Dust Bunny (2025)

dust bunny uhd

Mads Mikkelsen has become one of my favorite actors in recent years. I think I first saw him in the wonderful TV series Hannibal, portraying the deliciously deplorable Hannibal Lecter. But he’s been in tons of stuff, from Rogue One to Quantum of Solace and Doctor Strange. He’s one of those guys that just seems to show up in stuff, and every time he does, he makes the picture better. So I was excited to see him in this new film, Dust Bunny.

Bryan Fuller has made some great TV, including Pushing Daisies, Dead Like Me, and the aforementioned Hannibal. I had no idea he directed Dust Bunny until I saw the credits roll, at which point I was like, “Oh, that makes sense.”

Put Mads and Fuller together and you’ve got a recipe for a fun film. And it is. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.

Die My Love (2025)

image host

Lynne Ramsay’s latest stars Jennifer Lawrence as a mother who is, well, let’s just say she’s having a hard time of it. Her husband is gone a lot. She lives out in the woods with few neighbors. Her baby cries all the time. The dog her husband brought home does nothing but bark. It drives her a little mad. It is a bravura performance from Lawrence and a very good (if difficult to watch at times) film. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.

Bend of the River (1952)

bend of the river

Anthony Mann and James Stewart made a bunch of movies together. Many of them were westerns. Several are some of the best westerns made in the 1950s. Ben of the River is one of those. Stewart plays a man with a past who is trying to find redemption by leading a group of settlers to Oregon, where they will become farmers. He meets a lot of trouble on the way. Mann fills it with a lot of action and some beautiful scenery. You can read my full review at Cinema Sentries.

Rider on the Rain (1970)

rider on the rain uhd

Charles Bronson had such an interesting career. For a while, he was a terrific little character actor in films like The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven, and then he became a star and for a time he continued making interesting (if not great) films, and then he got stuck making dumb action films that wasted his talents as an actor.

Rider on the Rain is a very interesting film. It starts out like a rape revenge film, then turns into a thriller, but it turns into something far more interesting. You can read my full review over at Cinema Sentries.

Mudtown

image host

My wife and I watch a lot of British television. We’re huge fans of what they call panel shows, which are basically game shows with comedians. But we also love a good British mystery or crime drama. We subscribe to BritBox, a British streaming service that provides loads of stuff. Some of it is good, some of it is garbage.

The difficulty is that I don’t see commercials for British television; I don’t know anyone or follow anyone on social media that regularly talks about British television. So I have no idea what’s good or what’s not.

Mudtown is pretty good.

Clare Lewis Jones (Erin Richards) is a volunteer magistrate in Newport, Wales. I don’t even know what that means. I guess they hear low-level court cases and make decisions like a judge, but maybe not on major crimes. English law is weird.

Anyway, she’s good at her job. But she’s got a dark past. When she was young, she ran around with a guy now known as ‘Saint Pete’ Burton (Tom Cullen), who saved her neck back then. Now he runs drugs and is an up-and-comer in the criminal community. She’s got a husband and two kids. The oldest, Beca (Lauren Morais), has started dating Sonny Higgins (Lloyd Meredith), who is Saint Pete’s right-hand man.

One night Beca is at a party with her high school chums at some old abandoned warehouse. Someone starts a fire that just so happens to burn up a bunch of Saint Pete’s money that he had stashed in the warehouse. Later, one of the kids finds himself shot.

Most of the show involves Saint Pete trying to find out who started the fire and Clare trying to keep Beca out of trouble. There is a lot of family drama (between Clare and her husband and daughter, and Saint Pete and his crew).

The acting is good, the cinematography is great, and the story mostly worked for me. We recently watched a couple of shows where the characters made absolutely stupid decisions, and I was thrilled that for most of this one they actually seemed relatively intelligent. It gets a little dumb by the final episode, but mostly this worked for me.

I especially appreciated how they played with the whole my kids in trouble trope. A lot of shows will put a kid into trouble, and they don’t actually care that much about the kid. It is just a plot point to drive our heroes into action. But here Beca is a real character, and they do some interesting things with her.

I’m definitely hoping for a season two.

Broadchurch: The Complete Season Two

image host

I’ve been a fan of David Tennant since I watched him in Doctor Who. I try to watch him in just about everything he does (but he does a lot of things, so I’m always way behind.) I caught him in the first season of Broadchurch right as it was airing. I think that was the first time I ever saw Olivia Colman in anything, but I immediately became a fan.

That first season was excellent. It was one of those murders in a small, picturesque British village type things that they’ve done a million times, but the writing was good and the acting was excellent.

I was worried that season two would do what a lot of these types of stories do when they get a second season and add yet another murder to solve in this same sleepy little village, but it circumvents that problem in interesting ways.

I never did get around to watching Season Three, but reading this old review makes me want to go through the entire thing again. You can read my review of Season Two here.

