Monday Miniatures: Horrors, Both Real and Imagined

Welcome to Monday Miniatures, where I tell you about some of the stuff I’ve been watching in the past week that I wouldn’t otherwise get to share.

The week of Sept. 8-15, 2025:

Hero, directed by Zhang Yimou

How I watched it: Rented DVD from Vidiots

I remember vividly when this film came out in the U.S., having been delayed two years by Miramax. Quentin Tarantino, with close ties to Miramax, lent his name to the marketing, and my high school buddy and I were instantly drawn in by that. “Quentin Tarantino presents Hero” really meant something to a couple of 16-year-old boys. We talked about wanting to see it but never did make it to the theater.

Yimou’s Curse of the Golden Flower was the first movie I saw after I moved to college. It was playing at the local theater the week before classes started freshman year, so I went and saw it, then brought home a postcard-sized version of the poster to sit on my desk for the rest of the year. I thought the movie was just okay, but I liked having a souvenir from my first cinema experience in a new land.

Now that I have finally seen Hero after 21 years of dragging my feet, what did I think? It was fine. There are some interesting storytelling choices and the production design, like all of Yimou’s films, is gorgeous. But, let’s be honest, everyone’s here for the fight scenes, and as beautifully rendered as they are (with the exception of those corny CGI arrows), they’re a little same-y and wire fu has never much appealed to me anyway. I also feel the film is a little politically muddled and much prefer the director’s more potent character study, Raise the Red Lantern.

Escape Room, directed by Will Wernick

How I watched it: Amazon Prime

I may have mentioned it on the site before, and if you follow these Monday Miniatures columns long enough, you will start to see a pattern emerge. One of my can’t-sleep, go-to moves is low-budget indie horror. They’re usually short, they’re engaging enough, and sometimes you find a gem. This one, sadly, is not a gem.

Credit where credit is due, as Wernick was at least at the forefront of the trend of late 2010s movies about people trapped in dastardly escape rooms. These include the cleverly titled Escape Room (that’s this movie), Escape Room (2017, which came out the same year as this movie but stars Skeet Ulrich apparently), Escape Room (2019, the big-budget one you might be familiar with), No Escape Room (which despite its title is, in fact, about an escape room), and Escape Room: Tournament of Champions (a sequel to the 2019 one). That’s just to name a few.

I understand the appeal of the premise: trap a bunch of people on a spectrum of likable to unlikable in a puzzle box and kill them in amusing ways. Yet, somehow, none of these movies is very good, though I haven’t seen the Skeet Ulrich one. Saw pretty much got there first a full decade-plus before and didn’t need a hipster trend to attach itself to in order to stay afloat.

This movie at least gets points for having a believable-seeming escape room setup, not like the stunningly elaborate rooms of some other films. All of the characters are unlikable, and the acting isn’t great to boot, so when the deaths get going in the second half, despite a couple clever setups (again, ripped straight from the Saw franchise), none of it really matters much. Actress Elisabeth Hower gets the worst of it, spending 70 percent of the film fully nude for exactly zero reason.

A Cry in the Dark, directed by Fred Schepisi

How I watched it: Rented DVD from Vidiots

I knew what this movie was about, and I knew the iconic line, mostly from Seinfeld. Still, I was unprepared for the cognitive dissonance required to reconcile the American need to mock a funny accent (“Maybe, the dingo ate your baby.”) and the shattering reality of this story. It’s about an Australian couple who swear up and down that their infant daughter was killed by a dingo during a camping trip and a nation that would rather brand them murderers and how their story plays out in the media of the time.

I believe that Sam Neil, due to the Jurassic Park franchise, is underrated as an actor, and in this, he delivers an absolutely stellar performance as a pastor trying to reconcile his faith with both the death of his daughter and the torturous way his story plays out for all the world to see. Meryl Streep – very good, Oscar nominated, decidedly neither Australian nor Kiwi, as the real Lindy Chamberlain was – plays the mother accused of slitting the throat of her 3-month-old baby.

I had never heard of Schepisi, though he’s done a number of popular films, some of which I’ve even seen, and I would not say the direction is this film’s strong suit. It’s paced too slowly and takes way too long to get to the most interesting part of the story. That would be the trial that takes up this film’s final act, and I will say the courtroom sequences are well handled.

