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Fog Over Frisco

Although she’s playing a supporting role, Bette Davis gets one of her best screen entrances in William Dieterle’s FOG OVER FRISCO (1934, TCM). Reporters at a mob-owned dive are startled by what they think is gunfire. The camera cuts to an array of balloons, which explode to reveal Davis popping them with her cigarette. She’s in a partying mood and doesn’t care who knows it. She was also in the mood to strut her stuff as an actor and makes the most of what would otherwise be a routine Warner Bros. crime film. It’s a complete performance, with every move reflective of the fiery, restless young woman she’s playing.

Davis is Arlene, a banker’s daughter who’s into cheap thrills, including helping the mob dispose of stolen securities. To that end, she’s gotten engaged to one of her father’s top young executives (Lyle Talbot) so he can substitute the stolen bonds for legitimate ones he then sells, with the money going into her bank account. In truth, she’s in love with the head of the bank’s Honolulu branch and wants to shed her mob connections to marry him. That’s a dangerous game she’s playing, and before long her younger sister (Margaret Lindsay) and newspaperman Donald Woods are trying to figure out what’s going on.

I wonder if lesser actors hated Davis. She’s so alive, so thoroughly committed to even this shoddy material she shows up performers who just seem to be playing it by the numbers. Lindsay, in particular, suffers in comparison to her. As would happen later in JEZEBEL (1938), she comes across as an empty shell of a character. Her emotions are canned, and though she’s obviously prettier than Davis, she can’t begin to make the Orry Kelly wardrobe look as glamorous as Davis does through sheer will power. Even then, she’s better than Douglas Dumbrille as Davis’ love object. He’s so stiff, she might as well be playing her scenes opposite a mannequin. Yet she makes you believe her obsession with him just because that’s what a great actress does.

Woods fares better. He may have been nondescript as a songwriter in the period musical SWEET ADELINE (1934), but in a contemporary piece that calls on him to match the fast-talking Warner’s style of actors like James Cagney and Pat O’Brien, he helps keep the action moving. So does Dieterle, working on one of the programmers he had to make before he rose to directing stately costume films. It’s one of the fastest moving pictures to come out of that fast-moving studio, with scenes connected by wipes, both vertical and diagonal, and the occasional iris out. The cast also features Hugh Herbert as comic relief, Alan Hale as the chief of police, Irving Pichel as a mobster, William Demarest as another reporter, George Chandler as a cab driver and Skippy, aka Asta, as Davis and Lindsay’s dog.

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The men of URBAN LEGEND (1998) clockwise from top left-Jared Leto, Michael Rosenbaum and Joshua Jackson

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Urban Legend

The success of SCREAM (1996) revitalized the fading slasher genre even though few of the films that followed in its wake shared its self-referential wit. Jamie Blanks’ URBAN LEGEND (1998, Shudder, AMC+), borrowed the “Drew Barrymore Spot,” an early murder featuring an actor with some name recognition (here Natasha Gregson Wagner), and the revelation of a killer with a close relationship to the final girl. But even though some of the characters are aware of the urban legends on which their demises are based, that awareness doesn’t drive the film the way knowing the rules of the slasher genre drives the SCREAM franchise. Rather, like the films in the original run of slashers, the filmmakers labor to come up with a gimmick to distinguish their work. Basing the killings on urban legends may seem clever, but it didn’t prove all that fruitful, as the URBAN LEGEND franchise only consists of three films, one released direct-to-video, with little in the way of connection.

It all starts with Wagner driving on a wet night. She stops for gas, and the stuttering attendant (an unbilled Brad Dourif) tries to warn her there’s somebody in the back seat, but she’s so scared of the gas jockey, she drives off to her death. This is particularly upsetting as it eliminates two of the film’s best actors, though I’m sure some of the lesser cast members breathed a sigh of relief knowing they wouldn’t be wiped off the screen by Dourif. Anyway, college student Natalie (Alicia Witt) is related to Wagner’s murder in a spoilery sort of way and then sees her classmates wiped out. The university’s corrupt administration (or is that redundant?) wants to cover everything up, so she and student reporter Jared Leto keep getting into trouble searching for information, particularly since the bodies keep disappearing.

