The Crow (2024)

 

I'm probably one of the few true movie buffs who has not seen Brandon Lee's The Crow (1994), so I can't comment on similarities / differences between Lee's original, which was directed by Alex Proyas, and Bill Skarsgard's version, directed by Rupert Sanders.

Critics have not been impressed by Crow '24's storyline or the under-energized performances by Skarsgard, tatted musician Eric, and co-star British singer / actress FKA twigs, as Shelly. Watching two impossibly attractive people's slithering courtship is not enough to compel interest in an undercooked story about, well, it's hard for me to say. 

Film veteran Danny Huston plays Vincent Roeg, a tech villain with an ominous power of suggestion -- not sure how he came to have it -- who in in an unholy alliance with Shelly's mother, played by celebrated British stage actress Josette Simon, and other mysterious folk. The script does not explore comprehensibly any of this satisfactorily, but it all ends with the murder of one of Shelly's friends by Roe's agents and an attack on her and Eric as they try to avoid capture. 

The lovers are killed, and Eric finds himself in a mucky limbo with another of the undead, Kronos (Sami Bouajila), who tells him his love for Shelly will keep him suspended between life and death until her murder can be avenged. (It is quite likely all of this made more sense 30 years ago.)

I agree with those who say the first two acts of the film -- the courtship and the after-death revelation -- are a moody, atmospheric slog -- and the third act is where the real party is. But by then interest has passed and despite some pretty artful swordplay by Skarsgard and an astounding John Wickian body count in the halls of an opera house, the movie is DOA.

Requiescat in pace

Strange Darling

To even the boldest of cinephiles, J.T. Mollner's Strange Darling will be the damndest (strangest?) picture this year.  And THAT, most assuredly, is a GOOD thing.

Mollner, with actor Giovanni Ribisi as director of photography, has constructed a beautifully vibrant, non-linear, highly unpredictable story, billed as a re-enactment, of the final rampage of a serial killer in the Pacific Northwest. It has elements of horror, and the gore is substantial, but it is also terrifically funny in spots, which only adds to its intoxicating effect.

Willa Fitzgerald and Kyle Gallner are the principals in this bloody, freakishly disturbing story of hunter and hunted that begins in the middle of the chase and bounces among the hours leading up to and following the final standoff. The film's last minutes are a single shot of the killer staring into the camera lens as the color is bled out of the frame. To say more would be to ruin a nearly perfect picture.

I'm not that familiar with Fitzgerald nor Gallner but their performances are wonderfully synched, bending to every unexpected twist, making every excruciating moment totally believable, riveting. Veteran actors Ed Begley Jr. and Barbara Hershey are featured in one of the story's six chapters that is risibly titled "Mountain People."

This picture is NOT for the squeamish or those triggered by, well, just about anything.

Alien: Romulus

 

I've viewed the Alien franchise (excluding the crossovers with Predator) as an extended metaphor about how human vanity and greed can be supplanted by virtue and grit. It has also been a HUGE "you go, girl" to female empowerment, while rewriting the script on tension and viscera and gore.

Fede Alvarez's Alien: Romulus tracks along with the first three films in the series, especially, with corporate scheming being the villain and the skeletal anger machines that gestate inside of human hosts being the tools to galactic domination.

In this sequel, scrappy young orphan Rain, a wonderful Cailee Spaeny, is trapped on a dark mining planet with her brother Andy -- a masterful David Jonsson who, frankly, owns this picture. Andy is an android programmed by Rain's father to be her guardian.

After being denied permission to leave the planet, having completed her required number of hours in mines, Rain joins with a band of young renegades -- Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn, Aileen Wu -- who have spotted a damaged space station, the Romulus of the title, in the planet's orbit. They figure the station is carrying enough fuel to get them off the planet and to a better life where there is sunshine. They need Andy's machinery to make it all happen.

Problems with the pirating excursion present themselves almost immediately, with multiple disastrous threats just ticks of the clock away. The most pressing threat is the orbiting station's steady descent into the planet's asteroid rings and sure destruction. Added to this, of course, is the discovery of a hive of hungry, hungry aliens in the ship's inner chambers.

Alvarez, whom I first noticed for his excellent home-invasion thriller "Don't Breathe," has directed a film with three distinct acts. The opening exposition is smartly crafted so that audiences can overlook the thievery at the core of the narrative and see the scheme as getting back at The Man -- the soulless, grubby human counterpart to the snapping creatures on board.

The second act ratchets up the tension and the stakes as the team lands on the damaged station and discovers there is "life" on board, other than the reptilian monsters hibernating within -- a pretty neat narrative link to Ripley Scott's Alien (1979).

The third act raises the stakes on the existential threat even further, saying the alien enemy lies within us.

It's a great ride, with Alvarez using all of the cinematic tools at his disposal to create both claustrophobia and isolation in the battle and the chase, but also the intimacy of connections across the vastness of space -- represented most clearly and, yes, lovingly by Rain and Andy's devotion to each another.

Some might take issue -- as I did a bit -- with the story's infantilizing of Andy, who is Black, as a boy in a grown man's body. A charitable reading of the final moments of the film suggests Alvarez understands this and will "fix it" in the next picture -- which there surely will be.