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 Oct. 13-19, 2025:
A House of Dynamite, directed by Katherine Bigelow
Fail Safe, directed by Sidney Lumet
How I watched them: A House of Dynamite - in theaters (Alamo Drafthouse DTLA); Fail Safe - Tubi
A House of Dynamite was out of date before it was even released in one very specific way that tells us everything we need to know about the urgency of its message and the potency of its story. One of the film’s main characters, played by Jared Harris, is the secretary of defense. You will note that the current administration would prefer alternative terminology for this position and department, opting instead for a secretary and department of war. In the scenario posited by Bigelow and writer Noah Oppenheim, the distinction between “war” and “defense” means everything.
I watched this in conjunction with Lumet’s Fail Safe, unfairly saddled over the years with the impression that it is the stately, “eat your vegetables” version of Dr. Strangelove. Compared to Stanley Kubrick’s film, Pee-Wee’s Playhouse would seem stately. In fact, Fail Safe is a white-knuckle thriller that proves Lumet was a master of making the “men in a room” movie cinematic, a form he arguably perfected seven years prior in 12 Angry Men.
The takeaways from all nuclear thrillers – from Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove to Crimson Tide and A House of Dynamite – are largely the same. First, nuclear weapons proliferation was a mistake. Second, in a nuclear world, it is important to have rational, thoughtful, sane, and empathetic people in positions of power and making the split-second decisions that could save 10 million lives or end them.
One could reasonably ask why we need another movie that largely, if entertainingly, communicates these same themes when we have all that came before. My response would be that in the halls of power today, rationality, thoughtfulness, sanity, and empathy are in stunningly short supply. It’s critical that our great film artists, every now and then, remind us how bad things are and how little they’ve changed.
It should go without saying that Bigelow absolutely counts among our great film artists. With this, The Hurt Locker, and the controversial Zero Dark Thirty, Bigelow has proven to be the preeminent chronicler of the 21st century American war machine. The picture she paints is bleak but honest, though some will quibble with her facts. I believe Bigelow achieves an ecstatic truth through her films, a real reckoning with who we are as a nation and who we have allowed ourselves to become.
In addition to all that, A House of Dynamite, written by Noah Oppenheim, is a structural marvel, tightly edited, and featuring some of the best sound design of the year. Harris, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, and Anthony Ramos deliver tremendous performances as chess pieces with differing levels of culpability and responsibility in the film’s crisis. A marvelous movie, well worth catching in the theater if you can but certainly on Netflix when it drops this Friday.
Bring Her Back, directed by Danny and Michael Philippou
How I watched it: HBO Max
The Australian twin brothers Danny and Michael Philippou burst onto the horror scene in 2022 with the widely loved Talk to Me, a movie that asks: What if communing with the spirit realm were the new party drug? There is nothing in their new film, which was released back in May, that one could mistake for a party. Bring Her Back is unrelentingly bleak, which is not a criticism so much as a warning. If that’s not your thing, you’re going to have a bad time. If it is your thing, you’re going to have a bad time but you’ll enjoy it.
I enjoyed Bring Her Back but, by the end, found myself wanting more. Talk to Me was such a rich, deeply layered film about grief, addiction, trauma, and all that goes there that the expectations were quite high for this followup. Layered, however, is not what I would call it. Its themes are right there on the surface the whole time, which is not the worst thing in the world but doesn’t leave you much to chew on once the film is over. I walked away from Talk to Me and I couldn’t shake it. Bring Her Back passed through me like a ghost.
It might not be fair to compare, but I do so only because I know what the Philippou brothers are capable of, and I hope they keep raising the bar for their work. Sally Hawkins delivers a knockout performance, but having recently rewatched Weapons (more on that next week), it’s the kind of villain character I’m getting a little tired of. The kids in the movie are universally excellent, the filmmaking remains top notch, but I’m missing a little depth and nuance.