To get the good news out of the way, Blanks directs all this very well and has a top-notch score by Christopher Young to help build tension. You get some scenes with veterans like John Neville, as the dean, and Robert Englund, as a psychology professor teaching about urban legends, both of whom can always be relied upon for good work. Leto, who refuses to discuss the film, is pretty good as well, as is Rebecca Gayheart as Witt’s best friend, and Loretta Divine is quite funny as the campus cop who dreams of being the next Pam Grier. The killer, once revealed, gets to do some impressive scenery chewing that’s not in that performer’s usual line of business.

But, once the killer is revealed, a lot of the murders and the display of most of the bodies in a vacant building make no sense (and I can’t say any more than that). Witt has some very weak moments when her character gets all emotional. There’s just no there there.  And Tara Reid, as a bubble-headed student radio host is just plain awful. Blanks tried to minimize the bloodshed to the extent he had to reshoot one scene at the end to add a little more. But that restraint did not apply to the killing of a dog, which may make you want to reach for the nearest horse whip unless you’re averse to mixing species.

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Audiences wanted to see Burt Lancaster's chiseled physique and toothy smile beat the bad guys, as in THE CRIMSON PIRATE (1952). But though it contains his favorite performance, they didn't want to see him crumble under the weight of neuroses in THE SWIMMER (1968).

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The Swimmer

Burt Lancaster became a star because audiences wanted to see that athletic body and toothy grin triumph over the bad guys. What they didn’t want to see was that athletic body and toothy grin fall apart in a miasma of neuroses. Little wonder, then, that his favorite performance, as a man trying to swim home through his friends’ swimming pools in Connecticut, was one of his least seen. Frank Perry’s THE SWIMMER (1968, Criterion Channel) — which might more accurately be called Frank Perry’s, Sidney Pollack’s and Burt Lancaster’s THE SWIMMER — is an ambitious, frequently moving and occasionally overstated adaptation of a John Cheever story. It’s almost determinedly non-commercial, though for a product of Hollywood in transition from impersonal epics to personal visions, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Lancaster is Ned Merrill, a middle-aged advertising executive who emerges from the woods one afternoon to drop in on a pair of friends. When he learns that one of his acquaintances has added a pool, he realizes that he can get home to his estate eight miles away by swimming the pools along the way. At first, he encounters friends who are happy to see him, but then a bitter encounter with a woman (Cornelia Otis Skinner) whose dying son Lancaster had never visited, suggests there may be more going on. Other people he encounters hint at problems in Lancaster’s financial and family situations. He also starts to deteriorate physically.

Lancaster is such a physical actor, it’s almost painful to watch his body betraying him during Ned’s journey home. Yet he’s also cerebral enough to create silent moments with just his eyes capturing the character’s growing uncertainty. Most of the people he runs into on the way home are New York theater actors, and it’s a pleasure to spot Kim Hunter, who’s marvelously detailed; Louise Troy, Rose Gregorio and Jan Miner (yes, Madge the manicurist) dripping with vitriol; and Dolph Sweet. In her film debut, Diana Muldaur has one brief exchange that covers a lot of emotional ground and does it quite well. Janet Landgard is sweet and charming as the former babysitter who used to have a crush on Lancaster. Joan Rivers (another debut) is surprisingly natural as a woman flirting with him at a party. And Janice Rule, in scenes shot by Pollack after producer Sam Spiegel decided he didn’t like Barbara Loden’s performance, just about knocks you out of your chair as a former mistress. It’s the kind of short, intense performance that wins awards in films people want to see.

