Monday Miniatures: The PTA Project and an Animated Masterpiece

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. 22-28, 2025:

The Master, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Inherent Vice, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Phantom Thread, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Licorice Pizza, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

One Battle After Another, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

How I watched them: The Master - Blu-ray; Inherent Vice - Amazon Prime; Phantom Thread - Amazon Prime rental; Licorice Pizza - Amazon Prime; One Battle After Another - In theaters (AMC Americana at Brand XL)

The second half of my Paul Thomas Anderson rewatch is complete, ending with a screening of One Battle After Another on opening night. I will have a full review of the film up this week, as well as some thoughts on the whole PTA catalogue and hopefully some other fun bric-a-brac. For the moment, I will say the new film is one of the best films of the year, certainly in the top tier of PTA works, and a movie people will be talking about for a long time.

Flow, directed by Gints Zilbalodis

How I watched it: 4k DVD

The only non-PTA film I had the chance to watch this week, this is my third time seeing Flow but first at home after seeing it twice in theaters. In addition to being one of the best films of last year, it was also one of my favorites, so the moment Criterion announced they would be releasing a 4k edition, I knew I would be getting it. The DVD was released Tuesday of last week and my pre-order arrived Friday. I immediately popped it in.

I chose to watch with the new Zilbalodis commentary track, which offers a ton of insight into the way the filmmaker thinks about character development and using action to move a story forward. He also shared the difficulties in working independently with open-source software – high-definition animation files have a tendency to overwhelm a PC – but also the freedom to tell the kind of story he wanted in his way.

After seeing the film in theaters, I called Flow one of the most gorgeously animated films ever made, and seeing it in 4k has done nothing to change that opinion. The richness of the background details, the smooth camera moves, and the beautiful interplay between light and shadow all come through wonderfully on this transfer. There remain shots in the film – even after listening to Zilbalodis explain how they were done – that I can’t fathom how they were done. I can’t wait to dig into the director’s other work, which is also included in the set.

‘Horror. Terror. Death. Film at 11’: On Joe Dante’s Piranha

You know it’s a Jaws ripoff. I know it’s a Jaws ripoff. Director Joe Dante knew it was a Jaws ripoff. Super producer Roger Corman insisted it be a Jaws ripoff. Hell, it even came out the same summer as Jaws 2, much to the chagrin of the executives at Universal. But, which movie are we still talking about today? It ain’t Jaws 2. It’s Piranha.

Dante’s gloriously handcrafted B-movie creature feature remains as entertaining, outlandish, and subversive as the day it was released. The director was on hand Friday at Vidiots in Eagle Rock for a screening of the film in celebration of the 13th anniversary of Scream! Factory, a boutique DVD label specializing in mostly ’70s and ’80s horror.

“You gotta remember, this was a Vietnam War picture. This is a picture made during the war,” Dante told a sold-out house of rapt admirers. “It’s got a lot of political undertones, which can’t help but be overtones.”

It’s hardly surprising Dante and co-writer John Sayles – the pair would collaborate again on 1981’s The Howling – came together to make such a straightforwardly political film. Both men represented a kind of independent-minded, ‘60s free spirit radicalized by the Vietnam War, so of course they brought that into their art. What is more surprising is how entertaining they were able to make the film on a shoestring budget and a short schedule.

This is accomplished largely by cranking the mayhem and carnage up to 11, in that perfectly Corman-esque way of throwing ever more blood at the screen. The thing about Jaws is that the shark attacks are quite visceral and memorable, but they are few and far between. In total, five people and a dog die in Jaws. In Piranha, five people are dead before the real action is even underway.

Now, it should go without saying that Piranha is not a perfect film by any stretch. It’s a tremendous amount of fun, but it’s still flawed in the way so many B-movies of its ilk are flawed. The acting is occasionally suspect, some of the effects shots don’t hold up, and the plot is a structural mess in which many things happen just for the sake of having them happen. And getting back to the mayhem of it all, the film has two climaxes when surely one would have sufficed. 

At the same time, there’s not a thing I would change about it. That’s the magic of this brand of filmmaking, and seeing it in a packed house only makes that magic more powerful. Yes, we laugh together at the absurdity of it all, but we also cringe together and cover our eyes at the moments that still horrify. As he would later prove with Gremlins, Dante is a master of making you chuckle with delight then scream in terror within the same breath.

And, that brings us to the first of the film’s two climaxes: the summer camp. One of the fascinating things about the movie is that the heroes, played by Bradford Dillman and Heather Menzies, are always a step behind the piranha. In the first place, they are the ones who inadvertently release the genetically modified killer fish into the river system. Then, they spend the rest of the movie following a trail of corpses.

The Dillman character’s daughter is attending a summer camp downstream where, naturally, the kids are earning their swimming badges on this fateful day. So, it becomes a race against time to get to the camp and save the kids. But, here’s the wild thing about Dante’s film: They don’t make it in time. And they’re not just a little late. The piranha have a veritable feast on a couple dozen 8- to 12-year-olds and some counselors before the heroes show up to pull the body parts out of the water.

