LEBANON (2009)

And you thought DAS BOOT/’81 was claustrophobic.  Award-winning film from Israeli writer/director Samuel Maoz takes a near abstract look at war, following (in tight close-up) a single tank carrying five hardened fighters and one barely trained newbie as they cross into Southern Lebanon during the 1982 war,  part of an ill-defined mission to destroy PLO bases and launching sites.*  Without a specific goal, their job merely to reach a designated contact point so they can pick up orders for the next designated contact point.  Between man and machine, things quickly begin to break down: misread oncoming vehicles (friend or foe?); planned and unplanned attacks; a comrade lost; banned weapons renamed so they can be ’legally’ used; a chaotic village assault where enemy Arabs use civilian women & children as ‘living’ shields, encouraging collateral (and non-collateral) damage by Israelis; that tank newbie unable to pull the trigger (literally) having previously shot at nothing more dangerous than empty barrels; all while the tank turns into a abattoir of human filth and rotting offal, their view becoming ever more restricted to a tank POV.  No heroes or heroics, but with opportunistic ‘Phalangist’ warriors grabbing the prize for worst-of-the-worst.  Fortunately, the mission, which opens & closes on the same ironic shot, reduced on screen to only 90 minutes of horror.  But you’ll not forget a searing minute in this brilliantly shot and acted journey thru some of Dante’s darkest circles of Hell.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *For a bigger picture on the war, the remarkable animated documentary WALTZ WITH BASHIR/’08.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/08/waltz-with-bashir-2008.html

SIGNAL ONE (2026)

If you’re going to make yet another First Alien Contact movie (think THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL/’51 & 08; CLOSE ENCOUNTERS/’77; ARRIVAL/’16; many more*), especially if you’re on a lowball Canadian budget, you better have imaginative filmmaking chops and a fresh concept.  But the only fresh thing in writer/director Jonathan Sobol’s assault on the subject is Dennis Quaid’s face.  Even that, less fresh than unnaturally refreshened.  Quaid’s the billionaire visionary searching the heavens from his private island, built up to receive Alien Contact signals and staffed with space research geniuses leading the hunt.  Borderline psycho David Thewlis; college wiz Isabelle Fuhrman; never laid Josh Hutcherson.  The twist is that Thewlis crosses protocol and SENDS rather than only RECEIVES the coded calls and the beings respond in ways that scare the planet into a panic.  Hours later, the island is invaded by overbearing military types who don’t understand the nuances of alien call-and-response etiquette.  Will they take the whole operation down before friendly relations are established?  Dull, dull, dull.  And Sobol’s eccentric idea of even simple reaction shots less communicative than 'Gort' was in STOOD STILL.*

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Sobol does have one stylistic quirk to watch out for.  Though shot 1.85 : 1, he stages shots for a wider anamorphic frame with severe left/right positions that leave the middle empty.  But since he places the conversations for two within a ‘flat’ frame ratio, the backs of some heads are out of frame.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  *Simpler & more effective (also really funny/really scary), less pretentious and far more emotionally affecting, Robert Wise’s ‘51 STOOD STILL still stands ahead of the pack.

AGATHA (1979)

