Review: Stalker (dir. by Andrei Tarkovsky)

Posted on April 1, 2026 by Arleigh

“May they believe. And may they laugh at their passions. For what they call passion is not really the energy of the soul, but merely friction between the soul and the outside world.” — the Stalker

Stalker is one of those films that feels less like a story you’re watching and more like a place you’re slowly drowning in. Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1979, it’s a slow‑burn sci‑fi parable that spends most of its runtime trudging through damp, ruined spaces while three men argue about faith, desire, and whether any of it really matters. It’s not a movie you “get” on first watch; it’s the kind that lingers in your head for days, nudging you to rethink what you thought you wanted from life, and from cinema itself.

The basic setup sounds like genre bread‑and‑butter: a mysterious forbidden area called “The Zone” is guarded by the state, and only a few people—called “stalkers”—can safely guide visitors through it to a fabled Room that can grant a person’s deepest wish. Our guide is simply called the Stalker, played by Alexander Kaidanovsky with a mixture of haunted reverence and exhausted humility. He leads two men into the Zone: a jaded Writer who’s lost his inspiration and a cynical Scientist, each with their own idea of what they’re hoping to find. The tension in Stalker doesn’t really come from the physical danger of the Zone, though it’s full of traps and inexplicable phenomena; it comes from watching these three slowly peel open their own lies to themselves.

Tarkovsky’s visual strategy is almost perversely patient. He lingers on long, static shots of corroded metal, flooded tunnels, and overgrown railway tracks, while the camera glides in smooth, hypnotic movements that feel both weightless and heavy. The Zone is shot in a washed‑out sepia‑like palette, which makes it look like a half‑remembered dream or a charcoal sketch of a ruined world. The real world outside the Zone, in contrast, is the one that’s actually in sepia, while the Zone itself briefly shifts into color. This flip is a quiet but brutal joke: the thing everyone fears and wants to escape from—the decaying, post‑industrial wasteland—is actually more vivid and alive than the “safe” world, which feels duller, flatter, and spiritually dead. The longer you stay inside Stalker, the more you start to suspect that the Zone is less a physical location and more a mirror for the characters’ inner lives.

The central idea driving the film is the Room: the chamber that supposedly grants desires. The Writer and the Scientist have different theories about what the Room is doing. The Writer thinks it can expose the truth of what people really want, not what they claim to want. The Scientist rattles off more technical explanations, wondering if the Room is some kind of psychic field or natural anomaly. The Stalker, meanwhile, approaches it with a kind of religious awe; he believes the Room is a kind of judgment, a place where the universe reaches inside and shows you the core of your being. The film deliberately keeps the mechanics vague, so the focus stays on the question of human desire itself. It asks, in a very quiet way: what if the thing you want most is the thing that would actually destroy you—or worse, is the thing you’re too afraid to admit?

This is where the echoes of Dune start to creep in, even if Tarkovsky never admits it directly. Frank Herbert’s Dune is built around similar ideas: a mystical, hostile landscape (Arrakis) that tests and reshapes whoever tries to cross it, and a system of belief that promises transcendence if you’re willing to face the full, terrifying complexity of yourself. Both stories center on a guide figure—Stalker in the Zone, Paul Atreides in the Fremen’s desert—who leads outsiders into a place that follows its own rules and punishes arrogance. In Dune, the desert is a kind of crucible for destiny; in Stalker, the Zone is a crucible for the soul. The difference is that Herbert leans into prophecy and chosen‑one narrative, while Tarkovsky keeps the prophecy hazy and even mocks the men who fetishize it. The Zone doesn’t care about “chosen” people; it just quietly reflects what’s already there.

The payoff of Stalker is also the opposite of a heroic fantasy. In Dune, the protagonist’s journey to the heart of the desert culminates in a decisive, mythic confrontation that rewrites the future of an empire. In Stalker, the group actually reaches the Room, but the film refuses a conventional resolution. Instead, they argue about whether they’re even capable of deserving what they desire. The Scientist, who claims he wants to protect humanity from the Room’s power, is exposed as someone who fears losing control of his own fate. The Writer, who thinks he wants “truth” or “inspiration,” is quietly terrified that the Room might reveal how shallow his motives really are. The Stalker, in his idealism, is the closest to pure faith, but that faith is also fragile, constantly battered by the cynicism of the men he’s guiding. The Room doesn’t magically fix anyone; it just sits there, neutral, until the characters decide if they’re willing to confront the consequences of their own hearts.

Another way Stalker feels Dune‑adjacent is in its treatment of desire as a kind of test. Both works suggest that the deepest desires of human beings are not just personal wishes but political and moral statements. In Dune, the messianic fantasies of the Fremen and the machinations of the Empire reveal how easily spiritual yearning can be weaponized. In Stalker, the possibility of the Room is already politicized by the state that tries to seal it off, and by the figures who claim to want to “use” it for the greater good. The film’s closest hint at Herbert‑style mythology is in the legend of Porcupine, the Stalker’s mentor who supposedly used the Room to wish for riches and then hanged himself out of guilt. That story, told by the Writer, suggests that the Room doesn’t just grant desire—it interprets it, exposing the gap between what people say they want and what they secretly crave. It’s a more intimate, less epic version of the Bene Gesserit’s manipulation of destiny.

Philosophically, Stalker is far more pessimistic about human nature than Dune ever is. Herbert’s universe is full of grand schemes, hidden lineages, and cosmic prophecies; Tarkovsky’s world is modest, shabby, and claustrophobic. The film’s conversations are long, meandering, and sometimes self‑indulgent, but they also reveal the quiet desperation of people who feel spiritually stuck. The Writer confesses he’s tired of being celebrated for his work, the Scientist quietly fears being obsolete, and the Stalker agonizes over whether his faith is just a delusion that keeps him from a normal life. Their journey through the Zone is framed as a kind of pilgrimage, but the film undercuts the idea that pilgrimage guarantees enlightenment. The final scenes, returning to the Stalker’s home and his sickly daughter, complicate the idea of “fulfillment” even further. The Zone may have changed them, but it doesn’t heal them in the way a simpler hero’s‑journey narrative would pretend it does.

