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Capsules

CAPSULE: THE ICE TOWER (2025)

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La tour de glace

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DIRECTED BY: Lucile Hadzihalilovic

FEATURING: Clara Pacini, , August Diehl, Marine Gesbert, Gaspar Noé

PLOT: Jeanne, a fifteen-year-old orphan, leaves her foster home and comes across a film shoot for a dark fairy tale.

Still from The Ice Tower (2025)

COMMENTS: In the realm of the Ice Queen, the snow is vibrant, ethereal—and menacing. Drifts of crystalline flakes reflect muted light as it swirls aimlessly, falling upon and around the Queen, whose dusky gaze is a terrible, beautiful thing to behold. Jeanne beholds this gaze, and is immediately entranced by the fictional queen, as well as the actress who portrays her. Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s new film is as atmospheric as it is contemplative, unfolding Jeanne’s journey toward womanhood with all the portentous flair that cinema can offer.

If one were feeling glib, The Ice Tower could be described as “art- haunted-house”; but perhaps the film is too serious for that. That’s not to say it isn’t permeated by camera magic, on display for the viewer, and for Jeanne, who serendipitously falls into a film studio (almost literally) as the team there attempts to re-bottle lightning caught in a previous adventure featuring the cold, enigmatic Ice Queen. The Queen is played by Cristina, a cold, enigmatic actor interchangeable with her on-screen persona. As troubled as she is beautiful, Cristina relies on her “doctor” to help her through the her quotidian routine of performance, and curb her ambitions for an unreachable perfection. (This perfection, unattained, is the responsibility of the film-within-the-film director, played with graceful frustration by none other than Gaspar Noé.) While Cristina cannot abide flaws, the director lives in the real world—even if he is a magic-maker of cinema—and is quick to recognize that “good enough” is, by definition, good enough.

The Ice Tower is primarily about the bond between Jeanne and Cristina, the former replacing the actress who was cast as the queen’s protégé. By the finish, after all the narrowly framed widescreen shots, scant illumination, and a hauntingly dangerous venture to a remote cliffside, a fissure splits open; Cristina sought a lover, Jeanne sought a mother, and neither ends up contented. The clash between innocence and despondence worms through the gloomy corridors of Hadzihalilovic’s vision, with bright, minute illuminations crowded on all sides by murk. She has conjured a melancholy view from her dark crystal ball—with the sorcery of cinema forcing its light through the umbra.

The Ice Tower is in theaters now. We’ll let you know when it comes to home video.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a twisted retro fairytale that sits somewhere between Frozen and Mulholland Drive… an Old World children’s tale set in a place that’s both eerily real and utterly weird.”–Jordan Mintzer (festival screening)

Capsules

CAPSULE: WARM WATER UNDER A RED BRIDGE (2001)

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Akai hashi no shita no nurui mizu

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DIRECTED BY: 

FEATURING: , Misa Shimizu, Kazuo Kitamura

PLOT: An unemployed salesman intends to steal hidden treasure from a confectionary shop, but complications arise when he falls for the elderly owner’s caretaker, a woman with a unique condition.

COMMENTS: Sasano is already down on his luck when his only friend, Taro, passes away. The architectural firm he worked for has folded, leaving him unemployed, and his wife only calls to insult him while demanding his unemployment check. Taro, known as the “Philosopher,” lived as a hobo in a tent filled with rare books, but he was the only person to treat Sasano with respect and to offer him advice gleaned over the course of a misspent life.

Taro once told Sasano of a buried treasure, secreted in a pot, in a house with a view of a red bridge, in a summer resort town on the Sea of Japan. At an impromptu funerary meal held in his honor, Sasano mentions Taro’s claim to this improbable treasure. His hobo companions laugh it off; Taro told the rest of them about it, too. But after a series of unpromising job interviews, Sasano decides to leave Tokyo for the seaside, in search of Taro’s supposed pot of gold.

Arriving in the off season, Sasano stands out as an unlikely tourist. He locates the red bridge, and the house, which Taro had worried wouldn’t still be standing. Sasano spies a woman leaving the building and tails her to the grocery store. There, he catches her stealing cheese while awkwardly standing in a puddle of water. A dropped earring gives him an excuse to follow her back home. She hesitantly welcomes him in, then their chance meeting rapidly becomes a rather. . . aqueous sexual encounter.

Saeko, as she reluctantly explains, suffers from too much “water,” and when it overflows, she’s driven to commit crimes like petty theft. Thoroughly shocked by the whole thing, Sasano hypocritically reproaches her for stealing, while the relationship provides him convenient opportunities for him to search the house for Taro’s treasure.

