Update: the dog days were very much not over.
Despite the box office finally cooling off, temperatures in and around Hollywood refused to drop in September. If only someone would make a movie about the climate crisis, and if only that movie weren’t Digger. Spooky season is a lot less spooky when it’s 90 degrees outside, not that it’ll stop me from watching as many horror movies as possible this month — or from once again looking back at the movies of yestermonth.
They don’t make ‘em like they used to, except when they do. Anyone who’s ever wished that Adam Wingard would direct more movies like The Guest and fewer like Godzilla vs. Kong has had that wish granted by Onslaught, another throwback to the scuzzy genre pictures of yore. The ostensible antagonists this time around are a trio of mindless super soldiers whose escape from a secret facility somewhere in the desert puts them on a collision course with Celeste (Adria Arjona), a single mother grappling with PTSD from her own time in the armed forces. The true villain, as in The Guest, is the military-industrial complex that birthed those admittedly generic killing machines. The inevitable showdown that follows takes place in the trailer park Celeste manages and plays out like a cross between Halloween and Assault on Precinct 13, including an atmospheric synth score, which is to say that Wingard admires the work of John Carpenter even more than most of us.
As great as Arjona is — and, as in Andor and Hit Man, she really is great — the standout performances come from the supporting cast. Dan “Cousin Matthew” Stevens of Downton Abbey fame continues his legendary run of playing weird little guys as the mad scientist responsible for the super soldiers, while Family Matters star Reginald VelJohnson is particularly memorable as Celeste’s neighbor. Indeed, your enjoyment of Onslaught may ultimately hinge on whether you have space in your heart for the former Carl Winslow wielding a shotgun and yelling “You picked the wrong trailer park, motherfucker!”
Is The Uprising about Robin Hood or isn’t it? For most of the time leading up to its release, the answer appeared to be a definitive “no, why would you even ask that?” After the movie was briefly rebranded with the subtitle The Rise of Robin Hood, however, observers were confused rather than intrigued. Even after seeing Paul Greengrass’ latest, some viewers might not know the answer to what should be a fairly simple question. It’s true that Andrew Garfield plays a nameless ploughman who foments a rebellion in 1381 England, an especially bleak chapter in British history during which the plague-ravaged populace was none too pleased with the taxes levied by young Richard II (Woody Norman), and eventually dons a literal hood; it’s also true that he could just as easily be an everyman meant to evoke the timeless folk hero.
The more pressing question is whether The Uprising is a good movie, which is easier to answer — in the negative. For one thing, the vérité, shaky-cam approach director Paul Greengrass cultivated in the Bourne franchise and United 93 is far less suited to 14th-century England. Muddled dialogue and strange pacing render it nearly impossible to fully understand, much less care about, what’s happening in any number of important scenes; were it not for the credits, I couldn’t have told you a single character’s full name. Even more problematic is how long it takes to establish that the eponymous rebellion is actually a righteous cause. Paying taxes is a bummer, sure, but burning churches and storming the capital initially seems like a, shall we say, questionable way to portray what’s meant to be a justified uprising.
“If it’s a good movie,” according to Alfred Hitchcock, “the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.” The makers of Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom would surely agree. Like its predecessors, the latest stop-motion spinoff from Wallace & Gromit creators Aardman Animations is a dialogue-free romp whose sight gags and unspoken cleverness transcend the need for talking heads. (It’s also, alongside The Sheep Detectives, the second great ovine movie of the year — are ewe sensing a trend?) Taking place just before Halloween, it follows the follicular mishaps of the Farmer, the main human in the franchise, as he attempts to cure his baldness and muster the nerve to ask the local veterinarian to the annual Halloween Hoedown. What he thinks is topical hair-loss treatment, alas, is actually the result of Shaun’s ill-advised experiment to regrow his pumpkin patch.
The result is a veritable explosion of hair that turns the Farmer into a rampaging Bigfoot that has everyone in the quaint village running for their pitchforks. Co-directors Steve Cox and Matthew Walker pack the ensuing shenanigans with allusions to Frankenstein, Psycho (with dental floss standing in for the string section of Bernard Hermann’s legendary score), and other classics that parents will laugh at now and kiddos will appreciate when they’re older. Despite offering a little something for everyone, however, The Beast of Mossy Bottom avoids the common trap of not being for anyone. Bleat your heart out, Pixar.
Are video game adaptations good now? Following The Last of Us and Fallout on the small screen, Exit 8 and now Resident Evil on the big screen suggest that yes, they somehow finally are. Part of what makes Weapons director Zach Cregger’s take on the beloved, long-running zombie franchise so enjoyable is that it doesn’t just capture the vibe of its source material — it captures the haphazard feeling of picking up a controller and actually playing it for the first time. Ammo is scarce, the undead abound, and survival is exceedingly unlikely. That’s especially true of Bryan (Austin Abrams), an underpowered everyman utterly outmatched by the situation he finds himself in: transporting an organ to Raccoon City, a courier job that requires him to drive up a snowy mountain road sans snow chains toward even greater peril.
Bryan is hilarious in his haplessness, surviving each new encounter by the skin of his teeth and reacting with the same mix of disbelief and horror that you or I might. (Far be it from me to speak ill of the queen Milla Jovovich, who was frequently the sole bright spot in the earlier Resident Evil movies, but this kind of protagonist suits the material far better than her ass-kicking Alice.) It’s essentially a solo performance, with Bryan adding much-needed levity by thinking aloud as he fails to turn off the safety of whatever weapon he’s picked up and rummages through drawers for ammo. Cregger, as in Weapons, improves on most of his predecessors in this disreputable genre by knowing what to play for laughs and what to take seriously. Resident Evil might just be the best video game movie ever made, a title that recent trends suggest it won’t hold for long.
What is a chronovisor, and how might using one improve your life? Béatrice (Anne-Laure Sellier) is glad you asked and would be happy to tell you all about the occult device, which she learns about while researching her latest book. According to the headline she comes across in an old French magazine, “A Machine Has Been Invented That Photographs the Past” and its inventor, one Father Pellegrino Ernetti, vanished not long after using it to observe Jesus’ crucifixion. If that premise sounds identical to that of Devs, the Alex Garland miniseries starring Sonoya Mizuno and Nick Offerman from a few years ago, that’s because both projects were based on the same mythical apparatus said to be able to reproduce images from the past on a television screen.
Jack Auen and Kevin Walker’s heady, lo-fo thriller is a movie with dialogue like “the Jacobian understanding of the physical structure of the mind is of limited interest to my monograph” and and any number of minutes-long closeups of the books its heroine reads as she descends this ecclesiastical rabbit hole, often with subtitles superimposed over the original French and Italian. This probably makes it sound less than compelling to anyone whose idea of a good time doesn’t involve zooming in on microfiche at a research library. And yet it’s oddly thrilling in the same way The Da Vinci Code was meant to be, only infinitely less dumb and without the most questionable haircut of Tom Hanks’ career. The chronovisor may not exist, but at least movies like Chronovisor do.
