movie recommendation

Timothée Chalamet Brings His A-Game to the Raucous ‘Marty Supreme’
Elevation Pictures

One need not brace for the trite biopic standard when sitting down to watch Josh Safdie’s latest. The story of Marty Reisman (Marty Mauser by way of Timothée Chalamet in the film) is loosely adapted for this snappy drama that, if anything, uses ping pong as a background timekeeping device more than it does a major plot point. Marty Supreme is much more the next story of a fallible Safdie hurricane than it is a historical tribute to a late pioneer. And it’s all the better for it.

Mauser is in a similar precarious position to his cohorts in Howard Ratner (Uncut Gems) and Connie Nikas (Good Time), staying just barely avoiding drowning but choosing to sprint rather than tread water. He’s a sharp mouthed brat (a pisk, if you will) adept at the kind of charm that’s only effective until he keeps on talking. He’s an eye on an important prize: a ping pong tournament abroad that will grant him global acclaim. Mauser needs the cash to get himself there, and the resources to get there in style. So sets off his calamitous sprint through match losses, affairs, a nagging mother, a would-be business partner, and a pregnant old flame with a protective beau. Marty is a hurricane, like Safdie protagonists before him (though this one was crafted without Benny- but with their longtime collaborator, Ronald Bronstein). He is constantly in messes of his own making, something he feels slighted by as he is just doing “what it takes” to succeed.  Mauser uses people as rungs as he climbs to what he believes to be his manifest destiny.

Safdie sets his frantic drama in 1950s New York, where a generation of Jewish immigrants are still reeling from the holocaust. There’s the sort of scrappiness in Mauser one might expect to see in tales of post WWII gangsters like Benny Siegel or Meyer Lansky, men contending with being on the receiving end of a particular form of racism and refusing to be brought down. The backdrop allows Mauser to self-justify his sharpness and entitlement and also allows him to better appear a burden to Americans reeling from a war where they were made to liberate his people. It also lends Mauser a shorthand to interact with others in his neighbourhood and build the sorts of allyships that are only slightly more difficult to bruise with his antics.

Chalamet, who was already a favourite around cinephile circles, earns his place as a lead in a contender here. His delivery of Mauser’s snappy dialogue is deliciously funny, and his playful smugness is endlessly effective. Looking as much like a bar mitzvah boy as he does a snappily dressed 20th century man, he is able to play with the earnestness and entitlement of a man who has both childlike wonder and the weight of adulthood rushing through him. He’s complimented by titans in his co-stars like Gwyneth Paltrow, but there’s reason the character is titular.

Marty Supreme is a frantic tale of “pride before the fall” that’s dressed up like the most gorgeous period piece complete with fresh garments and detailed storefronts. Set against a table tennis tournament is the story of a snappy young pisk whose success comes from disobedience, the disobedience inherited into a people who were on the wrong side of a quest for extermination. 

Marty Supreme hits theaters December 25, 2025

Fantasia 2025: ‘Hellcat’ Leaves You Wondering Who is Infected
Hellcat Movie Still
Blue Finch Films

You awake to find yourself jostling around in a trailer. A disembodied voice emanating from a disembodied canine head informs you that you’ve been infected, and you’re on a clock to get to the only doctor who can help you. Stay calm lest you make it worse.

Lena (Dakota Gorman), a no-nonsense resourceful woman, does what we probably hope we’d all do and struggles to find her way out of the moving trailer using her wits and the random items tossed about her new cage. Lena concedes she is struggling physically, but it’s because of her pregnancy and not due to the mysterious infection the voice of the driver insists she has. The clock is ticking as Lena moves farther away from any civilization in which she belongs, and without her phone or a clear view to the outside, she is running out of time and completely at the whim of a ruthless driver who insists what he is doing is to keep her safe.

The chamber piece, or single location horror, becomes a battle of wits on the open road that leaves Lena struggling for a way out while also struggling with what is happening to her body. While the idea of a trapped person trying desperately to figure out what is happening while using limited items available to them feels much like Oxygen or Buried, Hellcat has even more in common with 10 Cloverfield Lane as the audience and lead struggle to decipher if their captor is helping them, trapping them, or a bit of both. Clive (the driver played by Todd Terry) is balanced but desperate and reads sometimes like a paternal character doing his best, but his best comes by way of threats, drugs, and off-screen violence.