What is most shocking about this film, nearly 40 years on, is how little has changed in regard to the way we treat the accused, particularly women and even more particularly those accused of murdering their children. The world wants perfect victims, perfect mothers, perfect sorrow, and anyone who does not fit this impossible standard is judged guilty in the public sphere long before they get their day in court. Anatomy of a Fall made this point quite clearly just recently, and it is disappointing how far we have not come. If anything, in the age of social media, it has only gotten worse.

Galaxy Quest, directed by Dean Parisot

How I watched it: Amazon Prime

I had seen this film a couple of times before, so this time, I watched it with commentary provided by the Blank Check with Griffin and David podcast. It remains an eminently watchable sci-fi spoof that is, admittedly, a little lost on me as someone who can count on one hand the number of Star Trek episodes I have seen from any series. I’ve not seen a single episode of The Original Series. I believe I’ve seen seven of the 13 movies – the first two Kirks, the last two Picards, and all three of the reboot series.

I don’t think you have to be a Star Trek expert to enjoy this movie, but it probably helps. The characters are pretty closely mapped onto those of The Original Series, and Tim Allen is doing a pretty clear William Shatner impression. Politics aside, it’s interesting Allen was never able to parlay his fame into a movie career outside of the Santa Clause series because he is quite good in this. Then, of course, you look at his résumé of films, and it’s possible he doesn’t have the best taste in projects. Remember Redbelt, though? That was good.

The Grey Zone, directed by Tim Blake Nelson

How I watched it: Criterion Channel

This is a tremendous piece of work that feels quite underseen and underdiscussed. There is one tragic flaw in it that keeps it from being a masterpiece, but other than that, this is a morally complex, handsomely mounted Holocaust film that deserves more respect and a wider audience.

Adapted from Nelson’s own play, itself based on a memoir by a Jewish doctor at Auschwitz, the film explores the personal conflicts and inner turmoil of the Sonderkommando, Jewish prisoners selected to aid in the execution of their fellow internees. It covers similar territory to the 2015 Best International Feature winner Son of Saul. Both films deal exquisitely with the moral and ethical dilemmas facing these prisoners. 

If they don’t do it, someone else will, but that doesn’t make it right. Is it murder if you don’t pull the trigger yourself? Each man has his own line that he will not cross, and what makes The Grey Zone such a rewarding experience is the way we come to discover where each man or woman draws his or her line.

The performances by the cast are uniformly excellent with a single exception: David Arquette, who tries his damnedest but is not up to the task assigned to him. Making matters worse, he shares scenes with a then-relatively unknown Michael Stuhlbarg, who has five to 10 lines in the movie and absolutely knocks it out of the park. Swap those two roles and I think you have a nearly perfect movie.

The Long Walk, directed by Francis Lawrence

How I watched it: In theaters (AMC Burbank 16)

For my full thoughts on this excellent film, check out my in-depth review posted here. In brief, this is a thrilling, timely story, well directed by Lawrence and with superb performances by the entire cast. Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson are particular standouts in a movie that is unrelentingly bleak and brutal but with a purpose. 

Drifting Clouds, directed by Aki Kaurismaki

Rocky VI, directed by Aki Kaurismaki

How I watched them: Criterion Channel

Checking in once again with my favorite Finnish master, Kaurismaki’s Drifting Clouds is another beautiful little dark comedy about getting beaten down by the world, dusting yourself off, and trying again. I thought this movie was lovely, and the leads, Kati Outinen and Kari Väänänen, have magnificent chemistry as a married couple who lose their jobs at the same time and struggle to stay afloat in a world that mostly doesn’t care if they drown.

I was charmed by how much this had in common with the director’s later Fallen Leaves, which made my top 10 list in 2023, right down to a brief comic bit about seeing a Jim Jarmusch movie in theaters. Jarmusch and Kaurismaki are friends whose films have much in common, but I have always gravitated more toward Kaurismaki. There is something about that bleak, Northern European sense of humor that just appeals to me.