Tarkovsky’s approach to pacing and atmosphere also feels like a spiritual cousin to the way later sci‑fi filmmakers try to balance spectacle with contemplation. Directors like Denis Villeneuve, who has openly admired Stalker, use long, slow shots and carefully composed landscapes to give weight to inner psychological states. Dune (2021) and Dune: Part Twoborrow from Tarkovsky’s bag of tricks—long silences, oppressive sound design, and an almost religious reverence for the environment—but they still wrap that atmosphere around a more conventional plot and character arc. Stalker, by contrast, barely clings to plot at all. It’s closer to a walking meditation, where the real action is happening in the pauses between lines of dialogue, in the way the camera hovers over a puddle or a rusted pipe as if it’s discovering something sacred in the mundane.

In the end, Stalker feels less like a straightforward sci‑fi film and more like a religious parable wearing the costume of genre. It asks the same questions that Dune subtly raises—what do we truly want, what are we willing to sacrifice for it, and how much do we actually understand ourselves—but it answers them with hesitation, doubt, and a kind of exhausted tenderness. The Zone isn’t a promised land; it’s a confession booth. The Room isn’t a magic button; it’s a mirror. And the Stalker himself isn’t a fearless explorer, but a broken man who keeps leading others into the dark because he can’t stop believing that, somewhere in that darkness, there might be a flicker of grace that could make it all worth it. If Dune is about the myth of destiny, Stalker is about the fragile, uncertain labor of faith in a world that keeps looking more like a ruined factory than a cathedral.

Documentary Review: 15 Days: The Real Story of America’s Pandemic School Closures (dir by Natalya Murakhver)

Posted on March 31, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In December of 2021, I was nearly attacked in a Target.

This was nearly two years into the COVID pandemic and the world was slowly reopening. (Since I live in Texas, my world reopened earlier than everyone else’s. Despite the predictions of folks up north, who were almost gleeful in their predictions that Texas would be wiped out by people coughing on each other at football games, we survived.) In 2020, my sisters and I couldn’t really celebrate Christmas the way we usually did because everything was closed. In 2021, we were l0oking forward to making up for lost time.

What I was not looking forward to was wearing a mask. Due to an ambitious politician named Clay Jenkins who was hoping to ride the COVID pandemic into the governor’s mansion, Dallas County still had a mask mandate. The mandate was unenforceable due to Governor Abbott’s executive order but still, a lot of people in Dallas were masking up. Sitting in the parking lot of Target, I told my three older sisters that I was not going to wear a mask inside the store. I have asthma. Having to wear a mask was more than just an inconvenience for me. Wearing a mask made it difficult for me to breathe and, given that more and more health authorities were starting to admit that masks didn’t make any difference as far as the spread of the disease was concerned, I didn’t see why I should have to unnecessarily suffer. My sisters said that they understood and that they would have my back if anyone said anything to me about my maskless state. “But no one will,” my sister Megan assured me.

As soon as I stepped into the store, I heard it.

“GET A MASK ON HER!”

It wasn’t a store manager or a cop or any other sort of authority figure yelling. It was an overweight, middle-aged woman riding around the store on her little scooter. Apparently, she spotted me as soon as I entered the store and immediately started driving herself in my direction, yelling the entire time. I couldn’t really understand the majority of what she yelled but I did manage to make out words like “Mask,” “kill all of us,” “selfish,” and a few others that I can’t repeat during Lent.

Again, because of Lent, I can’t tell you what my older sister Melissa said in response to her. My sisters, all three of whom had been masked up, removed their masks in solidarity. I wish I could say that the entire store applauded but most people were just trying to avoid looking at the fat banshee on her scooter.

Even after my sisters removed their masks, the woman continued to focus her anger on me, still yelling as I walked past her. (I attempted to smile politely at her, which did not help the situation.) Eventually, her voice faded away. She either left the store or found someone else to yell at.

I tell this story to illustrate one point. The COVID pandemic was a very strange time. One can both acknowledge the very real tragedy of COVID while also acknowledging that quite a few people fell down the doom rabbit hole and allowed themselves to be driven mad by the constant drumbeat of government officials, members of the media, and other commentators telling us that everyone was going to die unless we wore masks and maintained a distance of 6 feet from each other. Due to the COVID pandemic, businesses were forced to shut down. People lost their jobs. Families were not allowed to comfort each other. In many states, students were not allowed to go to school. To doubt any element of the government’s response to COVID meant running the risk of being listed as a “conspiracy theorist.” Blue states started to gleefully keep track of how many died in red states. Red states started to keep track of how many civil liberties were suspended by the blue states. (We all should have been keeping track of their number of politicians who violated their own mandates and simply shrugged off the outrage.) We were constantly told that we were in a war against the virus but if felt more as if the country was actually at war with itself and a lot of people seemed to be happy with that.

The documentary 15 Days opens with clips from a zoom meeting, in which Jane Fonda, Randi Weingarten, and a host of others discuss the pandemic as an opportunity to bring about social change. The documentary goes on to document how the school shutdowns went from being “15 days to slow the spread,” to nearly two years of remote learning. Parents discuss going from trusting the government and wanting to do the right thing to the growing disillusionment of realizing that “15 Days to Slow The Spread” was, from the start, an empty slogan. Epidemiologists who opposed the school closings discuss being censored and dismissed as “fringe extremists.” Student athletes talk about losing out on college scholarships. We learn about the struggles of doing remote learning. We learn how some students merely disappeared from the system.

