Photo caption: Albrecht Schuch in PEACOCK. Courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories.
In the droll and absurd comedy Peacock, Matthias (Albrecht Schuch of All Quiet on the Western Front) works in a most unusual companion service; he gets paid for jobs like masquerading as a client’s fictional partner. Matthias has so perfected being a chameleon that he has lost all sense of himself. This disquiets his wife and colleagues, and, when the vengeful ex-husband of a client terrorizes him, Mattias’ world starts to unravel.
Albrecht Schuch in PEACOCK. Courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories.
If you like Ruben Ostland’s work (Force Majeure, The Square, Triangle of Sadness), you’ll like Peacock. In fact, there’s a scene in Peacock that borrows A LOT from the chimp impersonator scene in The Square.
Austrian director Bernhard Wenger won a prize at Venice, where Peacock was also nominated for Best Film in the Critic’s Week.
I screened Peacock for NashFilm. It’s being shown at six Laemmle theaters in LA this Wednesday.
Photo caption: Frank Dillane in URCHIN. Courtesy of 1-2 Special.
In Urchin, the first film written and directed by actor Harris Dickinson, Mike (Frank Dillane) is a homeless British addict who gets jailed for a strong-arm robbery. Released on paroled with eight months of sobriety, Mike gets placed into a free apartment and a job with a very understanding boss, and he starts to forge healthy friendship with workmates.
The problem is that Mike thinks that society owes him. I’m not trying to get all Twelve-Steppy, but nobody is going to recover from addiction without accountability and gratitude, which Mike does not. Sure enough, Mike is frustrated by a normal minor responsibility and … Urchin is basically an exercise of waiting for Mike to blow it.
Critics have been falling over themselves in praising Dickinson’s film and Dillane’s performance. Indeed, Dillane is extraordinarily convincing in his portrayal of a street addict; unfortunately, he doesn’t succeed in getting us to care about Mike.
With the exception of a couple unnecessary and distracting moments of magical realism, Dickinson directs very ably. A la Mike Leigh (very high praise), he brings us right into the gritty world of panhandling, street drug sales, the police station booking room and menial workplaces. (Mike Leigh never needed magical realism and could keep us engaged in a bleak story.)
But Dickinson is a better director than a writer. The audience never develops a stake in Mike’s predictable demise, which leaves Urchin as an Eat Your Broccoli movie.
Photo caption: Leonardo DiCaprio in ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER. Courtesy of Warner Bros.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen a movie so over-the-top as Paul Thomas Anderson’s broad satire One Battle After Another. It’s sometimes hilarious, sometimes thrilling and always outrageous.
Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Bob, the tinkering bomb-maker in French 75, a group of far-left revolutionaries led by Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), charismatic and oversexed and too in love with her own badass flamboyance. Sure enough, once they piss off the nation’s repressive law enforcement establishment, French 75 is destined to go the way of the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army. In a shock-and-awe campaign led by Colonel Stephen J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), the revolutionaries are all neutralized or driven underground. Bob is able to get away and hide out under a new identity with Perfidia’s newborn daughter Willa.
The story resumes sixteen years later, with Bob and Willa living in a Northern California forest cabin. Bob is still a stoner underachiever, but he’s a devoted dad, and Willa (Chase Infiniti) has blossomed into a young woman of uncommon intelligence and curiosity. Suddenly, Lockjaw leads a military assault team to capture them, and the two are off on a two-hour race for their lives. When they become separated, Bob, despite his sparse hero skills, tenaciously tries to find her. Why has Lockjaw reappeared after sixteen years? He has his reasons, which I won’t spoil.
Paul Thomas Anderson, whose best movies are Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood, has a body of work that ranges from the super-serious (The Master) to the silly (Inherent Vice). But his movies are always character-driven and always centered in empathy – we understand what makes his characters tick. In this case, he celebrates the resilience of his protagonists.
