Reviews

Dressed to Kill (1980)

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I had always heard Dressed to Kill discussed in conversation about transphobia in horror cinema of the past, alongside Psycho and Silence of the Lambs in that they contained some manner of attempts at empathy for their crossdressing psychosexual killers. Psycho ends with a psychological explanation for why Norman Bates did what he did, and Lambs includes a scene that explains that Buffalo Bill is not really trans; “Dr. Lecter,” Clarice says, “there’s no correlation in the literature between transsexualism and violence. Transsexuals are very passive.” As society has already started walking back the hard-won rights of trans people (of which they already had so very few, you pricks) in recent years, Dressed to Kill feels like an artifact of a different time, wherein Brian De Palma, as Jonathan Demme would a decade later with Lambs, takes the time to explain that being trans doesn’t make someone crazy or evil, but also can’t help imitating Psycho in a way that feels transphobic through a modern lens. Of course, this is of a kind with De Palma’s eighties Hitchcockian thrillers; Dressed to Kill is to Psycho as Body Double is to Vertigo, after all. 

In typical Psycho format, we spend most of the beginning of the film with a woman we don’t initially realize is doomed: Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson), a dissatisfied housewife whose husband fails to fulfill her sexual desires and whose young son Peter (Keith Gordon) bails on their plans to spend the afternoon at a museum together in order to work on one of his inventions. After a short check-in with her therapist, Dr. Elliott (Michael Caine), Kate goes to the museum herself, where she and a handsome man flirt throughout the various exhibits before they grab a cab together and get up to some hanky-panky, which continues all the way up to his apartment. She leaves in a frightened state after realizing that her hook-up has syphilis and gonorrhea when she finds his notice from the state health department while looking for a memo pad to leave him a note and almost makes it out of the building before remembering that she left her wedding ring on his bedside table. When she goes to retrieve it, however, a person in a black overcoat and hat, shades, and sporting blonde hair enters the elevator with her and slashes her with a razor, quite graphically and viciously. When the elevator stops at another floor, high class call girl Liz Blake (Nancy Allen) sees the body and screams; she reaches out to Kate as the doors start to close, catching a glimpse of the killer in the convex mirror. 

Liz ends up hauled in for questioning by scummy Detective Marino (a perfectly cast, despicable Dennis Franz), as is Dr. Elliott, who lies to Marino that he doesn’t have any clues, despite the fact that he came straight from receiving messages from both Marino and a patient named “Bobbi” on his answering machine, confessing to having stolen Elliott’s razor from his shaving kit and done something awful with it. At the police station, young Peter uses some of his audio surveillance equipment to eavesdrop on the various investigations. As Liz begins to see a woman stalking her all over the city, she eventually runs into Peter, who has been surreptitiously surveilling Elliott’s office to try and find out if one of his other patients was his mother’s killer. Can this unlikely duo stay one step ahead of the killer and figure out who they really are before the police pin it on Liz to close the case? 

We’ve already established that the film apes Psycho in its structure, starting out with a decoy protagonist who ends up killed halfway through, only to pass off the leading role to another woman. It also features multiple shower scenes in reference to Psycho’s most famous sequence, complete with showerhead closeups and murders (even if only in a dream). Kate reaches out her hand in death the same way Marion Crane did two decades prior, and when Liz picks up the murder weapon, the string section of the orchestra goes wild in a familiar way. Finally, and most notably, the killer is a man with a split personality, with “Bobbi” taking over their shared body in the same way that “Norma Bates” took over Norman’s. Where it differs is in its typical De Palma sleaziness (although recent viewings of latter day Hitchcocks like Topaz and Frenzy, which were unpleasant in a similar way, have made me question whether Hitch would have been as depraved as De Palma if he had been active in the same, morally loosened era). Kate Miller literally drops her panties in the cab ride following her cruising of the museum, and there are several sequences that spend a lot of time on loving close-ups of areolas and blonde pubic hair; this is an erotic thriller after all. 

Perhaps it’s that which makes its gender and sexual ethics feel so weird to the modern eye. The film is unusually sympathetic to sex work for its day, showing Liz as a smart woman who happens to be a prostitute; she invests in art and is even on a first name basis with her stockbroker, with whom she communicates about insider tips that her clients let slip. The film also takes the time to include a segment from The Phil Donahue Show in which the host interviews an MTF transgender person (then-contemporary term “transsexual” is used universally throughout) to establish that trans folks are just like you and me. But that all of this is present in a film that also spends so much of its runtime being sexually titillating makes the film feel tawdry in a way that trivializes its presumably sincere attempts to pre-emptively defend itself against accusations of bigotry. On the whole, it feels more old-fashioned than offensive, which is fine, because it works rather well as a suspense thriller outside of all of these elements. 

The film also feels very much like it’s in conversation with the 80s slasher boom, even if it couldn’t have been intended as such. Psycho is often cited as the prototype for the slasher genre, and with good reason, and this film was released less than twenty months after Halloween, the generally agreed upon catalyst of the next decade’s horror subgenre dominance. One of the ways that the film manages to subvert audience expectations is by having a summation sequence following the climax in which Dr. Levy (David Margulies) explains the irrational rationale of what caused “Bobbi” to split off from her main, male personality and how their shared body’s sexual arousal prompted “Bobbi” to emerge and try to destroy the objects of that desire. It’s textually very similar to the scene in which a psychiatrist explains Norman Bates’s “possession” to the survivors of Hitchcock’s film, but instead of ending in that moment, Dressed to Kill still has 10 minutes left. We get to see “Bobbi” in a hellish mental institution, where she kills a nurse and escapes to stalk Peter and Liz; Liz has another shower scene to bookend the one at the start, only to emerge and realize that Bobbi is in the room with her, then gets killed, only to awake screaming. I have no doubt that the asylum scene here was a visual influence on a similar sequence in A Nightmare on Elm Street: Dream Warriors, and that double fakeout ending of “the villain escapes for one last kill” followed by “the final girl dies but it’s only a dream” is familiar in retrospect but was probably novel in 1980. 