Decently reviewed and reasonably popular, this speculative fiction on the true eleven-day disappearance of mystery writer Agatha Christie in the 1920s probably looks better now, when Mid-List ‘civilized’ entertainments no longer grace the big screen, than it must have on release.  Worked up by Kathleen Tynan (wife of top stage critic Kenneth, it's her sole film credit), and directed in comfy fashion by Michael Apted, the film is consistently fun & clever (Tynan just managing to layer in a bit of suspense* ), but mostly posh slumming for a cast of high wattage stars enjoying a period field trip while handing out narrative l’amuse-bouche.  Vanessa Redgrave is Christie, ennobled by height, beauty, ‘20s couture and Vittorio Storaro’s creamy lens stylings.  (The real Christie tall but horsey.)  Undone when Timothy Dalton’s husband (channeling the chilly Laurence Olivier of REBECCA/’40) asks for a divorce, she has a meltdown before hiding out in the very spa town used by his mistress.  Waiting to do mischief?  Enter American-in-the U.K. reporter Dustin Hoffman, groomed, dressed and polished as never before or since; if still a half foot shorter than his target.  With the whole country looking for the missing Queen of Whodunits, can he get a scoop before word leaks out . . . or Agatha does something stupid?  One of the last films made by First Artists (a briefly functioning Streisand, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Hoffman outfit), you have to presume Hoffman had more than usual input, gently fashioning one of the least self-regarding films on his C.V.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/SPOILERS:  *A bigger mystery is how no one, then or now, caught on to Tynan using ROMAN HOLIDAY/’53 (William Wyler/Gregory Peck/Audrey Hepburn) as template.  Runaway celeb hiding in plain sight under a false name; reporter finding/befriending her, also under an assumed identity; mutual, but deflected romantic feelings; inevitable split with the reporter nobly burying his exclusive.  At least Tynan knew to steal from the best.

THE UPRISING (2026)

Between misleadingly advertizing promising a proto-Robin Hood foundation tale (more grime/more gore/more ‘realism’) and a strong back-wind from Peter Watkins’ monumental (and monumentally over-praised) ‘you-were-there’ LA COMMUNE (PARIS, 1871), Peter Greengrass’s downbeat take on Britain’s doomed 14th Century ‘Peasant Rebellion.’ equally crippled by an inadequate budget making do with Revell® model towns & river ships, never had a chance.  A pity as the history is fascinating and little known outside the U.K.  Basically a tale of overreach by the rich & titled, now underfunded after the Great Plague, and how they went back to pillage villages once too often, arousing revolt in the South and up to London; the Peasant Rebellion.  Unsustainable, but not before churches were looted and upper-crusts killed, along with many innocents.  Andrew Garfield is intensely touching as the bereaved farmer who becomes figurehead to the movement, but Greengrass can’t structure the chaos that outran the noble ideas.*  Once we reach the final betrayal  and epilogue (which finally brings in the Robin Hood angle), he’s lost touch with cast & audience.  So, in an ironic twist, it’s King Richard II, switching sides & allegiances like a weather vane, who becomes (by default?) the guy we’re interested in.  Barely 14 at the time (late puberty in those days, you wonder if his voice had even changed*), his assumption and use of his power over subjects and Council, the sudden growth as political/military strategist is the thru line Greengrass misses.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Richard II, ten when crowned, at his most impressive in his teens.  Shakespeare’s RICHARD II focuses on later decline and dethronement.  See this Richard in the opening segment of THE HOLLOW CROWN/’16.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2025/11/the-hollow-crown-2016.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Here spoken in modern Mid-Atlantic English at a time when Chaucer, later patronized by Richard II, was writing.  (You still can't understand a word.  Subtitles suggested.)

COYOTE VS. ACME (2026)

