Movies

WARDRIVER: techno-noir

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Photo caption: Dane DeHaan in WARDRIVER. Courtesy of Cinequest.

In the pulsating and highly original thriller Wardriver, Cole (Dane DeHaan) is a hacker, who drives around Salt Lake City logging on to other people’s wireless networks, locating their business payrolls and draining them into his own secret accounts. He conveniently claims to only steal from banks, not people. Cole may be a professional criminal, but he is a geeky as your company’s IT guy. If you’re not already paranoid about the security of your home router, you will be.

Alarmingly, Cole finds himself entangled with a sequence of extremely dangerous bad guys, each scarier than the last. When he meets a beautiful woman who may or may not be who she says she is, his compulsion to save her puts him at even more risk. You will recognize all the elements of neo-noir here, but with a refreshingly techie flavor.

Dane DeHaan’s performance carries this well-acted film. DeHaan is always good (Kill Your Darlings, LIFE, Oppenheimer), and here his Cole struggles, relying on his wits alone, to keep things in his control. Fittingly for a noir protagonist, Cole recognizes that he is an underdog, but doesn’t grasp just how over-matched he is.

Sasha Calle in WARDRIVER. Courtesy of The Avenue.

Sasha Calle delivers just the right mix of vulnerability, sexiness and well-masked toughness as the object of Cole’s infatuation. Calle was excellent in In the Summers, an overlooked indie that made my list of Best Movies of 2024.

Mamadou Athie and William Belleau (Killers of the Flower Moon) stand out in supporting roles.

In a complete departure from her brilliant debut film Electrick Children, this time, director Rebecca Thomas works in a conventional genre and keeps the pace sizzling. The highly original techno noir screenplay was written by Daniel Casey.

I screened Wardriver for its world premiere at Cinequest, where it made my Best of Cinequest. It’s now available to stream on Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube and Fandango.

THE ONLY LIVING PICKPOCKET IN NEW YORK: desperate, not for survival, but for redemption

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Photo caption: John Tuturro in THE ONLY LIVING PICKPOCKET IN NEW YORK. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

The Only Living Pickpocket in New York features a gripping, perhaps career-topping, performance by John Tuturro. Writer-director Noah Segan has created a portrait of a man who has evaded all of life’s responsibilities except one, and now finds himself desperate, not for survival, but for redemption.

Tuturro plays Harry, who glides through New York City’s streets and subways in his long cashmere coat, effortlessly lifting wallets and sundry valuables from a populace to whom he is invisible. He cashes in the watches and jewelry with his longtime fence Ben (Steve Buscemi). Harry and Ben are struggling to adjust to a modern world in which nobody’s wallet contains cash and most Rolexes are worthless knock-offs. Still, Harry makes a good enough living to support himself and to pay for care of his beloved disabled wife.

Then Harry steals the wrong item from the wrong people. He embarks on a race against time to make things right. Can he save himself? Can he save anyone?

John Tuturro, so indelible in his many supporting roles, is unforgettable as Harry, a complicated man – both an outlaw who lives by a code and a deadbeat fiercely devoted to one responsibility. Harry is a thief with nerves of steel, but he knows to be terrified of the cops and organized crime. And he has mastered a pre-high tech world that is fading away. Despite his vulnerabilities, Harry is one wily character, just wily enough to give him a fighting chance.

Tatiana Maslany (Orphan Black, She-Hulk in the Marvel Universe) blazes as Harry’s long-estranged daughter. Buscemi and the rest of the cast – Giancarlo Esposito, Will Price, Jamie Lee Curtis – are excellent, too. Tuturro’s and Maslany’s performances are award-worthy.

This is only the third feature for Segan, a prolific actor and protege of Rian Johnson. His Harry character is unique and there is textured depth in all of the supporting characters. There is outstanding verisimilitude in all the NYC scenes, and the pacing is thrilling.

I screened The Only Living Pickpocket in New York for the Mill Valley Film Festival where I labeled it as the under-the-radar Must See at the festival. It’s one of the Best Movies of 2026 – So Far, and its theatrical release begins this weekend.

