[EXPRESSO] The Strays (2023) | Get Orf

Despite the brief description, this Netflix exclusive it’s not the home invasion horror thriller you’d think it would be…. kinda, since it’s clearly borne of the rise of “social horror”, it’s hard to not cite the obvious one here, since The Strays it’s clearly trying to walk in the path of Get Out.

And not really working for reasons i’m gonna explain after outlining the plot.

The Strays follows a light skinned woman called Neve, which leads a successful life as a vice-president of a private school (and a very white one) in a tiny but wealthy english suburb, and is overall well regarded by her peers, while she basically 100 % absorbed and perpetuates the mannerism of the white, rich and pastoral kind, having fundraisers for “less fortunate people”, not denying that they’re black but discouraging every aspect it might entails.

She is so immersed in this performative way of living that just the sight of two new black people in the ‘burbs is enough to shock and appall Neve, believing they “have it in” for her, or whatever.

The film tries to tackle themes of racism, class privilege, internalized self-repression, the set-up it’s good and promising, but then in the second act it kinda peters out as we go in flashback mode (plus the self-serving and unnecessary chapterization of events), and despite the final sequence being intense…. it just ends in a ironic fittingly way, as, despite all the things the movie wants to address, by the end it just quits in giving actual answers, undermining its very intention for commentary.

Frustrating, as there is something here that makes it worth a punt, the performances are solids, some scene quite intense, but the characters are lacking and the execution it’s disappointly non-committal despite intentions of doing so.

Pity.

[EXPRESSO] Marcel The Shell With Shoes On (2021) | Solid As They Come

Did not 100 % expect to see this one arrive in theathers here since it’s technically a 2021 release, but it has just now, and i just HAD to see it.

Based on a series of shorts of the same name by the same director, Dean Fleischer-Camp, this mix of stop-motion animation and live-action tells of a recently divorced documentary filmmaker, Dean, whom, while staying at an AirBnB, discover the titular Marcel, a one-inch high, talking, antrophomorphic seashell with one eye and “feet gloves”, living there with his granma Connie.

Fascinated, Dean starts filming the seashell’s daily routines, and when he blows up on the internet, Marcel hopes his newfound success can help him and Connie in finding the rest of his seashell community that used to live there, but was swept away after some kind of incident in the past.

Aside from the hilarity of having the Chiodo Bros (of Killers Klowns From Outer Space fame) deliver the top notch stop-motion animation for this utterly wholesome subject, it’s worth noting that – as other critics have pointed out – this movie does remind one of the japanese style of slice of life anime entertaiment, as it understands the appeal and finds the “magic” in everyday activity and routines, with the oddity here being these decorated seashells that are just alive, can talk, etc.

The plot it’s simple as expected, it does conclude properly and serves the needed purpose of tying together the various vignettes/situations the movie is composed of, but it’s not the strong suit, nor was it ever intended to be, that would be the amazing characterization, with Marcel being not just wide-eyed and charming, but also fairly relatable, quite chatty and surprisingly funny too.

Quite good one, that also cleverly keeps the runtime short for the better.

[EXPRESSO] Knock At The Cabin (2023) | Bautista Of The Apocalypse

Shyamalan is back to it after the aging beach shenanigans of Old, to tell the tale of a couple and their adopted daughter that, while going on holiday in a remote cabin in the woods, are visited by four mysterious, cultish individuals that invade their home, and then tell them they have been chosen and that the fate of humanity depends on them choosing a member of their own family to sacrifice in order to avoid the Apocalypse….

Quite the out-there premise, it’s a Shyamalan film alright, one that’s actually kinda difficult to discuss in any proper detail to avoid giving away hints of any kind about the “twist” could be, so i won’t be doing that (hence no talk about the ending, as you could assume by what i just wrote), but i will say that it’s quite intense and you never properly get to rule out definitely that these strange “home invaders” are saying, as you find yourself secondguessing what seemed like definitive proof, despite their odd behaviour and explained motives seeming truthful, so you end symphatizing with the antagonists as well with the couple and their child.

It starts out strong too, and it manages to keep the suspense all the way through, thanks to the excellent performances by the peculiarly assumbled cast of stars and the characters that make the movie stay consistent, the narrative gripping and help in make you overlook how heavy handedly are some themes approached (and some of the flashbacks feeling a bit like filler), making it all quite effective and honestly some of the best work M. Night Shyamalan has put out in recent years.

It’s perfect? No, but honestly it’s quite good and if you’ve ever liked one of the director’s movies, you’d be missing out by skipping this one.

[EXPRESSO] The Fabelmans (2022) | Cut n Spliced

Spielberg is back after last year’s excellent remake of West Side Story with The Fablemans, a romanticized semi-biographic retelling of his upbringing, especially the Arizona period of his childhood, following Sammy Fabelman, a boy that grew in a post-WWII jewish family and developed a deep love for cinema thanks to his mother.

He then further seeks refuge in cinema and making it after learning a shocking family secret, finding in the seventh art a way to process the uncomfortable truth he stumbled upon, alongside the many challenges he faces growing up, also due to his specific religious upbringing.