As a little treat, I followed that up with Rocky VI, a music video for the Leningrad Cowboys, who are like The Monkees of the Kaurismaki world – a fake band made up for a movie but which ends up making real-world waves. Rocky VI is a parody of Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky IV, following a small man in American flag trunks preparing to fight a very large Russian. The song is great, the video is hilarious, and I would encourage everyone to go check out the feature-length Leningrad Cowboys Go America.

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, directed by Cristi Puiu

How I watched it: Rented DVD from Vidiots

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is a masterpiece about the way humanity gets subsumed into the morass of bureaucratic systems and how those systems conspire to prevent even good people from doing the right thing. Based largely on a true story, Puiu’s film follows a 63-year-old man’s harrowing journey through the Romanian healthcare system, which dismisses him, judges him, and dehumanizes him until there is nothing left.

The film is told nearly in real time as ambulance driver Mioara (Luminita Gheorghiu) ferries Mr. Lazarescu (Ion Fiscuteanu) through streets of Budapest like they are crossing the River Styx, visiting hospital after hospital and finding each to be its own circle of hell. Mr. Lazarescu is an ulcer patient who still enjoys alcohol, a fact for which every doctor he meets will chastise him and to which they will attribute his symptoms. His ills also coincide with a major bus crash in the city, which has overwhelmed the hospitals.

Everyone is tired, overworked, and at the end of their rope, seeing Mr. Lazarescu as just another problem to deal with and lamenting why he must be their problem. But of course, the point of Puiu’s film is that the problem of Mr. Lazarescu belongs to all of us. It is a reminder that when we allow ourselves to dehumanize another, we also allow our own humanity to slip from us. 

Roger Ebert makes the point in his review that in Romania, at least, Mr. Lazarescu is never once asked for his insurance card. One can imagine the nightmare he would face in the U.S. This movie was made 20 years ago, and still, two decades on, we continue to dehumanize the poor, the unhoused, the underinsured, and every day, it wears a little more on the soul of the nation.

Scare Me, directed by Josh Ruben

How I watched it: Shudder

A fun deconstruction of horror storytelling tropes, starring Ruben and Aya Cash as two writers who end up in the same rented cabin when the power goes out and they decide to scare each other. It has the setup of a more traditional horror omnibus, in which they would tell each other spooky stories and we would see those stories play out. Instead, we never leave the cabin. Ruben and his team use shadows, sound, and the power of suggestion to build the sense of terror, as it would be if we were truly in the cabin with the characters.

It’s a neat gambit that I think mostly pays off. There’s an interloping pizza delivery man played by Chris Redd who is funny but a step too far in the reality of the story. Ultimately, Ruben wants to suggest that the scariest thing in the world is not the horror we invent but rather the weakness within ourselves, as personified here by the classically fragile ego of Ruben’s character. Cash plays a successful writer, and he is a hack who can’t stand it.

With its single location, small cast, and October 2020 release date, it has the feel of a pandemic production, but it actually premiered at Sundance before the pandemic (or if we’re being honest, amid the pandemic but prior to our awareness). That’s not meant as a dig at the film but rather an acknowledgement that Ruben makes a lot out of a little here, and while it doesn’t entirely stick the landing, it’s a good time getting there.

New movie review: The Long Walk

There was a time in this nation when there would be calls to postpone the release of this film. When a shooting that weighed on the national consciousness – which one this week, you would be right to ask – would be enough for the loudest voices in the country to call for boycotts, bans, or at the very least a moratorium on a movie such as this.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not one for moral outrage. I don’t believe in censorship. And, frankly, the righteous indignation meter is so constantly running on full that we live in a perpetual state of crying wolf. What bogeyman is bothering you today? A pop star? A children’s cartoon? An early-education influencer? At a certain point, you have to tune it out because the outrage isn’t real. It’s meant to provoke. It’s meant to steal your energy and wear you down so you’re too exhausted for the fights that do matter.

I mention all of this because if the latest Stephen King adaptation, The Long Walk, is about anything, it is about the normalization of violence and what happens to our humanity when we cease to be shocked by the horrors around us. You have probably seen the moment in the trailer when a young man is shot to death and one character turns to another to say, “I keep hoping that part gets easier.” The response: “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

One of the great triumphs of Francis Lawrence’s film is that the violence never gets easier. Death is never less than horrific, and to the great credit of the filmmakers, every death means something. Lawrence, of course, is well versed in dystopian fiction in which young people are made to play out a sick dance of death for the benefit (and control) of a mass audience, having directed four of the five Hunger Games movies, with another on the way.

