atypical story ever penned by Stephen King.

I mean, we’re talking a weirdly-structured but deeply moving meditation on the meaning of life.

You know somebody’s tinkering with the time/space continuum when the opening titles tell us that the yarn begins with Chapter III.

Here we meet Marty Anderson (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a middle school teacher struggling (as is everybody else) with the rapid collapse of civilization.  First the Internet went down.  Now cell phones aren’t working.  TV stations are going off the air one by one, but not before announcing that most of Northern California has fallen into the Pacific.

There’s still electricity, but nobody knows how long the juice will keep flowing.

With classes cancelled, Marty wanders the streets of his town, now cluttered with abandoned cars.  He has a conversation with a funeral director (Carl Lumbly) about a blitz of billboards, banners and TV/radio commercials that have appeared overnight.  These declare “Charles Krantz. 39 Great Years! Thanks, Chuck!” and feature a photo of Chuck (Tom Hiddleston), a pleasant-looking guy wearing a business suit and spectacles.  Maybe Chuck is retiring from his job, though he doesn’t look nearly old enough.

And anyway, the world is ending.

A big chunk of Chapter III centers on Marty’s efforts to reconnect with his ex, Felicia (Karen Gillan), a nurse now jobless since all the high-tech medical machines in her hospital stopped working. Reunited, Marty and Felicia sit in her back yard watching the stars blink out one by one.

Next up is Chapter II. We find Chuck (Hiddleston) attending a conference for accountants. On a stroll through the city center he is confronted by a busking street drummer (Taylor Gordon). Listening to the percussive symphony she generates, the buttoned-down Chuck begins swaying tot he music.  

Then he starts doing a few dance steps.  Before long he’s grabbed the hand of a passer-by (Annalise Basso) and together they put on an impromptu display of big band terpsichorean razzamatazz that draws a cheering crowd.

It’s a heart-in-your-throat “Singin’ in the Rain” kind of moment. Pure movie magic. (Much love to Mandy Moore’s spectacular choreography).

Mark Hamill, Benjamin Pajak

Then it’s on to Chapter I, which depicts Chuck’s childhood (as you’ve gathered by now, “The Life of Chuck” unfolds in reverse order). Orphaned by a car accident, young Chuck (he’s depicted as a middle schooler by the excellent Benjamin Pajak) is being raised by his grandparents (Mark Hamill and Mia Sara).

(Uh, wait a minute.  Mia Sara.  Wasn’t she Ferris Bueller’s squeeze only a couple of years back? Surely she can’t be anybody’s grandma.)

Anyway, this segment examines Chuck’s relationship with his loving grandparents, and his discovery of dance in an after-school club.  The kid’s a whiz…before long he’s the talk of the prom for cutting a rug with a girl two years his senior.  

Once again, the dance sequence is magic.  But what kind of career is dance for a red-blooded American boy? No, Chuck will grow up to study something more practical, like accounting.  But he’ll never forget the thrill of his body moving effortlessly to the music.

“…Chuck” bites off a big chew by attempting (in reverse) to depict one man’s life. What we come to realize is that Chapter III is actually unfolding in the head of a dying man.  Chapters I and II tell us how he got there, while introducing figures (Marty, Felicia, the funeral director) who will appear in his end-of-life reverie.

The film has been so deftly directed and acted (even from the unseen Nick Offerman, whose narration provides just the right taste of detached observation) that more than a few veiwers will find themselves in tears.  

| Robert W. Butler

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“THE LIFE OF CHUCK”: Dancing at the end of the world

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on December 1, 2025| 1 Comment »

Tom Hiddleston

“THE LIFE OF CHUCK” My rating: A-(Various PPV platforms)

111 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Mike Flanagan’s “The Life of Chuck” provides the 10 most joyful minutes of cinema I’ve seen in all of 2025.

Which is not bad for a movie that starts out depicting the end of the world.

“…Chuck” is a departure for writer/director Flanagan, possibly our best dispenser of supernatural horror (“The Haunting of Hill House,” “Midnight Mass,” both Netflix miniseries); but then it is based on what is probably the most atypical story ever penned by Stephen King.

I mean, we’re talking a weirdly-structured but deeply moving meditation on the meaning of life.

You know somebody’s tinkering with the time/space continuum when the opening titles tell us that the yarn begins with Chapter III.

