Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

We’re over an hour into Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes before we hear a human voice. That’s not to say we hear no voices; the apes here, “many generations” after the events in 2017’s War for the Planet of the Apes, have become, for them, downright chatty (though they mostly speak haltingly still, with occasional flutters of sign language). The human is Mae (Freya Allan), who is smarter than the average feral human at this stage in the Apes timeline. She throws in with some idealistic chimps in opposition to Proximus Caesar (voice of Kevin Durand), head of a more violent ape clan, who wants to get into a vault that contains lots of technology. Still, the movie privileges ape voices over the few speaking humans’.

I was a major fan of the preceding three Apes films, which, with the help of Andy Serkis as Caesar, shook out as unusually insightful Hollywood blockbusters. They felt as though they mattered and had something to say — they had substance. Kingdom isn’t nearly as sharp or as full of surprising details, but it engaged me anyway. If this franchise is to go on without Caesar, telling stories about his legacy and how it is used and misused isn’t a bad way to go. Our hero here is Noa (voice of Owen Teague), member of an eagle-training clan headed by his father. Proximus and his army invade Noa’s village, kidnapping the able-bodied of his clan so they can work to open the vault. Noa, Mae and an especially bright orangutan, Raka (voice of Peter Macon), ride off to free the eagle clan and otherwise discourage Proximus’ plans.

Caesar and Serkis are missed, but the story here is sturdy enough that we get on board. It has a lot of good will from the previous films going for it, and manages to hold onto some of it. The problem is, I’m not sure how many flavors of story can be told in this universe; how many times can they reiterate the monkey-Spartacus plot? The special effects, as always, are magical — a chimp named Anaya at one point signs “Anaya is scared” and shows the most abject facial expression of misery I’ve ever seen. The work on all the apes is top-flight, enabling them to convey any emotion and all its nuances. When apes from the peaceful eagle clan are reunited with clanmates they thought dead, they respond with unfiltered joy that’s like a shot of oxygen. The apes mostly haven’t learned to be circumspect with their feelings — that’s a human thing (“echoes,” the apes call us) — though the shrewder, and more aggressive, of the primates can dissemble.

Kingdom is more interesting when alluding to details and threads that it just lets go. William H. Macy turns up as a sketchy history teacher who’s been tutoring Proximus, and I wanted to sit in on one of those classes. A short tale about what exactly a human would teach an ape about the time before, when (as acknowledged here) humans dominated and kept apes in chains, would be a good one to tell in an Apes TV episode or comic book. This teacher implores Mae to forget about the good old days and get used to the new way of things, indicating that the humans have developed opportunistic people who’ll try their luck with the apes rather than sleeping under trees. If another trilogy is planned, maybe they’ll get into the concept of human “donkeys” (the term derisively used in War for those apes who worked with the human militia).

This 56-year-old franchise seemed to run out of gas in the ‘70s, and Tim Burton’s attempt in 2001 read more like his riff on the Apes themes than a serious bid to relaunch. But the reboot series starting in 2011 found fresh and intriguing things to explore, and Andy Serkis’ virtuoso complexity as the hero seemed to lift everyone else’s game (it is, I feel, his crowning achievement in mocap acting). If we can’t have his Caesar (though in a franchise that in its second film blew up the earth and then circled back to 1970s America in its third, never say never again) and the franchise can’t just be left alone now, I suppose an Apes going concern is fine. Thoughtful writers can pursue issues in the Apes ‘verse that make comparable franchises look like pabulum, and special effects have sharpened to the degree that the world of the apes can be shaped and demolished in ways that aren’t limited by the physical world. But if they’re just going to retell the story of good and bad apes and humans fighting each other again and again, why bother? 

Humane

Here’s a cheerful premise: Our future will be so grim that people deemed by the government to be a drain on resources will be obliged to step up for euthanasia. That concept powered the 2022 Japanese film Plan 75, and it provides some electricity — some — to the dystopian thriller Humane, directed by Caitlin Cronenberg from a script by Michael Sparaga. In a few years (presumably), the deteriorating climate will result in a serious shortage of water and other natural resources, so the government makes a deal: At least one adult from every family must agree to die. Their survivors will get a decent chunk of change. They will pass into the great unknown mystery knowing they sacrificed (or were sacrificed) for the greater good.