As Sasano spends more time in the town and comes to know its quirky residents, the story heads in a predictable direction; but its tale of two unlikely romances is tinged with metaphysical symbolism surrounding the element of water. In one scene, Saeko takes Sasano to meet a nuclear physicist who studies neutrinos. He explains to them how the particles have to be shot through “superpure water” in order for their experiments to work. The town’s pure water also provides the key ingredient to making the perfect sweet cakes, though as Saeko eventually reveals to Sasano, their river was once dangerously polluted with cadmium.

Director Imamura’s enduring interest in the connection between human beings and their environment, as well as his explorations into the influence of crime and nonconformity on Japanese society, surface here again, in his final film. The flights of philosophical fancy lead into brief moments of CGI-animated imagery, but most of the scenes remain rooted more or less firmly in reality. Ultimately, Warm Water makes for a slightly kinky but heart-warming tale of how to find purpose, meaning, and happiness in life, along with sex without shame.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…combines fish out of water stories with a weird metaphor for female sexuality in this sweetly quirky film which never quite gels.”–Laura Clifford, Reeling Reviews

Warm Water Under a Red Bridge [Blu-ray]

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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: GORY GORY HALLELUJAH (2003)

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DIRECTED BY: Sue Corcoran

FEATURING: Angie Louise, Tim Gouran, Jeff Gilbert, Todd Licea, Joseph Franklin

PLOT: Four aspiring actors on their way to New York run afoul of increasingly dangerous obstacles, including a group of rowdy Elvis impersonators, a backwards fundamentalist hick town, and a zombie apocalypse.

COMMENTS: Satire, the playwright and Algonquin wit George S. Kaufman opined, is what closes on Saturday night. Nevertheless, aspiring filmmakers frequently turn to satire as a means to walk the line between mass-appeal populism (near-parodistic references to familiar material) and fringe-appeal provocation (harsh critique of sociopolitical foes). All of which is to say, Gory Gory Hallelujah has the aspirational sweat of satire all over it. Unfortunately, Kaufman seems to have its number; Gory Gory bleeds out quickly.

Gory Gory has so many targets for its smug disdain that it plays like a sketch film. The opening salvo takes on the insular and pretentious world of theater, which is admittedly made even more amusing with the reveal that this delusional production of the Gospel is being staged in the theatrical mecca of Seattle. But that’s all forgotten once we set off on a road trip, a genre that revels in wacky mismatched personalities. From there, the targets are set up like the shooting gallery at a fair: here’s the crazy fight with a gang in a bar, here’s the hypocritically moralistic small town, here’s the evil lurking in the woods. The scenes are mileposts, rather than logical stops along the way.

This is a film that is not the slightest bit interested in nuance. Consider our central quartet of heroes, who check an impressive collection of boxes for character stereotypes: militant black man who nonetheless endures countless indignities; self-proclaimed feminist whose sexual and materialistic impulses frequently overrule the cause; nebbishy Jew who finds every opportunity to remind you of his faith; blissed-out hippie flower child whom the film wants to position as closeted, but who is actually ravenously omnisexual. That’s all there is to them; barely 24 hours after having watched the film, I’ve completely forgotten their names, and that’s just fine. They’re not characters; they’re trope delivery systems.

Title notwithstanding, Gory Gory Hallelujah isn’t really a horror film. The screwed-up small town feels like a low-rent retread of Nothing But Trouble, the witches’ coven is just an excuse to take a jab at man-hating lesbians, and the undead are lumbering actors with Green Goddess dressing smeared on their faces. I suspect if you asked director Corcoran and screenwriter Louise, they’d tell you they were making a comedy, a -esque everyone-is-awful romp that lets them flirt with edginess without having to catch any flack. Every once in a while, the film threatens to go somewhere truly daring, like the smarmy land baron’s reference to some “accidental lynchings” that hints at a truly vengeful motivation for the zombie uprising. Most of the time, though, the targets are only the most obvious, offering variations on the theme, “Aren’t these people just awful?” They are. It’s not a revelation.

