Japan Cuts ’25: A Samurai in Time

If an Old West gunslinger traveled forward in time to 1950’s Hollywood, he would probably find steady work as a stuntman. It would be a lot harder for him in today’s film industry. That is also true for Kosaka Shinzaemon. He was, and remains a real deal samurai from the Aizu Domain, who somehow traveled forward in time to the Kyoto Uzumasa studio, where most of the Japanese entertainment industry’s Jidaigeki samurai dramas have been filmed. It is a whole new era for him, but he retains some adaptable skills in director-screenwriter Jun’ichi Yasuda’s A Samurai in Time, which screens as part of the 2025 Japan Cuts festival.

It was a dark a stormy night. Frankly, Shinzaemon really didn’t notice the stormy part until he started clashing swords with Yamagata Hikokuro, a rival from the Choshu Domain. Suddenly, a flash of lightning strikes and there he is on the Kyoto backlot. Confusingly, half the people look normal, but the rest appear to wear strange foreign garb. He is a bit of a bull in a China shop, but Yuko Yamamoto, a conscientious young assistant director looks out for the presumed amnesia case.

Thanks to her, he finds a place to stay at the nearby shrine frequently used as a location. He also starts apprenticing with Sekimoto, a master of stunt-performer swordplay. Sekimoto warns his new apprentice that Jidaigeki productions just aren’t as popular as they used to be. Nevertheless, Shinzaemon becomes a regular stunt performer on Yamamoto’s series, because he just looks so authentic. In fact, he even draws the attention of Kyoichiro Kazami, a veteran movie star, hoping to reinvigorate the Jidaigeki genre. Indeed, Kazami shows a particular interest in Shinzaemon.

Samurai in Time might remind genre fans of Ken Ochiai’s loving tribute to Jidaigeki extras, Uzumasa Limelight, with good reason. Ochiai’s star, longtime Jidaigeki bit-player Seizo Fukumoto was originally cast as Sekimoto, before his unfortunate passing. Instead, his “junior” colleague, Rantaro Mine, plays the role with the kind of dignified gravitas Fukumoto brought to Limelight. So yes, the two films would pair nicely.

Tim Travers and the Time Traveler’s Paradox

He has a bit of a Looper complex. Instead of wanting to kill Hitler or attend a Coltrane concert, Tim Travers uses time travel to kill himself, so he can explore the resulting paradox. It is an ambitious but very bad idea that inevitably goes spectacularly awry in director-screenwriter Stimson Snead’s Tim Travers and the Time Traveler’s Paradox, which opens this Friday in theaters.

The titular paradox boils down to the notion that if you kill yourself in the past, your time-traveling self would still be alive thereby creating a paradox. It is a thought experiment that Travers takes to ridiculous lengths. Ill-advisedly, he also discusses his research with James Bunratty, an “alternate science” talk radio host. This will be a mistake, because it creates a trail for the hitman hired by the terrorists, whose plutonium Travers stole to power his time portal.

Fortunately, by the time Helter the assassin starts tracking Travers, he has already created at least a dozen other selves through time travel. He started by murdering his previous others selves, but then he started letting his selves from other times (merely one minute apart, but often enough to make considerable differences) live, so he could consult with himself. It also means Helter must keep killing every Travers he sees. To make things extra complicated, several of the Travers take time out for his/their date with Bunratty’s resentful producer Delilah, but it always ends badly, because neither of them is really suitable relationship material, especially him (all of them).

The loopy Looper-esque chaos of the first half is wildly entertaining. However, Snead has trouble maintaining the manic energy during the second half. It is also clear how desperately he was searching for an exit strategy—judging from the nearly incomprehensible speed of the double-talk. Nevertheless, Snead earns credit for developing a fresh take on time travel and for mining the science fiction material for a good deal of laughs.

JLA Adventures: Trapped in Time, Coming Soon to Tubi

Val Armorr was the original “Karate Kid,” predating the 1984 movie by almost twenty years, from the 31^st Century. The member of the futuristic Legion of Superheroes was never a marque DC character. Presumably, that is why they never litigated the title (for which they were thanked in the credits). Unfortunately, Armorr makes a real dog’s breakfast of things in the future, causing trouble for the Justice League in the past at the outset of Giancarlo Volpe’s JLA Adventures: Trapped in Time, another animated DC film coming to Tubi this Saturday.

In the present, for now, the Justice League foils an attempt by the Legion of Doom to counter-intuitively build up the polar ice cap, to profit from the resulting environmental disruption. Unfortunately, Lex Luthor is buried within the ice, where he remains lost until the 31^st Century.