The world-building in Humane doesn’t concern itself very much with some questions we may have (will birth control be mandated?). We see a few snippets of news on TV, some featuring Jared York (Jay Baruchel), an anthropologist working with the government on this morbid endeavor. Jared’s rich, famous father, anchorman Charles York (Peter Gallagher), has called Jared and his three other grown children to his home for dinner. When everyone — including addict Noah (Sebastian Chacon), embattled CEO Rachel (Emily Hampshire) and her teen daughter Mia (Sirena Gulamgaus), and aspiring actress Ashley (Alanna Bale) — has gathered, Charles drops the news: he and his wife Dawn (Uni Park) have decided to volunteer themselves for the cause — to “enlist.”

Charles is out of the picture in half an hour or so. His wife gets cold feet and flees, complicating matters greatly: the people who arrive to administer the enlistment, led by the amiable Bob (Enrico Colantoni), have to take a second body to replace Dawn. So the grown kids fight (often physically) over which of them is going to provide that body. Humane becomes a one-location thriller (it could be adapted to the stage with little trouble) in which four characters with varying degrees of pain in their lives try to defend their continued existence. That could be boring, but Cronenberg keeps things short and briskly paced, with a mitigating sense of humor — bleak humor, to be sure, but enough to humanize the brittle, often objectionable characters. 

Humane doesn’t seem to aspire to more than that; the world is narrowed down to one well-appointed home and one set of siblings squabbling. So it becomes an actors’ showcase, though the drama often devolves into stabbing, strangling, and gunplay. None of these people seem especially capable of fratricide, though I guess part of the satirical point is that these pampered bourgeois kids, who have grown up and into their own self-abusive flaws, turn easily and coldly to violence. I almost would rather have followed Bob and his partner from house to house, seen what they see — kind of the inverse of Asphalt City, in which a couple of guys go door to door saving lives, not taking them. 

But this is the Humane we got, and for what it is it’s crisply rendered. Of the three filmmaking children of Canadian master David Cronenberg (who contributes an aural cameo here), Caitlin seems to have inherited the old man’s dark sense of comedy, while Cassandra (based on her 2013 short Candy) got his erotic aesthetic and Brandon (judging by the two of his films I’ve managed to sit through) got his fixation on body horror. Put them all together and you have David, I suppose, just as combining the Corleone sons gets you Vito. Caitlin Cronenberg has an easy way with actors; her style is smooth, not off-putting or confusing. I’d like to see her write her own script next time, though, follow her own muse.

Civil War

Like a lot of flashpoints for cultural controversy, Alex Garland’s Civil War isn’t much to get angry or enthused about. It’s not a bad movie; it just isn’t what a lot of viewers will be wanting and expecting. Civil War is about a second such conflict in America, and some of its sounds and visuals have the spooky-surreal punch of the invasion sequences in John Milius’ Red Dawn. Garland, like Milius, wants the American audience to feel what it’s like to live under a hostile military presence. But he also wants to fashion a bouquet to war correspondents — our heroes are a quartet of combat photographers/writers, and they only get in the thick of things every reel or so. Meanwhile, the narrative takes no sides, which seems meant to placate the red and the blue by presenting a purple story that has already annoyed both sides.

Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and Joel (Wagner Moura) are seasoned war journos, joined by aging writer Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and neophyte shutterbug Jessie (Cailie Spaeny), who looks about 12. The American president (Nick Offerman) has somehow gotten himself a third term and done other dictatorial things. This has resulted (I guess?) in the country splitting up into factions — loyalist states (Florida, Colorado), neutral spaces, and a secessionist movement called the Western Forces based in a comically unlikely détente between Texas and California (Gavin and Greg, together at last!) 

