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Another Round

Brian Eggert — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 14:56:24 +0000

Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round dances on the ledge between tragedy and comedy, chaos and clarity. The Danish filmmaker fortifies his 2020 release, winner of the Oscar for Best International Feature and many other awards, not only with a superb ensemble cast headlined by Mads Mikkelsen’s outstanding performance, but also with a balance of puckish energy and philosophical depth. He opens the film with a quote from Kierkegaard: “What is youth? A dream. What is love? The content of the dream.” Vinterberg frames youth as a fleeting time of passion that becomes muted as one grows older. From there, he thoughtfully explores the midlife crises among men who run an impulsive experiment involving alcohol—a somewhat ill-advised attempt to recapture the dream of youth and renew their dispirited lives. Their reckless revival efforts put their careers and personal lives at risk for an experiment that awakens some and sends others further into a downward spiral. Just like the characters, the film, too, alternates between high and low, playful and sobering, pickled and profound. The full review is currently exclusive to Patreon subscribers. To read it, you can purchase individual access. Or you can join Deep Focus Review’s Patron community, where you’ll receive […]

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Christine

Brian Eggert — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 15:04:44 +0000

Few names deserve a place over the title of a Stephen King adaptation. John Carpenter’s is one of them. The director made Christine in 1983 from the source novel published earlier that year, and the resulting film balances both creative voices. The adaptation reflects some of King’s signature themes: horror rooted in high school trauma, possession (hotels, animals, and inanimate objects), and the entrenched psychology of his characters. But Carpenter’s production reimagines the book for the screen, transforming the titular killer car from a vessel for a maligned spirit into a faceless, unknowable threat—an abyss of evil that reflects and distorts its driver. When an engine revs over the opening credits, unaccompanied by music, it distills Carpenter’s ambiguous intent. The filmmaker embraces the terror of the unknown and the implication of evil, relying less on exposition than powerful images to tell his story. More than the particulars of the screenplay’s adaptation, Carpenter knows the classic car’s presence is powerful and can instill terror because it warps a familiar image from Americana into something unknowable and twisted. Blending Carpenter’s and King’s sensibilities, Christine idles at the crossroads where two horror masters converge. The full review is currently exclusive to Patreon subscribers. […]

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Bring Her Back

Brian Eggert — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 13:01:41 +0000

It’s tempting to accuse Bring Her Back and its directors, Danny and Michael Philippou—the Australian twin-brother duo behind 2023’s Talk to Me—of falling into the trap affecting so much of modern horror. Every other horror filmmaker has tried to dramatically elevate their movie with themes of loss and trauma, adding formulaic emotional weight to their premise through some manner of profoundly emotional messaging. I’ve complained about the trend before, particularly involving cases of blatant literalism, such as last year’s The Substance, where its otherwise resonant message proves so surface-level that there’s nothing to mine afterward. Few choices are more banal than horror movie characters who engage in open dialogue about “trauma” and other such buzzwords; when a movie states its themes in such overt terms, it’s condescending to the viewer. It doesn’t trust that audiences are smart enough to interpret a movie or figure out what a work of art means. And there’s a little of that in Bring Her Back, but not enough to render this nasty, squirm-inducing, emotionally raw experience ineffective. When a movie is this well done, its clichés evaporate. The full review is currently exclusive to Patreon subscribers. To read it, you can purchase access individually. […]

