It’s a good month for genre movie fans willing to peek into the quieter corners of their subscription streaming services — we’ve got a revenge western, a breezy Bayou thriller and a sci-fi caper that’s very much of the moment, in addition to the usual assortment of thought-provoking dramas and ruminative documentaries.
‘Fast Charlie’ (2023)
The actor Pierce Brosnan and the director Phillip Noyce were both involved in multiple installments of gigantic action franchises (James Bond and Jack Ryan, respectively), which makes their collaboration on this short, breezy, light neo-noir thriller all the more charming; it feels like something they knocked off for fun, rather than a cynical attempt to cash in on their previous successes. Based on Victor Gischler’s novel “Gun Monkeys,” it stars Brosnan as a mob fixer inching toward retirement whose primary job seems to be attending to his dying boss (James Caan, touchingly vulnerable in his final film appearance) — until a rival boss goes after them, prompting the old hit man back into action. Brosnan’s accent takes some getting used to, but it’s a sly, beguiling performance, and he generates a genuine sense of warmth and sweetness in a kinda-sorta romantic subplot with Morena Baccarin as an associate’s amusingly indifferent widow.
A frontier widow slaps on her six-shooters and goes looking for vengeance in this low-budget riff on grindhouse westerns (foreign and domestic), anchored by a tough yet empathetic central performance by the promising newcomer Sheri Rippel. Austin Snell — who is the picture’s writer, director, editor, cinematographer and score composer — takes pains to create an appropriately retro look and feel, shooting on film and tossing off the tropes of not only vintage oaters but also ’70s revenge films and blood-spurting horror flicks. But it’s not all simple homage; Snell devises inventive (if occasionally stomach-churning) sequences, including a hammer torture scene that’s especially memorable. Some of his special effects are mighty dodgy, but that’s also authentic to the films he’s quoting, and at its best, “They Call Her Death” engages in the kind of over-the-top mythmaking that old-school westerns do best.
Amiri Baraka’s 1964 one-act play “Dutchman” is a potent, allegorical chamber piece, in which an encounter between a Black man and a white woman on a New York subway steadily escalates from casual conversation to loaded seduction to emotional and physical violence. Its initial 1967 film adaptation basically shot the play; this version, from the director Andre Gaines (who wrote the script with Qasim Basir) is more unorthodox, not only updating the time frame and specifics but expanding the narrative to include the original play as a plot point. It’s risky, and Gaines’s structural flourishes don’t all land. But it’s a fascinating way to approach a text that is both timeless and specific, and the performers (especially André Holland and Kate Mara in the central roles) are electrifying.
Gore Verbinski made his name as a director of big, crowd-pleasing franchise films like “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “The Ring,” but he’s always offset those paychecks with such comparatively eccentric efforts as “The Weather Man” and “A Cure for Wellness.” His latest is decidedly of the latter vein, combining elements of apocalyptic science fiction, time-jump narratives, character drama and A.I. alarmism into a big, boiling stew of paranoia and panic that feels particularly timely. (It’s also a rare contemporary film that genuinely grapples with the way our phones have come to monopolize our attention, and the short- and long-term effects of that domination.) Sam Rockwell is smashing as an unlikely savior — maybe a hero, maybe a madman — and the stacked supporting cast (including Zazie Beetz, Michael Peña, Haley Lu Richardson and Juno Temple) is fun and frisky.
Tsai Chin is a legend of Asian American cinema, popping up in everything from the ’60s “Fu Manchu” movies to “The Joy Luck Club” to “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” but usually in supporting roles. Here, she’s front and center, the title character in this high-spirited crime comedy from the director Sasie Sealy. Chin is Grandma Wong, a fiercely independent 80-year-old denizen of Chinatown who finds herself unexpectedly in possession of big bag stuffed with mob money. Sealy’s direction is raucous and stylish, striking a bracing balance between sending up the clichés of the indie crime movie and deploying them with a knowing wink. And she got lucky indeed by casting Chin, who can convey toughness, pathos or self-aware humor with the smallest of gestures.
The classic 1939 film adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s “The Wizard of Oz” is one of the most dissected movies of all time, spawning countless books and documentaries, so the documentarian Jeffrey McHale wisely widens his scope for this spirited essay film, taking its protagonist as its subject, in her many iterations on stage and screen. Cleverly interweaving clips from a variety of “Oz”-related ephemera, beloved and forgotten (ever seen the BBC competition show “Over the Rainbow”?), as well as interviews with several of the actresses who’ve filled Dorothy’s ruby slippers, “It’s Dorothy!” tackles shifts in popular culture, racial identification and queer-friendly readings with intellectual dexterity and playful curiosity.
Sometimes a movie delivers exactly what its title promises, and sure enough, this documentary from the director Jeremy Workman tells the story of how, in the mid-2000s, a group of Rhode Island artists discovered a tucked-away space in the Providence Place Mall — backrooms before “Backrooms,” if you will — and turned it into a crash pad. Alternating between grainy archival footage and contemporaneous interviews with the suburban squatters, Workman’s film initially plays like a slacker heist movie. But it soon reveals itself as a thoughtful exploration of gentrification, sprawl and who gets to define what art is (and what it does).