What I haven’t seen before from Anderson are the violent attacks and white-knuckle chases that we see in more conventional Hollywood thrillers. Anderson delivers here, with a movie that’s chock-filled with exciting set pieces. The final chase on an up-and-down road called the Texas Dip outside Borrego Springs, California, is spectacular. Is this a political satire embedded in a thriller, or the other way around?
And about that broad satire – principal photography took place in the first seven months of 2024, before Trump’s election and before his second-term weaponization of ICE and attempt to inflict martial law upon American cities. It’s chilling that reality is now mirroring what Anderson, as he was writing the screenplay, must have thought was far-fetched.
From the get-go, Anderson paints the government forces as fascist and white supremacist. But he skewers the wacko far-left as well. One of the scenes with the revolutionaries is as funny as the Liberation Front/Splinter scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
Leonardo DiCaprio is a huge movie star who can carry a romantic drama (Titanic) or an action adventure (The Revenant) and, hell, play Jay Gatsby or Romeo. Here, his Bob shambles along, often terrified and klutzy, and none too strategic. It’s to DiCaprio’s credit that he turned down what became the righteous Jesse Plemons role in Killers of the Flower Moon to play a dumbass. And, again in One Battle After Another, he is racing for survival, always seemingly one step too slowly. It’s a fantastic, anti-Tom Cruise performance.
Sean Penn in ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER. Courtesy of Warner Bros.
Penn’s Lockjaw is the most demented military character in the movies since Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) in Dr. Strangelove. As perverse and perverted as he is, you have to acknowledge his epic relentlessness. Penn is able to humanize the awful Lockjaw with his vulnerabilities – sexual and social-climbing yearnings that control him.
Chase Infiniti, in her first feature film, gives us a Willa with the latent ferocity of her mom, but with more grounding, discipline and self-awareness. More of Chase Inifiniti, please.
Chase Infiniti in ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER. Courtesy of Warner Bros.
Teyana Taylor dominates the first chapter of One Battle After Another, with Perfidia’s stunning charisma and power. Benicio Del Toro and Regina King are excellent as two of Bob’s rescuers. Eric Schweig, an actor I’ve admired since The Last of the Mohicans (1992), shows up in a small but key role.
One Battle After Another has a Metacritic rating of 95. Although I’ve been singing its praises here, I initially found it a little too long for something so bombastic. Since then, I’ve thought about it more, and have placed it higher on my list of the Best Movies of 2025. Anyway, it’s so well-crafted and unusually outrageous that it’s a Must See.
Photo caption: June Squibb in ELEANOR THE GREAT. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
In the fine dramedy Eleanor the Great, the 94-year old widow Eleanor (played by 94-year old June Squibb) moves to New York City, near her daughter and grandson. On her way to a class for seniors at the Jewish Community Center, she is diverted to a group of Holocaust survivors, who mistake her for one of them. She is not a Holocaust survivor, but fails to correct them, and then gets in deeper when the enthusiastic college student Nina (Erin Kellyman) chooses her as the subject for a school project.
Nina’s mother has unexpectedly died six month before, and Nina is still rocked by the loss. She needs the support of her father, the celebrity journalist Roger (Chiwetel Ejiofor), but he is too consumed by his own grief to provide it. Eleanor’s grandmotherly nurturing fills the void.
Eleanor has just lost Bessie, her best friend of 50 years; the two women had been roommates as widows for the past eleven years. Grieving the loss and being new in a strange city, Eleanor is very lonely, and she adopts Nina as her own. The two become inter-generational soulmates.
But their relationship was founded on an outrageous lie – a lie that is easy to expose. We know that it is inevitable that Eleanor will, as they say, lose control of the narrative.
This is a really good movie, and not the one I expected. It’s not a geezer comedy. And it’s Nina’s movie as much as it’s Eleanor’s. As Eleanor the Great moves from a comedy of manners into an exploration of grief, the key is found in three relationships, those of Eleanor and Bessie, Nina and her dad and Nina and Eleanor.