At this point, it’s worth mentioning the piranha exist in the first place as an army experiment intended to destabilize Vietnamese river systems as part of the war effort. And, the army is largely concerned with ensuring this secret never becomes public knowledge. Allegorically, we understand the campers as stand-ins for the young men sent off to die in war. In actuality, though, it’s just viscerally upsetting to watch a lot of preteens screaming at the top of their lungs as they are eaten.

Had that been the ending, it would have been enough. Instead, in true Jaws fashion, we must have the civic leader who knowingly serves up the community as a buffet for the carnivorous fish. In this case, it’s the resort owner played by Corman stalwart Dick Miller, who not only insists the lake is safe but is, in fact, in league with the army. It’s as if Mayor Vaughn and the shark were business partners.

As must happen, all hell breaks loose. It’s carnage on a scale heretofore unimagined. In one of the film’s great satirical jabs at a nation that had spent more than a decade watching young men return from Vietnam traumatized, maimed, and worse, the event is covered by the local media in alarmingly deadpan fashion: “Horror. Terror. Death. Film at 11.” It’s a great laugh line, but it’s also a damning indictment of the media in 1978 and how far we have not come since.

The film spawned one direct sequel – pun intended – and a pair of remakes. I have almost certainly seen the also-Corman-produced 1995 remake more times than I have seen the original simply because it was the Piranha film of my youth. I also saw Alexandre Aja’s 2010 remake, Piranha 3D, in theaters. It’s a lovely night at the movies, but the CGI fish make one miss the tactile nature of Dante’s rubber puppets.

In the end, I think that’s the lasting legacy of Piranha. Sure, it’s a ripoff, but it’s also a film in its own right, made by true artists who said, “If we’re going to steal, we may as well steal the best we can.” And, their best was so strong that nearly 50 years later, people still gather to laugh and scream together on a Friday night.

Dante summed it well in his Q&A before the screening: “It’s a completely different business as, as you may have noticed, it’s a completely different world right now. It’s a completely different America right now, and we’re all in it together. And that’s why we gather in places like this to have shared experiences because that’s all we have left.”

A brief word on Scream! Factory

It should be self-evident but bears repeating regardless: If you can’t hold it, you don’t own it. In an era of streaming, when so many films are just instantly available with the click of a button, it is worth remembering how many films are not available. Whether it’s because an executive decided the rights weren’t worth the cost or the film simply never made the leap from one technology to the next, the history of an art form is shrinking before our very eyes. Media consolidation and corporate conglomeration do not take place for the benefit of the consumer.

Physical media mean more now than they ever have, and this is true across all art forms, by the way. Wait for the day your favorite musician no longer appears on Spotify, and you’re going to wish you’d kept a few of your old cassettes and CDs.

Scream! Factory, which partnered with Vidiots to present Friday’s screening, is the horror sub-label of home video distributor Shout! Factory. These kinds of boutique labels are cropping up more and more as the only places to find certain titles that would otherwise be ignored by the big studios and distributors. These companies do the work of restoring, preserving, and making available the history of the medium, and their efforts are worth recognizing and applauding.

After the film screening, I dropped by the small pop-up store Scream! Factory had set up inside Vidiots. I snagged a 4k restoration of Brian De Palma’s Carrie and blu-rays of personal favorite Tales from the Hood and cult classic Sleepaway Camp. With horror season right around the corner, I can guarantee each of these discs will be getting a spin very soon. I say all of this just to say: If you love something, preserve it.

Monday Miniatures: Back to School Means It’s PTA Season

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. 15-21, 2025:

Hard Eight, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Boogie Nights, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Magnolia, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Punch-Drunk Love, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

There Will Be Blood, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

How I watched them: Hard Eight and Magnolia - Amazon Prime rentals; Boogie Nights - Paramount+; Punch-Drunk Love - Criterion Channel; There Will Be Blood - DVD

With my most anticipated movie of the fall less than a week away and a series of pieces planned here for the release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest feature, now seemed like an opportune time to revisit each of the director’s nine previous films. I will be diving deeper into these films in separate articles later this week, so I’ll reserve comment for that. For now, let it be enough to say that this rewatch has been an absolute delight, Anderson is not only one of our most important but our most deft filmmakers, and my expectations for One Battle After Another could not be higher. 

Images, directed by Robert Altman

How I watched it: Rented DVD from Vidiots

I paired this with There Will Be Blood, which features a dedication to Altman, who was a mentor and inspiration to Anderson. It’s easy to see the influence in their sprawling, kaleidoscopic ensemble pieces like Altman’s Nashville or The Player and Anderson’s Boogie Nights and Magnolia. But even in something more internal and esoteric like Images, you can see the way the camera moves and actors are placed within a scene influencing the filmmaker Anderson would become.

Of course, Images is, itself, heavily influenced by Ingmar Bergam, in particular the Swedish master’s Persona. Altman would revisit this theme of fractured psyches a few years later in the more lauded Three Women, which I found a tad inscrutable. Images is a nervy little thriller with an excellent leading performance from Susannah York, whom I know best from They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? but whom you may recognize from the Christopher Reeve Superman films.

