Alaska, Scrambled

One night in Maybrook, a Pennsylvanian town by way of the Atlanta suburbs, a group of seventeen third-graders run off into the night, never to be seen again. Cue George Harrison. Thus begins, Weapons, the sophomore film by horror auteur and Whitest Kids U' Know alum Zach Cregger. Much has already been written on the unthinkable event at the heart of this story and specifically how much it can act as an allegory for school shootings, disasters, or just grief itself as a destructive force. For Cregger, the screenplay acted as a salve in the fallout of fellow WKUK member Trevor Moore's tragic accidental death. The first several pages flowed out of his inability to resolve this sudden loss, and from there he created a mystery for himself to solve. Where did all but one member of Justine Gandy's class run to at 2:17 in the morning? Why her? Why did that one student stay behind?

Something Weapons can truly boast is its ensemble cast, most of which had already evolved in the long gap between writing and production. To offer each of his key players a chance in the spotlight, Cregger's screenplay casts each of them off into their own storyline of near equal importance, which he has compared in interviews to Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia. Unlike in that film, however, Weapons specifically separates these intersecting plots into segments named for each protagonist, beginning with Justine and culminating with her remaining student, Alex. Along the way, the various perspectives offer an increasing amount of clarity into the central mystery. In that light, a more apt comparison would be to the films of Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds, Jackie Brown) or Steven Soderbergh (Traffic, Contagion).

Since the disappearance of almost every child in her class, the already mercurial Justine (Julia Garner, who I have consistently adored ever since seeing her in Kitty Green's The Assistant) has completely spiraled into alcoholism and manic depression. She remains obsessed with the case as the community of Maybrook scapegoats her in the absence of any concrete explanations, following Alex after school and staking out his house until nightfall. For comfort, she leans on the shoulder of her ex-boyfriend, police officer Paul (Alden Ehrenreich proving yet again to be the best leading man that Hollywood never let happen), a recovering alcoholic who immediately falls off the wagon when she invites him to a bar. The characters of Weapons are often sympathetic, but they're also incredibly flawed: Justine takes advantage of the married Paul's still harbored feelings for her, but the latter is quick to justify it with a lie about his marriage's stability.

The town's hostility towards the mousy teacher is embodied clearest with contractor Archer (Josh Brolin with surprisingly good comic timing throughout), a patriarch in inconclusive mourning after his son Matthew becomes one of Ms. Gandy's missing students. Frustrated by what he regards as shoddy detective work by Maybrook's finest, Archer begins an independent investigation involving Ring doorbell cameras and the geography of the town, narrowing down the children's location to a small neighborhood. Before he can act on this information, however, he encounters Justine at a gas station. He gives her a piece of his mind before reluctantly coming to her rescue after her boss, Marcus (a subtle and dependable Benedict Wong), suddenly starts to chase and attack her in a crazed, bloody state.

Though we have these new developments to grapple with, Cregger opts to refocus on Paul. These digressions right at the point of a breakthrough can be where Weapons may lose some, and the pacing is admittedly somewhat unbalanced at times, but the payoff truly makes most of it worthwhile. Now that he stands in the spotlight, Alden Ehrenreich's performance becomes totally unhinged, eschewing the rose-tinted glasses that Justine's perspective offers his character. He is quick to inflict brutality on James (Austin Abrams in maybe the best performance of the whole film), a young homeless crack addict who Paul keeps running into during emotionally tumultuous moments. This segment is where the Magnolia comparisons make the most sense, with the John C. Reilly character in that film being a similarly incompetent cop with a chip on his shoulder and a hilariously stereotypical mustache.

It quickly becomes clear that Paul has existed in a chaotic state for some time before we are ever introduced to him. As much as alcohol remains the Sword of Damocles hanging over his conscience, he constantly worries about the possibility of contracting STDs, specifically citing AIDS. Any threat to his circumstances would be enough to send him over the edge, and this causes a hidden mean streak to come forth in both encounters between Paul and James. I do not believe Cregger is necessarily trying to comment on police incompetency and brutality, but it certainly reflects on the degradation of authority in the American society as seen through the microcosm of Maybrook.

