Roger Ebert

San Diego Comic-Con is on top of its game again, after the pandemic shut it down and last year’s strikes kept most of the filmmakers and actors away. While efforts to expand the city’s convention center have stalled, the Con has simply taken over the adjacent Gaslamp neighborhood, with massive signs blanketing tall buildings and special events and installations taking over spaces from amusement park-style games and rides to immersive experiences in interior spaces. 

A joint exhibition on “Star Trek” and “Dr. Who” featured costumes and props from two series that have, to use a “Dr. Who” term, regenerated in many forms and with many characters over the decades. For the 20^thanniversary of “Shaun of the Dead,” an installation re-created the pub where much of the action takes place. 

A “Kingdom of Planet of the Apes” installation featured a timeline going back to the original novel and 1960s-70s films, with costumes, props, and behind-the scenes photos. Alain Gauthier was there to demonstrate the “Ape School” training he gave to the “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” actors. He showed us the difference in the walks of chimps, gorillas, and orangutans, and told us how his background in “movement acting,” dance, and months of observation helped him show the actors how to move like apes. 

I was listening to a panel on the second floor of the convention center when I felt the room shake. It was not an earthquake. Something was happening just below us in the convention center’s largest space, Hall H, where once again attendees were camping out in in line to get to see their favorite stars. Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman did not just show up to promote “Deadpool & Wolverine.”  They gave out tickets to a special showing. Perhaps the highlight was the news that Robert Downey, Jr. is coming back to the MCU as Dr. Doom. 

 There were panels on every imaginable element of pop culture. Some highlights:

Costume Design: “Where are my Lucys?”  Costume designer Trish Summerville looked out into the audience of the panel about the costumes in “The Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes,” then asked them to stand up, so we could appreciate their careful re-creations of the iconic dress worn by Rachel Zegler. At the end of the session, Summerville asked all the Lucys to meet with her so she could give each of them a gift of jewelry inspired by the film. Summerville’s panel included costume concept artists Gloria Kim and Oksana Nedavniaya, assistant costume designer Corey Deist, and fabric buyer Allison Agler. 

They described the process from the original creative concept (postwar 40s-50s, more earthbound, a bit gender-blurred with kilt-inspired uniforms, less outlandish than the more flamboyant costumes in the films that take place decades later), and the daunting mechanics of getting enough red fabric to get 700 matching costumes in the middle of a supply chain crisis during a pandemic. Agler said getting 5500 yards was “a big global enterprise.” Lucy’s skirt had 14 different fabrics that had to be aged and distressed. Some decisions were both aesthetic and practical, like the mandarin collars, which are gender neutral and create fewer continuity problems. And some of the items they worked hardest on, like a specially made belt, never made it on screen. 

Peanuts on Screen: A panel paying tribute to “Peanuts” animation covered everything from the origin story of the first Peanuts cartoon to the new AppleTV+ series “Camp Snoopy.” Jason Mendelson, son of the producer of the early Peanuts classics, told us how no one would buy the documentary about Peanuts creator Charles “Sparky” Schulz made by his father, Lee. “But CBS said Coca-Cola had bought space for a half-hour Christmas special and asked if he had anything.” Lee said yes, then called Schulz, and they wrote “A Charlie Brown Christmas” over the weekend, bringing in the composer who had worked on the documentary, Vince Guaraldi. CBS executives did not like the show because it used children’s voices, jazz, and a quote from the Bible. They would have pulled it but it was too late to get anything else. And so, a Christmas classic was born and Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, Linus, Schroder, and their friends went on to appear in animation for almost 60 years, and is still going strong with “Camp Snoopy.”  

Tod Barbee, who provided the voice for Charlie Brown in several films, including “Charlie Brown’s Thanksgiving,” laughed when he told us he did 26 takes on the “ugh” when Charlie Brown lands after Lucy takes the football away. Finally, they used someone else. He talked about going to the recording studio and meeting the other children in the cast in the lobby. 

Caleb Bellavance, who currently plays Franklin, said his experience was a bit different. He recorded in a closet in his basement, as it was during the pandemic. “Camp Snoopy” showrunner Rob (Boots) Boutilier said that Schulz’s original strips are still the heart of the storytelling, showing us examples of situations and dialogue in the original strips that inspired the series episodes. 

“Meth Gator,” from the People Who Brought You “Sharknado:” In almost every panel we see the extraordinary dedication and artistic integrity the creators bring to every project, from the biggest-budget blockbuster to the IP-extenders. Not so much The Asylum, which makes no pretense of art but has a lot of fun. When their distributor asked for another alligator movie, they obliged with “Meth Gator,” opening August 2, with a VOD release the following week. It is exactly what it sounds. The title of the panel: “Cocaine Bear” Move Over. They brought scenes from “Meth Gator,” but the audio was not working, so we watched it MST3K-style, with the producers providing commentary. I hope the film will be as entertaining. 

The People in the Credits: I always love the panels with the people whose names we see in the credits, to learn more about what they do and how what they do contributes to the way we experience a movie. For example, sound mixer Jeff Shiffman says he has a library of 4000 punch sounds to choose from when providing the “frosting on the cake” that sound design adds to a fight scene. Emilio Sosa came from theater to design the costumes for Disney’s “Descendants: The Rise of Red.” He said that meant coordinating not just with Disney but with Mattel, to make sure his designs would work on a doll. Co-producer/editor Shelly Westerman, of “Only Murders in the Building” told us about editing the intricate “Triplets” patter song performed by Steve Martin. VFX supervisor Michael Cliett said the visual effects in “Shogun” were the center but not the star of the series, “woven into the fabric of the story.” He did nine months of research and worked with Japanese advisors to create the world of 16^th century Japan. The scope and scale of the VFX designs were unprecedented. They created huge structures and smaller, sometimes grisly details, like how a head falls when it is cut off. Perhaps the widest range of projects was Stephanie Filo’s “Black Lady Sketch Show” and “Dahmer.” But, she said, “Every sketch is a different genre,” which is good practice. She told the very appreciative audience about an Easter Egg in “Black Lady’s Sketch Show’s” last episode. Look for a prop from each sketch in the final scene.

Cosplay: Fabulous, wildly imaginative, and a lot of fun, as always. Heres’s one from “Toy Story.” 

Hallmark: SDCC is all about popular entertainment, and that means not just aliens, zombies, and superheroes. Hallmark is here with a new reality series premiering on Hallmark+ this fall, “Finding Mr. Christmas.” Handsome actors will compete to become the next leading man in a Hallmark Christmas movie, produced and hosted by Hallmark Christmas movie all-star Jonathan Bennett. He told me that the challenges include cutting down and carrying a Christmas tree, rocking a Christmas sweater, and mastering the meet cute.  Members of the HCU (Hallmark Cinematic Universe) appear as guest judges. And they’ll all be staying in a classic Hallmark movie Christmas house.  Bennett wanted to do something different in reality programming, where the most frequent line is, “I’m not here to make friends.” He says they are there to make family. “The contestants learn to be better as actors and also as men, allowing themselves to be vulnerable with each other and the audience. Because we are Hallmark, we figured out a way to do a reality competition with heart.” 

