reviews

The Phoenician Scheme (2025)

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After getting out of my afternoon screening of The Phoenician Scheme, I texted Brandon that it might have hit my top three Wes Anderson films right out of the gate (although on later reflection it’s more safely in the top five), and he replied that it had been largely dismissed out of Cannes as a minor work from him. Within days, I stumbled upon this tweet and sent it to Brandon; in case it disappears, it reads “Oh, did another Wes Anderson film premiere to a muted response at Cannes only to turn out to be another masterpiece? I guess it’s summer again.” I mentioned last year in discussions around Asteroid City that I think Anderson is a filmmaker that we have started to take for granted, even if I personally didn’t care much for The French Dispatch (which Brandon reviewed very positively here). There was much consternation about Asteroid City among some of the people that I ran into at a Friendsgiving in November, and I mostly kept my opinion to myself. It’s a movie that requires you to get on its level and is the only one of his films that I would describe as genuinely surreal. If you didn’t like or get it, then I don’t know that I really have the language to articulate what about it spoke so clearly and effectively to me, or that “getting it” would automatically translate to “liking it.” What I will say is that Asteroid City is far from being an entry level Anderson film, or one with broad general appeal, and that The French Dispatch is also not one that I think should be anyone’s first. The Phoenician Scheme, however, with its mostly straightforward narrative structure, is one that I think will be of interest to a larger audience and range of viewers. 

Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro) is an international arms dealer and industrialist who finds himself surviving the most recent of numerous attempts on his life when his plane goes down in 1950. Unlike in his previous miraculous survivals, any of which may have taken the lives of his three dead wives, this time he undergoes a near death experience in which he faces divine judgment regarding his heavenly worthiness. Somewhat shaken by this, Korda reaches out to the eldest of his ten children and only daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton, Kate Winslet’s daughter), who is a novice preparing to take her final vows to become a nun. Although it’s been years, he offers to provisionally make her the heir to his empire, which would be flattering if all of her brothers weren’t children aged three to fifteen (Korda has adopted several in addition to his biological sons, in case all of his genetic progeny turn out to be duds). Further complicating matters is the widespread belief that Liesl’s mother, Korda’s first wife, was killed at his hands, and although he vehemently denies that he has ever directly or indirectly committed murder, his ongoing recognition of a large number of assassins whom he previously employed calls his veracity into question. Not to mention that he is completely unencumbered by any apparent ethical limitations, as his most recent and greatest work, an infrastructural overhaul of the fictional nation of Phoenicia, will require the use of slave labor, and that he claims responsibility for a famine in the area that’s destabilized local power structures in order for him to have his way. Although Liesl’s devotion to her faith calls her to return and take her vows, her own morals demand that she take the opportunity to agree to Korda’s offer on the condition that there are no more famines or slaves (and that her brothers are moved from a dormitory across the street into Korda’s gigantic mansion, and that some level of paternal attentiveness is provided for them).

For all his many, many flaws as a father and a human being, Korda has an endless thirst for knowledge, which includes the hiring of numerous tutors on various subjects to provide extemporaneous lectures to the boys and himself. The most recent of these is Norwegian entomology professor Bjørn Lund (Michael Cera), who ends up along for the ride serving as Korda’s new administrative secretary (the last one died in the plane crash that opened the film). Korda lays out the movie’s overarching plot quickly and in detail. Due to actions on the part of Korda’s industrial enemies, market manipulation of the cost of “bashable rivets” has suddenly created a funding gap for the whole titular scheme, so he must convince all of the other investors in his project to cover some percentage of “The Gap.” These include Phoenicia’s crown prince Farouk (Riz Ahmed), the brother duo of venture capitalists Leland (Tom Hanks) and Reagan (Bryan Cranston), Korda’s second cousin Hilda Sussman-Korda (Scarlett Johansson), Casablanca-inspired nightclub owner and gangster Marseille Bob (Mathieu Amalric), and “Uncle” Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch), Korda’s estranged half-brother. As Korda meets with each of them in turn, he finds himself returning to Heaven’s courtroom, where he is defended by an attorney named Knave (Willem Dafoe) before God (Bill Murray) and interacts with Liesl’s mother (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in her afterlife. Under the guidance of Liesl’s moral certitude and with things not going well for him “upstairs,” Korda grows as a person despite never losing his sardonic edge. 

The set pieces that comprise this one are all a lot of fun. When I was telling a friend about it, the one with whom I had watched so many Final Destination films, I noted that this movie opened almost like one of those would, with an airplane blowing out part of its fuselage and a man being ripped in half as a result, except that it’s done in a typically Andersonian visual style, with string and stop motion bits in place of fire and guts, and it sets a great tone for what is to follow. Even while using his standard palette, Anderson is doing a few new things, including using a very shallow depth of field in several wide shots of the massive room in which Korda reunites with his daughter, which causes the image to appear diorama-like until people enter and the illusory spell is broken. It’s fun stuff, and calls to mind the experimental playfulness on display in, for instance, the tour of the submarine in The Life Aquatic. The aforementioned surreality of Asteroid City is not completely absent here, although it’s limited to the scenes in which Korda finds himself at his out of body inquest and its various asides, and they’re very funny; there’s something a bit Mel Brooks about the whole celestial spectacle, which I mean as a great compliment. They’re also much more palatable, as I can imagine the average moviegoer—a “normie” for lack of a better term—showing up to Asteroid City and being completely put off by some of the more esoteric choices, especially with regards to the “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep” refrain that occurs near the film’s ending. Here, confining the more dreamlike elements of the piece to these near-death visions posits them in a rhetorical space that demands less suspension of disbelief (and which contains, perhaps, less whimsy) and is likely going to be more acceptable to the standard viewer. As such, The Phoenician Scheme could easily function as a very good introduction to Anderson’s body of work, since it’s much more straightforward approach would have a broader appeal. 