The Hunger Games franchise is fun, but it’s glossy, PG-13 YA lit stuff. This is hard ‘R’ because it must be. This is not about cute kids (alright, there’s one cute kid, but his fate is just as horrible as the rest) in an artificial reality. These are young men, mostly 18-25-ish, beaten down by a world that has nothing for them – no opportunity, no hope, no future. Not since a vaguely alluded to war allowed a totalitarian government to come into power and that regime unsurprisingly has tanked whatever economic prospects the people might have.

The only opportunity to improve one’s lot in life: win a lottery to represent your state in The Long Walk, a televised death march, at the end of which the sole survivor receives untold wealth and the granting of a single wish. As for the rest, the luckiest receive a bullet to the head. For others, it’s much worse.

Lawrence and writer JT Mollner (Strange Darling) waste little time in getting us on the road. We meet Ray (Cooper Hoffman), the lucky winner who gets to represent the state where this year’s walk takes place, and his mom, Mrs. Garraty (Judy Greer). Greer is wonderful in the couple of brief scenes we get her in, communicating a lifetime of devastation in just a couple minutes’ screentime. She drops Ray off at the starting line, where we meet a selection of other participants, and we’re off.

Mollner’s script is efficient and effective in letting us know who each of these characters is. Some of them feel stock – this is King’s first novel, after all – but they are imbued with depth and life by a tremendous cast, including Ben Wang as Olson, Roman Griffin Davis as Curly, Charlie Plummer as Barkovitch, Garrett Wareing as Stebbins, Tut Nyuot as Baker, and Jordan Gonzalez as Harkness.

The most important of Ray’s fellow walkers is Pete, played by David Jonsson. You might recognize Jonsson for his incredible turn as the android Andy in last year’s Alien: Romulus. He delivers the performance of the film as Ray’s friend, confidant, and mirror image, offering light to Ray’s darkness, hope to his despair. Hoffman, who is also excellent, and Jonsson have a natural chemistry that carries us through long stretches in which the film gives itself over to the two of them sharing, philosophizing, and simply being there for one another.

Mark Hamill, in his second King adaptation this summer after The Life of Chuck, plays The Major, ostensibly the villain of the piece, though the real villain is the society that permits all of this to take place. He is a suitably malevolent force, commanding a squad of faceless, nameless soldiers who carry out the will of the machine, executing young men for daring to need the most basic elements of survival and humanity.

Many of the things you might expect to happen in this story do happen, but the ways in which they happen are consistently surprising. While some characters start as clichés and variations on themes we have seen before, the story evolves away from the trite and into the specifics of each, succeeding in giving us a cast of characters we truly care about and making it all the more devastating for what we know must happen to them.

But, why must it happen? It happens because society not only allows it but insists upon it. The Long Walk is meant to give viewers hope – you, too, may someday be lucky enough to rise from your station – and pride – look how far the boy from your state got before he was massacred! Early on, we learn that although all of these boys volunteered for the lottery, none of them has ever met a person who didn’t volunteer, which makes a strong point about the illusion of choice under tyranny.

King published the novel in 1979, when it was largely seen as an allegory for the Vietnam War, the draft, and the senseless violence to which the nation was a party. That metaphor holds true enough, but in an age in which we are inundated with violence and death on levels never before imagined, it means something more. Of course, we still send soldiers off to die. We still send weapons to aid in the deaths of women and children in far-off lands. And, we still drop bombs on people we have never met for reasons that are vague at best.

But, here at home, we send children off to school with little more than thoughts and prayers that they will make it back safely at the end of the day. Most of them do. Some of them don’t. One should be too many, but it seems now there will never be enough death to spur us into action. The Long Walk is a visceral examination of the world we have built and a reminder that goddammit, it doesn’t have to be this way.