Gremlins: The Wild Batch: Season 2 of the animated series about gremlins gone wild premieres October 3. We got to watch the first episode and hear from the creators and voice actors about what adventures lie ahead for the mogwai and their human friends and foes. Something is happening with the usually cuddly Gizmo; he gets into all kinds of mischief when he appears to be sleepwalking. This leads Elle and three generations of Wings on a new adventure in a new country – San Francisco. Adding to the cast this season are John Glover, who appeared in “Gremlins 2: The New Batch,” and Simu Liu.  

Inclusion: I have never been in a space as intentionally and respectfully inclusive as SDCC. Everyone there is a passionate fan, but everyone I have seen is completely supportive of whatever weird thing anyone else is into. Inclusion is reflected in every aspect, from the ASL interpreters and wheelchair spaces at the panels to the discussions of making sure everyone’s stories are told and appreciated, not just in panels with specific focus on particular communities but in just about every panel. When a nervous young woman got up to ask a question, froze, and stammered, “I’m just so awkward,” the panelists and audience were warmly supportive. Many of the booths on the gigantic exhibition floor were about inclusion, including Magic Wheelchairs, which provides dream mobility machines for disabled children at no cost, turning them into superheroes, monsters, rock stars, princesses, or anything they can imagine, “celebrating the freedom wheelchairs give us, one epic costume at a time.” At the booth, Kevin Watamura told me that “Kids in wheelchairs want to be included, too, and this gives them the opportunity to feel seen as just a normal kid.” People come to SDCC because they love the craziness and fandom, but they keep coming back because it feels like home. 

Children often make for effective horror (or other genre) protagonists — after all, they can serve as a representation of our collective innocence, the purity of life that forces both worldly and otherworldly can corrupt or threaten. But they also offer a more honest, open lens by which to view the vagaries of adulthood: our cynicism, our faults, the pressures we visit upon them. These three titles out of this year’s Fantasia Film Festival aren’t all works of children in danger, but they do let us look at the sins of parenthood and society through new wide-eyed lenses.

Fresh off her invigorating feature debut “Piggy,” Spanish filmmaker Carlota Pereda returns with “The Chapel,” a decidedly atmospheric supernatural drama that echoes the early works of Guillermo del Toro (“The Devil’s Backbone,” “Chronos”). Set in a remote Spanish town, “The Chapel” opens in 1631 by telling us the story of the Black Plague, in which plague doctors dressed in crow-like masks would scour the town looking for the sick, locking them in the town chapel to spare the rest from disease. One of the most tragic victims of this is Uxoa (Alba Hernández), a young girl who’s ripped from her mother’s arms screaming. Then, as Pereda’s camera pans, we see a bystander holding up a smartphone; we’ve been watching a reenactment, a clever transition from the past to the present.

It’s a testament to Pereda’s stately, atmospheric direction, a vision preoccupied with seeing and belief and the links between generations, which fuels the mother-daughter melodrama of its primary story. You see, every year the town opens up the titular chapel for five days as a tourist destination — complete with rituals performed by local medium Ivana Peralta (Nagore Aranburu). One problem: the night of the festival, Ivana is found dead of natural causes by eight-year-old Emma (Maia Zaitegi), her young apprentice. 

Emma is herself preemptively haunted, as her mother (Loreto Mauleón) is dying of cancer in hospice; she’s desperate to learn the secrets of channeling the dead so that, after her mother dies, she can still reach her. With Ivana gone, her only hope is the medium’s daughter, Carol (Belén Rueda), who herself only performs cheap palm readings and flimflam shows for money. She doesn’t believe in the supernatural, which makes her a decidedly cynical guardian for the wide-eyed child.

From there, Pereda shuffles us along a suitably moody and well-performed ghostly drama that earns points for atmosphere but loses itself when it comes time to actually perform horror. Most of the scares come when Emma reads her Latin-laden book of smells, and without fail, her tummy aches and maggot-covered plague doctors come to try to snatch her away. It’s effective at first, but then gets repetitive, and the fiery climax within the chapel itself is a bit too hazy to really work. 

The lead performances are superlative, though: Rueda makes for a suitably pouty parental figure, eyes boring holes in everyone she meets through a face half-scarred by burns. But Zaitegi is a revelation, a beautifully cherubic figure who carries the pathos of her impending loss with unenviable pain. There’s a desperation to her behavior surrounding a dying parent that echoes J.A. Bayona’s deeply slept-on “A Monster Calls,” though its emotional highs don’t quite reach those peaks. 

A less effective brush with the supernatural comes with Alexander J. Farrell’s “The Beast Within,” a too-hazy-by-half childhood fable about a young girl named Willow (Caoilinn Springall) glimpsing the collapse of her family through innocent eyes. She lives out in the English countryside with her mother Imogen (Ashleigh Cummings) and father Noah (Kit Harington), while her grandfather (James Cosmo) watches on coolly on occasion. Willow is afflicted with an unnamed illness that requires an oxygen tank, which leaves her to witness the dissolution of her parents’ relationship through the hazy windows of their ornate country estate. Every so often, Noah’s facade of kindness gives way to bursts of aggression; every few nights, she sees her parents drive him away or search for him in the woods. One night, she dares to follow them and sees the truth: Noah is a werewolf, and his disease is tearing their family apart.

Farrell’s approach is almost too dreamlike, and some of the more interesting aspects of the film’s central metaphor (e.g., the lycanthrope-as-alcoholic-father) get lost in all the subjective haze. (He cut his fangs as a documentarian, which maybe explains the doubling-down on atmosphere over narrative.) The fairy tale trappings are exquisitely clear, with its patient shots of characters gazing wordlessly at each other, the camera offering a child’ s-eye view of all the moodily lit forests and crumbled stone edifices. But its charms wear off quickly, especially in a lilting second act that’s a bit too patient in exploring the dynamics we’ve long since established. Its creature-feature bona fides are clear, including some suitably visceral transformation effects that flash so quickly in the moonlit night they barely register. But apart from its domestic-drama angle, “The Beast Within” offers little to spice up its folkloric origins.

