by Angelo Muredda The early narrative on Dwayne Johnson’s starring role as veteran mixed-martial artist Mark Kerr in Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine was that it was sure to mark an overdue career reinvention for the wrestler turned actor turned annoying social-media poster. After years of his star power waning in terms of prestige as well as audience appeal–the decline measured in cringe posts about how the “hierarchy of power in the DC universe is about to change” thanks to his...| FILM FREAK CENTRAL
****/****starring Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, Christoph Waltzscreenplay by Guillermo del Toro, based on the book Frankenstein; or: The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelleydirected by Guillermo del Toro by Walter Chaw The poetry lives in the father. Do I mean the poetry? I’m not sure. No, I mean the place where this piece breathes and has always breathed is the father. The fathers. I say “poetry” because it’s a term that covers a lot of ground for me. Poetry is something that is ...| FILM FREAK CENTRAL
**/****starring Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Ryan Bader, Bas Ruttenwritten and directed by Benny Safdie by Angelo Muredda The early narrative on Dwayne Johnson’s starring role as veteran mixed-martial artist Mark Kerr in Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine was that it was sure to mark an overdue career reinvention for the wrestler turned actor turned annoying social-media poster. After years of his star power waning in terms of prestige as well as audience appeal–the decline measured in...| FILM FREAK CENTRAL
**½/****starring Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Charlie Plummer, Mark Hamillscreenplay by JT Mollner, based on the book by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachmandirected by Francis Lawrence by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. My least favourite thing is to go after something I mostly agree with, made by people who seem well-intentioned despite failing to recognize their dangerous biases. Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk nails who we are right now: a nation that leads the world in pr...| FILM FREAK CENTRAL
Ann Lee***/****starring Amanda Seyfried, Thomasin McKenzie, Lewis Pullman, Tim Blake Nelson, Christopher Abbottwritten by Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbetdirected by Mona Fastvold by Angelo Muredda Speaking at the press conference following the Venice world premiere of Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee, co-writer and second-unit director Brady Corbet, Fastvold’s husband, illuminated the couple’s fruitful creative partnership, which also yielded their co-screenwriting duties on 2024...| FILM FREAK CENTRAL
Affeksjonsverdi****/****starring Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Elle Fanningwritten by Eskil Vogtdirected by Joachim Trier by Walter Chaw Joachim Trier is my favourite living director. Through his work, I’m seen, and in being seen, I am less lonesome, less self-loathing. For a while, anyway. When he finds value in the melancholy heroes of his films, riddled though they may be with depression, prone to stupid mistakes and debilitating anxiety though they are, he...| FILM FREAK CENTRAL
**/****directed by Lisa Rideout by Bill Chambers For my brother’s birthday a couple of years ago, I bought him an officially licensed novelty T-shirt for The Zit Remedy‘s “Everybody Wants Something Tour” that he continues to wear proudly for the, well, novelty factor. Talk about kitsch heaven, if you’re a Canadian of a certain age. But as I watched Degrassi: Whatever It Takes, Lisa Rideout’s new and decidedly uneven documentary about the television institution that spawned The Zit...| FILM FREAK CENTRAL
***/****starring Isaach De Bankolé, Matt Dillon, Mia McKenna-Bruce, Tom Blythscreenplay by Claire Denis, Suzanne Lindon, and Andrew Litvack, based on Black Battles with Dogs by Bernard-Marie Koltèsdirected by Claire Denis By Angelo Muredda A sparsely populated construction site in West Africa becomes the locus of a nocturnal power struggle between Black labourers, white occupiers, and the land that rejects the latter like a virus in Claire Denis’s The Fence, an eerie postcolonial thriller...| FILM FREAK CENTRAL
*/****starring George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Riley Keough, Laura Dernwritten by Noah Baumbach & Emily Mortimerdirected by Noah Baumbach by Walter Chaw Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly wants to be two things. It wants to be Cinema Paradiso, and it wants to be George Clooney’s All That Jazz–a hagiography for the temple of film on the one hand, a self-lacerating reflection on the cost of stardom on the other. A tightrope, in other words, requiring an abiding, all-consuming, some might even say sl...| FILM FREAK CENTRAL
ZERO STARS/****starring Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, Joe Alwynscreenplay by Chloé Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell, based on O’Farrell’s noveldirected by Chloé Zhao by Walter Chaw There is so much acting in Hamnet. So much. The most acting. A host, a bounty, a feast. Remember Denzel Washington’s Fences? It makes Fences seem subtle and reserved–even dignified, if you can imagine, which I could not. Hamnet is heavy with acting in the sense that brood cows are heavy with young...| FILM FREAK CENTRAL
O Agente Secreto***½/****starring Wagner Moura, Gabriel Leone, Maria Fernanda Cândidowritten and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho By Angelo Muredda “He had a good voice,” an archivist muses to her colleague about a historical subject whose life under autocratic rule she’s been piecing together from audio cassette recordings and newspaper clippings late in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent. A chronicler of the gentrified streets, gated communities, and forgotten movie theat...| FILM FREAK CENTRAL