Batman: House of Gotham

house of gotham

I’ve been a comics reader for about fifteen years now. I’m not hardcore about it. I’m not one of those people who reads single issues as they come out each month. I read the stories packaged into graphic novels or omnibuses. I’m fairly random at that too, just picking up one book here and there without paying much attention to where it falls within the greater continuity of the character.

My favorites are Batman and X-Men (although I also really love Saga, Chew, and Sandman, among others.) Those two favorites have been around for decades. They have a long list of writers. They have all sorts of spin-off characters (X-Factor, New Mutants, Nightwing, Catwoman, etc.) that get their own runs. And then there are all kinds of one-off stories and side stories, and to be honest, I don’t really understand it. I get lost in all the titles.

Shadows of the Bat ran from 1992-2000 and its focus was on side characters. Or at least that’s what the Wikis say. But while the cover of this graphic novel has “Shadows of the Bat” on it, the single issues were apparently released as part of the Batman Detective Comics line. Like I said, I don’t understand all this stuff.

House of Gotham focuses on a boy whose family was killed by the Joker. Batman tries to help him by putting him in a Wayne-funded orphanage and various other things, but he’s an awfully busy superhero, so the kid winds up slipping through the cracks.

He finds help in the strangest of places – some of Gotham’s most notorious villains take the boy under their wing. Clayface befriends him inside Arkham Asylum. Penguin gives him a job. It is true that these villains help the boy with ulterior motives, but at least they are truly present. Unlike Batman.

The story takes place over the course of about a decade. Some of Batman’s most notorious cases – Knightfall, where Bane breaks his back, and No Man’s Land, where an earthquake seals off Gotham from the world – serve as a backdrop to this story. We understand why Batman is so busy he can’t pay much attention to the boy, but also that this is still a failure of our hero.

The art by Fernando Blanco (Artist), Jordie Bellaire (Colorist) is excellent, and the writing by Matthew Rosenberg is good. I love these kinds of stories where we get to know more about characters who would normally be in the background, who might normally get just a page or two, or a few lines to move the larger plot along. I’m also a huge fan of stories that allow the more famous stories to be seen just in passing.

I’ve been trying to read every Batman story ever written (a monumental task, I know). I bought this one randomly because it was on sale for cheap. I’m glad I did because I really liked it.

Murder in the First: The Complete First Season

image host

I used to write a lot more TV reviews. For a while, back when this blog was still young, I’d actually do what they now call recaps of different shows (running down the plots of single episodes and discussing their good and bad points.) Sometimes I wish I’d stuck with that, as it later became something you could actually make a living at. But it was a lot of work, and I stopped. But even after that, I did a lot of seasonal reviews when the DVDs came out.

I don’t do that anymore, but I keep thinking about it. In my continuing effort to write about all the arts I consume (and I really hate that word – consume – but it is hard to find a better one that fits all the arts), I may try and do more TV talking.

I hate to sound like a broken record as I’m posting all these old reviews, but I don’t remember this show at all. It sounds like it had a lot of potential but wound up being just another dumb cop show. You can read my review of it here.

The Running Man by Stephen King

the running man

For a time in the late 1970s and 1980s, Stephen King published several books under the pen name Richard Bachman. His publishers didn’t think it was a good idea for King to release more than one book a year, and he is a prolific writer, so he came up with Bachman as a way to release more books.

The Bachman books tend to be grittier, more intense, and grim. Such is the case with The Running Man. Set in the near future (2025!) America’s economy is in shambles and has become a totalitarian hellscape (!). The gulf between the rich and the poor has never been wider (!!). To keep the poor from rioting, the government has created a Games Network that features a variety of violent game shows in which people can win loads of cash (if they don’t die in the process, which they usually do.)

The biggest game and the one you can win the biggest loot from is The Running Man, where a few folks are set loose into the world, given a small head start, and then hunted like animals. The longer they survive, the more money their surviving family will receive.

Ben Richards is poor; his wife has turned to prostitution to make ends meet, and his young daughter is very sick. He becomes a Running Man. He learns he will do anything to survive – lie, cheat and even kill. He also learns there is a whole underground movement trying to get the people to rise up against the government.

This is King at his most cynical and his grimiest. He breaks his story into tiny chapters (each one with a heading counting down to presumably Richard’s end). There is none of that usual King excess. As such, we barely get to know Richards or this world he’s living in. Still, it is a cool concept, and King is always good at keeping me turning the page.

It is nothing like the Arnold Schwarzenegger film from the 1980s. The more recent adaptation is much more faithful, but it loses a lot of the stories bleakness.

Rio Bravo (1959)

rio bravo

Sometimes when I’m reading these old reviews, I wonder what I was thinking. In this review of Rio Bravo that I wrote in 2015, I compare it to High Noon (famously, Howard Hawks made Rio Bravo because he thought High Noon was stupid). I note that both movies are great, but I’d give High Noon the higher rating. I can’t believe I wrote that. I still think both films are great, but in terms of sheer entertainment, Rio Bravo is one of the greatest movies ever made.

I think about it often. I pull it out to watch pretty regularly. I rarely think about High Noon. But whatever, you can still read my review even if I don’t even agree with it myself.