As another Brian De Palma visual spectacle, this one is top notch. The split personality narrative is echoed in the use of countless split diopter shots that look fantastic and are perfectly suited for when they appear; a sequence in which it’s used for a close-up of Peter listening in on Det. Marino’s conversation with Elliott so that we can pick up on the details that Elliott is lying while also watching Peter’s face fall is particularly excellent. There’s also a great scene in which Elliott comes home and starts watching TV while Liz calls her stockbroker, splitting the screen between them. As we get to see both what Elliott is watching (the aforementioned Donahue interview) and his face as he does so, Liz calls her madame from a second landline in her apartment so she can negotiate for a specific amount for the night while telling her broker when to expect her with the money the next day. The screen and the soundtrack are suddenly very busy, and it feels like it’s building to a frenzy, but despite all of the overlapping dialogue and crosscutting, one never really loses track of what’s happening. It’s masterful. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Oh, Hi! (2025)

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If I had a nickel for every 2025 picture about a woman named Iris going on a romantic retreat with her boyfriend only to learn that he means much less to her than she thought, I’d have ten cents. What, were you expecting a Doofenschmirtz joke here? Please, I’m almost forty. 

Iris (Molly Gordon, who also has a “story by” co-credit) and Isaac (Logan Lerman) are on their first romantic weekend away together after seeing each other for four months. The two abscond to a rented farmhouse in High Falls, NY, where things seem to be going really well. They have great sexual and conversational chemistry, and they end the first lovely day together with a scallop and pesto pasta meal that Isaac prepares before they head to the bedroom, where they use the bondage gear that they discovered in a locked closet to cuff Isaac’s wrists and ankles to the bed. Afterward, when Iris starts to talk about their relationship, Isaac tells her that he never assumed that they were exclusive, and the conversation they previously had about their status was interpreted differently on both ends; she thought that they were dating dating, and he assumed that she simply didn’t want him to have unprotected sex with other people. Hurt (and more than a little drunk), Iris leaves Isaac chained up while she spends the rest of the night frantically googling ways to make him realize that she’s the one. The next morning, she tells him that she’ll uncuff him after twelve hours but that she intends to spend that time convincing him that they are meant to be together. After this time elapses, however, Isaac still isn’t won over, so she refuses to release him and calls her best friend, Max (Geraldine Viswanathan) for help, not realizing that she also brought her own boyfriend, Kenny (John Reynolds), whose Law & Order expertise means he knows that what Iris has done is a felony, and she’s now made Max and Kenny accessories. 

Molly Gordon is a lot of fun here as the deranged Iris, whose actions are unjustifiable but also ultimately sympathetic. If you had Logan Lerman chained to a bed, would you ever let him go? I didn’t think so. At one point, Max explains to Iris that Isaac is a “soft boy,” a variation on the fuck boy archetype who uses apparent emotional vulnerability and openness as a manipulation tactic to make women fawn over them, and she’s not wrong. Although we get a hint that Isaac is a bit of a dick in the film’s opening scene, wherein he flirts with a roadside strawberry stand worker with little to no regard for Iris’s feelings as she watches the whole thing go down, his actions once they get to the farmhouse are openly romantic and sweet, playing the part of the perfect boyfriend through and through. The cracks show once he’s been chained to a bed for over half a day, but one can hardly hold it against him that he resents the position that he’s been put in, even if what’s happening to him is not totally undeserved. Iris is doing something that we all have fantasized about doing at one point or another in our lives: forcing the object of our yearning and affection to spend enough time with us that they realize that it’s foolish not to give things a real chance. Although my daydreams about getting a heartbreaker to settle down have never involved a bound Logan Lerman (that’s filed under a completely different section of my fantasy catalog), one can’t help but appreciate the feelings that Iris has, even if we can’t justify her actions. 

Max and Kenny arrive at the midpoint of the film, and they’re delightful as well. Max is all-in on helping Iris get her man, even after she realizes that her U.S. visa is endangered by her presence at the scene of the crime, and Kenny’s devotion to her is admirable and charming to watch. John Reynolds calls to mind his characters from Horse Girl and Save Yourselves! here, and it’s an archetype he’s quite good in (so much so that he’s able to leverage it into something more sinister, as he did in the second season of Yellowjackets); he feels settled. After having to play second fiddle to Margaret Qualley in Drive-Away Dolls last year, Viswanathan gets to roll out the comedic chops that she demonstrated on Miracle Workers, and even though she’s billed lower this time around, it’s great to see her having so much fun. Her absolute insistence that her witch cousin’s spell to make Isaac forget the last two days will work is a delight to watch, especially as it spells out just how desperate the situation has become and Viswanathan’s conviction sells the scene. It doesn’t work, of course, but a playing-along Isaac does have a dream about Iris that indicates although Iris’s attempts to make him hers aren’t likely to be successful, Isaac’s faux self-reflection may be replaced by actual inspection of the issues he has that lead him to treat relationships as casual and disposable. Lerman isn’t called upon to do too much heavy lifting, acting-wise, but his underplaying of the scene in which he plays along to finally escape and his heartfelt conversation with Iris once she helps rescue him in the woods after he injures himself demonstrate that he’s more than just a toned chest and a pretty face. 

A nice, easy, fun romcom for anyone in the mood for it, Oh, Hi! is currently available on Netflix. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Sleeping Beauty (1959)

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Once upon a dream, Disney was in the business of producing world-class visual art. Now they’re just in the business of business — corporate acquisitions and such. The dream is over. So it goes.

That corporate culture shift didn’t happen overnight. At minimum, it happened over a decade. The 1950s saw Disney’s earliest, mightiest strides to diversify its portfolio, expanding into television and amusement parks after spending its first couple decades focused on its core mission: overworking & union-busting animators. Still alive, engaged, and at the helm, Walt Disney himself was conscious of the ways his company’s corporate expansion could dilute the quality of its feature films, so he made a point to reaffirm dominance in the field through technically accomplished pictures like Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan. Fittingly, the studio closed out the decade with the most back-to-basics title of the batch, 1959’s fairy tale romance Sleeping Beauty.

This feature-length adaptation of Tchaikovsky’s thinly plotted ballet is, above all else, a formal flex. Narratively speaking, Sleeping Beauty doesn’t accomplish anything that wasn’t already covered by Snow White or Cinderella. It’s yet another princess-in-distress fairy tale of a fair maiden being rescued from a jealous hag’s curse by a macho hero’s kiss. Only, it’s stripped of any defining characteristics that would make its doomed lovers lastingly memorable. Nothing about Princess Aurora is especially iconic, to the point where she’s more often referred to nowadays by the film’s title than by her proper name. All memorable character quirks are instead reserved for the women in charge of her fate: the three goofball fairies who protect her from Evil (Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather) and the villainous Mistress of All Evil (Maleficent, the only character here deemed worthy of her own spinoff franchise).

