Riverdale Season 7 Premiere, on CW

Jughead Jones suddenly found himself back in high school. The good news is he did not wake up naked on the last day of finals, for which he hadn’t studied for. Instead, he is in an alternate 1950s Happy Days-style universe—and he is the only one of his friends who remembers the first six seasons of Riverdale. Jones and the Archie comics gang go back to high school, where fans always remember them, in the seventh season of Riverdale, which premieres tomorrow night on the CW.

At the end of last season, Jones’ psychic girlfriend Tabitha Tate and their friends tried to save the Earth from Comet Bailey, but they failed. At the last second, Tate managed to send them back into the alternate past, so they can regroup and hopefully develop a plan B. However, only Jones initially remembers their past/future, whereas the rest of the group is busy living in the alternate 1950s.

According to Jughead’s narration, 1955 was a terrible time to be a teenager, but he has no idea how wrong he is. Before the Progressive Era, there were no “teens,” just people who were old enough to work all day in factories and those who were not (as the doc Teenage explains). Even for teens, there was little work available during the Great Depression, while eighteen-year-olds faced the prospect of military service during the Korean War, and the two World Wars. It was also in the 1950s that the segregationist policies initiated by Woodrow Wilson were finally effectively challenged, notably with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Ed decision and Eisenhower sending troops to integrate Little Rock schools in 1957. Seriously, 1955 is pretty choice-year to land in, given the grimmer possibilities.

Yes, the nation was still far from perfect, as the season premiere, “Don’t Worry Darling,” makes abundantly clear with its focus on the Emmitt Till murder. The Tate who doesn’t remember Jughead spends most of the episode trying in vain to cover the lynching in the Riverdale school paper, with Betty Cooper’s help. It is decent student drama to supplement Jughead’s efforts to figure out their situation, while he still remembers. For those coming in cold, Cole Sprouse’s nebbish charm as Jones and Camilla Mendes’ femme fatale turn as Veronica Lodge definitely standout amid the established ensemble.

However, there is not a lot fantastical or menacing business going on in the second episode, “Skip, Hop, and Thump!,” which focuses on several characters’ repressed sexuality. The percentage of Riverdale students identifying (secretly) as lgbtq is statistically unlikely, but Riverdale has always existed in a world of its own. At least, at the very end, it introduces a promising storyline that will presumably become a major focus throughout the final season.

As we learn more fully in “Sex Education,” it seems that Jones’ comic artist friend will be suspected of killing her awful parents in a way very much like that depicted in one of the horror comic books they just started freelancing for. This is definitely a geek-friendly arc that directly pays homage to EC Comics and their battle with the Progressive, Puritanical Comics Code.

Quentin Dupieux’s Smoking Causes Coughing

Grown adults who wear spandex richly deserve to be mocked. Unfortunately, satire has been choked unconscious by woke social justice warriors, just as the superhero genre peaked. Hollywood no longer has defiantly rude satirists like Mel Brooks. The closest we can get is the post-modern bizarro wackiness of Quentin Dupieux, from France. Whenever a rubber-suited monster attacks, the Tobacco Force is there to stop them in Dupieux’s Smoking Causes Coughing, which releases this Friday in theaters and on-demand.

Usually, the fab five can rely on their marital arts skills to defeat the human-sized kaiju they fight. However, when all else fails, they can call on the carcinogenic compounds for which they are named, to give their foes an immediately fatal dose of cancer. Benzene is the oldest, so he considers himself the group’s leader. Mercury is a family man, whereas Menthanol is a luckless loser with the ladies. Ammonia is the baby of the team, whereas Nicotine carries a torch for their boss, Chief Didier, even though he is a human-sized rat, with greenish slime oozing from his mouth.

After their last rocky encounter. Chief Didier orders them off on a team-building retreat. As they pass the time, they tell a series of campfire stories that are meant to be scary, but are really just indescribably bizarre and random, very much like Dupieux’s films. Unfortunately, while the Tobacco Force cool their heels, their intergalactic nemesis, Lezardin, is planning Earth’s final destruction.

In this case, a comparison to Brooks is quite apt, because sometimes Dupieux’s gags are riotously funny and sometimes they fall excruciatingly flat, but he keeps blasting them at the audience with a scattergun, regardless.

Quantum Leap: Friendly Skies

In the 1970s, criminals seeking to escape justice, like the mastermind of the Fountain Valley mass murders, not infrequently hijacked flights to Cuba, where they were sheltered by Castro’s Communist regime. Unfortunately, Dr. Ben Song suddenly finds himself serving as a flight attendant aboard one such hijacked flight, but their destination is a watery doom. Obviously, Song needs to save the passengers, but he must do so without the help of Ziggy, the project’s AI in “Friendly Skies,” the latest episode of Quantum Leap, premiering tonight on NBC.

In the previous episode, Janis Calavicci finally figured out the source of the Quantum Leap project’s leak: Ziggy, their AI. Despite Ian Wright’s whining, Magic Williams takes Ziggy offline, insisting they rely on the rest of the vast computing power at their disposal. That might slow the team down a bit, but it is pretty easy to figure out what Song is supposed to do.

His flight went down somewhere in the Atlantic, while in a dead spot for communications. At first, there are several possibilities, but again, the hijackers make it rather easy to figure out once the hijackers reveal themselves.

It turns out passenger attitudes towards flight attendants were not particularly enlightened in 1971. However, there is more to this episode than gender issues. The hijackers, who will potentially kill every soul onboard, are explicitly motivated by class warfare rhetoric. In fact, they have expressly chosen this flight because the airline owner’s son is among the passengers. Initially, Song assumes he is a spoiled brat, but he slowly learns there is more to the awkward teen than he realized.