Del Toro is excellent in this, giving a truly outstanding performance. Korda is a bit of an Andersonian archetype in that his treatment of his children is absurd in the way it finds comedy in its outlandish neglectfulness. This, along with his desire for familial reconciliation, makes him a figure very much like Gene Hackman’s Royal Tenenbaum, but with a bit of a twist. Whereas Royal had a desire to reconnect with his family that was almost entirely selfish and self-interested and he was willing to fake having a terminal illness to get in close, Korda is the ultimate capitalist robber baron who seems to have never cared about anyone other than himself (and perhaps Liesl’s late mother) but who has a large, unloved family that he has no real desire to connect to (like certain other billionaires we could name). He seems more interested in having a family because he’s expected to have some kind of legacy, even if he hadn’t given much thought to what that could mean until he survives his seventh plane crash. There’s a great scene in the “Marseille Bob” segment of the film in which said gangster’s night club is invaded by socialist revolutionaries led by Richard Ayoade, and Korda gets into the middle of things and ends up shot by a trigger-happy rebel. Bob mistakes this accident as a sign of Korda’s nobility and immediately agrees to cover a part of The Gap, and although Korda clearly takes advantage of this error, Del Toro plays the moment as if the motor-mouthed cad is slightly taken aback at how good it feels for someone to believe you’re capable of change. There’s a talent to adding that kind of nuance in both performance and direction without skipping a beat in the dizzyingly-fast dialogue. 

As a counterpoint to all of this, we see Liesl slowly let go of the trappings of faith while retaining her sense of self (there’s a great bit where she admits she’s never heard God’s voice but that she imagines that she does, and He just tells her to do what she was going to do anyway). First, as a rider to her accepting provisional heirship, Korda has her give up her humble rosary for a “secular” one, which is gaudy and covered in jewels. Later, she is given a more ornate replacement for her corncob pipe, which is even tackier. When she tries to return to her order, the Mother Superior tells her that these worldly possessions (which she did not seek but merely received) indicate that she is among those who are simply not cut out for a life of cloistered humility spent in prayer. Part of the film’s genuine heart is finding out where Liesl and her father are going to meet in the middle, and the film is filled with objective correlative metaphors for this in the number of images of things which don’t quite connect, most notably a railway gap of about twenty feet that ends up becoming a makeshift basketball court (it makes sense in context). 

Where the film fumbled somewhat was with the Uncle Nubar character. Cumberbatch is done up in intentionally ridiculous facial hair, and he looks a bit like Ming the Merciless if he stopped grooming or conditioning his mustache and beard and let the whole situation get a little scraggly. It’s a little much, and Cumberbatch’s performance is at first a hard pill to swallow, but by the time he and Korda get into a knock-down drag-out fight, I had come around on it. Some people in my screening were enjoying it from the start, and what I noticed at this movie (which was actually the same theater in which I saw Asteroid City last year) was that it shared that film’s propensity to elicit laughs from different parts of the audience at different times. The jokes come at such a rapid pace that sometimes you just have to give yourself over to the music of the dialogue, and the guy six seats over is laughing at something that you’ve missed and the couple behind you are getting a lot more out of Cumberbatch than you are while you’re laughing at something that it seems like only one other person enjoyed. In my screening, there was one man one row in front of me and two seats over who fell asleep almost immediately and then snored for the remaining 90 minutes. A comedy that’s able to be funny to different people in different ways (and a great movie to take a nap to for that guy in Row C) is laudable, and isn’t to be taken for granted. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Drop (2025)

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Watching all of those Final Destination movies in a single week must have rewired my brain, because I spent the first forty minutes of Drop waiting for a huge disaster to occur. After the film opens on a flashback to protagonist Violet (Meghann Fahy)’s final altercation with her violent, abusive husband as her infant watches, we cut forward to the present, where she is planning to go on her first date since then, leaving her now Pre-K aged son Toby with her sister, Jen (Violett Beane). This is the first time she and her son have been apart, and she’s understandably nervous. As we have all already seen this trailer (presumably many times), we know that on this date she is going to begin receiving airdropped directions to do something awful to her companion, we spend the first several minutes after her arrival to the (begging to be a Final Destination location) restaurant meeting all of the potential subjects. There’s Matt (Jeffrey Self), the UCB hopeful and waiter who’s on his first shift and whose oversharing about his sketch ideas may be either an actual annoying character trait or a cover for his activities; there’s pianist Phil (Ed Weeks), who attempts to hit on Violet sleazily before he’s warned off by bartender Cara (Gabrielle Ryan), who seems very invested in Violet’s first date; there’s Richard (Reed Diamond), a nervous man who approaches Violet thinking that she might be the blind date he’s been set up with before meeting his actual date; there’s also Connor (Travis Nelson), a handsome man that Violet bumps into on two separate occasions, which may have given him access to clone her phone; and finally the hostess (Sarah McCormack), whose access to all of the security cameras gives her a bird’s eye view that may be what’s enabling Violet’s harassment. By the time her date, Henry (Brandon Sklenar), arrives, we’ve got quite the list of potential suspects to keep us guessing about who’s behind the home invasion that Violet witnesses on her phone via her home security cameras, with the threat against Jen and Toby used to force Violet to steal from Henry and potentially murder him. 

The date starts casually enough, with Henry having the patience of multiple saints as Violet keeps checking her phone fairly constantly throughout the date, which she attributes to separation anxiety from her son. She shares the first couple of things that are airdropped to her with Henry; they’re mostly memes to get her attention, but quickly turn into threats and directions to destroy a memory card that Henry, who is the mayor’s photographer, has in his camera bag. This is the first clue that we get to the purpose of the unknown dropper’s motives, as we see there are photos of some documents which may point to corruption in Chicago’s upper echelons. Once this is complete, she’s directed to retrieve something from the paper towel dispenser in the ladies’ room, which turns out to be a vial of poison that she must use against Henry. It’s all a fairly tense affair, and it’s fun to watch Violet figure out reasons to keep going back to the washroom or direct Henry to help her look for her watch, while she also tries to figure out how to ask for help despite her every movement being monitored. The final climax of the film goes for a full-on action sequence as the identity of the dropper is revealed and Violet manages to get the upper hand, but not before they direct their accomplice to kill Jen and Toby, which means Violet has to race home and try to stop the assassin, in a mirror of her first scene in which her husband threatened her and baby Toby with a handgun. 

