Fantasia ’20: Crazy Samurai Musashi

Miyamoto Musashi was an epic figure. He was the subject of Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai Trilogy (staring Toshiro Mifune) and it took Tomu Uchida six films to do justice to his story. However, Musashi liked to keep things simple. His classic strategy treatise The Book of Five Rings usually runs under 200 pages, in translation. The latest cinematic treatment Musashi is both simple and epic. The illustrious swordsman will slice through 588 opponents during one long, continuous take in director-fight choreographer Yuji Shimomura’s Crazy Samurai Musashi, which screens as an on-demand selection of the 2020 Fantasia International Film Festival.

Previously, Musashi killed the patriarch of the Yoshioka clan, so they challenged him to a duel that is really an ambush. In addition to the clan’s loyal members and retainers, 300 mercenaries lay in wait for him. Clearly, the Yoshioka’s plan will not work out as they hope, but on the bright side, Musashi will save them a fortune in mercenaries’ wages.

Thusly begins a non-stop, uncut battle between Musashi and hundreds of opponents. There is not a heck of a lot of dialogue, but the screenplay is still credited to the one and only Sion Sono. You could almost call overkill, but in a way, the rhythmic waves of attacks become almost soothing, like the relaxion videos of the ocean tide. However, as Musashi and lead actor Tak Sakaguchi start to logically tire, Crazy Samurai becomes a legitimate performance piece. The sight of Musashi defiantly chopping down the numerically superior forces as he staggers about is truly arresting.

Fortunately for Musashi, the Yoshioka have an unfortunate habit of charging with their swords held over their heads, leaving their mid-sections conveniently exposed. It is not a winning move. Likewise, their refusal to attack from behind (perhaps a reflection of the Samurai’s Bushido code) certainly works in Musashi’s favor. Of course, practicality demands Shimomura pitch Musashi plenty of fat fastballs over the plate, so he can make it through this marathon melee.

African Violet (from Iran)

If you have seen Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, you understand difficult it must have been for Shokoo to divorce her first husband Fereydoun. A year later she married one of his friends, the considerably younger Reza. That is a lot of awkward history, yet Shokoo and Reza agree to take Fereydoun into their own home, after his children shunt him off to a nursing home. It will be difficult, but there are times when three’s company in Mona Zandi Haghighi’s African Violet, which opens virtually today.

There is so much that is implied, but left unsaid regarding Shokoo’s marriage to Fereydoun. Clearly, he was much older than she was. We can probably assume the union was not her idea. Yet, for fifteen years, they worked in concert to raise their children. It still didn’t work out. For years after their split, Fereydoun blamed Shokoo for running away with his best friend, but that really wasn’t fair. Regardless, their children inevitably took his side. Yet, Shokoo is still so grateful for his dedication as a father, she offers to care for him.

We can well understand Reza’s initial reluctance, but Shokoo cajoles him into agreement. After all, he has history with Fereydoun too. Despite resenting the old man’s presence, Reza also feels sorry for him. All three have conflicting feelings about each other, but the strange equilibrium that almost settles in will be disrupted by outsiders.

On the surface (and the next few levels down), African Violet is a quiet but keenly observed domestic drama. However, as you unpeel the layers, you start to confront the inherent inequities of Iranian society buried within. Clearly, Fereydoun’s union with Shokoo was not based on equal terms. Since she divorced and remarried, she is considered a scandalous woman by many, including her own family. Plus, it is rather ridiculous to see a brief scene of Shokoo and Reza laying in separate beds (in the same bed room), like Rob and Laura in The Dick Van Dyke Show, but that presumably says more about the Iranian production code than their marriage.

Yet again, African Violet demonstrates Iranian filmmakers’ remarkable comparative advantage for the domestic drama genre. Arguably, the Japanese film industry is their closest competitor in this respect. To this end, Haghighi coaches wonderfully subtle and understated performances from all three of her principals, while maintaining a palpable sense of compounded sadness.

Desert One: The Delta Force’s Darkest Hour

The U.S. Army’s Delta Force is feared and respected around the world, yet their first mission that most people ever heard of was a tragic disaster. That was Operation Eagle Claw, the aborted attempt to rescue the American embassy personnel held hostage in Iran. The mission was briefly depicted in the opening of the 1980s action classic, The Delta Force, but it deserves a more serious film treatment. That can sometimes be found in Barbara Kopple’s documentary Desert One, which opens virtually and in select brick-and-mortar cinemas tomorrow.

The 444-day Hostage Crisis was a constant demoralizing drumbeat that surely contributed to Jimmy Carter’s loss. Clearly, it was an unprecedented act of state-endorsed aggression, but as Ted Koppel (whose career at Nightline was made by the Hostage Crisis) notes on-camera, Carter hamstrung himself by unilaterally removing most of his options from the table. Essentially, he almost exclusively pursued a diplomatic resolution with an extremist regime already engaging in illegal behavior, that did not want to talk to him or his surrogates. In retrospect, the hostages Kopple interviews agree it was a worthy attempt, as did candidate Reagan at the time. Unfortunately, it failed.

The surviving veterans of Operation Eagle Claw go through the timeline of what happened and how it went wrong. At least one of the former Special Operators admitted he was skeptical of the plan, right from the start, but he followed his orders anyway, to serve his country and support his brothers-in-arms. In a particularly frustrating turn of events, the casualties occurred during the withdrawal from the “Desert One” rendezvous point, after Carter had already aborted the mission. Clearly, flawed intelligence and insufficient preparations for the desert conditions were contributing factors, but the film largely ascribes the incident to the “fog of war.”

It is satisfying and frankly rather overdue to see the veterans of Operation Eagle Claw finally get recognition for their service and courage. Conversely, it is sickening to watch the Ayatollah’s student captors gleefully reveling in the deaths of American servicemen and the general success of their hostage taking. By any standard of international law, it was completely illegal act of terror, but Kopple’s Iranian colleagues passively let them chortle away, unchallenged. She would never interview someone in the Trump administration in such a manner, so shame on her.

Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula

Maybe South Korea was a comparatively fortuitous location for the zombie outbreak, because it is a peninsula, with heavily fortified northern border. The country fell, but remnants of humanity endured. However, they are often more dangerous to encounter than the unthinking zombie hordes in Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula, which opens this Friday on VOD and at select theaters.