Without any of the usual pesky plotting or character concerns getting in their way, Disney’s team of technicians could focus entirely on the animation’s visual majesty. Afforded an extreme “Technirama” aspect ratio to paint his elaborate backdrops within, artist Eymind Earle crafts an extravagantly detailed tableau in every frame. Walt Disney tasked his crew with evoking Medieval tapestries in the film’s design, and Earle goes so overboard in his traditionalist craftsmanship that he upstages the characters that populate his backdrops.  In turn, his collaborators create an incredible depth of field through cell animation techniques, especially in early sequences where the wicked witch Maleficent and her fairy foes bless & curse the newborn baby Aurora through a series of magic spells. Roses, specters, lightning, and other abstract premonitions swirl in psychedelic montage as Aurora’s fate is decided at the foot of her royal crib. It’s a divine intersection of the fairy tale traditionalism of Snow White and the pure orchestral illustration of Fantasia — two mighty Disney triumphs from decades past, the best animation money can buy.

I have no interest in recounting Aurora’s troubled path to womanhood here. She’s cursed to die on her 16th birthday but is saved by a good nap and a classic case of puppy love. The rest is all arranged royal marriages, goofy sidekick antics, and sitcom-level mistaken identity hijinks. Even the mighty Maleficent is more memorable for her visual design than for her words or actions. We love the drag queen pageantry of her devil-horned headpiece. We love the green-on-black color scheme of her magic spells. We love her climactic transformation into a purple, fire-breathing dragon — another grand achievement in classic, hand-drawn animation. When the evil witch is defeated and Aurora is saved by the kiss of her sweetheart prince, the picture ends with the young couple dancing in the clouds. That’s also where the audience’s heads are supposed to be, not sweating the details of the storytelling on the ground.

When was the last time Disney was more focused on the visual majesty of it’s animation than on the marketability of its characters? Every in-house Disney production is now shrewdly designed to stock some toy shelf, amusement park attraction, or T-shirt screen press with fresh, sellable IP. It’s difficult to imagine an instance where they’d set aside character quirks & catchphrases to wow an audience with a return to classic, elegant animation. At this point, the company’s animation wing is a product delivery mechanism, like an assembly line conveyor belt. It used to be their entire raison d’être.

-Brandon Ledet

Eternity (2025)

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Do movies ever premiere on airplanes? I’ve occasionally seen ads from airlines proudly declaring that they are the exclusive in-flight entertainment home for a recent theatrical release, as if there’s a customer base out there willing to book a flight on Delta instead of Southwest specifically so they can watch Predator: Badlands on the back of a headrest. Has that kind of competitive bidding on fresh in-flight content created enough of a market to support direct-to-headrest film productions, though? Could it possibly be lucrative for a traditional Hollywood movie to skip theaters entirely and instead exclusively premiere as in-flight entertainment? I ask this having just watched the supernatural romcom Eternity, which drifted quietly through American multiplexes without much fanfare but will soon make for a major crowd-pleaser as an in-flight movie selection. It’s cute, harmless, weightless, and just overall pleasant enough to make a long fight go down smooth, already evaporating from you brain by the time you walk to baggage claim.

Miles Teller & Elizabeth Olsen star as an elderly suburban couple who die within a week of each other, rematerializing as their younger, happier selves in a Limbo-like eternity. Their decades of functional but unexciting marriage are threatened to be undermined by the return intrusion of Olsen’s first husband: a noble war hero hunk played by Callum Turner, who died tragically young. Now, she has a short span of time to choose between which of her two deceased beaus to spend her eternity with, essentially choosing between bright romantic spark and long-term marital comfort. Despite all of the supernatural shenanigans that distract from the competition between her two love interests, it’s a fairly straightforward romcom dynamic, which the movie openly acknowledges by having one of the two competing husbands rush to the train station to stop her from leaving at the climax. There isn’t even much tension in guessing which of the two men she’ll ultimately choose, not if you keep in mind that hot people don’t write movies; they just star in them. Of course the more nebbish Teller is inevitably going to be selected as Olsen’s prize; no hunky Turners were invited to the writers’ room.

If Eternity has any major flaws that keep it from rising above standard-issue romcom fluff, it’s all in the casting. Miles Teller simply isn’t enough of a certified uggo to contrast Callum Turner, whose main selling point appears to be that he is tall. We’re told by the script that Turner is as handsome as Montgomery Clift, but we can clearly see that is not the case, so he plays the stand-in idea of Montgomery Clift instead of the real deal. Olsen is also a kind of symbolic stand-in, playing the torn-between-two-hunks heroine with just enough blank-slate blandness that anyone watching from home (or, ideally, from the plane) can imagine themselves in her place without being distracted by the distinguishing specifics of her character. The only signs of life among the main cast are in the comic-relief pair of “Afterlife Coordinators” played by Jon Early and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who are employed by the unseen corporate gods of Limbo to talk this trio of lost souls into one afterlife or another as if they’re hurriedly selling timeshares out of a brochure. They’re funny, but not too funny. Nothing about the movie is too anything, presumably by design.

A24 is reportedly looking to upscale their in-studio productions to reach a wider market, recently trying their hands at the big-budget war thriller with Warfare, the movie-star sports drama with The Smashing Machine, and the period-piece Oscar player with Marty Supreme, with other mainstream audience ploys to come. I have to wonder how much the greenlighting of Eternity was influenced by that boardroom conversation. Was its marketing potential as a surefire in-flight entertainment favorite part of the justification behind that decision? The movie largely feels like it’s set in the liminal corporate spaces of an airport lounge & bar, with Early & Randolph’s afterlife realtors costumed as retro flight attendants. My only other theory on the initial pitch for the film’s commercial appeal is that it would make a great backdoor sitcom pilot, since Olsen gets to briefly taste-test different afterlives with her potential forever-husbands as she debates which eternity to settle into. There’s some brief magical twee whimsy in her climactic sprint between those worlds as she defies the laws of Limbo to reunite with her true love that recalls previous work from hipster auteurs in the A24 mold: Michel Gondry, Julio Torres, Girl Asleep‘s Rosemary Myers, etc. There just isn’t enough budget to fully flesh out the idea, though, so it ends up being a proof-of-concept sketch for a potential Good Place-style supernatural sitcom, coming soon to an Apple TV console near you. In the meantime, enjoy this low-stakes, low-emotions romcom set at the edges of those infinite-possibility worlds, for now boiled down to simple-concept settings: mountains, beach, train station, etc. And if you can, go ahead and pair it with a complementary ginger ale and a single-serving pack of pretzels — the way it was clearly meant to be seen.

