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.
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