This is a pretty decent premise, and one that’s followed through upon well. It bears mentioning that the narrative has a lot of the same plot beats as the 2005 Wes Craven picture Red Eye starring Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy. In that flick, McAdams’s character is a hotel manager who is blackmailed under threat of deadly violence against her father into moving a political appointee into a specific suite so that Murphy’s terrorist organization can complete an assassination. Like Violet, she too experienced a horrific event just a couple of years earlier that left her unwilling to give up, and the fury of which she channels into attacking her aggressor before rushing home to save her threatened family. Both films are very much of their era, as the earlier film explicitly labels Murphy a domestic terrorist and the object of his violence is associated with the Department of Homeland Security, making it a clear example of Bush era domestic terror politics. In this one, not only is the target of the killer’s ire someone who’s looking to expose corruption (and therefore automatically a hero), but the film’s entire gimmick centering around the whole “airdrop” smartphone element feels like a premise that should have been done a couple of years ago when that was a newer feature. One gets the feeling that this one will seem just as much like an unintentional period piece as Red Eye in just a few years, although I’m not certain it will have the same punch two decades from now that Red Eye still does today. 

Fahy is great here, and it’s fun to see her again after her stellar run on the second season of White Lotus, especially since she was also in the much maligned The Unbreakable Boy earlier this year, which had the misfortune of shooting in 2022 and then being shelved until after Fahy gained more recognition. Sklenar is attractive as Henry and definitely fits the mold of a handsome leading man, but I couldn’t help but notice how much chemistry Violet and Cara had from the outset, and in between wondering when the penthouse restaurant was going to fall out of the sky like the opening scene of Final Destination: Bloodlines, I kept thinking that Violet should just skip her date and make out with Cara instead. Even when my suspicions fell on Cara as the airdropper (or a conspirator thereof), I was still kind of rooting for a sapphic resolution to the story. 

This is exactly the kind of mid-budget thriller that movie studios used to churn out at a rate of a dozen a year, a quickly cobbled together script that took some recent tech news item and ran with it to craft a thriller around, usually relying on the audience’s general lack of tech savvy to be effective. I’ve never owned an iPhone and thus have never sent or received an airdrop (although they are careful to never use any of Apple’s branded products or tech names and even their use of the fiery Elmo meme replaces the Muppet with a generic stuffed animal), so I have no idea how plausible or implausible this is as a technological MacGuffin. I saw this with a few friends, some of whom are iPhone users, and they mentioned that this would have been more believable several years ago before everyone turned off the default airdrop “receive” setting, as most folks have stopped accepting airdrops as it largely became a method for pervs and other creeps to spam a given area with unsolicited dick pics. I have to take their word for it. For a nice, easy thriller that doesn’t require too much mental energy, Drop is decent, and fun enough for what it is. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Bring Her Back (2025)

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I was in the minority of people who saw Talk to Me in 2022 and felt indifferent toward it. Most people either loved or hated it (Brandon enjoyed it), and while I thought the ending (and I do mean the very ending, like the last minute or so) was novel and fresh, I found the overall experience to be a fairly rote possession story with little to make it stand out. When I heard that the directors, twins Danny and Michael Philippou, had a new feature coming out, I didn’t pay much attention to it despite it getting the same kind of word-of-mouth hype that Talk to Me had. Brandon asked me if I was interested in this one and I didn’t even know what he was talking about, but it wasn’t until the movie got the approval of a couple who work at my local coffee shop (hi, Michael and Brandon P.!) that I gave this one any serious consideration. I bought the tickets for me and my viewing companions in person in advance (the only way to make sure that you both get the Tuesday discount and that the tickets don’t sell out), and the theater employee nervously asked me what I had heard about the film as I was paying. I told her I hadn’t really heard anything, and she said that people had been coming out of the film talking about how frightening and gory it was, and that she wasn’t sure she would see it. After those two incidents, I was pretty excited, and I can say I was definitely not disappointed. 

Piper (Sora Wong) is the visually impaired younger stepsister of loving, caring Andy (Billy Barratt), and the apple of her father’s eye. Coming home one day, Andy discovers his father’s dead body lying on the bathroom floor, the shower still running, and although he tries to keep Piper away, his own shock prevents him from stopping her from touching the corpse. Andy’s not quite eighteen and thus can’t take guardianship of Piper, so child services places her with a woman named Laura (Sally Hawkins), who recently lost her own daughter, Cathy. Cathy shared Piper’s visual impairment, so her home is already set up with many of the accommodations that Piper would need, like taped-down rugs. Andy, afraid of losing Piper, begs social worker Wendy (Sally-Anne Upton) to convince Laura to take him in for the next few months until he can take guardianship of Piper on his birthday. Wendy cites that Laura has had bad experiences with other foster children with a past history of violence, obliquely alluding to something in Andy’s past, but is ultimately successful in keeping the step-siblings together with Laura for the time being. Upon arrival, however, Andy is immediately treated as extraneous and unwanted; Laura calls him “Anthony” and “Andrew,” and while Piper gets set up in Cathy’s untouched bedroom, Andy gets plopped in a room that’s mostly been used for storage, stuck on a mattress that’s too short for him, directly on the floor, and an accordion pocket door that neither closes nor locks. Laura is also fostering another child whom she introduces as Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), who exhibits odd behavior that the audience initially dismisses as a response to trauma in whatever home he has been taken from, but which could be something more sinister.

This is a great set-up, and goes in some really great directions from there. Before we meet Piper and Andy, we are treated to a scene on a VHS tape in which various people speak Russian and there appears to be some kind of possession or exorcism ritual being performed, which includes one of the participants being “confined” within a white ring of some kind. When we see that there is a white line that Andy and Piper have to cross in order to approach Laura’s house, we’re immediately clued in that something fishy is afoot, even before we get to witness the discrepancy in the way that Laura treats her two new fosters. The gaslighting of Andy (and, to a lesser extent, Piper) begins almost immediately, as Laura deliberately ostracizes her new foster son, completely disregards his privacy by reading his text messages (above and beyond sticking him a room that he can’t even lock the door of), and even pouring her own urine on him while he sleeps heavily as a result of Laura drugging his workout powder so that he believes he’s wet the bed. It’s clear that she knows just how to manipulate a young person who doesn’t have the proper vocabulary to explain their situation to the authorities, and she uses her knowledge as a former social worker herself to goad him into aggressive behavior in order to plant the seed of the idea that he will be a poor guardian for Piper in the minds of both the girl herself and Wendy the social worker. Not simplifying matters is the fact that although Piper loved and adored her stepfather, Andy’s relationship was more complicated, as their father took his aggression out solely on his son while pampering his stepdaughter. When both were much younger, this resulted in Andy repeating that violence by physically striking Piper in an incident that she doesn’t remember but which he regrets and seeks to make amends for every day. Andy’s kindness and selflessness comes through in the way that he attempts to bond with Oliver when Laura takes Piper out for a “girls’ day,” although things go completely awry in a way that he couldn’t have foreseen, because he doesn’t yet realize that he’s in a supernatural horror story. 