The world turned upside down: Hamilton at 10

One of the things about great art that distinguishes it from the merely good is the way it changes over time. It is malleable, not because anything inherent to the piece changes but because we change. It becomes what we need it to be, meeting the moment to reflect our hopes, our fears, and our insecurities.

When Hamilton debuted on Broadway 10 years ago, we were in Year 7 of the Barack Obama presidency. That presidency, though complicated, at least felt like the needle was moving in the right direction, pointing toward the dream of a more perfect union. It felt like an era of progress, opportunity, and possibility. For whatever flaws and failures you want to discuss from that time, America had at least pushed up against the bounds of what was possible, discovered a way to move forward.

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical reflected this in both execution and theme. Blending hip-hop and R&B with traditional Broadway musical numbers, a mostly non-white cast portraying the all-white Founding Fathers, its story of the fight for change and the need to put the cause above the self – it all spoke to the moment. In a word, it was inspiring. It said: Get out there, change the world, remake it in your image.

Then, 2016 happened. The desire to make America great again is inherently backward thinking, regressive, a challenge to the very notion of progress. It is borne out of fear and an inability or refusal to adapt to a changing world. It is also a weak argument, which to succeed requires only that good people do nothing. As we saw, though many stood, enough good people did nothing.

For this, too, Miranda had given us the blueprint in the form of Aaron Burr. He says nothing, does nothing, stands for nothing. He waits to see which way the winds blow, then follows. He is always behind, whereas progress and change exist at the tip of the spear. The Alexander Hamilton of Miranda’s story proudly – if haphazardly on occasion – carries the spear into battle. The Burrs of the world, who refuse to join the fight, only make it that much harder for the people on the front line to succeed.

The years went on, Hamilton becoming both the most successful musical in history and a flashpoint in the culture wars. The very people who mocked college students for requesting “safe spaces” were aghast when their vice president was booed while attending a performance of the show on Broadway. “How about a little respect and civility?” cried the people in their “Fuck Your Feelings” T-shirts.

Perhaps a few more of them would have survived if we would have printed “Fuck Your Feelings” masks. Oh, right, the pandemic. While the Hamilton cast recording was on its way toward becoming the best-selling cast album of all time, the apparatus put in place to protect the nation – and the world at large – from the next inevitable virus was being dismantled by people more concerned with destroying what came before than building what would come next. Backward thinking, remember?

So, those of us privileged enough to quarantine quarantined. We sought comfort. We sought release. We sought something to make us feel a little more whole, a little more human again. And once more, there was Hamilton.

In early February 2020, Disney paid $75 million to acquire the rights to a filmed version of the Broadway show, featuring the original cast, in one of the most expensive film-acquisition deals in history. The announced plan was to release the film in theaters in October 2021, but you will note that “early February 2020” is about five weeks before everything changed.

Cinemas shut down. Broadway theaters shut down. The world shut down. Apart from whatever else this meant – which we don’t have time to get into here – it accelerated the streaming revolution exponentially. Last Cinema Standing or not, to get my movie fix, I had to stream (though I did attend a fair number of drive-in movies during the lockdown).

The race was on to dominate the streaming landscape. Netflix, of course, had a massive headstart, having been in the game, pushing this radical change for years. Amazon Prime had been around, taking up much of the rest of the marketplace. But, as it became clear streaming was the future, everyone felt the need to get in on the action. Disney being Disney, the Mouse House got in ahead of the curve – pun intended; remember flattening the curve? – and launched Disney+ in November 2019, a mere four months before lockdown. HBO Max launched in May 2020 and Peacock in July that year.

What was Disney to do with this $75 million investment in a film with no theaters in which to play it? Well, bully for them, the company had a streaming service in need of a splashy way to draw subscribers. Nothing could be splashier than a high-quality recording of an era-defining, zeitgeist-capturing musical that was just sitting on a shelf for the theoretical day theaters might reopen. So, Disney dropped Hamilton into the streaming ocean, and more than a splash, it was a tidal wave.

It premiered July 3, 2020. Within a month, an estimated 37 percent of all Disney+ subscribers had watched it. At the time, that translated to 22 million subscribers, and unless they all watched it alone, that meant significantly more than 22 million people had watched it. The weekend of its release, the Disney+ app saw a 72 percent increase in downloads over the week prior. It ended up being the second-most streamed film of 2020, behind only Wonder Woman 1984.