That last detail is your loudest indication that Civil War isn’t meant to be a statement about our current polarized situation (and a surprising amount of reviewers really, really wanted it to be). It extrapolates a reality that could happen here into a story about the truth-tellers, the press who (theoretically, anyway) seek to capture what’s happening and report on it. Garland’s defense of the media against charges of “fake news” and “enemy of the people” is about the closest he gets to condemning a certain former president who, to these eyes, has very little in common with the president Offerman plays (for one thing, Offerman doesn’t have the material — he’s in it so little one could comfortably hold one’s breath throughout his scenes).

Every so often there’s stuff for Lee and Jessie to photograph, and Garland sticks to the stuttery realism of modern war cinema, the clatter and muffled bass of combat, people abruptly felled as though connected to the sky by an invisible thread that’s been snipped. It was done with more panache and feral virtuosity in Children of Men, but Garland’s attempt to honor the chaos of real warfare is noble. The comparison is apt, because despite what many of its overexcited boosters claimed, Children of Men plopped us in medias res in a grim meathook future and then had nothing much to say about it other than how much it would suck. Civil War is the same. Garland pays a price for his noncommittal approach: his world-building suffers to the point of being nonexistent or at least irrelevant.

If Civil War were a better movie it might spawn a franchise, like the odious The Purge, telling a variety of stories set in the dystopia it creates. Garland’s America has me wanting to know more about it than what we’re given piecemeal. What started the war, what politics were involved, how do some towns apparently choose to opt out of the conflict altogether? Meanwhile, Garland’s narrative is old and full of familiar tropes; the protagonists meet their predicted fates at the predicted times, and Jesse Plemons turns up on the road — this is in essence a glorified road-trip movie, with our heroes beating feet to D.C. to secure an interview with the president — to be creepy and militaristically sadistic in the manner of heavies in a hundred B-movies. Which Civil War basically is, though a well-acted one, and precisely calibrated in the combat sequences. But people need to chill about it. It is what it is, not what we want it to be.

Poor Things

It won’t do to take Poor Things literally. This, after all, is a movie in which a pregnant woman jumps off a bridge and is brought back to life, with the brain of her still-living child implanted in her own skull. The result is Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), who seems built to violate the Victorian mores of her society. We witness Bella, with her infant brain in a full-grown woman’s body, evolve from an innocent who spits out hated food and speaks in broken syntax to a wiser woman who reads up on socialism but still refers to the sex act as “furious jumping.” 

The movie, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite) and based on a 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, is partly a riff on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and partly a charcuterie board full of bits from other works of dark science fantasy, with frequent visits from weird cinema down through the ages. I loved it, though possibly would have loved less of it; at two hours and twenty-one minutes, Poor Things starts to circle and belabor its point. Some won’t mind; others won’t get past the first half hour. Not a horror movie itself, it’s best appreciated by horror fans with long memories and patience. Its visual imagination is richly capacious, it has an uncompromising vibe of pure cinema, and when you see it a second time — and you may want to — you’ll at least know at which points to hit the bathroom.

Stone gives a hungry, open-souled performance illustrated by I lost count of how many sex scenes; she will be and has been praised for her bravery in the second aspect, but the meat of her work resides in the first, as Bella’s brain grows and her responses to stimuli and to life — at some points in her journey, there’s little difference — gain more subtlety and less babyish affect. Stone helps put across the story as a fable about growth in a barren garden of a society. We’re not meant, from our privileged perch as 21st-century people, to take Bella’s arc as a Victorian woman as commentary on feminism or anything else. Victorian London is just the most diabolically fun setting for this tale and its central figure, a prickly and proudly ungovernable agent of chaos.

A lot of the film, with its mad-lab gore and copious sex and nudity (if this got through with an R rating, what gets an NC-17 these days?), is like a Hammer horror from the ‘60s seen through a fever-dream lens (literally a fisheye lens at times, as well as a bokeh blurring effect). Cinematographer Robbie Ryan and production designers Shona Heath and James Price can take deep bows. And Lanthimos doesn’t forget about the supporting cast, including a waffle-scarred Willem Dafoe as Bella’s creator (who burps bubbles when eating) and a whiny Mark Ruffalo as one of the (male) fools who try to trap Bella’s spirit. Poor Things has a paltry-for-the-2020s $35 million budget but manages to look like a big Hollywood saga, only seen through a funhouse mirror.

