Brotherhood of Wolves

Predator: Badlands (2025) - Trachtenberg A wise man once said that there are no bad Predator movies (yet there are, but generally batting average is indeed better as far as movie franchises go). And Dan Trachtenberg (Prey) continues this premise with Predator: Badlands. For the first time, the franchise is from the alien trophy hunter's point of view with his hefty Shakespearean - or at least Black Panther-ean backstory with the Oedipal complex and brotherhood and betrayal and revenge and so on.

We open in Yautja Prime, the predators' home planet. With space ships and all their technology, the planet is pretty barren. There are no females to be seen and no hairdressers. It's all about hunting, killing, and bringing home trophy kind of culture. Very macho and very rigid, like the way of the samurai or something...but I digress.

Young Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) is deemed a weakling and as the tradition goes, needs to be culled, because only the strong survives. After his merciless father slain his older brother for protecting him, Dek escapes and crash lands on a hostile planet where Kalisk, an apex predator creature lives. With the help of the marooned upper half of Thia (Elle Fanning) - an android among all synthetic armies in a specimen collecting mission from a Wayland-Yutani ship (nicely continuing the franchise's narrative thread). Thia convinces Dek that she can help him to hunt down Kalisk for his triumphant return and possible revenge, and in return, he can help Thia reunite with the other identical but bad synth Tess (also played by Fanning) and retrieve her bottom half (which proves just as deadly as the upper part).

The imagined world building is top-notch with great action sequences. With a little critter Thia names Bud who becomes a pivotal piece of the puzzle later on, becoming the welcoming comic relief in the relentless violence and mayhem. Trachtenberg, who has shown his ability to enliven and breathe a new life into the same old, machismo driven franchise in Prey, does it again with Badlands. Action sequences are cool, effects are aces, and Fanning's smudged up, cracked porcelain doll face is perfect as a conflicted synth.

By the end of Badlands, both Dek and Thia learn a thing or two, about hunting in a pact like that earth creature called wolves that Thia mentions and friendship. Badlands is superb entertainment and definitely worth seeing in this February movie desert landscape. It starts streaming on Hulu 2/12.

Gaze

Sound of Falling (2025) - Schillinski The farmhouse in Northwest Germany is a setting for Sound of Falling, a film consisting of the point of views of 4 women through multiple generations. with a jumbled timeline, Mascha Schillinski explores the lives of young women and their surroundings. Layered, highly cinematic images have cumulative effects, as they are imbued with secret meanings and intimate knowledges.

There's Alma, a preteen girl in a large household in the turn of the century. Her encounter with death in the family and her obsession with it are established through her brief voiceover, as we go back to her from time to time. There's Angelika, a teen girl in the 80s, testing out her boundaries as she senses male gazes from her immediate and distant male family members. Then there's Lenka, a young girl in the present day, imitating an older, extroverted girl, Kaya, from the village.

Florian Gamper's full frame cinematography is at once ethereal and dreamlike, showing the women's fears and desires across time and space. Sound of Falling deals with dark subjects - death, suffering, incest, hierarchy and male gaze, but Schillinski and co-writer Luise Peter at the helm, the film deals with it with such nuance and vivid visual details, the film transcends the mere narrative storytelling about generational trauma.

Unpredictable

Keeper (2025) - Perkins As in his other films - Longlegs, Monkey, Grethel and Hansel, Osgood Perkins has a penchant for creating dread with eerie images, this cabin in the woods movie is no exception. From the get-go, even before the ill-fated couple Liz (Tatiana Maslany) and Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) arrive at the handsome, all-windows-n-angles modern log cabin, we see the glimpse of various women and their eventual fate in a series of striking portraits.

Once we are in the cabin, Liz feels an ominous presence in the dark corners and shadows. Maybe this trip upstate with someone she doesn't know well enough, for a city rat like Liz, wasn't a good idea. There's a cake in a box with smudged fingerprints sitting on the kitchen counter. It's from a caretaker Malcolm says, off-handedly. An unexpected, awkward visit from Malcolm's asshole brother with his Eastern European girlfriend, leaves Liz a little more rattled. After eating the whole chocolate cake in the middle of the night, creepy things start happening and Liz doesn't really know if they are dreams or real.

Malcolm is called off for his job as a doctor into the city, leaving Liz all alone. She is haunted by the vision of the women seen in the beginning of the film as well as feeling that she is not alone in the cabin.

The images Perkins and DP Jeremy Cox (Monkey) are truly unsettling. The creatures are extremely creepy and the competing saturated color palate is beautiful and dark and very effective for the location. Some transition shots are stunning, comparable to that of Park Chanwook even, the king of transition shots. Love his play with background and foreground perspectives also. Keeper develops into a delicious folk horror territory, but not a clearly defined plot. And like other Perkins films, narrative thread is not the selling point, but atmosphere is and unsettling images are. This film has a lot of that.