In the future, Karate Kid and Dawnstar, a more responsible prospective member of the Legion of Superheroes gawk at his display in the superhero museum. Unable to control his rash impulses, Armorr accidentally releases Luthor from the ice. The dangers compound when the mastermind steals a cosmic hourglass bound to the mysterious Time Trapper.

Using the Time Trapper’s powers, Luthor first returns to the present, with Karate Kid and Dawnstar secretly following him. He then sends Bizarro, Solomon Grundy, Cheetah, and Toy Master back to the past, so they can send Kal-El back into space. The Flash, Cyborg, Wonder Woman, and Aquaman manage to follow them—but maybe Aquaman isn’t perfectly suited for the Kansas terrain.

Unlike the R-rated Justice League Dark, Trapped in Time tries to deliberately evoke the tone of the 1970’s Justice League/Super Friends Saturday morning cartoons. However, screenwriter Michael Ryan offers some clever time travel twists. In fact, it is much smarter in the way it handles potential time paradoxes than the 2001 Justice League series.

Things Will Be Different

It was supposed to be the ultimate “time-out.” The cops will never find these sibling outlaws’ time-slip hideout, but someone or something else has access to their sanctuary in director-screenwriter Michael Felker’s Things Will Be Different, which releases this Friday in theaters and on VOD.

Joseph and Sidney share some stormy family history, but they still sufficiently trust each other to pull off an armed heist. Their getaway could have been cleaner, but Joseph charted an unusual escape route. Apparently, this quiet farmhouse has the power to travel to some distant point in time, where they can simply wait out the cops. For each day spent in this mysterious other time, an equal day passes in the time-period the siblings left. They figure two weeks should be sufficient for the heat to blow over, but Sidney will still be home before her daughter misses her so badly.

However, just as brother and sister are about to triumphantly stride through that strange door, they find it mysteriously boarded up, with instructions to meet at the farm’s old mill. By using an old Dictaphone as a means of interdimensional, or intertime communication, the siblings learn the strange forces governing the farm are aware of their intrusion and they are not happy about it. However, all will be forgiven if they stay to capture and kill the violent “time bandits” using the portals for their own sinister ends. Of course, they agree, because what choice do they have, but the waiting takes a considerable toll, mentally and emotionally.

As weird as that sounds, Felker builds the premise and the rules of the world quite convincingly. This is gritty, grounded, lo-fi science fiction in the best sense. Frankly, viewers never get a full picture of the system that entraps the brother and sister, but the partial snapshot is pretty trippy. Technically, Things Will Be Different involves time-travel, but it really is very much its own thing. It is worth noting Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, the team behind films like Spring, The Endless, and Synchronic served as executive producers and played supporting roles. Felker’s film should definitely appeal to their fans, both thematically and stylistically.

Omni Loop: A Different Kind of “Red Pill”

Zoya Lowe’s pills should carry a heck of side effect warning: could cause small internal black holes. Obviously, that can be fatal. However, she will not die, because of their time travel properties, taking her back one week in time. As a physicist, she always wanted to figure out how they worked, so she constantly repeats her final week, in hopes of completing her research in director-screenwriter Bernardo Britto’s Omni Loop, which opens Friday in theaters.

Each loop starts with Lowe’s husband Donald and her daughter Jayne taking her home from the hospital and trying to make her comfortable, but she has gone through it so many times, she now just goes through the motions. However, she finally snaps out of it when she literally runs into Paula Campos, a young student carrying the quantum physics textbook she wrote with her husband.

Campos also has access to a dusty but adequate lab, so Lowe convinces her, with the benefit of repeated time loops, to help her analyze her mystery pills, so she can finally crack the code of time travel. Frankly, Lowe has no idea where they came from. They were given to her when she was a young girl, under mysterious circumstances, and have always defied conventional analysis. However, Campos’s campus has an incredibly unusual very-science fictional asset that could provide a new way of looking at Lowe’s pills. Awkwardly, it is now also home to her cranky old academic advisor, Prof. Duselberg.

Omni Loop represents a dramatic departure from most time travel and time loop films, particularly in terms of the acutely human scale of the narrative. Britto develops several highly original sf wrinkles, but it is the emotions that really make a lasting impression. There might be a few logical gaps, especially if you are theoretical physicist, but it hardly matters, because the film works so pwerfully as such an honest family drama.

Alienoid: Return to the Future

That phrase "return to the future” sure sounds like you could build a successful science fiction franchise around it, right? In fact, the first Alienoid was an entertainingly wild ride, incorporating superheroes, magic, time travel, and alien invasions. Like any aspiring franchise, it ended with a major cliffhanger, but nobody minded, because everything that led up to it was so cool. We will pick back up with Earth’s ragtag but superpowered defenders in 14^th Century Korea, where they must obtain the “Divine Sword” to save the present-day Earth in Choi Dong-hoon’s Alienoid: Return to the Future, which opens this Friday in theaters.