Perry uses some New Wave techniques — slow motion, double exposures, scenes shot from a distance with post-dubbed dialog — that work to create a dreamlike atmosphere. That surrealistic quality suggests this is more a voyage through Ned’s psyche than a realistic summer afternoon (Lancaster called the role “Willy Loman in swim trunks”). At the same time, that gives the film a bit of an overly determined feel. Once you get through the encounter with Skinner, you’re waiting to find out what else is wrong with Lancaster’s character. You know what he’s going to find at his home long before he gets there.

Yet the piece is also very satisfying thanks to the performances and a marvelous score by Marvin Hamlisch (yet another debut). He starts the film out as if it were a Hollywood romance, with a soaring motif the first time Lancaster swims. There are even hints of Aaron Copland in the themes and harmonies, setting this up as a quintessentially American story — a critique of materialism. Hamlisch keeps that style going when things are starting to fall apart, creating an ironic separation between plot and music. Then he starts working variations on his theme to reflect Lancaster’s breakdown only to return to big Hollywood scoring at the end to point up the ironies still further. The finale is almost an echo of Copland’s scoring at the end of THE HEIRESS (1949), which THE SWIMMER comes close to in creating a sense of devastation.

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The men of DROP (2025) clockwise from top left-Brandon Sklenar, Travis Nelson, Jeff Self, Sklenar (again) and Reed Diamond

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Drop

As writer and/or director, Christopher Landon specializes in delightfully grueling thrillers that take a simple question like “What if somebody tried to force you to kill your date” and answers them with escalating tension through a series of largely logical plot developments. Most of his films — like HAPPY DEATH DAY (2017) and SCOUTS GUIDE TO THE APOCALYPSE (2015) — take a fairly light-hearted, almost camp approach to their scares. But he can do serious quite well. Just look at DISTURBIA (2007), a mixture of teen drama and REAR WINDOW (1954) whose script first brought him attention. He didn’t write DROP (2025, Peacock), but he did play a major role in re-shaping the original plot by Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach, mostly to good effect.

Meghann Fahy stars as Violet, a widowed mother who may have killed her abusive husband. She’s finally ready for her first date, so as her sister (Violett Beane) babysits her young son, she goes to a high-rise Chicago restaurant to meet Henry (Brandon Sklenar), a photographer she’s been texting for months since they met on a dating site. Then she starts getting Airdrop messages telling her to kill her date or a gunman, who’s already in her house, will take out her sister and son. By the nature of the app, she knows it’s someone in the restaurant, but who?

Landon makes good use of technology as a plot device. Violet’s tormentor has bugged various spots in the restaurant, which also has cameras at key points recording almost everything going on. And her own security system at home lets her see where her son, her sister and the masked killer are. Landon also knows how to use cutting and camera movement to build suspense. There’s something off about the evening just in the way the camera prowls around the restaurant as Violet and Henry are shown to their table. But he’s a little too in love with flashy technical tricks. He masks out parts of shots to put focus on the areas that remain fully lit when the focus is already clear. And he uses slow motion more than he needs to. Those tricks turn what works as a realistic thriller into something more expressionistic, and it’s not necessary. At one point, I wanted to shout, “This isn’t the nouvelle vague, buster!” But to his credit, just when you think he’s going to do something predictable at the climax, he throws in a twist that gives it an extra zing that’s very satisfying.

Fahy is very good as the abuse survivor suddenly thrown into another abusive situation. She plays a vital role in keeping the action grounded, even when the plot starts spinning in outlandish directions and Landon’s technique is calling attention to itself. There are other good performances from Beane as the wisecracking sister, Reed Diamond as an older man on a blind date, Jeffrey Self as an over-eager waiter and Gabrielle Ryan as a sympathetic bartender. Sklenar is good, too. He has a nice give-and-take with Fahy, particularly when he’s trying to figure out her strange behavior. But I wish he hadn’t been costumed so obviously as some kind of dreamboat. He’s dressed to play a lumberjack in a Hallmark movie. And he’s sensitive on top of it, which means he probably is a lumberjack who’s wandered in from a Hallmark movie.