Junior army officer Han Jung-seok thought he was saving his family by getting them on the last transport out Korea, but instead, he hastened their death from an infected passenger. Only his resentful brother-in-law Goo Chul-min survives. Ironically, they are forced to seek sanctuary in Hong Kong (where in the real world, millions of Hong Kongers are eager to acquire their BNO credentials). Treated with contempt and barely scraping by, Han and Goo agree to a dodgy proposal from a HK crime boss. They are supposed to slip into Incheon, secure an abandoned armored car full of American Dollars, and bring it to the rendezvous point. For their efforts, they will get a percentage.

Of course, the zombies do not care about money, but the fortune hunters face a greater threat from a gang of former army troops, who have devolved into Mad Max-style barbarians. Yet, there are also good people surviving in the shadows, like Min-jung and her family.

Peninsula is getting a lot of angry reviews, because it is not exactly like Train to Busan, Yeon’s breakout hit. Instead, his sequel is much more action-oriented. In a sense, Peninsula is to Train what Aliens was to Alien. Yeon did not simply make the same film again, which is always a risk. Arguably, Peninsula is much less like a typical zombie film than even Train. By this time in the saga (that began with the animated Seoul Station), zombies are just part of the terrain that must be navigated. In fact, the survivors figure out clever ways to use zombies as weapons against their human foes.

Shudder: Random Acts of Violence

As a true crime writer, Todd Walkley is no Michelle McNamara or Ann Rule. His wife Kathy does not want to say it out loud, but she thinks he often lacks empathy for the victims he depicts in his Slasherman comic book. On the other hand, his indie publisher would say you can’t argue with success. Walkley is trying to find inspiration for a suitable ending, but he is about to get some unsolicited “help” from the real-life serial killer, whose crimes he chronicles in Jay Baruchel’s Random Acts of Violence, which premieres tomorrow on Shudder.

In hopes getting his mojo going again, Walkley and his friends embark on a driving tour from his Toronto home to pre-Covid ComicCon, through the very stretch of upstate New York where he grew up and the I-90 Killer stalked his victims. Everyone assumed the serial killer had “retired,” but when he sees the back issues they leave behind and hears his awkward radio interviews, the mystery murderer returns to his old ways. Soon, the killer is recreating the grisly murder scenes from Walkley’s comics and leaving him cryptic numeric voicemails.

Random starts out as a clever, uber-meta send-up of horror fandom and serial killer chic, but it runs out of originality at the midway point. Consequently, the only thing that distinguishes the standard issue second half is its sadistic brutality. Baruchel, who wrote both Goon movies and helmed sequel, clearly understands fan subcultures, but he totally loses his footing as a director. Granted, any adaptation of Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti’s graphic novel must have violence, as per the title, but in this case, the laughs suddenly stop—completely—which is problematic. The confusing flashbacks do not help either—and there sure are a lot of them.

Fantasia ’20: Fly Me to the Saitama

Saitama is a lot like New Jersey, but not quite as depressing. It is close to Tokyo, but it is definitely not part of Tokyo. Sadly, many Saitama residents developed an inferiority complex after years of Tokyo looking down on them, but a Saitama resistance will rise in Hideki Takeuchi’s adaptation of Mineo Maya’s satirical fantasy manga, Fly Me to the Saitama, which screens as an on-demand selection of the 2020 Fantasia International Film Festival.

As the son of Tokyo’s grossly corrupt governor, Momomi Hakuhodo strictly enforces the social hierarchy as the student body leader of his elite prep school. It would appear that transfer student Rei Asami has the perfect “Urban Index,” as a Tokyo native, who recently lived in the United States. However, he is actually a Saitama plant. Initially, Hakuhodo considers the mysterious Asami a threat to his authority, but he soon falls head-over-heels for the Saitama rebel. Hakuhodo will even turn his back on his father and his Tokyo birthrate, joining Asami in the Saitama underground, after he is exposed.

This timeless story of rebellion must be true, because Saitama’s most popular radio station broadcasts the story during the wrap-around framing scenes. Regardless, it is indeed a Yaoi boy’s love story, even though Hakuhodo is played by popular actress Fumi Nikaido. In the past, that might have earned the film bonus points for gender-bending, but these days, it could bring down the ire of the “own voices” censors on Saitama.

Of course, everyone should just take things in the playful spirit they were intended. Yuichi Tokunaga’s adapted screenplay quite cleverly sends up geographic snobbery. Many of the references might be lost on Americans, but if you equate Saitama with Jersey, Tokyo with New York City, and Chiba with Long Island, you will generally get the gist of it.

Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies

If ever there was a documentary that fully capitalized on the “fair use” principle, this would be it. In some ways, it serves as a fitting companion to definitive genre surveys, like In Search of Darkness and In Search of Last Action Heroes, but it transcends genres, while narrowing its focus. Danny Wolf and his many interview subjects keep track of the naked bits over the history of cinema in Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies, which releases today on VOD.

Wolf and company go back to the very beginning with Eadweard Muybridge. Ironically, some of the best stuff in the doc, is also some of the earliest, including the Evelyn Nesbit-ish artist’s model Audrey Munson, who starred as a conveniently nude model in 1915’s Inspiration, as well as long-tressed Australian swimmer Annette Kellermann, who swam with just her hair for cover in Fox’s A Daughter of the Gods.

The pre-code is duly appreciated, while the Hays-Production Code is roundly dismissed for its Puritanism, which is like shooting fish in a barrel. We also get a brisk tour through the naughty, naked exploitation films of the 1960s, but this handled with greater depth in American Grindhouse. Yet, perhaps the most familiar passages explain how the appropriation of the X-rated label gave rise to the NC-17 rating.

In terms of icons, a good deal of attention is appropriately given to Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, and Mamie Van Doren. Wolf and company also give all due to credit (or whatever) to Roger Corman’s women-in-prison movies, with context provided by Corman veterans, Joe Dante, Pam Grier, Linda Blair, and Sybil Danning. (Frankly, I’ll be very disappointed if I ever visit a women’s prison in the Philippines jungle and the warden doesn’t look like Danning.)

Marcell Jankovics’ Son of the White Mare

If Peter Max had painted Conan book covers instead of Frank Franzetta, they might have looked a lot like this film. They also would have confused the target audience. Marcell Jankovics set out to adapt several Magyar, Scythian, and Avarian folk myths, but the demands of Hungarian censors forced him to make strange alterations long the way. Yet, the resulting film was one of the most singularly auteurist animated film of its era. Its trippiness remains undiminished, as viewers can see when Marcell Jankovics’ newly restored Son of the White Mare opens virtually this Friday.