To state the obvious and to corroborate what Spielberg already explained in a very small pre-movie introduction, it is and indeed feels like the director’s most personal film yet about family and cinema, this kind of insight could have been autogenerated more than written.

What’s more important is that you easily kinda forget this is a semi-fictional story about Spielberg’s own childhoood and how his love for cinema blossomed, because you quickly become invested in the troubles of the Fablemans as a whole, the characters are that good indeed, the cast (which also includes David Lynch in a fantastic small role) it’s amazing, the themes are dealt with maturity, realism, the drama and comedy perfectly balance out each other, etc

I could use some more trite expressions, but i prefer to just go straight to the point with this one: it’s really, really good, exactly what you’d expect (in the positive sense) from the celebrated director, just Spielberg knockin it out of the park again, proving – if proof was needed to begin with – that he has more than “still got it” and that 2021’s West Side Story wasn’t a fluke.

Just go see it, even in a law abiding fashion.

[EXPRESSO] Violent Night (2022) | Santa Hard

Tommy Wirkola is back after last year’s The Trip (available on Netflix) to the snow tinted realm of horror…. but not quite.

This time around he cooked up a christmas black comedy that has been described as “Die Hard but with Santa Claus instead of John McClain”… because it’s pretty much that, set in a rich family’s villa where a group of terrorists (with the leader played by John Leguizamo) lies in wait to get their hands on a big chunk of million money.

It just happens that by accident the real, factual Santa Claus finds himself in that very house when shit goes down, and decides to fight them to save the family, especially as the younger child earnestly believes in him, by way of some magic, a warhammer and a lot of gruesome violence.

Yeah, it isn’t strictly a horror movie, it’s definitely heavy on action and comedy as you would expect from this deliberate pastiche of Die Hard and christmas movie, but again, it’s a Tommy Wirkola film, so it doesn’t really matter that this isn’t a new installment of Dead Snow or a christmas slasher, because we also get to see Santa pile up a more than respectable bodycount, using everything from ornaments to shovel to woodchippers and even a warhammer (tied to his backstory/lore here)

Heck, for good measure there is a straight up Home Alone “trap scene” and even that provides a lot of gore effects played for laughs that will still make you go “OW”.

There’s also the “Bad Santa” angle to the main character, but not quite, since he IS real here, and otherwise the surprisingly decent emotional moments would lose any kind of weight.

Violent Night it’s a pastiche of familiar elements indeed, but it’s a bloody fun holiday romp, too.

[EXPRESSO] Disney’s Strange World (2022) | The Ventures

Apparently Disney’s latest animated film (no, it’s not a Pixar joint) is bombing in theathers, and i do wonder why exactly, especially in its home market where people celebrate “turkey day”.

Probably the choice to market it a little too late to generate some online buzz, and as much it’s funny to point out how many “first gay character in a Disney movie that can be easily edited out for China” Disney seems to possess and parade about… in this case the discussion distracts from the fact this one it’s pretty good.

Strange World is a surprisingly good throwback to adventure films of yore, pulp adventure comics, and of course the old literary classics involving discovering new worlds with bizarre or extinct animals and fauna, especially Verne’s Journey At The Center Of The Earth.

The movie starts with a Davy Crockett-esque tale of Jaeger Clade bouts of ventures alongside his son Searcher, then we see Jaeger continue alone his voyage to find out what lies behind the enormous mountains that surround their village, while his son decides to remain to study a rare plant they found while exploring.

25 years later Searcher has basically created a new utopia as his botanical discovery led to them farming the plant (named Pando) and using it as an energy source/fuel that powers everything.

He lives with his wife and his son Ethan, but as the Pando plants begin to suffer from a sort of disease, he’s forced to journey into the inner depth to find out why, but it accidentally leds to them discovering an entire new world full of bizzare creatures, alien flora and living “isles”.

Likeable characters, fun interactions, lots of adventure and action in a world that does amaze and inspire in its oddities, and solid themes of enviromental coexistence.

[EXPRESSO] Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) | Multiversal Maelstrom

Been looking forward to this one all year, so despite not being “news” for most of the english speaking internet, it literally got in theathers here 4 days ago, i AM gonna see it and review it.

And while at first i wasn’t blown away in the way i expected, i was still incredibly surprised and intrigued from beginning to end by what it’s indeed quite the something else.

The premise sees Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang, a busy woman of chinese descent that runs a snall coin laundrymat, as she laments the woes of her aspirations being all unfullfiled by the burden of her job and her family, as she has to take care of her senile father, has troubles with her teen daughter, and feels unfullfilled in her marriage to a “weak man”.

All made worse as she has to undergo a fiscal interview by a very nosy ispector, but on her way there she notices a fracture in the multiverse, and she’s enlisted to save the fate of all universes by defeating an avatar of chaos.