Photo caption: John Tuturro in THE ONLY LIVING PICKPOCKET IN NEW YORK. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
Tatiana Maslany in THE ONLY LIVING PICKPOCKET IN NEW YORK. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.

STOLEN KINGDOM: true crime with nerds

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A scene from STOLEN KINGDOM. Courtesy of Slamdance.

The documentary Stolen Kingdom uncovers a series of offbeat pastimes and their bizarre convergence. Of course, we’re already aware of Disney fans and collectors. Stolen Kingdom also reveals the world of urban explorers, who trespass into closed and abandoned buildings. They’re enjoying the thrill of being where they’re not supposed to be and gawking at what the public isn’t supposed to see.

In Stolen Kingdom, we meet people who sneak into closed theme park attractions and even some daredevils who jump off the rides while operating and mosey around backstage(see photo above). Those folks can be tempted by the black market in Disneyana. As the behavior escalates from pranks to larceny, we know that somebody’s going to get in big trouble, Centering on the theft of an obsolete animatron, Stolen Kingdom takes on the guise of a true crime story, but with the very nerdiest criminals.

A scene from STOLEN KINGDOM. Courtesy of Slamdance.

Stolen Kingdom is one of those documentaries about our fellow humans that make us shake our heads.

Stolen Kingdom is the first feature for director Joshua Bailey. I screened Stolen Kingdom for Slamdance, a week after its world premiere at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. It’s now available to stream on Amazon and AppleTV.

Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: Sarah Suco and Pierre Lottin in THE MARCHING BAND. Courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment.

This week on The Movie Gourmet – new reviews of the charming French dramedy The Marching Band, the disappointing absurdist Western Dead Souls and the entertaining Hollywood fiasco documentary John Boorman and the Devil. If you miss John Boorman and the Devil tonite on TCM, you can still stream it inexpensively. I also posted a remembrance of Oscar-winner Eva Marie Saint, star of On the Waterfront and North By Northwest, who has died at age 102.

The Mill Valley Film Festival continues through October 11 with its prerelease showcase of the year’s most prestigious movies.

Last week, I wrote about Turner Classic Movies bringing us the first two movies in Kzrysztof Kieslowski’ Three Colours trilogy, which I include on my Greatest Movies of All Time. Well, TCM is playing the third film, Red, after all, on October 12.

CURRENT MOVIES

ON TV

Constance Towers in THE NAKED KISS

On October 11, Turner Classic Movies brings us possibly the most salacious gem from Sam Fuller, my favorite tabloid reporter turned Hollywood auteur.  In The Naked Kiss, a prostitute opens the movie by beating her pimp to a pulp, and then moves to a new town, seeking a new beginning in the straight world.  She gets a job as a nurse at the clinic for disabled children, and becomes engaged to the town’s leading philanthropist.  She thinks that everything will be great unless someone reveals her tawdry past.  But, instead, she discovers that her Mr. Perfect is molesting the disabled kids!  (Only Sam Fuller could pull this off!)

DEAD SOULS: absurdity rides in the West, but it’s not funny enough

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Photo caption: Zander Schloss and Alex Cox in DEAD SOULS. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.

The absurdist Western comedy Dead Souls begins with a solitary stranger walking the desert we’ve seen in spaghetti westerns. That reference is intentional, because director Alex Cox filmed Dead Souls near Almeria, Spain, in the Andalusian expanse used repeatedly by Sergio Leone. But we see right away that Dead Souls is more parody than spaghetti western – with the hotel clerk’s exaggerated twitching and the mayor sporting massive sideburns, each the size of Angela Davis’ Afro.

The stranger (played by Cox himself) is named Strindler, and his purpose is mysterious. He is up to something, and the locals can’t figure out what it is, even when they see him buying something of no apparent value.

We see the familiar western tropes, from the poker game in the saloon to the gunfight in the dusty street. There are homages to A Fistful of Dollars, High Plains Drifter, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and even Greaser’s Palace.

Strindler is guided around the ranches and mines by the town drunkard (Zander Schloss), whose sense of his own nickname is very funny. There’s a clever running gag whenever Strindler is asked if he has played poker, ridden a horse or fired a pistol. And there’s an outrageous pun on the name Strindler.