Here we meet Marty Anderson (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a middle school teacher struggling (as is everybody else) with the rapid collapse of civilization.  First the Internet went down.  Now cell phones aren’t working.  TV stations are going off the air one by one, but not before announcing that most of Northern California has fallen into the Pacific.

There’s still electricity, but nobody knows how long the juice will keep flowing.

With classes cancelled, Marty wanders the streets of his town, now cluttered with abandoned cars.  He has a conversation with a funeral director (Carl Lumbly) about a blitz of billboards, banners and TV/radio commercials that have appeared overnight.  These declare “Charles Krantz. 39 Great Years! Thanks, Chuck!” and feature a photo of Chuck (Tom Hiddleston), a pleasant-looking guy wearing a business suit and spectacles.  Maybe Chuck is retiring from his job, though he doesn’t look nearly old enough.

And anyway, the world is ending.

A big chunk of Chapter III centers on Marty’s efforts to reconnect with his ex, Felicia (Karen Gillan), a nurse now jobless since all the high-tech medical machines in her hospital stopped working. Reunited, Marty and Felicia sit in her back yard watching the stars blink out one by one.

Next up is Chapter II. We find Chuck (Hiddleston) attending a conference for accountants. On a stroll through the city center he is confronted by a busking street drummer (Taylor Gordon). Listening to the percussive symphony she generates, the buttoned-down Chuck begins swaying tot he music.  

Then he starts doing a few dance steps.  Before long he’s grabbed the hand of a passer-by (Annalise Basso) and together they put on an impromptu display of big band terpsichorean razzamatazz that draws a cheering crowd.

It’s a heart-in-your-throat “Singin’ in the Rain” kind of moment. Pure movie magic. (Much love to Mandy Moore’s spectacular choreography).

Mark Hamill, Benjamin Pajak

Then it’s on to Chapter I, which depicts Chuck’s childhood (as you’ve gathered by now, “The Life of Chuck” unfolds in reverse order). Orphaned by a car accident, young Chuck (he’s depicted as a middle schooler by the excellent Benjamin Pajak) is being raised by his grandparents (Mark Hamill and Mia Sara).

(Uh, wait a minute.  Mia Sara.  Wasn’t she Ferris Bueller’s squeeze only a couple of years back? Surely she can’t be anybody’s grandma.)

Anyway, this segment examines Chuck’s relationship with his loving grandparents, and his discovery of dance in an after-school club.  The kid’s a whiz…before long he’s the talk of the prom for cutting a rug with a girl two years his senior.  

Once again, the dance sequence is magic.  But what kind of career is dance for a red-blooded American boy? No, Chuck will grow up to study something more practical, like accounting.  But he’ll never forget the thrill of his body moving effortlessly to the music.

“…Chuck” bites off a big chew by attempting (in reverse) to depict one man’s life. What we come to realize is that Chapter III is actually unfolding in the head of a dying man.  Chapters I and II tell us how he got there, while introducing figures (Marty, Felicia, the funeral director) who will appear in his end-of-life reverie.

The film has been so deftly directed and acted (even from the unseen Nick Offerman, whose narration provides just the right taste of detached observation) that more than a few veiwers will find themselves in tears.  

| Robert W. Butler

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“TRAIN DREAMS”: One Man’s Life

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on November 24, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Joel Edgerton

“TRAIN DREAMS” My rating: A- (Netflix)

102 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

If Terrence Malick and Kelly Reichart had a baby it would be “Train Dreams,” a visually ravishing examination of one human life.

This is only the second directing credit from Clint Bentley (he wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay for “Sing Sing”), but it displays an astounding depth of  maturity and sensitivity. 

In adapting Denis Johnson’s novella (he co-wrote the piece with Greg Kwedar) Bentley has approached this sprawling tale as a sort of  visual folk song. There’s only limited dialogue, but since his leading player is the breathtakingly empathetic Joel Edgerton, little is required.

Will Patton’s voiceover narration (a device I generally despise;  here it is delivered like a poetry reading) tells us of the origins of Robert Grainier, a foundling who grows up in a small burg in the Pacific Northwest.  He comes to maturity in the early 1900s, when the mechanized modern world has not yet intruded on the wilderness.

Poorly educated, Robert excels at manual labor.  He helps build a wooden railroad bridge across a forested gulch, and witnesses the murder of a co-worker,  a Chinese man (Alfred Hsing) whose ghostly visage will haunt him throughout his long life.

Mostly Robert works for logging crews; his huge axe is practically an extension of his own arm.