The Big Door Prize, on Apple TV+

The Morpho is like the Polybius of fortune telling machines. One day, it just appeared in Deerfield’s general store. For a handful of quarters, it promises to tell your “true potential.” Some are impressive, like the “royalty” card received by Cass Hubbard, but for some, their Morpho cards become a source of shame. Soon, the Morpho machine turns the town upside-down in creator David West Read’s ten-episode The Big Door Prize, based on M.O. Walsh’s novel, which premieres Wednesday on Apple TV+.

Dusty Hubbard is a likeable, mildly under-achieving high school history teacher, who lives happily with his wife Cass and their daughter Trina. When the Morpho appears, he intuitively resists, especially because he is somewhat intimidated by his wife’s “royalty” potential.

His student Jacob Kovac is not a Morpho fan either. Poor Kovac already has more than enough to deal with. He can hardly talk to his father Beau, who is still bitterly grieving the death of his identical twin brother, the school’s star athlete. Unbeknownst to anyone else, Jacob Kovac was cheating with his brother’s neglected girlfriend, Trina. They are trying to secretly continue their relationship, while grieving as the town expects. However, the Morpho seems to know, judging from her card. Jacob’s card is something radically different, but it carries even more stressful implications.

Father Reuben has a complicated response to the Morpho machine. He understands the importance of interpreting signs. Indeed, he was led to Deerfield by signs that seemed prophetic at the time. While the series has a somewhat ambiguous attitude towards the priesthood as a chosen profession, Father Reuben himself is an entirely sympathetic character.

It is hard to precisely categorize Big Door Prize, but Read (a writer and producer on Schitt’s Creek) uses the fantastical element to create a surprisingly funny small-town sitcom. Admittedly, the neuroses of both Dusty and Cass Hubbard are often grating, but Read and the writers constantly puncture their pretensions and expose their self-importance.

On the other hand, there is some terrific chemistry that develops between Djouliet Amara and Sammy Fourlas as Trina and Jacob. We clearly root for them as a couple, despite all the complications of their relationship. Likewise, Damon Gupton and Ally Maki are weirdly engaging as Father Reuben and Hana, the town’s new bartender, who seems wholly unphased by the Morpho phenomenon—but something about the good Father might just be getting to her.

Batman: The Doom that Came to Gotham

This is another example of how DC films have been much more rewarding than Marvel films. Most Marvel films build to an incomprehensible third act of whirling, swirling CGI, after foisting off meaningless character cameos, to establish films that won’t be released for months, if not years. In contrast, DC had The Batman, which is more like Se7en than a traditional superhero movie and Joker, which wore its Scorsese influences on its sleeve. DC animated films have been especially willing to break established molds and formats. Following in the tradition of Batman Ninja and Superman: Red Sun, Batman gets a Lovecraftian twist in Christopher Berkeley & Sam Liu’s Batman: The Doom that Came to Gotham, adapted from Mike Mignola & Richard Pace’s limited comic series, which releases Tuesday on BluRay.

Prof. Oswald Cobblepot is not the Penguin in this universe, but his Wayne Foundation-funded arctic exploration turned out rather badly. By the time Bruce Wayne and his adopted orphans arrive to investigate, only Cobblepot and another crew member still survive, but they under the control of an ancient, cosmic demon. Wayne tries to bury the evil in the Arctic, but it remains hidden in the soul and body of his deranged prisoner.

Back in Gotham, Wayne receives a warning from Etrigan, the not-entirely evil demon, about the scope of the supernatural threat facing Gotham. It seems Ra’s al Ghul (the traditional occult supervillain of the Batman franchise) is trying to usher one of the elder gods into our world, via Gotham, of course. To stop him, Batman enlists the help of Oliver Queen, who is not the Green Arrow this time around, but he is a bow-hunter. He also shares a fateful connection to Bruce Wayne.

The way a lot of these alternate-world DC films reconceive their characters to fit a radically different context is often quite clever. In this case, it does not take much shoehorning to fit in Ra’s al Ghul, Jason Blood/Etrigan, and Kirk Langstrom/Man-Bat. Probably, nobody is more greatly reinvented than Queen, but it is hard to imagine many hardcore Green Arrow fans objecting, because he is the film’s best character.

Reggie, on Prime

Along with Pele, he was the personification of New York sports in the late 1970s. Reggie Jackson’s play on the field and his contentious relationship with Yankees manager Billy Martin were welcome distractions from “The Summer of Sam.” However, Jackson nearly became a notorious murderer himself, when he was brainwashed to assassinate the Queen in The Naked Gun. That is way more movie references than most athletes get, but Jackson was always at the center of the New York media’s attention, whether he liked it or not. Jackson looks back at his career highs and controversies in Alex Stapleton’s documentary Reggie, which premiers today on Prime.

For baseball fans, hearing Jackson take a call from Pete Rose at the beginning of the film might just overshadow everything that follows it. Jackson always shot from the hip, despite taking flak for it, so his candor in Stapleton’s film should not be a surprise. Jackson has a lot to say about black participation in Major League Baseball, both past and present. He also has a lot to unpack from his own career, including five World Series rings and two World Series MVPs.

Jackson won three World Series in Oakland, made the post-season twice with the California Angels and now works for the Houston Astros, but he will always be remembered as a New York sports legend. Therefore, it is fitting both Derek Jeter and Aaron Judge make appearances to discuss Jackson’s mentorship.

Surprisingly, the late George Steinbrenner’s image might be somewhat burnished by the film. On the other, it might lower Billy Martin’s stock. Regardless, watching Reggie will bring slightly more mature fans right back to the time when the manager was constantly generating NY tabloid headlines, right alongside Jackson. Love him or hate him, a good Billy Martin doc is seriously overdue.