To save Earth in the future, the AI “Thunder” must regroup with little Ean in the past. It is sort of like “going home” for the girl, because Thunder and his humanoid counterpart “Guard” found her orphaned there some 600 years ago, while they were chasing a renegade time-traveling alien criminal.

You might want to revisit the review for the first film, other reviews, its wiki page, and any other resource you can think of, because there was a lot going on. Long story short, alien criminals have been imprisoned inside Earthlings. Ususually, neither the host or the captive are aware of the situation, but when the alien “wakens,” oh boy, is there ever trouble.

Back in our time, there is a full-scale alien uprising going on. They plan to takeover Earth by poisoning our atmosphere. The only off-switch is the Divine Sword that Ean is looking for in the past. She has grown up to be the mysterious “Girl Who Shoots Thunder,” who made such an impression on Murak, a clumsy but powerful Taoist Dosa magician.

In the first film, the modern-day scenes worked a lot better than those in the past, largely because of the dopiness of Murak and the shtickiness of Heug-seol and Cheong-woon, a couple of mage-grifters, who start out as Murak’s rivals, but become his allies. Fortunately, they will find two new allies, the Satoichi-like swordsman Nong-pa in the past, and his future descendant, Min Gae-in, a customs service investigator, who can bust the aliens for not paying their tariffs.

The first Alienoid was probably the best superhero movie of the last five-years, because it was a fresh and original alternative to the stale Marvel and DC worlds. Return to the Future is still fun, but it often feels like a Marvel movie, because it mostly consists of costumed characters fighting each other in a one crazy, confusing set piece after another.

Totally Killer, on Prime

All the best slashers take you back to an Eighties state of mind. This one literally takes Jamie Hughes back to the 1980s. Late in the awesome 80’s, the mysterious Sweet Sixteen Killer murdered three high school girls, stabbing them sixteen times. Then, suddenly, he reappears in 2023, killing her mom. Through an odd chain of events, she travels back in time to stop the killer in Nahnatchka Khan’s Blumhouse-produced Totally Killer, which premieres today on Prime.

For years, Pam Hughes was preparing for the killer’s return, like Laurie Strode in Halloween (2018), but she wasn’t quite prepared enough. The killer targets her daughter next, but Hughes (as in John?) escapes in her best friend Amelia Creston’s science fair project, a time machine. Somehow, it works when the killer’s knife gets jammed in the control panel.

Obviously, returning will be a problem, especially since it needs wifi. Fortunately, Creston based her designs on plans in her mother Lauren’s old notebooks. The 1980s Creston will work on the technical problems, while Hughes tries to catch the killer, but it will be even more difficult than she expected. For one thing, the teen Pam and her mean girl friends are too busy partying to take her warnings seriously, until they start getting killed.

Screenwriters David Matalon, Sasha Perl-Raver, and Jen D’Angelo score some laughs at the expense of 80’s attitudes that now look dated, as seen through the eyes of the woke-entitled Hughes. Yet, despite their intentions, the Reagan decade still looks like way more fun than our current scoldy watch-what-you-say times.

Surprisingly, their take on time travel is more consistently fun and entertaining. Hughes will indeed change things, but not always in the way she hoped. Murders still happen, but the victims and locations change. It turns out fusing slashers and time travel resulted in a fresh take on both.

Relax, I’m from the Future, Co-Starring Julian Richings

Maybe science fiction has done us a disservice, filling our heads with unnecessarily dire warnings regarding the space-time continuum and time paradoxes. Perhaps if we ever achieve the means to time-travel, we should just take the opportunity to see famous bands before they started to suck and load up on collectibles. That is the approach lunkheaded Casper takes, but there is a decent chance he might be dangerously moronic in director-editor-screenwriter Luke Higginson’s Relax, I’m from the Future, which is now playing in New York.

Naïve Casper has obviously been blessed with good luck rather than brains. When he arrives through the time-portal thingy, fate delivers him to Holly, a hard-partying underachiever, who finds his future-talk amusing. Being a failed-activist millennial, she is sufficiently inconsequential to history, allowing her to serve as Casper’s front for placing sports bets (a lot of hockey, since they are in Canada) and buying lottery tickets.

Life becomes quite enjoyably meaningless for both, at least for a while. Unbeknownst to them, Doris, an enforcer from the future stationed in the current time-period, is always on the lookout for potentially disruptive time-travelers like Casper. Given his knowledge of cataclysmic future events, Casper is fairly confident he cannot mess things up too badly. However, his obsession with Percy Sullivan, a darkly cynical cartoonist, leads to trouble. In the future, Sullivan will be a popular cult icon for fans like Casper, who cannot resist crashing his “celebrated” suicide. Perversely, all that might change when Sullivan refuses to continue after Casper’s rude interruption.