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Lady of Burlesque

Brian Eggert — Sat, 31 May 2025 15:17:20 +0000

Lady of Burlesque’s opening titles describe the story as taking place “Along the Great White Way, before the lights went out.” This refers to Broadway’s Theater District during World War II, when the US Army ordered “dim-outs” in New York City in the event of air raids. Throughout the war years, theater owners shut down their marquees, and advertisers turned off their billboards in Times Square, both as a power conservation measure and a preemptive defense against enemy attacks. The titles signal the 1943 feature’s conversation with the recent past, dramatizing a period that moviegoers living through the war may have regarded as “simpler times.” By design, Lady of Burlesque is an entertaining programmer, even somewhat frivolous. Although it’s a backstage murder mystery involving comedians, singers, stagehands, and a string of dead performers, it’s also a comedy and a romance, offering its audience a funny and often borderline bawdy escape from wartime dread. The full review is currently exclusive to Patreon subscribers. To read it, you can purchase access individually. Or you can join Deep Focus Review’s Patron community, where you’ll receive exclusive access to this essay and many other reviews and blogs published on Patreon. Patrons also get access to: […]

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Deathtrap

Brian Eggert — Sat, 17 May 2025 14:11:22 +0000

Sidney Lumet’s film Deathtrap plays a cunning game. From one perspective, the 1982 feature redeploys thriller tropes of the era, offering a twisty cat-and-mouse scenario about two duplicitous professional and romantic rivals circling each other in a single location, leading to an inevitable murder or two. From another perspective, Lumet embraces playwright Ira Levin’s postmodern spin on such fare with a subversive undercurrent. In the former case, the film presents its bisexual characters as criminal types capable of murder and backstabbing, reinforcing discriminatory biases and representational norms of the time. However, the latter interpretation grants Deathtrap enough intelligence to recognize those negative stereotypes and blame not the individuals but the social conditions that force them into the closet. Consider the poster: The characters played by Michael Caine, Christopher Reeve, and Dyan Cannon are depicted inside a Rubik’s Cube, with panels marked with guns and knives. They peek out as if society has stashed them there, awaiting the promise of what the poster calls a “who’ll-do-it.” But like most aspects of Deathtrap, the threat is both literal and cleverly metatextual. The full review is currently exclusive to Patreon subscribers. To read it, you can purchase access individually. You can also join Deep Focus […]

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Hard Eight

Brian Eggert — Thu, 08 May 2025 13:11:11 +0000

Hard Eight features a single scene with Philip Seymour Hoffman, and it’s a memorable one. Dressed in shitkicker garb and full of “shaka-laka-do” antics, Hoffman’s Reno showboater taunts the “old timer” at the other end of the craps table: Sydney, played by Philip Baker Hall, whose calm demeanor and tailored suit needle at Hoffman. With undue confidence, Hoffman challenges Sydney to place a bet before he can light a cigarette. Sydney doesn’t flinch at the persistent badgering. Instead, he places two grand in chips on a “hard eight”—meaning, if the shooter rolls two fours, there’s a hefty payout on the high-risk bet. This forces the loudmouth to pause. Though he places $100 on Sydney’s “hard eight,” Hoffman’s tone shifts to nervy confidence. Sydney has just placed a considerable sum on the table, making it Hoffman’s responsibility to deliver on his overconfidence. His inevitable loss cuts a hole right through him. He can only shakily laugh and make a half-hearted attempt to buy Sydney a drink. But Sydney has already left the table. The scene conveys Sydney’s composure under pressure, while his bet, a statistical loser, has another purpose: it’s a $2,000 demonstration to Hoffman’s character that acting like a big […]

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Hell of a Summer

Brian Eggert — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 14:38:48 +0000

To stand out amid the exhaustive catalog of slasher horror movies, new entries in the subgenre need a hook. Not a literal hook (although that would be a serviceable gimmick), but something to make the familiar material memorable. Maybe it’s the particularly gristly kills and unique first-person presentation in last year’s In a Violent Nature. Perhaps it’s a fun mash-up, like when this year’s Heart Eyes set a masked killer loose in a rom-com scenario or when Freaky (2020) introduced a slasher element into a body swap comedy. Slasher movies often need something extra: a distinct sense of humor, a memorable killer, gory intensity, a genre innovation, a distinct formal style, or ironic self-awareness. Otherwise, they risk looking like cheap knock-offs of their antecedents. The full review is currently posted on Patreon. To read it, you can purchase access individually. You can also join Deep Focus Review’s Patron community, where you’ll first receive exclusive access to this essay and many other reviews and blogs published on Patreon. Patrons also get access to: • Exclusive weekly blog posts • Streaming recommendations every Friday • Polls to pick the movies reviewed on Deep Focus Review and Patreon • Access to the open AMA and […]