Jackson has a lot to say about the state of the game and society, which is important, but the fun parts feature Jackson reminiscing with his friends and teammates, like Rollie Fingers and Dave Stewart. There is also a lot of material that will be new to more casual baseball fans, like Jackson’s unsuccessful bid to buy the LA Dodgers, which didn’t fail due to a lack of money, considering Bill Gates and Paul Allen were part of his management group.

Sentsov’s Rhino

Among gangster films, this one is unusual, because almost none of its characters went to prison, but the director did. His crime was being Ukrainian in Crimea, which is weird, considering all decent countries recognize Crimea as part of Ukraine. Tragically, Putin saw it differently. Sentsov’s 2015-2019 stint in a Russian prison earned the director the Sakharov Award from the European parliament. Today, the film’s leading man is fighting for his country on the frontlines. Obviously, the current Ukrainian government has an antagonistic relationship with Russia, but that was much less so during the lawless 1990s, when Sentsov’s film is set. Life is hard and so is our protagonist’s head in Sentsov’s Rhino: Ukrainian Godfather, which releases this Friday.

There was a time when Rhino was a bullied little boy named Vova. However, the older he got, the tougher he had to be. His upbringing under his alcoholic father was not easy, as we see in an absolutely amazing time-lapse tracking shot that must quite a challenge to set-up. At first, Vova was just a street thug, but when he tangles with the wrong mobbed-up gym, he enlists with a rival gang for protection.

While his nickname is initially a source of embarrassment, its brutish implications are helpful to his reputation. After a period of slow but steady advancement, Rhino starts to make some aggressive moves of his own, which have violent consequences. In fact, he will regret many of his life choices, as the older, world-weary gangster confides to his mysterious companion, during the looking-back-in-retrospect flashforwards.

Rhino is too naturalistic to be a proper slam-bang gangster movie, but it is also much more violent and plot-driven than the average art-house social issue film. It very definitely tries to capture the vibe of 1990s that cause the disillusionment that contributed to the troubles of the 2000s. Had this period been more stable and transparent, it is less likely a Russian-aligned thug like Yanukovych could have risen to power. Indeed, this film is absolutely marinated in regret, on both the individual and collective levels.

Tanel Toom’s Last Sentinel

In lighthouse and deep-sea oil rig movies and series, like The Vanishing and The Rig, characters often feel like the rest of the world might have disappeared, leaving them stranded forever. For the rag-tag crew aboard this post-apocalyptic ocean fort, that is a very real possibility. Their relief is distressingly late and some of them are starting to act a little stir crazy in Tanel Toom’s Last Sentinel, which opens this Friday in theaters.

The seas have risen, but the two tiny surviving nations remain perpetually at war. It is just four of them manning this remote, seabound military outpost (modeled on WWII Britain’s Maunsell forts), but Sgt. Hendrichs will not let any of them slack off. Cpl. Cassidy tries to be an intermediary between him and the grunts, Sullivan and Baines, but it isn’t easy. Their relief is way, way overdue, but when a ship finally arrives, unannounced, it is a cause of concern rather than relief. In fact, Hendrichs almost uses the fort’s super weapon to blow them all up.

That would have been a mistake, but the empty vessel is still disconcerting. At least it isn’t full of rats, like in Three Skeleton Key. It also holds some supplies, as well as a good deal of mystery. Regardless, it is still a sea-worthy ship, but Hendrichs is not about to let the squad abandon their post.

The basic concept of this Waterworld-like world is familiar, but the execution of the Estonian Toom (an Oscar nominee for the short film, The Confession) is notably strong. The initial encounter with the derelict ship is surprisingly tense, as are several subsequent sequences. The isolated setting is definitely eerie and the spartan set design is highly effective. It all looks great, but unfortunately, some of screenwriter Malachi Smythe later plot points stretch credibility.

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.

Myanmar Diaries, on OVID.tv

Most young filmmakers are desperate for their first directing credit, but for the journalists and documentarians who constitute the The Myanmar Film Collective, identifying themselves would have lead to imprisonment, torture, and death. Laudably, the non-Burmese who also contributed to this documentary, also declined credit, as an expression of solidarity. Their brave underground films shame the international media, who have largely under-reported the human rights abuses following the February 1 coup. Here’s a “trigger warning:” reality is brutal in The Myanmar Film Collective’s Myanmar Diaries, which premieres Friday on OVID.tv.

One thing is crystal clear from all the constituent parts of Myanmar Diaries—the military regime has turned the nation into a true police state. No other words describe the conditions the Burmese people live under. Several of the most visceral and shocking segments were shot on smart phones or handheld devices. Frankly, most or all of them should have gone viral worldwide, but most viewers will likely see them here for the first time.

The audience will witness protestors shot down, mothers dragged out of their homes while their scared children cry and wail, as well as a defiant man live-streaming his attempt to hold back the warrant-less police trying to break down his door in the dead of night. On the other hand, we also see the resistance, who clearly represent the vast majority of the people. By far, the most memorable is the outraged auntie, who defiantly gives the “anti-riot” cops a verbal dressing down sufficient to shame them all back to the stone age.

Perhaps less consistent are the impressionistic interludes that express the fear, paranoia, isolation, and loneliness of ordinary Myanmar citizens. You could argue without irony that the entire film counts as a “horror” movie of sorts, but the most successful interlude uses the visual vocabulary of horror movies to represent people’s current fear.

Quantum Leap: Ben, Interrupted

In the original Quantum Leap series, Dr. Sam Beckett encountered “evil leapers,” who were trying to set wrong events that had gone right. Dr. Ben Song’s rival, Richard Martinez, a.k.a. “Leaper X,” insists he is not one of them, but he would say that, wouldn’t he? Regardless, Song finds himself reluctantly working with his presumed antagonist in “Ben, Interrupted,” tonight’s episode of Quantum Leap.