-Brandon Ledet

Deadline at Dawn (1946)

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By the time he started playing the title role in the 1951 season of The Adventures of Kit Carson, actor Bill Williams was thirty-six and had a respectably rugged face. A mere five years earlier, when playing dim-witted himbo sailor-on-leave Alex Winkley in Deadline at Dawn, he was so baby-faced I wouldn’t have believed he could transform so much in such a short time. This is a pretty important part of the plot, as the boy has to be so guileless that hardened city gal June Goffe (Susan Hayward) believes his innocence in the death of Edna Bartelli (Lola Lane), even when he’s not too certain himself. We in the audience, of course, know that Edna was alive enough to trade barbs with her blind, pianist ex-husband Sleepy Parsons (Marvin Miller) after she realized “the sailor” had taken her wad of cash and skittered off into the night, much to Sleepy’s annoyance. Deadline is another film in The Criterion Channel’s recently curated “Blackout Noir” collection, and the blackout experienced in this one is Winkley’s; he comes to his senses at a NYC corner newsvendor’s stall with way too much money in his pocket on a blisteringly hot night, and all he remembers is going up to Edna’s to fix her radio after being plied with alcohol. Alex Winkley stumbles into a dance hall and meets June and confesses that he stole money from a woman for no reason that he can recall, and she accompanies him back to the place so that he can return it, only for them to find her dead. To ensure that Alex doesn’t get clapped for the murder, they have to figure out who really did it before he has to catch his bus back to his naval base at dawn. 

Deadline at Dawn was the only film directed by Harold Clurman, a name I didn’t recognize. He was a stage director primarily, directing over forty plays for Broadway, and entered into an artistic partnership with playwright Clifford Odets early in his career, directing Awake and Sing! in 1935 for the Group Theatre, which Clurman had co-founded. Odets was a name I did recognize, if only from theatre department shelves; it is the nature of theatre that its writers’ legacies are longer and have more reach than its directors do. It makes sense that this film was penned by a playwright, in that it has a tighter ear for dialogue than it does for narrative coherence and consistency. Early in their overnight investigation, June and Alex meet a kindly cabbie named Gus Hoffman (Paul Lukas), who has a bit of a verbal tic that causes him to preface his observations with “statistics say” and derivations thereof. Better still, when June and Alex buy a cup of orangeade on the street but don’t drink any of it, the cashier bids them to come see him again by saying “Don’t drink our grapeade next time.” The film is peppered with all kinds of fun New Yawker types whose brief appearances tell a whole story about their offstage life: the irascible superintendent who doesn’t get paid enough, the lonesome man seeking to make a wife out of a dance hall girl, a frantic man with an injured cat, the boarding house matron who doesn’t want to rent to a woman because “Girls want kitchen privileges and they wash their things in the sink.” That’s the good stuff. 

The noir stuff, on the other hand, leaves something to be desired. The death of Edna Bartelli ends up having too many red herrings. The late Edna turns out to have been a blackmailer whose extortions eventually took her down. Our unlikely trio track down a woman who was seen leaving Edna’s building and confront her, but she was only there to confront Edna for blackmailing her husband and couldn’t have committed the crime. But did her husband? Did Sleepy Parsons? Could the killer be Edna’s lover Babe Dooley, a washed-up baseball player who periodically calls up to her window from the street like a drunken dog? Over the course of the film, the characters make far too many of what could charitably be called “Bat-deductions,” so named for the way that Adam West’s Batman could often parse together incomprehensible and unrelated “clues” into accurate conclusions despite no logical connection between the things. There’s a sequence in which Alex and June walk down to the corner from Edna’s place “because the killer might have done something like that,” then get drinks that they don’t finish, saying “Hey, maybe the killer would have bought a drink and then failed to drink it too!” It’s nonsensical, but how well the film plays for you will depend on what you want out of it. As a conveyance for delivering quippy dialogue and to show off Lukas and Hayward’s respective talents, it’s effective and fun. As a mystery film with a satisfying series of clues and payoffs, it’s less so. Perhaps the big reason for this is that the killer is someone we’ve come to like and trust over the course of the film, which means that the investigation, such as it is, was being guided by the guilty party for decent portions of it. It’s an emotionally convincing ending, even when it’s not necessarily a narratively convincing one. Enjoyable, but not a must-watch. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Looper (2012)

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After another stellar outing for Benoit Blanc in Wake Up Dead Man, I found myself realizing that there were still parts of Rian Johnson’s filmography that, despite our coverage of Brick (and Poker Face), The Last Jedi, Knives Out, and Glass Onion, were still untapped. I didn’t see Looper when it first came out, but I remember its production well, as it was shot in New Orleans (one of the best places to go to capture images of dystopian poverty in the immediate and long-term aftermath of Katrina) while I was in grad school there. In fact, my roommate at the time of filming was an extra; he was the piercer at the tattoo parlor that we lived in the back rooms of, and there was a casting call for “weird looking people” for a group scene. Having now seen the film and having scoured the big party scenes that I would have assumed he would have been in, I’m sorry to say that I couldn’t find him, alas. That’s not the kind of close watching that this film necessarily relies upon, but as with all of Johnson’s films, you better be paying attention if you want to get the maximum amount of satisfaction. 

Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a hitman living in Slumsville, USA in 2044. Addicted to an unnamed drug administered via eye dropper, Joe funds his habit as a “looper,” a specialized killer working for a crime syndicate that’s three decades in his future, where surveillance technology alerts law enforcement anytime someone dies. The mobsters of the 2070s skirt this by sending their victims into the past (the police apparently not being alerted if someone simply disappears), where Joe and the other loopers kill the doomed future victims and dispose of their bodies in exchange for silver. The loopers are themselves damned as well; all of them know that, sooner or later, they will have to “close their own loop,” meaning killing their own future selves (and getting one last big payday) and retiring, with the knowledge that they have only thirty years to live. When Joe’s buddy Seth (Paul Dano) fails to close his loop and allows his older self to escape, we get to see the lengths that temporally local crime boss Abe (Jeff Daniels) to make sure that Seth stays just alive enough not to destabilize the loop while also ensuring maximum suffering. 