As you probably already guessed, 15 Days has a political agenda and, as such, it won’t be for everyone. Certain parts of it were certainly not for me. (Personally, I think the film lets the Trump administration off too easily when it comes to the federal government’s COVID response.) But that doesn’t change the fact that 15 Days shows just how much damage was done to an entire generation by the senseless and largely partisan-driven decision to shut down the schools in so many states. In between clips of people claiming that “kids are resilient,” we get interviews with actual kids who lost two years of not just education but also social development to the shutdowns. The contrast between what we were told was happening with remote learning and what actually happened is stark. The director, a disillusioned and self-described “progressive Democrat” named Natalya Murakhver compares America during the pandemic to the totalitarian government that her family fled when she was a child and it’s hard not to feel that she has a point.

You may or may not agree with the film’s politics but, with each passing day, it becomes more and more obvious how screwed up the federal government’s response to the COVID pandemic truly was. Documentaries like this are important because right now, the gaslighting we’re seeing about what really happened in 2020 and 2021 is incredible. Neighbors turned against neighbor (or shopper, as they case may be). And an entire generation lost two of the most important developmental years of their lives.

The Eric Roberts Collection: The Wrong Teacher (dir by David DeCoteau)

Posted on March 31, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

When Charlotte (Jessica Morris) meets a younger man named Chris (Philip McElroy), she is both flattered and amused when he asks her out. “You’re a little young for me,” Charlotte says. However, Charlotte’s friend, Maddie (Akari Endo), insists that Charlotte really does need to get out more so Charlotte meets up with Chris for drinks. One things leads to another and soon, Charlotte is having sex with Chris in her classroom!

(Charlotte is an English teacher, along with being a struggling romance novelist.)

The next day, as Charlotte teachers her class, she is shocked when Chris shows up. “What are you doing here?” Charlotte asks. Chris reveals that he’s a new student and Charlotte is now his English teacher!

2018’s The Wrong Teacher is one of the many “Wrong” films that David DeCoteau directed for Lifetime. This one follows the usual pattern. Chris isn’t ready to let go of his one night of passion with the teacher. When he discovers that Charlotte is getting back together with her ex-boyfriend (Jason-Shane Scott), he snaps. Soon, people are getting shot and hit with baseball bats and videos of Chris and Charlotte going at it in the classroom are showing up on the school’s twitter page. Vivica A. Fox is alarmed that Charlotte could be so foolish. Charlotte declares, “You messed with the wrong teacher!” Thanks to some last minute strangeness that sees Charlotte adopting a Southern accent, The Wrong Teacher is enjoyably over the top.

As for Eric Roberts, he plays the assistant principal. He’s a bit burned-out. He’s easily annoyed. He doesn’t want any scandalous behavior in his school. He’s Eric Roberts and he makes the most of his three scenes. Eric even stands up and walks in this movie. He only does that when he’s particularly invested in a role. The Wrong Teacher? More like The Right Vice Principal.

Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:

Review: Planet Dune (dir. by Glenn Campbell & Tammy Klein)

Posted on March 30, 2026 by Arleigh

“We came here for a rescue mission, and now we’re just something on the menu.” — said by someone, maybe.

Planet Dune is a scrappy, low‑budget sci‑fi creature feature that knows exactly what it is, and that self‑awareness helps it go down easier. It is not a polished prestige production, but it does deliver a simple survival story, some intentionally goofy monster‑movie energy, and enough visual invention to keep genre fans from completely checking out. It also practically announces itself as another in‑name‑only knock‑off in the vein of The Asylum’s mockbuster factory, clearly trying to ride the coattails of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part One. The timing, the desert‑planet setting, the sand‑worm menace, and the threadbare plot all feel calculated to cash in on the renewed mainstream buzz around the Dune name, rather than to build something original.

From the start, Planet Dune leans hard into its B‑movie identity. The setup is straightforward: a rescue mission heads to a desert planet, only to find itself trapped in a fight for survival against giant sand worms. That premise is thin, but the movie understands the appeal of the concept and does not waste time pretending to be deeper than it is. The result is a film that moves quickly, stays focused on its basic threat, and mostly avoids getting bogged down in overcomplicated mythology. At the same time, every decision feels like a stripped‑down version of choices made in Villeneuve’s Dune—just without the budget, scope, or attention to subtext. It’s the kind of project that exists because someone saw a big‑budget, heavily marketed Dune release and realized they could slap a vaguely similar title on a sand‑worm actioner and sell it to undiscerning genre fans.

What works best is the movie’s commitment to its own absurdity. The sand worms are the obvious attraction, and the film uses them as a constant source of danger rather than saving them for a single big reveal. That gives the story a pulpy urgency, and in a movie like this, momentum matters more than subtlety. The effects are clearly on a modest budget, but they are used with a certain charm, and the film often benefits from embracing cheapness instead of trying to hide it. That kind of approach can make a low‑budget creature feature feel more fun than fake grandeur ever could, even if it never comes close to matching the visual or thematic richness of Villeneuve’s work.

There is also a strange meta‑layer in the casting of Sean Young, who played Chani in David Lynch’s Dune (1984). Her presence turns Planet Dune into a weird echo chamber of the Dune universe: it’s a cheap, micro‑budget knock‑off trading on the name and imagery of a franchise, while also bringing in a legacy face from one of the older big‑screen adaptations. That gives the film a faintly nostalgic, almost self‑aware vibe, as if it’s winking at fans who know the history of Dune on screen, even while it rushes through a script that’s functionally just a monster‑survival thriller with a desert‑planet paint job. It’s a choice that underscores how this movie is less about telling its own story and more about trading on the weight of other people’s Dune work.

The pacing is also one of the movie’s stronger points. A lot of smaller sci‑fi films spend too much time explaining the world or padding out the runtime with empty dialogue, but Planet Dune keeps things relatively lean. It gets in, sets up the threat, and lets the characters deal with one problem after another. That makes it easier to forgive some of the rough edges, because the film does at least understand that the audience is here for monster attacks, not a lecture on space politics. Compared with Villeneuve’s slow‑burn world‑building and political maneuvering, Planet Dune feels like a stripped‑down amusement‑park version of the same concept: same core idea, none of the fuss.

