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