And now for something a little sunnier: A slight, but charming coming-of-age story about a little girl and the bottle of rice wine who gives her orders from space. I’m talking, of course, about Kim Da-min’s exceedingly heartwarming “FAQ,” a thumb in the eye to cram-school culture with a sci-fi spin. When we first meet young Dong-chun (Park Na-eun), she’s already at her intellectual and emotional limit: her parents slam her into one after-school program after another, trying to prep her for the high-stakes world of adulthood with a barrage of math, science, and foreign language classes. (Her interventions even go so far as to seeking medical intervention to make her taller.) Trouble is, all this pressure taking its toll on the poor girl — she’s got crippling stage fright, and she barely has any friends at school. Her only comfort, it seems, are a pair of fuzzy children’s-show creatures who give her advice in a kind of Windows 95-desktop background mind-palace (a very charming detail).

But she gets even more divine intervention when she discovers a bottle of makgeolli (a Korean rice wine) at school, and she discovers that the bubbles speak to her in Morse Code (albeit backwards, and in Persian). And they’ve got a divine mission for her. 

That’s where “FAQ”‘s charms really fall into place, as her quest to decipher the code paradoxically leads her to work harder in her language classes and gives her newfound purpose outside her parents’ ambitions. But as the film progresses, it flowers into a sweeter, more melancholic take on the sky-high expectations of high-productivity cultures like South Korea’s, the way we can strip away our sense of hope and purpose by burying ourselves in metrics of excellence and status. In addition to Dong-chun’s stage fright, we also see glimpses of how the adults around her have fared in this system — whether it’s her mother reckoning with her ennui at giving up career for motherhood, or her layabout uncle, who’s given it all up to become a hippie drifter. One by one, they become involved in, or inspired by, Dong-chun’s journey, leading to a decidedly unexpected ending whose ambition echoes “Her” or, heck, in some ways Alex Proyas’ “Knowing.” Turns out the universe is one giant cram school, and sometimes a bubbling bottle of booze is just the most entertaining exam to take. 

If you’re a distinguished older male actor in Hollywood, you’re typically cast as Batman’s sidekick or a WWII veteran who escapes from assisted living (Michael Caine), God or a grieving father (Morgan Freeman), a brilliant psychotherapist or Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford), an action hero (Tom Cruise), Sigmund Freud and a Roman emperor (Sir Anthony Hopkins), or a daring drug mule (Clint Eastwood). But distinguished older actresses get cast in simple-minded comedies about old friends having silly adventures that make the lightest-weight beach read seem like Remembrance of Things Past. “The Fabulous Four” follows in the unfortunate tradition of the “Book Club” movies, “Summer Camp,” and “80 for Brady,” with an EGOT-full of brilliant talents mired in antics that “The Golden Girls” would consider too ridiculous. 

The quartet in this film is Susan Sarandon as Lou, an uptight, humorless cat lady and cardiac surgeon; Bette Midler as Marilyn, a wealthy recent widow who impulsively decided to get married again two months after the death of her husband of 48 years; Megan Mullally as Alice, a popular singer who is perpetually tipsy, high on drugs, or having sex with randos, sometimes all at once; and Sheryl Lee Ralph as Kitty, a kind-hearted weed grower and mother of an adult daughter who has suddenly become rigidly religious. You can glimpse Midler’s real-life daughter, Sophie von Haselberg, playing Marilyn’s daughter early in the film.

Marilyn is staying in a gorgeous mansion in Key West, where Ernest Hemingway lived when he wrote two of his books, which we are told so often they could be getting paid by the mention. She invites Kitty and Alice to her wedding but does not invite Lou because they have been estranged for years. So Kitty and Alice tell Lou the kind of preposterous lie that only works in painfully contrived screenplays: they don’t mention Marilyn. They just say she has won a six-toed cat from the Hemingway House. 

When Lou finds out she’s been tricked, she agrees to stay. However, she is clearly still in pain over the sense of betrayal by Marilyn, for reasons telegraphed so unmistakably from her arrival in Key West that the ultimate reveal carries no weight. Throughout the trip, she keeps running into a group of 20-somethings she met on the plane and accidentally becomes their badass ideal. 

Marilyn is so excited about her over-the-top wedding plans she barely notices that her friends think she is over the top. For another one of those reasons that only works in painfully contrived screenplays, she does not introduce her fiancé to her friends until the night before the wedding so there can be a very predictable twist. But the four are too busy having wacky adventures. Lou uses a Kegel (pelvic floor) exercise ball Marilyn gave her as a slingshot to take out a bicycle thief!  Lou accidentally unties the rope to the parasail because she is hallucinating! Yes, it is supposed to be a funny prank that Lou’s closest friends dose her with weed without telling her. Another intended-to-be hilarious scene takes place in a strip club, where a star performer connected to one of the women is recognized when she sees the birthmark on his bare butt while he is grinding on the bride-to-be.  

The Internet Movie Database lists more than 40 producers for “The Fabulous Four,” most of them “executive producers,” which can mean anything. Three are Mullaly, Sarandon, and Ralph. These women know what they are capable of, and they know what a good script is. Was a silly comedy the only project they could get funded? Or did they just want an all-expenses-paid trip to Key West? It does look spectacularly beautiful, though there are too many shots of chickens. 

The stars do their best to bring warmth and charisma with criminally under-written characters engaging in silly antics. There are lovely moments when they sing, including a duet with Michael Bolton(!). It just makes us wish it was a concert film. Or, as Gene Siskel used to say, we would be better off watching a film of the four actresses sitting around, talking about their lives. Instead, we get tired “jokes” about powerful weed gummies, an older person sharing every minute of her life with ridiculous TikToks, characters tearing each other’s clothes off in a fight and then somehow making up, and a character unexpectedly becoming a hero to some young people even though they have never heard of Joan Didion. Like these other actresses-of-a-certain-age movies, the entire story is grounded on some notion of a deep and sustaining friendship. But it’s hard to believe these women have any genuine connection other than cashing a check for a film that is not fabulous but forgettable. 

Sharks, while undeniably lethal, are also, studies have shown, kind of dumb. And “The Last Breath” is a cheesy new thriller that is even dumber than a real shark. Not that it features any real sharks — the predatory creatures here are CGI, and hilariously enough, they move through the water faster than the “rage virus” zombies of “28 Days Later” roam over land.

They don’t show up until about halfway through the Joachim Heder-directed movie, which begins during World War II, and the shelling of a ship that results in a wreck that’s apparently legendary in the present day. That’s according to old salt Levi (Julian Sands) whose rickety boat is playing host to a group of self-proclaimed “certified divers” who are also kind of pushy, to say the least. At least the males in the group are. There’s peroxided wannabe Alpha Brett (Alexander Arnold) and entitled stoner Logan (Arlo Carter), who wonders aloud at the dock whether a local ten-year-old would sell him weed. Rarely have two characters been presented so immediately as those whose deaths you will actively root for. But I’ll refrain from spoilers.

