Monday Miniatures: Classic Action, Early Auteurs, and New Releases

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.

Year in Review: What is a ‘2020 Movie’ anyway?

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Another way to phrase that headline would be: What is a movie in 2020 anyway? In one sense, what I mean is which movies would be eligible for “best of the year” consideration in a year as strange as 2020? In another sense, however, I mean to ask what we even mean anymore when we talk about film. Is it the theater? Is the pedigree of the artists? Is there some magical, mysterious force that confers importance upon a project such that we deem it “cinema?”

Famous culture critics such as Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall have raged against the debate between cinema and television for years, particularly when a director like David Lynch suggests the third season of his show Twin Peaks should actually be considered an 18-hour movie. Such a suggestion implies a certain embarrassment at the prospect of having made television instead of film. That is, of course, silly. Breaking Bad may be one of the finest pieces of art of the 21st century. It is definitively television, and it is decidedly better and more important that 90 percent of what we might call cinema.

If it were ever important at all to distinguish the two, the difference between film and television used to be relatively clear in my mind. Movies played in theaters. Television played at home on TV. With the rise of streaming and the seeming de-emphasis of the cinema, though, the lines get blurrier and blurrier, and the noise on both sides of the debate gets louder and louder.

It is funny even to frame it as a debate. The stakes are low, there is no right answer, and no one wins a prize for convincing anyone of anything. Anyway, for most folks, the distinction is academic. If you can watch it and enjoy it, does it matter if it is film or television or some weird hybrid in between or none of the above? No, but around here, we like to make academic distinctions.

So, we will not frame this as a debate --  I feel no need to convince you, and you should feel no need to change your mind -- but rather a discussion in four parts.

Case study No. 1: Portrait of a Lady on Fire

You may recall hearing a lot about Céline Sciamma’s brilliant romance around this time last year. The film debuted at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival then opened in theaters in November 2019 for a one-week Academy Awards qualifying run. It received no nominations, but the critics and few audience members who had seen it immediately recognized its brilliance. Thus, Portrait of a Lady on Fire ended up at or near the top of many Best of 2019 lists and even a few end-of-decade lists. It was not on mine.

I did not get to see the film until the same time much of the public did -- in February 2020. Its greatness was, of course, self-evident, featuring two stunning lead performances from Adèle Haenel and Noémie Merlant and some of the most gorgeous cinematography you will ever see. My own Best of 2019 lists had long since been compiled, and it felt strange to consider putting it on my Best of 2020 list more than a year and a half after it screened at Cannes.

This actually is a common problem with Academy eligibility and release windows of foreign films. One of the best films of 2016 was Danish war drama Land of Mine, but you will not find it on any of my year-end lists. This is because it was nominated at the 2016 Oscars but released in the U.S. in early 2017. To complicate matters further, it screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2015 and was released to theaters in Denmark in December that year. So, is Land of Mine one of the best films of 2015, 2016, or 2017? 

Such matters really only matter to those of us obsessed with listmaking and chronicling the history of the cinema in an orderly fashion. By any measure, Land of Mine is a tremendous achievement and a must-see film. So it is with Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which will appear in my end-of-2020 wraps-ups. By any previously established precedent, it would not have qualified for me as a “2020 movie,” but as we now know, 2020 was the year of the unprecedented.

Case study No. 2: Hamilton and David Byrne’s American Utopia

I have never attended one of those Fathom Events screenings where they show pre-recorded performances of theater productions. They always seem interesting but have never been a viewing priority. However, when I heard Disney was going to release Hamilton in theaters, that became a priority. Of course, theaters shut down and Disney chose to release the show on its nascent streaming platform in July.

The show, of course, is excellent, but is it a movie? Most would say no. The Academy deemed it ineligible for Oscars consideration, although it will be eligible at the Golden Globes as a film. Perhaps an argument could be made for it as an avant-garde documentary depicting a single performance of the Broadway show Hamilton. 

It certainly feels as though it rises above the level of a mere pre-recorded stage production, with editing choices and camera angles that place it in the realm of great cinema. But as Zoller Seitz and Sepinwall will tell you, a filmed piece of art being great does not make it a movie. I have not seen Hamilton appear on many if any year-end lists, particularly not those strictly confined to film. And yet, we have David Byrne’s American Utopia this very year as a counterexample.