Technically, Fanyuvo (who will become known as “Tree-Shaker”) is the third son of the White Mare. As in Greek mythology, we probably really should not dwell on the implied human-animal interactions in this world. We do know Tree-Shaker gained his tree-shaking strength for his mother’s milk. After her death, Tree-Shaker sets off on a quest, like any reputable fantasy hero, to defeat three dragons, who are holding three Princesses captive in the underworld.

To help him, Tree-Shaker recruits two brawny sworn-brothers, Stone-Crumbler and Irontemperer. However, Tree-Shaker does most of the heavy lifting. Frankly, Crumbler and Temperer fail him at an alarming rate, but on the other hand, they sullenly put up with show-off behavior (they even endure weird spanking scenes).

White Mare is the sort of film that can never be fairly represented in synopsis form. You really have to see it to get it. It is much more about Jankovics’ swirling colors than the narrative blow-by-blow. Visually, it is indeed a trip. Frankly, it is rather surprising the Communist censors allowed so much openly sexual imagery, including the topless Princesses. There is also an awful lot of symbolism to unpack, especially if you are up on your Slavic folklore.

OVID.tv: Xu Bing—Phoenix (short)

China should thank Taiwan for being such a good neighbor, but that is unlikely to happen. The ROC provides a shining example of a former authoritarian government that has successfully transitioned into a democracy. Less conspicuously, but still quite significantly, it was a Taiwanese mogul who funded the completion of an enormously ambitious work of Chinese contemporary art. Producer-director Daniel Traub documents the artist and the very public work during several on-site installations in the short documentary, Xuu Bing: Phoenix, which premieres this Friday on OVID.tv.

Xu Bing is globally recognized as an important living and collectible artist, so he had the cache necessary for a commission like the Beijing Central Business District Atrium. Ordinarily, he would not accept such offers, but he was inspired by the location, or rather the sight of the hard-scrabble migrant workers, living and laboring in squalid conditions. It started with the notion of using cast-off materials from the building site itself, ultimately taking shape as a pair of legendary winged Phoenixes.

Xu started the project at a time when Chinese artists could get away with more than they can now, but the Phoenix project was temporarily put on hold, because of a ban on construction and trucking during the Olympics and formally halted after the financial crisis hit. However, Barry Lam came forward with completion funding.

Fantasia ’20: Free Country

Patrick Stein, from West Germany, is a fiercely honest cop who will investigate the politically protected, no matter the consequences. East German Markus Bach has made a career arresting those who legally guilty of violating unjust laws. Thanks to reunification, they must work together solve a brutal double murder in Christian Alvart’s Free Country, which screens as an on-demand selection of the 2020 Fantasia International Film Festival.

Back in the West, Stein opened up a corruption case against the brother of his superior, so now he is on assignment in this former-GDR backwater. He has been partnered-up with the beefy Bach, who still takes a more physical approach to police work. However, both cops are rather put-off by the town’s callous disinterest in the fate of the missing (and presumed dead) Kraft sisters. The local brass wants them close the case quickly, but they are perversely dogged, especially when they get anonymous threats. With a pregnant wife back in the FRG, Stein has more to lose, but his intuition and initiative starts to grudgingly impress the guilt-wracked Bach. As they follow-up leads, they start to suspect the Kraft sisters were actually the victim of a serial killer.

Technically, Free Country is a remake of the Spanish film Marshland, but Alvart and co-screenwriter Siegfried Kamml cleverly adapt the post-Franco thriller to reunified Germany.  The mystery and procedural stuff of both films are perfectly respectable but they are still probably on the level of what you might find in many of the grittier European crime shows on MHz. Yet, what really sets Free Country apart is the reunification angle. Alvart takes us to a very particular time and place, when former East Germans were coming to terms with the crimes of the Communist regime. Bach is just at the right level to slide through to the new unified order, while still carrying baggage from his past.

The grungy setting is also quite distinctive. Invariably, the investigation draws Stein and Bach to rusty, abandoned industrial behemoths that probably never made sense economically and were maybe only built in the first place to supply a boastful line in a long-forgotten Erich Honecker speech.

Fantasia ’20: The Old Man Movie

Milk, it does a body good—except when it causes one of those freak Soviet-era milking disasters. The titular Estonian dairy farmer remains so spooked by his rival’s misfortune, he milks the heck out of his poor bossy. Fed up with it all, she runs off, not caring that her udder will eventually explode, drowning the valley in milk. To avoid catastrophe, his city-slicker grandchildren help him search in Oskar Lehemaa & Mikk Magi’s utterly deranged stop-motion animated feature, The Old Man Movie, which screens as an on-demand selection of the 2020 Fantasia International Film Festival.

Do not look to Old Man Movie for accurate lessons in agricultural science or really any kind of real-world applications. Having lived in cities all my life, I’m still pretty sure cows do not explode like atomic bombs if they go a day without milking, but fine, let’s just run with it anyway. Regardless, that is what happened to the villainous “Old Milker,” during the black-and-white newsreel prologue, when his cow just decided to stop giving milk. Of course, he deeply resented it when another diary farmer replaced him as the town’s milk supplier.

That would be the Old Man, Priidik, Aino, and Mart’s grandfather, who is less than thrilled to have his grandchildren for the summer. The teenagers, Priidik and Aino are not too happy about it either, but Mart, the young science geek is delighted. It is the sensitive Priidik who causes all the trouble by literally leaving the barn door open. Reluctantly, Grandpa takes the teens with him to search for his cow, leaving Mart behind, to create more chaos with his mad genius tinkering. Meanwhile, Old Milker is also hunting for Grandpa’s cow, determined to behead her, before she explodes.

In the Life of Music: Cambodia’s Most Recent Oscar Submission

There are many contradictory stories regarding the fate of Sinn Sisamouth during the Cambodian genocide, but as a popular, Western-influenced entertainer, they invariably end with his death. He is almost certainly gone, but his music is not forgotten. In fact, his beloved standard, “Champa Battambang” plays an important role for a rural Cambodian family, before, during, and after the horrors of the killing fields in director-screenwriters Caylee So & Sok Visal’s In the Life of Music, announced to release today on VOD.