Hellcat is mostly simple which can feel stretched in for a feature film runtime, but the powerhouse performance by Gorman makes the excursion an event. Almost all of the movie’s emotional weight comes from the lead’s stellar performance, one that’s peppered with extreme physicality.

Writer and director Brock Bodell has made a movie, like the aforementioned Cloverfield installment, which intentionally leaves the audience guessing. As Lena makes her way around the trailer while at the behest of Clive’s small cues, the audience is meant to attempt to decipher what caused Lena’s bite and why Clive is so insistent on his actions. The movie only gives the audience the information it wants them to have, and does so with breadcrumbs and in waves, then asks them whether they would subscribe to the same conclusions as Clive. It’s a fun game that makes it worth looking through the leads and into the background.

Hellcat is a stripped-down horror tale meant not to be slotted into a category until its larger reveals become broadly known in the zeitgeist. Its horror comes from toggling the true imminent threats and having its lead struggle along with the audience to decipher the real enemy.

Hellcat screened at the Fantasia Film Festival

The Long Awaited ’28 Years Later’ is a Tender Tale of Manhood at War
Miya Mizuno/ Sony Pictures

It’s almost difficult to slot the latest Danny Boyle horror instalment beside legacy sequels. Yes, it’s a long-awaited sequel of a rotting franchise, but there is no sense of reinvigorating the old or rehashing any updated storylines here. The third installment of the 28 movies comes in at about twenty-two years after the original and while it shares much in common with stories like Fallout or The Village (read: Running Out of Time), it pivots from a speedy sprint away from the infected to a slow walk into humanity.

It’s been fewer than thirty years since the rage virus ravaged parts of the UK, and a colony of survivors have set up a gated village on an island in the Scottish Highlands. They are a quarantined zone, living in a pocket world cut off from the rest of the planet which has moved on from the pandemic. The people of this area have regressed to the likes of pioneers in almost a primal retraction to medieval villagers. Like the greatest of zombie features, it taps into the fantasy of a world where the only worry is survival, this one without technology or AI, none of our politics or economic worry, just the early goal of returning from war and joining industry. Here, young Spike (Alfie Williams) lives with his seasoned father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and ill mother (Jodie Comer). Spike is of a generation who has never seen beyond the walls of the fortified village but is forced to learn some real-world lessons when the pre-teen is taken by his father on his first visit to the mainland. There, Spike encounters the infected and is forced to defend his life with a quiver of arrows and his father’s paternal instincts. Disenfranchised and spooked by his ordeal and his father’s version of recovery, the young boy decides to visit the mainland again, this time only with his ill mother looking to pivot from being a soldier and hunter to a saviour and protector. Framing the rest like a road trip, 28 Years Later becomes a somber and tender story of a young boy choosing his own version of manhood. One who is forced to do so in place abandoned by the world and where fear is the only thing keeping people alive.

It’s a surprising turn for a sequel to films known for their high-octane scares. The fast-transforming and fast-moving zombies of this universe function to increase the tension and leave it at a lingering hum even during the quietest moments. But instead of making bigger, scarier, more monstrous infected (or instead of only doing that) Danny Boyle and Alex Garland (director and writer, respectively) chose to examine the fallout of such a pandemic and war, comparing Spike and his father to the sorts of men made by wars and global crises. The 1903 poem, “Boots,”- which was also used hauntingly and effectively in the trailer- about the Boer War is used early in the film. Throughout, there are interjections of scenes of other historical wars and soldiers. 28 Years Later is effectively an examination of a child learning manhood in a world that needs a specific version of it from him and choosing to forge his own path. Having spent most of his life under his father’s tutelage, his viewpoint is changed when he encounters a soldier, a doctor, an apparent cult leader, and versions of men who can teach him something different about who he can choose to be. The sum of it becomes a sweet tale of growth that imagines the weight carried by those on the front lines of or left behind by a crisis.