The feature-length Relax grew out of Higginson’s short, which focused on Casper fateful meeting with Sullivan. In fact, this is the point where the feature starts getting good. The first act is largely a hodge podge of Casper’s buffoonery and a lot of radically-charged whining from Holly and her fellow lesbian friends. In contrast, Casper’s dilemma as to what to do about a still-living Sullivan constitutes a rather clever and darkly comic time-travel problem, which continues to compound in increasingly outrageous ways.

Aporia: Time Travel at its Grungiest and Most Heartfelt

Respect physicists. They can kill with equations. You just don’t see it happening, because of the “observer effect” (you’re not one of the observers). In this case, a gently mad scientist friend of Sophie Rice’s late husband created an uninspiring looking contraption that can put a nasty “equation” in someone’s head, back five years or so in the past, thereby killing them. Of course, she wants to use it to save her husband, but the ripple effects will be surprising in Jared Moshe’s Aporia, which opens tomorrow in New York.

Things have been bad for Rice since a drunk driver mowed down her husband Malcolm. Money has been tight, their daughter Riley has grown distant and lost ambition, while the wheels of justice have been insultingly slow to punish the loutish Darby Brinkley. Then Mal’s old physics buddy Jabir Karim drops his bombshell. The machine he soldered together with Malcolm can take out Darby before the accident happens. At first Rice doubts him. Then she presses the button.

Suddenly, Malcolm is back and Riley has returned to her high academic achieving form. Only Rice and Karim have miserable memories of the last few months, because of the observer effect. Of course, Rice should quite while she is ahead, but she also remembers seeing Darby’s estranged wife Kara looking distressed by his drunken behavior. When she tries to check on her, she finds the woman and her daughter Aggie have been evicted and face ruinous medical bills. At first, she enlists Jabir and her now in-the-know husband to help them conventionally, but Jabir is itching to apply his machine to the problem.

Aporia is the best kind of science fiction—the kind that does not depend on special effects, because it is driven by ideas and characters. Frankly, the story of Aporia would not look right in 3D IMAX. It is a grungy tale of grief and desperation that could be happening in your neighbor’s garage.

It is shame that all the proper critics and guilds ignore low budget sf (and barely pay attention when it comes from the likes of Nolan and Cameron), because Greer gives an awards-worthy performance as Rice. She is not playing a time traveler. She becomes a woman grieving her husband, as viewers can acutely feel throughout the first act. She also has solid chemistry with Edi Gathegi’s Malcolm Rice, which justifies all that anguish.

The Five Devils

Vicky Soler is sort of like Inuyasha or Goku from Dragon Ball, but instead of an anime hero, she is a bullied biracial French girl, who happens to have an uncannily powerful sense of smell. She can identify and reproduce anyone’s smell—and maybe even use that aroma to travel into their past. Her family’s traumatic history turns out to be a really bad trip in Lea Mysius’s The Five Devils, which opens Friday in New York.

Vicky’s mother Joanne is distant, but that just makes her daughter even more codependent. Her parents have a polite but obviously passionless marriage—to the point that even Joanne’s crusty old father is offering her Dr. Ruth advice. Young Soler has saved her mother’s scent, via some of her excess body lotion, which she uses for a hit of motherly togetherness whenever Soler cannot be bothered with her daughter. However, her latest huffs take her back in time, to her mother’s high school years.

Those time-travel interludes take on greater significance when she finally meets her Aunt Julia, her father Jimmy’s sister, who was recently been released from prison. Everyone in their small Alpine town seems to know about Julia Soler’s episode, except Vicky. Regardless, she soon gets an eyeful of her mother’s erotically charged relationship with Aunt Julia, before she married Vicky’s father. Weirder still, the teenaged Aunt Julia of the past, appears to know when Vicky is watching.

Five Devils is hard to exactly classify because it contains slippery elements of time-travel science fiction, dark fantasy, and magical realism, but the underlying fantastical engine driving the film mostly works. When you get the full picture of the ironic cycle the family is caught up in, it really is quite compelling. Viewers should still be warned, the first ten or fifteen minutes of scene-setting and dramatic establishment are rather cold and standoffish, but once the film gets going in earnest, it is strangely hypnotic.

The Tomorrow Job

It is not the Butterfly Effect that kills you. It is the paradoxes that melt your mind. Such are the perils of time travel braved by Lee Warner’s band of thieves. A shadowy time travel syndicate is making time travel larceny even more dangerous for them, but they inevitably accept one last assignment in director-screenwriter Bruce Wemple’s The Tomorrow Job, which opens tomorrow in theaters and releases Tuesday on VOD.