Amid the relative calm of 2007, Cambodian-American Hope has returned to her ailing mother’s homeland, to meet and make peace with her Aunt Bo and Uncle Vanny. They are both thrilled to host her. Somehow her mother survived and left them behind, but they cannot blame her for that.

As Hope and Vanny make their way to his provincial village, the film flashes back to 1968, when her parents, Chy and Phally, fell in love during a special summer concert. Their first meeting was a little awkward, but the chemistry was there and the closing performance of “Champa Battambang” totally sealed the deal. Of course, they try to stay together to some extent during the concentration camp horrors of 1976, but it is not easy. Chy is also running a risk befriending Mith, a former songwriter transparently based on Sisamouth. Initially, he is a target for the Khmer Rouge’s contempt, until they decided Angkor needs an inspiring propaganda song, but he might not have the stomach for such a commission.

In the Life is a solid decade spanning family drama performed with great sensitivity by its aptly-cast ensemble. The editing could have been leaner and tighter, but So & Visal definitely convey a vivid sense of a very particularly place, at very distinct times. You can feel the heat and the humidity wafting off the screen. Small World Small Band’s musical numbers, performed as the 1968 traveling band, will also stimulate waves of viewer nostalgia, even if you are unfamiliar with 1960s Cambodian pop music.

Apocalypse ’45: The War Against Japanese Militarism

If you think films produced by the U.S. military during WWII were merely “jingoistic” propaganda, you haven’t seen very many. Yes, films like With the Marines at Tarawa agreed an American victory was critically important, but they did not white-wash the harsh realities of battle. They also reflect a concern for documenting history that led to the dispatch of numerous military film crews. It turns out there was still more unseen footage of the war in the Pacific awaiting discovery in the National Archives, which film restoration specialist Ernest Savage and editor Paul Marengo digitally “cleaned up” and integrated into Erik Nelson’s documentary, Apocalypse ’45, opening virtually tomorrow (ahead of its premiere on the Discovery Channel).

“Apocalypse” is a strong word, but the destruction documented in this film is stark, even by our current jaded standards. It starts with footage shot during the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, by the great John Ford (whose war-time filmmaking activities were nicely covered in the documentary, Five Came Back), and ends with the Hiroshima’s post-atomic landscape. However, it is worth noting the latter footage was filmed by American servicemen providing medical treatment to Japanese survivors.

The rediscovered and restored archival footage is accompanied by the oral history of twenty-four surviving American combat veterans, including the centenarian Lt. Col. Thomas Vaucher and Corporal Hershal “Woody” Williams, the last surviving Congressional Medal of Honor recipient from Iwo Jima. Despite their advanced years, they still recall the events in question with vivid clarity.

Of course, the significance of Hiroshima hangs over the film, but Nelson and company handle it with unusual thoughtfulness. Throughout the film, they thoroughly explain Imperial militarist regime’s celebration of sacrifice and death, clearly establishing the extent to which they weaponized the civilian population. Every man, woman, and child were expected to fight the anticipated American invasion, literally to the death. The compounded horror could well have been worse than the two atomic bombs (and without them, you might not be reading this review right now).

Sputnik: The Soviets Brought Back a Passenger

There were good reasons why the Soviets placed their cosmodrome on the Baikonur steppe in Kazakhstan. The flat plains allowed for unobstructed radio signals and the dry climate was good for launch windows. The remote location was also far from observing eyes. The last point will be particularly key when cosmonaut Konstantin Veshnyakov is brought to a secret facility Kazakhstan to supposedly rehab after his “heroic” mission. However, Veshnyakov brought back a surprise “passenger” in Egor Abramenko’s Sputnik, which releases on VOD and in very select theaters this Friday.

Veshnyakov and his co-pilot are anticipating their heroes’ welcome when they hear something on the outer hull of their capsule. Next thing we see, a Kazakh herder finds Veshnyakov and an unsightly mess at the capsule’s crash site.

Supposedly, it will be Dr. Tatyana Klimova’s job to determine what happened to the cosmonaut, in physical and psychological terms. Like House M.D., she is better at tricky diagnoses than consent paperwork. As a result, she was awkwardly available for Semiradov’s proposition. He is in charge of the remote lab, so he is probably something like GRU, as well as military. Regardless, he is most definitely not telling Dr. Klimova the full story. He knows there is something symbiotic inside Veshnyakov that is decidedly deadly—and consequently, potentially valuable.

Set in 1983, the absolute nadir of Soviet Socialist hopelessness, Sputnik has an appropriately grungy look and oppressive vibe. You can certainly understand why cosmonauts would want to spend months in a tin can. The different setting and context help set Sputnik apart from the classic Alien, a tough but inevitable comparison just about every horror-from-outer-space movie has to contend with. In fact, Sputnik is probably the most successful film in the sub-genre to create its own identity since Tobe Hooper’s Life Force.

Van der Oest’s The Bay of Silence

An artistic, jet-setting childhood sounds like fun, but it messed up art-photographer Rosalind Pallisher pretty deeply. Unfortunately, Will Walsh did not realize that until after the birth of their infant son. Tragedy will stretch their marriage to the breaking point in Paula van der Oest’s The Bay of Sillence, which releases on VOD this Friday.

It was a whirlwind romance that culminates in the titular Italian body of water. Both are happy when pregnancy quickly follows, but a freak accident precipitates a premature delivery and a persistent case of postpartum depression. Milton Hunter, her gallerist and former step-father, assures Walsh everything is fine until Pallisher suddenly disappears with their infant son and her twin daughters from a previous relationship.

Sadly, when Walsh finally tracks down Pallisher, he finds their son is dead. She is the obvious suspect, but he also harbors suspicions regarding the missing nanny. He also learns his wife had a history of depression and schizophrenia from her mother, who suddenly reappears back in her life.

Presumably, Lisa St. Aubin de Teran’s source novel derives Du Maurier-esque suspense from the family angst and melodrama, but it just doesn’t translate to the screen here. Screenwriter Caroline Goodall and van der Oest spend a full thirty minutes on exposition and set-up, building towards the death of an infant, which they then keeping rubbing in the audience’s nose. Seriously, there is no finesse when it comes to that awkward plot turn.