Skip to the next paragraph to avoid spoilers (although they were probably the same ones as in the trailer)! Unfortunately, Laura is simply too well trusted within the social services to fall under suspicion until it’s too late. I don’t want to give too much away here since this is such a recent release and one that I think people should seek out and see for themselves, but there is a demonic entity present in the house and trapped inside of Oliver that Laura intends to use as a conduit to resurrect her daughter in exchange for Piper. (At least one person who edited the TV Tropes page for the film is operating under the assumption that Oliver is possessed by Cathy, but there are several visual indicators about what’s really happening that they must have missed.) It’s not simply that Laura wants Piper around to act as a kind of replacement for Cathy, but that she has ulterior motives that require her to isolate Piper, and Andy is standing in her way. 

This one is very effective, both in onscreen frights and in its somber tone. Expectations are effectively subverted. Throughout the film, much is made of Andy’s consistent workout routine and the bench presses that he does, but when the time comes that all of this would be most effective in saving him, he does not succeed. I got plenty of warnings about this one’s gruesome content, and I might be tipping my hand too much that I’ve been completely desensitized, but I will say that if you’re a horror fan, you’ll largely have seen much of this before, even if it’s still effective here. If you’re prone to gum/mouth/teeth nightmares, be forewarned that this one is going to set off some of those phobias. More important than all of that, however, is that this film effectively forges an emotional connection with the audience. There’s a little white lie that Andy tells Piper at the beginning of the movie to help her deal with her grief, and when that was called back to at the end of the film, I’m man enough to admit that I teared up. This one’s a real knockout. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)

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I went into my viewing of Final Destination: Bloodlines not having seen a single frame of any of the franchise entries in over twenty years, only being familiar with the first one from early high school sleepovers and having seen the opening (and only the opening) of the first sequel when it first hit Blockbuster shelves. Watching this one prompted me to go down a rabbit hole of watching the entire series over the course of a week, and although I wouldn’t say that binge retroactively gave me more appreciation for this one necessarily, I do think that it moved up in my rankings for a latecomer entry into an almost abandoned franchise. 

Back in the 1960s, young Iris (Brec Bassinger) has just learned that she’s pregnant, on the eve of a big date with her boyfriend Paul, who has managed to score reservations for a night at a recently completed Space Needle-style restaurant. Despite some difficulties getting in, the two still have a romantic time together, and Paul proposes to her while the two stand on an outdoor observation deck. Things quickly take a turn for the worse when a penny tossed over the side of the building by an unattended child gets sucked into the restaurant’s vents, creating a chain reaction that cascades from a shattered glass dance floor to an explosion of various gases to an elevator collapse to the destruction of the stairs. It’s bad. Iris manages to be the second to last to die, protecting herself and the young son of the venue’s lounge singer until the very last moment, when she dies (followed, presumably, by the kid). This turns out to be a premonition, however, and she manages to save a huge number of people from dying by getting them off of the dance floor before it collapses, and getting everyone evacuated. 

If you’re familiar with this film franchise’s (very loose) mythology, then you know that this means that Death personified is now pissed that its “design” was cheated, and it will now seek out and kill everyone who survived, in the order they “should” have died. This film adds a new wrinkle, however. Due to the large number of survivors, many of them went on to have children and start families, all of whom only exist because the plan was diverted, which means that Death has to prune the entire family tree of each survivor before moving to the next person on its list. It’s taken decades to tick off every box, and now the last remaining branches from the Space Needle survivors are Iris’s children and grandchildren, which is where we pick up in the present. College student Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) keeps having the same nightmare, about a woman named Iris saving dozens of people from a building collapse. Theorizing that the woman in her visions may be her estranged grandmother, she goes home to her father and brother, Charlie (Teo Briones), and while the reception from her father is warm, Charlie gives her the cold shoulder, clearly seeing a similarity in Stefani’s distance from her family and their earlier abandonment by their mother, Darlene (Rya Kihlstedt). Stefani’s father tries to warn her not to start asking questions about Iris, citing that she had made the lives of both her children, Darlene and Howard, miserable. Although she adjusted to her life after the near disaster initially, she later became obsessed with seeing “patterns” and was preoccupied with thoughts of death, and her seemingly unhinged protectiveness warped both of her kids. 

Ignoring him, Stefani immediately goes to the home of Uncle Harold, where we meet the cousins. Erik (Richard Harmon) is the eldest, a tattoo artist with his own extensive body art and piercings, with prim high school athlete Julia in the middle and fully grown adult man Bobby (Owen Patrick Joyner) rounding them out as the apparent youngest despite being, as noted, a grown ass man (they put him in a lot of oversized sweaters and backwards caps, but the effect isn’t convincing so much as it is confusing). I think we’re supposed to believe that Charlie and Bobby are about the same age, but it doesn’t work. When Uncle Harold kindly but firmly rejects Stefani’s questions, her aunt indirectly points her in the direction of a box of family records, which Stefani uses to locate the last known location of Iris, a bizarre fortress that Iris has constructed for herself and meets her grandmother. She learns about the family history and is given a book that traces the history of all of the restaurant disaster survivors and their descendants, revealing that Iris is apparently the last, and that once she’s dead Death will track down Howard and his progeny in order, followed by Darlene and her two kids. As is always the case, no one believes Stefani at first, but as more deaths occur around them, the remaining Campbells must try and work together to see if there’s a way to get off of Death’s list. 