It turns out that Strindler’s scheme would monetize American institutional racism. And that’s what Dead Souls is ultimately about – mocking the hardwired, guileless, shameless, open racism of America’s 19th century, that leaks into the present. Dead Souls even takes us into the Trump version of ICE, which I didn’t find funny; (maybe Too Soon?)

In 1994, writer-director Alex Cox made one of the all-time great cult movies – Repo Man. He followed that with the arthouse hit Sid and Nancy, and not much since that I recognize.

There’s a famous scene with Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles that made us laugh at outrageously racist characters – and I think it still works. But Dead Souls beats that dead horse too repeatedly. I found the absurdity amusing, but the entirety of Dead Souls just isn’t funny enough..

Dead Souls is streaming on Amazon, AppleTV and Fandango.

THE MARCHING BAND: an emotionally powerful Feel Good

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Photo caption: Pierre Lottin and Benjamin Lavernhe in THE MARCHING BAND. Courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment.

Surprisingly emotionally powerful for a Feel Good movie, the French dramedy The Marching Band weaves together Odd Couple and underdog stories. Thibaut (Benjamin Lavernhe) is an orchestra conductor of global celebrity, who has leukemia and requires a bone marrow transplant; his sister undergoes a compatibility test, and Thibault learns that she isn’t his biological sister. He is stunned to learn that, as an infant, he was given up for adoption by a woman who already had a toddler son.

Thibault arrives in a downtrodden mining town to track down his biological brother Jimmy (Pierre Lottin). Jimmy turns out to be a working class divorced dad, earning 11 Euros an hour slinging hash at a factory cafeteria. Rough-around-the-edges Jimmy is cool toward the cultured Thibault, he but he relents to donate the bone marrow.

Months later, Thibault is in remission, and he returns to Jimmy’s town to thank him again. Thibault is surprised to find Jimmy is the trombonist in the town’s marching band. Jimmy wants little to do with Thibault for two reasons. First, he reminds Jimmy of their neglectful mother, towards whom Jimmy only feels rage and contempt. Second, having always experienced poverty, he is jealous of all the advantages that Thibault has been given by the adoptive family.

At Jimmy’s modest flat, Thibault is wowed by Jimmy’s impressive collection of jazz vinyl. Thibault sees what Jimmy himself doesn’t – Jimmy has perfect pitch, innate musical taste and some talent as a musician. Even with their shared musical interests, Jimmy resists getting closer to Thibault, but Jimmy’s bandmates embrace Thibault’s celebrity.

The marching band is getting ready for a regional competition, which is a welcome distraction for the entire community. The factory is the town’s biggest remaining employer, and unseen corporate interests are threatening to close it. This being France, the workers are responding with labor strife, and everyone is suffering anxiety and dread. And, now, the marching band loses its conductor.

Now, here’s the key to The Marching Band’s success. At this point, director Emmanuel Courcol and his co-writers Irène Muscari and Oriane Bonduel could have gone corny. They could have had Thibaut conduct the band to win the competition, save the factory and live happily ever after with Jimmy. Instead, the complications of our real world intrude, and the story heads to a much more emotionally powerful conclusion. The Marching Band finds it way to a profound expression of love without sentimentality.

Lavernhe and Lottin are excellent, as is Sarah Suco as Sarah, a local activist/trumpet player who likes Jimmy. Lavernhe and Suco were nominated for César Awards (the French Oscar).

One of the top grossing recent French films at the French box office, The Marching Band was nominated for seven César Awards.

The Marching Band is a real audience pleaser, and it’s streaming on Amazon and AppleTV.

JOHN BOORMAN AND THE DEVIL: anatomy of a fiasco

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Photo caption: Linda Blair in JOHN BOORMAN AND THE DEVIL. Courtesy of Yellow Veil Pictures.

John Boorman and the Devil tells the true story of an all-time movie-making fiasco – and it’s more entertaining than the original film could have ever hoped to be. That 1977 bomb was The Exorcist II: The Heretic, which I correctly judged at the time to unfathomably bad. In John Boorman and the Devil, Boorman and his collaborators explain, in their own words, what happened.