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Dementia 13

At a time when most Hollywood studios were closed to the new talents coming out of film schools, Roger Corman was open to working with them since they were desperate, eager to please and inexpensive. That’s how Francis Ford Coppola got to make his first feature film, DEMENTIA 13 (1963, Prime, Tubi, Plex, YouTube). After a few other jobs, he was working on sound for Corman’s European shot THE YOUNG RACERS (1962). Since he already had actors and equipment in England, Corman asked Coppola to develop an idea for a film that could be cheaply made. When Coppola showed him a brief treatment for a sequence ending in an axe murder, Corman gave him a small budget and put him to work.

I’d like to say the results were a minor masterpiece, but they weren’t. Coppola created, or rather recycled, a tale about the eccentric guests and inhabitants at an Irish mansion.  While the ailing matriarch (Abbey Theatre star Eithne Dunne) prepares to leave her money to charity in the name of a daughter who had drowned a few years back, she has to cope with a greedy daughter-in-law (Luana Anders), a sensitive younger son (Bart Patton), a brooding older son (William Campbell), his American fiancée (Mary Mitchell) and a doctor (Patrick Magee) who seems to have no other patients. Then the killings start. It’s not hard to guess who’s doing it.

Visually, Coppola created a lot of very powerful sequences with Charles Hannawall, a production associate on several Corman films here making his only picture as cinematographer. The opening scene, with Anders and her husband in a rowboat, and the first axe murder are particularly well shot. The location work at Howth Castle in Fingal, Ireland, is appropriately atmospheric. And there’s a creepy scene in which Anders searches the dead child’s playroom, encountering toys you’d be scared to give your children for fear they’d never sleep again. But to clear up the plot, Coppola had to shoot additional footage in Griffith Park that’s just blah, and then Corman added another axe murder shot by Jack Hill, a good director in his own right but not on Coppola’s wavelength. Coppola’s script isn’t that good either. It’s filled with cliches and nonsensical lines meant to sound portentous.

Most of the acting is either embarrassing or non-existent. The exceptions are Anders, who captures her character’s greedy determination and makes her machinations a pleasure to watch, and Magee, whose doctor is a fruity delight. Coppola later praised his professionalism but mentioned a tendency to overact. That he does, but it’s almost a relief next to the non-performances surrounding him. And with lines like “Consider your mind as a bird in your hand. When it's relaxed, it lies quiet and easy. But when it's tensed and frightened, it strains to leave you. Quite a simple principal, isn't it?" you either have to chew the scenery or just lie down and play dead.

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D.O.A.

Sweating was Edmond O’Brien’s forte. Perspiration (and competition from three actors in 1954’s ON THE WATERFRONT) brought him an Oscar for THE BAREFOOT CONTESSA (1954) and got him through a lot of films noirs. He even sweat himself to death in Rudolph Maté’s D.O.A. (1950, TCM, Tubi, Plex, YouTube), though he had a lot of help from an unspecified “luminous toxin.”

In one of the great movie openings, O’Brien walks into an L.A. homicide office and announces he’d like to report a murder…his own. Flashbacks reveal he’s a small-town accountant who’s slipped poison while having a last bachelor fling in San Francisco. By the time he’s diagnosed, he’s already dying, so he spends what time he has left figuring out why he was targeted, leading to encounters with a cheating wife, a lying secretary, a gay smuggler and the criminal’s psychopathic boyfriend.