He meets and falls for Gladys (Felicity Jones) and together they build a cabin and have a daughter, though Robert’s work requires him to be away for months at a time.

The loggers are a hard-working bunch, a collection of loners who can go all day without saying a word.  There is one exception.  William H. Macy is terrific as Arn Peeples, a grizzled old codger whose main job seems to be serenading his fellows with nonstop running commentary on anything that comes into his head.

There are on-the-job accidents, some fatal.  Robert soldiers on.  His goal is to make money, return to his beloved wife and child, and start the process all over again.

Felicity Jones, Joel Edgerton

The scenes of the Grainier’s domestic life are so achingly beautiful that one is tempted to give up on civilization and take up residence in the woods. Adolpho Veloso’s camera seems to caress its subjects; frequently we’re distracted by the waving tufted tips of wild grass, or the grain of a tree trunk. Man and nature in harmony.

These scenes arebolstered by the presence of the uncredited young child who plays Robert and Gladys’ daughter.  The kid steals every scene without even trying. We’re as delighted in her as are her parents.

Then cruel fate intervenes. Robert is away on a job when tragedy strikes back home. His cabin lies in ashes; the fate of his wife and daughter unknown.

Ever faithful, Robert is determined to rebuild on his smoldering acreage so that when his family returns, he’ll be ready.

Edgerton is devastatingly effective as the stoic yet forlorn Robert. The sadness in his eyes, the gentleness in his movements, the way his posture changes over more than 60 years of physical labor…all these add up to an unforgettable portrait of a man who, by most standards, is unremarkable.

But then that’s the whole point. “Train Dreams” finds the unexpected nobility in everyday humanity.

| Robert W. Butler

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WHAT I’M WATCHING: “Death by Lightning,” “The Lowdown”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 10, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Michael Shannon

“DEATH BY LIGHTNING”(Netflix)

Historical drama gets no better than “Death by Lightning,” a recreation of one of the more obscure but weirdly resonant moments in our national history.

Based on Candice Millard’s superb history Destiny of the Republic, this retelling of the assassination of President James A. Garfield in 1881 has been spectacularly well acted and produced.  It almost perfectly captures the same emotional and intellectual notes that made the book so memorable.

And it does it all in just four one-hour episodes.

It begins with Senator Garfield (Michael Shannon) leaving his Ohio farm for the 1880 Republican National Convention in Chicago . His hope is to prevent the renomination of incumbent president Ulysses S. Grant, the figurehead of a spectacularly corrupt administration.

In a twist of fate that seems more fairy tale than fact,  it is Garfield himself who ends up the party’s nominee.  It’s not that he seeks the presidency…but he’s the only candidate the warring anti-Grant delegates all can get behind. 

In the process he makes an enemy of Grant supporter Roscoe Conkling (Shea Whigham), the U.S. senator from New York whose control of that state’s ports holds the American economy in a stranglehold.  Conkling is a savvy pol…he’s also willing to employ pure thuggery to get his way.  The comically boozy Chester Arthur (Nick Offerman) provides the muscle behind Conkling’s manipulations.

Garfield knows he cannot win without New  York.  So he does the unthinkable…he chooses as his running mate the hapless Arthur; basically it’s an end run around Conkling’s plan to sit out the election and pick up the pieces later.

The rise of Garfield runs parallel to the story of Charles Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen), a failed lawyer and hustler with serious mental issues.  Guiteau fantasizes that his support was vital in getting Garfield elected, and now he wants a reward.  And when his pathetic entreaties are rejected, he plots to kill the President.

Matthew Macfadyen

As was the case with Millard’s book, this series leaves viewers ruminating over what might have been.  In his three months as President, Garfield embraced a progressive agenda.  A Civil War veteran, he reached out to  African American leaders, especially black soldiers whose sacrifices were overlooked.  He laid plans to replace the spoils system with a non-partisan Civil Service.

I doubt we’ll see better acting this year than what’s delivered here by Shannon and Macfadyen.

Shannon probably has the tougher job, given that Garfield was low-keyed, modest and generous.  Not exactly a personality to set off dramatic fireworks. Yet the actor finds the heroic in Garfield’s calm reasonableness. Especially telling are the scenes with the Garfield family (Betty Gilpin is terrific as Mrs. Garfield), which bring to mind the domestic image of Abraham Lincoln and his brood.

The upshot is a genuine sense of loss.

