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| Dusan Makavejev's Man Is Not a Bird |
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 Aug. 25-31, 2025:
The Raid, directed by Gareth Evans
How I watched it: Amazon Prime rental
This one had been on the watchlist for a while. Film fans I trust had long recommended it as one of the pinnacles of action filmmaking in the new millennium. I don’t know if I’m willing to go that far, but there’s definitely a lot of fun to be had. The plot is video game stuff, the characters are thin at best, and because the story takes place in one location, even a few of the quite good action sequences start to feel a little samey.
That said, there are two big set pieces here that are worth the price of admission. The first is the hallway fight in which our hero, Rama (Iko Uwais), takes on and defeats what feels like an endless stream of bad guys coming from the stairwell and the elevator. The second is a drug lab fight that manages to bring some fresh looks to a film that’s pretty drab overall. Ultimately, it was fine, if a bit overhyped for me, and I’m probably good on the Raid franchise. By the way, if you’re looking to rent this movie as I did, the U.S. release is called The Raid: Redemption. If you’re like me, I just saved you 10 minutes of googling.
A Better Tomorrow, directed by John Woo
How I watched it: Tubi
Because I had watched The Raid, I found myself in the mood for more martial arts movies and discovered this early John Woo film that was his big breakthrough at the box office. More importantly, perhaps, this was the first of five films Woo would make with Chow Yun-fat, including The Killer and Hard Boiled. Their collaborations essentially defined the action genre for the next decade the world over, particularly once Woo made the leap to U.S. filmmaking, which he did immediately after Hard Boiled.
I see this film’s importance, but I did not think it was very good. One can see all the ways Woo would become the filmmaker he became. All the basics are there, but it all feels so basic. It’s a story about brotherhood, family, and Hong Kong gangsters, and it clearly laid the groundwork for the gun fu style of action filmmaking. It’s just that Woo did all of these things better later.
Despite playing low status in this film, Chow already has the aura of the coolest person in the room, and he gets the best action sequence in the film by far, a restaurant shootout that doesn’t end quite the way you think it will. Definitely check this out if you’re interested in the building blocks of a pair of action legends, but if you want them at their peak, check out their later collaborations.
Thunderbolts, directed by Jake Schreier
How I watched it: Disney+
By now, I hope we can all agree the Marvel Cinematic Universe should have ended with Avengers: Endgame. That would have been the artistically prudent decision. But Marvel (at least the film division) and less so Disney are not machines built to print art. They are built to print money. And, aside from bona fide hits Spider-Man: No Way Home and Deadpool & Wolverine, they’re not even reliably great at printing money anymore.
So, what of the art? Apart from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and the aforementioned No Way Home, quality is not really part of the equation anymore. Rather, it seems like an exercise in how long the studio can keep this tired old boxer of a franchise on its feet and in the ring. There is, perhaps, no better example of this than Thunderbolts*, which I missed in theaters but caught up with the day it was released to Disney+.
It’s competently made, the conflict is refreshingly earth-bound, and Florence Pugh can truly make anything work. But, what this movie ultimately is selling is The New Avengers, which the text of the film explicitly calls out as a craven stunt. However, just because you call it out doesn’t make it not so. My interest was held for much of the brief runtime, but I can’t give it much more than that.
Deadstream, directed by Vanessa Winter and Joseph Winter
How I watched it: Shudder
Though it seems divisive among horror fans, I had a good time with this one. It stars Joseph Winter as a YouTube personality who does extreme stunts for internet clout. He gets canceled and, worse, demonetized, so as part of his attempt to claw back into the spotlight, he decides to livestream himself spending the night in a haunted house. Unfortunately for him, the haunting is real, and he will go through quite a bit of hell in coming to this realization.
The film wrings some classic tension and scares from empty rooms watched by motion-activated GoPro cams, cribbing very much from the Paranormal Activity playbook. Later on, as things ramp up, there are some cool, gory effects, which I won’t describe since the surprise is half the fun. But all in all, the movie is knowingly funny. There’s a lot of broad comedy about internet influencers and the economy of virality, which I found both funny and astute. It’s no masterpiece, but spooky season is right around the corner and you could do worse.
Man Is Not a Bird, directed by Dušan Makavejev
Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator, directed by Dušan Makavejev
Innocence Unprotected, directed by Dušan Makavejev
How I watched them: Criterion Channel
My love of Makavejev began by accident, one of those weirdly serendipitous happenstances that sometimes is required to discover something new. In my freshman year of college, one of my hobbies was just to hang out at Borders on the weekends. Remember Borders? It was like Barnes & Noble, if you weren’t around for the halcyon days of mega-chain bookstores. I was totally super cool and had tons of awesome friends and also spent my weekends hanging out at bookstores by myself. I contain multitudes.
Anyway, I picked up one of the random film magazines and started thumbing through it when I got to a column on upcoming Criterion releases. At the time, I may have owned one Criterion release (the two-disc special edition of Do the Right Thing), but as a burgeoning cinephile, I knew it was important to be in the know about Criterion. A lot of cool stuff came out in June 2007, including Lindsay Anderson’s If… and the Chris Marker double feature of La Jetée and Sans Soleil.
However, what caught my eye was a small paragraph on the release of two films by Yugoslavian provocateur Makavejev. I had never heard of the director, much less the two films: W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism and Sweet Movie. The descriptions made both films sound so daring, confrontational, and nakedly political (in every sense of the phrase) that I absolutely had to see them. So, on nothing more than a magazine recommendation, I pre-ordered both discs. I fell in love with them that summer, and when I returned for sophomore year in the fall, I became very annoying about them, as a college kid is wont to do.