If you were on the internet at the time, you know its impact went far beyond streaming numbers and app downloads. It was inescapable. The memes, the discussion boards, the videos, the fan theories – Hamilton was everywhere. Every theater kid, past and present, came out of the woodwork to celebrate this cultural moment.

I watched it July 6, three days after its release. Then again July 7. And again July 12. It had me. Instantly, I recognized it as the towering artistic achievement that it is. I had just two regrets. First, I lived in New York City during Hamilton’s Broadway heights. I could have seen it, should have seen it, but tickets were going for $500 a seat minimum. The expense felt unjustifiable. This was a large part of the reason Miranda agreed to create a filmed version of the show in the first place: to make it accessible to families without $2,000 to spend on a Broadway show, if they could even get to Broadway.

It’s one of the reasons I prefer film to live theater. The rush of live theater is wonderful. I have acted in a number of shows and sat in attendance for some fabulous productions. But, it’s an experience reserved for those privileged by money and proximity. It is fleeting, existing only for the moment of time in which it is performed, which is what lends it its power. But, it’s not very democratic. I cannot convey to you the experience of sitting in the third row of the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in 2015 and witnessing the magic of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. You had to be there.

With a movie on the other hand, I can take you to the cinema and you will have the same experience I did. I can lend you a DVD or send you a link to stream it. It will be the same tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. And, we need not live anywhere near each other or near a single venue to share the experience. Film is for the people.

The second regret I alluded to was that I could watch the recording of Hamilton only at home, not in the theater as intended. I have a very nice TV and a comfortable living room, but it’s no cinema. And, while I understood the business thinking behind Disney’s decision, I lamented that we might never see Hamilton on the big screen. And then, all of a sudden, here it was.

In theaters this week, at long last, we have Hamilton. It opened No. 2 at the box office, earning a little more than $10 million. For a show that has slipped from the zeitgeist and a film that has been available to stream for five years, it’s an impressive haul, and Disney must be wondering how much money was left on the table all these years. The Disney coffers, however, are none of my concern. We are getting this show at the exact moment we need it, reflecting still our ever-changing hopes, fears, and insecurities. 

It would be absurd if it weren’t true that we have the opportunity to watch a cast of mostly Black and Latino performers sing about the promise of building a free nation at the very moment the Supreme Court of that nation has empowered the government to terrorize communities of color.

How darkly comic that just a couple weeks removed from the latest mass shooting to result in the deaths of children – a uniquely American pastime – we can take in a story about cycles of gun violence and the need to break our patterns in order to protect future generations from the mistakes we have made.

What cosmic joke puts us in a theater for a show about the power of democracy and the need to stand up to tyranny in the same instant that the very foundation of democracy – that one person’s vote counts the same as another’s – is under attack, not for the first time and surely not for the last?

I would love to sit here and gush about everything that makes Hamilton such an achievement as a piece of musical theater: the intricacies of the lyrics, the stunning choreography (which is only improved by seeing it on the big screen, by the way), the structure, the detail, and the performances. But, you don’t need me to tell you that what Miranda has created is singular in its vision and execution. The show speaks for itself.

And, anyway, me sitting here, breaking down how Miranda’s leitmotifs clue us in to each character’s fate long before they become clear in the plot would be a little like analyzing the brush strokes on Monet’s Water Lilies. It would be fun and perhaps informative, but it would miss the forest for the trees. I’m more interested in what we feel when we take it in and what we can do with that feeling.

In the moments before his onstage death, Alexander sings:

“Legacy, what is a legacy?

It’s planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.

I wrote some notes at the beginning of a song someone will sing for me.

America, you great unfinished symphony, you sent for me.

You let me make a difference.

A place where even orphan immigrants

Can leave their fingerprints and rise up.”

So, the feeling I am left with watching Hamilton now is that these words do not reflect the America I see around me, but rather the nation I wish we could be. The villains want to write our country’s coda, but we cannot let them. Let this moment in history be a measure, a phrase, a single note that fades into oblivion and gives way to the song we sing tomorrow, together in triumph.