This month I finally started to appreciate Brian De Palma, plus I spent one long, four-movie day at the Hot Docs Documentary Film Festival 2025.
A Minecraft Movie
United States of America, Sweden | 2025 | 101m | English
A CGI monstrosity bereft of anything that makes compelling cinema, but what did I expect? Jack Black carries the movie, and his over-the-top line deliveries – always with his face in center frame with an green screen to his back – indicate that he knows exactly what kind of slop he’s starring in. I laughed a few times; the opening sequence had me cautiously optimistic (“As a child I yearned for the mines” got me good) but unfortunately the script couldn’t keep up the charm of those fast-paced, goofy opening minutes. Your enjoyment of this film will strongly correlate to how funny you find the word “butt.”
Cruising
United States of America, Germany | 1980 | 102m | English
This felt like a movie at the precipice of greatness, but it was held back by several missteps.
For starters, the acting is occasionally atrocious, most noticeably from Paul Sorvino, who plays the police captain. Many scenes felt like first takes, and it surprised me that a director like William Friedkin would be satisfied with them. The star of the show, Al Pacino, feels out of place with this material, too. In far too many scenes he just exists as part of the environment, but I can’t interpret the emotions on his face or figure out what is going on with his character arc. He’s clearly drawn to this seedy underworld, but why? Is he disgusted? Is he aroused? Is he simply that motivated by the idea of a job promotion that he’ll put his ass on the line (literally)?
Watching the film, I was imagining so many more interesting ways that the script could have gone: what if he starts to lose attraction to his girlfriend because he finds himself slowly beginning to prefer the gay scene? What if the killer, when he states, “You made me do this to you,” is a symbolic representation of AIDS or some other deadly consequence of promiscuity? Even the film’s double-entendre title fails to make any meaningful connection between the random brutality of the police against this particular gay subculture and the behaviors of said subculture; while the ending comes close, it’s ultimately too ambiguous to make any clear statement. Even Al Pacino himself has stated that he didn’t know how to play that final scene because he himself didn’t understand what the film’s ending was going for.
Maybe Cruising would have benefited from including all of the lost footage that would have gotten this movie branded with an X rating, but it doesn’t seem like anyone really wanted the hardcore gay porno that William Friedkin originally envisioned: not the MPAA, not the 1980 filmgoing audience, not the miscast Al Pacino, and not even the gay community themselves, who protested this film on release because they felt it painted them in a negative light. I think there are enough compelling elements to Cruising that it could have been something great in the hands of a better director, which is an odd and unfortunate thing to say given who the director of this film is.
Pulp Fiction
United States of America | 1994 | 154m | English
I credit Pulp Fiction, as many others surely have, as the movie that really “got me into movies.” The dialogue was unlike anything else I had experienced; it was a movie that was so much fun that it didn’t seem allowed. Even now, I find it invigorating, exciting, and inspiring in how creatively it tells its story. It also leaves enough mysteries and points of potential analysis (What’s in the briefcase? What is the significance of the code, 666? Why is Honey Bun’s dialogue inconsistent between the opening and closing scenes?) that I find it as deep and enriching as any good work of literature. Call me a filmbro, I don’t care. Pulp Fiction is one of the all-time greats.
Mulholland Drive
United States of America, France | 2001 | 147m | English
Oh great, I have to go do homework to understand what the hell I just watched and have some YouTube essayist explain to me why it’s actually, like, super clever and totally not a jumble of abandoned TV series plot lines whose incoherence I’m supposed to just forgive because of… dreams, or something. No thanks! I already spent 2 and a half hours with this movie. When the ending came I let out an audible “What?” in the theater.
I think it could actually be possible that one day I grow to appreciate this film on a rewatch (much how I liked Eraserhead a lot more the second time around) but I don’t feel compelled to embark on that journey any time soon.
The Wild Bunch
United States of America | 1969 | 145m | English, Spanish, German
The Wild Bunch has been on my radar since Tarantino hyped it up in Cinema Speculation. Described as “outrageous” and “ultra-violent,” I went in thinking, “Come on, it’s from 1969. How outrageous can it really be?” And now having seen it, I think it underwhelmed exactly to the extent that I expected. Maybe at the time this was released it would have been mind-blowing, but I’m too desensitized to movie violence at this point to be sensationalized by squibs and red paint.
I also have to admit that I just really don’t care for Westerns. Nothing about the setting or the themes or the imagery speaks to me – it never has. The Wild Bunch is a bit more entertaining that most Westerns, but there were still long passages filled with characters who looked too similar for me to keep fully abreast of the plot. The extended scenes of unsubtitled Spanish dialogue didn’t exactly keep me engaged, either. I liked the score, the cinematography, and a few moments of character interactions between all the different scumbags, but their story and their motivations left absolutely no impact. To me, The Wild Bunch was simply another Western with some above-average action scenes but ultimately another reminder of why I find this entire genre so painfully uninteresting.
West Side Avenue
Philippines | 2001 | 301m | Tagalog, English
I think it is physically impossible to discuss this movie without saying the words “five hours,” so I’ll get it out of the way that yes, I was extremely intimidated stepping into the theater for this movie knowing that it would be shown with no intermission. Instead, the TIFF website informed me, director Lav Diaz encouraged viewers to “take breaks as needed.” I, alas, did inevitably need to take a bathroom break at one point, but I realized that I had kept telling myself, “One more scene. I don’t want to miss anything important.” I think that speaks to how gripping West Side Avenue really is.
