While WAKE UP DEAD MAN may not bring anything novel for newcomers to the series, it’s a treat for KNIVES OUT fans, serving as a corrective for the excesses of GLASS ONION and imbuing the story with meaningful resonance for contemporary Christian politics.
Mike Flanagan is no stranger to adapting Stephen King’s work, but like King himself, he’s tended to stick to horror. THE LIFE OF CHUCK represents a foray into King’s more literary work and, with its formally experimental structure and its genuinely life-affirming joyfulness, also represents a renewed confidence for Flanagan in his own writing.
HARVEST is too tonally inconsistent and tediously obtuse to harvest any emotional substance from the ideas that it sows.
Uberto Pasolini ably converts the last half of Homer’s Odyssey into a single narrative by focusing on the trauma of returning home when you’re no longer the person you were when you left.
The premise of renting people to fill social roles resembles Werner Herzog’s FAMILY ROMANCE, LLC or Yorgos Lanthimos’ ALPS. Still, Bernhard Wenger, the film’s writer and director, takes the film in a different direction that feels very Östlund-esque but without Östlund’s satirical bite. As the film concludes, it feels like it has pulled its punches a little.
Though THE LUCKIEST MAN IN AMERICA alludes to broader themes around media production and how broadcast media edits narratives to cut out the messy humanity of people’s lives, the film focuses on telling an entertaining story and highlighting Hauser’s performance.
Though at first THE END seems like a strange direction for Joshua Oppenheimer, the themes of repression, denial, and delusion soon make a clear connection between this and his documentary work.
TORNADO’s blending of genres is not always entirely successful, occasionally creating an uncanny feeling, but the film isn’t afraid to proudly showcase its influences and try something new with them.
Watching in 2025, we unfortunately know that the story of American neo-fascism has only continued, and so the ending of documentary HOMEGROWN seems both sad and premature.
STEALING PULP FICTION has an ironic postmodern sensibility combining a reverence for cinema and the cinema-going experience – midnight screenings, overflowing tubs of popcorn, the smell of 35mm prints – with an ironic appreciation of Quentin Tarantino’s own postmodern work.