Instead of Rod Taylor’s elegant throne, these time travelers merely take a pill that allows their minds to perceive one day into the future or past, for an hour in duration. Before and after such a trip, Warner’s crew takes great pains to perceive as little as possible, to minimize the chance of noticing potential paradoxes. Usually, they like to be blindfolded in an unmarked van.

Once they “return” from a job, they have to marry-up their actions over the next 24-hours, to avoid paradoxes. Schrodinger’s Cat is always very much top of mind for them. Frankly, it does not really make much sense for them to be committing heists in the future, but they do and Wemple’s fast-talking dialogue keeps viewers from asking questions in the moment. Warner has also used the technology to place big bets, which makes more sense.

For the general population the risk of paradoxes is relatively low. Warner was one of the few survivors of Dr. Jay Tupple’s time travel experiments—and he stole the corner-cutting scientist’s remaining stock of pills when he bailed on the study. The only other supply is in the hands of his fellow guinea pig-turned rival, Derrick Wagner. The rogue enforcer is determined to get his hands on Warner’s stash, which would be bad, because Wagner is much less concerned about the ethics of time-travel. That is saying something, because Warner is pretty dodgy. Unfortunately, Wagner has the backing of a shadowy Cabal led by “The Organizer” and he is willing to sacrifice the sanity of his henchmen to get the job done.

Or something like that. Figuring out how everything works in Tomorrow Job is more than a little tricky, but it somehow feels like it is being consistent, even when you’re confused by it all. At least everyone is trying to adhere to an internal system of logical, which imposes an intriguing set of constraints on the characters. However, the business with the Big Brother-like Organizer just doesn’t land right. His scenes come across as cheesy rather than ominous. In retrospect, Wagner probably should have simply been his own freelance master.

Still, there is something about the film’s low-key visuals and vibe that weirdly works for it. The cast, many of whom have worked previously with Wemple, also have a “Regular Joe” look that lends the film credibility. Crooks and grifters like Warner have to blend in, rather than stand-out, even if they are popping time travel pills.

Choi Dong-hoon’s Alienoid

You might think it would be easier to fight off hostile aliens in the year 2022 than back in the Fourteenth Century Goryeo Korea, but Earthlings would be technologically outclassed in either era. At least back then they had magic and superheroes. In addition to all of the above, this film also has time travel, so it pretty much has it all. However, it will not necessarily be clear which alien from the future is inhabiting which human character from the past in director-screenwriter Choi Dong Hoon’s wildly inventive Alienoid, which opens Friday in New York.

630 years ago, the Earth’s resident prison warden, simply known as “Guard” and Thunder, his AI assistant, drove their SUV into Goryeo times to recapture a fugitive alien. Guard represents a galactic order that imprisons the consciousnesses of their criminals inside the brains of humans on Earth. In most cases, both the host and the imprisoned remain unaware of the situation. However, when the aliens are awakened, they can take control and run amok. In this case, their fugitive sought to escape into the past. Guard and Thunder nabbed their quarry, but the collateral damage left infant Ean an orphan.

Stone cold Guard was willing to abandon her to fate, but the stealthy Thunder smuggled her back to 2022 for Guard to raise as his daughter. He is not an affectionate father, but parenthood helps establish his human cover. However, Ean is smart for her age, so she suspects Guard is involved in something weird.

Meanwhile, six centuries earlier, Murak, a clumsy, but sometimes powerful Taoist dosa magician is on a quest to find a legendary blade. Initially, he finds himself competing against the mysterious “Girl Who Shoots Thunder,” who wields some very contemporary firearms, but the real threat comes from a cabal of alien body-snatchers.

Alienoid is a crazy kitchen sink movie, filled to the rim with every possible science fiction and fantasy element imaginable. Yet, it is also highly refreshing, because it creates a whole new science fiction universe that is not tied into and carrying the baggage of the Marvel or DC Universes. Hollywood just doesn’t have this kind of originality or ambition anymore. Is this really the safest or most cost-efficient way of imprisoning criminals? Probably not, but it certainly provides the impetus for a lot of crazy and thoroughly entertaining mayhem.

Resnais at Film Forum: Je T'Aime, Je T'Aime

Claude Ridder is not your typical time-traveling hero, but he was a fitting protagonist for Alain Resnais, the late surrealist filmmaker, who was often associated with the French New Wave, despite never fully identifying with the movement. In fact, Resnais’s take on time-travel film could represent the ultimate Nouvelle Vague film, because of its radically fractured approach to time. After consenting to serve as a human guinea pig in a time-traveling experiment, Ridder finds himself uncontrollably reliving brief snippets of his life in Resnais’s Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime (I Love You, I Love You), which is definitely worth re-watching in honor of the filmmaker’s recent centennial.