Where the film is weak is in its main character. Stefani is kind of boring, and you’re never really all that invested in her success. I don’t normally like to denigrate performers in these reviews, but Santa Juana brings very little to the table. Looking at her filmography, she’s only ever been in a couple of episodes of The Flash and the few film credits she has are for movies that aren’t even notable enough to have Wikipedia pages. On stage, she was the understudy for a role in a Canadian production of Dear Evan Hansen, and “understudy” is exactly how I would describe her performance. It’s like the studio saw the success of the two most recent Scream sequels and said, “Get us a Melissa Cabrera type,” and she just happened to fit the visual mold that they were seeking. I’m not trying to be mean, but it’s hard to believe that she auditioned for this role rather than being selected based solely on her headshot. It doesn’t help that Stefani is one of the more underwritten characters from this franchise. For the first time, our main character isn’t the person who had the death premonition at the top of the screenplay, but is just related to them, so she never even gets to have any establishing character moments of her own as she tries to save people from disaster. Everything happens to her, not because of her, and it would have taken a stronger performer to wring a little more pathos out of a character who seems to have been underwritten on the page from the start. Compare her to Briones, playing her younger brother, and although he isn’t given much more to do than huff teenagerly when his big sis comes home after what feels like a long time away and doesn’t even seem to care that much about catching up, he’s giving a solid performance even when the material is underwhelming. 

Overall, though, this one is pretty fun. In my overview of the previous installments, I noted that my friend called Final Destination a franchise where “You get exactly what you expect in a nice way,” and this one is no exception. The things that you want from a Final Destination movie are present: a harrowing opening scene, a bunch of people being snuffed out via Death’s contrived coincidences, an appearance from Tony Todd to explain the rules, a last-minute aversion of death that lulls the remaining survivors into a false sense of security, and a mean ending. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. What this film does, like Final Destination 5, is introduce some new elements to the lore that work in its favor. That all of Death’s victims here are the descendants of previous intended victims who were able to stay out of harm’s way for a time is interesting, and there’s a particularly fun twist with regards to a character who seems utterly screwed but who ends up being fine because they were never actually on Death’s list in the first place. It works.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Friendship (2025)

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I was delighted to be able to request “Two tickets to Friendship, please!” at my local box office last weekend, which may have been the most fun I’ve had ordering movie tickets since requesting “Two tickets to the Moon, please!” in 2009. Part of the fun in this case was seeing the movie with my own best friend, as part of a leisurely Saturday afternoon enjoying movies & cocktails in the French Quarter. According to general online punditry, that kind of easy-going male friendship is a modern anomaly. We are reportedly in the middle of a “Male Loneliness Epidemic” that I’ve luckily avoided by A. occasionally leaving my house and B. maintaining a semi-social hobby (movies! movies! movies!). Having to restart my ongoing friendships from scratch in middle age does sound like a total nightmare scenario, though, as painfully illustrated by the Tim Robinson & Paul Rudd buddy comedy we watched that afternoon. In Friendship, Robinson stars as a lonely office worker who relies on his wife & son for the entirety of his social life until he’s encouraged to leave the house & make friends with the new neighbor, played by Rudd. Robinson’s mental health delicately balances on this new friendship going well, which makes for great comedic tension as he repeatedly, spectacularly fucks it up. By the end, it’s clear that his Male Loneliness affliction is entirely self-inflicted, making Friendship a cautionary tale for anyone who tends to overthink low-pressure hangouts into high-tension social bomb scares. It’s got all the raw-nerve social tension of an I Think You Should Leave sketch, sustained for 100 minutes of top-volume cringe.

Friendship is consistently funny in the exact way you’d expect a Tim Robinson vehicle to be, with three or four standout gags that had me laughing to the point of temporary mania. To avoid spoiling those gags, I will simply highlight them with single-syllable prompts: soap, sewer, toad, Jimp. The humor is immediate as soon as you lay your eyes on Robinson’s milquetoast narcissist, dressed head to toe in a harshly limited range of beiges & browns. He needlessly fills his coffee mug to the very brim, precariously carrying it down the hallways of his office with constant warnings that his hot coffee is in danger of spilling & scalding with any minor swerve. It’s an entirely self-created problem, which carries over to how he fumbles the easy, low-stakes social heist of being friendly with his new neighbor. Like Mr. Bean walking into a crowded antiques store, the laughter starts well before he fucks up, since I Think You Should Leave audiences are already familiar with the ways Robinson’s characters escalate low-stakes social interactions into acts of communal terrorism. Surprisingly, though, the title of the picture is not entirely ironic. In the chaos of Robinson burning down his marriage, his rapport with his teenage son, and his social standing with the much cooler, more popular Rudd, he does manage to make a genuinely friendly, intimate connection with the other man over a shared secret, communicated with a wink. Rudd can’t socially afford to acknowledge that connection in public, since Robinson is so disastrously inept at being around other people, but the connection is there, and it’s oddly sweet.

As a post-Tim & Eric anti-comedy of manners, Friendship speaks to an acquired taste for which I happen to be in the exact right demographic. If you belong in the bracket of irony-poisoned weirdos who know Conner O’Malley by name and would be delighted to see a film soundtracked by SlipKnot and Ghost Town DJs, you already know this is a comedy you’ll enjoy. If any one of those pop culture references mean nothing to you, congratulations on not being a maladjusted Millennial ghoul; you’re likely better off. All I can report at this point without recounting my favorite individual gags in the style of “The Chris Farley Show” is to say that I had a lot of fun laughing throughout the movie with my friend. Then we left the theater for another round. It’s not that serious if you don’t put pressure on it to be serious.

-Brandon Ledet

The Story of Adele H. (1975)

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As recently as a few years ago, the gold standard for an actress performing a full mental breakdown onscreen was the late, great Gena Rowlands’s starring role in Cassavettes’s A Woman Under the Influence. It has since been surpassed—at least in terms of press-junket citations—by Isabelle Adjani’s equally astonishing turn in Żuławski’s Possession. Whether it’s due to the overall cultural warming to Genre Cinema as a respectable artform or it’s due to the wider home video distribution of Possession in particular, Adjani’s horrific mid-film freakout is now cited as artistic inspo for actresses as wide ranging as Sidney Sweeney (in her self-produced nunsploitation film Immaculate) and Reinate Reinsve (in the much classier schoolboard-meeting drama Armand). Even Rowlands’s recent passing hasn’t lessened Adjani’s ascent in influence. In either case, it might be nice to hear a few other performances from those immensely talented actors’ oeuvres cited as influences from time to time, so that Adjani is not only remembered for smashing her groceries against a tunnel wall and Rowlands is not only honored for coming up with that thumbs-up raspberry tic.