The Spike Lee concert film of David Byrne’s Broadway show is a wonderful, joyous document, and it has appeared on many end-of-the-year lists, but it is not substantially different from Hamilton as a film. It is a Broadway production, recorded and presented with amazing craft by a great filmmaker. Fans of Stop Making Sense or The Last Waltz would argue the concert film has a long, vital history in the cinema, but what is a Broadway musical if not a concert with a story?

Again, I have no answers here, only questions and beliefs. In this case, that belief is that if we want to call Lee’s film one of the best of the year -- and it should certainly be considered as such -- then we should refer to Hamilton in the same fashion.

Case study No. 3: Small Axe

I will be brief here because I intend to write about Small Axe in much greater depth in the coming days. If you are unfamiliar, Small Axe is a series of five feature films directed by Steve McQueen, all dealing with the experiences of West Indian peoples in the UK around the mid-20th century. The films played on Amazon Prime in the US and the BBC in the UK, though the first two features in the series, Mangrove and Lover’s Rock, premiered at the New York Film Festival.

If you look around, you will find Small Axe represented across lists of the best television of the year and the best films of the year, sometimes by the same publications. Everyone can agree on the series’ brilliance, but no one can seem to agree what it is. Some critics have broken it apart and called Lover’s Rock one of the standalone best films of the year, while still others have made the NYFF double feature of Mangrove and Lover’s Rock a single entry.

I do not begrudge anyone their opinion and am simply thrilled Small Axe is receiving the recognition it deserves. Hopefully, wherever people read about it, they are intrigued, and they watch it. That is the point of all this year-end handwringing anyway. For me, much like Krzysztof Kieślowski’s much-lauded Decalogue, Small Axe is meant to be taken as a whole. It is one grand, magnificent film, and that is how this site will treat it.

Case study No. 4: Nomadland, et. al.

Finally, what of the “2020” films that were not released to theaters or streaming services in the previous calendar year? Nomadland, Minari, Promising Young Woman, and more, the movies some folks have seen, which will be eligible for this year’s Academy Awards, but which most of the filmgoing public will not have had the chance to view. These are some of the best reviewed, most anticipated films of the year, and they just will not be able to factor into any kind of year-end wrap-up, at least not on this site.

If all of them end up being stunning masterpieces, then we will likely have a more wide-ranging version of the Portrait of a Lady on Fire scenario outlined above, and that is okay. If January 2020 rolls around and I am the only one left talking about Nomadland amid next year’s crop of potential modern classics, then so be it. I am here to talk about great films, whenever and however, and at the end of it all, that is why we are here. To talk about great films, whether or not they fit our preconceived notion of cinema.

Last Cinema Standing’s 2017 Year in Review

The tendency in people is to look for a lesson, a theme, some kind of connecting thread to give all the chaos around us meaning and purpose. We invent religions and other systems of belief to cope. We study far-off stars and earth-bound microbes in search of answers. We talk, hopefully, with each other – as opposed to at each other, over each other, or not at all – creating communities to guide us, comfort us, and protect us. There must be some reason, we think, we wonder, we hope, and in the face of great uncertainty, we press on.

All of this is to say 2017 did not make much sense. At times, navigating the past 12 months felt like creeping through a dimly lit corridor, grasping at shadows instead of the light. I won’t get too political here – there will be plenty of time for that later – except to say it was a bad year and logic suggests this will be even worse.

Last Cinema Standing began as a way to start a conversation about films, to relate them to people’s lives, and to foster a deeper appreciation for what the movies can teach us about ourselves and each other. In the face of the world as it is, it is fair to ask if that mission still has meaning. I submit it means more now than ever before. I am fond of quoting Roger Ebert and in particular his calling the cinema “a machine that generates empathy.” In this new world, I cannot think of a greater need than such a machine.

So we press on. Where life does not provide a lesson, a theme, or a thread, perhaps the year in film will offer one. Beyond that, however, the Year in Review gives us a chance to reflect on and celebrate a bounty of wonderful movies and experiences. It is about the moments, the quotes, the performances, and the films that will stick with us as the calendar pages flip. Last Cinema Standing will spend the next week diving into all of that and more, but first, I wanted to share a few highlights from a year in moviegoing.