Ridder is a pitiable fellow in many ways. He still works as a shipping clerk at a Parisian publishing house, due to his chronic lack of ambition. Ridder also just survived a suicide attempt. Rather symbolically, he tried to shoot himself through the heart. Yet, his rather cavalier attitude towards life is what attracts the Crispel Research Center.

As the various blandly bureaucratic scientists explain to Ridder, they successfully sent mice back in time for one minute and then returned them safely. Of course, mice cannot discuss the experience, so they wish to recruit him to be their first human test subject. Ridder does not have any good reason to decline, so he agrees.

Much to everyone’s alarm, something goes wrong with the process this time. Ridder keeps randomly “quantum leaping” into past episodes of his life, many of which involve his troubled relationship with Catrine, who struggled with depression until her early demise. At various times, Resnais leads the audience to suspect something definitely transpired between them that contributed to her death and his suicide attempt.

Resnais’s 1968 film is often considered a source of inspiration for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but it is worth noting Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime also predates Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five and the subsequent George Roy Hill film adaptation. It certainly constitutes a fractured narrative, by any standard or measure. As Ridder endures the shuffle-play of his sad history for viewers to watch, each jump gets shorter, with surreal imagery starting to intrude into what had appeared to be an otherwise mundane existence.

Arguably, Resnais’s narrative approach was considerably ahead of the other genre films of its era. However, the scenes in the Crispel Center have a cold, sterile vibe reminiscent of classic 1960s science fiction films like Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville and Dr. Heywood Broun’s early sequences in 2001: A Space Odyssey. That coldness is similarly reflected in the characters, especially Ridder, who is standoffish and often rather self-sabotaging. Likewise, Catrine is usually moody and distant—or at least that is how he remembers her.

Resnais demands the audience’s full attention, by revisiting key incidents from different perspectives, at slightly earlier or later time-frames. It might look repetitive, but there are nuances to pick up on. Ultimately, when it all comes together, it lands with devastating emotional force.

Needle in a Timestack: Ridley Adapts Silverberg

If there is one subgenre that brings out the romance in science fiction, it would be time travel (as in Richard Matheson’s Somewhere in Time, etc). Nick Mikkelsen wants to keep time travel romantic, but his desperate attempt to save his marriage might turn it into tragedy in director-screenwriter John Ridley’s Needle in a Timestack, a surprisingly faithfully adaptation of the Robert Silverberg short story, which releases in theaters and on-demand this Friday.

Nick and Janine Mikkelsen are happily married, with a dog. However, he suddenly finds they are happily married with a cat. He hates cats (who doesn’t?), so he quickly deduces someone has altered their timeline. In their near future (which looks a lot like the here and now), time travel is a thing for those who can afford it. Changing the past to influence the future is strictly forbidden, but it happens all the time.

Mikkelsen tries to “back-up” their marriage, but it is not sufficient to stop Janine’s wealthy ex-husband Tommy Hambleton. He is determined to get her back, so after a particular severe time distortion results in Mikkelsen’s alternate marriage to his old flame, Alex Leslie, Mikkelsen decides to fight fire with fire and jaunt back himself.

Ridley’s adaptation of Silverberg keeps all the clever parts, while shrewdly cranking up the romantic vibe. The well-balanced balanced results should appeal to fans of the author, as well as light time travel romances. Yet, there is an element of darkness to the film that effectively cautions against rashly fooling around with the time-space continuum.

Long Story Short

This is a film Andrew Marvell and Robert Herrick would approve of—or so we assume. Honestly, all anyone ever remembers of them are “time’s winged chariot” and “gather ye rosebuds while ye may.” A procrastinator like Teddy isn’t very good at seizing the day, but he will learn his lesson through drastic fantastical intercession in screenwriter-director-co-star Josh Lawson’s Long Story Short, which releases this Friday on VOD.

When Teddy met Leanne, it was certainly eventful. It took him forever to finally pop the question, but even after he did, he only agreed to set a date because of a mysterious stranger’s meddling. Weirdly, she also gave them a strange, mystical tin can that holds the uncanny and inconvenient power of flashing Teddy forward one year, every ten or fifteen minutes or so.

Much to his alarm, Teddy finds himself skipping over Leanne’s pregnancy, the birth of their daughter, and the increasing tensions threatening their marriage. He also finds himself forgetting their anniversary, over and over. With the help of his ever-loyal best friend Sam, Teddy tries to fix his life and stop the fast-forwarding phenomenon, naturally using Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day as a model.

Long Story Short is a bit like the dark and downbeat Adam Sandler vehicle Click, but it is funnier, more optimistic, and generally more pleasant to spend time with. Even when things look really bad, Lawson retains the possibility Teddy can still fix things, or at least improve them.