In fact, Bay holds very few surprises as a thriller, because the supposedly mystery villain practically looks directly into the camera and tells the audience not to trust him. Frankly, there is so much telegraphing in this movie, it should be sponsored by Western Union.

Max Reload and the Nether Blasters

The so-called “Harbinger” has ambitions to subjugate the human race, because that is what super-villains do, but he is also a bit of a game-player, like Death in The Seventh Seal. His latest game of choice is the video game. He is using a notoriously unreleased cartridge game that a hardcore nerd like Max “Reload” Jenkins cannot resist. When his play-through goes viral, so does the virus to end all viruses in Scott Condit & Jeremy Tremp’s Max Reload and the Nether Blasters, which releases today on VOD.

Jenkins is a talented coder and gamer, but he drives his best friends Liz and Reggie crazy, because he can never play like a reliable team-member. Obviously, he is due for a lesson and the Harbinger will provide the impetus. Reload Jenkins is crazy about the ultra-retro Nether Dungeon franchise, so when a mysterious old man drops off a copy of the fabled unreleased sequel, he jumps at the chance to play it. It turns out there is a true Doomsday virus embedded in the code, which his hacker nemesis inconveniently spams out to the world. Those infected by it turn into glowing eyed zombies.

Fortunately, there is someone who understands what is going on. Eugene Wylder, the original creator of the Nether Dungeon game. Of course, he and Reload bicker like cats-and-dogs, because they are so alike. They might mess up the one chance to save the world, by beating the Harbinger at his own game.

Nether Blasters cleverly channels the spirit of 1980s video game movies like The Last Starfighter and WarGames, while bringing the game-play technology up-to-the-minute. For gamers, there is a good mix of old school and contemporary gaming, whereas science fiction fans will dig the 1980s nostalgia. The latter is reinforced by surprisingly endearing performance of Martin Kove (the Cobra Kai sensei in The Karate Kid), as Jenkins’ guardian grandpa.

There is also some 1990s nostalgia in the form of Kevin Smith playing the three friends’ boss at the videogame store, but that isn’t as much fun (yet, its still some of his most endurable work in years). For further geek cred, Wil Wheaton narrates an in-film documentary on the history of the Nether Dungeon game.

Ted Lasso Finally Coaches True Football

Pigskin football evolved out of rugby and association football (a.k.a. soccer) way back when, so a gridiron coach like Lasso out to have soccer deep down in his genes—way, way down there. Regardless, he is a good coach who has a knack for reading his players. At least that is what the former NCAA Division II champion figured when he accepted an offer to coach a professional English football team. However, people are counting on him to fail in co-creators Bill Lawrence & Jason Sudeikis’ Ted Lasso, which premieres this Friday on Apple TV.

Lasso went viral with his goofy white-guy dance moves after his team won the Division II championship, but he is completely inexperienced when it comes to association football. His aw-shucks Kansan persona is completely out-of-place in the English Premiere league, but that is why new AFC Richmond owner Rebecca Welton hired him. She just acquired control of the team as part of a messy tabloid-fodder divorce from her notoriously philandering husband. To get back at him, she wants to sabotage his beloved team. Enter Lasso.

Of course, the first weeks will be rocky. Yet, Lasso has a few not-so-secret weapons. The first is the loyal Assistant Coach Beard, who is a quick study when it comes to any sport. The other is his genuineness. He truly cares about his players, which even skeptics like cynical sports reporter Trent Crimm will begrudgingly admit. The trick will be winning over bitter past-his-prime team captain Roy Kent and Richmond’s prima donna striker, while Welton secretly schemes to undermine him.

Based on the first three episodes out of embargo, Ted Lasso is a pleasant enough sitcom-style comedy, but real football fans hoping for a lot smart, inside Premiere League satire might be disappointed. Lasso, who was originally created for a series of NBC sports promos before getting the Apple TV call-up, is more of a vehicle for gentle fish-out-of-water comedy than a thinly veiled expose like Armando Bo’s wickedly droll El Presidente.

Still, there are usually one two big laughs in each of the first three episodes, with regular chuckles peppered in between. By sitcom standards, that’s not bad, but it isn’t the stuff of big event, subscription selling streaming TV.

Hard Night Falling, with Dolph Lundgren

Mystery-thriller fans like to think of Interpol as an agency of globe-trotting super-cops, but they have really just been bureaucrats serving as an international clearing house informing member countries of known criminals. Frustratingly, the organization has been corrupted in recent years by China and Russia, who have abused Interpol’s subpoena system to harass dissidents and human rights activists. Honestly, the nation of Spain should be ashamed of itself for arresting Bill Browder at Putin’s behest. Still, it is much more fun to think Interpol as an elite group of crime-fighters. That is definitely the sort of fictional Interpol agent Dolph Lundgren plays in Giorgio Bruno’s Hard Night Falling, which hits regular Prime tomorrow.

Michael Anderson and his three team-mates busted the arms dealers they were tracking, but thanks to the interference of the Italian cops, their latest customers got away. Unfortunately, Anderson will quickly find them again that night, when he joins his daughter Diana and gently-estranged wife Mary at a swanky banquet in fabulous chateau outside Rome. The reunion goes well until a heavily armed gang takes the party hostage. Being a pro, Anderson makes a gunman just in time to hustle his daughter to safety, but he is separated from his wife during the scuffling. Of course, he made the right choice, especially since his wife is a doctor, who will definitely be useful to have around on a night like this.

Things get pretty Die Hard-ish from here on out, but two-thirds of the action comes from Anderson’s team fighting their way in than from the big guy inside. Regardless, the action here is pretty good. Bruno produced Lundgren’s last neo-Poliziotteschi, The Tracker, which was more stylish and probably a better showcase for its star. However, the stunt work and fight choreography are definitely superior in Hard Night.

In fact, most of the best fights feature Natalie Burn, who is quite impressive as Emma, the Black Widow-ish member of Anderson’s team. This is a vast improvement over her last film with Lundgren, the rather grim Acceleration. If it were not for the production shutdown (thanks Xi Jinping), Hard Night could have really given her some momentum.

We Hunt Together, on Showtime

These killers are many things the media loves to champion. He is an immigrant, who was forced to serve as a child soldier in the DRC. She is a genius, who has works in the sex industry after suffering a childhood trauma. The cops on their trail are everything their colleagues resent. He is a former internal affairs investigator and she is a self-medicating addict. Yet, both duos will be surprisingly evenly matched, thanks the dysfunctional chemistry they each share in writer-creator Gaby Hull’s six-part We Hunt Together, which premieres tomorrow on Showtime.