When one of Joe’s victims does not appear on schedule, he’s sufficiently distracted that the man, who turns out to be his own older self (Bruce Willis) is able to escape. As it turns out, Old!Joe is on a mission to answer the age old question of “Would you be able to go back in time and kill baby Hitler?” with a resounding “Yes, and anyone else born that same day at that same hospital, just to be safe,” which turns out to be less morally straightforward than he expected. In the future, there’s an underworld figure toppling and absorbing various criminal enterprises into one evil force, the “Rainmaker,” and Old!Joe eventually fell in love with a woman who died at the hands of the Rainmaker’s goons. With Abe’s organization after both of them, Young!Joe and Old!Joe find that they can’t trust one another despite being one person. Meanwhile elsewhere, Sara (Emily Blunt) is raising her young telekinetic son on a farm; he’s not the only one, as about 10% of people have barroom card trick level telekinesis at this point, but he has potential to become much more. 

The performances here are fantastic. This was probably Willis’s last great outing (and I say that as a Moonlighting fan, so you know I’m always rooting for him), and he brings a lot of gravitas to the screen. There’s a moment where Young!Joe demands to see the photo of Old!Joe’s wife, saying that he can avoid ever speaking to her and thus ensure that she’s safe from being killed by the Rainmaker’s gunmen in 2074, but Old!Joe refuses; it’s not enough that he keeps her safe, but he wants his life back, specifically, no matter what he has to do. There’s a moment where Old!Joe realizes this about himself, that his decision is much less selfless and much more self-serving than he had convinced himself, and Willis conveys every moment of it with conviction. Gordon-Levitt, despite acting through prosthetics that are intended to make him look more like a young Willis, is nuanced in his interpretation of Willis’s body language, intonations, and idiosyncrasies, without it ever feeling like he’s doing an impression. Despite his small role, Dano makes his usual meaty meal out of a cowardly sleazeball, and it’s always a delight to see. Particularly impressive is the amount of menace that playing-against-type Jeff Daniels is bringing to the table. Perhaps glaringly, the person I haven’t mentioned yet here is Blunt, which is in some part due to her relative lack of screen time, as she doesn’t really appear until the midpoint of the film. But it’s also that she’s not given as much to do, as she’s relegated to a role that’s not really all that demanding, although there’s a scene where her son starts to pull a Carrie that shows her pull out some fierce chops. 

The sci-fi conceits of the plot are fun. The introduction of the idea that telekinesis has been discovered and is widespread but is limited to what amounts to little more than parlor tricks feels like a weird tangent given that it disappears from the plot for a while, but when it comes back, it’s relevant and feels like a piece falling into place. That’s always been one of Johnson’s strengths as a screenwriter, and one that feels very satisfying to me as a bit of a systems thinker myself. The film doesn’t spend any time faffing about with trying to justify its time travel conventions, as Old!Joe gestures to a bunch of drinking straws on the table between them and says that they could give themselves headaches making diagrams with them or just get on with things, and that’s what they (and the film) do. One gets the sense that Johnson was the kind of person who may have made just those kinds of diagrams in his younger days and knows exactly what complaints to expect and how to make them irrelevant. 

I still have yet to see The Brothers Bloom, but I do know that it’s a bit of a departure from the serious noir-at-a-high-school vibes of Brick and the techno noir of Looper, which is a bit of a bummer. I don’t foresee myself growing tired of Benoit Blanc (or Poker Face, although its fate hangs in the balance as of this writing), but I wish there were more noir reinventions from Johnson to watch now. Since it’s been over a decade since Looper and he hasn’t gone back to that well, I don’t know if we’ll see him release another one soon, if ever. I’d like to see him try his hand at one of these again, as it’s always a pleasure to see.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Star Trek: Section 31 (2025)

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In 2026, the Star Trek franchise will celebrate its sixtieth anniversary, and this upcoming summer will mark thirty years since the thirtieth anniversary marketing push coincided with my being babysat by a family of Trek fans who introduced me to what has become a lifelong obsession. That 1996 anniversary was marked by a huge jump in merchandising of toys, knick-knacks, and fan publications, and since the franchise had two shows airing at the time (Deep Space Nine and Voyager) and that November saw the first solo feature outing of the Next Generation crew in First Contact, it had significant cultural visibility. Ten years later, the fortieth anniversary in 2006 found the franchise dead, as the end of Enterprise in 2005 meant that ‘06 was the first year since 1985 that the franchise hadn’t produced either a film or a season of television. The first show to air post-Enterprise, prequel (at least at first) series Star Trek: Discovery, would miss the fifty-year anniversary by a year and premiere in 2017, where it proved … divisive. Nevertheless, Discovery ushered in a glut of Trek content, having now concluded its fifth and final season, Picard had a three-season run, animated sitcom Lower Decks aired five seasons, and kids’ cartoon Prodigy ran for two seasons. With all of these having concluded, that unwieldy number of series has come to an end. As of the sixtieth anniversary, Strange New Worlds is the only continuing series, with even that having already wrapped its final two (yet to be broadcast) seasons, with a new series, Starfleet Academy, launching in January. 

Both of the then-running series produced episodes for the thirtieth anniversary. DS9 aired “Trials and Tribble-ations,” which used state-of-the-art compositing to insert characters from the series into one of the original show’s most memorable episodes; Voyager less successfully produced “Flashback,” which relayed the untold story of what Sulu was up to during the events of Undiscovered Country. One would think that, having missed doing anything special (other than releasing Beyond to very little fanfare) for the fiftieth anniversary, the franchise’s current helmers might have considered doing something special for the sixtieth, but instead, we got a surprise “feature film” dumped directly onto streaming a year early, sometime after it was first announced as another series in Paramount’s massive streaming library. To explain, I’ll have to build you a timeline because, just like this movie, this review has to dump a lot of exposition on you multiple times in order for any of this to make sense. 

