Movie Reviews

September 5 Is Almost Nauseatingly Suspenseful

Published

1 year ago

December 13, 2024

September 5 Is Almost Nauseatingly Suspenseful

Peter Sarsgaard captures the right pitch for this type of role: a soft-spoken single-mindedness that can quickly shift to outrage or bewilderment.
Photo: Paramount Pictures

Tight as a drum and almost nauseatingly suspenseful, Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5 presents an unexpected angle on a familiar event. The violent standoff at the 1972 Munich Olympics, which saw the Palestinian terror group Black September take a group of Israeli athletes hostage — an incident that resulted in the shocking deaths of all the captives and most of the captors — has been well documented on film, most notably in Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated 2005 drama Munich. Fehlbaum returns to the event via its on-the-ground transmission: the ABC sports team that, while providing round-the-clock live coverage of the Olympics that year, suddenly found itself in one of the biggest, most dramatic news events of its time.

This approach is filled with potential pitfalls. At heart it’s kind of an underdog story, about sports guys, chroniclers of the frivolous, punching above their weight when given the opportunity. Make it too much of one, however, and you undermine the deadly gravity of the situation. At one point, network headquarters suggests to ABC sports chief Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) that they let the news team handle this one, and he refuses; his guys found the story, they have access to the satellite link, and they’re the ones on the ground. Sarsgaard, who gave his greatest performance more than two decades ago in another true-life journalism drama, Shattered Glass, once again captures the right pitch for this type of role: a soft-spoken single-mindedness that can quickly shift to outrage or bewilderment as the situation demands. You can imagine this guy, with those seemingly kind eyes that also look like they could slice right through you, leading a newsroom. (The actor, who won the Volpi Cup at Venice last year for Memory, probably deserves a bit more recognition these days as one of the best we’ve got.)

The movie stays largely within the confines of ABC’s remote studio in Munich, which Fehlbaum and his crew have scrupulously re-created, reportedly down to the tiniest details. Its dark, cramped corridors and control rooms absorb the sinister mood of the events happening outside; every decision begins to feel like a life-and-death matter, even though in many of these cases it’s just journalists and technicians pressing buttons and saying words. Much of the suspense derives from the ways that the studio crew, led by Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) and Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin), figures out how to cover the unfolding story, from tapping into radio frequencies being used by the police to dressing up a crew member as an athlete so he can smuggle canisters of film in and out of the now-cordoned-off Olympic Village. At 94 minutes, the film races by, but it also demonstrates a patience and fascination with the process — with the whirr of tape reels, the tangle of cables, the lumbering weight of cameras — that enhances the tension. By focusing so intently on this particular group of people covering this broader event, Fehlbaum finds his way into an otherwise pre-determined drama. We know what happened at Munich, yet we find ourselves living through the events as if their outcome was unwritten.

The film also takes on the quality of a conjuring. Fehlbaum has also remained ruthlessly faithful to the facts, interweaving acres of real, contemporaneous television footage with this modern-day reconstruction, so that his actors are interacting with actual images from the era. When they talk to the legendary sportscaster Jim McKay, we’re seeing the actual McKay (who died in 2008) as if he were responding in real time; when an Israeli athlete who got away from the kidnappers comes into the studio for an interview, we’re seeing the real guy. That may not sound like such a dramatic aesthetic gambit, but the incorporation is so thorough, so constant, that the movie starts to feel like a conversation with the past. Which it is: We forget, perhaps, that the presence of Israeli athletes at Munich was a big deal in 1972, just a generation and a half removed from World War II, in a landscape where the shadow of the Holocaust still loomed large.

Of course, September 5 comes at a time when it’s bound to become part of another conversation, about what’s currently happening in Palestine. The film serves as an important reminder that civilians have died on both sides of this conflict for decades — that nobody anywhere, really, has a monopoly on the murder of innocents. And while September 5 was filmed before the events of October 7 and Israel’s subsequent attack on the Gaza Strip and beyond, the filmmakers didn’t walk into this guilelessly; the struggle in the Middle East might sometimes exit the news cycle, especially in the U.S., but it’s been an ongoing debacle for most of our lifetimes.