Macfadyen, on the other hand, gets to play a crazy man…but with restraint.  The key to his Guiteau is the disarming “normalcy” of his presentation.  The guys often sounds reasonable but behind the fancy words there’s a crippling desperation at war with rampant narcissism.  In any conversation there comes a moment, a tell if you will, that suggests something is seriously wrong with this guy. Maybe you can’t quite put a finger on it, but that creepy feeling on the back of your neck is inescapable.

The fourth and final episode unfolds in the aftermath of the assassination attempt. Garfield lingered in agony for a month while inept physicians tried to locate the bullet for extraction…even calling upon inventor Alexander Graham Bell to employ a primitive metal detector.

Weirdly enough, the reform movement Garfield put into motion survived him, thanks to an unlikely proponent we won’t name here.

Now this is all pretty heavy stuff, but director Matt Ross and writer/creator Mike Makowsky often put a bleakly funny spin on the material.  The brutal cronyism of Conkling and Arthur gets the full satiric treatment (the parallels between their machinations and those of our current President are inescapable) and the characters often employ ear-burning language.  I doubt that statesmen of the 19th century were that open with their profanity, but in dramatic terms it works…most of the really vile pronouncements come from the show’s heavies.

Even the smallest roles are deftly handled.  Among the supporting players are Bradley Whitford, Vonnie Curtis-Hall, Paula Malcomson and Zeljko Ivanek.

When it’s all over, “Death by Lightning” leaves us marveling at the decency of good men and the unpredictability of fate.

Ethan Hawke

“THE LOWDOWN” (Hulu)

I love, love LOVE this show.

Lee Raybon (Ethan Hawke) is a shabbily-clothed freelance journalist whose search for truth always has him in hot water with Tulsa’s movers and shakers.

In this funny and weirdly moving series from Sterlin Harjo (the man who gave us “Reservation Dogs”)  Lee sets out to prove that the suicide of one of the local gentry is actually murder.

He runs up against the dead man’s brother (Kyle Maclachlan), who’s running for governor; the scheming widow (Jeanne Trijpplehorn), a neo-Nazi cult  and a whole bunch of corrupt power  brokers.

All while trying to keep his struggling used book store afloat and delivering questionable parenting to his teenage daughter (Ryan Kiera Armstrong). 

Plus Lee gets beat up.  A lot.

This sprawling noir comedy (think Jim Thompson on laughing gas) is crammed with eccentric and memorable characters, and the players (among them Keith David, Tracy Letts, Tim Blake Nelson, Killer Mike, Tom McCarthy, Peter Dinklage, John Doe and the late Graham Greene) take full advantage of the possibilities. Rarely have so many scene stealers been assembled in one place.

I was borderline bereft when “The  Lowdown” reached its eighth and final episode.  But I’ll tell you what…I’m gonna plop down and watch it all over again.

| Robert W. Butler

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SHORT TAKES: “Frankenstein,” “Weapons”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 8, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Jacob Elordi

“FRANKENSTEIN” *My rating: B+ (Netflix)

149 minutes | MPAA: R

For the first hour or so Guillermo del Toro’s new (and let’s face it, ultimate) version of “Frankenstein” left me a bit cold.

It’s been brilliantly designed and photographed but emotionally…kinda meh.  

Turns out I just had to show a little patience.  For once the Creature comes to life, so does the movie.

Indeed, our sympathies lie with none of the human characters…least of all Oscar Isaac’s Victor Frankenstein, the ruthless and ego-driven medical genius bent on reanimating dead corpses.

No, this “Frankenstein” belongs to Jacob Elordi’s Creature…and please note that he will not be described here as “the Monster.”  For this stitched-together superman exhibits more pure humanity than any of the “normal” folk around him.  It’s a performance that transcends the scars and death-blue pallor of the Creature’s skin to reveal, well, a beautiful soul.

Expect an Oscar nomination for Elordi, a screen heartthrob and sexual icon (“Saltburn,” the Max series “Euphoria”) who here shows unpredictable depths of loneliness, love, rage and compassion.

Del Toro’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel begins at the end.  The crew of a sailing ship trapped in the Arctic ice take aboard a frostbitten man being pursued by a terrifying giant.  This is Victor Frankenstein, and to the Captain (Lars Mikkelsen) he relates his tale.

We see the boy Victor dealing with his icily controlling and intellectually cruel father (Charles Dance); this helps explain why as an adult Victor is a bit of a medical oddball, convinced of his own brilliance and openly contemptuous of his colleagues.