Moorhead & Benson’s Synchronic

It might be a trip, but it isn’t necessarily fun to take. However, it is great to watch from the safety of the audience’s perspective. In this case, the very latest designer drug has an especially heavy kick. It alters the mind’s perspective of time, inducing literal time travel. Of course, getting back is the difficult part in Synchronic, the latest film from Moorhead & Benson (a.k.a. Justin Benson & Aaron Moorhead), which just opened in actual theaters (but obviously not in the City).

Steve Danube and Dennis Dannelly have been seeing some pretty horrifying things recently when responding to calls as New Orleans paramedics. The crime scenes are inexplicably surreal, but there is one commonality, the newest synthetic: Synchronic. Sadly, double-pronged tragedy will soon hit very close to home for both first responders. Dannelly’s daughter Brianna will mysteriously disappear while taking Synchronic at a college party and Danube will be diagnosed with a brain tumor. As fate would have it, the growth is right above his pineal gland.

Sick of the destruction wrought by Synchronic, Danube buys up all the remaining borderline-legal stock, but doing so, he draws the attention of a stranger who knows its time-traveling secret. Evidently, it works through the pineal gland, which usually calcifies for those who reach their third responsible decade or so, but Danube’s has been kept ironically and unhealthily young. To find Brianna, he will take a series of spectacularly bad trips, with each one steadily depleting his supply.

Moorhead & Benson are emerging as masters of genre films that are mind-bending, but also powerfully emotionally charged. As with their prior collaborations, Benson handles the screenwriting on his own, but Synchronicity is clearly very much shaped and informed by their partnership. To a large extent, the film portrays all the hard work necessary to make bromance work, long after the equivalent of the bro honeymoon. Yet, they still pull us in with an intriguing genre hook—in this case a take on time travel that we really haven’t seen before.

Anthony Mackie is flat-out terrific as Danube. It is a complex portrayal of a flawed man, who shifts from being angry at the world and life in general to an acute concern over some very extreme developments—that’s called growing up. He banters and spars with Jamie Dornan’s Dannelly quite effectively, but the chemistry he develops with Ally Ioannides, as Brianna, is even more interesting. It is the kind of jury-rigged family relationships that are so important in real-life, but are rarely seen on film.

Animation First ’20: The County Fair (short)

Forget about Seth MacFarlane’s Ted. These Belgian plastic figurines had perfected the foul-mouthed toy shtick long before he ever came along. Actually, they keep it relatively clean during their latest misadventure, but Cowboy and Indian are just as stupid, self-centered, and offensive as they ever were in Vincent Patar & Stephane Aubier’s latest short film in the A Town Called Panic universe, The County Fair, which screens as part of a showcase for the production company Autour de Minuit, during this year’s Animation First Festival.

Fans will not be surprised when Cowboy and Indian tank their latest test at school. Horse, their mature guardian is so disgusted he threatens to withhold the tickets he bought for this year’s county fair. This will be sufficient motivation for the two dim-witted toys to knuckle down and ace the make-up test. However, when events conspire to still prevent them from attending the fair, they do what any wildly irresponsible cartoon character would do. First, they try stealing tickets, then they resort to time travel to avoid the obstacles in their way.

SBIFF ’20: James vs. His Future Self

It is sort of like Looper, but the purpose of the time travel is love rather than contract killing. After years of research, James invented a process for time travel, but he had lost the love of his life long before that. Bitter over his life choices, the scruffy scientist uses his own method to try to convince his younger self to concentrate on the woman he loves instead in Jeremy LaLonde’s James vs. His Future Self, which screens during the 2020 Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

James is intellectually brilliant, but an emotional idiot. Even though he is highly attracted to his co-worker friend Courtney, he is too consumed with his work to make any sort of advance. His older self will explain, in quite rough terms, what a mistake that is, but it is almost impossible to get through his younger self’s thick head. Nevertheless, the junior James agrees to finally act on his feelings, in order to make old bitter James (or “Uncle Jimmy” as he is forced to call him) go away. Initially, it all comes as a pleasant surprise to Courtney, who had largely given up on him. Unfortunately, the present-day James hasn’t really changed his obsessive, preoccupied ways yet.

LaLonde and co-screenwriter-co-star Jonas Chernick bring a fresh twist to time travel science fiction, even though they are not overly obsessed with the quantum mechanics of the space time continuum. Their focus is more on the personal, particularly James’ relationship with his older self. Most viewers would probably classify it as a time-travel rom-com, but it has a surprisingly bittersweet sensibility. It shares a kinship with The Wrong Todd (which could even be described as poignant at times), substituting time travel for parallel universes.