Poor Things is essentially a comedy. We never fear for Bella even when things look bleak and Jerskin Fendrix’s ominous score becomes, according to the editorializing subtitles, “perplexing.” With its concerns with dark scientific inquiry and female consciousness coming into its own, it’s the true Barbenheimer this year. It arrives just in time to give me happy optimism about the future of cinema as a delivery system for idiosyncratic visions. It may not make studio accountants giddy, and might even be too stubbornly strange for the Academy, but it’ll take its place among the iconic works in dark-fantasy history. But this sort of unstable experiment comes with a mild warning: I loved it, but some of it I didn’t like. If that makes sense.

No One Will Save You

There’s hardly any dialogue in the surprisingly effective new alien thriller No One Will Save You, which has things to say about guilt and feelings of isolation along with delivering alien thrills. Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever) lives alone in the house where she grew up, nursing the loss of her mother and her childhood friend Maude, to whom she still writes letters. One night, an alien comes to visit, getting around on tippy-toes that look like thumbs. Brynn spends much of the movie trying to hide from, escape, and otherwise evade the aliens. The movie’s title refers to the fact that everyone in her small town has turned on her. Brynn is on her own.

Brian Duffield (Spontaneous) has written and directed No One Will Save You with a healthy respect for odd sounds as well as silence. Brynn is alone most of the time and trying to keep quiet, so it makes sense for there to be (almost) no dialogue. The movie works as a creature feature, albeit one in which we’re not quite sure what the aliens want — but then again, neither is Brynn. She’s sure, however, that they intend something ominous and nasty. They’ve seemingly already taken over the bodies of some folks in town, steering them awkwardly towards Brynn, whose private pain they appear to find interesting. (Judging from this film and the recent Landscape with Invisible Hand, we humans are terrific entertainment for the gray men.)

The filmmaking, proceeding by image and sound alone, is nicely accomplished pure cinema. There wouldn’t be much of a movie, though, if Duffield didn’t have an expressive actor like Kaitlyn Dever at its center. Dever runs a fairly large spectrum of emotion here; her Brynn is human and flawed but tough when she needs to be. What happened between Brynn and Maude is something we don’t find out till near the end, and Dever conveys a feeling of a rock of sorrow sitting heavily in her stomach. We have no trouble reading Brynn emotionally, even if we share her confusion. Nobody stands around burping exposition. Brynn and we are on our own in this thorny narrative filled with chittering, weirdly articulated beasties, whose designs only become clear once we consider one of Brynn’s hobbies — recreating her town via little model houses.

Are we meant to take the movie’s events literally? There’s room for an interpretation that’s part 2001, part Bradbury’s “Mars Is Heaven.” The ending can therefore be viewed through a dark or rose-colored lens. No One Will Save You is the sort of mid-budget gem that’s all but disappeared from multiplexes; people want to credit Barbenheimer with rejuvenating the theatrical experience, but Barbie and Oppenheimer, aside from their qualities, were $100 million behemoths backed by major studios and corresponding marketing campaigns. So a trim, affecting movie like this one, which clearly wants to elicit emotions other than “boo!” scares (though it deals in those, too), has to premiere on the streaming service Hulu.

I can only hope that the movie, like Hulu’s equally deserving Prey, will emerge on physical media someday. It’s earned the chance to sit on shelves and in library collections, and I’d prefer it didn’t withdraw into the fog of Hulu back content after a month. It needs to be stumbled upon, discovered. The film isn’t anything radical or brilliant; it just devises a good story and tells it honestly, and isn’t that something we all miss? As for the ending, depending on one’s mood it could be taken as a cold shot or as a warming gift, and I’m in the mood to leave Kaitlyn Dever’s Brynn in a place happier than the one in which we met her.