Baba Lenga was working for tips as a washroom attendant while waiting for his asylum application to be granted when he met Freddy Layne. Later that night he saved her from her violent date. He did not kill the creepy yuppie at the time, but they will hatch a plan to finish the job a few days later. At that point, Layne has the emotionally needy Lenga completely ensnared with her charms. She will manipulate the trained killer like a puppet on a string, to do what he does best.

It will be profoundly cynical DS Lola Franks and her gratingly cheerful new senior partner, DI Jackson Reid who are called to the site of their first murder. She resents his anti-corruption background and his lack of homicide experience, but she comes to appreciate his intelligence. She still has trouble with his chipper attempts at comradery, but they both see through Layne’s attempts at deception.

The parallel between the pairings of Layne and Congolese Lenga with that of Franks and the Gambian-born Reid is rather effective, precisely because Hull never overplays it. It gives Reid (and viewers) a vantage point to understand and empathize with Lenga, but that is as far as it goes.

There is a lot of seductive game-playing going on between Layne and Lenga that is sure to be featured prominently in promo clips, but the best stuff in Hunt is Reid and Franks’ procedural work and odd couple bantering. They make a great on-screen team, who could easily carry further seasons tracking different killers.

Out Stealing Horses

Norway and Sweden have a close but complicated relationship, as Trond Sander’s family perfectly illustrates. He now lives in a remote cabin in Sweden, but in some ways, he never left the northern Norwegian logging country where he spent a formative summer in his early teens. Grieving a recent loss, Sander looks back on his last summer with his father in Hans Petter Moland’s adaptation of Per Petterson’s novel, Out Stealing Horses, which releases today on demand and in limited theaters.

After the death of his beloved wife, late-middle-aged Sander moved to rural Sweden (just before Y2K), where his thoughts often turn to his father. He was a manly, taciturn man, who spent long stretches away from his family. Back in 1948, his son assumes it was due to curmudgeonly chauvinism, but he will come to doubt that conclusion during the course of the summer.

The drama starts for Sander on the morning he and his friend Jon Haug go “out stealing horses.” By that, they mean joy-riding wild horses they corral in the woods. Unbeknownst to Sander, Haug is in a dark mood, because of a recent family tragedy. Sander is not particularly sensitive, but he still notices how the unfortunate events expose fissures in the Haug family that also seem to involve his father. Yes, Sweden will also factor into the events that unfold.

Since Out Stealing is set during the immediate post-war era, it rather logically follows that the Sanders and Haugs are still carrying baggage from the occupation. Yet, it is a relatively minor, but important element, in Sander’s coming of age story. There is a whirlwind of love unrequited, love not-so-secretly requited, simmering jealousy, and bitter regret swirling about him. We can certainly understand why this summer interlude had such a profound psychological impact on him. However, the 1999 sequences are not merely tacked on buffers, but actually hold quite a bit of significance of their own.

Twilight Zone: The Howling Man

It was sort of horror and sometimes science fiction, but The Twilight Zone was really a genre unto itself. Still, it is somewhat strange to think how few of the old school horror movie stars turned up in guest-starring roles (of course, Karloff had his own competing shows at the time, Thriller and The Veil). However, not only did the great John Carradine take a detour through the “dimension of sight, sound, and mind,” his episode also happens to be one of the most gothic of the series. Yet, it remains a perennial fan and critic favorite. Celebrating its 60^th anniversary this year, “The Howling Man” (S2E5) airs this Monday morning on Syfy.

Charles Beaumont, the third great Zone writer after Rod Serling and Richard Matheson, adapted “Howling Man” from his own short story—and he has been ripped off several times since (most notably by I Trapped the Devil). During the aftermath of WWI, David Ellington commenced a walking tour of southern Europe in search of meaning. Caught in a freak deluge, he tries to take refuge in an austere abbey, but the rustic brothers try to turn him away. It is only when he collapses from weakness that they relent. However, when he comes to, he confronts Brother Jerome, demanding to know why they imprisoned the bearded man wailing in a dungeon cell. Of course, the monk tries to convince him that is not a man, but rather someone much more sinister.

Tightly helmed by veteran TV director Douglas Heyes, “The Howling Man” has lost none of its power in sixty years. It is scary, but it is even more disturbing on a philosophical and metaphysical level. It is easy for viewers to place themselves in Ellington’s position and imagine the resulting guilt and torment. Technically, it is also a great TV production, featuring sets worthy of the old Universal monster movies and cinematographer George T. Clemens’ surprisingly dramatic angles and framing.

A Thousand Cuts: Duterte’s War on Journalists

Why is Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte still popular in his own country? Despite the lost livelihoods of Filipino fishermen, he has basically conceded China’s claims of sovereignty of the entire South China Sea. Even though he presides over large Catholic and Muslim populations, he continues to cozy up to Xi’s regime, while it razes churches, persecutes believers of all faiths, and wages a campaign of cultural genocide and mass incarceration against the Muslim Uyghurs. It certainly helps that Duterte shares the CCP’s hostility towards a free press. Ramona S. Diaz follows one of his leading journalistic gadflies as she deals with trolling, death threats, and specious criminal charges in A Thousand Cuts, which releases virtually tomorrow.

Maria Ressa interviewed Duterte several times during his rise to power. As we can see from the clips Diaz incorporates, she was tough, but always respectful. She clearly was not “out to get him” from the start. Nonetheless, her online news outlet Rappler aggressively covered his “war on drugs” and the extralegal killings it inspired, which inevitably brought her into conflict with his government.

Diaz also follows Mocha Uson, a former pop idol who now serves as the field marshal of Duterte’s social media army, as well as his hand-picked senate candidate and a long-shot opposition rival. Frankly, Diaz is so fair in her approach, she shows Uson’s human side, even while capturing all the slimy trolling she facilitates.

Thousand Cuts is all observation, with no talking head interviews to tell us what to think. Nevertheless, what she records is undeniably damning. After watching Duterte’s orchestrated harassment of Ressa and Rappler reporters, it is clear the free press in the Philippines faces dire, existential threats—and consequently, so does its democracy. Diaz even managed to affix an up-to-the-moment post-script that is impressive in its nimbleness, but chilling in its implications.

