Movie review by Greg Carlson

Memories of 1980s and 1990s video store culture will draw viewers of a certain age to “The Last Blockbuster,” Taylor Morden’s breezy, goofy documentary on the king of the corporate movie renting business. Long since destroyed by on-demand ease and streaming subscriptions, there was a time when millions “made it a Blockbuster night” before the harsh reality check of technology and a handful of bad decisions relegated the brand to punchline status. Accordingly, the film’s home on Netflix provides a level of irony partially addressed in the movie’s overview of Blockbuster’s spectacular decline.

Alongside the historical bullet points, Morden relies heavily on talking head interviews with an odd assortment of industry professionals including Kevin Smith, Ione Skye, Jamie Kennedy, Brian Posehn, and several others. Many of the comments are the kind of earnest and heartfelt personal observations that will remind viewers of their own trips to pick out movies. Too often, however, the tongue-in-cheek tone veers into the empty calorie territory of VH1’s cable television time-filler “I Love the ‘80s,” as subjects like Doug Benson and Ron Funches can’t resist using their screen time to test what feels like standup material.

Morden has much better luck with central subject Sandi Harding, the manager of the world’s only surviving Blockbuster store, located in Bend, Oregon. Affable, smart, practical and positive, Harding is as dynamic as any of the on-camera “celebrities” rounded up by Morden and writer Zeke Kamm. In the hands of a different filmmaking team, one imagines that Harding’s story alone would have been enough to carry a feature-length story. It’s fascinating to follow Harding as she fills her Target shopping basket with new DVD and Blu-ray releases that will soon be made available on her rental shelves.

Blockbuster’s business plan, which used database software that helped streamline store-franchising replicability, buried thousands of unique mom-and-pop video rental shops during the peak of the company’s mid-2000s brick-and-mortar dominance. Morden doesn’t entirely ignore this foul stain, but he fails in any meaningful or sustained way to fully explore and engage the dark side of Blockbuster’s monopoly. A brief but welcome appearance by salty Troma Entertainment curmudgeon Lloyd Kaufman at least calls out the chilling effect of Blockbuster’s sanitized and family-friendly product policy on independents and boutique labels.

As the latest addition to the growing subgenre of documentaries about home video’s tumultuous and exciting journey, “The Last Blockbuster” fleshes out one more chapter in the saga that includes recent takes like “The Last Video Store” and “At the Video Store,” as well as “Rewind This!” and “Adjust Your Tracking.” Despite frequent and persistent predictions that physical media will eventually disappear — an idea reiterated at least once in “The Last Blockbuster” — the strength and popularity of collecting and the will to find and see movies that would never have been carried by a Blockbuster in the first place is reflected in the ongoing work of the Criterion Collection, Vinegar Syndrome, Arrow Video, Shout! Factory, Kino Lorber, Olive Films, the American Genre Film Archive, Anchor Bay, Blue Underground, Severin Films, and many other keepers of the flame.

Will we ever see a widespread return to video rental spaces where people interact face-to-face as they discover new cinematic adventures, make connections, and invite chance recommendations that cannot be replicated by algorithms? Time will tell.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

An engrossing portrait that takes viewers deep into the world of marijuana farming in Northern California’s Humboldt County, “Freeland” rumbles along on the strength of a lovely central performance by Krisha Fairchild as Devi, a one-time hippie and last-woman-standing from the idealistic commune of the title. Fairchild, who played the fictionalized character who shares her name in nephew Trey Edward Shults’s debut feature “Krisha,” has been lauded for her efforts. Most recently, she received the award for Best Actress at the 2021 Fargo Film Festival.

“Freeland” filmmakers and longtime collaborators Kate McLean and Mario Furloni made the short documentary “Pot Country” in 2011, and that piece influences and informs the content of their feature. The writing and directing team (Furloni also serves as the cinematographer of “Freeland”) harnesses both techniques and storytelling sensibilities from their nonfiction experience. The exposition, confidently handled, invites the spectator into a fully-realized world. Devi takes seriously the cultivation of her plants. She employs a small team of young but like-minded workers to harvest the crop. Her relationship with Josh (Frank Mosley) appears at first glance to be rooted in trust.

