Dispatch from Cambridge: The quirky, witty twee of Wes Anderson may be running dry. Sad but so. The genre-bending director scored early and often with such notable art house hits as his take on Salinger’s Glass family, “The Royal Tenenbaums” (2001), his toe dip into animation, “The Fabulous Mr. Fox” (2009) and my favorite, “Moonrise Kingdom” (2012). The list goes on. Anderson was pretty much a sure thing, but his most recent three films – “The French Dispatch” (2021), “Asteroid City” (2023) and this ambitious misfire – have been sputters of what was and what might have been and, worse, smug delves into cinematic overindulgence.
The creepy horror shenanigans of YouTubers-turned-filmmakers Danny and Michael Philippou caught fire with their feature debut “Talk to Me” (2022), which played smartly with genre, race and mythos. It didn’t all click, but you couldn’t forget it. With their follow-up, “Bring Her Back,” the brothers reach a new level in psychological horror that features several grim, look-away scenes.
Things begin badly for brother and sister Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong), who come home after school and find their father dead on the bathroom floor. Piper is legally blind (she can see shapes and light, and that’s about it) and the protective Andy is months shy of his 18th birthday, ineligible to get custody. Complicating matters, there are documented incidents of violence in Andy’s past. Initially, child services wants to split the two up, but a saving grace comes in the form of Laura (Sally Hawkins), a former child services worker who lost her daughter in a recent drowning accident and is caretaking for another foster child, a mute 10-year-old by the name of Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips).
As the sibs settle in at Laura’s remote bungalow, there’s hope in the air, but something’s clearly off. Laura’s chatty and welcoming, but also controlling, spouting out a litany of rules and regs between awkward hugs. Piper is given the daughter’s room – which, bathed in pink and bejeweled with beads, has been maintained like a shrine – while Andy is relegated to a utility closet of sorts that has barely enough room for his mattress and a workout bench. The first real tell comes when we meet Oliver, a lithe androgynous sort with a faraway look in his eyes, standing shirtless and barefoot at the bottom of the drained pool out back, holding the cat that’s “not to be let out of the house” like he’s about to break its neck. Damien, the kid from “The Omen” (1976), has nothing on Oliver. And there are those strange red marks under his eyes; hard to tell if they’re birthmarks or the result of some occult ritual.
All good things must end, or so they say. But do they have to? This part deux to 2023’s “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” does have a sheen of finality to it, with plenty of nostalgia.
The key to the MI series is Tom Cruise: No Cruise, no movie. He’s a transcendent (and ageless) actor who sells the brand with bona fide stardom, a renown for performing his own stunts and a drive to be forever outdoing himself – and he usually doesn’t disappoint. In “Final Reckoning,” he succeeds with the help of writer-director Christopher McQuarrie, back for his fourth MI go-round.
Obviously, Cruise has a lot of faith in McQuarrie – and why wouldn’t he? After winning a Best Screenwriting Oscar early on for “The Usual Suspects” in 1996, McQuarrie has had a meteoric shot of a career in Hollywood. Besides these MI shuffles, he was one of the pens on another Cruise franchise, “Top Gun: Maverick,” back in 2022 and four others, directing Cruise in“Jack Reacher” (2012) and with scriptwriting creds on “Valkyrie” (2008), “The Edge of Tomorrow” (2014) and “The Mummy” (2017).