Speed of Life: A Time Travel Ode to Bowie

He wrote “Space Oddity” and starred in The Man Who Fell to Earth. David Bowie brought science fiction into rock & roll better than anyone, so he probably would have been amused by the fanciful notion his death could so unbalance the universe, it tears a wormhole into the space-time continuum. That is exactly what happens in director-screenwriter Liz Manashil’s Speed of Life, which releases today on VOD platforms.

January 10, 2016 is a particularly fateful day for June Hoffman. First, her favorite recording artist, David Bowie, passes on to the great glitter club in the sky. Next, her boyfriend Edward Karp is ripped through the wormhole caused by his passing. Rather awkwardly, they were having a “we need to have a talk” sort of argument when he disappeared. For the next three decades, she lives in a state of limbo hoping he will re-materialize, as indeed he does, just when she is due to move into a dystopian state-mandated retirement home on her 60^th birthday.

Karp has not aged a second, but society is now a watered-down version of Logan’s Run, requiring communal early bird dinners at sixty, rather than death at thirty. She had intended to run away with her torch-carrying friend Samuel, but Karp’s arrival complicates everything.

Speed of Life is a heartfelt film that features several nicely turned performances, so there is definitely stuff there to like. With that stipulation, it must be noted Manashil does not have a strong grasp on the mechanics of time-travel narratives. Ultimately, she sort of tries to have her temporal cake and eat it too, resulting in an ending that makes no sense whatsoever. She also seems to be uncomfortable handling dystopian themes, because the nearly sixty-year old Hoffman appears to live in a bizarrely sunny and laidback Brave New World. Frankly, it is never clear just how much urgency there is to the countdown to 60. On top of all that, the brief 75-minute feature feels conspicuously padded with a subplot involving Samuel’s daughter Laura and her new neighbor Phillip, which never pays off to any meaningful degree.

Tribeca ’19: See You Yesterday

The space-time continuum is so un-woke. After inventing time travel for her high school science project, Claudette “CJ” Walker keeps popping back in time, in order to save her older brother from a problematic police shooting. Unfortunately, each trip seems to make things worse. You might think a teen whiz kid would have read enough science fiction to know bad things happen when you try to alter the past. Yet, she persists anyway in Stefon Bristol’s Netflix-produced See You Yesterday, which premiered during the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival.

Initially, Walker and her platonic bestie Sebastian Thomas were only thinking about scholarships. Unfortunately, she soon realizes it has very practical and personal applications when her big brother Calvin is fatally shot. Obviously, this is brand new technology, so there are limits on how far back and how often they can jump. They will devise some work arounds, but the unforgiving nature of the space-time continuum remains a cold, hard fact.

The police shooting is about as potentially divisive catalyst as you can imagine, but Bristol depicts it in less abrasive and polarizing terms than viewers will probably expect. Nevertheless, the police in Yesterday are still basically clichés, with no real individuality. Frankly, the film would have been more compelling if the cops in question were also shown to be more-or-less decent, but were driven by misunderstandings and circumstance to commit a fatal mistake, making it a tragedy all the way around.

Nonetheless, Yesterday has a surprise cameo that will win over any fan of time travel science fiction, even if they are card-carrying members of Patrolmen’s Benevolent. More importantly, the two young stars, Eden Duncan-Smith and Dante Crichlow are an extraordinarily winning and charismatic on-screen duo. Honestly, Crichlow’s agents should be pitching him to be the live action Miles Morales (from Spider-Verse), because he can totally combine teen angst and science nerd cred. The same is true for Jonathan Nieves, who steals a few scenes as their classmate with a talent for circuitry, who makes no secret of his crush on Walker.

There is indeed a lot of logic-defying scientific double-talk in Yesterday, but Duncan-Smith and Crichlow pull it off like champs. Bristol also keeps raising the stakes and widening the scope of the temporal disruptions in ways that have a potent sense of tragic inevitability. Nacho Vigalondo’s Timecrimes is still the gold standard of time-looping head trips, but Yesterday can claim some of the sharpest written time travel business in several years.

It is refreshing to see a film in which teens are smart rather than stupid. It is also nice to see teens who really look like teens. In terms of the depiction of cops in Yesterday, it might be productive to view it in conjunction with the DC Noir pilot, based on the short fiction of George Pelecanos, which also screened at Tribeca. Ever-reliable character actor Jay O. Sanders portrays a veteran patrol officer, who personally knows the residents on his beat and probably understands the dynamics of the urban neighborhood better than the young man who raises the ire of a local drug dealer. Is it fair to expect perfection from peace officers every second of every night, year after year, regardless of the stress and dangers they encounter?

So, watch both films and get two perspectives. See You Yesterday will be easier to find in the short term. It releases May 17^th on Netflix, following its screenings at this year’s Tribeca.