The hermetically sealed quality of Fehlbaum’s film perhaps prevents us from reading too much into it about contemporary politics — or maybe it invites us to read whatever we want. But of course, such a framing can itself reveal the real-time political machinery of a historical event. Within this heated environment, we see how attitudes and language become codified. At one point, there’s even an internal conversation about whether to refer to the Black September captors as “terrorists.” We know how that one turned out. September 5 reminds us — as did Munich, as does No Other Land, for that matter — that it’s the drip, drip, drip of small, seemingly minor decisions and actions that wind up determining how we see, experience, and understand history.

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Movie Reviews

Roll On 18 Wheeler: Errol Sack’s ‘TRUCKER’ (2026) – Movie Review – PopHorror

Published

6 hours ago

March 1, 2026

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Roll On 18 Wheeler: Errol Sack’s ‘TRUCKER’ (2026) – Movie Review – PopHorror

I am a sucker for all those straight-to-video slasher movies from the 90’s; there was just a certain point where you knew the acting was terrible, however, it made you fall in love. I can definitely remember scanning the video store sections for all the different horror movies I could. All those movies had laughable names and boom mics accidentally getting in the frame. Trucker seems like a child of all those old dreams, because it is.

Let’s get into the review.

Synopsis

When a group of reckless teens cause an accident swroe to never speak of it. The father is reescued by a strange man. from the wreckage and nursed back to health by a mysterious old man. When the group agrees to visit the accident scene, they meet their match from a strange masked trucker and all his toys with revenge on his mind.

Roll on 18 Wheleer

Trucker is what you would imagine: a movie about a psychotic trucker chasing you. We have seen it many, many times. What makes the film so different is its homage to bad movies but good ideas. I don’t mean in a negative way. When you think of a slasher movie, it’s not very complicated; as a matter of fact, it takes five minutes to piece the film together. This is so simple and childlike, and I absolutely love it. Trucker gave us something a little different, not too gory, bad CGI fire, I mean, this is all we old schlock horror fans want. Trucker is the type of film that you expect from a Tubi Original, on speed. However, I would take this over any Tubi Original.

I found some parts that were definitely a shout-out to the slasher humor from all those movies. Another good point that made the film shine was the sets. I guess what I can say is the film is everything Joy Ride should have been. While most modern slashers are trying to recreate the 1980s, the film stands out with its love for those unloved 1990’s horror films. While most see Joyride, you are extremely mistaken, my friend; you will enjoy this film much more.

In The End

In the end, I enjoyed the entire film. At first, I saw it listed as an action thriller; I was pleasantly surprised, and Trucker pulled at my heart strings, enveloping me in its comfort from a long-forgotten time in horror. It’s a nostalgic blast for me, thinking back to that time, my friends, my youth, and finding my new home. Horror fans are split down the middle: from serial-killer clowns (my side) to elevated horror, where an artist paints a forty-thousand-year-old demon that chases them around an upper-class studio apartment. I say that a lot, but it’s the best way to describe some things.

The entire movie had me cheering while all the people I hated suffered dire consequences for their actions. It’s the same old story done in a way that we rabid fans could drool over, and it worked. In all the bad in the world today, and my only hope for the future is the soon-to-end Terrifier franchise. However, the direction was a recipe to succeed with 40+ year old horror fans like me. I see the film as a hope for tomorrow, leading us into a new era.

Trucker is set to release on March 10th, 2026

Movie Reviews

‘Scream 7’ Review: Ghostface Trades His Metallic Knife for Plastic in Bloody Embarrassing Slasher Sequel

Published

18 hours ago

February 28, 2026

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‘Scream 7’ Review: Ghostface Trades His Metallic Knife for Plastic in Bloody Embarrassing Slasher Sequel

It’s funny how this film is marketed as the first Scream movie in IMAX, yet it’s their sloppiest work to date. Williamson accomplishes two decent kills. My praise goes to the prosthetic team and gore above anything else. The filmmaking is amateurish, lacking any of the tension build and innovation in set pieces like the Radio Silence or Craven entries. Many slasher sequences consist of terribly spliced editing and incomprehensible camera movement. There was a person at my screening asking if one of the Ghostfaces was killed. I responded, “Yeah, they were shot in the head; you just couldn’t see it because the filmmaking is so damn unintelligible.”

Really, Spyglass? This is the best you can do to “damage control” your series that was perfectly fine?

I’m getting comments from morons right now telling me that I’m biased for speaking “politically” about this movie. Fuck you! This poorly made, bland, and franchise-worst entry is a byproduct of political cowardice.