That said, the movie is not above criticism. The biggest issue is that the characters are more functional than memorable. They do what the plot requires, but they are not written with enough personality to make every relationship or loss land with real weight. When the film pauses for emotional beats, those moments can feel undercooked because the script has not given the cast enough room to become more than survival‑movie placeholders. In a genre piece like this, that does not automatically sink the experience, but it does limit the impact, especially when viewers are already thinking of how Villeneuve’s Dune strained and expanded its characters across multiple films.

The performances are mixed in the way you would expect from a project like this. Nobody seems to be phoning it in, and that effort matters, but the material does not always give them much to build on. Some scenes benefit from the actors treating the material seriously, while others feel a little stiff because the dialogue is plainly there to move people from one danger zone to the next. The movie works best when it leans into the adventure and stops pretending it is a character drama. Sean Young gives a more grounded presence, but even that can’t fully offset how thin the script is; her casting feels more like a symbolic nod to Dune’s cinematic history than a way to deepen this particular story.

Visually, Planet Dune has the same plus‑and‑minus quality common to many independent sci‑fi films. The desert setting gives the movie a strong sense of scale, and even when the effects are rough, the barren environment helps sell the idea of isolation. At the same time, there are moments where the limitations are obvious, and the production does not always disguise them elegantly. Still, the film’s look is consistent enough that it rarely becomes distracting in a way that breaks the whole experience. Compared with Villeneuve’s meticulously composed frames and sweeping desert vistas, Planet Dune feels like a backyard‑budget cousin: same basic palette, significantly smaller scale.

There is also a pleasant lack of pretension here. Some genre movies try to compensate for weak writing by becoming self‑important, but Planet Dune seems content to be a monster chase with a space wrapper. That honesty is refreshing. It does not make the movie great, but it does make it easier to enjoy on its own terms. If you approach it like a serious epic, it will probably disappoint you, especially with the memory of Villeneuve’s Dune still fresh in your mind. If you approach it like a scrappy midnight movie—one that exists mainly because someone saw Dune in theaters and figured they could sell a knock‑off soundtrack on the same name—it has a better shot at working.

The film’s weaknesses are still hard to ignore. The story is very familiar, and viewers who have seen enough desert‑planet sci‑fi will recognize the beats immediately. There is also some repetition in how the danger is staged, and not every sequence feels equally inspired. A tighter script and a stronger sense of character could have lifted the whole thing a few notches. As it stands, Planet Dune is more effective as a mood piece and monster showcase than as a fully satisfying drama. It never reaches for the political, religious, or ecological weight of Villeneuve’s Dune, and it never really tries; it’s closer to a DVD‑rack detour for genre fans who just want sand worms and a vaguely Dune‑adjacent name.

What saves it is that it rarely feels cynical. Even when it is clumsy, it is trying to entertain rather than impress. That gives the movie a bit of personality, and personality goes a long way in low‑budget genre cinema. The casting of Sean Young, the desert‑planet premise, and the obvious Dune name‑play all point to a project that knows exactly what it is: a small‑scale, opportunistic creature feature that wants to surf the wave of a bigger franchise without the heavy lifting. It may not be the kind of film that wins over skeptical viewers, but it is also not a total write‑off. For viewers in the mood for a cheap, goofy, sandworm‑infested sci‑fi ride—one that openly trades on the legacy of both Villeneuve’s and Lynch’s Dune—Planet Dune gets the job done on its own very modest terms.

The Eric Roberts Collection: Eternity: The Movie (dir by Ian Thorpe)

Posted on March 30, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In the 1980s, no band better represented mediocre R&B than Eternity.

At least, that’s the claim made by 2014’s Eternity: The Movie, an occasionally amusing comedy in which Pennsylvania-bred singer/songwriter Todd Lucas (Barrett Clarke) moves to California, gets his dream job of working at BJ-Maxx, and eventually befriends a coworker whose name actually is BJ (Myko Oliver). BJ is a saxophonist who has released a solo album in which he covers the theme songs of classic detective shows. When the naive Todd and the irresponsible BJ get together, they become an unlikely hit-making duo. Their first song Make Love, Not Just Sex, shoots up the charts and soon, Todd and BJ are putting all of their personal issues to music.

Eternity: The Movie is a comedy that recycles a handful of jokes over and over again. The main joke is that Todd and BJ come across as being extremely into each other, even while they’re sleeping with groupies and both pining for their neighbor, Gina Marie (Nikki Leonti). Todd and BJ are the type of musical partners who discuss their lives while sharing a bubble bath. It’s not the cleverest joke ever told but, thanks to the ability of the actors to say the most ludicrous of lines with a deadpan face, I did chuckle occasionally. The better joke is that their music is both convincingly bad and also convincingly catchy. It’s the type of bad music that you can believe would become very popular. At one point, Todd sings a song about his ex-girlfriend, who drowned in a river. Throughout the song, he laments that she just wasn’t a better swimmer. The songs are performed with just the right amount of earnest stupidity to be funny.

As for Eric Roberts, he plays the manager of BJ-Maxx. Jon Gries and Martin Kove also show up, playing a record executive and the record executive’s father respectively. I’d like to see a movie where Eric Roberts and Martin Kove start a band. Someone should make that happen.

Previous Eric Roberts Films That We Have Reviewed:

Scenes I Love: The Montage from The Parallax View

Posted on March 30, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today, we wish a happy birthday to actor, director, and producer Warren Beatty.