It’s a novel enough spin on the multiverse concept that now audiences are quite familiar with, definitely an interesting premise and a fun execution, though i didn’t laugh as much as i expected, almost disappointing since it’s a really inventive movie that indeed tries a lot of weird ass things, set ups, the visuals fully take advantage of the multiverse “gimmick” and the fights scenes especially are as well coreographed as ridiculous in nature.

It’s not just as funny as i feel it could/should be, but even so i wasn’t really disappointed, as it’s still quite fun, highly captivating, inventive, the emotional moments are quite good, the cast its stunning, the characters likeable, making overall for a damn good chaotic time.

[EXPRESSO] Hatching (2022) | My very own Birdperson

I said it before, many other fellow reviewers said it before, and indeed it’s a great year for horror films. This Finnish body horror thriller being no exception.

The trailer felt a little too honest and overly spoilerish, but it’s actually not, as it doesn’t revolve about a drawn out reveal of the creature, since it shows you fairly quick how it came to be and how it looks. It’s just the bait, so to speak.

The plot concerns a young girl that trains hard as a gymnast to make her monstruosly demanding mother happy, but one day feels bad for a bird that enter their house, made a mess, and was almost killed by her mother, as she later founds the bird isn’t dead yet, forcing her to tearfully finish it.

To placate her guilt she decides to take care of the egg the dying bird crawled back to, only to be surprised at the creature that eventually emerges and she seems to share a psychic bond with…

Aside from the creature being a stunning delight of horror with excellent effects, there’s plenty of outright disgusting moments, and a character that actually one ups the creature in the “monster” factor, the girl’s mother, what a gloriously despicable, narcissistic, commanding, guilt tripping abomination of a human being that you really want to see killed.

And the movie isn’t afraid to go to some heavy scenarios that reinforce the family (mostly the mother) as more than “typically disfunctional”, feeding into the manifest but effective and heavy themes explored, the fairly reinforced symbolic parallels, but the narrative actually develops in an interesting way, the characters are quite good and there’s plenty of that nordic horror stylical furnishings and love for pulling no punches.

Great feature-lenght debut for director Hanna Bergholm.

[EXPRESSO] Beast (2022) | Lion Puncher Idris Elba

I know what some of you thought when this one was announced.

“Isn’t this basically a remake of the movie “Prey” from 2007, but with Idris Elba?”

And indeed i thought the same, but luckily i forgot pretty much anything in detail about that movie, despite watching it in theathers when it came out, i only remember it being either quite shit or not good.

But yep, the premise it’s the pretty much identical, with a family going on a safari only to be forced into confronting a killer lion on a revenge mission against humans, after it survived an attack from some poachers. Don’t worry though, this potentially interesting facet it just mentioned and never explored, because it would cut into the cliched interactions between the family members.

Just some minor differences as it’s just the dad and the two daughters, since the wife died and this safari was meant as an experience to elaborate grief together, this type of mild tripe layered on top, but it’s kinda different as it’s a modern killer animal movie, so it not a full-on horror-thriller affair, it has horror elements but – curiously enough – it’s more about very old school adventure style scenes, despite the big antagonist being a lion acting pretty much like a slasher villain.

Keeping in mind it’s not really a horror (or horror-thriller) film, Beast it’s fairly entertaining, the acting is solid, good production values, and its hard to dislike a movie where Idris Elba punches a lion in the face multiple times, but the script is too cliched, generic and uninterested in actually explore any of the potential themes the premise provides, the characters don’t fare much better, so it ends up being a pleasing enough, fast moving experience but also quite a throwaway one.

[EXPRESSO] Broker (2022) | “Your Baby, Delivered To You, In A Box”

I was miraculously able to watch a preview screening for this one, which competed in this years’ Cannes Film Festival, and is a South-Korean drama directed and written by Hirokazu Kore-eda, better known for Like Father, Like Son, Shoplifters, Maborosi, also director of The Truth/La Veritè, a french film starring a very international cast and his first movie not set (or filmed) in Japan.

Given the director’s well known penchant for family dramas, it’s not surprising his new film it’s about the theme of family, but here touched upon in a more unique way, as it involves a woman who leaves her newborn in a baby box, only to be stolen by child traffickers with a proven scheme.

The mother of the child does come back, tracks down the two traffickers, but instead of ratting them out or worse, she decides to go along on a roadtrip with them so to interview potential new parents for the baby. But eventually this unusual crew is finally tailed by two police officers that are also investigating a murder…

If you’re expecting this to turn into a Hangover style roadtrip movie, you clearly haven’t been paying attention to the premise i just wrote, because rest assured that Zach Galiafinakis isn’t gonna show up and play a mentally challenged manchild, as Broker deals with the themes of child abandonment, criminality and family as seriously as you would expect from a movie that touches upon such serious and real situations.

Though, it manages to sport a surprising amount of levity and tender moments, quite needed in this delicate drama about murder, pregnancy, adoptions, etc, because Broker it’s good & depressing. Quite depressing, but not entirely hopeless.

My kind of movie… though Broker felt a bit longer than necessary, for me.

Still, a solid, good drama.