On October 6, 1967, Star Trek airs “Mirror, Mirror,” the first of what will be far too many trips to the so-called “mirror universe,” where the peaceful Federation is replaced by the brutal and totalitarian Terran Empire. In April of 1998, Deep Space Nine airs the first episode of the series to reference “Section 31,” a covert operations unit acting within Starfleet against its declared principles of egalitarianism, democracy, and peace. On the 24th of September 2017, Star Trek: Discovery, a new series starring Sonequa Martin-Green as Michael Burnham, debuts; Burnham is introduced as the first officer of Captain Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh), who dies during the two-part feature length premiere. Later in that same season, Discovery takes its own adventure into the mirror universe, where Yeoh returns as the evil version of Georgiou, the emperor, who returns to “our” timeline at the end of this galavant for a redemption arc that was, at best, misguided from its inception. Georgiou is eventually recruited into Section 31 as part of the second season’s story arc, and the news was released that Paramount was developing this as a spin-off to star Yeoh. This was put on hold due to COVID, and then in March of 2023, Yeoh won an Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once, meaning that she didn’t really have as much time for all this Star Trek nonsense as she had before. I assumed that the project had simply been cancelled, but it was suddenly re-announced as a one-off non-theatrical feature and hastily dumped into everyone’s home screens, where it managed to be hated by just about everyone. I kept this one in my back pocket for a while because I knew our well of Star Trek annual podcast discussion topics was starting to run a little low. After covering First Contact in 2023, we talked about the documentary Trekkies in 2024 and the even more tenuously Trek-related Please Stand By in 2025; I figured this one would do for our 2026 topic. In those malaise-filled days during the holidays, however, I decided to give this one a pre-screen watch, and I could not in good conscience subject Brandon to it. 

After a pre-credits sequence that establishes Georgiou ascended to the throne after killing her own family before scarring and enslaving her last competitor (and lover) for control of the empire, we’re in the primary narrative dimension of the 23rd Century, where a ragtag group of mercenary specialists has converged at a space station outside of Federation territory to prevent the sale of an omnicidal weapon. Coincidentally, the sale is set to take place in a bar/hotel/space station operated by the fugitive Georgiou. She catches on rather quickly and the leader of this group, Alok (Omari Hardwick) explains the situation and introduces his team: shapeshifter Quasi (Sam Richardson), psionic “honeypot” Melle (Humberly González), exoskeleton-bound Zeph (Robert Kazinsky), and Starfleet liaison Rachel Garrett (Kacey Rohl), the only character here with a canon precedent. Also on the team is Fuzz (Sven Ruygrok), who appears to be Vulcan but is actually a microscopic life form operating a humanoid mech suit. Georgiou teases them about their ho-hum plan and then introduces a new, more exciting one that predictably goes awry, allowing for her to discover that the weapon is of her design from her previous life as Terran Empress before it’s taken by a masked man. A “now it’s up to these unlikely heroes to save the galaxy” plot ensues. 

To this movie’s credit, it certainly looks expensive. That’s not the same thing as looking good, mind you, but it is worth noting. A hefty chunk of change was clearly invested in the Section 31 series, which is probably why this exists in the first place. This “film” is so clearly cobbled together from the ideas of an unproduced TV series that it’s actually divided into episodes, I mean “transmissions,” with individual titles. Even without them, the episodic narrative beats of cliffhanger and resolution at forty-minute intervals would telegraph this structure. This makes for narrative chaos, since instead of three distinct acts we’re dealing with a film divided into thirds which are then subdivided into their own rhythms of rising and falling action; it’s muddled, to say the least. The writing likewise leaves a great deal to be desired. Screenwriter Craig Sweeny’s background largely lies in mystery procedurals, as he was an executive producer on Elementary, of which he wrote sixteen episodes, and has since gone on to create and serve as exec producer for Watson. Section 31 tries to have some mysteries, but if there’s anyone who didn’t assume that the masked villain was Georgiou’s presumed dead lover/enemy from the moment they appeared on screen, then that person has probably never seen a movie before. The mole—there is, inevitably, a mole—likewise is the person you’d most suspect based on simply having seen any movie of this kind before. 

This might have worked better if there had been some breathing room. If the audience had a week between the installment where we introduce the fact that Fuzz can fly out of his Vulcan mech suit and into other cybernetics to futz with them and the next episode where said mech suit seems to be operating on autopilot while Zeph’s exoskeleton is acting up, then maybe it would have felt like more of an “ah-ha” moment. As it is in the text itself, it feels like more of the script’s tendency to overexplain the new elements that it introduces while also showing the frayed edges where character arcs are whittled down. This is most obvious with Quasi, who was presumably so named because his shapeshifting would have been a metaphor for being unsure of himself in the version of this that went to series. The characterization for this is thin throughout before becoming unusually pivotal to the climax when he has to trust his instincts and push one of two buttons. It’s all very surface level and rote.

Worst of all, however, are the film’s shuddering attempts at comedy. Sam Richardson is primarily a comedic actor, but the lines he’s given to deliver here are all absolute duds. The joke about whether the galaxy-threatening MacGuffin is called “godsend” or “god’s end” must have lasted less than thirty seconds but felt like it went on forever. Fuzz’s constant leaps to anger over perceived microaggressions about his size or species are, as comedy, dead on arrival. This film forced Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh to use the phrase “mecha boom boom” as a reference to sex with a person with cybernetics. Overall, however, the person I felt the most sympathy for throughout was poor Kacey Rohl, a Vancouver-based actress who’s one of those performers who’s always giving a quietly powerful performance, whether as budding sociopath Abigail Hobbs on Hannibal or in (my favorite) her recurring role as tough-as-nails hedge witch Marina on The Magicians. Yeoh is capable of making every stupid line given to her in this work on at least some level, but Rohl is tasked with some lifting that made me embarrassed on her behalf, like when she has to give herself a pep talk about how she’s a science officer and “science is just controlled chaos” in a scene that sees her skedaddling out of frame repeating “chaos, chaos, chaos!” She’s also the one given the most jarring instances of modern slang, like “whatevs” and calling Georgiou a “bad bitch.” Not a single comedic moment lands, which means that if you’re not going to be surprised by any of the film’s twists, you’re not going to find satisfaction in good character arcs or the humor, meaning that there’s nothing of value here to make the investment of the studio’s money or the audience’s time worthwhile, a film truly for no one. 

