DRONE: stalked by a mystery

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Photo caption: Marion Barbeau in DRONE. Courtesy of Frameline.

Émilie (Marion Barbeau) is stalked through Paris by a mysterious drone, in Drone, a thriller that explores issues of privacy and the male gaze. A magnificent 4-minute opening sequence, introduces us to the vulnerability caused by the voyeur drone. Émilie is funding her architecture studies by working as a cam girl, a situation where she is physically detached and in control of her male customers. But there is no detachment or control whenever the paranoia-inducing drone suddenly appears.

There are exhilarating set pieces in a parking garage, a motorcycle chase and an abandoned factory, as writer-director Simon Bouisson and cinematographer Ludovic Zulli keep their drone camera in pursuit of the story’s stalker drone. In his first theatrical feature, Bouisson keeps the tension pounding, all the way to the ingenious ending.

Marion Barbeau in DRONE. Courtesy of Frameline.

Émilie is a recent architecture graduate from Lilles who has earned a high-powered fellowship in Paris. As her fellowship project, she chooses an adaptive reuse of an abandoned factory. Of course, even without the drone, we would fear for Émilie’s safety as she wanders around the dark, creepy, abandoned factory and takes long solo jogs through the city at night.

Who is flying the drone? Is it a camgirl customer who has hacked the firewall? Is it her toxic male classmate? Or her swaggering, entitled boss? Or, perhaps most terrifying, nobody at all?

Émilie is relationship-shy, but reluctantly intrigued by a DJ. Will the budding romance put both women in drone-jeopardy?

Marion Barbeau, a former ballet dancer, is superb as Émilie. Émilie, so vulnerable throughout the movie, is remarkably strong and determined, which lifts Drone above the ordinary woman-in-peril genre. Barbeau is able to project Émilie’s fundamental badassness.

I’ve listed Drone in the special Festival Films category of my Best Movies of 2025 – So Far. I screened Drone for Frameline (where it was my favorite film), and I’ll let you know when it has a theatrical or VOD release in the US.

BOB MACKIE: NAKED ILLUSION: the man who invented the red carpet

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If ever a fashion designer dominated the Hollywood red carpet, it is Bob Mackie The biodoc Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion tracks his remarkable life and career, and his impact on the evolution of the red carpet.

Director Michael Miele had the cooperation of Mackie and Mackie’s design director Joe McFate (one of the producers). That leveraged access to Mackie clients Cher, Carol Burnett, Bernadette Peters, Pink, Mitzi Gaynor and Miley Cyrus, and to fashion icons RuPaul and Tom Ford, who all appear in this biodoc. So do members of Mackie’s very complicated family. Cher alone is worth the ticket price.

I saw Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion at a SLO Film Fest screening with Bob Mackie and Joe McFate in person; Bob Mackie: Naked Illusion won the SLO Film Fest’s Best Documentary Feature.

MR. NOBODY AGAINST PUTIN: the first casualty of war is truth

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Pavel Talankan in MR. NOBODY AGAINST PUTIN. Courtesy of the SLO Film Fest.

Nothing has changed since Aeschylus observed that the first casualty of war is truth, as revealed in Mr. Nobody Against Putin, the blistering exposé of Putin’s outrageous domestic propaganda about his Ukraine War.

Pavel Talankan is an unassuming, goodhearted guy with a small-time job as the events coordinator at the school in a remote Russian industrial town. That also makes him the school videographer, so no no one notices that, as he films school assemblies, award ceremonies and performances, he is also capturing the blatant Big Lie propaganda. It’s a surreptitious documentary filmed in plain sight.

Pavel is an unlikely muckraker. He is a free-thinking nebbish who loves Russia and loves his hometown of Karabash in the Ural region, putrefied by a noxious copper plant and called “the most toxic place on earth”.