Stylistically, it’s a marvel what Boyle was able to do with a 2025 instalment of a franchise known for the aesthetic crafted in the early 2000s. Yes, he used the iPhone camera with some technology boosters, but the design and appearance also create a visual throughline. Out of the gate with a haunting cold open of children crying while watching Teletubbies, the movie is sprayed with a UK punk aesthetic. The movie doesn’t quite smell bad, but you sense that it’s all-over musty. The dizzying and frenetic edits keep the movie feeling like the guerilla blood fests you remember from 2003 and 2007, but it still fills the borders of a modern silver screen.

Where the zombie pandemic fantasy has often been about a world without modern stresses, 28 Years Later is coming on the heels of a real global pandemic that saw us retaining modern stresses which would eventually become exacerbated. It’s a tall order to examine such a thing, and perhaps why we’ve not seen any “world comes together to fight the evil,” zombie movies since 2019. Boyle and Garland’s story, instead, imagines the tears in such a fantasy, positing a world where we might regress into the likes of the Trojans or the Vikings, where instead of effectively working together to save the world, we’d send young men to the front lines and expect them to trade their lives for a version of manhood that supports someone’s idea of the greater good.

28 Years Later hits theaters June 20th, 2025

‘It Feeds’ is the Off-Season Sport for Fans of Jump Scare Greats
Black Fawn Distribution

The opening of It Feeds sometimes seems at a hint to the ending, but that’s only because it’s so reminiscent of another story about a supernaturally gifted cleanser of evil spirits. The cold open has its gifted psychic therapist working her way through a darkened world on another plane and witnessing a beast seemingly trapping a young child. It’s a lot like the finale of Insidious. This original Canadian horror feature has a lot in common with the great modern horror franchise, but it doesn’t seem to want to compete with it so much as stand proudly beside it.

Ashley Greene leads as Cynthia, a psychically gifted therapist who performs supernatural cleanses on her clients under the guise of offering traditional mental health care. As a way of protecting herself and her daughter (Ellie O-Brien) from prying eyes or those experiencing difficult demons, she has a set of rules to prevent letting their secrets out or bringing too much supernatural hazard in. When they meet a frightened young girl covered in burns who begs for Cynthia’s help and her garish father (Shawn Ashmore) who refuses it, they face an ethical dilemma where they have to decide if they should help her and potentially expose themselves to danger, and whether they should heed the warnings of the sharp patriarch.

 The rules of Cynthia’s practice are quickly established, but so are the rules of the movie’s in-world villains. It’s smart and makes for consistent storytelling where the stakes and dangers are always clear to the audience. Of course, it all comes down to cheering on Cynthia to slowly make the decision to assist, which requires the film to bring the danger closer to her. Cynthia has reasons to be reluctant and her daughter has reasons to push her, so they’ll each have to face or avoid the dangers on their own until Cynthia has to metaphorically suit up.

Writer/ director Chad Archibald knows his audience and knows his genre and either pays a lot of homage to it or borrows heavily from it. While the comparison to Insidious is apt and worn on the film’s face, it also has some plot elements that feel like Let the Right One In or even The Omen. The girl’s father’s motivations are difficult to track which makes for a clever secondary villain when different characters have different ideas about how to best a dark entity. It’s in these “disagreements” that It Feeds becomes more than another in the canon of demon jump scare movies.

Canadian horror fans will rejoice not only at another on our list of horror successes, but at the gaggle of Canadian genre icons like Ashmore, Julian Richings, and Juno Rinaldi (probably more of a comedy icon but I still cheered at her appearance). It’s still a good time to be a Canadian horror fan, and It Feeds is here to remind us.

It Feeds has a lot of unique elements that make it a worthy twist on familiar skulking-dark-entity horror, but in a lot of ways is a truncated version of those movies. It holds its own on plotting and scares, but much of it will feel familiar to fans of the canon of James Wan. Though I don’t expect it to spark its own long-running franchise of spinoffs and sequels, I do expect to see more from Archibald who could submit It Feeds as quite the impressive reel in a campaign to direct more like it.

It Feeds hit select theaters in April of 2025

‘825 Forest Road’ is as Imperfect and Endlessly Cozy as Stephen Cognetti’s Other Spooky Movies
AMC Networks

Maybe “cozy,” isn’t the first word that comes to mind when thinking of the Hell House LLC franchise, but they certainly fit the bill for lots of horror fans. In a take for another piece and another day, Stephen Cognetti’s found footage movies tap into that coziness sweet spot of parallel play and immersive theater (even in a meta way in the third installment). Veering from the found footage style, Cognetti’s latest, 825 Forest Road, holds onto the cozy spooky air of his earlier films. But with that, comes some of the usual missteps.