Landscape with Invisible Hand

One would think, as many others have said, that extraterrestrial visitors would probably want to give Earth a wide berth. Aliens don’t need to destroy the planet — we’re doing a fair job of that ourselves. The aliens in Landscape with Invisible Hand, a mopey sci-fi drama, take over Earth because they want to save us from ourselves — or so they say. Called “the Vuvv,” they rule from offworld colonies and resemble “gooey coffee tables.” Through translators, the Vuvv lay down the law: Anything that does not enrich or amuse them is not worth the space it inhabits. They try to be polite about it, but they find themselves conquering an easily cowed species, except for a few rebellious types.

We follow the Campbell family. Beth (Tiffany Haddish), the mother, was once an attorney; now she has resumes out to fast-food chains. (Which, I guess, are still permitted to exist. The worldbuilding here probably doesn’t bear much deep thought.) Her son Adam (Asante Blackk) is a budding artist; the movie has eyes for him but more or less forgets about his sister Natalie (Brooklynn MacKinzie). Adam gets friendly with Chloe (Kylie Rogers), a fellow student in his art class. They kiss but seem more like casual friends than boyfriend/girlfriend. Regardless, Chloe hears about a way for them to make money by wearing “nodes” that allow the Vuvv to watch their romance; the aliens find human love fascinating.

That might have been sufficient for an interesting premise, but writer-director Cory Finley, adapting a YA novel by M.T. Anderson, more or less drops that thread in favor of showing the Vuvv’s demands bringing indignity to the Campbells and to Chloe’s family, who live in the Campbells’ basement. What if one or both of the couple were gay yet had to keep up the ruse of playing straight? Instead, the Vuvv hold the threat of “debt for six generations” over the humans’ heads, leading to first Beth and then Chloe’s father playing wife to a Vuvv who only knows about family and marriage from what it’s seen on Earth television from the ‘50s. Watching Tiffany Haddish trying to play a good stereotypical wifey to a gooey coffee table should be funnier than it is. A lot of stuff here should be.

Haddish only really gets her blood up in one scene, but it has no consequences since Chloe’s father apparently seamlessly steps into the wife role (it seems we all look the same to the Vuvv). Landscape tries to be an allegory about corporations deforming human life, but there’s a distinct lack of intriguing details, and though the plot eventually brings in a Vuvv who appreciates Adam’s art and offers him an elite position to ply his trade, its appreciation is only on the level of commerce and propaganda. Well, what if there were Vuvv with artistic, or at least not totally mercenary, sensibilities? The Vuvv are all boringly the same; they all have matching quirks and dominating personae. They don’t seem to have been thought out in dramatic terms — or comedic; the movie comes perilously close to being neither/nor, or null. 

Sometimes it enters that territory anyway. Haddish brings some gravitas to the scenes where her Beth frets about providing for her family; she plays Beth’s reality with all the pained honesty, clinging to whatever dignity she can, of an actor who once lived in her car. But that’s about it for emotional realism. We don’t really care about Adam and Chloe’s relationship, even if its failure means debtors’ prison for the family. Cory Finley apparently has bigger fish to fry, but any satirical points are so obvious as to be a big blur — we wait for something to flip the script, for someone among the Vuvv to act opposed to Vuvv dictates. But they don’t. They oppress, and the humans do what they must to survive. The result is more depressing than insightful or entertaining.

Asteroid City

In further evidence that our buddies calling the shots at Hollywood studios are all heart, Wes Anderson’s best film in years, Asteroid City — which almost demands to be seen on the big screen — has been trebucheted from most theaters and onto streaming after a little more than two weeks. Anderson uses his old familiar trick of boxing off painful experience, this time through layers of representation, as in his The Grand Budapest Hotel. Our view is that of an audience member watching a movie, and in that movie we see a play, and the making of that play, and its broadcast adaptation for television. It offers far more than can be taken in at one viewing, and leaves itself wide open for interpretation.

As a longtime Anderson fan (Rushmore is a lifetime top-tenner for me) I was left feeling bruised and hollow by his last effort, The French Dispatch. It came dangerously close to just being a parade of hip actors filing onscreen for their one line. Asteroid City is filled end to end with actors, too, but the melancholy that suffuses all of Anderson’s films feels anchored to something real here. Anderson returns to loss and grief over and over, dressing it up immaculately in symmetrical-bordering-on-ceremonial compositions with the actors center stage, or far off to the side, delivering their speeches softly and without much emotion. The success of his efforts depends largely on his cast and whether Anderson has left them enough air to breathe and create and possibly even argue with the aesthetic they’re in.