Erin Kellyman in ELEANOR THE GREAT. Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
Of course, no one can play an old gal full of piss and vinegar better than June Squibb (Nebraska, Thelma), and she doesn’t disappoint. But the revelation here is Erin Kellyman’s remarkably convincing performance as Nina; she’s great.
Ejiofor is good as Nina’s dad, and so are Jessica Hecht as Eleanor’s sandwich generation daughter and Rita Zohar as Eleanor’s dear friend Bessie.
Eleanor the Great is the first feature for Scarlett Johannson as a director and for screenwriter Tony Kamen. Johannson directs this film very ably, with near-perfect pacing. Scarlett Johannson is also a NYC native who loves NYC, and like Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese, she gets to celebrate the city in her work.
A much deeper film than its marketing would indicate, Eleanor the Great is still an audience-pleaser.
Photo caption: Sean Bean and Daniel Day-Lewis in ANEMONE. Courtesy of Focus Features.
The searing drama Anemone opens with a sixtyish man leaving his home in northern England for a motorcycle ride to a remote forest, where he hides his bike and begins hiking in, heading for coordinates handwritten on a slip of paper. Eventually, he arrives at a cabin hidden deep in the woods. The man who lives there, off the grid, as a hermit, wordlessly invites him in. The two are brothers who haven’t seen each other for two decades.
Both men are retired British soldiers who served in Northern Ireland’s Troubles. Twenty years before, Ray (Daniel Day-Lewis) abandoned his pregnant wife Nessa to become a recluse. Jem (Sean Bean) assumed Ray’s role in caring for Nessa and Ray’s biological son. Now the son (Samuel Bottomley) is emotionally floundering and Nessa (Samantha Morton) has written to Ray, asking him to return and help the son resolve his issues. Anchored resolutely in his bitterness, rage, guilt and shame, returning is the last thing that Ray wants to do.
Gem delivers Nessa’s letter right away, which Ray initially refuses to read. Gem, playing the long game, stays for a few days, patiently wearing down Ray’s resistance. Gradually, Ray unloads stories from the past that explain his choices.
Ray is an intense guy, played superbly by Day-Lewis. Having suffered traumas and indignities in his military career, he has coped by spurning all human interaction and adopting a simple life that he can control. Day-Lewis, generally recognized as the world’s best living screen actor, gets to explode in several visceral monologues about his haunting experiences.
Sean Bean is really good here in a very subtle performance. The role of Jem is far less showy than that of Ray, but Bean brings a world-weary, solid decency to Gem, who is fully engaged as he listens to Ray’s charged stories with empathy. Samantha Morton is good, too, but with far less screen time.
If you already know anything about Anemone, it’s probably that Day-Lewis came out of retirement to act in the first feature directed by his son Ronan Day-Lewis. Daniel and Ronan co-wrote the screenplay.
As a director, Ronan Day-Lewis has a gift for exquisitely framing shots – the first seven or so shots could be hanging in an art museum. The soundtrack – toggling between driving rock and silence – is singular. As a storyteller, he lets his audience figure out what’s going on as facts about Jem and Ray unspool. Ronan even throws in some magical realism apparitions and a near-apocalyptic hailstorm. Ronan Day-Lewis ends the the movie perfectly, with a shot that isn’t even a half-second too long (although it took a superfluous twenty minutes to get there).
Although Anemone’s portrait of Ray is unsurpassed, the story is not deep or surprising enough to support a two-hour running time. The dramatic tension is whether Ray is going to leave the woods and meet his son. That would be the decent thing for him to do, it may be his last chance at redemption, and that’s the outcome the audience is rooting for. Well, since this IS a movie, what do you think he’s going to do? As much as I admired much of the film, I wasn’t on the edge of my seat.
Even though it’s overlong, I’m glad I watched Anemone for the superb performances by Day-Lewis and Bean and for the stunning visuals and soundtrack.
