2026

dir: Derrick Borte

2026

This is bad. Very bad.

I have long held a belief that no film with Russell Crowe in it can be completely worthless but I did not reckon with the vast, indifferent powers of the people involved with this remarkable movie.

On my streamer it comes up as The Get Out, which is a fairly innocuous title, but when I tried to look it up online it comes up as Bear Country. Bear Country? What the absolute fuck? This is set in LA, mostly in Koreatown, as far as the establishing shots pretend, but minutes in to this fiasco it was pretty obvious this was made on the Gold Coast, Queensland.

The only bears we have to worry about in Queensland are drop bears. And maybe some bears that mix up a mean margarita and are a bit too free with their hands on the dancefloor.

This stupid film seems like it’s about a nice enough harmless middle aged guy who’s contemplating leaving the high life (as a club owner laundering money for a cartel) for something simpler, but really it’s about people given too much money to make something that really makes it feel like they were making it up as they were going along. I mean like they pitched this to someone, and that Russell Crowe would star, and someone said yes and threw money at the producers, and then they had to figure out how to make something in the form and shape of a movie so as to not be sued for breach of contract.

As such, this flick has a beginning, a middle and an ending, but everything in between seems like and sounds like when a kid breaks something expensive in your house and then you asked them what happened, and they give you a story where everyone and anyone, dinosaurs, cowboys, penguins, crocodiles somehow conspired elaborately to break the thing leaving them solely not responsible, as a mute witness to destruction.

And somehow this is actually based on a book, like, an honest to goodness book, written years before the AI strip-mined all books and then regurgitated it back to us. I cannot claim to have read Strip by Thomas Perry, but I’ll wager that it’s got to be better written and more thoughtful than anything on display here.

Most improbably of all, Australia’s Own (New Zealander) Russell Crowe, Commander Rusty Crowe, plays an Albanian-American chap called Manco Kapak.

Manco Kapak? Uh, okay. How well do you think Russell Crowe does pretending to be a sleazy Albanian club owner? Gold chains, Gucci t-shirts and Sergio Tacchini tracksuits? Yeah, about that well.

dir: Janus Metz Pedersen

2026

Are monsters born, or made?

We like to believe we’re responsible for our own fates (if we still want to believe we have free will), so the corollary of that must be that we create monsters, they don’t spring fully formed from their father’s foreheads.

This film, this freaking film, posits that a guy that tried to kill around thirty people over the course of 18 years, but only killed 3, might not have become the monster he became had some guy at Harvard not experimented on him way back in the late 1950s.

That guy, played as a young man by Jacob Tremblay, is Ted Kaczynski. Maybe not a household name, but people of a certain age remember hearing about his nickname as the Unabomber. Scourge of academics and public intellectuals. Destroyer of lives through the post. Prophet of doom against industrial society. Even if he was treated as something of a joke by late night talk show hosts, he actually killed people, and maimed a whole lot more.

All because he hated the modern industrial world, scientific so-called progress that only led to more degradation and destruction of the natural world, and a society that was heedlessly speeding towards its own doom.

It’s hard to say if he was trying to slow things down or speed things up, and while we must question the morality of his actions, he did have something of a point.

This flick doesn’t make its case convincingly along the way, but I did still find it interesting.

Undermining its own case, by the time Kaczynski is at Harvard, a young math prodigy all of 16, he already believes these core beliefs about the ruinous state of the world, which he shares with anyone who’ll listen. The film cuts from the past to the present (present for the film is the 1990s, when they were zeroing in on the elder Kaczynski in his shack in the mountains), with little notice and with choppy editing to boot.

In the present, Shailene Woodley, who is good in other stuff, not so much here, plays a fictional FBI agent whose specialty seems to be linguistics(?) Following whatever lead she can to get the jerk, where no-one else has been able to nail the fucker down for 17 years, the release of his manifesto to the media gives her a baseline for how the suspect thinks, acts and expresses himself, giving indications of age and education that contradicts most of their suspects.

Imagine. Imagine being tasked with that. Having to track down one highly motivated person with ill-intent in a country as vast as the US. Trying to find a needle in a nation of needles.

dir: Jane Schoenbrun

2026

A film can be deeply serious about its subject matter, and still be quite silly. I don’t mean silly as a pejorative, exactly, just in the sense that something can be meaningful and absurdly funny, side by side.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma can be an intelligent and trenchant take on 80s slasher movies and the culture that generated them, yet another take on the psychoanalytical links between Eros and Thanatos (the sex drive and the drive towards death/annihilation), a catty satire on contemporary “Hollywood” and its drive towards deathlessly milking franchises until there’s nothing but dust, and a deeply personal evaluation of one’s own queer / trans awakening and search for sexual fulfilment, and a campy delight that revels in its own unreality. All at the same time.