If we wanted to think of this one as something close to an anniversary special, it’s worth noting that virtually every member of this by-the-numbers ragtag group seems to be functioning as a reference to a previous Star Trek film. As mentioned above, Melle is a Deltan, an alien species introduced in The Motion Picture, and Alok is a genetically augmented human left over from the Eugenics Wars like Khan while the “godsend” device also functions very similarly to the Genesis Device from that film. Fuzz is introduced as a Vulcan who laughs uncharacteristically, as was Sybok in the cold open of Final Frontier, and Quasi is identified as a Chameloid, a species only ever heretofore mentioned in Undiscovered Country. The use of future Enterprise-C captain Rachel Garrett references the launch of the Enterprise-B in Generations, while Zeph’s cybernetic exoskeleton deliberately evokes the image of First Contact’s villainous Borg. These allusions are relatively subtle in comparison to the more overt bits of fanservice that Trek fans are presumably supposed to gawk at, which I won’t bother to get into. The truth of the matter is that Section 31 is not only a bad Star Trek movie, it’s also a bad film in general. Despite the film angling for a continuation in its final moments, I hope we never get another one.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Shakedown (1988)

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Midway through the 1988 police-corruption thriller Shakedown, Sam Elliott’s undercover cop hands a revolver to Peter Weller’s disheveled lawyer and asks, “You know how to use one of these?,” and Weller responds in his default, deadeyed deadpan, “Fuckin A, bubba. I’m from New York City.” It’s a throwaway action-movie one liner, but the entire picture is framed within that assumption that anyone who’s tough enough to survive 1980s NYC street life is always a half-second’s notice away from engaging in some good, old-fashioned gun violence. The movie opens with Law & Order veteran Richard Brooks minding his own business smoking crack in Central Park, when he’s approached by an undercover “blue jean cop” who reaches into his jacket for a concealed weapon. By the time the ambulance arrives, both men are bleeding to death on the ground from gunshot wounds, with no witnesses having seen who shot whom first. To determine whether the crack dealer (Brooks) fired his gun in self defense, the public defender assigned to his case (Weller) has to team up with the only blue jean cop he trusts (Eliot) to shoot even more guns at even more cops & drug dealers across the city’s seedy underbelly. They start shootouts in the backroom brothels above 42nd Street porno theaters; they pistol-whip perps during fistfights on Coney Island roller coasters; they chase stolen cop cars through homeless encampments and set fire to the resulting wreckage. Fuckin A, bubba, welcome to New York City.

Shakedown doesn’t have the same lost-and-found mystique as the recently restored Night of the Juggler, but it emerged from the same vintage gutter sludge. Narratively, it’s a by-the-books buddy cop thriller, except one of the cops happens to be a lawyer . . . and maybe also a robot. Peter Weller is as glaringly inhuman as always in the lead role of a long-suffering public defense attorney who’s tempted to leave the street-level grime behind in favor of a cushy yuppie lifestyle at a private firm. He says he’s tired of having to defend the “the scumbags, the jerkoffs, the sex freaks, and the killers” of NYC in court, but anyone who knows him sees right through the facade. When he’s assigned to defend the Central Park dealer who killed an undercover cop in self-defense, you can tell he loves the job far too much to ever walk away. In order to prove his client’s innocence, he has to team up with the only non-corrupt cop left in the city: Sam Elliott, a humble Texan expat. We meet Elliot in a grindhouse cinema, watching an absurd downhill skiing shootout from director James Glickenhaus’s previous feature The Soldier, teasing the insane action spectacle to come once he & Weller hit the streets and turn up the heat. The movie quickly delivers on that promise, scoring its whirlwind tour through pre-Giuliani New York City with the infinite supply of “ghetto blaster” boomboxes that used to decorate every street corner, along with the dealers & sex workers who operated them.

Shakedown is classic NYC sleaze with a stacked cast of always-welcome reprobates. Honeymoon Killers legend Shirley Stoler briefly pops in as a takes-no-shit security guard. Corman veteran Paul Bartel plays a night court judge in a single scene. David “Richie from Sopranos” Proval plays the corrupt cop who mans the evidence desk at the local precinct, stubbornly blocking Weller from the evidence that proves his client’s innocence. It’s a never-ending parade of celebrity cameos for anyone who happens to be the kind of person who would be watching a 1980s corrupt-cop thriller named Shakedown. After recently seeing Weller in Of Unknown Origin & Naked Lunch, Stoler in Frankenhooker, and Bartel in Basquiat & Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills, it felt like a kind of season finale for my personal year in trash movie watching. So, I’ve come up with a quick, arbitrary metric to see how it ranks against other vintage New York schlock thrillers I’ve watched this year: determining its production crew overlap with my two most recently watched TV shows. According to the IMDb “Advanced collaboration” search, Shakedown shares 50 collaborators with Law & Order and 27 with The Sopranos. That’s ahead of Night of the Juggler (28 Law & Order, 6 Sopranos) but behind Cop Land (an impressive 75 Law & Order, 73 Sopranos). Of course, that’s more raw data than it is analysis, but all you really need to know about this movie anyway is that it’s aggressively grimy and Glickenhaus blows shit up real good. The rest is just character actors & mise-en-scène.

-Brandon Ledet

Bean (1997)

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Cinema is a democratizing artform. While the average family might not be able to afford a trip to see an opera or a ballet in-person, anyone with a library card can get a taste of those highbrow artforms by borrowing Powell & Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann from the library for free. Moviegoers regularly get exposed to great works of literature, far-off gorgeous vistas, and heady academic pursuits just by keeping our eyes on the screen, distracted from the financial inequalities that separate us from enjoying those experiences in real life. For instance, as a small child growing up in Chalmette, Louisiana, there was no chance I was ever going to travel to Paris to see the iconic American painting Whistler’s Mother in person, but thanks to the British culture-clash comedy Bean, I was educated on the piece’s historical importance anyway. Thanks to Bean, I was also exposed at an early age to the refined tastes of dry British wit, as embodied by the titular rubber-faced goon, Mr. Bean.

The basic premise of Bean hinges on Americans’ assumption that because Mr. Bean is British, he is therefore an erudite sophisticate. In reality, he is a working-class dolt who can barely keep his job as an art museum security guard, which mostly entails sitting quietly in a chair. Bean is such a disastrous embarrassment that his employer ships him off to America as the unlikely shepherd for the aforementioned James McNeill Whistler painting, risking major lawsuits & profit loss just to be rid of him for a while. It takes a few days for the Los Angeles clout chasers who are purchasing that famous painting to catch on that Mr. Bean is not the art-history expert Dr. Bean they made up in their heads when they heard he works for a British art museum. By then, he has already destroyed the multi-million-dollar painting through a series of escalating slapstick pratfalls, threatening to take down the life & reputation of an American museum curator with him (played Ghostbusters II‘s Peter MacNicol). And so, Whistler’s Mother was never the same again, in the film or out.