McLean and Furloni will take the Krisha-Josh connection to fresh and unexpected places. Other pairings may be less pronounced and explosively dramatic, but are equally important. The directors lean heavily on the thematic mileage introduced by Krisha’s ex Ray (John Craven), dialing up the sense of regret and the longing for a different era. “Freeland” builds much of its tension around Krisha’s struggles to adapt to the major legal changes and regulations transforming her industry.

In addition to Mosley and Craven, the other supporting cast members add much depth to “Freeland.” Among those performers, Lily Gladstone deserves special mention. Unforgettable and brilliant in Kelly Reichardt’s “Certain Women,” Gladstone makes an impression here as Mara, another member of Krisha’s small crew. The actor capitalizes on every moment of her time on the screen, leaving one to wonder why she has not been cast more frequently in higher profile projects.

The movie, of course, is a tour de force showcase for Fairchild — an overnight sensation several decades in the making. Her first theatrical film credit listed in the Internet Movie Database is “Truckstop Cook” in Nancy Savoca’s excellent 1991 “Dogfight,” and she has more than two dozen additional television and movie appearances to her name. Devi is a meaty opportunity. “Freeland” is structured to constantly escalate the problems and increase the tension, and Fairchild takes the audience with her every step of the way. Even when the choices of McLean and Furloni strain credulity, Fairchild never plays a wrong note.

Like so many titles affected by the response to the global pandemic, “Freeland” had to cut a new path to find its viewers. Last year, the movie was scheduled in the Visions section of the canceled 2020 South by Southwest Film Festival — and its eventual distribution might have looked a bit different. From March 18 to 28, however, audiences can access “Freeland” as part of the virtual 2021 Fargo Film Festival. Tickets are on sale now.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Filmmaker Sabrina Doyle’s “Lorelei” aims for hardscrabble, working-class romance. Good onscreen chemistry between Jena Malone and Pablo Schreiber lifts the filmmaker’s debut feature out of traps set by occasionally mundane dialogue and predictable complications. Tonal and stylistic swings trade off between grim realism and dreamy expressionism. Savvy viewers will be able to say they’ve seen most of this world before — in stronger, more resonant packages — but the commitment of the lead performers sustains “Lorelei” in a way that earns solid audience support and respect all the way to the final frames.

Despite Malone’s higher profile, the movie’s point of view belongs to Schreiber’s prison parolee Wayland Beckett, a motorcycle gang member newly released following a fifteen-year stretch for armed robbery. Doyle sketches her blue collar Pacific Northwest milieu in a confident first act. The most effective scenes in the film follow Wayland as he reconnects with Malone’s Dolores, cautiously at first and then as headlong as a freight train. The out-of-sight but not out-of-mind high school sweetheart has enough economic struggles of her own and is hardly in position to help her ex. But in a blink, Wayland leaves his post-incarceration church shelter to move in with Dolores and her three kids.

Schreiber’s imposing physicality masks Wayland’s softheartedness if not his desire to avoid being placed behind bars again. That Zenlike calm, however, must be tested by conflicts and setbacks. As a screen type, Wayland belongs to a tradition of tender toughs yearning to make good while transitioning to life on the outside. Schreiber makes Wayland his own, but his character is a cinematic sibling to the kind of men brought to life by Matthias Schoenaerts in “Rust and Bone” and “The Mustang.” And even though Doyle does not intend to directly interrogate the prison system, hints of “American Me” and “American History X” accompany Wayland’s reform journey.

Despite devoting more space to Wayland, Doyle takes advantage of Malone’s gifts for conveying flinty determination. The performer is particularly good at balancing on the tightrope between impulsiveness and responsibility. Dolores deferred her dreams of competitive swimming when it turned out life had other plans for her. Doyle and Malone collaborate to imagine someone whose frustrations and bitterness threaten to boil over, but we always see just enough thoughtfulness and concern to understand that Dolores does the best she can — until she can’t.