In Alan J. Pakula’s 1974 film The Parallax View, Beatty plays a seedy journalist who goes undercover to investigate the links between the mysterious Parallax Corporation and a series of recent political assassinations. In the film’s most famous sequence, Beatty — pretending to be a job applicant (read: potential assassin) for the Parallax Corporation — is shown an orientation film that has been designed to test whether or not he’s a suitable applicant. The montage is shown in its entirety, without once cutting away to show us Beatty’s reaction. The implication, of course, is that what’s important isn’t how Beatty reacts to the montage but how the viewers sitting out in the audience react.

So, at the risk of furthering the conspiracy, here’s that montage.

Review: Dune (dir. by David Lynch)

Posted on March 27, 2026 by Arleigh

“The sleeper has awakened.” — Paul “Muad’Dib” Atreides

David Lynch’s Dune is one of those movies that somehow manages to be both a spectacular failure and a strangely hypnotic piece of cinema at the same time. It feels like a film willed into existence through pure creative tension: on one side, Frank Herbert’s dense, political, and spiritual sci‑fi novel; on the other, David Lynch’s surreal, psychological, dream‑logic sensibility. The result is a singular oddity—visually bold, dramatically uneven, and endlessly fascinating if you’re in the mood for something that feels more like a hallucination than a conventional space opera.

To call the adaptation ambitious is underselling it. After the collapse of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s infamous attempt to adapt Dune, the project eventually landed at Universal with producer Dino De Laurentiis, and Lynch—fresh off The Elephant Man—was brought in to turn Herbert’s galaxy‑spanning book into a two‑hour‑ish feature. On paper, it seems like inspired casting: Lynch had the visual imagination and emotional intensity to do something memorable with the material. But he was never a natural fit for streamlined blockbuster storytelling. His instincts live in mood, subconscious imagery, and uneasy psychological textures rather than clean plot mechanics. You can feel that clash all over the final film, and it’s part of what makes it so weirdly compelling.

Right from the opening, Dune doesn’t hold your hand. Princess Irulan’s floating head lays out a massive info‑dump about spice, the Imperium, and Arrakis that plays like someone reading you the glossary at the back of a sci‑fi novel. It’s dense, awkward, and kind of charming in its sincerity. The movie takes Herbert’s universe extremely seriously—no wink, no irony, no attempt to sand off the stranger edges. The Bene Gesserit, mentats, feudal houses, and prophecies are all presented straight, as if the audience will either keep up or be left behind. There’s something almost punk about that level of commitment.

Kyle MacLachlan, in his debut as Paul Atreides, is perfectly cast for Lynch’s take on the character. He’s got this earnest, slightly naive presence that gradually hardens as the story pushes him toward messiah status. Instead of leaning into a swashbuckling hero archetype, Lynch frames Paul’s evolution as something interior and dreamlike, almost like a spiritual awakening happening inside a hostile universe. Paul’s visions aren’t giant, crystal‑clear CGI prophecy sequences; they’re fragmented, flickering images, whispers, and flashes of desert and blood. You can feel Lynch trying to drag the sci‑fi epic into his own subconscious, even if the narrative doesn’t always keep up.

The supporting cast is packed with strong, sometimes delightfully bizarre performances. Francesca Annis gives Lady Jessica a sensual, haunted calm that fits the Bene Gesserit’s mix of discipline and manipulation. Jurgen Prochnow’s Duke Leto radiates dignified doom; he feels like a man who knows he’s walking into a trap but can’t step off the path. Then you get to the Harkonnens, where Lynch just lets his freak flag fly. Kenneth McMillan’s Baron is a grotesque comic‑book monster, oozing, cackling, floating on anti‑grav tech, and reveling in cruelty. It’s not subtle, but it is unforgettable. And of course Sting as Feyd‑Rautha, stalking around in barely‑there outfits and sneering like a rock star beamed in from another film entirely, just adds to the movie’s fever‑dream energy.

Visually, Dune is a feast and sometimes a bit of a choke. The production design leans into a kind of retro‑futurist baroque: cavernous sets, ornate technology, and spaces that feel less like functional environments and more like places out of a dark fantasy. Lynch and cinematographer Freddie Francis infuse everything with shadow, smoke, and texture, so even the quiet scenes feel heavy and loaded. The sandworms are huge, tactile, and worshipful in scale; the way they burst from the desert feels more like a religious manifestation than a monster attack. Even if you’re lost in the plot, the images stick with you—daggers, stillsuits, weirding whispers, blood on sand.

The sound and music do a ton of work in giving the film its identity. The score, primarily by Toto with contributions from Brian Eno, is this fusion of 80s rock sensibility and orchestral grandeur. It shouldn’t work, but it does; the main theme swells with tragic heroism, while other cues veer into eerie, synthy territory that matches Lynch’s off‑kilter tone. The sound design around the “weirding” abilities, the internal monologues, and the roar of the sandworms all help sell the world even when the script is sprinting past exposition. It’s one of those films where you might not fully grasp every detail, but the combined force of image and sound makes you feel like you’ve visited a real, deeply strange place.

The big structural problem, and the thing that most clearly separates Lynch’s adaptation from Denis Villeneuve’s two‑part version, is time and emphasis. Lynch is trying to cram the entire arc of Dune into a single film, and that means the plotting goes from methodical to breakneck halfway through. The first half lingers on the setup—Caladan, the move to Arrakis, the betrayal—while the second half rockets through Paul’s Fremen transformation, the guerrilla war, the sandworm riding, and the final confrontation. Subplots are hinted at and dropped, character arcs feel truncated, and the voiceover is forever trying to patch gaps the edits created. Themes like ecological transformation, the manipulation behind religious prophecy, and the long‑term horror of Paul’s rise are mostly reduced to gestures.