This time around, Song’s host is a private detective going undercover in a notorious 1950s mental asylum, sort of like Nelly Bly did, but without a good exit strategy in place. Fortunately, Song has the Quantum Leap team and their AI, Ziggy, to help guide him. His mission is to rescue his client’s sister, who was committed by her husband, for the sake of a quick and easy divorce. However, Song probably won’t be able to leap if one or both of them is lobotomized.

As a further complication, Martinez leaps into the body of one of the thuggish orderly-enforcers. He claims he wants to help, but Song is understandably wary. Nevertheless, he does not have a lot of options.

This is the first episode in a while that really digs into the “Leaper X” subplot. In addition, there is also more intrigue and drama involving Janis Calavicci, who apparently assisted Song make his unsanctioned leap. That means this episode really involves time travel, rather than mere small-bore family melodrama. The stakes are also huge, at least for Song.

The Legend of Gatotkaca

This is the first cinematic foray into the Indonesian “Satria Dewa” superhero universe—and probably the perfect time for it, considering how stale the Marvel and DC franchises are getting. At least this is something different, inspired the Mahabharata, albeit in a very modernized kind of way. Our hero still fights the Kaurava, but now they are more like an evil, genetic secret society in Hanung Bramantyo’s The Legend of Gatotkaca, which releases tomorrow on DVD.

Yuda’s mother Arimbi barely saved her son from a sinister supervillain, but the battle cost her memory. Since his teen years, Yuda has cared for her, dropping out of school to earn money. He therefore hoped to at least vicariously enjoy his well-heeled friend Erlangga’s graduation, but instead the valedictorian is mysteriously murdered on-stage.

Many of Jakarta’s best and brightest have recently fallen victim to a serial killer, who has the cops baffled. Of course, it is not really a mortal agent doing the killing. It is the Kaurava secret society, especially Beceng, their chief costumed assassin, who is knocking off those who carry the rival Pandava gene. Beceng also killed the father and brother of Dananjaya, who is sort of like the Hawkeye of the Satria Dewa universe. As Yuda starts asking questions, he meets the small band of Pandava resistance against the Kaurava cabal, led by Dananjaya.

Yuda also forges and alliance and perhaps something more with Agni, the daughter of Erlangga’s professor. With all their help, Yuda will unlock the secret of his mother’s mysterious heirloom, which holds the power of Gatotkaca, but he still has a lot of butt-kickings in-store for himself, at the hands of Beceng and the Kaurava.

Or something like that. Bramantyo and co-writer Rahabi Mandra lean into the series lore, presumably to please pre-existing franchise fans, but they often leave newcomers a bit confused. Regardless, if you consider the film a Sanskrit fusion of The X-Men and Underworld, you might generally get the idea. In fact, many of the Javanese elements make a refreshing change from the vanilla superhero movies Marvel and DC have been churning out (more Ant-Man and Shazam movies, really?).

The action is also pretty intense. Let’s put it this way, Yayan Ruhian (“Mad Dog” from The Raid) plays Beceng—and he hasn’t lost a single step. He definitely delivers in the fight scenes, making a spectacularly nasty bad guy.

NYICFF ’23: Moominvalley

Swedish-speaking Finnish writer Tove Jansson’s Moomins characters are popular throughout Europe and maybe even more so in Japan, where there have been numerous anime adaptations and one of two Moomins theme parks. However, they have a smaller cult following here in America, mostly from fans of Japanese animation. The British dub for Sky TV could still find an audience here, if a streamer picked it up, given the voice talent (including Kate Winslet and Taron Egerton during earlier seasons). For Moomins lovers, three episodes of the third season screen again today during the 2023 New York International Children’s Film Festival.

Moomins look like hippos, but they are trolls—of the pre-social media variety. They are also quite sweet-tempered. It is mostly Moomins in Moominvalley, but they are a few other creatures, like the Kangaroo-looking Sniff and some humanoids, who are referred to as “Hemulens.” Perhaps for accessibility’s sake, the three episodes selected for NYICFF feature the Moomins helping their human friends.

In “Toffle’s Tall Tales,” Moomintroll (son of Moominpappa and Moominmamma) and Sniff help the five-year-old-looking little boy Toffle, who was changed to non-binary in this series (to appease the new kind of woke trolls), find a safe place to stay while the residents of Moominvalley hibernate. Their journey gets thoroughly complicated by Toffle’s penchant for spinning outrageous yarns. Conveniently, Jansson has been dead since 2001, so she had no feedback on the revision to her original character.

In “Miss Fillyjonk’s Last Hurrah,” Moomintroll misdiagnoses a tiny chicken bone lodged in her throat as inevitably fatal, so instead of trying to cure her, he convinces his severe spinsterish neighbor to finally enjoy some adventures in life, while she can. It is a very O. Henry-ish “carpe diem” episode, but pleasantly so.

Finally, in “Snufkin and the Fairground,” Moomintroll’s best friend (who displays anarchist tendencies in Jansson’s books) takes over a popular amusement park, after the previous owner resigns. Not surprisingly, he turns out to be a weak manager.

The Outer Limits: Please Stand By (Pilot)

The Twilight Zone had its share of extra-terrestrials, but first contact and alien invasion were really specialties of The Outer Limits. The was true right from the start—the very start. The first episode aired that under the title, “The Galaxy Being” was very slightly re-edited from the unaired pilot, appropriately known as “Please Stand By.” That “being” was from another galaxy, who did respond well when he suddenly found himself in our world. In honor of the show’s 60^th anniversary, the original pilot screens tonight at UCLA.