Here, he does. Everyone here gathers in the southwestern Asteroid City for the Junior Stargazers Convention, and there’s something about filming in the desert that moves artists like Anderson — or Jordan Peele with Nope in recent years — to think about stories and their role in our lives. Wisely, Anderson gravitates to Jason Schwartzman and Scarlett Johansson, who play actors playing characters. Sometimes we catch them as actors, most often as their characters. Augie Steenbeck, the character in the play, grieves his wife; Augie’s portrayer, Jones Hall, has his own grief, and on one occasion Jones adds a level of realism to a painful scene that jolts his scene partner — Johansson as actress Mercedes Ford playing actress Midge Campbell — out of character. 

How easily the spell of story can be broken, says Anderson, whose work features pain shut up in pretty boxes, sometimes punching holes out of those boxes. (I’ve always felt that the box-punching was at its most gratifying and loud in Anderson’s first three films, the only ones he wrote with Owen Wilson.) Asteroid City is whimsical on the surface — it features an alien that’s sometimes stop-motion and sometimes a latex suit filled by an actor whose presence is too good a joke to spoil — but the uncanny color scheme draws us in, invites us to look deeper. Eventually the movie states its case plain, in a repeated mantra that may repel some on-the-fencers in the audience: “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep,” which could mean any number of things. 

It’s clear by now, after almost 30 years, that Anderson can’t make movies any other way. He’s never going to make an emotionally sloppy Sidney Lumet urban drama. You dig the cut of his jib or you don’t, and if you don’t, nothing in his films is going to win you over. I’m on Team Wes, but I don’t blame you if you’re not. There’s just too much stuff, even if I like it, that can elicit understandable exasperation. But there aren’t so many American filmmakers with such an immediately recognizable style that we can afford to pooh-pooh one. I’d say he’s earned respect even if he leaves you cold. Asteroid City, though, is a return to the populous but warmer climes of Moonrise Kingdom and Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson’s one-two punch from the early-to-mid-‘10s. Whether you like it or not, Anderson isn’t lost in Wesville yet; he still has stories to tell and emotions to work out through them (though not in them). 

Videodrome

On February 4, it will have been forty years since David Cronenberg’s Videodrome — his magnum opus about fantasy and control — emerged, like a rash, on theater screens and shortly thereafter withdrew its shingle and closed shop. In the decades since, it has been re-appraised as an important work on display in the Cronenberg museum of images and ideas. Taking the form of a classic noir, the film is less a whodunit than a what’s-it-gonna-do-to-me. The protagonist, Max Renn (James Woods, seldom moister or better), owns and operates a shady indie TV station that traffics in the obscure and the louche. Max is always on the lookout for harder content, and he finds it in Videodrome, a program consisting only of torture and murder (simulated or real? does it matter?). 

One of the great ironies of Videodrome is that the actual content of the Videodrome programming isn’t the problem — it’s not, in and of itself, harmful to the viewer. It’s just there to lure people — perhaps a certain kind of person not averse to violent fantasizing — and then the signal, which we’re told could just as easily be conveyed in a test-pattern screen, causes hallucinations and, eventually, death. The concept of salacious and/or violently stimulating content as a Trojan horse for something else is borne out by Cronenberg’s own movie, which attracts us with kink and splattery, suppurating Rick Baker special effects and then infects us with its virus of ideas — or at least an invitation to debate them. Unlike Videodrome, Cronenberg doesn’t want to hurt you, just provoke thought.

Following the rabbit hole of clues and sketchy figures, Max gets involved with Nicki Brand (Debbie Harry), who gives advice on the radio by day and indulges s&m urges at night. Nicki is intrigued enough by what she sees of Videodrome to want to be part of it. For Max, she becomes the erotically entreating face of Videodrome, her lips bulging forth from the TV set from which many of Max’s head trips flow. Despite the wild and often unprecedented imagery he puts on the screen, Cronenberg has never been a flashy director, which suits his material just fine. If we’re to understand what Cronenberg is telling by showing, we need to see it, straight on and dead-eyed. No fancy cinematic footwork will do.