The best way to see Dune in Lynch’s version is actually through the extended cut, which adds a bit more context to certain scenes and lets the film breathe slightly more than the theatrical release. The theatrical cut is so aggressively compressed that pieces of motivation and setup just vanish, leaving the story feeling even more disjointed. The extended version restores some of the connective tissue—especially around Paul’s early time with the Fremen, the political maneuvering in the lead‑up to the final act, and the way certain characters orient themselves in the larger conflict. It doesn’t magically fix the studio‑driven structure or the inherent weirdness of Lynch’s choices, but it does make the film feel a little more complete, a little closer to the director’s original vision. It’s still messy, but less like a rushed homework assignment and more like a genuinely eccentric, if compromised, longform take on Herbert’s world.

Tonally, Lynch and Villeneuve are almost mirror images. Lynch’s film is cramped, loud in its weirdness, and often grotesque, playing like a baroque horror‑opera about destiny. Villeneuve’s is stately, slow‑burn, and solemn, more interested in the weight of empire, colonialism, and religious manipulation. Even their takes on Paul are distinct. In Lynch’s film, Paul ultimately plays more like a triumphant chosen one; whatever ambiguity is there gets overshadowed by the climactic victory and the literal act of making it rain as a grand, almost celebratory miracle. Villeneuve leans harder into the darker implications: Paul is framed as a potentially dangerous figure whose rise may unleash something terrible, and his two‑part arc emphasizes the holy war and fanaticism coalescing around him instead of treating his ascension as a clean win. Where Lynch’s ending lands somewhere between pulp myth and studio‑mandated uplift, Villeneuve’s execution feels closer to a tragedy about messianic power.

Knowing all that, Lynch’s Dune ends up feeling like a relic from an era when studios occasionally handed gigantic, unwieldy properties to filmmakers with intensely personal styles and just hoped for the best. It doesn’t “work” in a conventional plot sense, and if you’re coming to it after the sleek coherence of Villeneuve’s films, it can feel like a chaotic, cluttered alternate‑universe version of the same story. But that alternate universe has its own power. There’s a raw, handmade intensity to Lynch’s take—a sense that he’s trying to turn Dune into a waking dream about destiny, decay, and the seduction of power, even as the studio scissors are hacking away at his vision.

In the end, David Lynch’s Dune is a beautifully broken thing: a movie that fails as a straightforward adaptation but succeeds as a cinematic experience you can’t quite shake. Villeneuve gives you a clearer, more faithful, and philosophically aligned Dune, the one that explains itself and lets you sit with its implications. Lynch gives you the nightmare version, messy and compromised, but pulsing with strange life. If Villeneuve’s two‑part saga is the definitive modern telling, Lynch’s film—especially the extended cut—remains the haunting alternate path, a vision of Arrakis filtered through a very particular mind, sandblasted, grotesque, and unforgettable.

Film Review: Armor (dir by Justin Routt)

Posted on March 26, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

In rural Alabama, James Brody (Jason Patric) is a recovering alcoholic who makes his living as an armored truck driver. He works with his son, Casey (Josh Wiggins). Every day, James and Casey transport millions from bank to bank and usually, they’re able to do it without incident. However, this day is different. James and Casey find themselves trapped on a bridge with a team of thieves on every side of them. James and Casey struggle to escape while working out their own personal issues.

Sylvester Stallone receives top billing in 2024’s Armor and, just by looking at the poster, you would probably be excused for assuming that Stallone was playing the hero of the film. Instead, Stallone only has a few minutes of screentime and he plays one of the criminals, a tough guy named Rook. Rook may be a professional thief but he has a conscience and he doesn’t believe in killing anyone who doesn’t need to be killed. That sets him apart from the rest of the thieves.

One may wonder what a star like Stallone is doing in a low-budget, direct-to-video film like this. The answer is that Armor was produced by Randall Emmett, a producer who specializes in getting big names to appear in small roles in B-movies. Not much money may have gone into the budget of Armor but one can be sure but the majority of it was used to pay Stallone’s salary. According to some comments left on Letterboxd by someone who claims to have worked on the film’s crew, Stallone shot his scenes in one day and was deliberately kept in the dark about the fact that the film was actually being directed by Emmett and not the credited Justin Routt. Now, whether or not any of that is true, I can’t definitely say for sure. However, it definitely has the ring of truth. Randall Emmett himself is best known for producing many of Bruce Willis’s final films. With Willis having retired and John Travolta perhaps busy, Sylvester Stallone ended up as Emmett’s star-in-name-only for Armor.

Give credit where credit is due. Stallone dominates the few scenes in which he appears. For all the criticism that Stallone has taken over the course of his career, this film reminds us that there’s no other actor who has quite the same screen presence as Sylvester Stallone. As for the rest of the cast, Jason Patric is convincing as the haunted James. Unfortunately, the film can never make up its mind whether or not it wants to be an action flick or a relationship drama. Patric does his best but he’s let down by a script that never seem to be quite sure what it wants to say.

I appreciated that this film took place in the South. The film opens with a news report about an armored truck crash in Dallas and, as soon as they mentioned the Thornton Freeway, I was like, “I was stuck there just a few days ago!” The majority of the film takes place on a bridge in Alabama. The scenery is lovely, even when the action is hackneyed.

Dune: Part Two (dir. by Denis Villeneuve) Review

Posted on March 26, 2026 by Arleigh

“The Mahdi is too humble to say he is the Mahdi. Even more reason to know he is!” — Stilgar

Dune: Part Two picks up right where the first film left off, diving headfirst into Paul Atreides’ quest for revenge on the desert world of Arrakis, and it absolutely delivers on the epic, operatic scale the setup promised. The first movie was all mood and table-setting; this one cashes in that patience with a story that’s bigger, louder, and way more emotionally volatile, without totally ditching the cerebral, slow-burn vibe that makes Dune feel different from other sci-fi tentpoles. Denis Villeneuve isn’t just continuing a story; he’s doubling down on the idea that this whole saga is less about a hero’s rise and more about the terrifying consequences of people begging for a savior and then getting exactly what they asked for.