James, on the other hand, is even more of an outcast than even Justine as the suspected witch, living in the woods and always struggling to scrape together enough capital to fuel his addiction. After his initial encounter with Paul, in which the latter threatens him into silence after being knocked unconscious, James breaks into a suburban house to both seek shelter from a storm and find pawnable valuables. Here, in what is revealed to be Alex's house, he discovers all seventeen of the missing third-graders and runs to collect the reward money. When Paul sees him approach the police station, however, he sees red and gives chase, only backing off from executing a member of the most oppressed class in America when James reveals what he now knows.

We swap one sudden burst of violence for another, reorienting the perspective to that of Marcus, the queer principal of Maybrook Elementary. In the fallout of the mass disappearance, Justine has earned his chagrin repeatedly through her harassment and accusations towards Alex, eventually pushing him to invite the lone survivor's parents to the school. In lieu of them arrives Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan in the sole Oscar nomination for the film), an inscrutable woman caked in makeup who claims to be the caretaker for Alex while his parents are indisposed by "a touch of consumption."

After a puzzling first meeting between Marcus and Gladys, she unexpectedly shows up at his house after considering the threat of Child Protective Services being called. Using a bowl of water, a tree branch, and a ribbon she had previously stolen from Marcus's office, Gladys reveals her true intentions and casts a witchy curse on the unassuming principal. Under her control, Marcus is forced to violently murder his husband and go after the all too perceptive Justine, finally closing a loop opened by Cregger nearly an hour prior. After putting a stop to Marcus's mad spree of violence, Archer finally teams up with Justine, the two coming to a realization that the children, much like the principal, had been turned into mindless weapons locked onto a target: Alex's house.

The final segment of Weapons rewinds much further than any other portion of the film, beginning with Aunt Gladys's arrival days or even weeks before the disappearances. Madigan plays the unknowable force brilliantly, bouncing between the pathetic and the sinister in the same scene at times. Cregger offered her two origins: one in which Gladys is a mortal woman using witchcraft to stave off a disease and one in which Gladys is an immortal being pretending to be human. In the latter interpretation, if one is more literal-minded with the themes, then Gladys can represent the cycle of violence and trauma itself. If the events of Columbine or Stoneman Douglas are any indication, in every community is an Aunt Gladys and those who would deny such a phenomenon's existence. So it goes.

To maintain her more recognizably human appearance, Gladys demands of Alex his classmates' bodies as vessels. Under the threat of his parents murdering each other in a passionless trance, he complies, gathering the personal effects of the seventeen missing children soon to tear this community apart. If he does this, Gladys claims, she will let his parents go and eventually leave Maybrook altogether. Instead, when Justine and Archer lay siege to the house at the center of Weapons' mystery and free those weaponized by Gladys, their minds do not return. As the child narrator notes in the epilogue, Alex's parents would have to be taken care of like any comatose patient. This is where the messaging of Cregger's screenplay becomes most haunting no matter the interpretation: whether in grief or in the fallout of an unimaginable tragedy, you may never come back.

I cannot claim that Weapons is a perfect film, but in the scope of modern horror, a genre and scene that I have several major gripes with, there is so much more here to unpack than the average attempt at "elevation" that often just reads as embarrassment to write for the genre. After Barbarian left me with somewhat mixed reactions between its ambitious structure giving the feeling of underdevelopment alongside some strong performances and character details, it is so satisfying to watch Cregger firmly strike it out of the park on his second at-bat.

"Oh fuck, Willow."

-Austin Abrams in Weapons

With her debut feature film, Kristen Stewart has pretty seamlessly transitioned from one profession to the next with the sort of aplomb you may expect from the Twilight actress if you'd been actually paying attention. Since she'd first achieved prominence with an early child performance in David Fincher's criminally underrated home invasion thriller Panic Room, Stewart's career has been particularly exciting to watch from afar, amassing from a young age a list of film credits of which any of her contemporaries would be jealous. Even as she starred in critically panned blockbusters or failed January horror shlock (Underwater), there was a unique energy to a Kristen Stewart performance that you could find nowhere else.

When it was first announced to be released in competition for the Un Certain Regard category at Cannes last year, there was an excitement towards what her directorial voice would be, only heightened when early reviews proved so glowing. On an initial viewing, it's fairly easy to see why. On paper, The Chronology of Water, based on Lidia Yuknavitch's memoirs, could end up a hackneyed biopic if in a lesser director's hands, but Stewart provides a psychological and often postmodern edge to the style and the perspective of her debut. This is most readily apparent in the editing; Yuknavitch, as played phenomenally by Imogen Poots, will sometimes drift off into thought, and the edit will cut forwards and backwards in her memories for just a few frames at a time, all the while chopping up the droning Paris Hurley score.

Occasionally, the editing can prove to be a slight hindrance, mostly with regards to the 128 minute runtime. Some sequences can grow repetitive, notably in the first act focusing on Yuknavitch's childhood, and the length overall could easily be shaved by 10 to 15 minutes for stronger pacing and impact. After the first 45 minutes, however, Stewart latches onto a superb rhythm, especially once Yuknavitch drops out of college and moves from Texas to Oregon. Here, she joins a writing class led by the counterculture icon Ken Kesey (Jim Belushi in a supporting performance that any first-time director would feel so lucky to secure), and, through artistic expression, she begins to come to terms with the childhood abuse suffered at the hands of her father (Michael Epp fresh off The Brutalist and in a completely different, truly terrifying register here).

I cannot say I loved The Chronology of Water, especially when the narrative can sometimes feel so lopsided and scatterbrained, but there are plenty of highlights throughout, such as with the older sister character played beautifully by Thora Birch in her first notable starring role in over two decades. Poots and Birch are able to communicate so much with so little dialogue, reminding me of just how dirty Hollywood has done the latter post-Ghost World. If this performance is enough to kickstart her career's second act, then that alone would make The Chronology of Water worth it. Even more than that though, Kristen Stewart has proven with the film that she has an artist's vision to be reckoned with, and I for one cannot wait for what comes next.

"Come in. The water will hold you."

To be honest, I have never sunk into a Flanagan before, whether that be his Netflix shows or his films. That is until The Life of Chuck, an adaptation of the 2020 Stephen King short story of the same name, which I have not read that either. Because of this, it can be hard to differentiate what parts of the tone and the writing are King's fault and what parts are Flanagan's. Regardless, I can appreciate the earnestness with which the film carries its exploration of existentialism and grief, but the tone definitely turns me off.

Told in reverse order, this somewhat elongated drama begins with its third act, "Thanks, Chuck", a somewhat intriguing tale of the universe's last days that is often let down by a heavy dose of expository dialogue and overbearing sappy soundtracking. Karen Gillan and especially Chiwetel Ejiofor are quite good in their roles, processing the oncoming death of everything with subtle details that give the lacking script more dimensionality, but the MVP here is Matthew Lillard as Ejiofor's temperamental neighbor. The second act, "Buskers Forever", is by far the best part of the film, but it's also by far the shortest. Chuck Krantz, played excellently by an underused Tom Hiddleston (why are all the leads Brits playing Americans though?), is inspired by a drummer on a street corner and starts spontaneously dancing in an extended sequence that truly pulls you into the spirit Flanagan wishes to channel.

This energy is sorely lacking in the first act, "I Contain Multitudes", where the themes of existentialism and fear of death are forced into the forefront to such a degree that it's almost condescending. Like in the third act, the supporting performances are strongest here (including Mia Sara in a rather hauntingly small appearance), but the central child performance leaves a lot to be desired, and the tone is so all over the place between the bleak family history and the more light-hearted school sequences that I struggle to get a handle on the point at times. The most egregious aspect of the whole film, constantly intruding on my enjoyment, is the narration by Nick Offerman. If audiences found it egregious in Train Dreams, where Will Patton has a soothing enough voice to sell it for me, I can only imagine how jarring it must be in the theater when, 20 minutes in, Ron Swanson starts needlessly explaining what a better movie could convey in a look or a gesture.

There are strong moments and angles of The Life of Chuck that make me not want to completely write this off as a failure, but it sure cannot help but be as uneven as possible. This is the type of film where one's mileage will vary heavily depending on personal taste, and I'm not completely turned off by it even when it arrives at an ending that clearly thinks it's deeper than it actually is in practice. I would say it's worth giving a try as a curiosity, but I could not bring myself to completely recommend it.

"Everything goes down the drain, and all we can say is 'that sucks'."