Maslany, who has one of the most interesting faces in cinema and serves as one of the executive producers of the film, is all game for a small cast and one location, atmospheric horror. Her natural delivery and demeanor, her quick wit is highlighted in basically a one woman show. I can see if it won't be everyone's cup of tea, but I loved it.

The Big Empty

Air Doll (2009) - Kore-eda Hirokazu Kore-eda's Air Doll appears to be tackling the modern society's illness - urban loneliness and soullessness, the themes explored by by other prominent Japanese auteurs of its time, namely, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Sion Sono and Shinji Aoyama, with Korean actress Bae Doona (Linda, Linda, Linda, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Host). The result is a mixed bag.

Adapted from a manga, about a blow-up sex doll, Air Doll is an odd choice for Kore-eda in his mid-career, because he had always been regarded as a Ozu's heir apparent with his gentle, life affirming, if not death obsessed films. It concerns a middle-aged man living alone with his sex doll (Bae), named after his ex-girlfriend Nozomi, as a companion. He talks to her and bathes her and has sex with her. While he is out working as a waiter at a restaurant, Nozomi comes to life and walks around the town. She even gets a job at a video rental store. People around her are unbothered by her demeanor or she has seam lines around her body. With her big eyes and blank expression, Bae approaches the role with pure wonder and innocence of a new born child.

Nozomi's accented Japanese narration serves well as an inanimate object which came to life and just gained a heart. Walking around and meeting people, observing and experiencing human conditions, she learns that there are others out there that compliment you and complete you to have a full life, that people need one another. She has an accident at the job and punctures her arm and deflates and her colleague Junichi (Arata) puts a plastic tape on her arm and blows air back into her navel. The romance begins. He says she and he are not unlike. He feels empty inside as well. He says many feel that way. She then experiences heartbreak, realizing that she is someone else's mere substitution.

She even tracks down her maker (Joe Odagiri). He philosophically explains that human life is both sad and beautiful. But when all is said and done, we are either burnable (humans) or unburnable (sex dolls, because of environmental restrictions) garbage. Yes, once it gets dark, it never lets up.

The film is closer to Spielberg's A.I- Dark yet saccharine. There are secondary stories of other characters we get only glimpses of, and don't quite resonate as it should. Air Doll is not quite the right fit for genteel filmmaker.

Use Your Illusion

The Last Movie (1971) - Hopper After the success of Easy Rider (1969), a movie which defined the counterculture/hippie generation, the Universal Pictures gave Dennis Hopper a carte blanche to make a new movie, fully expecting another hit with the youth audience. But what they got was jumbled, incomprehensible mess, a movie only a heavily drugged, highly egotistical Hollywood actor could dream of. The Last Movie has all the hallmarks of an ambitious and masculin epic possible-only-in-the-70s' feel to it - the exotic locations (shot in the high mountains of Peru), large sprawling cast including thousands of local extras, grand theme (film aping real life aping film) and recalls more successful, better articulated films of its day- Aguirre: the Wrath of God, El Topo, Heaven's Gate, The Days of the Locusts, etc.

The film 'loosely' tells the story of a Hollywood Stuntman Kansas (Hopper) doing stunt work on the set of a Hollywood western production, directed by Sam Fuller, up in the Andes. After the production ends and everyone goes back home, Kansas remains and shacks up with a local girl, Maria (Stella Garcia) and dreaming of having a good life - a house on the hills, with a swimming pool perhaps. His real motivations to stay is never clear.

In the meantime, there is a cult-like local group, unhealthily influenced by the presence of a Hollywood production, starts reenacting a movie production of their own, with cameras, lights and boom made out of sticks and firecrackers, and using real violence because they don't understand that the filmmaking process is fakery. The local priest (Thomas Milian) is not too pleased about it. It's a devil's doing, he says.

Kansas with his friend Neville (Don Gordon) try to suck up to Anderson, a rich, sleazy business owner and his bored lusty wife, for their expedition to find gold, and gets tangled up in sexual escapades, much to the distress of Maria.

As Kansas gets swepted up in the locals' 'movie production', he really gets hurt and is bedridden. But is it his drug filled imagination or is it real? With the non-linear narrative and no definite ending, it is up to the audience to decide.

Studded with appearance by Hopper's friends - Peter Fonda, Fuller, Kris Kristopherson, Toni Basil and the like, and heady with the metaphors for filmmaking, the US cultural colonialism and jump cuts and "scene missing" title cards, The Last Movie is full of grand ideas and stunning scenery (shot by László Kovács) but doesn't come together coherently. Panned by the critics, and its failure at the box office pushed out Hopper to an exile from Hollywood for a dacade after this film.