The good, or not as bad, zoomers on the boat trip include Noah (Jack Parr), grizzled Levi’s younger mate and also the ex of good doctor Sam (as in Samantha, and played by Kim Spearman), who’s stuck in the lout party taking the boat out. Is a rapprochement in store? Again, no spoilers. While Levi, having discovered the aforementioned shipwreck, has resolved to report it to the authorities despite it having been his personal passion — “forty years I’ve been looking for her” — finance bro Brett has other ideas, and his money does some persuasive talking. So off Levis and company go to drop the wannabe adventurers in the drink. Where they find skeletons, claustrophobic settings, and eventually a snapped guideline. Did a barracuda do that? No, of course, a barracuda didn’t do it.

The arrival of multiple huge speed-of-light sharks coincides with everyone’s oxygen tanks getting dangerously low. While Levi mostly stays on deck knitting — a “dexterity exercise” to soothe his dive-damaged nerve — his reference early on to his old red scuba suit and the nickname it bestowed on him back in the day stands out like Chekhov’s proverbial first-act gun.

His work as Levi represents the final film appearance of Julian Sands, who died in 2023 while hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains of California, and he’s reliably wry as he first resists heroics and then goes for broke.

The movie’s lifts from “Jaws” are so blatant that they might as well be read as affectionate, aspirational homages. As goofy and unconvincing as it often is, “The Last Breath” is difficult to get exasperated over. It may go down easier still if you opt to see it in a very well-air-conditioned setting.

The suburbs are hell. That’s what the movies keep telling us. Perfect nuclear families living in their McMansions are often anything but perfect. It’s not exactly new cinematic territory, but it’s a well that gets tapped often because it’s just a lot of fun to watch rich families implode, often of their own doing. In that vein, the new suburban-set thriller “The Girl in the Pool,” from director Dakota Gorman and screenwriter Jackson Reid Williams, breaks no new ground. But with its many twists and turns, it is indeed a lot of fun. 

One-time teen idol Freddie Prinze Jr. plays the family patriarch Tom, a businessman, who, while still handsome, feels past his prime (at one point, Prinze Jr. splashes his face with water and the back of his balding head reflects in the mirror, and it struck me how rare it is to see any stars actually allow signs of their aging to show on screen). Tom is celebrating his birthday and is soon meant to meet his wife Kristen (Monica Potter) for dinner at a fancy restaurant. He’s left work early to get ready and is surprised by a visit from his much younger mistress Hannah (Gabrielle Haugh). 

Their tryst in the family pool quickly becomes a murder scene and the audience is at first led to believe Tom is the culprit as he attempts to both clean up the mess and hide her corpse from the guests attending a surprise party organized by his wife and their adult kids Alex (Tyler Lawrence Gray) and Rose (Brielle Barbusca). Although we’re firmly planted in Tom’s psyche as he re-hashes their afternoon delight and its grisly aftermath, the choppy flashbacks are careful not to reveal exactly who did the deed and why the woman was murdered. 

Pressure from the party mounts. Partygoers keep getting too close to where Tom has stashed away the body. He’s harassed by his father-in-law William (Kevin Pollak, charmingly acerbic), who makes it clear that Tom and Kristen’s marriage has been on the rocks for awhile. Another unexpected visitor pushes Tom to his limits. As Tom spirals into a frantic drug-induced paranoia state, the film adds twist after twist, until the entire family has blood on their hands. 

Gorman playfully switches perspective in one scene, pulling back from a claustrophobic ultra-close-up of Tom to a wide shot of Alex, Rose, and her boyfriend watching Tom as he pitifully stumbles around the backyard. It’s a refreshing reminder that not only are we watching a movie, but also Tom the character is so deep in his own world, that it’s like he’s in his own movie as well. It’s a pity, then, that Gorman’s direction isn’t always this razor sharp as there is a current of mordant humor throughout Williams’ script that could easily have made this whole affair a pitch-black comedy. 

The same goes for the uneven characterization of the women. Haugh’s Hannah seems to exist solely to look hot in a bikini and spout red herring-laden dialogue. The always solid Potter adds a steely gravitas to what mostly amounts to a stock character in Kristen. I kept waiting for her to get a great monologue moment like she does in the similarly lurid thriller “Along Came a Spider.” Alas, it never comes. Rosie is similarly underwritten, reduced to a pastiche of Gen-Z stereotypes, although Barbusca does her best to overcome the trite material with some hilarious line readings.

By design the son Alex remains an aloof presence, looming largely in the periphery until a third act twist places him squarely in the center of the action. For his part Gray goes all in, delivering one feeble excuse after another for his rancid behavior with a perfect mixture of derangement and vulnerability. A cookie-cutter copy of his equally ordinary, yet completely self-obsessed father. 

Not surprisingly, Prinze Jr., who served as an executive producer on the project, has the meatiest role, and he is truly fantastic as the desperate Tom. Unlike Burt Lancaster’s crestfallen suburban patriarch in “The Swimmer,” Tom is always presented as pathetic. In the opening sequence he asks his friend, “Am I a good man?” but it’s clear from the jump that he is absolutely not. The film never once props him up as aspirational, just sweaty and sad. Flustered, he’s always asking for five minutes so he can come up with a plan, but Tom’s the kind of zero who could be given a whole year and still wouldn’t come up with a good plan. 

Tom’s eventual journey towards something resembling redemption is played a little too straight. One final bad decision to cap off a film full of bad decisions should be laced with dramatic irony, especially since it is a damning indictment of how white men’s rage, at any age, is often coddled and protected by those with the most power. It’s a stinger that would have been better served on a more preposterously pulpy platter. Instead, the film ends with a limp whimper. What could have been a deliciously dark satire, instead remains in the liminal space known as aggressively average. 

Everyone from Shakespeare to Martin Luther to Pier Paolo Pasolini has taken a crack at retelling one or more tales from Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron. First published in 1353, the short story collection follows 10 noblemen and women as they flee Black Death-ridden Florence for a secluded villa in Fiesole. Over the course of a fortnight, the guests take turns telling stories, resulting in 100 tales, ranging from erotica, tragedy, comedy, and beyond. But just in case the viewer is led astray by the title, Netflix’s new limited series borrows only the title of Boccaccio’s book, and instead imagines how the guests behaved during their rural sojourn. Because it is merely inspired by and not based on the original stories, the series lacks nuance, its point of view is about as sharp as a daytime soap opera, and for the life of me I don’t know how these scripts made it into production. This is perhaps the worst series to hit the airwaves since HBO’s “The Time-Traveler’s Wife,” a feat I did not even think possible. 