Similar to the Hell House LLC movies, 825 Forest Lane is location based and involves a haunted menace attached to a particular home. This is the home that Maria (Elizabeth Vermilyea who will be familiar to franchise fans) and Chuck (Joe Falcone) are moving into with Chuck’s struggling sister, Isabelle (Kathryn Miller). Chuck is attempting to swoop in for Isabelle in perhaps an attempt to reconnect with her after she suffered the loss of their parents. Shortly after relocating to the too-good-to-be-true home away from the bustling city, the group starts to notice strange goings on and prying eyes from concerned neighbours. Chuck starts to investigate the story of Helen Foster, a ghost who haunts the area, pushing its residents to suicide. With Isabelle as a risk for self harm, the group works to find the location of Helen Foster’s missing home at 825 Forest Road to break the curse before it comes for their small family. Told in small parts- from each of the main characters’ perspectives- the audience learns more about how they have arrived at the cursed locale and how they are trying to protect themselves and each other.

The multi-perspective structure isn’t quite Rashomon, but it functions well enough to give the audience breadcrumbs about what is happening in each of the characters’ rooms, though it cuts off some story elements for no real narrative reason. It pays off the most for the leading women when the story ends up a bit of a tale of supporting each other. If I were perhaps to give it too much credit, I’d nod to the feminist subversion of the perspective switch in how it tosses out the lead skeptic of the bunch in favour of a new view of the women supporting each other in their difficult experiences. Then there’s the “mental illness horror” of it all, which isn’t completely egregious but probably is tired and potentially objectifies the issue by using it as an easy entry point. It’s ideas about suicide and depression are potentially outdated, but they do tap into similar themes from movies like Smile about suicide as a contagion and depression befalling a generation of young people.

While this is his first feature outside of Hell House LLC, it’s very much a Film by Stephen Cognetti. Yes, there’s the haunted locale, but there’s also a lot of familiar scares including live streaming gags, moving mannequins, and creepy piano tracks. The haunted home locks them in to torment them, and there is the deterministic plot built around the characters’ old art. So, this movie isn’t breaking any molds nor is it a campaign for the creator’s versatility, but it is perhaps more evidence that his movies can adapt a familiar style to make more media for those looking for a comforting fright. It has the same quality of Things Heard & Seen where it perhaps doesn’t all stack up to a flawless narrative, but it allows for the sweater-clad-tea-sipping comfort of someone bopping around a small town thinking about a ghost. The Hell House LLC movies often forecast their own scares with talking heads which allows the audience to comfortably brace for scares that feel like controlled burns. 825 Forest Road is a feature length version of that.

So, will this latest Shudder haunted house have you begging your friends to fall in love with the newest ghost, or making comparisons to the best of Mike Flanagan’s work? Perhaps not. But if you’re the type of person who likes the terror that comes with invisible guard rails and the right amount of nightmare fuel, 825 Forest Road is shrieking to be added to your regular list. What can I say? I’ve already watched it twice.

825 Forest Road streams on Shudder April 4, 2025

‘Novocaine’ Wants to Remind You of When Action Movies Were Fun
Jack Quaid as “Nate” in Novocaine from Paramount Pictures.

That’s not to say that directors, Dan Berk and Robert Olsen, are the only ones out here trying to thrust movie watchers back into the action movies of yore. Michael Bay and Doug Liman have been trying the same with films like AmbuLAnce and Road House. So with a surprising twist on the action comedy toned with splatstick comes Novocaine, a blood-soaked action comedy that breaks through the chains of midnighters.

Jack Quaid and his overflowing charm lead as Nathan Caine, the mild-mannered bank assistant manager living his life within the confines created by his condition. Caine can’t feel pain, so to avoid any life-threatening accidents, he lives life in a box made of smoothies (he could bite his tongue if he chews!), watered down coffee, and tennis balls acting as metaphorical and literal guardrails. Caine’s life finally gets tastier when he meets Sherry (Amber Midthunder), a colleague with a forkful of cherry pie and a whole other experience with self-inflicted pain. When their bank is robbed and Sherry is taken hostage, Caine uses his condition as his superpower and takes every kick, punch, bullet, and burn with ease and valour so he can rescue his dame.