Victor’s ambitions know no bounds, and with the help of a rich benefactor (Christoph Waltz) — who it turns out has his own twisted motives — our man gets to work sorting through the bodies left on a recent battlefield (the setting is 1850s Europe), looking for pieces that can be sewn together and animated with a jolt of lightening.

When not impersonating God, Victor expresses a bad case of the hots for Elizabeth (Mia Goth), the fiancé of his brother (Felix Kammerer). Clearly he observes few moral boundaries.

Oscar Isaac

That becomes even more clear in his relationship with the Creature.  He keeps his nearly naked (and weirdly erotic) creation chained in the castle basement, where he berates the poor unfortunate for lacking the mental acuity to match his physical power.

It is Elizabeth who breaks through, treating the Creature with kindness and unlocking his emotions and intellect. But exasperated by what he views as a failed experiment, Victor attempts to destroy his creation in a massive conflagration.

Turns out the Creature cannot die, as much as he might wish for it. The second half of the film finds the Creature joining Victor and the captain aboard the ship to explain why he’s been pursuing the semi-mad doctor over land, sea and ice.

It is in the Creature’s backstory that we find grace notes of beauty and longing.  The highlight is his “adoption” of a farm family.  Hiding in their idle gristmill he emerges at night to leave presents of dead game and firewood at their door.  They call their mysterious and unseen benefactor “the spirit of the woods.”  

The Creature’s real education begins when the blind grandfather is left alone and befriends this stranger, teaching him to read (how a blind man teaches someone to read is a poser, but I’m not complaining) and opening up his intellect to literature, history and philosophy.

Maddened by the knowledge of both his “otherness” and his inability to end his miserable existence, the Creature decides on revenge.  He’ll pursue Victor halfway around the world for a final confrontation between father and son.

The old “Bride of Frankenstein” attempted to humanize the Monster (the blind hermit had a brief but telling scene), but the dominant themes of that classic were horror and camp.  Here del Toro goes for an emotional and spiritual catharsis.  That might seem a stretch for what is essentially a horror movie, but damned if he doesn’t pull it off.

In the end we’re left not so much with lingering terror as a disquieting sadness.

Well done.

Julia Garner

“WEAPONS My rating: B (HBO Max)

128 minutes | MPAA rating: R

A long tantalizing  tease capped by a what-the-hell ending pretty much describes every horror movie I’ve seen in recent years.

It’s no different with “Weapons,” writer/director Zach Cregger’s followup to his brutally effective creepfest “Barbarian.”

The film opens with spectacular imagery…at exactly the same moment one fall night, nearly two dozen elementary school students rise from their beds and in their pajamas race away from their  homes with arms stretched at a weird angle…it’s simultaneously scary and beautiful.

Turns out all the missing children were from the class taught by Justine (Julia Garner).  Only one little boy, Alex (Cary Christopher), shows up at school the next day.

The others seem to have vanished without a trace.

The authorities are baffled. The parents frantic…and then vengeful.  They turn on Justine, accusing her of being behind the disappearances/abductions. She’s told to go on hiatus until things settle down.

Cregger’s screenplay tells the story from several different perspectives.  First there’s Justine, whose long-dormant drinking problem gets kicked back into high gear.  There ‘sthe local cop (Alden Ehrenreich) who is part of the search and has a sexual relationship with Justine.

Archer (Josh Brolin) is one of the parents, driven to acts of desperation by the loss of his son.

Marcus (Benedict Wong) is the principal, trying to keep a lid on the town’s boiling emotions.

Austin Abrams is a young drug addict pulled into the mystery.

And finally there’s little Alex, whose home life harbors a dark secret.

Amy Madigan

About two-thirds of the way through the film we meet Alex’s Aunt Gladys (a nearly unrecognizable Amy Madigan), who’s just come to town and wears a gosh-awful orange wig that makes her look like a septagenarian Bette Davis after an all-night rave. Gladys is bleakly funny and not a little creepy — you just know she’s got something to do with the mass vanishing.

With its elements of the Pied Piper legend plopped down in contemporary suburbia, “Weapons” certainly grabs our interest and keeps us guessing as to what’s going on.  If the final reveal is a bit underwhelming, Cregger seems to think so, too, because at the last moment “Weapons” shifts from slow-creep dread to over-the-top physical comedy.

Even if the big explanation is a fairy-tale head-slapper, most of “Weapons” is extremely watchable and quite involving.

| Robert W. Butler

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