Reviewed: “The Shrouds,” “Pangolin: Kulu’s Journey” and “The Wedding Banquet”
‘The Shrouds’ (2024)
Master of the macabre David Cronenberg has always been one to explore the impacts and unintended consequences of near-future technology on humans – and often, in humans. Take “Videodrome” (1983), in which the advent of cable TV and pop-up public access stations served as a crucible for snuff videos, or “Existenz” (1999), in which a game designer trying to evade assassins melds physically with her game and the Internet. In “The Shrouds,” Cronenberg, still wrestling with the grief of losing his wife to cancer in 2017, deals with connecting the living to the departed through a Chinese-manufactured sheet with high-tech capabilities that allows the bereaved to log in through an app and look in on their loved ones as they decay away into eternity. It’s creepy and cool stuff that has some far-reaching implications, such as China perhaps leveraging the shrouds as a surveillance network. As an arguable stand-in for Cronenberg, the handsomely gaunt Vincent Cassel plays Karsh, who has also lost his wife Becca (Diane Kruger) to cancer and subsequently founded GraveTech, an Internet-connected series of cyber sarcophagus plots around the globe. Instead of headstones, there are tech towers that, with the right passcode or eye scan, allow one to pop up images of the dead or dial up memories. Karsh’s life is complicated: He dates, but prefers more illicit sexual liaisons involving Becca’s sister Terry (also played by Kruger) and Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), the blind wife of a prospective client (Vieslav Krystyan). Then there’s Terry’s ex-husband Maury (Guy Pearce), who does much of the coding for GraveTech. Karsh’s nighttime imaginings of Becca missing an arm or a breast are far more lurid and grim than anything gazed upon electronically in the crypt. There’s also the mystery of small nodes that have grown on some of the deceased: Are they bone tissue residue, spy-network plants or something else related to the medical treatments they received at end of life? Unfortunately, many plot threads are left dangling, but they are a minor annoyance offset by the riveting psychosexual dance between the principal cast. Cassel holds the film together, but it’s Kruger and Holt who drive it – especially Kruger as Terry, who regards Karsh with contempt until an unexpected encounter, when his offhand conspiracy theorizing turns out to be her sexual trigger.
The latest from prolific filmmaker Stephen Soderbergh (“Ocean’s Eleven,” “Traffic”) is a sharp, thoughtful spy thriller in the neighborhood of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (2011), if updated for these high-tech times and tossed on a treadmill. There’s plenty of cloak and dagger, but the story’s center is the relationships between husbands, wives and lovers, be they deviously duplicitous, of high fealty or otherwise. “Black Bag” comes in at about 90 minutes, matching the paranormal psycho-thriller “Presence” released this year by Soderbergh. Who drops two utterly different films within weeks of each other? Both were written by “Jurassic Park” (1993) scribe David Koepp, who outdoes himself here, and both were shot in limited locations, though “Black Bag” has a bigger, world-hopping feel to it. The London-set work and contrasting light-dark framings brought together warmly by a deep, bass-driven jazz score impress in craftsmanship and seamless ease. At the epicenter of the smoldering espionage are British operatives George (Michael Fassbender) and his wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). George has been alerted to a mole at the agency and tasked to find them – and given just a week to do so. On the list of five possible double dealers: his wife. Hanging in the balance is a nuclear meltdown and the potential death of 20,000 people, but that’s just a side issue to what interests Soderbergh and Koepp. We begin with George inviting the suspects to his and Kathryn’s posh London flat for a lovely lamb roast. Every guest is a professional liar, but did I mention the gravy’s laced with a truth serum? The other attendees are grizzled party-boy Freddie (Tom Burke), his latest office fling and X factor Clarissa (Marisa Abela), the hunky yet generic Col. Stokes (Regé-Jean Page of “Bridgerton”) and the agency’s resident psych, Zoe (Naomie Harris), who, because of a departmental mandate, has regular sessions with everyone at the table. She’s also having a fling with the colonel. As the serum kicks in and courses come and go, infidelities are confessed. The meal culminates with a knife pinning one diner’s hand to the table. George sifts through the fallout as he finds Kathryn plans to travel and a movie ticket stub for two in the wastebasket of her boudoir. When inquired as to the destination of her trip, “black bag” is Kathryn’s response; the info can’t be divulged, with no exceptions for spouses. The chemistry between Fassbender and Blanchett is intellectually and erotically electric, and George and Kathryn have a fashion sense to die for. The casting overall is a coup, though Pierce Brosnan, still dapper as ever as an agency higher-up, feels stirred in as an afterthought. The casting and lean, well-honed and MacGuffin-driven script by Koepp make the film work, as well as the tightness of the final product as pulled together by Soderbergh, who edits and shoots as well.