Few things regularly fall as short of expectations as seeing some previously lost film you’ve waited years (decades?) for.  A legendary silent miraculously found in some Russian film archive turns out to be a formula programmer by a famous director on autopilot.  A print of some Early Talkie discovered in a dusty studio vault reunited with synch-sound discs found in the Seattle attic of a deceased private collector, where the pristine visual element turns out to be the alternate silent release.  An acknowledged masterpiece (LAWRENCE OF ARABIA/’62?) brutally trimmed from its original 22 reels down to 19 for a ‘70s re-release, finally restored to its original length, sent off to theaters with two reels printed in reverse.  Yikes!  So, when Warner Bros. opted to take a thirty-mill tax write off in 2023 and effectively erase the completed negative of this Live-Action/Animated mash-up (based on Ian Frazier’s dry/witty New Yorker piece on how Wile E. Coyote sued ACME Industries for years of malfunctioning products), you knew to keep your hopes down when Ketchup Entertainment came to the rescue with a Buy-Out/Theatrical release offer.  Surprise!  The film is a 1'43" ear-to-ear grin, studded with legit guffaws every couple of minutes.  (Including slapstick toppers topping the toppers on gags.)  This time, your wish is fulfilled.  Having previously spent much of his time doing big budget visual effects, director Dave Green segues smoothly into integrated visuals (CGI animation coaxed toward a hand-drawn æsthetic) and has consistent fun rug-pulling the narrative line with perfect pacing, pitch-perfect comedic acting (from animated humans and animators) that mesh seamlessly.  (Extra points to Tweety & John Cena!)  And shout outs to Will Forte for not attempting to compete with the Zanies, but letting his Personal Damages Attorney get his laughs playing straight man (Rowen to a gaggle of Martins).  And to Merry Melodies copycat vocalist Eric Bauza repeating from THE DAY THE EARTH BLEW UP/’24.*

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Remarkably for a pick-up, ACME grossed more than six times what BLEW UP made for the same releasing company.  That one’s all animated, so perhaps the better second feature might be WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT/’88.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2025/04/the-day-earth-blew-up-looney-tunes.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2021/12/who-framed-roger-rabbot-1988.html

CREEPY / KURÎPÎ: ITSUWARI NO RINJIN (2016)

Slow-burn horror from writer/director Kiyoshi Kurosawa is aptly titled, but ultimately a near miss, mostly from its hard-to-swallow third act.  It certainly starts well with a prologue that traps a psychopathic serial killer after his brief escape from a holding cell in a police office building.  With no way out, the murderer still manages to make his point to the detective who’d been conducting the interview.  The film then jumps ahead a few years as the detective, now retired from the force and teaching college, keeps one foot in the game by investigating a cold case disappearance that happened near his new home six years ago.  Clues point to his odd duck of a neighbor whose personality runs hot and cold*, yet forms an unlikely friendship with the ex-detective’s discontented wife.  And that’s when you start to pick up on how this story is developing into a fool-me-once/fool-me-twice suspense thriller built from lessons not learned in that gruesome prologue.  But Kurosawa gets sloppy, unable to convince us of the creep’s powers of persuasion over his ‘assistants,’ while police forensics go untried on that cold case and putative victims seem to lose peripheral vision so they can be easily attacked.  The whole third act hobbled with implausible story beats and too many shrink-wrapped bodies to dispose of.  Or is it the film that's been shrink-wrapped?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Film composer Yuri Habuka often sounds like she’s channeling Bernard Herrmann.  Effective, but giving this suspenser Htchcockian overtones Kurosawa may not have been looking for.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *Japan’s social conventions and physical restraint can look nearly as ‘off’ as the behavior of the film’s creepy villain.  Which doesn’t hurt, as you might expect, but adds an extra note of complexity.

MICMACS / MICMACS À TIRE-LARIGOT (2009)

Typically, French writer/director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, best known Stateside for AMÉLIE/’01 and DELICATESSEN/’91, demonstrates a bad case of the cutes along with a weakness for excessively ornate design that makes someone as OTT as Baz Luhrmann look more severe than Mies van der Rohe.  Cinematic vices that allow even his most popular successes to quickly exhaust themselves and his audiences.*  At least this fabulist caper, an eccentrics’ tale of revenge against rival titans of industrial war weapons, comes with a literary background as it’s straight out of Jean Giraudoux’s equally twee THE MADWOMAN OF CHAILLOT (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-madwoman-of-chaillot-1969.html), though missing Giraudoux’s farcical boulevard grandeur.  Jeunet opens with farcical tragedy² as a land mine kills a father before thirty years pass and his son takes a bullet in the head.  (Collateral damage from a terrorist incident.)  But the son recovers to seek revenge against that pair of international arms dealers, helped by some  ‘Court of Miracles’ eccentrics who design a plan of action worthy of Rube Goldberg.*  You have been warned.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *From our limited Jeunet list, A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT/’04 shows him at his most digestible.   https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/06/very-long-engagement-2004.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *The shame of it all is that Jeunet shows real technical chops at almost everything he tries.  Maybe someone could get him and, say, Terry Gilliam enrolled at some lion taming school . . . as beasts who need taming.