Jigoku, directed by Nobuo Nakagawa
How I watched it: Criterion Channel
There’s a group of films that are on my October watchlist every year and that I somehow never get around to watching. I’m hoping this finally will be the year of Yes! The 1960 Japanese classic Jigoku is the first one off the list. I had no idea what this film was about, but when the opening title card came up, revealing the direct translation of the film’s title as simply “Hell,” I knew I was in for a ride. And, what a ride it turned out to be!
Chopped (an operative word here) neatly into two halves, Nakagawa’s film is about actions and consequences, or quite literally about sin and punishment. In the first half, mild-mannered but easily influenced student Shirô (Shigeru Amachi) is led down a path of vice and destruction that results in the death and damnation of everyone in his orbit. This sequence ends with a scene of murder and mass death that is not necessarily violent but shocking nonetheless. The violence comes next.
The film’s raison d’être is its second half, a literal depiction of hell pulled from a combination of Buddhist cosmology and Chinese mythology, as well as a little bit of Christian dogma. Nakagawa’s imagery is enthralling, presaging the psychedelic era that was to come in the later ’60s and early ’70s. The violence is graphic but artful, depicting the tortures of hell as existing in a sort of perpetual dream state, where it is not simply suffering of the body but suffering of the soul. It is a chilling interpretation of eternity.
Slice, directed by Austin Vesely
How I watched it: Tubi
I really wanted to like this movie more than I did, and there absolutely is fun to be had here, just not quite enough. Set in a world where humans co-exist with mythical creatures like ghosts, werewolves, and witches, none of the characters seems particularly amazed by anything going on, which makes it difficult for the audience to be amazed by anything either.
The plot revolves around a series of murders alternately blamed on ghosts and a werewolf (played by Chance the Rapper) and a bizarre scheme to open the gates of hell. None of it makes much sense or comes together in a satisfying way. There are funny performers in this who got some big laughs from me, at least, but there’s really not enough meat on the bone.
Let me tell you the scariest thing this movie supposes: The opening involves the murder of a pizza delivery man who is killed while completing a delivery to a ghost. To be clear, the ghost has ordered a pizza, which means he intends to pay for that pizza. We also see a different ghost working at the pizza place. How horrifying that in this world, not even death earns us release from the hamster wheel of capitalism.
Tales from the Hood, directed by Rusty Cundieff
How I watched: Blu-ray I own
An essential annual watch at this point, Cundieff’s omnibus horror is 30 years old this year. It has been fascinating to rewatch and reflect on this movie over the years. For all intents and purposes, I have grown up with it. It absolutely informed my own political consciousness, specifically as it pertains to race, but its politics have not kept up with modern leftist ideals. Through no fault of its own, it reflects a very ’90s view of the problems associated with racism in this country.
Most prominently, this view largely holds that Black people bear equal responsibility for the ills of racism in their community, focusing heavily on Black-on-Black crime, domestic violence, and Black characters choosing to be subservient to white ones in order to be near power. Today, we are more aware of the systemic problems that create the conditions that foster these issues. Spike Lee, who produced this film, can fall into this trap, as well, and has done so as recently as this year in his Highest 2 Lowest.
That being said, I still believe that if we watch this film with respect for the context in which it was made and a healthy dose of progressive skepticism, it still has a ton worthwhile to say. And, it’s still fun and scary as hell. It’s probably not a coincidence that the best story is the one that remains most politically relevant: that of the “former” KKK member running for political office and bemoaning the (imagined) negative effects of anti-white racism by virtue of affirmative action. The puppet effects alone in that one are all-time horror stuff.
For this viewing, I watched with Cundieff’s commentary recorded for the Shout! Factory Blu-ray I bought as part of the pop-up I wrote about in conjunction with a screening of Joe Dante’s Piranha at Vidiots. It was fun and informative and came with the exact kind of behind-the-scenes stories you would want as a watcher of DVD commentaries, one of the many film-fan luxuries the streaming era is attempting to take from us. At 30 years old, this film remains as special to me now as when it was first released, and I hope still to be watching it 30 years in the future.