Any film with locations on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco and Los Angeles’ Bradbury Building promises a lot of visual flourishes, and D.O.A. comes through in that department. It helps that it was directed by a legendary cinematographer who had worked with everyone from Carl Th. Dryer to Ernst Lubitsch and filmed by Ernst Laszlo, a favorite of Robert Aldrich’s. They turn San Francisco and Los Angeles into nightmare cities with killers lurking in every dark shadow. O’Brien is appropriately frantic as the dying detective, and there’s some good supporting work form the male actors, particularly Luther Adler as the smuggler and Neville Brand as his hired gun/boyfriend, a gay psychopath who says to O’Brien, “I knocked off guys I could like. But I don’t’ like you….I never liked that puss of yours from the minute I seen it.” You don’t have to think too hard to figure out what kind of guys he could have liked if he hadn’t knocked them off first.

The women don’t fare as well for the most part. Russell Rouse and Clarence Greene’s script may have an intriguing idea and construct the mystery well, with a whopping big red herring wasting a lot of O’Brien’s remaining time. But they make most of the women victims. That’s a particular disservice to Beverly Garland, making her film debut billed as Beverly Campbell, who doesn’t get to show the strength that would make her a cult favorite (side note: when she told reporters she didn’t think the film would land a Best Picture Oscar nomination, the producers had her blacklisted, sending her into the arms of low-budget producers and directors like Roger Corman, who were repaid with some of the best performances in their films). Pamela Britton fares even worse as O’Brien’s secretary/fiancée. Before he leaves, she wants to go to San Francisco with him. Then she thinks he should go alone. Then she thinks he shouldn’t go. Then she decides it’s okay. No wonder she plays her part in a haze of generalities. Girlfriend had better material on MY FAVORITE MARTIAN.

Still, you get some hot jazz licks mimed by James Von Sreeter but performed by Maxwell Davis. If you look closely, you’ll spot Frank Cady and Peter Leeds as bartenders, Jerry Paris as a bellhop, Ivan Treisault running a photographic studio and Hugh O’Brien as the world’s least convincing jazz fan. Has anybody ever verified Diana Barrymore’s presence in the film?

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The men of FINAL DESTINATION 3 (2006) clockwise from top left-Ryan Merriman, Dustin Milligan, Texas Battle, Jesse Moss and Kris Lemche

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Final Destination 3

It was inevitable. After some very good movies, it was time for a bowser, though I should at least admit that it wasn’t as godawful as I remembered it. Mind you, James Wong’s FINAL DESTINATION 3 (2006, HBO Max) is still bad. It has some decent leads and good cinematography (by Robert McLachlan), though they’re more than balanced by gratuitous nudity, inane dialog and some, shall we say, over-emphatic performances.

This time the premonition is of a roller coaster crash, which makes for a pretty impressive disaster sequence. The prophet is high-school senior Wendy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, one of many superannuated teenagers whose presence begs credibility). A bunch of her classmates are pulled off the ride with her and start dying in the order…you know the drill. You get death by tanning bed, car motor, weight machine, nail gun and cherry picker. Wendy is riding with her best friend’s boyfriend (Ryan Merriman), while her boyfriend and Merriman’s girlfriend are in the first car and die right away, adding a little grief and guilt to the mix. There’s another secondary premonition at the end, but it’s much more elaborate than the ones in FINAL DESTINATION 2 (2003) and is designed to make it clear that nobody’s getting out of this one alive. Yeah, I know, spoilers, but can you really spoil anything in a franchise this formulaic.

Wong has said he wanted to make the film about control, and he makes an effort to get that into the film, but the lines about it are awfully obvious and don’t sound like anything a teenager would say. Neither do the lines about Winstead’s grief and guilt. She and Merriman try hard to make it all work, and they don’t exactly wind up with egg on their faces, but they’re clearly talented actors stuck with clunky dialog. But hey, at least they get to show some talent. The two privileged pretty girls, the hyper jock and the horndog character are either given to overacting or directed to overact shamelessly to the point you’re almost glad to be rid of them (note, names withheld to protect the possibly innocent). And after we’re meant to sneer at the horndog for asking the pretty girls to take off their tops, it seems hypocritical to have them play their death scene topless.