The Exorcist became a monster hit in 1973, making an unexpected fortune for Warner Bros. The studio, seeing others profit with Exorcist ripoffs, wanted to cash in with a genuine Exorcist sequel. Trouble was, both The Exorcist’s director William Friedkin and writer Peter Blatty felt cheated by Warners and were embroiled in bitter litigation.

The studio courted director John Boorman, who was at his height of marketability, having just made Point Blank and Deliverance, two great films that have since been added to the National Film Registry. Boorman, however, was bored by the idea of making a horror movie; instead, he wanted to make a trippy art movie, as he had with Zardoz. Unfortunately, Boorman’s vision, as reflected in the continually rewritten screenplay by Rospo Pallenburg, manifested itself as incoherent cinema. (I remember being completely puzzled as I watched Max Von Stdow wandering through an Ethiopian desert,)

Of course, the target audience for the film was the folks who had enjoyed The Exorcist. Because The Exorcist was a horror movie, they were understandably expecting Exorcist II would be another horror movie. Disappointed by the lack of horror, confused and bored, Exorcist II: The Heretic was greeted with hostility. and then ridicule, and finally laughed off the nation’s movie screens.

John Boorman in JOHN BOORMAN AND THE DEVIL. Courtesy of Yellow Veil Pictures.

In John Boorman and the Devil, director David Kittredge brings us interviews with Boorman himself, stars Linda Blair and Louise Fletcher, the screenwriter, the assistant directors, a camera operator and the script supervisor. We even hear from the biologist in charge of wrangling the thousands of locusts. Boorman is a good sport and reflects on his biggest personal disaster with a minimum of defensiveness or self-pity. Blair and Fletcher are delightful raconteurs.

It didn’t help that Exorcist II: The Heretic is filled with unintentionally funny moments. At one point, Linda Blair tap dances. Wearing an African tribal headdress, James Earl Jones spits out a whole tomato. Even today, Blair and Fletcher burst out laughing at the name of the movie’s demon – Pazuzu.

Boorman dryly recounts advice he received from the great director David Lean: “Everybody makes failures. Just don’t make a famous one.”

I had heard William Friedkin taking delight in a hilarious anecdote about a disastrous Pasadena test screening of Exorcist II. Because Friedkin wished the sequel and its studio ill, I had presumed that he had embellished the incident – but John Boorman and the Devil brings an eyewitness who corroborates Friedkin’s version.

And here’s another tidbit – Boorman wanted to cast then emerging star Christopher Walken, but the studio insisted on big name Richard Burton. Burton turned in a one-dimensional performance, relying on his majestic voice and gravitas and little else.

John Boorman and the Devil is streaming on Amazon, AppleTV and Fandango. On October 9, Turner Classic Movies is showing John Boorman and the Devil in a double feature with Exorcist II: The Heretic; watch the first and skip thr second.

THE SCOUT: not what she signed up for

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Photo caption: Mimi Davila in THE SCOUT. Courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment.

In the observational indie dramedy The Scout, Sofia (Mimi Davila) is a movie location scout, racing around NYC to find shooting locations for the pilot of a TV episodic series. That means that, all day, she meets new people, some of whom reveal discontent in their own personal lives. That also means that her frenetic work life doesn’t leave her the time or space to reflect on her own life.

Sofia’s job is to coax complete strangers into letting a film crew take over their home, she needs to build some level of trust with them. Many share the dissatisfaction with their own personal situations. The first is a woman who has successfully raised children who are living their own lives far away from her. The second is a guy bewildered by his recently becoming a stay-at-home dad; “My life is basically over,”

We are our choices. Everyone Sofia meets seems to be asking “how did life turn out this way?, a question Sofia finally poses to herself.

Sofia encounters a home owner who was once a close gal pal. It looks like she’s rediscovered a rewarding human connection, but a job fiasco intervenes. Exhausted, highly pressured and gritting her way an avalanche of indignities, Sofia finally takes a moment to take stock of her own life.

Max Rosen and Mimi Davila in THE SCOUT. Courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment.

The Scout is the first feature from writer-director Paula González-Nasser, who drew upon her own six years as a location scout. González-Nasser proves herself a keen observer of human nature. The Scout is essentially a theme braided into a series of vignettes and , González-Nasser’s construction of the story and its pacing are excellent.