Sit back and enjoy, because cosmic forces will be controlling the transmission we are about to watch. Allan Maxwell is a brilliant scientist, who uses his radio station as a cover for his underground SETI research. Basically, his DJ-brother Gene “Buddy” Maxwell programs polite jazz and bachelor pad-ish easy listening. It was probably a good spot on the dial to hear Joe Bushkin and Eddy Duchin, if you could pick-it up. Dr. Maxwell deliberately keeps the output low, so it does not interfere with his own experiments.

Much to his surprise, Maxwell’s microwaves create a link through which he and a mysterious alien from Andromeda start communicating. The scientist could continue their trans-galactic exchange all day, but his wife insists he attend their local town’s long-planned awards ceremony in his honor. He turns the station’s output down even further, to maintain a stable connection, while the “Galaxy Being” “holds the line,” but the fill-in DJ cranks it way up, inadvertently dragging the alien into our world. Havok soon follows.

Obviously, the network picked up Outer Limits, but they had creator Leslie Stevens (who wrote and directed the pilot) somewhat water-down its intensity. They also cut a line from the Galaxy Being that suggested his people might just come to Earth and kick our butts, now that they knew of our existence. That is especially unfortunate, because it represents one of the earliest pop-culture manifestations of Cixin Liu’s “Dark Forest” concept, decades before the Chinese novelist’s Three-Body trilogy.

Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game

Playing pinball is sort of like the video game experience, except the ball and flippers are actually real. The game seems cool in a retro way now, but it was some of the most fun you could have for a quarter in the early1970s. Unfortunately, it was still banned in New York City, thanks to the Puritanism of the Progressive reform movement. Inexperienced GQ journalist Roger Sharpe played a major role in legalizing the game. Sharpe’s campaign for pinball respectability is quite charmingly dramatized in Austin & Meredith Bragg’s Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game, an MPI-supported film, which releases today on VOD and in select theaters.

As a divorced twenty-five-year-old with hardly a quarter to his name, Sharpe came to the City with vague dreams and limited prospects. However, when he finally found a pinball machine, in an adult bookstore, the college pinball wizard started to get his groove back. Then the store was raided—for the pinball machines, not the porn.

By this time, Sharpe had secured a junior writing position at GQ. He also started dating Ellen, a very pretty but somewhat older single-mother working in the same office building. First, Sharpe parlays his pinball outrage into his first major GQ piece. After that, he is able to secure a book deal for his illustrated pinball history. In the process, he interviews all the founding fathers of the much-maligned pinball industry. As a result, he starts to make a name for himself as a pinball expert. Soon, the trade industry group covering pinball approaches Sharpe to testify on behalf of the game in front of the New York City Council, but Sharpe is leery of potential negative attention.

Given the title, it is probably a safe bet that Sharpe “saves the game,” or at least contributes to the repeal of New York’s ban. However, the Braggs still make the drama surprisingly pacey and entertqainingly grabby. Their use of the older, third-wall-breaking Sharpe to offer sly commentary on the unfolding action works much better than in previous films. Thanks to Dennis Boutsikaris’s portrayal of the somewhat more mature and graying Sharpe (who was onboard with the film, as an executive producer), all the exposition is weirdly fun and amusing. Frankly, we could listen to an entire multi-part documentary, featuring Boutsikaris adopting Sharpe voice, to talk about pinball history.

Yet, throughout the film, the Braggs give equal weight and significance to Sharpe’s relationship with Ellen and her son, Seth. As Sharpe, Boutsikaris explicitly says there are things that are more important than pinball, in almost exactly those terms. That means the younger Sharpe has more to do once he “saves the game,” which is a refreshing break from the typical climatic testimony cliché.

As Roger and Ellen, Mike Faist and Crystal Reed (also very good in Swamp Thing) have insanely appealing chemistry, right from the start. Their relationship necessarily has its ups and downs (otherwise this would be a pretty dull film), but viewers immediately start rooting for them. It is also worth noting the work ethic and values espoused by Ellen, who at one point explains how she grinds away as a secretary to provide for her son, in order to avoid resorting to welfare. That is really quite something to hear in a film.

Faist and Reed are terrific handling the grounded romantic comedy. Bryan Batt and Mike Doyle also deliver a lot of snarky laughs as Harry Coulianos and Jack Haber, the now legendary art director and editor of GQ. Among other things, Pinball nicely recreates the groovy milieu of 1970s magazine publishing.

Leave, on Shudder

The Norse Wolf Cross looks satanic, but it is actually Pagan. Either way, it is a handy symbol for a horror movie. Hunter White was found with one when her adopted father, a cop, responded to a call, regarding a baby wailing in a cemetery. Having taken DNA tests and done extensive research, she secretly visits Norway in search of her roots in Alex Herron’s Leave, which premieres on Shudder tomorrow.

White told her father she was leaving to start college at Georgetown (where The Exorcist was set, a completely unrelated fact), but she is headed to Norway instead. Her DNA is 99% Norwegian and she discovered Cecilia, a Norwegian Death Metal vocalist, was playing in Boston the night she was abandoned. Despite a rocky start, Cecilia turns sympathetic, deducing White is the birth daughter of her now-institutionalized bassist, Kristian, and Anna Norheim, the girlfriend her presumably murdered in a particularly grisly fashion.

From there, Hunter follows the trail to the Nordheims, who are welcoming, but also suspiciously hardcore fire-and-brimstone Christians. Some supernatural force keeps telling White to “leave,” as per the title, but she keeps ignoring it.

That’s right, this film teases good old fashioned satanic panic, but turns into to be all about evil Calvinists. It does not do itself any favors in this regard. The film starts with the frighteningly evocative scene of White’s discovery in the graveyard, but that is just about the film’s first, last, and only scary moment. The rest is a bunch of silly stuff with sinister Evangelicals, including a patriarch pushing eighty, who somehow consistently overpowers the twenty-five year-old White.