The cast, as is usually the case in mid-TV aiming for a prestige rep, is not without merit. As Sirisco, the steward of Villa Santa, the location of the nobles’ country getaway, Tony Hale (“Veep,” “Arrested Development”) does his damnedest with meager material, fighting to find shades of grey in a portrayal of a proud but anxious servant who is on the verge of losing his mind. Hale’s partnership with Leila Farzad, who plays the no-nonsense cook Stratilia, feels like it takes place in a completely different series. Giampiero De Concilio truly shines as the messenger Andreoli; the actor’s light touch gives the part a necessary level of indifference, providing the series’ few true laughs. Zosia Mamet continues to corner the market on entitled, delusional brats as Pampinea, the wealthy fiancée to Visconte Leonardo, the owner of Villa Santa; she turns up for her holiday in the country with her handmaiden Misia (Saiorse-Monica Jackson of “Derry Girls”), who is struggling to define her identity outside of her unending loyalty to her mistress. 

Perhaps most impressive of all are Karan Gill and Amar Chadha-Patel. The former plays a kind but somewhat detached nobleman married to the aggravatingly pious Neifile (Lou Gala), and the latter plays Dioneo, an intelligent and alluring doctor who may or may not be preying on his nobleman friend/boss Tindaro’s (Douggie McMeekin) hypochondria. Rounding out the guests are Filomena (Jessica Plummer), a young noblewoman who has thus far survived the plague with the aid of her abused handmaiden Licisca (Tanya Reynolds). 

The original Decameron is, to me, an early literary version of what, in television, is known as a bottle episode: characters are held captive in a room by the writer, and what they say reveals something about them, the times in which they live, and the artist who pens them into existence. Excellent examples of this include “MILF Island” (“30 Rock”), “Cooperative Calligraphy” (“Community”), “Connor’s Wedding” (“Succession”), “The Suitcase” (“Mad Men”), and “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” from Rod Serling’s “Twilight Zone.” But nothing about the Netflix adaptation makes sense, much less creates commentary on the past or the present. Characters make decisions that they reverse within minutes; alliances are dissolved without any real explanation; toward the back half of the eight episodes a dozen new characters enter the narrative to serve no real purpose. The soundtrack hails from the 1980s and ’90s: New Order, Depeche Mode, Enya, The Pixies, Edwin Collins — the pop music needle drops of Peacock’s reality dating show “Love Island” are about as edgy. Even the women’s costumes do not resemble the historical record of 14th century Italian fashion; everything looks like a child’s half-hearted attempt at Ren Faire attire, lacking structure and detail. The production design was clearly inspired by Federico Fellini’s “Casanova,” which is set four centuries after the events of “The Decameron.” I suppose this is all par for the course for a new member of Netflix’s catalogue, much of which looks and sounds like a mid-budget Hollywood studio film penned in the early 2000s. 

In a New York Times puff piece about the making of “The Decameron,” director Andrew DeYoung (he helms two episodes out of eight) gushed that series creator Kathleen Jordan (“Teenage Bounty Hunters”) and the writers “did such a beautiful job of touching upon what we just went through without being didactic.” Perhaps he was on the set of a different series, because the eight episodes I saw were so heavy-handed I felt genuinely depressed. Yes, the wealthy abuse their servants, flee consequences while the working class suffers, and adversity does occasionally cause them to change for the better, but these broad strokes neither reveal anything new about human psychology to us, nor are they portrayed in a way that draws us in. And it’s not as though artistry and pandemics are mutually exclusive. “Station Eleven” was a vibrant take on an uncontrollable and catastrophic flu; it used Shakespeare, a brilliant color palette, humor, and science fiction to talk about love and loss. “The Last of Us” wielded stellar performances, horrifyingly realistic visual effects, and expansion of its video game origins to create something indelible. “The Decameron” is a failure on nearly every level and is a missed opportunity to show that humanity has never really changed. 

If Boccaccio’s wise observations about love, fidelity, wealth, morality, and class do not inform your narrative; if you are content to waste the talent of so many people on writing that wouldn’t pass muster in an introductory screenwriting class, may I suggest you rename your series “Florentine Flu: Electric Boogaloo.” Perhaps someone will immortalize the series in a low-effort Twitter meme: the real “Decameron,” after all, was the friends we made along the way. 

Whole series screened for review. Now on Netflix.

At the Art House Convergence’s recent independent film exhibition conference held in Chicago, Josh Frank, author and urban drive-in entrepreneur, announced his radical initiative for luring people back into theaters: Silent movies.

Hold on, hold on, hear him out. “Silents Synced,” scheduled to launch nationally Oct. 4, will present classic silent films synced to seminal albums and songs by iconic alternative rock bands of the late 1980s and ‘90s. First up is F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” paired with Radiohead’s albums “Kid A” and “Amnesiac.”

The second release will be Buster Keaton’s “Sherlock, Jr.” paired with career-spanning songs by R.E.M. In a statement, Bertis Downs, the band’s manager, said, “The guys thought it seems like a good idea and they like the uncanny way their music and ‘Sherlock, Jr.’  match up — kind of perfect. What a great and unlikely way of presenting great art.”

“Silents Synced” will be distributed in partnership with CineLife Entertainment, a division of Spotlight Cinema Networks, which books exclusively to independent indoor and drive-in theaters.

“People look for what’s next and new,” Frank says. “My secret sauce is I look for what’s next in what was. I look at what was popular before my time and figure out how it is still valid today. I take what people liked about it and bring it back better.”

Inspiration for “Silents Synced” goes back more than 15 years. In 2006, Frank was invited to the premiere of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival’s presentation of Paul Wegener and Henrik Galeen’s 1915 horror film, “The Golem”” with a commissioned score by Black Francis, front man for the band The Pixies, whose oral history Frank co-wrote.

“It was incredible, and left a lasting impression,” Frank says.

Three years later, Frank opened the 12-car Blue Starlite drive-in in an alley in downtown Austin in 2009.  “It was more an art installation,” he jokes. The Blue Starlite focused on classics and revival house programming, not standard drive-in fare at the time, but one of his earliest programming experiments was to pair Fritz Lang’s visionary “Metropolis” with Nine Inch Nails’ “The Fragile” to show privately to a few friends. “I’ve never forgotten how cool that was to do,” he says.

The downtown location has moved out of the alley and onto a parking garage rooftop. A second five-screen location off of I-35 presents a mix of new indie releases (“Maxxine,” “Robot Dreams”) and contemporary classics and cult faves (“Jaws,” “Dirty Dancing”).

When the pandemic hit and drive-ins enjoyed an unexpected resurgence, Frank’s idea for “Silents Synced” further crystallized. “There was not a lot of new content,” he says, “which led to serious outside-the-box thinking. What new type of movie experience would give people a compelling reason to go out to a movie theater?”

Frank is no stranger to quixotic quests. He spent five years co-creating a graphic novel based on Salvador Dali’s 1937 14-page treatment for a proposed Marx Brothers film, which at the time, MGM deemed unfilmable. “Giraffes on Horseback Salad” was published in 2015.

