Late Stage Films

      I'll put it in writing right here, right now: I do not like "The Square". It is a two and a half hour film with exactly 2 good sequences (Elisabeth Moss fighting over a condom and Terry Notary being an ape, to be precise) and otherwise filled with satire that is both very obvious and not especially funny. It won the Palme D'or. Surely that should have been that. But no, Ruben Östlund, the primary figure in Swedish cinema on the global stage at this moment in time, somehow snagged a second golden palm for... it would be pithy to call it the same thing, but it's darn close.   What we have here is a "high concept" but puddle deep satire of rich people. Ruben  Östlund thinks that rich people are kind of lame. He thinks this generally, because nobody should have that much wealth, and he thinks specifically that rich people are fake woke hypocrites. These are the exact same things he thought in 2017 when he won his first top prize at Cannes. What we have...

 "A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night" is the kind of brilliant film that instantly turns its director into a star. Ana Lily Amirpour's debut feature is stylish, has a number of very nice horror set pieces, and it somehow manages to be both a clever inversion of horror tropes and a meaningful commentary on the state of Iranian women and societal decay. Her follow up films, "The Bad Batch" and "Mona Lisa And The Blood Moon", are stylish. I wish they were something more, because Amirpour is weird and exciting and Hollywood needs that. But I don't think they are.  Distributed by small time Saban Films in a few independent theaters for a few weeks, "Mona Lisa" starts off strong enough. We see a girl with psychic mind control powers escape a mental institution, with plenty of good gore and fun camera work, and the movie just kind of is  that for the rest of the run time. The film's opening sequence is by far the best bit of horror here. The ...