The closest the film gets to a point-of-view comes in the admittedly unexpected finale, when the death of absolutely everyone presages a revival-hymn closing number that suggests we’ll all be equal in the great beyond. Whereas before everyone was greedily nasty to each other, now they’re all dancing arm-in-arm, united in brotherhood after they’ve cast off the pesky need to breathe. It would make for a solid mission statement if there’d been even a hint of it prior to the closing minutes of the film. As it stands, it’s just one more radical shift in tone for a movie that has already lurched awkwardly from one setpiece to the next. Gory Gory Hallelujah has a lot to be angry about, but just doesn’t have the heart for it. Maybe in the next life.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Tripping over the line between silly and stupid, camp comedy “Gory Gory Hallelujah” — the title is the best part — emerges more sub-Troma than subversive…aims for bad-taste hipster satire in the John Waters vein. But co-creator/editor/thesps Sue Corcoran and Angie Louise should have left at least one job — screenwriting — to a third party.” Dennis Harvey, Variety (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Christopher Fox. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)         

Gory Gory Hallelujah

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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates, Shorts

THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: GHOSTS BEFORE BREAKFAST (VORMITTAGSSPUK) (1928) / APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: ALICIA (1994)

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Recommended (for both)

Repression in a society is often noticed first in the arts. When works are banned or proscribed for subject matter deemed offensive to the state, or when artists and their patrons are threatened if they do not alter their messages so as not to displease the powers that be, an attentive eye can pick up the seeds of repression being planted. One might even notice it in attacks on the programming at the national center for the performing arts. Today, our attention turns to a pair of short films that are in the orbit of repression: one that was its victim and one expressly about it.

The title card that precedes “Ghosts Before Breakfast” points the finger  clearly at its tormentor: “The Nazis destroyed the sound version of this film as degenerate art.” The accusation seems absurd to modern eyes, so it’s instructive to recall, in the march to World War II, just how much the ascendant Fascists despised modern art, especially surreal and abstract works. No doubt that attitude came from the top, considering failed artist Adolf Hitler was a strict devotee of classical styles. Dictatorships are always humorless scolds, though, and the Third Reich was especially obsessed with a devotion to German propriety and order. Director , who literally wrote the book on Dadaism, was always going to run headlong into trouble.

Nothing that ensues in “Ghosts’” 500-second running time would seem to merit the iron jackboot of censorship: a bow tie refuses to stay knotted, body parts detach and spin around, and men disappear behind poles. (That last is a nifty special effect once accomplished by your humble correspondent.) Most notably, a quartet of bowler hats liberate themselves from the tyranny of resting upon men’s heads, choosing instead to fly about the neighborhood in flock formation until tea is finally served. It’s mostly lo-fi camera trickery in the Méliès tradition, not overtly serious at all. (Occasionally, one can see the strings on the hats and even the shadow of the marionette’s pole, and it detracts from the short’s charm not a whit.) Richter is always a playful surrealist (witness the giddy way he skewers the evangelization of capitalism in Dreams That Money Can Buy), and “Ghosts” captures that spirit in its simplest form. It’s light, it’s fun… no wonder the Nazis hated it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Featuring unimaginably brilliant special effects achieved through the use of stop-motion animation as well as live-action tricks, the film chronicles the delightful protests of objects ranging from hats to water hoses. The entire short is structured like a relentless magic trick, inviting the audience to witness a bewildering spectacle where the laws of physics completely break down.” – Swapnil Dhruv Bose, Far Out

Oh, how they would have utterly loathed “Alicia,” Jaume Balagueró’s nightmare musing on the abhorrence of femininity. After our young heroine menstruates during a moment of idle self-pleasure, uniformed thugs haul her away to become a kind of indentured remora to a hideously bloated creature. Alicia’s act of defiance is to have the temerity to reach sexual maturity, at which point she is a commodity for the beasts to consume and discard. Balagueró’s film (a student work that presages his future efforts such as the REC series) exudes a palpable sense of a terrible power that punishes people for who they are.

In less than 8 minutes, there’s no time to be subtle, and Balagueró dials up the unsettling and odd atmosphere well past the initial premise. Alicia herself (played by twins Ana and Elena Lucia) is as white and smooth as a cherub, the very essence of purity before her blood drips onto a book titled “The Drama of Jesus.” Rubber-clad troops force the girl to consume a goopy slime that emits from their masks and drill into her neck in a cascade of oily fluid. When she finally emerges from this dark underworld, she exits through a refrigerator, as if she has only been kept around as food. Meanwhile, the final shot is the ogre framed with the shape of a cross, just in case you’re wondering whom to implicate. The theme of the punishment women endure is explicit, but the concept is dressed up in grotesque imagery that carries the slight story up to another level.

Film is storytelling, and storytelling is speech. Richter may have only intended to tweak the establishment, not rouse the beast; Balagueró was clearly prepared for whatever expressions of offense or disgust might come his way. But both are compatriots in cinema, for storytelling is also bravery, and there’s nothing weird about standing up for their voices.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

 “…a disturbing and even suffocating atmosphere in which we also glimpse hints of the purest Cronenberg every time the mutilations of the flesh come into play.” – Rubén Collazos, Cinemaldito (translated from Spanish)

(“Ghosts Before Breakfast” was nominated for review by Rafael Moreira; “Alicia” was nominated for review by Morgan. Suggest a weird movie or two of your own here.)