What starts as a police procedural turns into a panoramic view of a community of Filipino-Americans all affected, in one way or another, by the unexplained death of Hanzel Harana, a troubled young man who lived and died in Jersey City. Most scenes place the viewer inside mundane yet intimate locations: a home, a bedroom, a therapist’s office, a drug den, a restaurant. The camera often stays in place, but the effect is that we feel like we are sitting in the room right next to these characters, watching them navigate their lives and situations the best they know how. Few characters are blameless in their actions, but we spend enough time with each of them that we can understand why they chose the path that they did, leading to the tragic, foregone conclusion of Hanzel on the sidewalk, dead of a gunshot wound. There’s a theme of film-as-healing; early in the movie, detective Juan Mijares excoriates a filmmaker he finds documenting this community wrecked by drugs and violence. Later, after so much time facing a broken world, even concluding that to continue on the murder case would cause him to “want to kill a lot of Filipinos,” does Mijares find the humility within himself to sit in front of the documentarian’s camera, to confront his own demons, and to speak the painful truth.
West Side Avenue is more than a murder mystery; it is a deep and devastating portrait of an American community on the outskirts of visibility, let alone wellness. Watch this film not for the bragging rights of having endured its length but because of its moving character portraits and substantial emotional power.
Screamers
Canada, United States of America, Japan | 1995 | 108m | English
Each “s” sound was punctuated particularly harshly on the 35mm print of Screamers that I saw, which might tell you something about the quality of the film given how that is one of my most distinct memories of viewing it. The film is bogged down by too much sci-fi nonsense backstory (note the ill-advised Star Wars-esque opening text crawl), which is a shame because the action scenes, when they happen, are goofy, self-serious fun. Screamers tells a cynical story where betrayals happen so often that they cease to be surprising before long. The world-building created by the costumes, props, extensive set designs, and creatures showed a good deal of moviemaking passion undergirding the film, but I had the feeling that this material could have been something great if only better care had been put into the script.
Cisco Pike
United States of America | 1971 | 95m | English
What could have been a tense crime drama about a desperate, down-on-his-luck man who can’t escape the fact that pushing drugs pays better than playing open mics and the corrupt cop he must keep a delicate relationship with in order to break free from a risky lifestyle once and for all instead settles into a laid-back vibes film about all the eccentric characters one would encounter in early 70s California.
Kris Kristofferson doesn’t act so much as he just… is Kris Kristofferson… but his performance works for what the film is. That is, until a dramatic moment near the end calls for him to react with grief and shock and instead he can only silently gaze into the camera. The real thrust beyond the movie isn’t the drama of the plot but rather the character portraits of various dreamers and schemers who, for one reason or another, keep finding themselves drawn back to drugs even when they know that a better life is out there for them.
I don’t think a lot of people remember Cisco Pike; even in a sold-out theatre of film buffs at the Revue Cinema’s 35mm screening it seemed that most people were seeing it for the first time. I do think that with better directing, the movie’s dramatic tension and emotional impact could have been, *ahem* higher. But I still enjoyed the time spent with this believable collection of characters and their fun but ultimately tragic exploits.
Paul
Canada | 2025 | 87m | French, English
Maybe it’s mean to call such an intimate portrait of this man “boring” but the guy gets off on degradation so as far as I know he’ll give my review a heart.
“Paul,” a name for this documentary as dull as the movie itself, shows a shy, overweight Quebecois man who claims to have overcome his crippling anxiety by turning into a “cleaning simp” who spends his days cleaning the homes of heavily tattooed female sociopaths – free of charge, of course. There are a lot of interesting questions that could have been explored here: Why is Paul so depressed and anxious? How does turning to voluntary slavery help him through this? What kind of person takes advantage of this emotionally vulnerable man and convinces themselves that they’re doing something “nice”? Are we, the viewers, all part of the exploitation holding this man back from attaining self-respect and true healing? Instead, the documentary stays content pointing a camera (often way too closely) at Paul’s fat face to watch him grunt and grin as he goes on all fours and gets paddled.
As sensational as the subject of the film is, the director never really finds a story to tell. The movie ended suddenly just as I was finally nodding off in the theater. When I walked out at the end, Hot Docs Documentary Film Festival ushers were handing out promotional coasters with Paul’s face on them, so we can bring further disrespect to his face by planting drinks on top of it, presumably. If you’re interested in Paul the Cleaning Simp, you should probably just follow him on Instagram and skip this documentary.
Other Movies I Saw This Month
- Mean Streets (1973) [3.5/5]
- Dressed to Kill (1980) [4.5/5]
- Dog Day Afternoon (1975) [4/5]
- Princess Mononoke (1997) [5/5]
- Electrocuting an Elephant (1903) [0.5/5]
- Body Double (1984) [4.5/5]
- Basic Instinct (1992) [4.5/5]
- Snake Eyes (1998) [4/5]
- My Missing Aunt (2024) [4.5/5]
- Life After (2025) [4.5/5]
- Yalla Parkour (2024) [2.5/5]
Best Movies I Saw This Month
- West Side Avenue
- Body Double
- My Missing Aunt
Worst Movies I Saw This Month
- Electrocuting an Elephant
- A Minecraft Movie
Josh Anderson 