Luckily, Isabelle Adjani does have at least one other major role in which she’s tasked to perform manic mental anguish to great success. She does such a stellar job embodying the violent psychosis of unrequited love in the 1975 classic The Story of Adele H. that it often feels as if she’s being directed by Ken Russell instead of François Truffaut. The French New Waver mostly behaved himself behind the camera, shooting the anti-romance period piece with the made-for-TV aesthetics of a Masterpiece Theatre episode – complete with TV-friendly screen wipes. Adjani initially appears to be on her best behavior as well, arriving on the scene as a lovelorn romantic tracking down the traveling soldier who once proposed marriage to her against her family’s wishes. However, the more we come to understand just how obsessed she is with making this romantic connection happen (and just how little affection the soldier has expressed in return), it quickly becomes apparent that she’s a woman possessed. Then she gets worse, scarily so. Adjani’s ecstatic performance as a globetrotting stalker gone mad works in direct contrast to her director’s muted browns-and-greys historical aesthetics, so that all you can focus on is the immense power she wields as a screen presence. It was an incredible feat for the still-teenage actress, and it’s admittedly even more incredible that she somehow pushed her craft even further in Possession.

For his part, Truffaut is seemingly more preoccupied with the real-life historical spectacle of the story he’s telling than he is by the filmmaking mechanics of telling it. Stepping away from the more obvious visual & artistic trickery of his preceding film Day for Night, he instead reassures his audience with onscreen text, archival photographs, and vocalized diary excerpts that the events depicted are real things that happened to real people. The only overt trickery of the picture is hiding the full name of his subject from the audience, as the titular Adele H. is better known to the public as Adele Hugo, daughter of the famous French novelist Victor Hugo. As in the film’s narrative, the real-life Adele Hugo did travel to Canada & Barbados against her father’s commands to chase an unlikely romance with a fuckboy soldier who spurned her. It was a passionate, one-sided obsession that eventually drove her to the madhouse just as performed by Adjani in her first starting role – often expressed in the exact words of her personal letters & diary. Outside a couple double-exposure sequences in Adele’s sweaty nightmares, however, Truffaut never matches the mania of his subject in the film’s visual palette. He instead leaves that task entirely in Adjani’s scarily capable hands, which she uses to feverishly scribble endless love letters in her cramped Nova Scotian apartment instead of resting her mind with sleep.

Just in case the connection to Adjani’s now career-defining performance in Possession wasn’t already top-of-mind, Adele H. does include a brief scene in which the actor performs a manic episode against the brick walls of an urban tunnel – this time while being attacked by a wild dog. It’s just one of many jaw-dropping moments of ecstatic physical performance in the film, but it is still a visual reminder that Adjani’s one of the best to have ever performed that total breakdown routine in the history of the medium. Before Rowlands was the go-to citation for that manic extreme of the craft, I’m sure Catherine Deneuve’s performance in Repulsion made the publicity rounds in the same way. Maybe someday Elizabeth Moss’s work in titles like Queen of the Earth, The Invisible Man, and Her Smell will get its turn. For now, though, Isabelle Adjani is the reigning queen of melting down onscreen, and that icon status is well earned (in more films than one).

-Brandon Ledet 

Her Vengeance (1988)

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Golden Harvest’s 1988 rape revenge thriller Her Vengeance is reportedly a remake of fellow Hong Kong exploitation flick Kiss of Death, released by the rival Shaw Brothers studio in 1974. However, sometime between those two productions the most notorious American landmark of the genre, I Spit on Your Grave, left its permanent mark on the rape revenge template, so citing its primary influence becomes a little muddled. Her Vengeance does adhere to the exact plot structure of Kiss of Death, following the training-and-payback saga of a sexually assaulted woman who learns her martial arts skills from a physically disabled wheelchair user before getting her titular vengeance. Something about the continued violation of that initial assault following her well after the inciting incident screams I Spit on Your Grave to me, though. The frustrating, traumatizing thing about I Spit on Your Grave is that its vengeful antiheroine is assaulted multiple times before she flips the power dynamic of the film’s violence, restarting the 1st-act violation several times over without letting the audience move on to something less vile. In Her Vengeance, the initial assault continues in less literal ways, but persists nonetheless. Our assaulted antiheroine contracts gonorrhea, which exponentially worsens even as she trains her body for combat. She reveals her assault to her blind sister (and, by extension to the audience) by explaining that the gang who jumped her were also the same five scumbags who killed their father and left both the sister and the sister’s fiancée physically disabled. Then, her vengeful warpath accidentally puts the last few living people she cares about in their own mortal danger as innocent bystanders, so that she’s repeatedly traumatized every time the gang goes tit-for-tat with her assassinations. It’s relentlessly, exhaustingly bleak.

Thankfully, the dependably entertaining director Lam Nai-Chou lightens up the mood where he can, bringing some of the cartoonish hijinks from his better-known classics The Seventh Curse & Riki-Oh to a genre not typically known for its goofball amusements. As nightmarishly vicious as the gangsters are in every scene, they do initiate an armored truck heist by sticking a banana in the tailpipe, a classic gag. Frequent Sammo Hung collaborator Lam Ching-ying performs most of the more outlandish antics as our heroine’s wheelchair-using martial arts trainer, using his chair as a weapon and a constant inspiration for over-the-top stunts. Seemingly overwhelmed by the pure evil emanating from the worst of the surviving gangsters, he also rigs his nightclub with lethal boobytraps for a spectacularly violent climax, like a Home Alone precursor for convicted murderers. These outrageous “Triad Spring Cleaning” sequences are especially fun to watch due to the film’s Category III rating, which allows it to indulge in the most grotesque practical gore details imaginable. That freedom to indulge cuts both ways, though, making for an excruciating first-act assault as the gang members take turns abusing our antiheroine in a graveyard nightscape. Lam mercifully does not fixate on actor Pauline Wong Siu-Fung’s naked, abused body during that sequence, which helps diffuse any potential dirtbag eroticism seen elsewhere in this disreputable genre. Instead, he catalogs the cartoonishly evil Dick-Tracy-villain faces of her attackers, each with names like Salty, Long Legs, and Rooster. He also finds some sly humor in her eventual revenge on those C.H.U.D.s, having her cut off one of their ears with a pair of scissors, then later featuring a Vincent Van Gogh portrait as a background detail. Her Vengeance is not the Steel & Lace-level absurd escalation of the rape revenge template you’d expect from the director of The Seventh Curse, but Lam still finds a few occasions to have his usual fun, so it’s not a total dirge.