Other figures fade into the picture, like gangsters out of the noir fog — mainly media cult types, who study the effects of mass communication and either caution against it or weaponize it. Somewhere in the film’s second half, Cronenberg gets a little lost in the weeds of his own story’s implications. But that’s what makes it art. Cronenberg has famously said that you make a movie to find out why you wanted to make the movie. Videodrome, possibly, stays unresolved for us because it was unresolved for him, and how can something this visually and philosophically tangled be resolved? It can’t. It can only go out on a small frequency and reach the like-minded, who may perceive its unanswered questions as a void they feel duty-bound to fill with interpretation.

Cronenberg began with a disturbing childhood experience with a TV signal that was barely coming in; the (again) unresolved fuzz and hiss of a bad signal, he thought, could have been a dark and frightening program without enough juice to cut through the static. That’s not even a premise, that’s a vibe, and the original tone of young Cronenberg’s unease makes it into the movie. The sometimey signal of Videodrome seems to cast its malefic spell by what it conceals as much as reveals. Sweaty imagination pastes in what the eye misses. Videodrome has a lot to say about the bad romance between eye and brain, mind and body. Cronenberg has taken his childhood fear and built a world of conspiracy around it. Some of it plays as old hat — Cronenberg had just been down a similar paranoid road with 1981’s Scanners — and some of it is an excuse for Cronenberg and Rick Baker to do the Lovecraftian work of imagining the unimaginable. “Long live the new flesh” are Max’s final words, and Cronenberg’s artistic credo. The flesh Cronenberg shows us may be new, but it’s as flawed as the old flesh, because it’s ours. 

Nope

With Nope, his third feature as writer-director, Jordan Peele solidifies his status as one of the most exciting new American filmmakers now working. He has a steady command of mood and suspense, and he knows enough to let subtext be subtext and not overexplain it. I can’t tell you how relieved I was, for instance, that the sad and terrifying story of Gordy the trained chimp, which opens Nope on an ominous note, doesn’t turn out to be connected in some way with the larger plot.¹ Yes, we meet a survivor of the incident as a grown man, Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun), but Peele has the sense to let the event linger and fester in the back of our minds while we watch what certainly appears to be an alien-invasion thriller.

Ultimately, Nope shakes out as a comment on Hollywood and how people are wasted, swallowed up, disfigured in the name of entertainment. But it’s also foreboding and spooky as hell, like Peele’s previous thrillers, Get Out and Us. The movie is set mostly on a ranch dedicated to training horses for use in TV, movies and commercials. The ranch is owned and run by OJ (Daniel Kaluuya), who takes care of the horses and occasionally sells one to Jupe, who now manages a Western theme park and low-key ghoulishly dines out on his traumatic experience with Gordy. 

All of this is background, and it’s a slow but compelling burn until we recognize what’s going on: a creature of unknown origin is feeding off of local life. I was reminded of Stephen King thinking about him and Louis L’Amour having separate ideas while standing at the edge of a pond: “His story might be about water rights in a dry season, my story would more likely be about some dreadful, hulking thing rising out of the still waters to carry off sheep . . . and horses . . . and finally people.” It’s OJ’s vibrant sister Emerald (Keke Palmer) who figures out what should be done about it: get it on video and get rich. For a while, nobody else comes up with any more productive notions, like how to kill it, because it takes a while to learn what might kill it.

There is one beautifully simple yet brilliant callback: the impact of a balloon popping. It’s a shame one particular character isn’t there to appreciate the second instance. Nope goes on a bit, slightly north of two hours, but is never boring, not with the amount of character and world-building detail Peele packs into the story. The people in the movie are written as utterly unique, including a Fry’s tech clerk (Brandon Perea) who helps set up surveillance and a grizzled cinematographer (Michael Wincott, with his usual gravelly growl) who rises to the challenge of capturing the thing on real film at magic hour. (Cinematographers — what are you gonna do?) Kaluuya gives us a stoic and almost comically unflappable figure — a classic Western hero — and Palmer crackles and pops as a firecracker with innumerable side hustles. 