Doyle leans in to a handful of cute touches. Wayland’s primary mode of transportation is a battered ice cream truck. Multiple aquatic motifs and links to the mythical siren of the film’s title culminate in a memorable family reunion. But for every blunt or clumsy choice, the filmmaker responds with an equal number of subtler grace notes. Like so many recent movies, “Lorelei” had to contend with pandemic-related changes. A planned world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival evaporated when the event was postponed. Despite that disappointment, “Lorelei” continues to work its way through film festivals to what will hopefully be some kind of wider availability down the road. Even if it stays under the radar, it is a movie worth seeking out.

“Lorelei” is an official selection in the narrative feature category of the 2021 Fargo Film Festival, and will be available to screen as part of the virtual event from March 18 to 28.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Filmmaker and activist Iara Lee’s “Stalking Chernobyl: Exploration After Apocalypse” ventures into the sites and surroundings of the abandoned Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, introducing an assortment of “stalkers” drawn to the growing popularity of this upside-down variant on eco-tourism. Lee incorporates excellent, pre-disaster archival footage that emphasizes a constructed, utopian, Soviet-era idealism. And she balances that perspective with contemporary accounts of the explorers who seek thrills picking through the ghostly remains of Pripyat. The result largely avoids the fate of so much media designed primarily to inspire action. Despite the stern warnings predicting future catastrophe, Lee’s film investigates the past by sharing stories of the present.

Lee listens to a wide range of voices: children who lost parents to radiation-related illness, Pripyat residents forced to leave behind nearly all their belongings, sanctioned and unsanctioned guides trying to make an income, fearless (clueless?) enthusiasts who camp in abandoned buildings and drink water retrieved from the plant itself. Others explain their connections to a place many would never agree to visit. The historical content, especially the sections addressing the so-called “bio-robots” and liquidators who risked their lives in the aftermath of the disaster, is as harrowing as the ongoing concerns that forest fires will ignite radioactive material.

Despite the movie’s clear position on the dangers of expanding nuclear power, Lee does not shrink from the otherworldly allure that draws so many to Chernobyl and Pripyat. Photographers love the haunting, decaying rooms that appear to have been designed directly for some post-apocalyptic horror film or video game. The latter, Lee reminds the viewer, overlaps with the digital simulacra in “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl,” the first-person shooter that draws from real-life geography as well as the sci-fi novella “Roadside Picnic” and Andrei Tarkovsky’s film “Stalker,” the latter of which gets a closing credits shout-out from Lee for its inspiring lyricism.

The piles of books in classrooms, the empty swimming pools, the desolate apartment blocks, the iconic Ferris wheel, and the rows of hospital beds make for grim sets captured over and over by the cameras of amateur and professional alike. One subject points out a central conundrum: no measures are in place to prevent visitors from interacting with and disturbing these spaces. No matter how conscientious some stalkers claim to be, things are taken and things are left behind. Dozens of dolls, manufactured long after 1986 and positioned to enhance the eerie effect, seem to multiply like an invasive species.

Whether or not you have seen the work of Maryann DeLeo or “Voices from Chernobyl” or “The Russian Woodpecker” or the popular 2019 HBO series or any number of other fascinating films on the subject, one suspects that a large group of viewers will watch “Stalking Chernobyl” with a sense of morbid curiosity, stunned that so many young people are undaunted by the long-term impact of the disaster on the environment and on the human population. But one look at the massive structure of the Duga radar array — dizzyingly captured by drone photography as well as by the daredevils who climb it — and you realize that the Exclusion Zone, or “Zone of Alienation,” will continue to attract attention no matter the level of hazard.

“Stalking Chernobyl: Exploration After Apocalypse” received the Best Documentary Feature Award from the 2021 Fargo Film Festival. The movie will screen as part of the virtual event from March 18 to 28. 

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Rodney Ascher’s previous two nonfiction features, “Room 237” and “The Nightmare,” played out like the cinematic equivalent of staying up late with friends to swap scary stories, conspiracy theories, and the kind of half-remembered word-of-mouth urban legends that have only grown more potent in the internet age. The filmmaker’s new movie premiered at Sundance last week and debuts online today. “A Glitch in the Matrix” makes a fine addition to Ascher’s filmography, placing simulation theory on the shelf next to sleep paralysis and an obsession over the “hidden meanings” in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.”