More than anything, Pavel cares about his students, and he is increasingly disgusted as Putin ramps up the propaganda. First, a cadaverous party hack, whose heroes are the most vile Commie hitmen in history, spreads empirically false information about Ukraine being the aggressor in the war. Then, horrifyingly, Wagner mercenaries are brought in as classroom guest speakers. Silently, Pavel continues to film, letting the propagandists defile themselves for history.

Pavel is a hero, albeit a non-violent one, who risked his life to gather this material. David Borenstein exquisitely formed Pavel’s footage into a searing exposé of Putin’s soul-crushing impact on Russia. The secret audio from the funeral of a former student killed in Ukraine is heart-rending. The film begins with video of Pavel’s midnight escape from Russia,

I saw Mr. Nobody Against Putin at the SLO Film Fest; I’ll let you know when it gets a theatrical or VOD release.

SEW TORN: a thriller like none you’ve seen before

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Photo caption: Eve Connolly in SEW TORN. Courtesy of Vertigo Releasing.

Sew Torn is the first thriller (or movie) I’ve seen where the main character’s day job isn’t detective or writer or architect, but mobile seamstress. Barbara (Eve Connolly) is a seamstress and her super power is rigging Rube Goldberg solutions with needle and thread to face any emergency situation. It doesn’t take long before she’s entangled in a fight to the death between two gangs of crooks, and we’re asking just what are we watching here?

We’re watching a compelling thriller, a genre film with a gimmick, albeit a sui generis gimmick, and it’s the calling card of its talented auteur. Writer-director Freddy MacDonald made the first version of Sew Torn as a 6-minute short while in high school, which led him to being accepted as the youngest ever Directing Fellow at the AFI Conservatory. After winning a student academy award, he and his father Fred MacDonald worked the screenplay of Sew Torn into a feature. Freddy MacDonald has yet to turn 25.

Both Barbara and Joshua (Caleb Worthy), a young hood embroiled in the gangland shootout, need to escape from the domination of their parents. Barbara’s mother is dead, but Barbara, struggling with depression, is trapped living her mother’s life. Joshua’s father (a bloodcurdling John Lynch) is very much alive and threatening the survival of everyone he encounters.

Barbara is glum and passive, and sure doesn’t look like the hero of a thriller, until she whips out a spool and a thimble to MacGyver herself out of a lethal jam.

There’s a surprise in the construction of the story, which I won’t spoil, except to say that it involves the reimagining of outcomes. You’ve certainly never seen this movie before.

I saw Sew Torn at the SLO Film Fest, where it won the Best Narrative Feature. After a successful festival run that began with a debut at SXSW, Sew Torn is available to stream on Amazon, AppleTV and YouTube.

NYT’s The Best 100 Movies of the 21st Century (part 1)

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Photo caption: Song Kang-Ho in PARASITE, justifiably on the NYT’s Best Movies of the Century.

Naturally, The Movie Gourmet has thoughts about the New York Times’ recently published The Best 100 Movies of the 21st Century. First of all, I’m glad that the NYT did it – it demonstrates that one of our most credible institutions thinks that cinema is important to the culture and that people should take it seriously. Movies matter.

And, it’s a pretty good list. I can weigh in because I’ve seen all 100 except for Portrait of a Lady on Fire (#38), Let the Right One In (#70) and Interstellar (#89), and I’ve written about most of them. There’s solid representation of animated films and international cinema, with a few comedies and only one comic book movie (The Dark Knight). Parasite is a worthy choice for #1 on the NYT list, although I would place it at #2 behind Boyhood (#23 on the NYT list).

ACCOLADES

I am absolutely delighted to see some deserving films on the list that aren’t often included in the Great Movies conversation: In the Mood for Love (#4), Children of Men (#13), Memories of Murder (#99), Spirited Away (#9), A Serious Man (#36), Y Tu Mama Tambien (#18), Anatomy of a Fall (#26), Her (#24), A Prophet (#35), Aftersun (#78), The Act of Killing (#82) and Grizzly Man (#98). Lately, In the Mood for Love has been getting more buzz from cinephiles.