Nope even tucks in some film history, telling us that the Black jockey who rode a horse for Eadweard Muybridge’s famous 1887 Animal Locomotion Plate 626 was the ancestor of OJ and Emerald. That’s a claim they make to boost their business; it’s also accurate inasmuch as the rider — to this day no one actually knows his name, though the fucking horse was identified — is, in a way, ancestor to all artists of color unnamed, dismissed, and ignored while they added to the history of cinema. The more we think back on Nope, the more depth it takes on; it is the work of a specifically Black sensibility fed by decades of Hollywood, for good (the influence on his own art) and ill (the reality of being non-white in the white dream factory). And Peele has fed well, and knows which bits are nourishing and which not, and he also knows the dangers of consuming too much filled with too little.

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¹Without getting into spoilers, what I mean is that Gordy doesn’t figure into the threat later on; it doesn’t turn out that he was controlled by the menace, or something. Other writers would try to tie those elements together in a neat, cheap little bow instead of allowing Gordy his own power as subtext.

Prey

The well-loved Predator (1987) pitted Arnold Schwarzenegger and a cadre of tough guys against an ugly alien hunter with superior technology. After several sequels over the years, the franchise notes its 35th anniversary with Prey, an action-thriller set in 1719 among mostly a Comanche tribe as they attempt, more or less feebly, to contend with this merciless E.T. warrior. It takes Naru (Amber Midthunder), a young Comanche woman raised as a healer but yearning to be a hunter, and her loyal dog Sarii to defend the tribe against the Predator as well as some human predators (some French trappers).

Some have called Prey the best Predator film since the original. I may not be the best judge of that — Predator 2 (1990) eludes my memory, I fell asleep on Predators (2010), and I missed The Predator (2018) and the Alien Vs. Predator duology. But I’ll take their word for it. Sharply and succinctly directed by Dan Trachtenberg, from a meat-and-potatoes script by Patrick Aison, Prey establishes its conflict with no fuss, gives us a hero straining against the role 18th-century Comanche culture dictates for her, and doesn’t skimp on the action. It’s brisk old-school entertainment, and what it’s doing on Hulu and not on a big screen near you is beyond me.

Then again, Hulu offers the choice to view the film in a version dubbed in Comanche, which feels right. Not that there’s much chat anyway. The French trappers, mainly scum and Predator fodder, speak in French subtitled in French, so I guess it doesn’t matter what they’re saying. The one exception speaks Comanche to Naru and provides her with firepower other than her bow and her tomahawk. Why do I mention all this? I guess because the film’s setting (it was filmed in chilly Alberta, Canada) and polyglot nature reminded me of some of the better spaghetti westerns, especially those by Sergio Corbucci. 

I hasten to add Prey doesn’t share much besides aesthetics and a certain people-talking-past-each-other vibe with Corbucci. But I’m glad of any current movie that evokes him. I’m also glad to make a better acquaintance with Amber Midthunder, whom I might’ve seen in one TV show or another; here she takes the screen effortlessly and builds rapport with us immediately. Naru makes a fine no-frills heroine, though she’s made a bit too flawless. Other than the hunting training she works on by herself and doesn’t always come naturally to her, she doesn’t have a streak of impatience or something a young, energetic hero would have to unlearn. Of course, in such an action-centered movie this comes with the territory.

Naru takes some hits and losses, but her dog isn’t one of them, which is fine with me as a frequent visitor to the Does the Dog Die? website. Generally, Prey doesn’t want to bum us out too much. It’s a zippy Saturday-matinee creature feature. The apparent randomness of its setting (there is talk of setting further Predator movies in various other eras) allows for some subtext that isn’t stressed too much. What I admire most is that the film prizes Naru’s smarts above all else. Sure, she’s brave, loyal and independent, but she’s also a quick study, and she notices things about the Predator’s techniques that help keep her and others safe. She’s a great hero for this moment — not tough so much as resilient.