Overall, I  prefer Altman at his biggest and boldest, allowed to paint on his grandest canvases. If nothing else, Images serves as proof of Altman’s wonderful versatility, even at this early middle stage of his lengthy, prolific career.

Malice, directed by Harold Becker

How I watched it: Tubi

What my grandmother would have called hooey, this was the last Aaron Sorkin-penned script I had yet to see, and now having crossed it off the list, I understand how it could have fallen to the bottom of the priority stack. If I could say anything for it, at least in the Sorkin universe, it might not be as bad as Being the Riccardos. At least he followed it up with the unbroken run of The American President, Charlie Wilson’s War, The Social Network, Moneyball, Steve Jobs, and Molly’s Game, while also sneaking in two fantastic television shows (The West Wing and Sports Night; no need to talk about Studio 60).

Sorkin doesn’t deserve all the blame here, as the underbaked script was co-written by Scott Frank, who was nearly three decades away from cementing his own TV legacy with The Queen’s Gambit. The overdirection? That belongs to Harold Becker of VisionQuest and Sea of Love fame. The appalling acting? Lay that at the feet of Nicole Kidman, Bill Pullman, and the usually reliable Bebe Neuwirth. 

Alec Baldwin comes out unscathed with a performance that taps into everything that would come to define the Baldwin on-screen persona: calm, cool arrogance in the face of nearly universal distaste. A year after Glengarry GlenRoss proved Baldwin could be relied upon to deliver chunky monologues about how great he is and much the rest of the world should thank him for that greatness, here, he gets the now-iconic “I am god” monologue. It’s as good as you’ve heard and mostly worth the price of admission.

Beyond that, there’s not much to recommend in this erotic thriller that is neither erotic nor thrilling and a noir pastiche in which the mystery is solved quite accidentally. Everyone involved had done better before and would do better again.

Corman’s World, directed by Alex Stapleton

Piranha, directed by Joe Dante

How I watched them: Corman’s World - Tubi; Piranha - In theaters (Vidiots)

I watched the documentary Corman’s World about legendary producer Roger Corman in anticipation of catching the Corman-produced Piranha at Vidiots, where Dante was on hand to discuss the film. I’ll have more to say about that in a separate piece. The documentary is the exact kind of hagiography one might expect, and that’s not a bad thing. There are worse folks in Hollywood to lionize, after all. We get some great interviews with Dante, Martin Scorsese, and longtime collaborator Jack Nicholson, who credits Corman for giving him work when no one else would.

The thing I wish there were more of: the movies. At the time this film was made in 2011, Corman had literally hundreds of credits to his name. It would be unreasonable to dig too deeply in the span of a 93-minute documentary, but one wishes Stapleton and Co. had zeroed in on a few choice examples, Piranha perhaps foremost among them.

Corman was well known for his ability to shoot quickly on tight budgets, but it would have been fascinating to highlight more of the specifics on how he accomplished that. Instead, the film focuses more on Corman’s status as the father of the New Hollywood movement, giving directors like Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and more their early shots at filmmaking. It’s a fair focus, but it ultimately means the film settles for surface-level appreciation rather than rigorous study.

12:08 East of Bucharest, directed by Corneliu Porumboiu

How I watched it: Rented DVD from Vidiots

A key film in the Romanian New Wave, this comes a year after The Death of Mr. Lazarescu put the nation’s cinema on the map at Cannes and a year before the Palme d’Or-winning 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days conquered the Croisette. Porumboiu’s film is perhaps smaller in scope than either of those two efforts, but it is no less ambitious.

The original Romanian title of the film literally translates to “Was it or wasn’t it?” As the film ultimately makes clear, the question refers to whether the small town of Vaslui was involved in the 1989 revolution that deposed dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. The 12:08 of the international title refers to the time of day when Ceausescu gave up power. Up for debate is whether the people of Vaslui protested in the streets before 12:08 p.m. or celebrated in the streets after in the safety of a nation free of its dictator.

Porumboiu uses his characters to ask vital questions about who benefits from a revolution, who gets left behind, and what any of it means anyway. It is an incontrovertible good that Ceausescu was removed from power, but it is fair to ask what kind of nation should spring up instead.

The Man Without a Past, directed by Aki Kaurismaki

How I watched it: Rented DVD from Vidiots

This was probably the most popular Kaurismaki title I had yet to see, and it may be my favorite of all his films, or at least right up there with Le Havre and Fallen Leaves. Kaurismaki is the ultimate humanist in that in his best works, the vast majority of people are decent and kind, while systems and bureaucracies serve to oppress and deny.

Here, a man played by Markku Peltola arrives in Helsinki via train and is immediately mugged and beaten within an inch of his life. As a result, he develops amnesia. So, with no identification and no memory, he begins to slip through the cracks of society. The community members around him, many of whom find themselves also forgotten by society, become his saving grace.

At every turn, he is thwarted in his attempts to apply for benefits, to find work, to navigate the legal system simply because has no name and no past. It is not enough that he is a human being, alive and real, sitting right before you. Systems are not set up for this, and it should come as little surprise that it takes a human to understand humanity. As our economic and political leaders further push algorithms and artificial intelligence on us, we would do well to remember this lesson.

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.