Photo caption: Mohammed Ghassan (right) in TO A LAND UNKNOWN. Courtesy of Watermelon Pictures.
The searing thriller To a Land Unknown takes us to Athens, into the underground world of Palestinian migrants stuck until they acquire false passports that will get them into Germany. Yasser (Mohammed Ghassan) is a decent family man forced into low level criminality to survive and raise money for the forged passport; he is also burdened by responsibility for his cousin, whose drug addiction is a ticking bomb. Repeatedly exploited and defrauded, Yasser conceives of one very risky way out – to scam the very human traffickers preying on him.
Ghassan is excellent, as is Angeliki Papoulis as a fun-loving but clear-eyed Greek woman also living in the margins.
To a Land Unknown is the gripping first feature for Dubai-born Mahdi Fleifel, who works between Britain, Denmark and Greece.
I screened To a Land Unknown for the Nashville Film Festival and recommended it in my Under the radar at Nashville. After a brief arthouse run, To a Land Unknown is streamable from Amazon, AppleTV and YouTube.
The Last Movie is Dennis Hopper’s notoriously “lost film”, buried by a hostile movie studio in 1971 and still generally unavailable. Given Hopper’s drug addled, out-of-control state during this decade, I was expecting a mess. But what is on the screen is an excellent 1970s art film, beautifully shot by László Kovács. There is a surreal thread that not everyone will buy into, but I think the movie works as a whole.
Hopper plays a Hollywood horse wrangler who is in Peru for a location shoot. He has gone native. setting up local girlfriend Maria (Stella Garcia) in a modern house. He’s already alienated, but a fatal accident on the movie set triggers him into rejecting Western modernity in favor of indigenous Peru. His paradise in the Andes becomes elusive as he meets Ugly American visitors. And then things get really weird, as the local indigenous people begin acting out the movie shoot – only without film. It is a parable of colonialism.
That weirdness, Hopper’s experimentation with the non-chronological construction of the film and some disjointedness/incoherence in the story will be off-putting for many viewers and keeps The Last Movie from being a Great Film. Roger Ebert called it “a wasteland of cinematic wreckage” and condemned it to one star. That said, the setting and Kovács’ cinematography make for a visually stunning film.
Julie Adams in THE LAST MOVIE
Hopper is always interesting as an actor, but The Last Movie features excellent, perhaps career-topping, performances by Stella Garcia, Julie Adams and Don Gordon.
Stella Garcia in THE LAST MOVIE
Garcia projects the inner strength and ambition of a Maria who sees herself as far more than the gringo’s plaything. On the face of it, Maria seems exploited. but she has a strong sense of her value and she insists on getting her due. Anyone who sees her as only arm candy is underestimating her at their own risk. Garcia had already amassed 23 of her 30 screen credits before The Last Movie, then played the top female character in Joe Kidd, and didn’t do much screen acting afterwards.
Julie Adams plays the sexually voracious wife of a visiting American businessman, capable of cruelly inflicting humiliation. With a career that started in the Studio Era (she co-starred with James Stewart and Rock Hudson in 1952’s Bend of the River), I can’t imagine that she got many scripts like this, and her performance is incendiary.
Prolific character actor Don Gordon plays Neville, another American expat. Neville is the guy who thinks up a get-rich-quick idea but doesn’t take into account that someone richer, more powerful and with more business sense can take the whole thing away from him. Gordon’s drunk scene is just perfect, especially in capturing how really drunk people don’t notice things about themselves or others. Gordon had the fourth lead in Bullitt and Papillon, and guest-starred in scores of television shows, but his very best work was in The Last Movie and in Hopper’s searing Out of the Blue (aka No Looking Back).