Curiously, the recent Vinegar Syndrome release includes a longer-running alternate Category IIB cut of the film that averts its lens from some of the more violent details but adds in additional scenes of dramatic context that overcorrects their lost length. Apparently, Golden Harvest produced five different cuts of the film in total, mostly as a preemptive measure to avoid its inevitable censorship by the Hong Kong government. If I were a more diligent cinema scholar I might’ve watched the IIB cut of the film for comparison’s sake before writing this review, or revisited I Spit on Your Grave, or sought out Kiss of Death. Since this is such a deeply, deliberately unpleasant genre, however, I can’t imagine wanting to suffer through this story a second time, no matter how softened or warped. The only reason I watched Her Vengeance in the first place is because it was packaged with my recent purchase of fellow Category III grotesquerie Devil Fetus, and I had some light familiarity with the director’s name. I do not regret the discomfort at all. Pauline Wong Siu-Fung gives a heartbreaking performance as a sweetheart nightclub employee who’s embittered & radicalized by her Triad gang-assault, emerging as a vicious killer herself on the other side. Lam Ching-ying makes spectacular use of his wheelchair prop, delivering some of the coolest, most badass disability representation I’ve ever seen in a martial arts film. Lam Nai-Chou crafts some memorably bizarre action-cinema payoffs typical to his most eccentric works. Still, I don’t think I’ll be making this particular journey into rape-revenge Hell again anytime soon. Once was plenty, thank you. I’ll stick to the relatively wholesome safety of Devil Fetus until these psychic wounds have healed.

-Brandon Ledet

The Prophecy (1995)

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I remember seeing previews for the Sci-Fi Channel premiere of Gregory Widen’s directorial debut The Prophecy (which, as of this writing, is his only feature director credit, although he did an episode of Tales from the Crypt) in the late 90s. It scared me a little, and I also remember being a little freaked out by the VHS cover, with Christopher Walken looming over figures in the desert, yellow eyes shining. He’s great in this, and when the movie works, it’s usually because of the inhumanity of his Archangel Gabriel, a kind of body language and erratic emphasis that’s one of the actor’s many specialties. Widen also wrote the film, having previously garnered some success for penning 1986’s Highlander as well as 1991’s firefighter action thriller Backdraft. As a horror fantasy, The Prophecy obviously borrows more from the former than the latter, once again featuring battles between immortal beings, ancient texts, and the grappling between Good and Evil. 

The film opens with narration from Simon (Eric Stoltz), an angel, as he recounts the events of the First War in Heaven, the story that we all know about a third of the angels being struck down from heaven because Lucifer rebelled in an attempt to become a god himself. What we don’t know is that there was a Second War, one that’s been in a stalemate since the first one, between those angels loyal to the Almighty and those led by Gabriel (Walken, as noted), who are throwing a cosmic temper tantrum over God’s preference for humans, as demonstrated by the latter’s possession of souls. In fact, because of this cold war, no soul has ever reached heaven in the history of mankind. As Gabriel later reveals, humans are much more skilled than angels in the areas of “war and treachery of the spirit,” and thus he and his lackeys are seeking out a deeply evil soul of a recently deceased war criminal, as his talent for warmaking could tip the scales in the balance of the rebels. Caught up in all of this is Thomas Dagget, a detective who, years earlier, saw a vision of angels at war during his final confirmation for the priesthood, causing him to abandon the faith. He’s called in when the body of one of Gabriel’s lieutenants, slain in an altercation with Simon, is found and autopsied, with strange results. For instance, when humans grow, their bones have natural striations that can be used to determine the age of a body, but this man’s bones have no such markings, as if they were created spontaneously in their current form; he also has the blood chemistry of an aborted fetus. 

Simon and Thomas meet briefly before the angel takes off to Arizona to dig up the grave of the recently deceased Colonel Hawthorne, from whose corpse he inhales the man’s dark soul. Knowing that Gabriel is hot on his trail, Simon sticks the soul inside of a young girl named Mary (Moriah Shining Dove Snyder) at the local reservation school, shortly before Gabriel arrives and kills him. Mary’s teacher Katherine (Virginia Madsen) starts to notice a change in the girl’s disposition as well as her declining health. Meanwhile, Gabriel searches for the soul hiding spot with the help of two undead lackeys: Jeffrey (Adam Goldberg), whose life was suspended by Gabriel in the moment of his suicide, and later Rachael (Amanda Plummer), who is caught in the moment of her death by cancer. The film makes its most interesting turn with the appearance of Lucifer (Viggo Mortenson), who doesn’t care all that much for the people caught in the middle but knows that a victory on Gabriel’s part will turn Heaven into Hell which, as he says, “is one hell too many.” 

This movie is messy. Widen has a strong eye for composition and the film has a style that’s unique, and he manages to craft some truly horrifying images, most notably quick flashes of the grisly results of the heavenly war with angels impaled on spears and rotting through Thomas’s visions (think the very brief splices of the terrors that had to be cut from Event Horizon to secure its R rating). There are also some fun things that he does with the mythology that, since he was basically crafting his own Bible fanfic and could make up the rules as he went along, can likely be accredited to him all the way. In particular, I love the way that every angel that we meet has a habit of “perching” on things — road barriers, fence posts, the backs of chairs. It’s like an unconscious habit for them to sit on their feet with their legs folded beneath them like birds, and it’s a clever bit of storytelling through body language. I also really liked the angel autopsy, as each of the things that’s revealed about the corpse is something that makes sense as a scientific oddity that would befuddle a coroner in the way that it’s similar to but not exactly like a human body. 