Identifying good filmmaking is one thing, but personal taste is pivotal in ranking films. I rank the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man (#36) higher than their There Will Be Blood (#3), Jordan Peele’s Nope higher than his Get Out (#8), Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood…(#44) than his Inglorious Basterds (#13), Denis Villaneuve’s Incendies higher than his Arrival (#29), Pedro Almodovar’s Broken Embraces higher than his Volver (#80), Greta Gerwig’s Barbie higher than her Lady Bird (#39). I can’t imagine how the NYT panel overlooked Adam McKay’s The Big Short and Don’t Look Up in favor of his Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (#85).

SOME QUIBBLES

A few movies should have been ranked much higher: Before Sunset (#49), Best in Show (#57), Oppenheimer (#65), Minority Report (#94).

There are only two lousy movies on the whole list: The Tree of Life (#79) and The Favourite (#52). And the panel generally resisted including Eat Your Broccoli Movies, except for Yi Yi (#40) and The Gleaners & I (#88). I just don’t like The Royal Tenenbaums (#21), Frances Ha (#90), Inside Llewyn Davis (#83), Melancholia (#84) and City of God (#15).

With only three documentaries (The Act of Killing, Grizzly Man, The Gleaners & I), the list is pretty light on docs. On any list of 100 films, I would have added An Inconvenient Truth, They Shall Not Grow Old, Stories We Tell, and the three films in the Seven Up series (49 Up, 56 Up and 63 Up).

BIG MISSES

The NYT panel whiffed on six movies that should be in the century’s top 30, let alone 100, films: 25th Hour, Million Dollar Baby, Nomadland, The Power of the Dog, Shoplifters and Sideways. What were they thinking?

And there’s not a single film from Clint Eastwood (Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima), Spike Lee (25th Hour), Alexander Payne (Sideways, The Descendants, Nebraska), Debra Gralnik (Winter’s Bone, Leave No Trace), Sarah Polley (Away from Her, Take this Waltz, Stories We Tell), Kelly Reichardt (Wendy and Lucy) the Dardennes brothers (The Son, The Kid with the Bike), Hirokazu Koreeda (Shoplifters, Broker), Jane Campion (The Power of the Dog), Chloe Zhao (The Rider, Nomadland), or Jeff Nichols (Take Shelter, Mud, The Bikeriders). Given the inclusion of work from Yorgos Lanthimos, Lars Von Trier and the way overrated Wes Anderson, that’s pretty shocking.

THE CONVERSATION BEGINS

Thanks, NYT. Now it’s our turn. I’m working on my own list (much shorter than 100) of the century’s best. Watch this space.

Edward Norton in Spike Lee’s 25TH HOUR – regrettably not on the NYT list..

JANIS IAN: BREAKING SILENCE: she stepped onto the roller coaster at 16

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Photo caption: Janis Ian in JANIS IAN: BREAKING SILENCE. Courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment.

In Janis Ian, Breaking Silence, the biodoc of the earnest pop-folk singer-songwriter, a teen prodigy steps onto the roller coaster of the music industry at a tender age and experiences the highest highs and the lowest lows. And, it turns out that there’s more to Janis Ian than Society’s Child and At Seventeen.

The word prodigy is overused, but accurately describes Ian, who was doing professional-level song-writing at age 14. Her dad answers a booking request on the home phone with with, “You know she’s only 15, right?“

We’re not surprised that Ian experiences the shock of instant national stardom, the vicissitudes of record companies, the proverbial crooked business managers, (but not as MANY drugs as in most music biodocs).  But it’s insightful to hear from Ian herself about how all this seemed and felt as it happened. Ian recounts her relationships while touring, with both men and women, and the impact of being outed involuntarily.

When Ian is unexpectedly confronted by someone who broke her heart years before, she blurts out the perfect last laugh.