The simple set up sends the every-man into the underworld fray, but Novocaine is more than just an average Joe taking on unreal baddies. It takes that premise and mixes in some gnarly gore (with this and The Monkey, those of us who laugh at good gore are having a great year), and a host of tropes that feel ripped from 80s action films. Its early reveal is massively forecast but simultaneously difficult to see until you clue into the sort of film you’re watching. Its gory midsection is sometimes tiresome but does its best to stay fresh, then the third act barrels into throwback action that’ll leave a queasy audience ready to cheer.

Novocaine almost never asks you to take it seriously which is to its own detriment. Dancing a little bit too close to parody, it stuffs the film with a comedy version of a cliched cop partnered with a serious version of one who still seems completely inept at police work. Pit them against the world’s dumbest and most brash bank robbers (seriously, they could learn restraint from the robbers in Point Break), and I guess you can see why the skinny bank manager would take this battle on his own.  It makes the lore of the cops and robbers difficult to buy into and sucks some of the comedy out of Caine’s splatter parade by being a bit too dumb. It’s perhaps worth it to see Ray Nicholson go full Bodhi but he is not given room to be Sonny Wortzick.

While it’s tempting to compare Novocaine to the other average Joe movies that succeeded John Wick, it’s much more on a plane with Baby Driver and Boy Kills World where a guy with a particularly special skill takes on larger than life villains with a specific motivation, the whole affair being brightly lit with saturated colours (that really make that red blood pop). Novocaine isn’t the next in line of average Joe shot-em-ups, it’s a reminder of a time where the best movies had action stars dangling off the sides of a city bus.

Novocaine hits theaters March 14, 2025.

‘Rumours’ is the Solution to Crafting Political Satire in the 2020s

What’s that quote about how no one knows what they’re doing, we’re all just pretending? You know the one. The one that resonates when you realize you’re suddenly an adult and you have no idea what you’re doing. That further resonates when you realize your parents aren’t omniscient. And even further when you realize that the people in charge of everything are literally clueless. Take that horrifying thought and imagine your G7 leaders managing another global crisis from their towers before being thrust from them and directly into another one. That’s the black comedy painted all over Rumours, a gut busting political satire from Canadian creators, Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson.

Political satire will always be timely, but Rumours picks at the fresh wounds of the pandemic, climate change disasters, and the wars abroad. Maddin and co imagine our most prominent leaders as immature, petulant, windbags who spend more time sipping wine and drafting hollow statements than they do taking any real action against crises. They’re not faces of evil per se, but they’re gutless ivory tower dwellers full of so much hot air, they almost float, and they’re otherwise as unequipped as the rest of us.

The eclectic cast is clutched together by Kate Blanchette’s star power and accent proficiency, her as the sharp German Chancellor surrounded by a hopeless romantic Canadian Prime Minister (Roy Dupuis as Maxime Laplace), a barely conscious and babbling American President (Charles Dance as Edison Wolcott), a nervous bumbling English Prime Minister (Nikki Amuka-Bird as Cardosa Dewindt, and further securing herself as the queen of awkward, weird, dry comedy), the irreverent and hard to pin down President of France (Denis Ménochet as Sylvain Broulez), the vapid Italian Prime Minister (Rolando Ravello as Antonio Lamorte), and the frantic fly on the wall Prime Minister of Japan (Takehiro Hira as Tatsuro Iwasaki). They’ve assembled in a protected manor in Germany to strategize and prepare a statement for an unspecified global crisis. While the world is implied to be dealing with one thing or another, they gather over wine glasses, notepads, and the uncomfortable social situation created by the weeping Canadian PM struggling with his love life. It’s all vapid and fluffy and the “strategy” seems completely secondary to their social structure and personal matters. That is until they find themselves alone (which they notice as no one seems to be refilling their wine glasses) and surrounded by dripping zombies.