For the most part, the toying with of fantasy elements works. Lucifer’s reluctant (and ultimately self-interested) investment in preventing the villainous Gabriel from getting his way is good stuff. Although the inclusion of Jeffrey and Rachael is a bit superfluous (Jeffrey mostly serves the in-universe function of driving Gabriel around and handling all the human stuff and the narrative purpose of receiving exposition, and Rachael just replaces for the last fifteen minutes after Jeffrey when he dies), the whole slowly dying puppets angle is interesting. The conflict between Gabriel and the loyal heavenly guard is also clear. What doesn’t work is where it gets bogged down in all of Hawthorne’s soul stuff. We spend too much of the film with Thomas investigating who Hawthorne was (a Korean War general, war criminal, and apparent cannibal) just to establish that he has a truly awful talent for suffering and war, and it really doesn’t make a lot of sense that Simon would stick this McGuffin into a little girl other than because the narrative says he has to. It’s lucky that Lucifer turns up at the end to claim the soul once it’s exorcised from Mary via a Native American ritual (no tribe is ever named, nor is the ritual given a title either; it’s just the typical nineties “Magical Native American” trope), because otherwise I’m not really sure what his endgame was. It’s all a bit convoluted, to the film’s detriment. Its other problem is that, well, it’s just not very good. No one is giving a bad performance, there are some decently unique visual choices and interesting tableaux, but this is a 90s destined-for-VHS-cult-status movie that will forever be playing third banana to Candyman (which also featured Madsen) and The Crow, the sleepover flick for you and your goth best friend when those two (or The Craft, which released the following year) were already rented out on a Friday night. It’s available for streaming right now on Tubi … but only in Spanish. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Leila and the Wolves (1984)

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Leila and the Wolves is a 1984 docu-drama that took over half a decade to make, premiering at the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival in West Germany and then going underground for decades at a time. It got a re-release in the U.K. twenty-four years later at an event called “Women’s Cinema from Tangiers to Tehran” in 2008, then disappeared again for some time after that before popping up in various European festivals before getting proper stateside screenings this year with limited releases in the U.S. and Canada. Ten years prior to its first release, the film’s Lebanese director Heiny Srour (Leila has no credited writer, as many of the stories of which it is comprised were real experiences Srour collected) was the first Arab woman to have a film considered at Cannes, with her 1974 documentary The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived. Leila tackles a similar subject matter, focusing on the forgotten/erased role of women in the liberation movements of Lebanon and Palestine in the twentieth century. 

The film isn’t invested in recounting the broader history prior to the 1920 British occupation, and some familiarity with the region is helpful. Prior to its dissolution in 1922, the Ottoman Empire controlled portions of the Middle East that are now occupied, in whole or in part, by Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Beginning in 1915, the government of the U.K., represented by Britain’s senior ambassador to Egypt, Henry McMahon, and Hussein bin Ali of the Kingdom of Hejaz (the western coast of the Arabian Peninsula which is now partitioned into parts of Saudi Arabia and Jordan) exchanged a series of letters. Called the McMahon–Hussein correspondence, this exchange committed Britain to recognition of an independent Arab state in the Middle East in exchange for assistance in fighting the Ottomans as part of the Middle Eastern theatre of WWI. This prompted the Arab Revolt (1916-1918), which ultimately led to the end of Ottoman control of the area; in combination with the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923), the Ottoman Empire was, as they say, history. 

Britain, as it is wont to do, reneged on this promise, and secretly signed the Sykes–Picot Agreement with the French Third Republic, which set forth the terms under which Britain and France would partition the remains of the Ottoman Empire. This led to the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine, which placed Palestine (and an area called Transjordan which now comprises parts of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq) under British rule, meaning that the Palestinians had essentially assisted in their liberation from one foreign power only to be stabbed in the back by their supposed allies, who became their new occupiers in 1920. “Mandatory Palestine” existed as a geopolitical extension of British rule for just shy of three decades, until 1948. If you’ve paid attention to the news at all during the time that you’ve been alive, then you know the rest. 

In Leila and the Wolves, Nabila Zeitouni is Leila, a modern Lebanese woman currently residing in London. Her friend, a man played by Rafik Ali Ahmad, is planning a showcase of photographs depicting various acts of resistance against Western occupying forces. Leila protests that all of the photographs depict only what the men of the region did to resist occupation, asking where the evidence of women’s contribution to the efforts are. Her friend laughs her off, saying that women “weren’t involved with politics at the time.” Following this, Leila goes on an extended out of body experience/astral journey through and into the photographs and the events depicted therein. After encountering a group of women in black burqas and niqab in a semicircle on a beach, watching men splash about in the surf without a care in the world, Leila moves through time, with mostly newly shot recreations but also incorporating archive footage where available. 

In a photo of men resisting British soldiers (in their ridiculous little imperial uniform shorts) and driving them down an alley, we pan out to see the women in the adjacent homes standing on their balconies, ready to pour boiling water down on the retreating occupiers. In a time of greater lockdown and restriction, the resistance takes advantage of the fact that women planning a wedding will be regarded as being beneath suspicion to use them as information couriers to organize activity (humorously, in this sequence, Ali Ahmad plays a quisling translator for the Brits, consciously intertwining this role with that of the dismissive curator). Later still, women are more actively engaged in the fighting, including participation in the exchange of gunfire. We also travel through Leila’s subconscious as well, as there are a few overt fantasy sequences. The first sees Leila as she might be if she accepts the narrative of female pacificity and political disengagement, a glimpse into an imagined future in which she sits in a room surrounded by her daughters and their daughters’ daughters. The questions that she asks of them are banal and concerned only about familial relations. Which daughter are you? Married? Kids yet? Only one? Are you my granddaughter? Are you married yet? Towards the film’s end, Leila finds herself in another fantasy sequence amidst the wreckage of ancient buildings, dancing with nearly a dozen skeletons in black garb. 

Across the spectrum of reviews I read, I don’t think I ever saw any of them connect the film to what stands out to me the most about it, which is its punk sensibility. Leila is clearly anti-establishment in its views, as there’s never a question about the film’s certitude of the morality of resisting foreign occupation, and it instead focuses on the necessity of remembering all the fallen. During my viewing, I was struck by the way that there was a disjointedness to the narrative; this is not entirely to its detriment, as this made the experience somewhat trancelike and thus all the more immersive, but it’s not what one would call seamless. In this way, it brought to mind one of Brandon’s favorites, Born in Flames, which can also be characterized by its piecemeal construction, but which, to quote him, is a “work of radical politics that transcends its jumbled narrative.” Because our discussion of it on the podcast was so fresh in my mind, I also kept thinking of how he described the punk ethos of Times Square as well; I think that it’s the DIY effect of the film’s use of recreations, although this one is also technically impressive in all that it accomplishes in ways that most punk films are not. Regardless, it’s an important and informative document of its past and our present, connected across time and as relevant as ever. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond