“Tales of the Apocalypse”
Rent it or buy it on most major platforms.
Anthology films are, for the most part, wildly uneven, so it’s worth noting how consistently good these five shorts are, despite being vastly different from each other. (All of them have been available to stream for free on YouTube, but this new collection brings them all together under one convenient roof.)” fits that description perfectly. Wordless and depressingly evocative, the film follows a woman (Lila Guimarães) trying to survive in a cursed city. Mucci uses a monochromatic palette to create nightmarish tableaux, with haunting detail here and there (I won’t soon forget that ferret). His movie makes you want so much more, and when do viewers feel that way?
More and more women are trying to make it on their own, albeit in space, in William Hellmuth’s ‘Alone’ and Damon Duncan’s ‘Cradle’ – both shorts have satisfying surprises that ‘Twilight’ fans Zone” will enjoy, and Steph Barkley gives a surprisingly good performance as a pilot stranded on the edge of a black hole in “Cradle.”
The dangers of mad emotions underlie both Susie Jones’ “New Mars” (a settlement on Mars attempts to regulate love for the greater good of the colony – with yet another final twist) and “AI-pocalypse by Lin Sun (featuring a dimension-hopping android). For lovers of the short form, it’s a real treat.
A stern father (Valerio Binasco) protects his three daughters from the post-apocalyptic world by making sure they stay safe in the family home: the streets of their town are too dangerous for them, so only he goes out, in a costume of hazardous materials, for food for food. The film by Emanuela Rossi from Italy unfolds as an allegory of patriarchal power that keeps women in the dark, figuratively and literally – when girls venture into their backyards for fresh air, their father makes them wear glasses that have been almost completely blacked out as protection from the now deadly sun. They could easily be young women raised in a fundamentalist sect.
This kind of film relies on creating a compelling claustrophobic and unsettling vibe, and Rossi excels at the first part of the world-building, with the father yielding grimly bigoted authority. ‘Darkness’ takes another direction when he mysteriously goes missing and the older sister, Stella (Denise Tantucci), has to leave the house to find something to eat for her siblings, Luce (Gaia Bocci) and Aria (Olimpia Tosatto). The film’s twists and turns will be somewhat familiar to seasoned sci-fi viewers, but Rossi gives them an effective bent for house art and maintains enough ambiguity to create a lingering sense of unease.
‘Heaven’
Stream it on Netflix.
Boris Kunz’s “Paradise” is set in the near future where people in need of quick cash can sell years of their lives, which can be bought by those who want to extend their longevity. Max (Kostja Ullmann) works at a slick company that specializes in these “timed transfers,” and he’s very good at his job: convincing people to sell their time. Except he and his wife, Elena, are using his life as collateral. When the couple’s overpriced apartment burns down and the insurance isn’t done, they have to pay the mortgage and Elena has to go through a 40-year “forced donation” at a time. Almost overnight, they lost everything and Elena grew into an older woman (Corinna Kirchhoff takes over from Marlene Tanczik to play her). As if that weren’t enough, the recipient of his years is Max’s own boss, Olivia Theissen (Iris Berben).
But wait, there’s more! Elena and Max become embroiled in the Adam Group, a terrorist organization fighting what she sees as time theft, showing their opposition by executing the recipients. It may have been an unnecessary frill for this German film, which is less interesting when it ventures into thriller territory than when it deals with the ethics (and practical consequences) of selling and selling. buying time.
’65’
Stream it on Netflix.
You may have noticed that “65” didn’t receive rave reviews when it was released a few months ago. Pay no mind to them: Contrary to what you may have read, this is a pretty good dinosaur action movie that will stand the test of time better than last entry’s “Jurassic World Dominion.” of a franchise now officially lost to tiresome bloat.
For starters, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ film is just 93 minutes long and makes good use of that fast running time. Second, there are dinos And aliens. Third, those aliens are a little girl, Koa (Ariana Greenblatt) and Mills, a spaceship captain played by Adam Driver — whose intensity makes him look simultaneously out of place in that buttery popcorn bucket and just about right for that. Both characters are humanoids from distant planets that crash land on Earth. Since the film is set 65 million years ago, they find the place teeming with prehistoric beasts eager to tear them apart before they can return to their escape pod. And that’s the whole plot. Beck and Woods added a fun little twist by having Koa speak no English, so she and Mills can’t communicate, but other than that, the movie is utterly straightforward — and entirely entertaining.
Like “65,” the latest film from prolific French director Quentin Dupieux tackles a subject familiar to summer blockbusters – in his case, superheroes. But whereas “65” follows the dictates of the dinosaur subgenre, albeit in a simplified way, “Smoking Causes Coughing” pokes fun at the very idea of superteams. The one here is an assembly of attitude-charged avengers squeezed into shiny outfits inspired by “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”, “Ultraman” and “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers”.
The general idea is that the Tobacco Force, whose members go by names such as Nicotine (Anaïs Demoustier) and Methanol (Vincent Lacoste), is sent into forced retirement by its boss, Didier – a rat puppet voiced by Alain Chabat. The film is essentially a series of false directions: every time you think it’s heading one way, it turns left. Dupieux takes the basic bricks of superhero films (there is also, of course, a villain with galactic ambitions, played by Benoît Poelvoorde) but instead of assembling them into a regular story, he cheerfully spreads them out. “Smoking Causes Coughing” is a funny delight if you give in to its crazy logic.