Voices from Chernobyl, on OVID.tv

When watching this documentary, the parallels between the Soviet Union’s response to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the Chinese Communist Party’s response to the Wuhan Covid outbreak look eerily comparable. Reports were covered-ep and whistle-blowers were silenced, resulting in thousands of deaths that might have been prevented. Yet, Nobel Prize winning oral historian Svetlana Alexievich’s book was not just an expose. It also thoroughly documented and expressed the love and grief of survivors. Luxembourgian filmmaker Pol Cruchten adapted her book with his artistically rendered documentary, Voices from Chernobyl, which premieres today on OVID.tv.

The words are spoken in French, but they are adapted from the Ukrainian and Russian of survivors—if “survivor” is the right term. Many widows of reclamation workers and fire-fighters remain in mourning years after the disaster. Alexievich also talked to a teacher, who explains how damaged her young students have been by the incident. Physically, they are under-sized and sickly, while psychologically, they are preoccupied with death. Counter-intuitively, she are her colleagues are oddly pleased to see any signs of traditional school children misbehavior, since it signals signs of inner life.

We also hear (or in many OVID viewers case, read in subtitles) the words of the chief of the Belarusian nuclear authority, who had cautionary reports regarding the Chernobyl disaster stolen from his office. Had the authorities acted on his warnings, it would have saved hundreds of lives—maybe thousands, but the Soviets preferred to pretend nothing was wrong, in hopes of avoiding an international propaganda disaster. The lives of thousands of Ukrainians were disposable towards that end. Remember, good old Mikhail Gorbachev was General Secretary at this time—you can see his rotting portraits abandoned throughout the wreckage of Pripyat Cruchten’s cameras capture.

Instead of talking heads, Cruchten superimposes the words of Alexievich’s interview subjects over scenes of ghostly Pripyat or carefully composed tableaux, symbolically representing the horrors of Chernobyl. Stylistically, it is a lot like experimental hybrid films, such as Scars of Cambodia or Into the Crosswind. Cruchten’s cast are more like interpretive dancers than traditional thesps, but there is definitely something acutely expressive about their screen presences.

Back to the Drive-In

Drive-ins were widely considered the big winner of Xi’s pandemic, because they were the only theaters open during the shutdown—but not so fast, mister. It turns out they also suffered from the same supply chain issues and staffing woes that affected every other company. Often, opportunity turned into frustration, but drive-in proprietors carried on. Writer-director-everything-else April Wright follows eight drive-ins as they plug away amid the pandemic’s aftermath in Back to the Drive-In, which releases today on VOD.

If you have seen the documentary At the Drive-In about the Mahoning Drive-In in Pennsylvania, you will be familiar with the general state of drive-in business. Converting to digital was a challenge for most, if not all, but it was necessary to keep screening the latest Hollywood studio tent-poles. Some, like Bengie’s Drive-In still largely feature new releases, except during the pandemic shutdown, when they had to rely on older films.

However, many drive-ins have found success with repertory programming. After all, what sounds like more fun to watch on a hot summer night, a timeless favorite like Jaws or Jurassic Park or the next Marvel product, carefully sanitized for the Chinese market? In fact, the Greenville Drive-In really embraces the retro rep spirit, designing special cookies and cocktails to accompany films like The Great Lebowski (obviously, they were serving White Russians that night).

All the featured drive-ins share a number of problems, like supply chain issues. Everyone seems to have problems stocking staple items like popcorn cups. Of course, they also complain about the cost of doing business with the studios. However, the Wellfleet Drive-In on Cape Cod must contend with heavy fog that is unique to their location.

One of the cool things about Wright’s film is seeing the new Drive-Ins spring up, like the Field of Dreams Drive-In the owners literally build in their Ohio back yard. The owner-architects of the Quasar Drive-In in Nebraska emphasized nostalgia in their design, incorporating vintage equipment acquired from shuttered drive-ins around the country. Good luck to them both.

Gotham Knights, on CW

Honestly, the new leadership at Warners probably saved the DC franchise by axing the unreleased Batgirl movie if reports were correct it killed off Michael Keaton’s Batman. He was a lot of people’s introduction to the Caped Crusader and superhero movies in general. Seriously, they bring put him back in the mask, just to murder him? That would have produced some massive ill will. However, killing off a hardly seen Batman in a CW show based on a DC video game is another matter. Yes, Batman is about to die (violently), but his adopted son and a rag-tag band of rejects hope to find his killer and clear their names in Gotham Knights, developed by Natalie Abrams, Chad Fiveash, and James Stoteraux, which premieres tomorrow on CW.

Turner Hayes’ birth parents were also murdered, which was presumably why fellow “orphan” Bruce Wayne adopted him. The wealthy philanthropist never revealed his secret identity to Hayes. He seemed determined to keep his adopted son separate from his Dark Knight world. Yet, he still trained Hayes extensively in martial arts and fencing. The now-privileged teen only learns the truth when Batman is murdered, presumably by Duela, the slightly unhinged daughter of the Joker and Harley Quinn, and her current running mates, Harper Row (known in the comics as Bluebird) and her trans brother Cullen.

Just as Hayes and his platonic bestie, Stephanie Brown, start using the Bat-computer to investigate possible payments to Duela’s crew, he finds himself framed as the source of funds. Barely escaping the crooked cops trying to kill them, Hayes reluctantly convinces the outsider-weirdos to team-up to prove their innocence. In addition to Brown, they have an ally in Hayes’s classmate Carrie Kelley, who also happened to be the final Robin—and isn’t wanted for murder.