The most wide-ranging and expansive of the trio, “A Glitch in the Matrix” juggles a variety of bold pronouncements (reinforced by the likes of Elon Musk and Neil deGrasse Tyson) related to the idea that our experience is but an illusion, a mirage, a kind of constructed environment controlled by some superior or artificial intelligence. Popularized in its present incarnation by Swedish-born Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, who appears in the movie, the argument that nothing is real serves as a springboard for Ascher to hear from true believers.

The onscreen presence of several subjects — a Harvard-educated engineer, a clergyman’s son, a teacher and artist — is intensified by Ascher’s decision to retain voices but upgrade visuals using motion capture animation and Fortnite-esque 3D avatars designed by Chris Burnham. We quickly grow accustomed to the sight of the videogame-like characters communicating via Skype in their otherwise everyday home-computing environments. Better-known figures, like mysticism and consciousness enthusiast Erik Davis and graphic fiction superstar Chris Ware, appear with no digital enhancements.

The backbone of “A Glitch in the Matrix” is not the influential science fiction blockbuster (which still receives plenty of Ascher’s attention), but the thoughts and writings of Philip K. Dick. The cult novelist and short story wizard — whose books have been adapted into “Blade Runner,” “Total Recall,” “Minority Report,” “A Scanner Darkly,” and “The Man in the High Castle” — delivered a 1977 address to an audience in France in which he shared in fascinating detail the reasons that convinced him he was living in a simulation. The various “clues,” often contained within the kinds of “meaningful coincidences” associated with Jungian synchronicity, become a common feature of simulation hypothesis adherents.

The most divisive structural choice Ascher makes is contained within the lengthy sequence in which Joshua Cooke, speaking to the director via phone from prison, recounts the night he killed his parents. Despite Cooke’s stated desire to help others avoid his fate, the so-called “Matrix Murderer” consumes far too much attention and the segment fails to transcend its true-crime, cautionary tale aura. The movie would have been much better off giving more time and space to Emily Pothast, who does not believe that we are trapped in a simulation.

Accompanied by clips from Sam Weiss’s classic short animation “The Cave,” narrated to perfection by Orson Welles, Pothast discusses the Allegory of the Cave and emerges as the movie’s strongest critical voice/voice of reason. Offering some tantalizing commentary on the erotic, Pothast proposes that (as she puts it in a post on her involvement with “A Glitch in the Matrix” published for “Medium”) “intimacy — that is, attending to the subjectivity of the other — is the antidote to solipsism.” No glitch in that thought.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Maite Alberdi’s “The Mole Agent” is currently enjoying some award season love, with late January recognition from the National Board of Review in the Foreign Language Film group and steady buzz as a possible feature documentary Oscar contender and/or inclusion in the International Feature category as the official entry from Chile. Alberdi’s engaging movie was also broadcast this week on American television as part of PBS’s “POV” series, roughly one year after a premiere in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

“The Mole Agent” refers to the unlikely undercover spy of the title, a gentle octogenarian named Sergio Chamy. Sergio, seeking some adventure to occupy his time and his mind following the death of his wife, responds to an ad placed by a private investigator. The shamus, Romulo Aitken, seeks to plant the elderly widower in a nursing home to determine whether one of the residents is being treated with the appropriate care. Outfitted with a few key pieces of James Bond-esque gadgetry, including camera-enabled eyeglasses and pen, Sergio is dispatched, with the blessing of his daughter, to the facility.

Only 37 years old, Alberdi is a dynamic figure in documentary studies and practice. Like many nonfiction filmmakers, her production credits cover major tasks in editing, sound, and photography, and she continues to teach documentary filmmaking at the university level. Along with a co-authored book on theories of documentary, Alberdi has also written film criticism. Descriptions of her desire to capture the intimacies of interpersonal interaction and to consider the marginalized are central to “The Mole Agent,” the kind of movie you might initially think is about one thing, but by the end has transformed into something else.

Alberdi was able to collect her story elements by gaining access to the nursing home with her camera crew under the guise of making a broader movie focused on the day-to-day rhythms of the people living there. None of the residents knows anything about the mole’s true motives, and even though he does his best to please Romulo, Sergio’s mission soon takes a back seat to a series of more interesting connections between the spy and the women who are attracted to him in one way or another.

