So…I like Don’t Worry Darling, Olivia Wilde’s much-discussed tabloid-fodder sophomore feature, well enough. At its best, this modern iteration of a Stepford Wives-style dystopia is creepy and unsettling in an uncanny valley kind of way, even if it is a bit up its own ass and so, so assured of its own importance.
Kids in small towns spend a lot of time wishing for something, anything to happen. In Nyla Innuksuk’s feature directorial debut, the sci-fi horror Slash/Back, a group of friends get their wish in the form of an alien invasion on the longest day of the year. When extraterrestrial interlopers show up in the remote, barely-sub-arctic Inuit village of Pangnirtung, it’s up to Maika (Tasiana Shirley) and her pals Jesse (Alexis Wolfe), Uki (Nalajoss Ellsworth), and Leena (Chelsea Prusky) to save the day. And the visitors definitely learn that “nobody fucks with the girls from Pang.”
A long-lost documentary about an isolated Peruvian penal colony directed by a long-time collaborator of Werner Herzog? You had me at hello, Sepa: Nuestro Senor de los Milagros (Sepa: Our Lord of Miracles). And the newly restored film does not disappoint.
With Dark Glasses, his first film since 2012’s Dracula 3D, horror legend Dario Argento wants to remind you that, even at 81, he can still make a Dario Argento movie. Most, or at least many of his cinematic trademarks are present and accounted for. We’ve got striking colors, an unseen killer terrorizing young women, and a Goblin-esque score that could be lifted from one of the director’s late-70s/early-80s works, among other touches. While it doesn’t reach the highs of his more iconic films, it’s quick and efficient, fits solidly in his wheelhouse, and certainly rates higher than much of his recent output.
“How come you’re always covered in blood?” This single line of dialogue between characters accurately encapsulates Project Wolf Hunting, the new action movie from writer/director Kim Hong-sun (The Chase). The answer is also relatively simple: because there is so, so much blood in which to be covered. Not only is the movie over-the-top violent, but every last wound is an absolute gusher, just nonstop blood spurting out of heads and necks and severed limbs of all varieties. Everything is some combination of slippery and sticky and showered in red.
At a glance, the story of Ana Lily Amirpour’s Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon is relatively straightforward. When Mona Lisa Lee (Jean Jong-seo, Burning) escapes a mental institution, she finds herself alone and struggling to survive on the streets of New Orleans. From those simple beginnings, however, things become much more complicated, dreamy, and strange. In part, at least, because Mona Lisa has unusual abilities, she can control other people and make them do things.
In the opening scene of Walter Hill’s new western, Dead for a Dollar, bounty hunter Max Borlund (Christoph Waltz) visits outlaw Joe Cribbens (Willem Dafoe) as he’s about to get out of jail, where Borlund put him. This sets the stage for a tale of hard, violent men on an inevitable collision course. And at no subsequent point does the film live up to the potential of this first moment.