Based on mysterious coins that keep turning up, Hayes and company deduce the real culprits are the Court of Owls, which is sort of like Gotham’s Illuminati, the secret power pulling all the strings. Working with Duela and the Rows is not easy, but as they start interfering with the Court’s criminal enterprises, they gain a reputation as a new vigilante group dubbed the “Gotham Knights,” by a press that is unaware they are also Gotham’s most wanted.

Gotham Knights is definitely a mixed bag, but the stuff that works makes it compulsively watchable. As Hayes, Oscar Morgan too much of a cold fish to be a compelling lead, but Olivia Rose Keegan is entertainingly twitchy and erratic as Duela. Frankly, Navia Robinson portrays Kelley/Robin with the kind of grounded charisma that should have made her the lead of the series, whereas the constant whining of Fallon Smythe and Tyler DiChiara as the Row siblings gets to be a chore to sit through.

Fortunately, the series also gets some help from adults. Misha Collins is terrific as District Attorney Harvey Dent, who will slowly start to believe Hayes’s claims of innocence. Of course, since his name is Harvey Dent, he will have his own issues to deal with. Doug Bradley (of Hellraiser fame) has one of the best guest-starring turns of the year in episode six, playing Joe Chill, the gunman convicted of killing Bruce Wayne’s parents, who wants to speak to Hayes before he is finally executed.

Quantum Leap: Ben Song for the Defense

1989 was a great year, except maybe here in New York. The city was about to descend into a period of chaos, ended by Giuliani’s election in 1993. Dr. Ben Song will not do anything to prevent that this leap. Instead, as a public defender, he scrambles to save a young man who will be wrongly imprisoned for manslaughter in “Ben Song for the Defense,” tomorrow night’s episode of Quantum Leap.

The clever thing about this episode is it breaks format slightly, without really breaking format. Since Addison Augustine’s military background was so helpful to Song in the previous episode, she hands the holographic baton over to her Quantum Leap Project colleague Jenn Chu, because of her knowledge of the legal system. Chu got her legal degree while serving time, so the former hacker certainly has some insights.

Unfortunately, Song’s host is so overworked, because crime in New York is starting to explode, she hardly has the time to give Camilo Diaz’s case the attention it deserves. No, that is not how the series’ writers room spins things. Regardless, Song has to get Diaz off, so he can save his younger brother from the gangs trying to get their hooks into him.

There is some decent courtroom drama in “For the Defense,” which harkens back to classic episodes of the original series, such as “So Help Me God.” However, the writers cannot help including little digs at the 1980s, which leads to some credibility issues, like Song’s host being in a romantic same-sex relationship with the second chair Assistant DA on her case.

A Spy Among Friends, in The Epoch Times

A SPY AMONG FRIENDS is a carefully crafted espionage thriller that depicts the treachery and hypocrisy of Kim Philby. It turns out it was easier to admire the workers' paradise from afar than to live under it. EPOCH TIMES review up here.

The Magic Flute, Mozart Produced by Roland Emmerich

This classic tale is all about a prince trying to save a princess and it starts with a monster attack. We typically do not see it this way, but Mozart’s most popular opera is a total quest fantasy. Therefore, maybe it isn’t totally inappropriate to combine it with elements of Harry Potter, just slightly goofy. Young Tim Walker does not simply study Mozart’s opera, he journeys into it in Florian Sigl’s The Magic Flute, produced by Roland Emmerich, which is now playing in Los Angeles.

Walker, a Sensitive Andrea Bocelli copycat, has been granted rare permission to join the student body of Hogwarts-like Mozart Academy of Music, because of the recent death of his alumnus father. Before he died, Walker’s father asks him to return the rare Magic Flute manuscript he nicked from the school’s library. He tries to sneak it back his first night there, triggering the mystical portal to the world of The Magic Flute.

Accepting Prince Tamino’s quest, Walker constantly sneaks out of his room at 3:00 to reinsert himself into the opera. His disappearing acts thoroughly confuse his sidekick Papageno, the opera’s comic relief. Meanwhile, in the real world, his flakiness annoys his roommate, Paolo, and his prospective girlfriend, Sophie.

The look of both worlds is quite amazing. The “Potterizing” of The Magic Flute is sometimes quite clever, but Walker really ought to be better prepared for the trials he faces, considering how intently he studies the titular Mozart opera.

Regardless, probably the best part of the film, both in terms of special effects and vocal delivery is the Queen of the Night, played by real deal opera diva Sabine Devieilhe. She definitely rises above the often-awkward-sounding contemporary English translation of Mozart’s libretto.

Nobody else can match her range, but wisely, Jack Wolfe and Niamh McCormack really do not try, as Walker and his potential real-world love interest. Instead, they perform some likable vintage pop. Their romantic chemistry is lightweight, but agreeable.

The Ritual Killer

Who better to catch a serial killer than an eighty-something year-old anthropologist? It probably makes more sense than asking another serial killer for help, especially since Dr. Mackles is an expert in Muti, the traditional spiritual medicine practiced in Southern Africa. It appears there is a rogue practitioner committing sacrificial murders to benefit his clients in George Gallo’s The Ritual Killer, which releases today in theaters and on VOD.

The guilt Det. Lucas Boyd carries after his daughter’s death has left him nearly non-functional, except when chasing violent criminals, who then bear the full brunt of his rage. He and his partner start investigating a trail of bodies mutilated with surgical precision that lead to the mysterious Randoku. The large, scarred man definitely stands out, but he is still frustratingly hard to catch.

To interpret the African writing and exotic spices found at a crime scene, Boyd enlists the help of Dr. Mackles, an African Studies professor, who is clearly freaked out by them. Initially, he tries to play cool and beg off the case, but he inevitably starts advising Boyd on the Muti aspects of the ritual sacrifices.