He knew bringing “Silents Synced” to fruition would not be—wait for it—duck soup.

But “Silents Synced” may have been made for these times. Coupled with low attendance woes, theaters are grappling with the effects of last year’s six month’s writer’s strike, which wreaked havoc on Hollywood’s production pipeline. “Inside & Out 2” and “Despicable Me 4” may be doing boffo business, but efforts to get people to return to their pre-pandemic habit of regular outings to the movie theater have been seemingly a mission: impossible.

Frank drew on treasured movie and music memories from his Gen-X youth. “I grew up in the days of midnight movies,” he says. “Every weekend, you knew your people would be at ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show.’ There was also the Pink Floyd laser light show at our planetarium that synced Pink Floyd music to this trippy laser extravaganza.”

Frank envisions “Silents Synced” as a having the same repeatable potential that will appeal to film and music buffs, particularly fans of that particular band. Titles yet to bs announced for 2025 will be synced to They Might Be Giants, Pearl Jam, the Pixies and others.

Frank has spent the last two years, he says, negotiating with record labels. The films are in the public domain, but he is taking care to find  and negotiate for exceptional prints. such as Kino Lorber’s restoration of “Sherlock, Jr.”

But at the heart of “Silents Synced,” Frank says, beats the imperative that has endured for more than a century of film exhibition, from the first moving images, through such technical innovations as 3-D, Cinemascope and IMAX.

“It’s all about creating an experience you cannot get anywhere else,” he says.

Taika Waititi, Iain Morris, and Jemaine Clement putting their mark on Monty Python creator Terry Gilliam’s 1981 classic “Time Bandits” is an ambitious scheme in of itself. In recent times, Waititi and Clement’s brand of whimsical comedy, while frequently clever and funny, has become somewhat tiresome. Waititi’s “Next Goal Wins,” which he co-wrote with Morris, felt like Waititi was operating on autopilot. Nonetheless, “Time Bandits” utilizes their whimsy effectively by targeting a younger audience who will appreciate their dry witty humor. This 10-episode Apple TV+ adaptation proves that the team’s renowned comedic flair remains viable and valuable. 

11-year-old Kevin (Kal-El Tuck), a history buff, is a loner. At school, he’s the last one picked for their sports team. At home, his parents and younger sister Saffron (Kiera Thompson) mock him for being so nerdy and a chatterbox. One night, his wardrobe opens up a portal, but this isn’t Narnia calling. No, no. Instead, a motley crew of time-traveling thieves who don’t do anything called the Time Bandits — Penelope (Lisa Kudrow), Alto (Tadhg Murphy), Widgit (Roger Jean Nsengiyumva), Bittelig (Rune Temte), Judy (Charlyne Yi) — arrive in his bedroom. Instantly, he’s amazed and seizes the opportunity to join them in their history trotting quest — to Penelope’s dismay. 

When Kevin eventually joins the bandits, his entire home life is put in danger. His parents are turned into coal by a demonic overlord named Pure Evil (Clement) and his sister eventually goes on her own trek to find Kevin.

“Time Bandits” evokes a strong resemblance to a classic Jay Ward romp. I’m talking about the “Peabody and Sherman” segments of the “Rocky & Bullwinkle” show. Much like Wards’ sci-fi riff, Bandit gets to have its cake and eat it too by educating kids about different times in history and poking fun at the people from each time with lighthearted charm and clever wit. Much of “Time Bandits” thrives due to the distinctive comedic character interactions between the bandits and the episodic adventures they embark on throughout time. Lisa Kudrow is a delight as a lazy, moralless time pirate and her dynamic with charming newcomer Kal-El Tuck inspires plenty of laughs. 

There’s a lot of fun to be had with the downright animated silliness that comes from the humor, whether it’s from strong wordplay, hilarious misunderstandings, or whimsical over-the-top performances from its lively group. With every historical period they travel to, from Medieval times to 1929 Harlem during the prohibition era, fans of other Waititi-related work will be enthused to see his veterans pop up in several eras, such as Con O’Neill from “Our Flag Means Death” as a sheriff of Nottingham. Every Bandit has a fun set of gags, with the standout being Tadhg Murphy’s Alto, an aspiring actor who gets into mayhem at each destination. 

However, there is no way to avoid discussing the elephant in the room, being Charlene Yi’s ultimate departure from the series after the actor publicly addressed the physical and mental abuse they experienced on set earlier this year. And the final result is completely transparent, as they’re written out during the series’ midpoint. Their absence leaves a sour taste in one’s mouth, making “Time Bandits” less fun than it was before. 

Yet, given that this show is strictly intended for a family-oriented audience, (though there are weird instances of bloody violence that had me questioning the TV-PG rating at one point) I assume these kids wouldn’t care less. Unless one of them points out why the empath character just straight up left, inexplicably? 

If you’re looking for a fun, silly diversion and clever character-oriented comedy for the family, “Time Bandits” is a pleasant time to be had. This iteration stands well on its own as a delightful sci-fi romp that might actually make your kid want to crack open a history book for once. The Supreme Being knows I did that, having watched my fair share of “Peabody and Sherman” back then.

Whole season screened for review. 

Wonder what movies we’ll be talking about during this upcoming Oscar season? A handy cheat-sheet every year is the lineup of the Venice Film Festival, which starts August 28 and is the first of several high-profile fall festivals. Even the 2023 edition, which was hampered by a lack of stars due to the then-ongoing actors’ strike, debuted the likes of “Poor Things,” “Ferrari,” “Evil Does Not Exist” and “Green Border.” But now that the actors and writers have gotten new contracts, this year’s Venice will be filled with plenty of buzzy premieres. But which films, sight unseen, look the most intriguing?

Putting together a list of 10 promising festival movies is always a difficult task. You’re going on gut feelings and personal preference. For instance, maybe you’re someone who is waiting anxiously for the Venice opener “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” Perhaps you’re excited about “Wolfs,” which reunites “Ocean’s Eleven” stars George Clooney and Brad Pitt. Kiyoshi Kurosawa fans will no doubt want to hear how his latest thriller “Clouds” is. Well, those movies, and many others, missed the cut, which just speaks to the amount of possible bangers Venice might have on tap. Listed alphabetically, here are the films that have most piqued my interest.

“Babygirl”

Dutch filmmaker Halina Reijn likes making audiences uncomfortable. Her feature debut, 2019’s “Instinct,” was about a prison therapist inexorably drawn to the dangerous rapist she’s meant to be treating. Then Reijn returned with “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” a horror-satire that was like an Agatha Christie murder-mystery combined with a commentary on Generation Z. I don’t think she’s pulling any punches for her third feature, an erotic thriller that, according to Variety, “examines power dynamics and sexuality in the workplace.” Nicole Kidman stars in “Babygirl” as a CEO who starts a highly inappropriate affair with a young intern at her company (Harris Dickinson). This isn’t the first time this year that Kidman has played a woman pursuing a younger love interest, although “Babygirl” looks to be much darker and more button-pushing than her Netflix rom-com “A Family Affair.”