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE ACTOR (2025)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: André Holland, , May Calamaway, Asim Chaudhry, Joe Cole, Fabien Frankel, , , , Youssef Kerkour, Simon McBurney, Tanya Reynolds, , Scott Alexander Young

PLOT: An actor in the 1950s loses his memory after being struck in the head by a jealous husband, and winds up in a small Ohio town trying to puzzle out his own identity.

Still from the actor (2025)

COMMENTS: For his solo debut feature, protege Duke Johnson takes on a neurological  dysfunction; but whereas his  mentor would tackle an ambitiously exotic condition like Cotard’s syndrome or Fregoli syndrome, Johnson restricts his theme to humble amnesia. Paul, an actor, is struck on the head with a chair when caught in bed with another man’s wife. He wakes up in a hospital with no memory—he has to be told his name and occupation—and is almost immediately run out of town by a detective who warns him that adultery is against the law and he’ll be arrested if he returns. He knows he is from New York City, but doesn’t have enough pocket change for a ticket there, so he ends up in a small Midwestern town working at a tannery. While there, he meets and romances nice—if eccentric—small-town gal Edna, but leaves her behind once he’s saved up enough for a bus ticket back to the Big Apple. In the big, wicked city, his former friends (a roguish lot) treat him like nothing has changed, despite the fact that he doesn’t remember them, and his agent gets him a small comeback role on a TV show. But will the fact that he can’t even remember names that were told to him a few minutes ago affect his prospects as a thespian?

Johnson’s uses blatant theatrical artifice to suggest Paul’s disorientation. Scenes are staged like a big budget play or a low-budget TV show. A third-person narrator occasionally interjects exposition. Some of the streets Paul walks through look like they are built on studio backlots, with large swaths of blackness disguising the emptiness of the warehouse. Elements from a cartoon bleed into the real world. His own life shows up on everyone’s favorite program “A Silent Heart” (which appears to be the only TV show in existence in Paul’s world). Paul discovers that some real items in his house look like impractical stage props. An invisible wipe tracks his journey from an interior to an exterior location. Voices may be slightly out of sync, and he glimpses vaguely familiar faces. Doctors try recovering memories through “narcoserum”-aided hypnotic regression, leading to a dream sequence that’s only slightly mistier than his regular reality. Paul’s cameo casting in “The Silent Heart” (which, not by accident, involves a trial) throws him into a Kafkaesque nightmare where his self-confidence in what he assumes is his own acting talent is overwhelmed by the reality that he is not capable of processing what’s going on around him. All of this creates an impressively dreamlike world, putting us in the mindset of an amnesiac for whom the world operates according to familiar tropes, yet feels unreal in its concrete details.

What “really happens” in The Actor is, for the most part, easily determined. But the confusing part is what it all means—why bother to tell this story that seems to arrive nowhere? Amnesia, in and of itself, is not usually the subject of a narrative, but a rather common (even a clichéd) device for seeding a mystery. Here, there’s no great reveal—not on the plot, the psychological, the thematic, or the metaphysical levels—although we frequently get the sense that some epiphany is just about to arrive. The colorblind casting ( was originally intended to play the lead) isn’t especially distracting, but seems to be a missed opportunity for adding another layer to the story; amnesiac or not, a black actor’s experiences in Jim Crow America would have a vastly different character than a white actor’s. In the end, the movie plays like nothing more than a dreamy demonstration of the life of an amnesiac, with no discernible deeper message beyond “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” The fact that so many of The Actor‘s individual scenes create such effective senses of disorientation and anticipation makes the movie’s refusal to ultimately resolve itself an underwhelming and slightly frustrating experience. It’s a film that somehow manages to be intriguing without becoming actually interesting; its fascinations are entirely formal and theoretical. You should still probably check out whatever Johnson tries next, though; he has his cinematic technique down.

A word about that large cast: after Holland and Chan, the rest are listed in the opening credits simply as “the Troupe.” It’s reminiscent of the collective credit “the Mercury Actors” in Citizen Kane, and as in that movie, the end credits show clips revealing who played which role. Recognizing the actors is one of the unexpected minor treats of The Actor.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a weird, trippy, movie that has themes of reinventing oneself when you think it is too late to do so. André Holland is incredible.”–Tessa Smith, Mama’s Geeky (contemporaneous)

The Actor [Blu-ray]

The Actor [Blu-ray]
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