It happens on occasion that two movies with similar plots release on top of one another. There was Armageddon and Deep Impact in the summer of 1998, Dante’s Peak and Volcano in 1997, and November 2024 gave us Aftermath a few weeks ago and now Armor. And talking about these two DTV armored-car-heist-on-a-bridge movies, Armor is not only the lesser of the two, by far, there's nothing of value or interest to find here. Except for die-hard Sylvester Stallone completists.
When a martial arts master dies, his son and his top apprentice vie for control of his wushu school in 1920s Tianjin. On this simple foundation director Xu Haofeng (The Hidden Sword, screenwriter The Grandmaster), with his brother/co-director Xu Junfeng, builds 100 Yards into an intricate exploration of rivalry, social change, the weight of tradition and expectation, and much more, all wrapped in absolute top-tier martial arts choreography.
Elevation, the new sci-fi adventure from The Adjustment Bureau director and Bourne Ultimatum writer George Nolfi, is fine. That’s the most accurate way to put it. It’s a solidly executed creature feature with an intriguing if underdeveloped hook, charismatic leads, moderate tension, and a crisp visual style. It gets right in, does its business, and wraps things up in less than 90 minutes. Is it thought provoking, innovative, or particularly memorable? No. But it’s entertaining and compelling enough if that’s all you’re after.
Isaac Ezban’s Parvulos: Hijos del Apocalips is very literal in its title. These are actual children of the apocalypse. Salvador (Farid Escalante Correa), Oliver (Leonardo Cervantes), and Benji (Mateo Ortega Casillas) are three brothers, the oldest, Sal, a young teen, surviving on their own after a virus causes the end of the world. They do all the typical apocalyptic things, scrounge food, do their best to get through every day, and tend to the dark, sinister secret lurking in their basement.
Have you ever looked up at the night sky, seen a falling star, pointed, and screamed, “Witch”? If so, or if you’re a fan of eerie, modern desert folk horror, you may want to put Falling Stars, the first feature from directors Gabriel Bienczycki and Richard Karpala, on your radar.
In the wake of the Rapture, a devout religious enclave has forsworn the “sin of speech,” living a wordless existence in relative isolation. (Their whistling, however, does feel a bit like cheating at times.) When a young woman the credits tell us is named Azrael (Samara Weaving, Ready or Not) is set to be sacrificed to zombie-like creatures that inhabit the woods, she attempts to escape with her lover (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Candyman) and must fight to avoid being torn limb from limb.
If you could go back in time and offer advice to your younger self, what would you say? What wisdom would you impart? Invest in a particular stock early? Follow a certain career path? Maybe don’t eat that burrito you left sitting out overnight that one time? That’s the basic concept of My Old Ass, a gentle, moving, light sci-fi coming of age story from writer/director Megan Park (The Fallout). This feels like one of those movies that has the potential to become a generational touchstone. It’s lovely and earnest, deeply emotional, and achingly bittersweet in poignant ways.
Fumika (Akari Takaishi, Baby Assassins) is your average college student. She has a crappy job, constantly fends off creepy men pestering her, and she’s very clumsy. Seriously, she falls down. A lot. Things change a wee bit, however, when she meets the ghost of a vicious hitman, Kudo (Masanori Mimoto, First Love), who occasionally possesses her and takes control of her body. It’s like Upgrade or even Venom at times as the two consciousnesses occupy the same space. (Or All of Me with fisticuffs?) After some coaxing, she agrees to help him exact revenge against the people who killed him. So goes the plot of Kensuke Sonomura’s new action-oriented ghost story Ghost Killer.
Stop me if you’ve heard this. Five college friends—an alpha male, an outdoorsy type, a tomboy, a hot girl, and a nerd. A spooky, remote cabin in the woods. (Actually, a spooky, remote Dutch villa in an Indonesian jungle, but the idea is the same.) A cemetery. A well. An old caretaker. No cell service. No power. Things get weird and people start dying. That’s customary horror fare. But from this basic framework, The Draft director Yusron Fuadi tweaks the formula in clever, inventive ways and crafts a fun, fresh take on what the movie calls “cheap Indonesian horror films,” and the oft-repeated tropes of the genre across national boundaries.