I eventually caught up with Makavejev’s one stab at commercial filmmaking, The Coca-Cola Kid, which is still weird and subversive as hell, but I had never gone back to the beginning. Makavejev had made three well-regarded features leading up to my beloved arthouse classics, two narrative features and one experimental documentary.
Watched in close succession, as I did, they reveal a filmmaker coming into his own, building the confidence and know-how to create what would become his lasting legacy. Man Is Not a Bird, his first feature, is much closer in style and substance to the then-nascent Czechoslovak New Wave than it is to the more experimental Yugoslav Black Wave movement, of which Makavejev is among the most important figures. And yet, all of his pet themes are there: political oppression, man’s destructive desire for self-pleasure, and the failure of our institutions to serve the people.
Love Affair, on the other hand, sees Makavejev toying with the pseudo-documentary style that would define his greatest works. He mixes a narrative about a young woman’s doomed love affair with straight-to-camera interviews with criminologists and coroners discussing the modern approach to murder and crime solving. The jumbled timeline and flashy editing are exhilarating, and you can see Makavejev becoming Makavejev.
By Innocence Unprotected, he has made the leap, ready to become the filmmaker who would make W.R. and Sweet Movie. The film is a documentary about the first Serbian sound film, also called Innocence Unprotected and made during the Nazi occupation, featuring interviews with some of the people behind the film, including most notably the director, writer, and star Dragoljub Aleksić. But, it is also a collage of wartime news reels, Nazi propaganda, and nearly the entirety of the original Serbian film.
The original film is bad, but the way Makavejev uses his film to recontextualize it lends it depth and gravity. It reminded me a bit of Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. While W.R. and Sweet Movie remain his masterpieces and my favorites of his work, this journey through Makavejev’s early features has only deepened my love for those films and increased my appreciation of the filmmaker.
The Toxic Avenger, directed by Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz
How I watched it: Amazon Prime
I knew this film by reputation but had never seen it. The same could be said for me of the whole Troma Entertainment experience. I know of The Toxic Avenger, Class of Nuke ’Em High, and Tromeo and Juliet, but I had not seen them. I mostly remember the studio for offering a part in one of its movies as the grand prize for a VH1 pop culture game show. Which one? I don’t recall off the top of my head.
Anyway, I wanted to catch up with this because I was interested in seeing the currently-in-theaters remake starring Peter Dinklage and I wanted the original context. Fans of these films will ridicule me for saying this, but it’s so much wilder than I could have imagined. It has the blood, guts, and bare breasts common to a lot of ’80s horror and cult films, but it is all pitched to such campy highs that the film becomes genuinely, endearingly baffling.
It certainly captures a specific mid-’80s, anti-Reagan, counter-culture spirit in its distrust of political institutions, the police force, and generally anybody who would be considered “cool” in a different movie. At its deepest core, if it can be said to have deeper themes of any kind, it’s about the toxicity of vanity, specifically with regard to physical appearance. Our hero – who is spontaneously and uncomplicatedly embraced by the people of his home town – is a deformed monster who mostly battles gym rats. I think the theme is pretty clear. More to come next week.
Highest 2 Lowest, directed by Spike Lee
How I watched it: In theaters (Laemmle Monica)
Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to write about this film in a more in-depth fashion at some point this week. For now, I will say that Lee’s remake/reimagining of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low is a fascinating piece of interpretation that makes a number of changes to the source material that I think largely pay off in a more modern context. Denzel Washington is tremendous, towering in more ways than one, and A$AP Rocky is the surprise of the year so far for me.
The Roses, directed by Jay Roach
How I watched it: In theaters (AMC Americana at Brand)
What a blast this was! This film did slightly less than $10 million at the box office this weekend in its debut, despite being marketed to high heaven, and I get it. I don’t know who was asking for a truly bleak comedy about marriage that is a remake of a popular but little-discussed Danny DeVito movie from the ’80s. But, damn it, the people are missing out.
Roach wanders out of the wilderness of made-for-TV docudramas like Game Change and All the Way to get back into Meet the Parents mode with a comedy that has real jokes and real characters and real pathos, a shock on all counts in the modern cinema landscape. Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised as the adaptation comes to us from Tony McNamara, writer of The Favourite and Poor Things, so we know he has a way around a wicked word or two.
But, the real joy here comes from the chemistry between stars Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch. As two people with equally deep wells of love and hate, dripping with resentment for one another, they are absolute dynamite. All Roach has to do is set the fuse, start the camera, and step back. It’s marvelous to see two such talented performers given characters with such depth, complexity, and honesty. I highly recommend checking this out in theaters with an audience before it becomes just another comedy (with a kind of bad poster) languishing on a streaming service. It’s better than that.
Nobody 2, directed by Timo Tjahhanto
How I watched it: In theaters (AMC Americana at Brand)
I caught this because it looked like fun. It delivered fun. It did not deliver much more than that. The plot machinations are haphazard at best, the character development coming off the first film is illogical, and the CGI is frankly pretty bad. All that said, if you like Bob Odenkirk kicking ass, in this film, Bob Odenkirk kicks ass. There’s a great fight on a “duck boat,” and the climactic carnival battles gets about as much fun out of its setting as one can imagine – often in ways that are totally illogical, but the Nobody world already plays pretty fast and loose with logic. Not as good as the first film, but maybe more fun.
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