-Annalise Basso in The Life of Chuck

After falling in love with the prison drama Sing Sing, I was excited to see what writer-director team Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar were up to next. On first watch, I connected heavily to Train Dreams, their follow-up, finding solace in its ruminations on isolation, the cycle of life and death, and the normalized brutality of Manifest Destiny. When I gave it a rewatch earlier, I noticed more of the cracks others have identified in its storytelling and its presentation.

First, on a simpler level: the 60fps camerawork gets on my nerves heavily and I struggle to understand what they gain from this choice. It actively distracts from the stunning cinematography by Adolpho Veloso (who recently filmed M. Night Shyamalan's Remain, a film I am highly anticipating). At times, I can agree with the general consensus on the narration being unnecessary or manipulative on occasion, but I also cannot deny that it works on me for the most part. Will Patton is such an excellent orator that his voice alone can invest me in a story.

Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones as the young married couple Robet and Gladys have lovely chemistry, but both performances do leave me a tad cold at times. I was a big fan of Jones' work last year in The Brutalist and Edgerton's recent supporting performance in Cannes favorite The Plague, but here neither rises above good. However, neither ever are mediocre. More impressive are a lot of the supporting players: Clifton Collins Jr.'s brief turn as a dying man who traumatizes a young Robert; Paul Schneider in one of the most memorable scenes as a motormouth who is revealed to be an outlaw on the run; and most powerfully William H. Macy as the explosives specialist of Robert's forestry team. Every moment with any of these wonderful character actors is where the film works best.

I find the second half, when the narrative becomes even more introverted and focuses solely on Robert's grief after the loss of his family and his home, is less engaging and often too repetitive for its own good. Many have compared the style of the film to Malick (which I mostly disagree with on account of Malick's narration always being whispered stream-of-consciousness), and the most Malickian sections are in this section. When Bentley and Kwedar focus on the deep-dive into the settling of the Pacific Northwest and the construction of the railroads, it's truly riveting. Unfortunately, this is less of the film than you might think on first watch.

The film has a Slaughterhouse Five-esque unstuck structure to it, with the narrative often skipping forwards and backwards into different points in Robert's life. I find the final sequence, in which Robert somewhere in his 50s or 60s rides a propeller plane, to be easily the most successful part of the second half. Some online have accused this finale of being like a "credit card commercial" between the music and the narration, but I think it's quite a magical moment that brings me solace after the last hour had been so brutally depressing.

Does it completely earn the Best Picture nomination? No, not particularly, and it would never make my ballot for Best Cinematography in a year like 2025 where that category is so stacked (see also: 狂野时代 (Resurrection), 28 Years Later, Caught by the Tides, Universal Language, and Marty Supreme). Regardless, this is undeniably quite a lovely, powerful movie in moments that matter, and if you're like me and you enjoy a film that gives character actors plenty of time to shine, you would absolutely get a lot out of Train Dreams.

"On that spring day, as he misplaced all sense of up and down, he felt, at last, connected to it all."

-Will Patton in Train Dreams

In 2020, my pick for best film of the year was Bacurau co-directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho. In that twist on the weird western genre, the Brazilian writer-director incorporated shades of John Carpenter and Brian de Palma for the mise en scène and the action-heavy storytelling. With this, however, was a conscious refocusing throughout from the colonizers' gleeful hyperviolence and bloodshed to the beating heart of a community. The titular Bacurau can stand in for any of the rural villages and towns in northern Brazil, preyed on by the bloodthirsty thickheadedness of the richer south, united in a neo-fascism familiar to anyone in the United States. As much as Mendonça shines a spotlight on the late Udo Kier (playing a role best described as Peter Thiel by way of The Most Dangerous Game) in one of his final roles, he shines a bigger light on amateur non-actors and relative unknowns in the Brazilian film industry.

With O Agente Secreto, Mendonça maintains that passion for the particulars of Brazilian life, even if the scope of his films are able to widen with a budget increase and newfound support from a more liberal administration. Instead of directly poking at the bear through paper-thin stand-ins as in Bacurau, he adopts the setting of his own birthplace, the coastal city of Recife during the 1977 Carnival holiday. Wagner Moura, most well-known for his roles on Netflix's Narcos and the DreamWorks sequel Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, is cast in a phenomenally well-sculpted role as the political refugee Armando Solimões, in hiding alongside far-left radicals and societal outcasts sheltered by the enigmatic Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria with remarkable presence for so little screentime). Armando takes the alias Marcelo Alves and starts to work in Recife's identity card office, all the while searching for the only card that proves his mother, who he never knew, ever existed.