It is, most of all, a film brought into being by film itself, by movies themselves, in the ways that the writer / director Jane Schoenbrun expresses through her stand-in Kris (the great Hannah Einbinder) that she sees herself created at least in part by the movies that she has loved or been affected by.

Not all of us had the luxury to be shaped by the films of Ozu, Tarkovsky, DeSica, Rossellini, Varda, Fellini etc. Most of us (of those of us who are film obsessives) were shaped by sometimes terrible movies that nonetheless shaped or warped some parts of our psyches when we watched something at way too young an age. Blue Velvet. Threads. Faces of Death. Vampyres. Straw Dogs. Deep Red. Alligator. Desolation Alley. Galaxy of Terror. Sometimes terrible, no-good flicks that still did something to some inappropriate part of you when they affected some part of your brain and body that you never knew were going to operate normally ever again. And logic and sense were never going to be able to get in the way to protect you, not for a long time.

Imagine, like the protagonist of this film, a writer / director commissioned to reboot a slasher franchise, that elements of how you feel about yourself, see yourself, experience your life, were also wrapped up in your experience of watching the first film in the franchise, being the (fictional) Camp Miasma. The flick itself is fictional (to us), which means it’s not based on a specific flick or slasher franchise, just many of them. So yes there’s Sleepaway Camp, but the Friday the 13ths are not far away from the subject material, or the presumed aesthetics.

So Kris, the director, is keenly aware of why the studio is hiring her to reboot this so-called ‘problematic’ franchise, seeing as a crucial aspect of the original was that the ‘villain’ is a trans person, and she is too. ‘They’ hope to cash in and avoid criticism about the intended flick also being labelled transphobic. She is being used to whitewash, or transwash the eventual product.

dir: David Robert Mitchell

2026

It feels like… we don’t get much of a break from 1980s Spielbergian nostalgia these days. It feels like… we’re kinda trapped in that era mentally? Whatever the internal longing for that era represents, I’m here to tell/beg you folks: it wasn’t a great time to be alive. A senile president plotted endless dumb ways to solve diplomatic disputes with warfare by any other name, the Middle East was consumed by death and destruction; interest rates were sky high, unemployment was rising. Petrol prices were through the roof, inflation was a scourge, and because of the movie War Games we all wondered whether a supercomputer was going to kill us all.

As we can see, nothing like today. So why the constant siren’s call of that fucking era? In the 1980s I can remember that there was a lot of nostalgia for the 1960s, but I’ve never read or seen much of anything that says the people in the 1960s were nostalgic for the 1940s, so I don’t know if it always runs in 20 year cycles. Kids today seem more obsessed with the 1990s, but what do I know? A few weeks ago a ‘young’ person was describing the music played at a club as being “very mid 2010s cringe” and I had no fucking idea what they were talking about.

Director David Robert Mitchell at least is old enough to remember the 80s, so I guess it’s not all about needle drops and corny signifiers picked up from other 80s movies and tv shows. I was hoping someone would be drinking a Tab or eating a Sunny Boy or a Zooper Dooper, and maybe eating some Whizz Fizz out of a little green bag with one of those cocaine scoop plastic spoons, but different people have different memories of that vaunted era. But there has to be more to life than this.

It wasn’t all Dungeons & Dragons, Cabbage Patch Dolls and New Coke for most of us. There was the threat of nuclear war and radioactive disasters like Chernobyl as well to think about.

It’s just that whenever anyone imagines struggling heteronormative families in suburbia, living lives of noisy desperation, for some reason the 80s keeps coming to mind, as if that’s when families and existential ennui were invented. People were dissatisfied with their lives for millennia before the 1980s, it’s just that they mostly were too busy trying to not starve or die to have the luxury of self-reflective moments.

So of course the premise being a middle class family finding itself at the mercy of dinosaurs is a hooky one, but really, we’re meant to think, the true enemy is living an unfulfilled, suburban life.

The suburbs are where people go to grow families but also strangle their hopes and dreams, according to this and many other movies about suburbia. The mother of this family, Denise (Anne Hathaway), is sick of this family, sick of her husband, and sick of being stifled by her life on Oak Street. Who can blame her? Her husband is played by Ewan McGregor, I mean, what a curse that would be. Greg, her oblivious hubbie, has lost his job but hasn’t told the family, and delivers pizzas for some extra cash, and even though she doesn’t know this for most of the film she resents deeply that he lives and breathes, and dreams of running away.