Sofia is trying to satisfy the whims of a movie crew that generates plenty of droll humor, especially for their outrageous disrespect of the people who are offering their homes (“that’s an ugly door“). We cringe as the all-white creative team, every one of whom is surely on the political left, lapses into the most clueless ethnic stereotyping. They’re as serious as if they’re making Hamnet, but the pilot itself is clearly formulaic crap. (The guy who owns the fish store is pretty funny, too.)

The Scout earned buzz at its Tribeca premiere. Having opened this past weekend in New York, The Scout in rolling out more widely in theaters, beginning with the DTLA Alamo Drafthouse on Friday.

THE HISTORY OF CONCRETE: a lens on absurdity

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Photo caption: John Wilson in THE HISTORY OF CONCRETE. Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

The comic doc The History of Concrete finds filmmaker John Wilson looking for a project. His Emmy-nominated HBO series How to with John Wilson is off the air and some of his residual checks are in the single digits. He decides to embark on making a film with built-in absurdity – a documentary on the most uninteresting subject imaginable – concrete.

Off he goes with his camera and his wry sensibility- riffing off concrete and his own distractions. His deadpan movie pitches are funny, and so is the guy who takes outsized satisfaction at every piece of chewing gum that he sandblasts off the sidewalk. Other segments, like members of a Buddhist cults take turns walking around the same block in Queens until they amass 3100 miles, get tiresome.

But the funniest bits are only tenuously related to concrete, if at all. Wilson attends a screenwriting workshop on how to write and sell a Hallmark movie. And then he stumbles across a new business model that preserves the tattooed flesh of departed loved ones, suitable for framing. Yikes!

Now, John Wilson is an acquired taste. I find his nasal voice to be whiny, even when he’s not whining. He also overestimates the humor and insight in some situations and lingers on them too long. The History of Concrete, while in the same vein as Erroll Morris’ Gates of Heaven or Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March, doesn’t approach matching the mastery of those auteurs. But, if you enjoy Wilson and his How to with John Wilson, then this is your movie.

The History of Concrete releases into theaters this weekend.

SWEETHEART DEAL: a triumph of cinéma vérité

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Photo caption: Kristine in SWEETHEART DEAL Courtesy of Abramorama; copyright Aurora Stories LLC.

The engrossing documentary Sweetheart Deal follows four Seattle sex workers; none of them want to be working in prostitution, but each is a heroin addict and sees obstacles to getting sober. They are at best indifferent to the men they service, and each night they fear that some customer will turn out to be a murderer.

Elliott is a man in his 60s who lives in an RV parked on the strip. He says his mission is to keep the prostitutes safe, offer them comfort and encourage them to kick their addiction. All four women drop in to Elliott’s RV for a meal or a nap. Elliot’s RV is the hub of Sweetheart Deal.

This is a remarkably empathetic film. Each woman tells her own story of addiction, and we witness the ravages of heroin addiction upon their health and the carnage in their family relationships. In the third act, there’s an an unexpected betrayal, sickening and monstrous. Not every heroin addict who works the streets is going to survive. But even the most vulnerable can sometimes find the power to find justice and save themselves – and that’s the ultimate redemption in Sweetheart Deal.

It’s harder to identify with Elliott, despite his self-proclaimed altruism. Essentially, he’s just another homeless guy who is getting a form of status and authority from his vocation with the women. He enjoys the attention of the documentary crew and reporter, so much so that he doesn’t notice that the reporter is appalled by an inappropriate boast.

Sweetheart Deal is a triumph of cinéma vérité. A project of over seven years, Sweetheart Deal is the first feature directed by Elisa Levine and the late Gabriel Miller, and it is brilliant filmmaking on several levels. The filmmakers managed to engender an amazing level of trust with their subjects, resulting in the access that allows the audience inside their world. It’s also brilliantly constructed and edited; the very first shot of the film – a man feeding pigeons – takes on new meaning and importance by the end of the film.

When I screened this movie in 2024, I had already seen fifteen documentaries and screened another 80 while helping to program a film festival – Sweetheart Deal was the best of them all.

Sweetheart Deal had a brief theatrical run in 2024 and is now available to stream on Amazon and AppleTV.