If you didn’t already think Christopher Lee was cool, one, really? Two, you may very well change your tune after watching The Life and Deaths of Christopher Lee, the latest documentary from Jon Spira (Elstree 1976). As one might expect from the title, the film delves deep into the life and times of the iconic actor—don’t call him the King of Horror, he did not appreciate that—exploring every nook and cranny along the way.
“Can we speak ill of the living before it’s too late?” asks Magpie (Emma Appleton) in writer/director Dean Puckett’s The Severed Sun. It’s certainly one of those situations where if people had taken a moment to talk it out, many if not all of the more unfortunate events of the film could have been avoided. But then we wouldn’t have this moody, engaging, occasionally quite gory, if a bit spare entry into the folk horror canon.
We’ve all been there. We’re in the middle of extra-legal incursion into a foreign country, we’ve been shot, we’re bleeding out, not long for this world. Our old friend cradles our head as we take our last breath, and we use these last moments on this mortal coil to utter our final words…and we make a joke about our dick size. This has happened to all of us, right? No? Hmm. Well, this happens in Long Gone Heroes, to a significant character, late in the game when this should carry substantial weight, and it really nails the mentality of this movie.
I'm a sucker for any movie that's going along fine but then is all... "and now there are wolves." (Insert any variety of killer animal.) The hook here, in Adam MacDonald’s Out Come the Wolves, is the wolves, but that’s not really the point. The eponymous predators don’t show up until relatively late in the game—you know it’s coming, it’s right there in the title and prominently featured in all the marketing—but things are already harrowing and conflict-riddled enough by the time our furry pals appear.
If it looks like an Alien movie, walks like an Alien movie, and murders you in space with a giant armor-plated extraterrestrial killing machine, then it’s probably an Alien movie. And by god, Evil Dead director Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus is an Alien movie. We’ve got xenomorphs, we’ve got face-huggers, there’s a chest-burster, corporate malfeasance, capitalistic overreach, acid blood, synthetics up to no good, and all the expected bells and baubles.
Birds sure are creepy little fuckers, aren’t they? Dinosaur-looking sons of bitches. At least that’s what Cuckoo would have you believe. Though Luz writer/director Tilman Singer’s latest off-kilter horror offering definitely keeps you guessing as to the why of the lingering avian motif, it ultimately pays off in wild ways, taking unusual paths to get there.
Do people still like movies where Elijah Wood walks around the New Zealand wilderness? Because there’s a great deal of that in Bookworm, the latest directorial effort from Ant Timpson (Come to Daddy). It may not be quite as epic as the Lord of the Rings movies, but it’s impossible for that landscape to not look incredible, and there’s plenty of adventure on this sweet, earnest journey of reconciliation between a long-estranged father and daughter, a journey that also happens to be something of a cryptid hunt.
When you hear about a DIY Estonian horror-musical that took the filmmaker (Sander Maran served as director, writer, editor, cinematographer, songwriter, and probably more roles) a decade to make, you can’t help but be curious. And Chainsaws Were Singing is all of that and so, so much more. This is a bizarre, wild time that goes way, way out in the wilderness and is something fans of movies like Cannibals: The Musical and Hundreds of Beavers need to check out.
If something seems too good to be true, it probably is. So goes the well-worn saying, so goes the story of Donna (Dana Namerode). A talented pianist, the diagnosis of an aggressive, highly localized cancer means the only way to save her life is to amputate her arm. As her days become a series of indifferent doctors and callous support groups, the prospect of losing everything she’s devoted her life to leads her to accept an offer from Sam (Johnny Whitworth, Empire Records), a mysterious (sketchy) scientist who claims he can cure her. What initially looks like an immediate, miraculous cure turns into something much more sinister. And occasionally quite gooey.
19-year-old Australian dynamo Alice Maio Mackay already has a hell of a roster of low-to-no-budget horror movies under her belt with the likes of T-Blockers, So Vam, and Bad Girl Boogey, among others. And now she’s back to throw her hat in the holiday horror ring with Carnage for Christmas, a bloody fun yuletide romp that’s definitely going into my regular seasonal rotation.
Well, it’s that time again, time for the Fantasia Film Festival in ye olde Montreal. That’s in Canada for the geographically challenged. It runs from July 18 through August 4.