Waiting for the Barbarians

In this far desert country, the temperature is hot, the air is dry, and the allegories run heavy. This is the distant frontier of an unnamed European empire. The uniforms look French, but the geography resembles Eurasia. During his tenire, the unassuming Magistrate has largely maintained a climate of laissez-faire tolerance with the locals. Of course, when an inquisitor from the capitol comes looking for trouble, he will inevitably find it in Ciro Guerra’s Waiting for the Barbarians, which releases tomorrow on VOD.

We know by now nothing good comes from a visit by the Inspector General. That would be Colonel Joll, who is conducting a fact-finding mission along the frontier. Much to the Magistrate’s surprise, he is bizarrely interested in two rather pathetic sheep thieves he is holding in custody. After a ferocious interrogation session, Joll and his troops tear off after the suspects the broken men named.

The world-weary Magistrate fully understands the Colonel’s campaign is a self-fulfilling prophecy (as does the audience), but Joll is a power unto himself. Despite the precariousness of his situation, the old bureaucrat will do his best to make things right for at least one of Joll’s victims, a nomadic woman, who stirs feelings of both pity and longing within him.

The very title of Barbarians conspicuously evokes a Pogo-esque response, along the lines of: “but we were the barbarians.” There is absolutely no subtlety here whatsoever. Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee adapted his own novel, but the dreaminess of the book becomes the broad strokes and bombast of propaganda theater.

Nevertheless, Mark Rylance (the king of nebbish angst) does his best to portray the Magistrate with tragic sensitivity. He also develops an intriguingly complicated relationship with the Woman, played by Mongolian thesp Gana Bayarsaikhan, but the narrative surrounding it is awkward and clunky.

Frankly, Johnny Depp seems rather bored going through the motions of Joll’s villainy. On the other hand, Robert Pattinson mostly engages as bursts of inexplicable anger as Officer Mandel, like he knew his part would be consigned to the film’s margins (while still looming large over the one-sheet).

Oskouei’s Sunless Shadows

It is tricky to prosecute, but domestic violence is definitely a crime in the West, whereas in Iran there is no legal recourse against an abusive husband or father. Consequently, many desperate young women take matters into their own hands. The criminal justice system should hardly be surprised, but is still coldly unforgiving. Acclaimed Iranian documentarian Mehrdad Oskouei returns to the Centre for the Correction and Rehabilitation of Young Adults to document a group of girls convicted of killing their predatory husbands and fathers in Sunless Shadows, which screens virtually as part of MoMI’s film series, Bound Unbound: Four by Mehrdad Oskouei.

If you have already seen Oskouei’s Starless Dreams, you know the girls at the detention facility really are just girls. Yet, many of them were already married—and they have all been convicted of murder. Most of them really were not thinking clearly when they committed their crimes. They were just wanted to make the violence stop. Those who acted together with their mothers are now tormented with maternal concern. Yet, ironically, for most of the incarcerated women, the Centre is unlikely shelter from the exploitative men in their families and society at large.

The irony further compounds when they are visited by a recently released fellow prisoner, who admits she returns often. While there are advantages to the relative freedom of contemporary Iranian society, she misses her friends and the protective environment the shelter offers.

Just when you think Starless cannot get any sadder, Oskouei finds something even more poignant. He focuses on the personal rather than the political, but it is impossible to miss the profound misogyny and inequity of Iranian society reflected in each of the women’s stories.

Coma: A Russian Dreamscape

Prepare to plumb the collective unconscious, but it is deeper and more real than Yung ever imagined. It is a shared-dream world inhabited by coma patients, shaped by everyone’s aggregated memories. This is indeed a trippy place to suddenly awaken, but it holds even greater secrets that will eventually be revealed in Nikita Argunov’s Coma, which releases today on DVD and VOD.

When you wake up in “Coma,” you do not remember who you are (so come up with a nickname you can live with), but there are flashes of memory regarding what you were. It is an unstable world, populated with shadowy monsters called reapers, so “the Architect” is lucky someone expected him and dispatched a team of soldiers to collect him. He is pretty clueless at first, but eventually his ability to build things with mind surfaces under stress. “The Architect” (there was one in The Matrix too, but he was very different) is a lot like Neo, “the Chosen One,” but there is something nagging him in his repressed memory about how he went into his coma in the first place.

Coma boasts some legitimately eye-popping visuals. Previous Russian special effects-heavy genre films have been decidedly hit-or-miss (take The Guardians, please!). However, Coma is legit. As an added bonus, the twists and turns in the screenplay (credited to Argunov, Timofei Dekin, and Aleksey Gravitskiy) hold together surprisingly well. The only real drawback is the cold fish ensemble, but fortunately they are often dwarfed by the spectacle of the fantastical world. Also, they have been dubbed, which admittedly could rob their original performances of some of their texture and nuance.

Rinal Mukhametov is okay as the bewildered Architect and Anton Pampushnyy is sufficiently thuggish as Phantom, the hard-charging squad leader who arranges his initial reception. Probably Lyubov Aksonova fares best as Fly, the woman they are both interested in, but the big villain arouses our suspicions right from his initial entrance.

Skin Walker, Co-Starring Udo Kier

You could definitely say Regine has family issues. She thought her deformed half-brother Isaac died in child-birth, but he might have survived to become the monster killing people in the woods. Either way, her father is still Udo Kier, so she certainly did not have it easy growing up. She has returned for her unbeloved grandmother’s funeral, but stays to uncover her family secrets in Christian Neuman’s Skin Walker, which releases today on VOD and DVD.

Regine had a traumatic childhood, as her fractured memories and flashbacks cannot attest. Just when she is poised to start a new life with her grungy boyfriend, she returns home to the family chateau. Claus, her old pops is not exactly welcoming. Instead, it is her mother’s old lover Robert who wants to talk to her. Partly, he wants to warn her about Isaac, but sees her as a means to reconnect with her mother. In fact, things get a little weird between them. Unless, Regine is just plain nuts.

Buckle up sports fans, because Neuman’s jarring narrative shifts could cause whiplash. Honestly, Skin Walker plays like a film that had two or three cast-members die during production and was subsequently cobbled together by the producers, as best they could. Logic goes out the window, but it almost takes on the up-and-down thrills of a roller coaster—almost but not quite.