Reviewed: ‘Eephus,’ ‘Chaos: The Manson Murders,’ ‘Mickey 17,’ ‘Delicious’ and ‘Silent Zone’
‘Eephus’ (2024)
If you need a baseball fix before the Red Sox’s opening day, this drolly nostalgic work by first-time feature filmmaker Carson Lund may be just the thing. In it, a bunch of old-time ballers play one last game at a park in the autumnally speckled hills of Central Massachusetts (Douglas, to be exact) before the lot is torn up and a school built. The time is somewhere in the early to mid-1990s, when the Curse of the Bambino was still a thing, but besides 1970s Sox hurler Bill “The Spaceman” Lee appearing in a small part, there’s no mention of the hometown team or MLB at all – these are just local dudes with day jobs playing for Adler’s Paint on some team called the River Dogs. It’s unclear if they ever play other teams, are in a league or just play each other. The ragtag and grizzled lot are cut with character as deep as the wrinkles on their mismatched uniforms. Many have paunches, and others casually sip beer and offer laconic barbs as they warm up for a sleepy match that begins with the sun high in the sky and concludes with the aid of headlights as a cold October evening rolls in. It’s a long, lazy marathon that Lund builds as a dryer, tamped down version of Richard Linklater’s “Everybody Wants Some!” (2016) with the same level of respect and love for the game that John Sayles imbued in his unheralded “Eight Men Out” (1988). Adding local flavor is legendary documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman as the voice of the radio broadcast announcer. The title refers to a super slow, arcing pitch that came into being in the 1940s and makes a knuckleball look like blazing heat. It’s rare but gets an every-now-and-then use due to its ability to daunt and confound batters – try it a second time, and it’s to the moon. For lovers of the game, this nostalgic slow roll is right down the strike zone. (Speaking of the Red Sox and the Curse of the Bambino, I have been part of a season ticket holder group since that game was played out in Douglas, but I almost missed seeing the Sox reverse the curse, something you can read all about in my “The Season That Almost Wasn’t” published in Slippery Rock University’s lit mag SLAB in 2007. You’ll likely get paywalled, but here’s a publicly viewable version posted last year on Substack.)
‘Chaos: The Manson Murders’ (2025)
Keeping with legendary Cambridge-based documentary filmmakers, the latest from Errol Morris (“The Thin Blue Line,” “American Dharma”) tackles the unshakable enigma of Charles Manson, his cult and the grisly Tate-LaBianca murders they committed. Fifty-plus years later, the inconceivable acts of Manson and his “family” loom like they happened yesterday. Morris’ rewind is kind of chaotic despite being organized into neat chapters, throwing a lot out there without resolving things as the filmmaker normally does. The Beach Boys, Doris Day, a Kennedy assassination, the CIA and LSD experimentation all make their way in, and the film’s peppered with frequent segues to Manson songs played off his one record – believe it or not, the diabolical manipulator was not a bad singer-songwriter; the Beach Boys even recorded one of his tunes, which, in a way, led to the Tate murders. It’s all based on a similarly titled 2020 book by Tom O’Neill, who claims the race war theory put forth by lead prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi was fabricated for courtroom theatrics so Bugliosi could get rich off writing “Helter Skelter.” This feels a tad like conspiracy theory. More interesting is the archival footage of Manson, creepy and charismatic, and the chilling confessionals from his followers who did the killings, though most informative and credible are former prosecutor Stephen Kay, who worked alongside Bugliosi, and Bobby Beausoleil, a songwriter who joined Manson’s cult and is still in jail for carrying out an earlier murder at Manson’s behest. (His testimony is delivered from telephone interviews. It should be noted that he’s up for parole this year, so there’s that.) Morris and O’Neill put a lot out there, but the most compelling part of the film is the maniacal puppet master, his cold, aloof rantings, hold on his subjects and ability to skirt the law and authorities even when he was a known sociopath and likely high risk to the public. The film makes one want to go back and rewatch Quentin Tarantino’s rescript of history, “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” (2019) to cross reference fact and fiction. No matter, Manson, his minions, their crimes and courtroom antics remain a fresh and lurid annal of American history.