So what, if anything is redeeming? Winstead is good as a young woman living with grief, and Merriman plays a believable character arc as his carefree jokester grows up in the face of events. The more elaborate death scenes are still well set up and often comical (though the pretty girls’ death seems unnecessarily cruel and drawn out). The big climax comes at a tricentennial celebration for the characters’ New England town, and along with making the whole thing seem like one big death trap, Wong and McLachlan get in some nice shots of the characters with the camera angled upwards to catch fireworks in the background. At least it distracts from the tiresome plot and bad dialog.

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The Godfather

I had only seen Francis Ford Coppola’s THE GODFATHER (1972, Paramount+, Hulu) once, during its original theatrical release. I went to a theater in Wildwood, NJ, with my mother and a friend of hers, and I can still recall that during the climactic montage linking the baptism of Michael Corleone’s (Al Pacino) nephew with the murders of various Corleone family enemies, my mother whispered, “Blasphemy!” For her, it was an affront to the church in which she was raised, but if anything is attacked in the film, it’s the American dream. The picture even starts with the line “I believe in America,” before showing exactly what American enterprise can do. I wasn’t impressed with THE GODFATHER at first, but then, that was when I thought GOODBYE, COLUMBUS (1969) was a great movie. And I was mightily disappointed when it beat out CABARET (1972) for Best Picture. But the film has grown in my mind since I first saw it, and a return to it reveals an amazing array of treasures.

Although the action seems to be epic in scope, covering almost a decade and highlighting the various members of the Corleone biological and crime families, it really has a single focus. It’s about the transformation of Michael from the child who was deliberately kept out of the family business to its leader. It’s all done in well-modulated steps. When his father is gunned down in the streets, he stands over the man in the hospital and says, “I’m in.” Later it’s he who devises and executes the retaliation plot. With the death of his brother Sonny (James Caan), presumptive heir to the family business, and the murder of his first wife, he’s definitely in as he becomes increasingly ready to turn to violence.

The film opens with a bravura sequence. It contrasts the outdoor wedding celebration, reflecting Michael’s sunny past as the privileged child of a family steeped in its Italian American heritage, with what will become his future, the dark, shadowy, quasi-gothic interiors of the Corleone home, where Don Vito (Marlon Brando) hears entreaties to use his power and connections to help various members of his community. That dichotomy remains, with life going on in the sunshine while planning takes place mostly in the shadows. It’s very much a product of the Vietnam War, the assassinations of the 1960s and the Nixon era. What goes on in the shadows of American life is something to be feared. That’s underlined by a fascinating contrast that appears later in the film. At Connie’s (Talia Shire) wedding in the beginning, she walks around collecting financial tributes due the bride of such a powerful family. When Michael marries Appolonia (Simonetta Sandrelli) in Sicily, she moves among the guests handing out candies. Even the sunny celebration at the film’s opening has been tainted by the move to America.

So much has been written about the leading performances, all of them quite good, I’d like to call attention to some of the less celebrated actors. Salvatore Corsitto opens the film with an expertly delivered monolog asking Brando to avenge his daughter’s abuse by a man she had trusted. He’s so simple and committed you may not notice how the writing is setting up the film’s main issues. Gabriele Torrei has some lovely moments as the baker who helps Michael save Don Vito’s life. As Caan’s wife, Julie Gregg pulls off an expert slalom as she transitions from bragging to her friends about her husband’s sexual prowess to realizing he’s just gone off for a tryst with one of the bridesmaids. And Sandrelli, with very little dialog, makes Appolonia a touchingly ail and innocent character. On her first meeting with Michael, her eyes register fear of this handsome stranger, and the fear is still there when they’re courting. She’s a haunting presence in a film filled with memorable performances.