That all sounds like a passable premise, but the screenplay (unpromisingly credited to three scribes: Bob Bowersox, Francesco Cinquemani, and Luca Gilberto) proceeds in such an orderly straight line, it turns into a total snooze. At least the one moment of lunacy at the end gives viewers something to remember, but the rest is the stuff of mediocre 1990s TV-movies.

The legendary Morgan Freeman looks about as bored playing Mackles as he did in the underwhelming Vanquish, which was also helmed by Gallo (maybe Freeman should stop working with him). The saving grace is Cole Hauser, whose hard-boiled brooding as Boyd is better than the film deserves.

Unicorn Wars, from GKIDS

Remember during basic training, when your drill instructor told you war was a lot more than teddy bears and unicorns? (Most New York film critics can ignore this rhetorical question.) Turns out that was a good thing. This eternally running war between teddy bears and unicorns is both brutal and pointless. It makes you wonder just what good is war anyway, except for halting genocide, repelling illegal invasions, and liberating oppressed people—but aside from that, what is it good for? Regardless, the titular war is not good for anyone except maybe the privileged teddy bear officers in Alberto Vasquez’s Unicorn Wars, from GKIDS, which opens tomorrow in theaters.

Bluey and Tubby are two Kane and Abel teddy bear brothers, who are going through basic training together, Tubby acts like the shy, sensitive one, but Bluey is actually scared and damaged inside, due to his mother’s rejection. They recruits act like Care Bears around each other, but when the subject of unicorns comes up, they turn into blood-thirsty Z-emblazoned war criminals.

For years, the teddy bears have waged a genocidal war against unicorns, fueled by propaganda dressed up as ancient wisdom. According to legend, the teddy bear who drinks the blood of the “last unicorn” will gain super-heroic powers, sort of in the Highlander tradition. Of course, it doesn’t make sense. That is Vasquez’s statement on war.

It is hard to say whether Unicorn Wars works or not, because it greatly depends on Vasquez’s intentions. If he set out to make a film about unicorns and teddy bears that would shock and horrify parents that accidentally took their kids to it, then Unicorn Wars is a smashing success and completely worthy endeavor. However, if it was meant as a lofty anti-war statement then it is a clumsy, ham-fisted, rub-your-nose-in-it failure. At some point, when you are constantly getting hit over the head, it starts to drag. That point comes awfully quickly in Unicorn Wars.

Sound of Silence, Hello Darkness

This is another extremely zeitgeisty horror movie that the filmmakers probably did not realize was so zeitgeisty. In this film, talking can lead to death, so express yourself at your own peril, just like when you brave censoring tech companies and woke trolls on social media. Counterintuitively, this time around, it starts very analog, with an old fashioned “wireless”-style radio, which had all kinds of wires. Soon, noise in general becomes weaponized in the T3 directing trio’s Sound of Silence, which releases Thursday on VOD.

Back in Italy, Emma Wilson’s tinkering father comes across a vintage radio, but after he fires it up, all heck breaks loose. Her father is now in a coma and her mother is being held overnight, due to her defensive wounds. When Wilson’s arrives with her boyfriend Seba (for Sebastian), her mother begs them to book a hotel rather than go to the family home, but of course, she insists on staying there.

Shortly thereafter, the radio starts menacing her. In several scenes, a spectral woman appears and disappears, advancing towards Wilson, as she turns the wireless on and off. Soon, any noise is sufficient to trigger the audio specters. The evil force also infects Seba as it had her father. However, she has one recourse not available to most people—the soundproof studio her father built for her during her teen years.

The quiet fearful quaking stuff has been done before, but the neo-Giallo style adopted by T3 (Alessandro Antonaci, Daniel Lascar, and Stefano Mandala) serves it well. There are several genuine nailbiter scenes, especially the on-off sequences. Admittedly, the conclusion does not make much sense, but what do we really expect, anyway? The epilogue also seems almost completely unrelated, but it is also seriously creepy, so why not?

The Stratum, on DVD

This sort-of-near-future world is sort of like Elysium, but with catfishing. However, you have to give hacker James Walsh credit. He is actually more than he presents himself to be. He looks exactly like his avatar, but he is a real person instead on AI. Unfortunately, his overtures to a lonely satellite resident might undermine her efforts to save humanity in Crash Buist’s The Stratum, which releases today on VOD and DVD.

The Peoples’ Terrorists, or whatever they call themselves, blame Gatesian oligarch William Wright and his company for all the ills in the world. When the even-worse-Covid hit, he ferried those who could pay to the safety of his Satellite of love. However, his secret daughter Ayla was inconveniently allergic to the life-support systems. Instead, she needed her own hermitically sealed capsule.

With all that free time, she created art and possibly discovered the formula for clean cold fusion. She is lonely though, so she talks to Walsh when he injects his avatar into her VR workshop, posing as an AI sent by her father.

That was not part of the original plan. Edgar Bane, self-proclaimed general of the Peoples Extremists hired him to hack Wright Corp. As he was touring through their system, he stumbled into Ayla’s virtual realm. While drawing out intel from her, Walsh starts to fall for the cyber-punk princess, so he takes exception to Bane’s “revolutionary” plans for her.

Obviously, The Stratum was shot for less money than it would cost too buy two dozen Dunkin Donuts for your next office breakfast. However, co-screen-writing co-stars Buist and Lauren Senechal have sketched some interesting ideas in here. The “courtship” between Walsh (in his AI guise) and Wright works surprisingly well. The violent extremism of the Peoples’ Army is also highly realistic and all too believable (regrettably). Bane’s big plan is simply horrific. Yet, perhaps the film’s cleverest element is the crazy “Buddha” AI persona that manages the underground tech “Red Box” vending system.