Three Films Make A Post: When the dead start to walk you'd better start running…

The Dead Pit (1989): Half hokey supernatural slasher, half pocket zombie apocalypse movie, Brett “The Lawnmower Man” Leonard’s feature debut never adds up too much. Between attempts at the nightmare logic of a Fulci and the cheesy one-liners of A Nightmare on Elm Street style slashers at their worst, the film never finds any personality of its own.

The acting is dire, the effects undistinguished, and for every single effective shot, there are three whole scenes that look and feel amateurish. It is a film easy to point and laugh at, if you’re of a mind to, but I never found myself interested enough in The Dead Pit to find much actual joy in doing this.

The Cloned Tyrone (2023): If you can make it through the much too broad first twenty minutes or so, you might find that Juel Taylor’s conspiracy thriller weird pulp comedy has rather more to offer than a handful of obvious jokes – hell, there’s even a good reason why these jokes start off as obvious as they do. The movie manages to apply methods and a comedically heightened version of the style of 70s conspiracy thrillers to the feeling of being black and poor in America, and that role’s truly horrifying and individuality-eating aspects. While it’s at it, it then turns this into the kind of existentialist horror that can make one’s laughter get stuck in one’s throat.

Taylor’s direction is intelligent as well as just clever as a meta-game, increasingly putting emotional weight on characters and situations you wouldn’t have expected to be meant to carry them. That John Boyega, Jamie Foxx and Teyonah Parris make one hell of a core cast doesn’t need mentioning; nor Kiefer Sutherland’s effectiveness as a villain.

The Three Musketeers – Part I: D’Artagnan aka Les trois mousquetaires: D’Artagnan (2023): When in doubt, go back to the classics, as does this umpteenth adaptation of Dumas. This is an update clearly meant for the blockbuster franchise era, so the second half of the film follows in December, there’s a scene in the end credits, and the score is as generically 2023 as you can imagine.

Director Martin Bourboulon is fortunately very good at what he does, mixing modern and original sensibilities effortlessly, keeping close to the same points film adaptations of the Musketeers prefer, while modernising and sexing up the margins. It’s a fun, energetic kind of blockbuster, with a great cast – Eva Green as the Milady, Vicky Krieps as Queen Anne, Vincent Cassel as Athos, and so on – a sense of play as well as one of drama.

Will this be the start of the Musketeeromatic Universe? Will someone eventually adapt “Twenty Years Later/After”? We can only hope/fear.

In short: Corsage (2022)

Quite a few filmmakers approaching their material the same way as Marie Kreutzer does in this art house darling concerning a highly fictionalized version of the last year in the life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, or as anyone in a German language country who has seen a certain 50s film trilogy will know her by, “Sissy”, would end up with a film that seems rather too in love with its own eccentricity.

Kreutzer is a much too controlled director for her to let things slip out of her hands that easily, so her flights of fancy, the conscious use of anachronistic elements – sometimes in genuinely funny ways – her sardonic humour as well as the film’s genuine humanity and care for its characters feel rather more of a piece than you’d expect when reading up on the film. In fact, even though it doesn’t at first appear so, this is an absolute masterpiece of directorial control over spiky and complicated material. Thus, Kreutzer – helped by a riveting central performance by Vicky Krieps – can take all her film’s seemingly disparate elements – the commentary on star cult, on the treatment of aging women, loneliness sexual, emotional and intellectual in a world where a woman is supposed to repress the first, not show the middle, and lack the last, depression, the satire of KuK clichés and so on – and turn them into a movie that is absolutely of one piece. In fact, as Kreutzer uses them, all these elements and directions turn out to be not so disparate at all but absolutely necessary parts in talking about her complex interests.

That Corsage is also often wickedly funny, or sad, and staged with enormous power is one result of this approach.