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The men of CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD (2025) clockwise from top left-Aaron Abrams, Carson McCormac, Vincent Muller, Alexandre Michael Deakin and Kevin Durand

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Clown in a Cornfield

Okay, so there’s this clown…and he lurks in a cornfield (except when he doesn’t)…and he kills people. Does that sound like one of the worst pitches in horror movie history? Then you’d probably be surprised to learn that Eli Craig’s CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD (2025, Shudder, AMC+) isn’t a total waste of time. Yes, it’s overly obvious at places and even a little preachy, and it doesn’t cash all the dramatic checks it writes, but it’s well played and beautifully shot and even moves into a utopian space by the end.

After her mother’s death, Quinn, (Katie Douglas) moves to Kettle Springs, a small Missouri town where her father (Aaron Abrams) has just been recruited as the local doctor. She immediately falls in with the wrong group, a bunch of bored kids who in addition to the usual drinking and rowdy behavior have created a vlog that turns the town mascot, Frendo the clown, into a serial killer. When Frendo starts actually killing people, they think it’s just a stunt at first and then have trouble convincing the adults that it’s not just one of their videos.

For me, what’s most fascinating about the film is the way it reflects my own interpretation of the FRIDAY THE 13TH movies. Far from the exercises in misogyny Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert mistakenly claimed they were, they were really films about the generation gap. The victims aren’t all women, and some of them aren’t guilty of any of the stereotyped teen slasher sins of doing drugs or having sex. The first victim in FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980) is a sweet young woman who wants to devote her life to teaching children. And the killings grow out of a mother’s thirst for revenge at the irresponsible camp counsellors she thinks allowed her son to die. The only real crime most of the slasher kibble have in common is being young. That’s really what’s going on in CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD. From the start, there’s an emphasis on bitter teachers, the town sheriff and even parents who seem to have it in for the youngsters, who are seen as enemies of the established way of doing things. There’s also a neat variation on final girl Quinn’s relationship with her love interest (Carson MacCormac) that explains how she presumably remains a virgin to the last.

Of course, when it gets to the big reveal, which I won’t spoil, some of the protests from the potential victims seem more the stuff of an editorial page or a dyspeptic social media post than believable dramatic dialog. The film also sets up some things, like the “boy who cried wolf” element with the group’s having made videos about an imaginary killer clown and then being confronted by the real thing, that get dropped. But Craig does some very good camera work (with cinematographer Brian Pearson) and editing. He loves tracking shots that whirl around the character and reveal new elements in the environment. That adds greatly to the tension. His cast — particularly Douglas, who nails the character of a teen who’s had to grow up way too fast, and Kevin Durand, as the whacko town mayor — is quite good. And for once, the final shots suggesting a possible sequel — seemingly inevitable given the film made back ten times its admittedly low budget — aren’t depressing.

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Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger

The only thing better than a night spent watching clips from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger movies would be watching one of their films in its entirety. Those are waiting on my DVR, but I’m perfectly happy to have spent an evening with Martin Scorsese as he guided me through their careers and his relationship to their films in MADE IN ENGLAND: THE FILMS OF POWELL AND PRESSBURGER (2024, TCM). David Hinton is credited as director, but this is very much the love child of producers Nick Varley and Matthew Wells.

Like Scorsese, I first discovered The Archers on television. Shortly after Philadelphia introduced UHF stations, one programmed the same movie every night for a week, much as a New York station had shown the “Million Dollar Movie” while Scorsese was growing up. Both BLACK NARCISSUS (1947) and THE RED SHOES (1948) turned up in that franchise, and I can’t remember how many times I saw each. There was something compulsively watchable about both. Part of it was the emotionalism of the acting, but also the visual grandeur, even on a portable black-and-white TV. And when the rest of the family was out, and I got to watch one of them in color…well, wowza!