If you can imagine it, world leaders land smack in the middle of a real crisis and their notepads are insufficient protection from the fold. That’s where the Canadian creators find their comedy, not only in the social satire about hapless leaders but in seeing them clunk around in high heels with shapely haircuts trying to defend themselves from monsters. It’s as much an Iannucci political satire as it is Mars Attacks. And with the former comes the crackling dryness which works until it doesn’t. Blanchett walking gingerly in smart dress shoes and managing the crew’s emotions is what trailer clip dreams are made of, but the gag loses freshness around the midpoint, only saved by the sudden appearance of Alica Viaknder as the representative of the European Union. Surprise guests, though, unfortunately can’t keep the back half afloat but the film has earned enough good will by then to keep your attention.

Rumours is the bridge between weird cinema and overt political commentary that 2020s earth inhabitants crave- it lampoons our world leaders but creates a situation remote enough from reality to allow for brainless (non-literally…) laughs. I mean, unless you count how close the Canadian and American reps are to their Earth-1 counterparts but let’s not get into it.

Rumours hits theaters October 18, 2024. 

The Belko Experiment

Image result for the belko experimentI can hardly count how many movies I have said were my “best Midnight Madness experience ever” at this point.  But if there is a film that fits the bill of quality, gore, fear and sheer madness that works so well with the live tiff Midnight crown, it’s The Belko Experiment.

I went into this one like “oh, cute, the guy from The Newsroom is in it.” The world building is so strong, that a quick opening montage and you are right on board with this spooky corporate allegory and you know this will be far from “cute.”

Americans are recruited to work at a cushy office in Colombia.  Over the top security is justified by the dangerous area and workers are treated to the cliche office of their dreams.  When the building locks down and  a mysterious voice floods the intercoms demanding employees participate in a bloody game, the foreseeable chaos ensues.

This Battle Royale meets Office Space take isn’t the only one of its kind, but it is no doubt the most successful.  It is the absolute best blend of gore and fear, completely balanced to keep it a legit thriller despite the splashing blood.  It also prompted me to update my zombie contingency plan for the office.  My monitor riser makes an amazing shield.

Great if you liked: Battle Royale, The Hunger Games, Mom and Dad, Shaun of the Dead, Mayhem, The Final Girls

 

Tusk

Image result for tusk posterIt’s weird when a movie comes in cold, expecting to become a cult classic later in its life.  This questionable strategy, surely, and lead to a pretty disappointing opening for this Kevin Smith joint, but as it bubbles under the surface, showing up on Netflix, Tusk might slip right into cult fave status.

Based on a random discussion had on Smith’s podcast, this film follows a podcaster who seeks out a mysterious recluse with an affinity for Walruses.

It’s certainly scary, with the podcaster quickly becoming a hostage, but it’s also weird, wild, and funny.  I don’t know if I would call it a horror comedy, since it is something else entirely.  Not playing on tropes, but creating its own new weirdness, Tusk will make you laugh, but also feel full blown dread.

The performances are as weird as the subject matter, and the ending is a… lark. Check it out.

Great if you liked: Clerks, Inglorious Basterds, Zombieland, Yoga Hosers, Warm Bodies, Mom and Dad, Dogma

In a Valley of Violence

Image result for in a valley of violenceThere are always moments when I bring up Westworld and someone responds “I don’t like Westerns.”  And often, I retort “well it’s more of a Sci-Fi than it is a Western.”  But, as someone who also never liked Westerns, I think I need a new retort.  Maybe I watched the wrong kind.

In a Valley of Violence is the right kind.  I saw this at a small festival for the sole reason that I trust Ethan Hawke.  Predestination had played the year before at the same fest and I wanted more of that.   I was totally blown away by how much fun Valley was and was revitalized in a desire to watch some cowboys.  The cast acts the hell out of this off beat script and it results in a real delight. It has all the ‘dog protectiness’ of John Wick and the “this dude made a western?” of The Quick and the Dead.

This is usually where I put the short synopsis to prime you for the flick, but it honestly would be really difficult to narrow this down to a few sentences.  In the tradition of a Western, rising actions are numerous.  The mysterious Paul stumbles across a town en route to Mexico where they run into this priest, and there are these girls, and a cop, and something about being an army deserter, I don’t know. Just trust this one.

Great if you liked: No Country for Old Men, John Wick, The Quick and the Dead, There will be Blood, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, Gangs of New York