Narratively, the film tracks Paul and his mother Jessica as they embed deeper into Fremen culture while House Harkonnen tightens its stranglehold on Arrakis. Paul trains, raids spice convoys, and slowly evolves from accepted outsider to full-on messianic figure, even as he keeps insisting he doesn’t want that role. The emotional throughline is his relationship with Chani, who acts as both partner and conscience, pushing back against the religious fervor gathering around him. At the same time, you’ve got Baron Harkonnen scheming from his grotesque oil-bath throne and Feyd-Rautha unleashed as the house’s rabid attack dog, chewing through enemies in gladiatorial arenas and on the battlefield. The stakes are clear and simple—control of Arrakis and its spice—but the film keeps twisting that into something more existential: control of the future itself and who gets to write it.

Visually, Dune: Part Two is just ridiculous in the best way. Arrakis still feels harsh and elemental, like the planet itself is a character that occasionally decides to eat people via sandworm. The desert exteriors are shot with that hazy, golden brutality where every wide shot makes the Fremen look tiny against an uncaring landscape. When Paul finally rides a sandworm, it’s not played as some clean, heroic moment but as a thrashing, chaotic stunt that looks legitimately dangerous—he’s clinging to this titanic creature, sand exploding in sheets around him, the camera swinging wide so you feel both the scale and the sheer lunacy of what he’s doing. The Harkonnen world, by contrast, is stark and stylized, all cold geometry and void-like skies, leaning into monochrome to make it feel like you’ve stepped into some industrial underworld. Villeneuve’s obsession with scale and texture pays off; every frame feels like it was composed to be stared at.

The action this time is more frequent and more brutal. Where Dune: Part One held back, this one goes for full war-movie energy. You get Fremen ambushes out of sand, night raids lit by explosions, and a final battle that’s basically holy war meets desert cavalry charge. Sandworms surf through shield walls, ornithopters slam into the ground, and a sea of troops gets swallowed by sand and fire. The choreography stays clean enough that you can track who’s doing what, but it never loses that messy, grounded feel—knife fights still feel close and ugly, even when they’re surrounded by massive spectacle. The duel between Paul and Feyd is the peak of that: sweaty, vicious, and personal, more about willpower and ideology than just skill.

Performance-wise, the film runs on the tension between Timothée Chalamet’s Paul and Zendaya’s Chani. Chalamet gets to shift from haunted survivor to someone who realizes he can pull the strings of history—and chooses to do it anyway. He plays Paul as a guy who genuinely hates what he sees in his visions but can’t stomach losing, which gives the final act a bitter edge. Zendaya finally gets the screen time the first film teased, and she makes the most of it. Chani isn’t just “the love interest”; she’s the one person in the story who consistently calls bullshit on prophecy, seeing how Fremen belief is being turned into a weapon. That skepticism, that refusal to be swept up, becomes the emotional counterweight to everything Jessica and the Bene Gesserit are engineering.

Rebecca Ferguson’s Jessica goes full political operator here, and it’s honestly one of the most interesting arcs in the film. Once she takes on the role of Reverend Mother, she leans into manipulating Fremen faith, playing up visions, symbols, and omens to lock in Paul’s status. She’s terrifyingly pragmatic about it, and the movie doesn’t let that slide as a “necessary evil”—it’s part of how this whole situation curdles into fanaticism. Austin Butler’s Feyd-Rautha is pure menace: feral, theatrical, and oddly charismatic, like a rock star who decided to become a warlord. He feels like the dark mirror of Paul, another bred product of a toxic system, but one who embraces cruelty instead of burden.

Then you’ve got Florence Pugh’s Princess Irulan and Christopher Walken’s Emperor Shaddam IV, introduced with real weight as the heir to the throne and the man who greenlit House Atreides’ betrayal—but then largely sidelined as bit characters rather than the shadowy power brokers they should be. On paper, they’re the architects of galactic order, pulling levers from opulent palaces while Paul scrambles in the sand. The film gives them poised entrances and sharp dialogue, but parks them as observers to Paul’s whirlwind, more like well-dressed cameos than forces reshaping the board. Walken nails the Emperor’s weary calculation, and Pugh hints at Irulan’s future scheming, but without deeper scenes of imperial intrigue, they orbit Paul’s story instead of challenging it head-on, underscoring how his rise eclipses even the old guard.

Hans Zimmer’s score keeps pushing that strange, alien soundscape he built in the first film and then amps it up. The music leans hard on percussion, guttural vocals, and warped instruments that feel half-organic, half-industrial, like you’re listening to the desert itself breathing. The score doesn’t really do the classic “themes you hum on the way out of the theater” thing; instead, it sits in your bones. During the big set pieces, it’s almost overwhelming—drones, chants, and pounding rhythms layering on top of each other until your seat feels like it’s vibrating. In quieter scenes, Zimmer pulls back just enough to let a harsh little motif peek through, usually when Paul is weighing his choices or when Chani realizes how far things are slipping away from what she hoped for.

Thematically, Dune: Part Two sinks its teeth deepest into the dangers of blind faith and the double-edged sword of prophecy—how it can shatter chains of oppression only to forge far heavier ones in their place. Frank Herbert’s original warning pulses through every frame: belief isn’t just a comfort or a spark for revolution; it’s a weapon that smart people wield to hijack desperate hearts. The Fremen, crushed under imperial boot and environmental hell, latch onto their Lisan al-Gaib legend like a lifeline, and figures like Jessica and the Bene Gesserit are all too happy to fan those flames. Lines like Stilgar’s “The Mahdi is too humble to say he is the Mahdi. Even more reason to know he is!” twist logic into a pretzel, showing how faith devours reason—Paul’s every hesitation or miracle just “proves” his divinity more. Chani’s gut-punch retort, “This prophecy is how they enslave us!” lays it bare: what starts as liberation from Harkonnen greed morphs into submission to a new myth, one engineered off-world to keep Arrakis in check.