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Ash Is Purest White

Brian Eggert — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 13:04:32 +0000

Jia Zhangke’s Ash Is Purest White has been described as a remix and a greatest hits compilation of themes from throughout his career. Musical symbolism aside, the 2018 film incorporates motifs explored in his earlier features, from the documentary footage blended with a fictional narrative that pervades most of Jia’s work to his interest in China’s crackdown on criminal behavior (see Xiao Wu, 1997). There’s even a familiar appearance by a UFO, recalling a brief scene in Still Life (2006). But rather than mere variations on established preoccupations, China’s most incisive documenter of the country’s social and economic development into a globalized power streamlines his ideas for perhaps his most effective mixture of narrative thrust and national commentary. The Sixth Generation filmmaker once again uses the pretense of a genre, namely the gangster saga or jianghu, to access and disguise his observations about the increasingly draconian and repressive Chinese state. As a result, Ash Is Purest White remains one of Jia’s most accessible and discerning films. The full review is currently posted on Patreon. To read it, you can purchase access individually. You can also join Deep Focus Review’s Patron community, where you’ll first receive exclusive access to this essay and many […]

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Mountains May Depart

Brian Eggert — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 13:13:17 +0000

Mountains May Depart opens with star Zhao Tao cheerfully dancing to Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West” in an exercise class. It’s a lively and entertaining start to the film, regardless of the delightfully infectious song underscoring the film’s central theme all too precisely. Writer-director Jia Zhangke’s 2015 feature contains his usual investigation of China’s rapid globalization in a pointed narrative, deploying a glossy melodrama to create a moving portrait of his country’s embrace of Western capitalism. The result is not unlike the song: it’s effective despite its obviousness. Jia’s narrative unfolds over a quarter-century, broken into three distinct parts, each reflected by distinct formal flourishes, framed by not one but two leitmotifs—Pet Shop Boys’ 1993 cover of the Village People’s hit and Sally Yeh’s Canto-pop ballad “Take Care.” These structural pretenses and a shifting aspect ratio to represent three distinct points in time suggest Jia’s considerable complexity as a filmmaker. They also contribute to the film’s shift away from Jia’s purely aesthetic and philosophical ambitions. Mountains May Depart tells a sweeping story of history and change, with pronounced feelings and big emotional scenes. And while its dramatics present an unexpected deviation in Jia’s filmography, they’re also part of a mounting […]

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A Touch of Sin

Brian Eggert — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 13:33:21 +0000

Jia Zhangke has described A Touch of Sin as a “martial arts film for contemporary China.” The title pays homage to King Hu’s wuxia epic, A Touch of Zen (1971). However, the comparison may seem faulty at first glance. Hu’s existential period piece involves chivalrous knights-errant who travel the land and seek out noble adventures, leading to a rather unconventional three-hour meditation on fighting for honorable causes; how women, too, can serve as warriors; and Buddhist transcendence. By contrast, Jia’s film adopts an anthology format, telling four distinct but superficially interwoven stories, each loosely based on actual events that occurred in contemporary China. Each finds its protagonist exposed to the corruption, humiliation, and despair that result from a capitalist system. Its characters respond with bloody violence, either because they’ve reached their limit or resolved that violence is the only solution. Between the portmanteau format and modern-day setting, the two films seem to have little in common. However, the association invites comparison and leads to Jia’s transgressive confrontation with the consequences of China’s dramatic embrace of capitalism. The full review is currently posted on Patreon. To read it, you can purchase access individually. You can also join Deep Focus Review’s Patron community, where […]

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