Bugonia (2025)

★★★½
Capsule Review

Director Yorgos Lanthimos takes the premise of the South Korean film Save the Green Planet! and, with a keen eye and experienced hand, elevates it to soaring heights. That's okay. It's happened before. Vanilla Sky was superior to the original Spanish film Open Your Eyes. In Bugonia, cousins Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis) kidnap the C.E.O. of a pharmaceutical company and hold her hostage on the belief that she is an alien from outer space on a mission to destroy humanity. Michelle (Emma Stone) tries to convince them she is not an alien, but they don't listen, which leads to a power struggle between the two sides to see who will emerge victorious (either them, by getting on to her "spaceship," or her, by escaping). Lanthimos improves upon the original by establishing the paranoia of the abductors before the abduction takes place, by allowing the abductee to assert her position strongly and by placing less emphasis on the law enforcement subplot. The result is a more accomplished film that delivers a powerful punch.

© 2025 Silver Screen Reviews

Save the Green Planet! (2003)

★★★
Capsule Review

Paranoia fuels this little shocker from South Korea. In Save the Green Planet!, a loner and conspiracy theorist kidnaps a high-profile C.E.O. and holds him hostage because he is convinced that this public figure is an alien from the Andromeda galaxy. Lee Byeong-gu (Shin Ha-kyun) and his girlfriend Suni (Hwang Jeong) bind and gag their victim Kang Man-shik (Baek Yoon-sik) and torture him until he confesses. I watched this after watching the American remake Bugonia, and the remake is the better version of the same story. Writer and director Jang Joon-hwan came up with this highly original concept and filmed it with passion, but his completed project had room to improve. Kang's manipulation of Lee towards the end plays too quickly. I preferred Emma Stone's calculating persuasion. Jang's movie is a great template, but on its own as a study of paranoia and the extremes someone could take it, Save the Green Planet! works well enough.

© 2025 Silver Screen Reviews

Café au Lait (1994)

★★½
Capsule Review

Lola (Julie Mauduech) is pregnant, and the question of who the father is dominates the story early. There are two possibilities, but the answer to the question is resolved before we expect it. Rather than keep us in suspense, director Mathieu Kassovitz (who also wrote and stars) uses the question to examine how the two potential fathers feel drawn to Lola and how the men might feel about each other. His story creates an interesting dynamic that sees Felix (Kassovitz) and Jamal (Hubert Koundé) at first as competitors and eventually as partners to ensure Lola's comfort during the later stages of her pregnancy. Their collaboration is tenuous at best, resulting in outburst and reconciliation and back again. The actors are good enough to perform what the script asks of them, but there isn't much narrative thrust to make for an engrossing story. The actors and costar Vincent Cassel as Felix's friend would reunite in La Haine, which is nothing like Café au Lait and much more accomplished.

© 2023 Silver Screen Reviews

The Last American Virgin (1982)

★
I had a Karen once. Her name was Maria, so I get it. The Last American Virgin has this reputation for being brutally honest about the unfairness of unrequited love and the heartache that follows when the realization settles in that all your best intentions were for naught. Writer and director Boaz Davidson culminates his T&A show with this hard lesson, but he doesn't earn it because of his inability (or unwillingness) to present his characters as anything other than sex-starved teens looking for their next fix. The denouement is there for shock value. It does not serve the purpose its defenders say it does because the characters are shallow, the narrative is scattershot, the sex is sleazy, and the acting is substandard, which prevents us from being truly invested in the story.

Roofman (2025)

★★★
Capsule Review

The true story of "Roofman" is the kind that would lend itself to a good movie if handled right, and Derek Cianfrance's Roofman is up to the task. It's a funny, lighthearted and fictionalized version of the actual events, which featured an escaped convict who hides out in a Toys R Us store (the Circuit City next door in real life) and befriends and eventually dates a local woman. Channing Tatum is Jeffrey Manchester, an Army veteran who went on a crime spree by robbing McDonald's restaurants but notably not abusing the employees in the process. After a prison escape, he hides out in the famed toy store and meets Leigh Wainscott (Kirsten Dunst) and begins a courtship that he balances with his outlaw status. They have great onscreen chemistry. The details of how Manchester carves out his hiding place and passes the time while hidden are presented here in plentiful and meticulous fashion.

© 2025 Silver Screen Reviews

Christy (2025)

★★★★
I looked up Christy Martin's fight record after I finished watching the biopic Christy and was amazed by her win-loss totals. I then watched her 1996 match against Irish boxer Deirdre Gogarty, which took place on the undercard for the Mike Tyson and Frank Bruno main event. It was an astonishing display of athleticism and a technical masterpiece. Writers Mirrah Foulkes and David Michôd and director Michôd bring Christy Martin's turbulent life to the big screen to chronicle her beginnings in amateur boxing competitions to the professional stage in Las Vegas and beyond. It was a life of triumph and shocking lows that almost came to a tragic end. It's a remarkable story on its own, but to see Sydney Sweeney embody the role so effectively as Christy is to see an actress take a big leap forward to challenge herself and convey all the pain and tragedy of that story into a gripping narrative.

Scream 3 (2000)

★★
The below review was written in 2000. After my rewatch, I looked at this review and decided to repost it and not write an update, since it largely explains my current feelings about the movie.

The first two Scream movies were all about being self-aware. They knew the conventions of horror movies and poked fun at them too. What they didn't do was fall victim to them. Scream 3, on the other hand, is a by-the-numbers slasher flick that offers a few chuckles but otherwise doesn't have anything new to say. Even with the same director and the main actors of the series returning, Scream 3 falls short of expectations. Maybe that's because Kevin Williamson didn't write this installment. Ehren Kruger (any relation to Freddy?) has the screenwriting credit. Williamson does have a producer credit, though I have to wonder how much he was involved with the production, because this entry isn't as fresh as the first two.

Scream 2 (1997)

★★★
Scream 2 continues the premise of the original film and adds to it by featuring characters who not only know they're in a horror movie but also know that they are in a sequel to a horror movie. As Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy), the resident horror movie buff, helpfully explains to former deputy Dewey Riley (David Arquette), there are rules to follow regarding the body count, level of violence and suspects. Kevin Williamson returns as the screenwriter, and he has no shortage of ideas to explore in this sequel, which is amazing considering that he was a busy man during this time. In addition to this, he wrote 1997's I Know What You Did Last Summer and created Dawson's Creek, which premiered in early 1998. This time around, he toys with the conventions of slasher movie sequels and our expectations for them. The result is a movie that doesn't match its predecessor's originality but does feature a worthy mystery and engaging cast.

Scream (1996)

★★★½
Scream was the perfect storm that made landfall at the right time when it was needed the most. By 1996, the big three horror franchises of the '80s were finished. Freddy was dead, Jason went to Hell and Michael had one last shot at relevance with 1995's dreadful Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers before his series ran out of gas. There were still notable horror movies in the first half of the '90s (Candyman, Body Snatchers), but the outlook for the slasher movie genre looked bleak. It was just as well. Most were just obvious cash grabs with little to offer beyond what had already been done better by John Carpenter and Wes Craven. It would be Craven himself who saw an opportunity to reflect on the genre and toy with its conventions in his 1994 feature Wes Craven's New Nightmare, but its low box office haul showed that something was missing to make this kind of movie appealing again.