Reviewed: ‘The Monkey’ and ‘Elevation’ in theaters and streaming now
‘The Monkey’ (2025)
Osgood Perkins, a dead ringer for dad Anthony Perkins (“Psycho”), continues the family tradition from the other side of the lens with this spin on horror master Stephen King’s 1980 short story. The not-so-slow burn is set in Casco, Maine, where we open with Capt. Petey Shelborn (Adam Scott) walking into a pawn shop covered in blood to fix his windup mechanical monkey. After a flamethrower, a speargun and a rat enter the scene, we learn that the monkey is not a toy, a point hammered home regularly by those possessing it. It is something evil, if not death itself. Its victims of ghoulish, cartoonish circumstance are random – only the person winding up the monkey is safe. When the monkey plays its drum, anyone nearby is at risk. Petey’s twin sons Hal and Bill (both Christian Convery) later discover the monkey in a closet in their unhappy home; their dad is now a deadbeat, as their mom, Lois (Tatiana Maslany), tells us. A few cranks of the monkey’s key by the curious kids and mayhem ensues among mom, babysitter Annie Wilkes (Danica Dreyer) and Uncle Chip (Perkins), who moved in to care for the boys with his swinger wife, Aunt Ida (Sarah Levy). The twins behead the mechanical monkey, throw it in the trash and down a well, but it always returned. Flash forward 25 years, and Hal (now played by Theo James) works at a supermarket and visits his own son Petey (Colin O’Brien) once a year out of fear of cursing him. Hal, the film’s occasional narrator, tells us that he and his brother don’t get along. Bill is now totally unhinged and wants to bond with the windup wingding of disaster, with Petey and Hal looped in to his demented scheme as much of Casco gets sent to the great beyond in bloody ways. Part of the fun is Theo James’s yin-and-yang roles as the buttoned-up, protective and paranoid Hal and the delusional Bill, who sports a pseudo-mullet and “damn it all to hell” gusto. Elijah Wood (“Lord of the Rings”) pops in for a dark turn as dim-witted Ted, employed by Bill to retrieve the monkey. Levy’s Aunt Ida is unforgettable for all the wrong reasons, with an unsettling sexual aura and a plotline that’s a creepshow instant classic.
Payal Kapadia’s somber meditation on womanhood and companionship amid the bustling streets of Mumbai feels like a living and breathing document. It follows the lives of three intertwined women, two of whom are nurses and roommates. The more dour of the duo, Prabha (Kani Kusruti), is estranged from her arranged husband, who is now working in Germany, and moves through her days with restrained and wistful introspection. The younger of the two, Anu (Divya Prabha), is bright-eyed, perky and naively idealistic as she constantly overspends and often asks Prabha to cover her rent. She has a secret Muslim lover who asks her to wear a burka when sneaking over for their trysts. That’s one of the interesting things about Kapadia’s portrait of Mumbai – it delves into and illuminates the myriad subtle cultural, linguistic and religious identities that coexist nearly seamlessly in the dense urban setting. The movie places the patriarchy under a microscope, not by lambasting double standards and gender inequality, but by showing the sisterhood formed through common causes and tribulations. Prabha and Anu are busy working out their romantic and professional futures while the third woman, the hospital’s cook, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a steely, no-nonsense, middle-aged widow, rails in vain against a developer who wants to displace her. “All We Imagine as Light” is a quiet film that affects the viewer in ebbs and flow, and Kapadia’s poetic cinematic flourishes add a dreamy, hypnotic affect to the deeply emotional sojourn. Kapadia was recently in Brookline to show the film at the Coolidge Corner Theatre and was rightly praised as a breakthrough filmmaker. The texture and tenor of “All We Imagine as Light” is reminiscent of Deepa Mehta’s Elements trilogy, which bodes well for Kapadia’s future endeavors.
The Revolutions per Minute Festival hosts 10 works by Somerville experimental filmmaker Saul Levine at The Brattle Theatre on Sunday.
Not sure what experimental films are? If you’ve ever been to Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art and seen trippy, surreal video installations, you’re on your way. Experimental or avant-garde film is usually deeply personal, often sociopolitical in context and reflective of the artist’s life in the moment.
Levine, born 1938, has been producing films for nearly 60 years; he was a professor in the Visual Arts Program at MassArt for 39 years.
Levine started his filmmaking career with “Salt of the Sea” (1965), featuring footage of his friends hopping from a boat to a buoy in the New Haven harbor. “I tried to make the jump with the camera,” Levine said, “and I fell into the water but held on to the camera.” The waterlogged footage, which Levine described as “abstract swirls of magenta and turquoise,” was turned into a four-minute short that ended with a clear shot of his friend perched upon the buoy.
If you watch Levine’s later works, such as his series “Driven (Boston After Dark)” (2002-present), in which Levine rides around in a car filming subjects and captures moments in time, or “Sun Drum Moon Note” (2018), which screens Sunday, you’ll notice shaky camera work. Part of that is Levine’s editing style, but adding to it are genetic neurological ticks – what Levine refers to as “tremors” – that he’s had since birth. As a result, Levine also speaks with a noticeable stammer.