Don Gordon (right) in THE LAST MOVIE
And here’s some fun for movie fans. Fabled outlaw director Sam Fuller plays the director of the movie-within-the-movie. Various cinema notables show up as part of the film crew and at the cast party: Toni Basil, Rod Cameron, Peter Fonda, Henry Jaglom, Kris Kristofferson, Dean Stockwell, Sylvia Miles, John Philip Law, James Mitchum, Michelle Phillips (Dennis Hopper’s wife for eight DAYS), Dean Stockwell and Russ Tamblyn.
What happened to The Last Movie and why did it become a Lost Film? First, Dennis Hopper’s self-indulgence and drug abuse caused him to discard his script, co-written by Stewart Stern, and wing it on the principal photography by cobbling together improvisations that appealed to him at the time. Then Hopper hung on to the film, constantly re-editing it, blowing past his deadline by six months. Universal Pictures mogul Lew Wasserman had given Hopper $i million and creative control; finally getting a movie that was late and grievously over budget – and a movie he found incoherent – Wasserman was outraged and buried The Last Movie’s distribution and publicity. The fiasco ruined Hopper’s reputation in the industry, and he wasn’t able to direct another movie until Out of the Blue in 1980.
I got to see The Last Movie at a 2017 special event curated by the now defunct Cinema Club Silicon Valley. The screening of The Last Movie was preceded by Along for the Ride, the 2016 Dennis Hopper documentary from the perspective of Satya De La Manitou, Hopper’s personal assistant and wing man for forty years. (Along for the Ride is streamable from The Criterion Channel, Amazon, Vudu and YouTube.) The double feature was accompanied by a panel discussion with Along for the Ride director Nick Ebeling, filmmaker Alejandro Adams, film professor Sara Vizcarrondo and critic Fernando Croce.
Hopper regained the rights to The Last Movie in 2006, but was unable to release it on DVD before his death in 2010. Still close to a Lost Film, The Last Movie is only streamable on kanopy, and it occasional screens at repertory arthouses. I’m choosing not to embed the trailer because it unforgivably gives away the last shot.
History is a compendium of individual human stories, oft caught up in a world event. That’s what drives the riveting documentary Last Days in Vietnam, which chronicles the desperate attempts of many South Vietnamese to escape before the Communist takeover in 1975. Over 140,000 got out in the initial exodus, including 77,000 through the means depicted in this film – mostly compressed into just two panicked days.
As if there weren’t enough American folly in Vietnam, the first evacuation plan didn’t include any non-Americans, even including the Vietnamese dependents of Americans. Then there were evacuation plans that were never implemented because of the blockheadedness of the US Ambassador. In the final week, young American military and intelligence officers took matters into their own hand, and began a sub rosa evacuation – ignoring the chain of command, breaking immigration laws and risking career-killing charges of insubordination.
Last Days in Vietnam is directed by Rory Kennedy (daughter of RFK), who recently made Ethel, the affecting bio-doc of her mother. Kennedy does a good job of setting the historical stage for those who didn’t live through the era, and then letting the witnesses tell their compelling personal stories.
The talking heads include:
the six-year-old who jumped out of a helicopter and then watched his mother drop his baby sister on to a ship’s deck;
the US Navy vet who plays the taped diary that he sent home to his wife after the fateful day;
the CIA analyst who unsuccessfully tried to convince the deluded US Ambassador that the end was at hand;
the college student who managed to get over a wall inside the embassy, but found that his freedom was not guaranteed;
Ford Administration officials Henry Kissinger and Ron Nessen, who relate the White House view of the events.
One heroic young American officer managed with ingenuity and chutzpah to get out hundreds of Vietnamese. In the film’s most poignant moment, it falls to him to tell the final American lie to the 400 Vietnamese remaining in the US embassy, for whom there were no more helicopters.
I saw the movie in San Jose with an audience that was about half Vietnamese-American, some of the age to have lived through this period. San Jose’s 100,000 Vietnamese population is largest of any city outside Vietnam, and many Vietnamese-Americans still memorialize the subject of this film as Black April. The exit from the theater was somber.