The film offers generous clips from all of the Powell-Pressburger pictures and many of those Powell made on his own. In fact, it’s hard to read the opening credits because they’re backed by shots from the films. Scorsese’s comments are both personal and well-informed as he shares how the works originally captured his imagination and explains the tension in them between British realism and Powell’s more expressionistic imagination. He also shows a few clips from his own films to demonstrate Powell’s influence on him. In lesser hands that might seem self-serving, but here there’s just enough of Scorsese to make his point, and it’s fascinating to compare the duel in THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP (1943) and the ballet from THE RED SHOES with the fight scenes in RAGING BULL (1980).

For me, Powell and Pressburger, as a team, are Romantics (note the capital “R”); they seek truth in the world of the emotions. The expressionistic elements are means of immersing the viewer in a character’s emotional experience. Even a comparatively realistic film like THE SMALL BACK ROOM (1949) is built around its main characters’ emotional lives more than the accumulation of objectively observed detail. Their films elicit deep emotional responses within me. I mean, Powell is the only director who could get David Niven to move me to tears.

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The men of THE MONKEY (2025) clockwise from top left-Theo James, Rohan Campbell and Adam Scott

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The Monkey

Horror has become writer-director Osgood Perkins canvas through which he manages to control his own past traumas by visiting similar scares upon the audience. The results can be uneven. His LONGLEGS (2024), despite a strong visual sense and good performances, has a lot of plot holes. What a surprise, then, that his most controlled and accomplished work to date, THE MONKEY (2025, Hulu), mines those traumas for comedy.

Theo James stars as twins — sensitive Hal and bully Bill — whose childhood is haunted by the presence of a mechanical drum-playing monkey. When you wind it up, the last beat of the drum coincides with an unusual death. After it kills their babysitter, their mother (Tatiana Maslany) and an uncle (Perkins), they chain the thing up and drop it in a well. Twenty-five-years later, Bill calls his now-estranged brother to inform him it’s resurfaced and is taking out the population of the town where they grew up. And he does it the one week of the year Hal has custody of his son (Colin O’Brien), from whom he’s tried to keep his distance for fear the curse will affect him.

This all sounds very serious, but Perkins treats most of the deaths as slapstick showpieces, some of which have the same complicated machinery as in the FINAL DESTINATION films. His timing is spot on in all of them, whether the sudden opening of a closet triggers a shotgun blast or a series of accidents electrifies a swimming pool. And as an added quirk, whenever these things happen near James, he’s showered in blood and body parts. This all comes from a very serious source. Perkins has said his inspiration was the shocking, headline-making deaths of his parents, his father from HIV complications the children never could have expected and his mother in one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center. This is reflected in the film’s theme: everybody dies, yet we’re constantly surprised by it. As Bill says at one point, “Did you know that twenty-seven percent of all English-speaking people will say, ‘Oh, sh*t, or “Holy sh*t’ before they die. Now, it’s funny, because death is the one big thing that’ll happen to all of us, and yet we still can’t help but be somehow surprised by it.” The added joke on this is that many of the deaths are so strange you couldn’t expect them, from stampeding horses in the middle of the night to a cobra lurking in a hole in a Maine golf course.

Perkins’ cast keeps the ball in the air throughout. James is so good at differentiating the adult twins that when he shows up as Bill it takes a few shots to realize he’s playing a double role. Maslany makes the most of her limited time as the boys’ eccentric mother. There are also nice bits by Sarah Levy, who deserves more screen time as the eccentric aunt who takes them in, Adam Scott as the father who first got stuck with the monkey, Nicco Del Rio as a hippy priest not sure exactly how to handle a funeral and Elijah Wood as the stepfather who wants to adopt Hal’s son to prove he’s the parenting expert he claims to be in print. O’Brien should get special credit for not getting too mawkish as the son. He’s caught between a father who seems to be rejecting him and a stepfather who seems like a joke, and he keeps catching his biological father in lies about his past. That could be the stuff of soap opera, but the young actor manages to capture an ironic viewpoint that keeps the door open for comedy, even as the film deals with serious family issues.