Age and neurological affliction keeps Levine from getting behind the camera as much as he used to. Levine’s time at MassArt was also cut short, ending with his resignation in 2018. He said he felt “forced out” after school administrators accused him of harming students by showing his compiled film “Notes After a Long Silence” (1989), a collage that includes scenes of him having sex with his then partner. “It was ridiculous,” Levine said, as he’d screened “Notes” over several years without complaint and “the film was posted on the school’s website.” Levine gave passionate commentary on the situation in a video on Facebook, saying he felt “ambushed” by the school’s administration. The same year, fellow MassArt professor Nicholas Nixon, a Guggenheim fellow and photographer, came under scrutiny in a Boston Globe article for more severe, yet similar allegations of inappropriate academic behavior. The Globe mentioned Levine in conjunction with Nixon, who also resigned.
It’s amazing, given how Draconian the Iranian government has been about censorship and control over its own narrative, that the voices of filmmakers Mohammad Rasoulof and Jafar Panahi persist. Both have been arrested and spent time in jail because they make films critical of the oppressive regime. These films are usually shot and edited secretly and often bootlegged out of the country to gain distribution in the West. Panahi struck the first blow with the sublime and frightening “The Circle” (2000), which detailed the systemic imprisonment of women for morality violations that most people in a free state would consider little more than jaywalking. Rasoulof goes further with “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” crafting a domestic gender rift against the backdrop of the real-life death of Mahsa Amini in 2022 after being taken into custody for a hijab violation. The event galvanized the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and led to protests in the streets. In the home of Iman (Missagh Zareh), he and his wife Najmeh (Sohelia Golestani) and teenage daughters Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki) come at the headline event differently. Iman, who works for the state judicial department and reviews and signs execution orders, believes the theocracy’s line that Amin died of a stroke; his wife and daughters, like all those protesting, believe the death was the result of abuse and torture. Iman has a gun as part of his position, and as tension in the house rises, the firearm goes missing. Ultimately the action leaves the confines of the family’s apartment and the distrust threatens to turn violent. Just before the film played Cannes, Rasoulof was sentenced to eight years in prison with a flogging and fled the country, another reflection of a theocratic patriarchy holding authoritarian reins chokingly tight.
‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’ (2024)
A perfect companion to RaMell Ross’ superb “Nickel Boys,” as both deal with a grotesquely unjust Black experience on the cusp of the civil rights movement. “Nickel Boys” is a microcosm of racial injustice, whereas “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” looks globally. The doc by Johan Grimonprez details the dubious events surrounding the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, inaugural leader of the Democratic Republic of Congo – just liberated from Belgium and quickly becoming a Cold War conflict because its rich uranium deposits were coveted by the United States and Soviet Union for use in nukes. It is astounding to see archival footage of the smooth and charismatic Malcom X and an animated Nikita Khrushchev making the same condemnations at the U.N. of the West for its colonialism and denial of rights to Black people. Insert into the mix Louis Armstrong as a Trojan horse cultural ambassador to the Congolese while Eisenhower, the CIA and Belgian operatives scheme against Lumumba in ways troublesome, embarrassing and downright heinous out of fear the nation (and its uranium) would fall into Soviet hands. Grimonprez, employing frenetic freestyle editing, homes in on socially active jazz greats of the time – among them Nina Simone, doing her amazing “Sinnerman,” Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach bringing the beat and emotional heat and Dizzy Gillespie – as well as X and Maya Angelou (she, Lincoln and Roach stormed the U.N. in the wake of Lumumba’s death) to fill the frame with sound and voice. The frequent shards of quotes he flashes onscreen are stunningly effective. Grimonprez has tapped into an incredible intersection of time, place and players that he turns into an immersive experience that entertains and informs unlike any Wikipedia page or history book.
‘The Room Next Door’ (2024)
Iconic Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar (“Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down,” “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown”) makes his first English-language film, and with the double-barrel casting of Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore on paper it seems like a can’t-miss collaboration. While it definitely hits, it’s not the boom you’d expect from such a loaded lot. Based on Sigrid Nunez’s novel “What Are You Going Through,” “Room Next Door” is a contemplation on mortality – something that seems to be on Almodóvar’s mind these days given this, “Parallel Mothers” (2021) and most personally, “Pain and Glory” (2018). Novelist Ingrid (Moore) and war correspondent Martha (Swinton sporting a neat crop top), Manhattanites but distant for years, reunite because Martha is terminally ill and wants Ingrid to spend the end days with her in a quaint VRBO upstate. The performers are all in, yet the characters somehow feel shallow and contrived and the dialogue too meted, as if were a stage play. It’s gorgeous and affecting, but ephemeral and wispy.
For What it's Worth 