Mendonça and Moura are a truly dynamic pairing, working together to keep Armando's character in the shadows for much of the first act. He goes about his business fairly quietly, befriending members of the apartment block and visiting his son Fernando, who has been under the care of Armando's film projectionist father-in-law. O Agente Secreto acts as a perfect companion piece to Mendonça's 2023 documentary film Retratos Fantasmas (Pictures of Ghosts), a quasi-autobiography forming the memories of his childhood through the lost movie palaces of Recife. Much of the exposition on Armando's backstory arrives within Sr. Alexandre's movie palace when Elza, a radical offering to help "Marcelo" escape Brazil under the military junta, begins recording a testimony. This cassette tape is Armando's own identity card, the only proof decades on that he ever existed.

We begin to flash forward interstitially to two young college students researching Elza's network, and one of the girls, Flavia, grows obsessed with piecing together the life of Armando, buried underneath the chaos of the 20th century. As Flavia and the audience both listen in on this conversation, Mendonça pulls back the curtain in a devastating magic trick. Armando is no secret agent; instead he is simply an engineering professor who upset a powerful electrical executive. Much like many victims of the carnage throughout the Fifth Brazilian Republic, the almost anarchic chaos invited by the junta was taken advantage of by fascist sympathizers and anti-intellectuals. Eletrobras director Henrique Ghirotti, unwilling to settle for simply destroying Armando's career, puts out a hit on him through São Paulo backchannels.

The press begins to report on a disembodied hairy leg coming alive and attacking gay men cruising in a Recife park. This real-life Pernambucano urban legend was included by Mendonça as an homage to a local journalist who used the "hairy leg" as a euphemism for police corruption and misconduct. The Civil Police chief Euclides meets "Marcelo" and immediately takes a liking to the mysterious figure, inviting him to harass a Holocaust survivor assumed to be a Nazi due to his German heritage (Udo Kier in a powerful final role) and offering him protection. When the comically elaborate line of hitmen-hiring-hitmen finally reaches Armando's doorstep, he convinces Euclides' men under false pretense to help defend him.

In the end, however, the policemen are unceremoniously murdered by the working class gunman Vilmar, who Flavia learns eventually made his way to Armando. Although we never see his death, the impact could not be greater, leaving a haunting crater in the landscape of O Agente Secreto's epilogue. Flavia makes her way up to Recife to meet Fernando, now played by a more well-groomed Wagner Moura. On both viewings, this is the moment in the near three hour runtime where I think Moura earns all the acclaim of the last several months. In a year with many actors playing multiple characters (Jackson Yee in 狂野时代 (Resurrection), Mia Goth in Frankenstein) or even twins (Michael B. Jordan in Sinners, Dylan O'Brien in Twinless), Moura most succeeds in tangibly emphasizing the differences between his respective characters as people.

Fernando, who works as a doctor at a hospital, is unable to recall what his mother or father looked like, even inventing a memory of waiting for his father the day Armando was assassinated. Instead, the memory of his childhood that most resonates with him is when his grandfather took him to see Jaws, an episode surely inspired by Mendonça's own childhood. He bids Flavia farewell but does accept a flash drive containing Elza's tape, the only surviving audio of his father's voice. Finally, in an ending that truly shakes me to my core, he reveals that the movie palace where one of his most cherished memories took place was eventually torn down and turned into his hospital. So it goes.

A film like O Agente Secreto is truly rare, borrowing from 70s Pakula conspiracy thrillers as much as the sociological underpinnings of Varda or the gleeful splatter-driven thrills of Carpenter. Between the vividly humid visuals brought by cinematographer Evgenia Alexandrova and the beautifully interwoven score by the brothers Alves, it can be so easy to get lost in the world Mendonça and his collaborators capture. Most likely, I will continue to watch it again and again as I continue to keep a close eye on one of the most exciting filmmakers of the 21st century.

"Just sad, y'know? But life goes on, and I wanna say you guys have made me happy, just keep that in mind. This shit will pass, y'hear?"

-Tânia Maria in O Agente Secreto