“The Brutalist”

For those who love their arthouse fare to be epic in length, filmmaker Brady Corbet has excellent news for you. As the follow-up to his maximalist pop-star portrait “Vox Lux,” he will be unveiling “The Brutalist,” a three-and-a-half-hour (including intermission) drama, which, according to IndieWire, concerns “a Hungarian Jew [played by Adrien Brody] who survived Auschwitz before emigrating to America. On U.S. soil after years of poverty, he’s entrusted by a patron, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), with a gigantic architectural project.” Expect comparisons to “The Fountainhead” for a film that also features Felicity Jones, Joe Alwyn and Alessandro Nivola. Corbet is known for pursuing challenging subject matter, and this ambitious undertaking sounds no different. 

“Harvest”

More than a decade ago, one of the hot regional film movements was the Greek Weird Wave, whose most famous member was Yorgos Lanthimos, who went on to worldwide success. But one of his friends and colleagues during that era was Athina Rachel Tsangari, who made a splash with her second feature, the Venice competition title “Attenberg,” a twisted, oddly touching coming-of-age tale. (Her lead, Ariane Labed, took home the festival’s Best Actress prize.) Sadly, Tsangari has only made one feature since then—the 2015 examination of masculinity, “Chevalier”—but at last, she returns with this adaptation of the Jim Crace novel about a tiny English village that starts experiencing unsettling occurrences. Caleb Landry Jones leads the cast of “Harvest,” which may not be as starry as many of the Venice premieres but could be a creepy stunner. 

“I’m Still Here”

Awards season loves a good comeback story. Sony Pictures Classics is certainly positioning Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles as a candidate this year. He earned acclaim in the late 1990s and early 21st century thanks to delicate dramas like “Central Station” and “The Motorcycle Diaries,” but he hasn’t made a feature since 2012’s disappointing “On the Road.” Salles is back with “I’m Still Here,” based on the true story of Eunice Paiva, a housewife who took on the Brazilian military regime in the 1960s after her husband, a congressman, was disappeared. Based on Paiva’s son’s memoir, “I’m Still Here” will star Fernanda Torres, with “Central Station” Oscar nominee Fernanda Montenegro playing Eunice Paiva as an older woman. This has the potential to be the sort of emotional powerhouse that audiences and Academy voters flock to.  

“Joker: Folie à Deux”

The original “Joker” started its awards-season campaign at Venice in 2019, taking home the festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion, on the way to earning more than a billion dollars worldwide and winning two Oscars, including Best Actor for Joaquin Phoenix. Critically, though, the film received a wide range of reviews, with some praising “Joker’s” grownup tone and magnetic central performance while others despised its pseudo-Scorsese nihilism. I was a fan, so I’m intrigued by this much-hyped sequel, which like its predecessor will premiere in competition on the Lido. This time, Phoenix is joined by Lady Gaga, who plays the Joker’s equally troubled love interest Harley Quinn. “Joker: Folie à Deux” will be a musical, so no one can accuse this sequel of lacking in ambition. I’m expecting this follow-up film to be equally divisive—I can’t wait to see where I land.

“Maria”

Angelina Jolie will debut her latest directorial effort, “Without Blood,” which stars Salma Hayek and Demian Bichir, at the Toronto Film Festival. But before then, she’ll be in front of the camera at Venice for “Maria,” the newest biopic from Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín. Like his “Jackie” and “Spencer,” this will focus on a famous woman in the midst of crisis: acclaimed opera singer Maria Callas near the end of her tumultuous life. Both Natalie Portman and Kristen Stewart received Best Actress nominations for their portrayals in Larraín’s films, so Oscar prognosticators will be curious to see how Academy Award-winner Jolie comports herself as Callas. She hasn’t been nominated since 2008’s “Changeling” and this looks to be her most high-profile dramatic role since her poorly-received 2015 marital drama “By the Sea,” in which she co-starred alongside her now-ex-husband Brad Pitt.

“Pavements”

Pavement was one of the most important bands of the 1990s, a greatly influential indie-rock group whose epochal albums like “Slanted and Enchanted” dazzled with their shimmering guitar and quizzical/poetic lyrics. They were critics’ darlings, not multiplatinum sensations, so it’s probably not a surprise that a movie about them will also be pretty idiosyncratic. Filmmaker Alex Ross Perry, who previously made the scabrous, moving fictional rock portrait “Her Smell,” was approached by frontman Stephen Malkmus to do a sorta-documentary, sorta-love story narrative based around the group’s music. So what exactly is “Pavements”? According to Perry, “Legitimate, ridiculous, real, fake, idiotic, cliché, illogical. … You take the Todd Haynes Bob Dylan movie, the Scorsese documentary, the Pennebaker documentary, and the movie Dylan himself directed that everyone hates [‘Renaldo and Clara’] and put them all in a blender.” “Pavements” will feature footage from the band’s recent reunion tour, but also include actors like Jason Schwartzman, Tim Heidecker, Zoe Lister-Jones and Fred Hechinger. Like their terrific body of work, this movie sounds incredibly cool.

“Queer”

A year ago, Luca Guadagnino was supposed to debut “Challengers” at Venice. But because of the actors’ strike, the studio pulled the film from its opening-night slot, delaying its release until early 2024. The Oscar-nominated director is back on the Lido with another love story, this time based on William S. Burroughs’ novel, about an American war vet (Daniel Craig) living in Mexico pursuing a younger serviceman (Drew Starkey) in the 1940s. “Queer” reunites Guadagnino with several of his “Challengers” collaborators, including screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes and composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Few contemporary filmmakers do romance as beautifully as Guadagnino, and Craig is already building buzz for a possible first Oscar nomination. 

“The Room Next Door”

In recent times, decorated Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar has dipped his toe into English-language filmmaking with his shorts “The Human Voice” and “Strange Way of Life.” Now, he’s made his first feature in English, reuniting with “Human Voice” star Tilda Swinton for “The Room Next Door,” in which she plays a mother engaged in a contentious relationship with her daughter (Julianne Moore). For cinephiles, the team-up of those three luminaries—announced through a tantalizing Instagram post—was reason for excitement, but considering “The Room Next Door” was shot this spring, most of us assumed we wouldn’t see the film until next year. Instead, Almodóvar will be back in Venice, where he won Best Screenplay for “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” in 1988 and a Career Golden Lion in 2019.