Janis Ian: Breaking Silence was made with Janis Ian’s cooperation, and takes a very sympathetic point of view; that’s okay because Ian herself is clear-eyed, self-deprecating and maintains a solid, often wry, perspective on her experience. Janis Ian herself testifies, along with others close to her (including old pals Arlo Guthrie and Joan Baez). 

This is the third feature for director Varda Bar-Kar, who is aided by excellent editing from Ryan Larkin in his first feature.

I originally reviewed Janis Ian: Breaking Silence for its brief thetricl release earlier this year. It’s now playing on PBS American Masters; you can find American Masters on your PBS channel or watch the film on the American Masters website.

Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: Marion Barbeau in DRONE, one of Must See films at Frameline. Courtesy of Frameline and StudioCanal.

This Week on The Movie Gourmet – my coverage of Frameline, which is running through June 28, centers on directorial debuts in international cinema.

I also posted a reminder to catch the bracing neo-noir Pale Flower this Saturday and Sunday on Turner Classic Movies’ Noir Alley with Eddie Muller. This Japanese slow burn erupts into thrilling set pieces, and you shouldn’t miss it.

REMEMBRANCE

Harris Yulin, with Al Pacino, in SCARFACE.

Character actor Harris Yulin brought intensity and authenticity to characters that ranged from authoritative to kindly to venal ones. He appeared in lots of big movies (Scarface, the 24 series and the Ghostbusters, Star Trek and Rush Hour franchises)  and smaller, even better ones (Victory at Entebbe, Night Moves, St Ives, Truman, The Place Behind the Pines).

CURRENT MOVIES

ON TV

Ricardo Darín, Gastón Pauls and Leticia Brédice in NINE QUEENS.

As I alerted you to last week, tonight Turner Classic Movies is airing the rarely-broadcast Argentine neo-noir Nine Queens. Nine Queens has a great con artist plot, kind of midway between House of Games and The Sting. And it stars one of my favorite actors, Ricardo Darin, the Argentine Joe Mantegna. Sadly, the writer-director Fabián Bielinsky died at 47, right after his masterpiece The Aura, ending a very promising career.

And, as I wrote this week, TCM is presenting the bracing Japanese neo-noir Pale Flower this Sat/Sun Pale Flower on Noir Alley with Eddie Muller. Don’t miss this one.

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Mariko Kaga in PALE FLOWER

Coming up on TV – the bracing neo-noir PALE FLOWER

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Ryô Ikebe in PALE FLOWER

Coming up this Saturday and Sunday on Turner Classic Movies’ Noir Alley with Eddie Muller, the Japanese neo-noir Pale Flower is a slow burn that erupts into thrilling set pieces. This is pioneering neo-noir. Pale Flower is writer-director Masahiro Shinoda’s masterpiece; its look and feel is as different from classic noir as are Elevator to the Gallows and Blast of Silence.

Maraki (Ryô Ikebe) is a fortyish Yazuka hit man, just released from loyally serving a prison term. He went away for offing a gangland rival, but now the two gangs have become allies. Out gambling with fellow Yakuza, he encounters the much younger woman Saeko (Mariko Kaga). The stoic and completely self-contained Maraki becomes fascinated by – and then obsessed with – Saeko, who lives her life seeking thrill after thrill.

PALE FLOWER

Maraki and Saeko meet gambling on the Japanese card game of hanafuda (flower cards). She is the only woman at a table surrounded by male gangsters. Shinoda makes the tension of card games resemble that of walking into a hostile bar or waiting an Old West quick draw gunfight. The card games are silent but for the ritual betting and the players clicking their cards. The film’s title refers to both hanafuda and Saeko.

Mariko Kaga in PALE FLOWER

Just who is this mystery woman? Muraki is snagged, but he is too cool to search out her background. His obsession is more complicated than sexual passion alone, although there is a sexual element (watch whether he acts on it when he can). The mystery makes Saeko (the then 20-year-old Mariko Kaga in only her fourth movie) all the more captivating.