1408 (2007)

While big brother Harvey Weinstein juggled A-list projects, ‘shorting’ profit participants and sexually abusing female interns & junior execs at MiramaX & later his eponymous company, kid brother Bob stayed busy Exec-Producing B-list genre slop, mostly horror (series and one-offs) that played like ‘content’ decades before A.I. existed.  Bob a prophet of schlock before the fact.  This one, a typically profitable terror-torial one-off taken from a Stephen King short story, stars a somewhat thickened/puffy John Cusack* who seems to have misplaced his ‘Epi-Pen’ along with his character’s writing talent as a past-his-prime author of  haunted house/paranormal investigations.  Now burdened by the tragic death of a young daughter, and the marital breakup that followed, he’s eager for a new ghost story to reset his brand.  That’s why he won’t listen to hotel manager Samuel L. Jackson’s pleas to back off from over-nighting in Room 1408 of NYC’s Hotel Duncan.  Sure enough, he hasn’t settled in before a funhouse of horrors starts beating him up with visions of past victims, poltergeist attacks and replays of personal family tragedies.  Still new to English language pics, Swedish director  Mikael Håfström leaves a mess for Weinstein favored editor Peter Boyle to clean up.  But he can’t help the film from over staying its welcome and piling on the poltergeists and shock cuts to diminishing effect.  Somewhere inside here is a pretty good episode of ONE STEP BEYOND or THE TWILIGHT ZONE.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Have Oscar nom’d Samuel L. Jackson (hotel manager), Tony winner Len Cariou (dead Dad) or Tony and Emmy’d Tony Shalhoub (book agent) ever been given less to do?

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Hard to think of an actor as inconsistent as the supremely talented Mr. Cusack.  His last Stephen King role, a cameo in STAND BY ME/’86, astonishingly memorable considering the brief screen time.  Here he seems to be channeling near contemporary Nicolas Cage for inspiration . . . and besting him by holding something back.

AMÉLIE ET LA MÉTAPHYSIQUE DES TUBES / LITTLE AMÉLIE OR THE CHARACTER OF RAIN (2025)

Inexplicably well-reviewed (if little seen) animation from France (feature debuts for directors Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han), best described as Whimsical/Creepy.*  Largely focused on Little Amelie as she passes from two to three years-old in the 1970s at the lux pagoda-style house her Belgian family (Mom, brother, sister, house helper) live in while Dad works a year in Japan.  Discovering some new natural wonder every day, Amélie develops a kiddie God Complex, getting into trouble with every adventure.  Mom weirdly unconcerned with safety in spite of near drownings and spills.  No matter, that local housekeeper serves as surrogate while late developer Amélie coos in wonder before finally starting to walk & talk.  If she’d only shut up!  A regular French philosopher manqué!  Now, we’re supposed to coo.  Short and stocky compared to her family, as if she needs to be shown thru an anamorphic lens.  (Or was she designed by Botero?).  The family does share unnaturally round cat’s eyes, just not the feline kind.  More Cat’s Eye marbles.  Yikes!  Though not the villainous landlady, a war survivor who hates Europeans.  But it’s Amélie you’ll want to slap.  The film like one of those over-sized child’s picture books your Grandma thought would make a nice gift, but which you never took out of its shrink wrap.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Hard to get behind a film that uses White Chocolate as Proustian Madeleine.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT:  *TURNING RED/’22 director Domee Shi needs only eight minutes to land a lot of the ideas being messed with here in the hilarious child/parent horror of BAO/‘18.