Paul embodies this tragedy most painfully. His spice-fueled visions reveal futures of jihad consuming the stars, yet the “narrow path” he chooses—embracing the prophecy—breaks the Fremen’s subjugation to outsiders while binding them to him as unquestioning soldiers. It’s not accidental heroism; it’s a calculated gamble where prophecy empowers the oppressed to topple one empire, only for Paul to birth a deadlier one, fueled by the very zeal that freed them. Princess Irulan’s cool observation, “You underestimate the power of faith,” chills because it’s the Emperor admitting belief outstrips blades or thrones—faith doesn’t just win wars; it rewrites reality, turning Fremen riders into galaxy-scouring fanatics. Even the Reverend Mother Mohiam’s “We don’t hope. We plan” unmasks prophecy as cold manipulation, a multi-generational con that breakers colonial chains today while guaranteeing control tomorrow.

Villeneuve doesn’t glorify this cycle; he revels in its horror. The final rally, with Fremen chanting “Lisan al-Gaib!” as Paul seizes the throne, thrills like a rock concert and curdles like a cult initiation. Chani riding off alone isn’t defeat—it’s the last gasp of clear-eyed doubt in a tide of delusion. Faith topples the Baron and humbles Shaddam, sure, but it installs Paul as its high priest-emperor, proving Herbert right: saviors don’t save; they scale up the suffering. The film tweaks the book to amplify this, giving Chani more agency to voice the peril, making the “victory” feel like a velvet trap. It’s prophecy as breaker of chains—smashing Harkonnen spice rigs and imperial ornithopters—then creator of new ones, with Paul’s jihad looming not as triumph, but inevitable apocalypse.

If the film has a real sticking point, it’s that tension between being a massive, audience-pleasing sci-fi epic and being a deeply cynical story about the cost of belief. On a surface level, it totally works as a grand payoff: you get your worm rides, your duels, your big speeches, your villains being humbled. But underneath, Villeneuve keeps threading in this idea that what we’re watching isn’t a happy ending; it’s the start of something worse. The sidelining of Irulan and Shaddam reinforces how Paul’s myth-centered rise devours old powers, prophecy steamrolling politics.

As a complete experience, Dune: Part Two feels like the rare blockbuster that respects its audience’s patience and intelligence. It assumes you remember part one, assumes you’re willing to sit with long, quiet moments and sudden bursts of violence, and assumes you’ll notice that the “hero’s journey” here is more of a slow moral collapse dressed up as triumph. It’s messy in spots—some pacing jolts, some underused heavy hitters in the cast—but it swings so hard and with such confidence that the rough edges end up feeling like part of its personality. The result is a movie that works both as an immediate, visceral ride and as something you keep chewing on afterward, wondering if you were supposed to be as excited as you were by the sight of a new god-king being crowned in the desert.

Film Review: Survive The Game (dir by James Cullen Bressack)

Posted on March 25, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Looking at the title of 2021’s Survive the Game, you may be tempted to wonder what game the characters are attempting to survive.

The answer is that there isn’t a game, unless you’re one of those people who still insists on using “The Game,” to refer to the drug trade because you once heard someone do the same thing on The Wire.

Though there are no games, the film is full of people who are trying to survive. For instance, after a drug bust gone wrong, Detective David Watson (Bruce Willis) is trying to survive having been shot in the gut. He manages to do so surprisingly well, even though he’s being held hostage by the bad guys. The leader of the bad guys, Frank (Michael Sirow), is supposed to be a fearsome torture expert but David just smirks at him.

David’s partner, Cal (Swen Temmel), survives by running to a nearby farm. The farm itself is owned by Eric (Chad Michael Murray), a veteran who is haunted by the death of his wife and who just wants to be left alone. With the bad guys surrounding his farm and looking to eliminate all of the witnesses, Eric teams up with Cal.

There’s a lot of bad guys in this film and they’re all so eccentric that they really do become the main attraction. The bad guys are occasionally entertaining. They spend a lot of time bickering and each one has at least one particularly obnoxious personality trait that can be used to distinguish one from the other. Most of them have a tattoos. One has a mohawk. Quite a few have brightly colored hair. You can’t help but wonder how any of these people could possibly be successful criminals because they’ve all gone out of their way to make sure that it will be easy for law enforcement to spot and identify them. To once again cite The Wire, Wee-Bey Brice yelled at at his son Namond for not shaving his head because the police would be able to easily spot Namond’s haircut. Wee-Bey had a point.

Anyway, this is a siege film. Cal and Eric spend almost the entire movie running around the farm and picking off bad guys. For those of you who are into this sort of thing, some of the kills are imaginative and ruthless. Interestingly, some of the bad guys are presented as being more sympathetic than the film’s heroes. They have their own relationships and fears and they get upset when their friends are killed. I actually felt a little bit bad for some of them. It makes Survive the Game slightly more interesting than the usual DTV B-action movie.

As you may have guessed, this is another Randall Emmett production. Emmett is best-known for his ability to get former and current A-listers to take small roles in his B-movies. As such, an actor like Bruce Willis or Sylvester Stallone would put in a day’s worth of work and the film could be advertised as starring Bruce Willis as opposed to Chad Michael Murray. In Survive The Game, there’s a somewhat endearing moment that occurs when Willis appears to start laughing at the ludicrous dialogue to which he is being subjected. That said, Willis was obviously not doing well when he appeared in this film and it does make some of his scenes somewhat difficult to watch. The viewer really does end up missing the Bruce who could drive Alan Rickman to distraction.

Survive the Game is a film that I had long meant to watch, though I’m not sure why. I think the title appealed to me. Again, I’m not sure why. It’s better than some of Emmett’s DTV action movies but it’s still pretty forgettable. I would still watch a prequel about how the mohawk guy became a ruthless mercenary. It seems like there’s probably a story there.