In another gripping set piece, Saeko races her sports car through Tokyo’s tunnels and overpasses at 2:30 AM. In the passenger seat, Muraki is transfixed by her recklessness. He’s not thrilled by the careening wild ride, he’s thrilled by Saeko’s compulsion to seek the thrill.

Mariko Kaga and Ryô Ikebe in PALE FLOWER

The ultimate thrill might be to accompany a hit man on the job. The climactic three-minute scene is a mob hit in a church, set to an aria, Henry Purcell’s Dido’s Lament. It is operatic – and remarkably similar to Francis Ford Coppola’s later montage in The Godfather where Michael Corleone’s assassins kills all his enemies while he is standing in church at the christening of his sister’s baby. Muarki’s murder-for-hire is up-close-and-personal.

When Maraki and Saeko are on-screen, Pale Flower is dramatically and stylistic Stylistic – the card games, the car race, the final killing, In contrast, we see the mundane plotting of the Yazuka bosses (but not their crimes) as they kibbitz at the horse races. Their underlings go bowling.

Does it all matter? is a central theme in film noir. Pale Flower’s powerful final prison scene is the the ultimate neo-noir ending.

Pale Flower is included in Roger Ebert’s Great Movies. Pale Flower is challenging to find; it can be streamed with a subscription to Criterion Collection or kanopy, and it plays occasionally on TCM, including on June 21-22.

Ryô Ikebe in PALE FLOWER

Frameline goes international again

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Photo caption: Marion Barbeau in DRONE. Courtesy of Frameline and StudioCanal.

Frameline, the oldest and longest-running LGBTQ+ film festival in the world, opens tomorrow, June 18 and runs through June 28. The program includes 150 films from 40 countries, including 42 world, North American and US premieres. As always, it’s a very rich slate of films.

I’ve selected five international films to highlight. Let’s begin with two Must See directorial debuts from France and Italy.

Drone: Émilie (Marion Barbeau) is stalked through Paris by a mysterious drone, in a thriller that explores issues of privacy and the male gaze. A magnificent 4-minute opening sequence, introduces us to the vulnerability caused by the voyeur drone. Émilie is funding her architecture studies by working as a cam girl, a situation where she is physically detached from and in control of her male customers. But there is no detachment or control whenever the paranoia-inducing drone suddenly appears. There are exhilarating set pieces in a parking garage, a motorcycle chase and an abandoned factory, as writer-director Simon Bouisson and cinematographer Ludovic Zulli keep their drone camera in pursuit of the story’s stalker drone. In his first theatrical feature, Bouisson keeps the tension pounding, all the way to the ingenious ending. Must See.

Manfredi Marini (right) in Giovanni Tortorici’s DICIANNOVE. Courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories and Frameline.

Diciannove: The title is Italian for nIneteen, the age of Leonardo (Manfredi Marini), who is leaving his Palermo home for the first time to begin college in London. Ever restless, he is eager to embark on his life journey, but doesn’t know where to head, and, being nineteen, he won’t listen to anyone else. In mere days, Leonardo pivots from business courses in London to the study of Italian literature at a university in Siena. Nineteen is an age that most of us sample experiences, but Leonardo is an introvert, sometimes bratty, who refuses to socialize, and we wonder if he will ever forge relationships or act on his sexual urges. Diciannove is that highly original coming-of-age film in which even what Leonardo chooses NOT to do is interesting, and we can’t predict what could make his spirit soar at the end. Diciannove is the debut feature for writer-director Giovanni Tortorici, a protege of Luca Guadagnino, who produced the film. Tortorici and cinematographer Massimiliano Kuveiller (who has also worked with Guadagnino) maintain visual interest by throwing everything at the screen – disco scenes with an operatic score, slow motion, animated dreams and every kind of fancy cut. Diciannove is the singular and imaginative calling card of a new auteur; see it at Frameline before its US arthouse release later this year. Must See.