Writer-director Julia Ducournau’s Raw screened as part of the Film Society’s New Directors, New Films Festival, and it was a treat, indeed. Ducournau and star Garance Marillier stayed for a fabulous question-and-answer session afterward, during which a woman in the audience stood and angrily confronted the director. She wondered why such a film even needs to exist then stormed out of the theater. Ducournau merely smirked and continued undeterred. There must be a perverse pleasure in making a film that upsets someone to such a degree but nevertheless compels her to sit through the whole thing.

In April, the QUAD Cinema, one of those great old New York City art-house theaters, after a years-long renovation and change of hands, re-opened as a cinephile’s dream. Apart from its wonderful selection of first-run films, the operators have dedicated the QUAD to becoming the premier repertory theater in the city. As part of that mission, the programmers present the First Encounters series, in which notable figures in the film world choose films they have never seen, watch them with an audience and react.

I was fortunate to attend the inaugural event, at which writer-director-actor Greta Gerwig presented David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. A few days later, John Turturro was on hand for a viewing of Satyajit Ray’s world cinema masterwork Pather Panchali. To see a great or interesting film anew through the eyes of one who has never seen it is among the true joys of cinema – this is why we share our favorite movies with our friends – and to experience that with professionals who are also endlessly knowledgeable and boundless in the depth of their love for the form, well, that is just the icing on the cake.

In September, the Lincoln Center screened Spike Lee’s Crooklyn as the inaugural One Film, One New York selection, an initiative to unite the city under the banner of a single moviegoing experience. The film was shown for free around the city, and Lee appeared at the Lincoln Center in Manhattan and the BAM Cinematek in Brooklyn with New York Times film critic AO Scott to discuss his quintessentially New York film. My fiancée and I waited three hours in the rain to hear Mr. Lee’s thoughts, and he did not disappoint. Spike, as ever, was Spike – equal parts prickly, confrontational, and humble, but always damn right.

The following month came the New York Film Festival, where we attended a screening of Sean Baker’s lovely ode to the resilience and spirit of childhood, The Florida Project. Baker was joined onstage afterward by his co-writer and the stars of the film, including the 7-year-old scene-stealer Brooklynn Prince, who if she so chooses could feature in everything from now until the sun burns out and that would be just fine.

Eight years ago, I called Carter Burwell the best composer working in Hollywood, an opinion that has not wavered. Last month, I got the chance to tell him so when he was on hand for a screening of Todd Haynes’ Wonderstruck. Long stretches of the film are carried only by music, and Burwell once again proves up to the task. In discussion, he proved worthy of admiration not only for his talent but for his kindness and generosity,

I could go on all day like this, and if you catch me in conversation, there is always the chance I will, but let’s wrap it up with this: In May, I attended the Film Society’s Chaplin Award Gala, where Robert De Niro was honored for his contributions to the cinema. It was about this time the current administration was elbow-deep in its attempts to defund the National Endowment for the Arts, among other arts programs.

It was a wonderful evening, filled with humorous, heartfelt speeches from folks like Meryl Streep, Ben Stiller, Michael Douglas, Whoopi Goldberg, and Martin Scorsese, who ultimately presented De Niro with the award. But the highlight surely was De Niro, who could not pass up the opportunity to stand up and speak for artists and art everywhere in a speech that spoke to the very core of why we were all there that night.

“Everyone knows Chaplin was a great artist, but he made his movies to entertain. It was only later that they became art,” De Niro said. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because of our government’s hostility towards art. The budget proposal, among its other draconian cuts to life-saving and life-enhancing programs, eliminates the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. For their own devices and political purposes, the administration suggests that the money for these all-inclusive program goes to the rich, liberal elite. This is what they now call an alternative fact. I call it what it is — bullshit.”

Bullshit it was, and bullshit it remains. If there is a lesson, a theme, or a meaning to be taken from the chaos of the past year, it is this: Art will not be silenced, and each of the extraordinary writers, directors, and performers contributing to the cinema is evidence of that fact. So we press on.

Welcome to Last Cinema Standing’s 2017 Year in Review, in which we will look back at the year that was cinema through the best moments, best quotes, best performances, and best films of the past 12 months. Check back each day this week for a new entry. Tomorrow: Top 10 Moments.