Rowan Atkinson is hilarious as Mr. Bean. That’s just a fact. It’s easy to brush off his style of humor as a haphazard collection of silly face contortions, but I believe there’s a genuine, traditional elegance to his sub-verbal shenanigans. He brought some classic Charlie Chaplin & Harpo Marx silent-comedy clowning to the 1990s video market, whereas American equivalents like Jim Carrey & Robin Williams were more focused on shouting t-shirt worthy catchphrases. When we first meet Bean in the opening scene, he breaks his ceramic mug while running late to work, so he resolves to mix his entire instant coffee concoction in his mouth to not waste time: coffee powder, sugar, cream, and boiling water straight from the kettle — swished around like mouthwash before painfully swallowed. While traveling by plane to America, he manages to explode a barf bag all over his fellow first-class clientele. The movie’s most infamous gag involves losing his wristwatch while stuffing a turkey. When he looks inside to find it, he ends up wearing the entire bird on his head, suffocating to death while stumbling around like a buffoon. Every room he enters is a potential disaster zone. Characters beg him to understand that, “If you do nothing, nothing can go wrong,” but he persists in fucking up everything he touches anyway. Children everywhere love him for it, as do the smartest of adults.

I was only being partially sarcastic in that opening paragraph. Bean really was my first exposure to Whistler’s Mother as a 10-year-old Chalmatian, and most of the movie’s plot revolves around showing that painting respect as one of the most important works of American art, positioning it as the nation’s Mona Lisa. Of course, the comedy’s art museum setting is mostly an excuse to shoehorn Mr. Bean into a quiet, stuffy atmosphere where his goofball theatrics can do the most damage, but it made an impression on me at that age nonetheless. Its jokes about the crass commercialization of fine art in the wide range of Whistler’s Mother merch designed for the LA museum’s gift shops is the kind of low-level satire that kids can feel smart for catching onto. It’s mixed with for-their-own-sake gags like Mr. Bean ironing his tighty-whiteys—which are funny to kids for reasons unknown—but the satire’s there all the same. One slapstick gag involves Bean getting smacked in the head by giant Alexander Calder mobile in the museum’s driveway, which is the perfect meeting point between its high-culture setting and its dumb-as-rocks humor. We’re always going to make idiotic slapstick comedies for kids as long as we’re making movies at all, so we might as well smack the little tikes over the head with some great works of art while we’re at it. It’s a public service, an investment in our future.

-Brandon Ledet

Soul Survivors (2001)

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I was a nü-metal shithead in the early aughts, which means I’ve seen almost every teen-targeted horror film produced in that era. From the blissful highs of Ginger Snaps & The Faculty to the tepid depths of Idle Hands & Urban Legend, I dutifully watched every Hollywood studio horror marketed to my teenage sensibilities like a soldier taking marching orders. And yet, I had somehow not heard of the ghostly 2001 psych thriller Soul Survivors until I recently stumbled across it on the shelves of my neighborhood Goodwill. Soul Survivors so clearly  belongs in that post-Scream horror canon that its DVD includes a Behind the Music parody promoting the alt-rock band Harvey Danger, whose hit single “Flagpole Sitta” was made famous by the trailers for fellow teen-horror relic Disturbing Behavior several years earlier. There was no question that I had to close this personal knowledge gap by purchasing the used disc, but the lingering question that still remains is why, exactly, was this title lost in the shuffle and forgotten to time? It certainly has more going on conceptually than most of its tie-in-CD-soundtrack contemporaries, so why had I never heard of it but I know everything about, say, 2000’s The Skulls?

The best answer I can come up with is that Soul Survivors is more of a supernatural teen melodrama than a proper horror film, which may have been a letdown for the nü-metal shithead audience it panders to. It shares some sappy tonal territory with I Know What You Did Last Summer & Valentine in that respect, but those movies at least boasted recognizable masked villains to chase the teens around their soap opera sets. In Soul Survivors, the only identifiable villain is confusion. Melissa Sagemiller stars as a college freshman who parties one final night away with her high school crew before the friend group splits up for good. After some sweaty dancing with her bi-curious bestie (Eliza Dushku) at a Satanic rave at the edge of town, she flips her car in a reckless driving accident, losing her high school sweetheart (Casey Affleck) in the wreck. Only, once she attempts to move on with her life in the months after the accident, it becomes unclear whether she actually was the one who survived. She & her boyfriend are communicating from opposite sides of this mortal plane, but she gradually comes to realize that her soul is the one in transition, and her new freshman campus life is really just an operating-table hallucination that she can’t snap out of.

In short, Soul Survivors is Jacob’s Ladder for concussed teenagers. Sagemiller is stalked by scary-looking metalheads (one wearing a see-through plastic mask under a beanie, the other costumed like Danzig); Dushku is tempted by a demonic lesbian upperclassman (Angela Featherstone); and Affleck frequently pops in to whisper ghostly words of hoarse encouragement; but none of its action is as literal or physical as the similar, better-remembered supernatural shenanigans of the Final Destination series. Sagemiller’s liminal, fraught campus life is a medically induced nightmare, which lowers the immediate stakes of its stalking scenes but also frees the movie up for more abstract thinking and lyrical editing than the by-the-numbers slashers it most closely resembles. I don’t know that its big-picture observation that, “Even a dream of life is better than facing death,” makes much philosophical sense out of context, but by the time it’s crosscutting the cosmic connections & divisions between Sagemiller’s dream persona and her real-life circumstances at the go-for-broke climax, there’s a strangely compelling poetry to it. It’s poetry for dummies, but it’s poetry nonetheless.

As soon as I pressed play, I immediately got the sense that the fine folks at Artisan Entertainment knew they had purchased a box-office bomb. Scenes of Sagemiller saying tearful goodbyes to her parents before driving off to college are hastily shoehorned into the opening credits to rush the prologue along so we can get to the sweaty Satanic dance party ASAP. That expediency cuts the film down to a brisk 85-minute runtime, as if the producers were eager to get the whole thing over with posthaste. Maybe it was just too difficult to market a supernatural weepie with ironic lines of dialogue like, “We have our whole lives ahead of us,” as opposed to a rote slasher with built-in Halloween mask merchandise. Whatever the case, the condensed runtime means that we rush through headier ideas in a shorter span of time than what’s afforded to its comparatively empty-headed contemporaries. Scares are scarce here, but its sincere exploration of the fuzzy border between the worlds of the living and the dead is convincingly eerie, more so than in fellow aughts-era spookshows like The Mothman Prophecies and The Butterfly Effect (which both have a half-hour’s bonus runtime to play with, unused).

-Brandon Ledet