Alberdi plays out several threads that question longstanding patriarchal traditions of the Catholic church’s influence on society. The San Francisco Nursing Home, near Santiago, has a high ratio of women to men, something of an anomaly in Chilean eldercare. The most compelling of these stories is the one centered on lifelong virgin Bertita, whose religious devotion and earthly desires clash in a thorny conflict when she sets her sights on marrying Sergio — who has emerged as the most eligible bachelor in the place.

There is no doubt that Alberdi’s warm and sympathetic character study of Sergio deliberately capitalizes on humor derived from his bumbling ineptitude with the surveillance tech and his popularity with the ladies. Detractors have argued that the framing of the geriatric gumshoe’s questionable competence borders on exploitation, but followers of Alberdi’s work will counter that the filmmaker seeks to share with us a seldom-seen world filled with vibrant people desperately seeking autonomy, agency, and independence.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

New Zealand filmmaker Roseanne Liang teams up with Chloe Grace Moretz for B-movie madness in “Shadow in the Cloud.” An utterly ridiculous creature feature set aboard a bomber en route from Auckland to Samoa in 1943, Liang’s film must be approached with a healthy suspension of disbelief and monster-positive open-mindedness. Head-scratching lapses in basic logic and common sense have never stood in the way of a grand time watching the cinema’s long tradition of mutants, freaks and malevolent goblins. Those low budgets and short running times promise a certain kind of pleasure, and “Shadow in the Cloud” operates in that spirit.

Moretz plays Flight Officer Maude Garrett, a last minute passenger assigned to a Flying Fortress ominously named “The Fool’s Errand.” Carrying a mysterious package and paperwork validating her confidential mission — much to the chagrin of the flight’s skeptical crew — Maude is allowed to take off. Confined to the Sperry ball turret, Maude listens on the intercom to a steady stream of ugly sexual harassment from nearly every man on board. Despite being subjected to awful insults and unchecked misogyny, Maude asserts her qualifications and stands her ground.

If the threat of violence and rape wasn’t enough, Maude quickly realizes an equally pressing concern crawling around the exterior of the aircraft: a nasty, bat-like gremlin threatens to disable the plane. Maude knows she faces an uphill battle convincing her traveling companions that a bugbear of folklore poses a clear and present danger. Liang juggles the whole works efficiently and takes a staging risk that pays off handsomely — nearly all the action of the film’s first half is confined to the claustrophobic, prison-like sphere where Maude is stuck. Calling to mind aspects of both the famous Randall Jarrell poem and the “Amazing Stories” episode “The Mission,” Liang keeps the camera, and our attention, on Moretz in the bubble.

The gremlin plot shares screentime with the unfolding drama surrounding the contents of Maude’s top secret traveling case as well as the arrival of Japanese fighters eager to shoot down the B-17. It is the sabotaging beastie, however, that commands our primary attention, and Liang pays her respects to a wide range of classic pop culture precedents. From Roald Dahl’s 1943 book anticipating the Disney movie that never happened to Bob Clampett’s Bugs Bunny cartoon “Falling Hare,” the “Shadow in the Cloud” team acknowledges gremlin mythology with genuine admiration and respect.

The movie’s strongest gremlin connection, however, is through disgraced co-screenwriter Max Landis, whose famous father John Landis co-produced and co-directed the ill-fated “Twilight Zone: The Movie,” which features the George Miller-helmed remake of the well-known episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” The younger Landis, accused by eight women of criminal acts including rape, physical assault, emotional violence and sexual abuse, was removed as a producer of “Shadow in the Cloud” even as Writers Guild of America rules kept his screenwriting credit on the film.

While the knowledge of Landis’s involvement in “Shadow in the Cloud” invites a closer and darker reading of the film’s most menacing lines of dialogue, Liang and Moretz have both emphasized the extent to which the movie was re-written before shooting began. Director and star prevail, even if the end result is as battle-scarred and bullet-riddled as the fuselage of the cursed vessel that functions as the site of the drama. A concluding montage set to Kate Bush’s “Hounds of Love” shares period clips of the many women who served in the air forces of the Allies of World War II.