“Separated”

Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris tends to make his best films when he’s angry or impassioned, whether exonerating falsely accused killer Randall Dale Adams in “The Thin Blue Line” or grilling former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara for “The Fog of War.” As Morris explained last year, his new film is “about the separation of families—including parents and children—on the Mexico-U.S. border by the Trump administration.” Called “Separated,” the documentary couldn’t be more timely at a moment when Trump is promising mass deportations if reelected president, and I expect it to be an enraging, sobering portrait. Morris has praised journalist Jacob Soboroff’s 2020 book on the topic, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy, so I wouldn’t be surprised if his film draws inspiration from Soboroff’s reporting. There are several intriguing documentaries at this year’s Venice—including the latest installment of Wang Bing’s “Youth” series about migrant workers in China—but I can imagine “Separated” might provoke major headlines.

The two-hander is an elegant structure for a lower-budget effort: Just plop two characters together, often in a single location, and let the actors’ performances and the innate tension of the scenario play itself out. It’s a very genre-flexible conceit, malleable enough to fit everything from murderous chamber piece to yakuza thriller to pitch-black tragicomedies starring middle-aged Michiganders. In that spirit, three films I’ve seen at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival manage to use their reduced cast and focus on pairings to intriguing effect, even if not all of them completely hold together.

“Confession,” one of three films in the fest from director Nobuhiro Yamashita, starts with a leg injury. Two men — college friends Asai (Toma Ikuta) and Jiyong (Yang Ik-june) — are making their annual pilgrimage among the snowy mountains of Japan, a kind of tradition to honor their long-lost friend Sayuri (Nao), who disappeared on one of their treks years prior. As we meet them, Jiyong’s leg has been broken, and the whirling blizzard tells them he’s not gonna make it. So he makes a presumptively dying admission of guilt: he killed Sayuri all those years ago, out of jealousy for Asai’s relationship with her. Before Asai can really process that revelation, suddenly the snow clears enough to reveal a remote cabin in which they can seek shelter. Asai drags Jiyong inside, keeping them safe from the storm… but not this unearthed secret.

At a brisk 70 minutes, “Confession” is deliciously taut. Its early stretches build slow-burn tension as the two figure out how to reconcile this massive elephant thrown into the room. It’s Hitchcockian at first, Asai and Jiyong going through the niceties of friendship, patching up the latter’s leg, and trying to find supplies and contact the outside world. But it’s not that long before we see the lengths to which Jiyong will go to protect his crime, the two exhausted, altitude-sick friends turning to violence at the drop of a shovel. That’s where Yamashita’s direction comes alive, making elegant use of a well-established space (with food closets and cellar doors and an ominous wood-burning hearth) to find new ways to threaten and surprise Asai in his mad scramble for survival. It’s a bit Chan-wook Park in stretches, from its agonizing build of suspense to the way Yamashita’s camera keeps its grandest surprises just out of view.

Granted, it’s all in service of a story that’s a bit slight — its final act depends on a Russian nesting doll of twists that feel one or two too many to register — and the object of their animus, Nao’s Sayuri, doesn’t get much to do in flashbacks besides serve as said object. But as a slim, efficient genre exercise, its moment-by-moment mad scramble for survival, “Confession” is a fun time.

Okay, it’s maybe cheating to call Hiroshi Shuji’s yakuza thriller “Tatsumi” a two-hander, per se, but its central pair anchors what is otherwise a comparatively rote example of the genre. In a small Japanese fishing town, numerous yakuza gangs battle for control; in the middle is Tatsumi (Yuya Endo), a worn-down, cynical fisherman who disposes of bodies as a side hustle for each crime family. He’s the kind of world-weary guy who will, as we see in the opening minutes, oversee even his younger brother’s death by overdose and clean up the corpse afterward. But cracks form in his hard exterior when circumstances force him to protect Aoi (Kokoro Morita), a rebellious teenage girl, who finds herself in the mafia’s crosshairs after witnessing a power-play killing. Trapped in the middle, the two must work together to survive the various factions coming after them, and negotiate — or shoot — their way out of trouble.

“Tatsumi” is hardly a Beat Takeshi vehicle; it plays more as crime drama than shoot-em-up action, and the script lays thick its grand tragic ideas of cycles of violence and the death of humanity in the world of organized crime. It’s nothing new, but played with sufficient panache that it doesn’t get too boring — especially when Endo and Morita get to explore a brittle brother-sister dynamic as their characters become more accustomed to each other. Shoji makes efficient use of his presumably low budget, flitting between cramped gangland restaurants and sprawling car parks and fishing docks coated in an amber sheen to sell the griminess and grittiness of its setting. 

It’s dour but appropriately so: it’s a movie about the emptiness of this kind of life; after all, Tatsumi casually clips fingers and pulls teeth as if he were gutting a fish. But that also holds us back from getting to know many of the supporting cast, which can sometimes confuse the complex dynamics the pair try to navigate. (That said, Tomoyuki Kuramoto stands out as the wild-eyed Ryuji, a particularly psychopathic enforcer who becomes Tatsumi’s most ardent nemesis.) Even so, Shoji paints a picture of a tense, tragic world from which there’s seemingly no escape, and the emotional toll it takes on those lost in it.

“Vulcanizadora” has already made a modest splash out of Tribeca, but the latest from Michigan-based provocateur Joel Potrykus (“Relaxer“) mines ghastly existential pathos from middle-aged malaise. A followup of sorts to his 2014 “Buzzard,” “Vulcanizadora” plops its two loser leads from that film, Marty and Derek — played by Joshua Burge and Potrykus — into the Michigan forest for some seemingly aimless wandering. Now easily in their forties, wrinkles and grey hair disrupting their metal-fan attire and whoa-man vocal tics, the pair pal around, setting off fireworks, digging up old porno mags, and talking vaguely about some kind of ritual they plan to enact once they get to where they’re going. They’re pathetic, sad, washed-up manchildren, seemingly embracing their dead-end lives and trying to wrest some control back from the years that have been lost to idleness. That is, until you figure out what they’re really trying to pull off once they get to their beachside destination, which is where “Vulcanizadora” takes on a more hilariously tragic direction.

Shot with a kind of clandestine 16mm, “Vulcanizadora”‘s look feels as ramshackle as its protagonists: pitted, pockmarked, knotted. Long takes hold on Marty and Derek trudging idly through the woods, talking themselves up to whatever they’re doing, a desperate grasp for purpose in an aimless universe. Potrykus’ smartest move, frankly, is to let its metaphorical bomb go off halfway through, and in a cruelly funny twist of fate, leaving one of the losers left to sift through the wreckage. This latter half lends “Vulcanizadora” a perverse significance, morphing into a cautionary tale of how we can become alienated even from our own desire for accountability. It’s the cruelest thing of all to feel the guilt of doing something unforgivable; it’s even worse when the world dares to forgive (and forget) you anyway.