***/****starring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Luke Grimes, Emma Stonewritten and directed by Ari Aster by Walter Chaw The problem I have with Ari Aster movies is that Ari Aster is contemptuous of his characters. He gives them anxieties he then maximalizes into catastrophes so extreme they’re funny. (How else does a cake allergy turn into a telephone-pole beheading?) And once he creates an unbearable situation, he scoffs. It’s tempting to draw a corollary between his work and that of pos...| FILM FREAK CENTRAL
*½/****starring Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Jenna Davis, Jemaine Clementwritten and directed by Gerald Johnstone by Walter Chaw Gerald Johnstone’s M3GAN 2.0 feels like one of those 1980s teensploitation sci-fi adventure flicks. D.A.R.Y.L., for instance–D.A.R.Y.L. exactly, let’s face it. Given that D.A.R.Y.L. hardly set the world on fire, this does not bode well for M3GAN 2.0. To its credit, it takes a wild swing at relevance, M3GAN 2.0 does, in a way that’s at complete odds with...| FILM FREAK CENTRAL
DRACULA (1931) ***/**** Image C Sound C|A (with Glass score) Extras A+ starring Bela Lugosi, Helen Chandler, David Manners, Dwight Frye screenplay by Garrett Fort, based on the novel by Bram Stoker and on the play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston directed by Tod Browning DRÁCULA (1931) ***/**** Image C+ Sound B- starring Carlos Villarias, Lupita Taylor, Pablo Alvarez Rubio, Barry Norton screenplay by Garrett Fort, based on the novel by Bram Stoker and on the play by Hamilton Deane an...| FILM FREAK CENTRAL
by Walter Chaw I’ve spent decades predicting the fall, but when the fall came, I certainly didn’t feel like doing a victory lap. When the pandemic shut down everything for a while, I realized that my worst fears had come true, and then, for the first time in as long as I could remember, my depression quieted like a rash that’s lost its savagery. Respite, because my worst fears weren’t looming anymore–they’d finally arrived. All that was left to do was find a new way through. Is th...| FILM FREAK CENTRAL
****/****starring Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Willem Dafoeinspired by the screenplay Nosferatu by Henrik Gallen and the novel Dracula by Bram Stokerwritten for the screen and directed by Robert Eggers by Walter Chaw The hysteric female can be viewed as a ‘flipped’ version of the male paranoiac; while the male represses his fears about the nature of his sexuality, the female’s hysterics seem to circle around her inability to direct her sexuality as she pleases, or he...| FILM FREAK CENTRAL
“Good-looking people turn me off. Myself included.” –Patrick Wayne Swayze RED DAWN (1984) [COLLECTOR’S EDITION] – DVD **½/**** Image B Sound C+ Extras N/A starring Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson, Powers Boothe screenplay by Kevin Reynolds and John Milius directed by John Milius THE OUTSIDERS (THE COMPLETE NOVEL) (1983) [TWO-DISC SPECIAL EDITION] – DVD ****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A+ starring C. Thomas Howell, Matt Dillon, Diane Lane, Leif Garrett screenplay b...| FILM FREAK CENTRAL
Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD discs SUPERMAN (1978) ****/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A- starring Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Ned Beatty screenplay by Mario Puzo, David Newman, Leslie Newman and Robert Benton directed by Richard Donner SUPERMAN II (1981) ***/**** Image A+ Sound B+ Extras A- starring Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Ned Beatty, Jackie Cooper screenplay by Mario Puzo, David Newman and Leslie Newman directed by Richard Lester SUPERMAN II ...| FILM FREAK CENTRAL
My mom died this year, but I lost her decades ago. Our relationship was radioactive, and I had neither the courage nor the resolve to even begin to repair it–or to investigate whether there was anything left to repair. I lost a mentor this year, too, because I wasn't interesting enough to maintain as an apprentice. I turn 50 in 2023. It's an age that seemed absurd to me as recently as a few years ago. If I live to 54, I'll be how old my dad was when he died. My mom's death brings an end to ...| FILM FREAK CENTRAL
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+ starring Lisa Yang, Chang Chen, Chang Kuo-Chu, Elaine Jin script and dialogue by Edward Yang, Yan Hong-Ya, Alex Yang, Lai Ming-Tang directed by Edward Yang by Walter Chaw My family fled mainland China to Taiwan in 1949, just ahead of the communist takeover. My grandfather on my mother’s side, a member of the Chinese military, asked his aide to fill out the paperwork necessary for their emigration. In his haste, the kids were given sequential birth dates (...| FILM FREAK CENTRAL
THE DEAD ZONE (1983)****/**** Image C Sound Astarring Christopher Walken, Brooke Adams, Tom Skerritt, Herbert Lomscreenplay by Jeffrey Boam, based on the novel by Stephen Kingdirected by David Cronenberg by Walter Chaw Michael Kamen’s score for The Dead Zone sounds so much like Howard Shore’s work that if I didn’t know better… Maybe something about Cronenberg inspires doomed Romanticism in his collaborators. What’s sometimes lost in the focus on body-horror in his pictures is how li...| FILM FREAK CENTRAL
2019 will be defined for me by two things–one is interesting, the other is not. The “not” is that my friend Sam killed himself. He used a gun. Sam and I disagreed about guns. He had been in various levels of law enforcement, retired to be a 9-1-1 operator, found himself traumatized after his service, and moved across the country to be closer to his young daughter and ex-wife. To be a dad, you know. Sam owned a lot of guns, but in the last couple of years, he began to ask me about statis...| FILM FREAK CENTRAL
March 9, 2003 | Offered the opportunity to visit with David Cronenberg a second time recently, I sat down with the legendary director the morning after moderating a post-screening Q&A with him at Denver’s Landmark Mayan Theater (where a sell-out crowd of over 450 was enthusiastically in attendance for a sneak of Spider) to discuss his work from student films Stereo and Crimes of the Future all the way through to what is arguably his best–certainly his most mature–film, the oft-delayed ...| FILM FREAK CENTRAL