The Raid on a Blank has become the new Die Hard on a Blank, action movie shorthand wise, and I’m here for every last one. And the easiest way to describe Indian director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s Kill is as The Raid on a Train. That is, of course, reductive and not the whole story, and while awesome, Kill is no Raid. (What is? That’s an unfair comparison.) Still, what follows is a brutal, badass time full of gnarly, head-smashing, bone-snapping violence steeped in sweet melodrama that’s one of the best times at the movies this year.
“Do you have it in you to make it epic?” one character asks another near the end of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. In answer to his own question, George Miller casually strolls over, taps the mic, leans in, and responds, “Yes, yes I do.” The 79-year-old action maestro has once again stepped up to show the whippersnappers exactly how to do it. And it is good.
Much of Cambodian import Tenement, making its North American debut at the Seattle International Film Festival, will be familiar to those reasonably well-versed in supernatural horror. The story follows someone returning to a place they once had a connection to and finding it haunted by more than memories. Though the film may lack a bit of originality, it delivers an effective, to-the-point, gorgeously staged chiller.
In 1951’s The Lavender Hill Mob, Alec Guinness plays Holland, a milquetoast bank clerk. He routinely supervises the delivery of hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of gold bullion. Honest to a fault, viewed by his coworkers as a goody two shoes, he’s the kind of bloke who reads to his elderly landlady at night. He would never. Right? When means, inspiration, and opportunity come together, however, Holland breaks bad and, with a ragtag crew of mismatched outlaws, heists his latest load.
Sucks to be Helen (Louise Brealey). She works nights at the chicken-packing plant, lives with her dirtbag ex and his idiot 20-year-old baby mama, and cares for his dying mother, Gwen (a wonderful Sorcha Cusack), who’s as close to a mother as she’s ever known. When Joanne (Annabel Scholey), her schoolgirl crush, returns to town, it lights something ablaze within her.
In Eternal, a rift on the ocean floor threatens to destroy not only Earth’s climate but the burgeoning relationship between a young submarine pilot and aspiring singer.
From the 1970s to the ‘90s, London’s Scala theater was a haven for cinemaniacs. From arthouse to exploitation and everything in between, they screened oddities, avant-garde experiments, and whatever the hell they wanted.
12 years after skipping town, career thief Trojan (Misel Maticevic) returns to Berlin, desperate and looking for work. What he finds is a world that’s moved past his old school ways, adopting new technology and the unfamiliar attitudes of those who adapt to such things, and a list of old contacts who have gone straight or otherwise left behind the life. When he finally lands a job, a four-person art heist, things spiral ever out of control. Such begins Thomas Arslan’s Scorched Earth. (Not to be confused with the DTV post-apocalyptic joint starring a certain disgraced former MMA star of the same name.)
First-time feature writer/director Francis Galluppi’s crime thriller The Last Stop in Yuma County takes a simple, straightforward set up, fills it full of eccentric characters, piles on one complication after another, and ratchets up the tension and pressure until it must explode. It’s a hell of a first film, polished and sure-handed, and apparently caught the right eyes even before release, since the filmmaker has already been tapped to helm the next Evil Dead movie.
Another week, another direct-to-video action-thriller. Lately, many of these stars either Aaron Eckhart or Olga Kurylenko, and director Jesse V. Johnson’s Chief of Station happens to feature both. (It truly only stars Eckhart, with Kurylenko relegated to a supporting role, but we’ll take it.)
You know the story well. In a dystopian world, the despotic siblings who rule with an iron fist murder a family who opposes them. The only survivor, a young boy, left deaf and mute by the experience, trains his entire life with a very stoned shaman for a mission of revenge with only the mental incarnation of his dead sister and his internal monologue, the voice of his favorite childhood video game, for company. Yeah, that old yarn, right? And thus, we have Boy Kills World.
Raising twin teen boys is a harrowing enough proposition, but when you have to raise twin teen boys in the middle of an end-of-the-world scenario, it’s even more fraught with peril. And sibling rivalry, and raging hormones, and dammit-dad-leave-me-alone-I’m-brooding. In this exact predicament is where Nicolas Cage’s Paul finds himself in Arcadian. Not only does he have to protect his sons, Joseph (Jaeden Martell, It, Midnight Special) and Thomas (Maxwell Jenkins, Lost in Space), from monsters that come in the darkness, he has to keep them from killing each other. No minor feat.