Bruce Pintos in KEEP COMING BACK. Courtesy of Frameline.

And here are three more highlights from Frameline’s menu of international cinema – from Uruguay, Croatia and Taiwan:

  • Keep Coming Back: In his first feature, director Sergio de León sends up the conventions of the underdog drama with deadpan drollery. In rural Uruguay, 18-year-old Emilio’s mother dies, leaving with a pile of debts and a collection of pigeons. The only way he can keep the family house is to win the great pigeon race. Staggered by grief, confounded by financial stress and with his hormones raging toward a sexual awakening, Emilio (Bruce Pintos) plunges ahead earnestly. Absurd hilarity ensues, including a very funny I’m sorry about your mom and the robust retelling of the story of Winkie, the historical hero pigeon. US Premiere.
  • Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day: Croatia’s official submission for the 2025 Academy Award for Best International Feature, this is an aspirational film with an epic sweep, passionate sex and profound tragedy, all the way to unexpected redemption. This searing critique of the Tito regime pits a man of principle and ideas against the repression of the small-minded. The heroic bravery that helps overthrow Nazi puppets is revealed to be no match for the homophobia and mindless adherence to the party line of post-war apparatchiks. Frameline hosts the International Premiere.
  • Silent Sparks: In this Taiwanese neo-noir, small time hood Pua is released from prison and checks in with the swaggering, exuberant local crime lord. The boss assigns him to a lieutenant, Mi-Ji, who happens to be Pua’s former cell-mate. But when Pua and Mi-Ji meet again, the encounter is a study in social awkwardness. Pua just wants to start earning money and working his way up in the syndicate, but Mi-Ji is surprisingly unhelpful. What explains Mi-Ji’s behavior toward Pua? As Silent Sparks smolders on, the risks escalate. Promising first feature for writer-director Ping Chu.

You can buy tickets for these films and peruse the entire program at Frameline. Here’s the trailer for Drone.

Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: Paul Reubens in PEE-WEE AS HIMSELF. Courtesy of HBO Max

This Week on The Movie Gourmet – a new review of the French coming-of-age drama Bonjour Tristesse and a tribute to the groundbreaking French comedy La Cage au Folles, coming up on TCM. Plus a preview of the upcoming Frameline film festival and a fond reflection on La cage aux folles.

REMEMBRANCES

Mara Corday in THE BLACK SCORPION

60s pinup queen Mara Corday starred in a series of monster movies: The Giant Claw, The Black Scorpion (both among my Least Convincing Movie Monsters) and Tarantula. Corday concluded her career in several Clint Eastwood movies, most memorably in Sudden Impact as the waitress hostage rescued by Clint with “Go ahead, make my day.”

Clint Eastwood and Mara Corday in SUDDEN IMPACT

Frederick Forsyth’s early days as a spy and a journalist gave him fodder for his potboiler novels, many of which were adapted into movies like The Odessa File, The Dogs of War and, perhaps my favorite thriller, The Day of the Jackal.

CURRENT MOVIES

ON TV

George C. Scott (right) with Michael Sarrazin and Slim Pickins in THE FLIM-FLAM MAN
George C. Scott (right) with Michael Sarrazin and Slim Pickins in THE FLIM-FLAM MAN

Tonight, Turner Classic Movies resurrects the great, great comedic performance by George C. Scott as the con man Mordecai Jones in The Flim-Flam Man (1967).  Mark Twain would have loved this movie.

And set your VCRs for TCM’s June 20 airing of the rarely-broadcast Argentine neo-noir Nine Queens. Nine Queens has a great con artist plot, kind of midway between House of Games and The Sting. And it stars one of my favorite actors, Ricardo Darin, the Argentine Joe Mantegna. Sadly, the writer-director Fabián Bielinsky died at 47, right after his masterpiece The Aura, ending a very promising career.

Ricardo Duran and Gaston Pauls in NINE QUEENS.