Last Days in Vietnam is a PBS American Experience film, and there are many clips, images and audio on their site; the entire film can be streamed from YouTube.
Photo caption: Linda Fiorentino in THE LAST SEDUCTION
There’s just one reason to watch the 1994 neo-noir The Last Seduction, and that’s the delicious performance by Linda Fiorentino as a sociopath more outrageously devious than any character that Barbara Stanwyck, Audrey Trotter, Jane Greer or Claire Trevor ever got to play.
Fiorentino plays Bridget Gregory, who steals her husband Clay’s entire stash of drug deal money and moves away to start a new life under a false identity. Beholden to extremely unpleasant loan sharks, Clay (Bill Pullman) sends a private eye top track her down. Bridget must escape the detective and then enlist a sap to get rid of Clay. She finds her sucker in Mike (Peter Berg), and the tale spins into a web of double-crosses.
Linda Fiorentino and Bill Pullman in THE LAST SEDUCTION
Bridget is fun to watch because she takes the role of femme fatale to unsurpassed heights (or depths?). Her super power is the gift to contrive lies that are both pathological and extraordinarily imaginative. She brazenly employs her sexuality, unmatched audacity and a ruthlessness without any glimmer of empathy. She is just so, so bad.
Both her role and her performance were the best in Fiorentino’s career. However, because The Last Seduction aired on TV before its theatrical release, it didn’t qualify for the Academy Awards. This meant that Fiorentino was denied what would have been a certain Oscar nomination. Some not-so-great movies followed (two with TV heartthrob and movie bust David Caruso), and then her career fizzled out.
The Last Seduction was director John Dahl’s third feature and his third neo-noir after Kill Me Again and Red Rock West (which he had co-written). Since 2009, Dahl has specialized in directing episodes of top tier TV (Breaking Bad, Homeland, The Americans, Californication, Outlander, The Bridge, House of Cards, Justified, Hannibal, Ray Donovan, Yellowstone).
The Last Seduction may not be as good as the apogee of all neo-noirs, Chinatown, but it’s right up there with One False Move as the best neo-noir of the 1990s. The Last Seduction can be streamed from Amazon, AppleTV and Fandango.
Linda Fiorentino and Peter Berg in THE LAST SEDUCTION
Photo caption: Maddison Brown in TO KILL A WOLF. Courtesy of To Kill a Wolf.
In the character-driven indie drama To Kill a Wolf, a reclusive woodsman in the Pacific Northwest (Ivan Martin) finds the seventeen-year-old runaway Dani (Maddison Brown) collapsed in the forest. He brings her back to his isolated cabin, nurses her back to health and tries to learn how he can return her to her home. She’s not forthcoming, so he has a mystery to solve. Meanwhile, the audience is on to other mysteries – why is the Woodsman (that’s the character’s appellation in the credits) living such an isolated life and why is his relationship with local community members so charged? As the Woodsman takes Dani on a road trip to her most recent residence, the answers, one by one, are revealed. It’s an absorbing story.
To Kill a Wolf is the first feature for writer-director Kelsey Taylor, who demonstrates herself to be a very promising filmmaker. A superb story-teller, she doesn’t explain behaviors before you need to understand. We’re continually wondering about the characters and about what will happen next, and are usually surprised about what the Woodsman is doing and why. Music is unusually important to the characters and to the film itself. The way Taylor ends the film is perfect – the final shot is not even a half-second too long.
Ivan Martin in TO KILL A WOLF. Courtesy of To Kill a Wolf.
The lead performances are excellent, as are those of the rest of the veteran professional cast. The roles of Dani’s Aunt Jolene and Uncle Carey are especially well-written, realistic and textured, and the performances of Kaitlin Doubleday and Michael Esper are vividly authentic. As the Rancher, David Knell captures the surprises in the character’s attitudes.
To Kill a Wolf begins streaming today on VOD, including Amazon, AppleTV and Fandango.