Red Penguins: The Pittsburgh Penguins Russian Co-Venture

Who knew documentaries about Russian hockey would become a sub-genre in themselves, but here is the third getting serious distribution. They have the obvious advantage of a sports topic, but they also use athletics as a proxy to examine larger geo-political developments. In this case, when the Pittsburgh Penguins looked for opportunities in Russia, they found excitement and danger instead. Gabe Polsky chronicles their short but eventful venture in Red Penguins, which releases tomorrow on VOD.

Quick history lesson for Millennials: we won the Cold War, the Socialist USSR lost, and it was a good thing for the world. Consequently, the Red Army hockey team, the pride of Soviet propaganda, was in danger of financial collapse. Their “Ice Palace” had fallen into disrepair and the team could not even afford new jerseys. Seeing an opportunity, Howard Baldwin, of the Pittsburgh Penguins ownership group, negotiated a financial-management arrangement with the Red Army team.

The Penguin group gave them an infusion of cash, with the expectation the team redubbed The Russian Penguin would start generating merchandising revenue and serve as a pipeline of Russian talent to the Pittsburgh team. Steven Warshaw was the young, crazy marketing kid who was supposed to make it happen.

Somewhat logically, the history of the Russian Penguins parallels that of Russia’s political history. The Yeltsin years were wild and rather dangerous, but also a good deal of fun. However, the fun came to a stop when the mobbed-up oligarchs solidified their holdings under Putin. The Pittsburghers’ Russian adventure parallels that storyline.

Initially, Red Penguins is a larky doc that reminisces over the strippers who worked in an underground club in the Ice Palace basement, whom Warshaw eventually brought up on the ice to provide mid-period entertainment. Indeed, Warshaw shrewdly fell back on those old marketing standards, sex and booze, which really started to pay dividends when combined with a hammy mascot and improved play on the ice. Unfortunately, the party came to an end when mobsters started circling the team, with the winking encouragement of the team’s Red Army bosses.

Anyone contemplating a joint-venture in Russia or China should watch Red Penguins first. As Baldwin and Warshaw explain, they so expected the Russians to skim a little off the top, they even budgeted for it. Yet, the extent of the Russian stealing was so great, it led to a management crisis.

Ostensibly, the Russians won and the Pittsburghers lost, but in a short-sighted way which illustrates why the Russians are still not a global economic power (unlike China). The open Russian corruption scared away Disney, whom Baldwin was courting for a multimillion-dollar merchandising and programming deal. Apparently, Eisner denies it now, but Polsky pretty well establishes their considerable interest. The Russians might have taken Baldwin and company for several hundred thousand dollars, but the opportunity cost for doing so could well have been tens of millions. You can see this kind of thinking throughout the late Yeltsin and early Putin years. The oligarchs grabbed the natural resource companies, but the manufacturing and service industries remain stuck in the mud. Putin is a dictator who means us harm, but the Russian economy is a sickly dog.

Coroner (Pilot)

In the days of Burke and Hare, anatomists were not held in high regard by the popular press. Times have changed. These days, some of our favorite TV crime fighters are pathologists. The CSI franchises and Da Vinci’s Inquest (also Canadian) are the best examples, but the tradition goes back to Quincy M.E. Dr. Jenny Cooper, Toronto’s freshly appointed coroner, now joins their ranks. The protagonist of M.R. Hall’s mystery novels comes to American television, when the Canadian series Coroner premieres this Wednesday on the CW.

As a former ER doctor, Cooper thought she knew the sort of things people did to each other, but now she sees the patients who do not make it to the hospital. Frankly, she is maybe not in the best mindset for her new gig, since her husband recently died from an aneurism right in front of her eyes. However, she will need the job, when she discovers the mountain of debt her late spouse left her holding.

Det. Donovan “Mac” McAvoy and his partner Det. Taylor Kim are a bit surprised to see her offer what looks like a quick prayer over her first pick-up, but he warms to her relatively quickly. Her dogged pursuit of the truth rather matches his own working methods. He also shares her empathy for the kids incarcerated at the juvy facility where two supposed suicides were found.

The actual mystery Dr. Cooper investigates in the pilot is not particularly complicated and resolves itself surprisingly easily, but the first episode also has to carry a lot of exposition. However, the chemistry developing between her and Det. McAvoy is already quite promising. Plus, Cooper’s foreboding visions of a sinister black dog are quite a distinctive motif. Still, the general level of writing seems pretty conventional, largely on par with shows like Profiler and Crossing Jordan, from about twenty years ago.

Statecraft: The Bush 41 Team, on PBS

If there was a year history went off on the wrong course, it was probably 1992, well before 2016. For the previous twelve years, America was an optimistic nation, where we believed our best years were ahead of us. Clinton won the election by selling pessimism based on an economic recession that looks utterly trivial in retrospect. Years later, Trump and Obama both cynically exploited that lingering pessimism, yet back in 1992, the nation had good reason to stay optimistic. Pres. George H. W. Bush, the so-called “Foreign Policy President” had lived up to his billing, thanks to the help of his team. Top Bush foreign policy officials look back at his administration in Statecraft: The Bush 41 Team (directed by Lori Shinseki and produced in conjunction with the Miller Center of Public Affairs), which premieres this coming Tuesday on PBS.

Fittingly, Statecraft reminds us Bush 41’s involvement in foreign affairs started on a very personal level when he served as teenaged fighter pilot in WWII. He built an impeccable resume, most notably including his tenure as Ronald Reagan’s loyal vice-president. However, he largely brought in his own team when he succeeded Pres. Reagan. They were as experienced as he was, and in many cases they were long-time associates—often even close friends.

We hear from a number of them in substantive talking head interviews, including Defense Secretary (and future VP) Dick Cheney, Vice President Dan Quayle, Chief of Staff John Sununu, Gen. Colin Powell, and advisors like Condoleezza Rice, Robert Gates, Stephen Hadley, and Robert Zoellick. It is definitely an impressive cast, who offer some considerable insight on the history they witnessed.

There is a lot of interesting material here, but Statecraft is at its most illuminating for general audiences when it chronicles the leading role Pres. Bush played to facilitate the reunification of Germany. We now forget both the Soviets (really the Russians at that point) and our Western European allies were dead set against it, but Bush had a prescient vision that a unified Germany, which was still a full military member of NATO, would lead to a more stable and secure Europe.