The production company was so adamant about silencing their outspoken star, who simply stated that she’s against the killing of Palestinian people by an evil totalitarian regime, that they deliberately fired her, conflating her comments to “anti-semintism,” when, and if you read what she said exactly, it wasn’t. Only to reconstruct the buildup made in her arc and settle on a nonsensical, manufactured, nostalgia-based slop fest to appeal to fans who lack genuine film taste in big 2026. To add insult to injury, this movie actively takes potshots at those predecessors, perhaps out of pettiness that Williamson didn’t pen them or a mean-spirited middle finger to the star the studio fired. Truly, fuck you. Take the Barrera aspect out of this, which is still impossible, and Scream 7 is a lazy, sloppy, ill-conceived, no-vision, enshittification of Scream and a bloody embarrassment to the franchise. It took a real, morally upright actress to make Ghostface’s knife go from metal to plastic.

FINAL STATEMENT

You either die a Scream or live long enough to see yourself become a Stab.

Movie Reviews

Movie review: Ballet-themed erotic drama ‘Dreams’ dissipates in finale

Published

1 day ago

February 28, 2026

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Movie review: Ballet-themed erotic drama ‘Dreams’ dissipates in finale

Mexican writer/director Michel Franco explores the dynamics of money, class and the border through the spiky, unsettling erotic drama “Dreams,” starring Jessica Chastain and Isaac Hernández, a Mexican ballet dancer and actor.

In the languidly paced “Dreams,” Franco presents two individuals in love (or lust?) who experiment with wielding the power at their fingertips against their lover, the violence either state or sexual in nature. The film examines the push-pull of attraction and rejection on a scope both intimate and global, finding the uneasy space where the two meet.

Chastain stars as Jennifer McCarthy, a wealthy San Francisco philanthropist and socialite who runs a foundation that supports a ballet school in Mexico City. But Franco does not center her experience, but that of Fernando (Hernández), whom we meet first, escaping from the back of a box truck filled with migrants crossing the U.S./Mexico border, abandoned in San Antonio on a 100-degree day.

His journey is one of extreme survival, but his destination is the lap of luxury, a modernist San Francisco mansion where he makes himself at home, and where he’s clearly been at home before. A talented ballet dancer who has already once been deported, he’s risked everything to be with his lover, Jennifer, though as a high-profile figure who works with her father and brother (Rupert Friend), she’d rather keep her affair with Fernando under wraps. He’s her dirty little secret, but he’s also a human being who refuses to be kept in the shadows.

As Jennifer and Fernando attempt to navigate what it looks like for them to be together, it seems that larger forces will shatter their connection. In reality, the only real danger is each other.

The storytelling logic of “Dreams” is predicated on watching these characters move through space, the way we watch dancers do. Franco offers some fascinating parallels to juxtapose the wildly varying experiences of Fernando and Jennifer — he enters the States in a box truck, almost dying of thirst and heat stroke; she arrives in Mexico on a private plane, but they both enter empty homes alone, melancholy. During a rift in their relationship, Fernando retreats to a motel while working at a bar, drinking red wine out of plastic cups with a friend in his humble room, ignoring Jennifer’s calls, while she eats alone in her darkened dining room, drinking red wine out of crystal.

These comparisons aren’t exactly nuanced, but they are stark, and for most of the film, Franco just asks us to watch them move together, and apart, in a strange, avoidant pas de deux. Often dwarfed by architecture, their distinctive bodies in space are more important than the sparse dialogue that only serves to fill in crucial gaps in storytelling.

Cinematographer Yves Cape captures it all in crisp, saturated images. The lack of musical score (beyond diegetic music in the ballet scenes) contributes to the dry, flat affect and tone, as these characters enact increasing cruelties — both emotional and physical — upon each other as a means of trying to contain their lover, until it escalates into something truly dark and disturbing.

Franco, frankly, loses the plot of “Dreams” in the third act. What is a rather staid drama about the weight of social expectations on a relationship becomes a dramatically unexpected game of vengeance as Jennifer and Fernando grasp at any power they have over the other. She fetishizes him and he returns the favor, violently.

Ultimately, Franco jettisons his characters for the sake of unearned plot twists that leave the viewer feeling only icky. These events aren’t illuminating, and feel instead like a bleak betrayal. The circumstances of the story might be “timely,” but “Dreams” doesn’t help us understand the situation better, leaving us in the dark about what we’re supposed to take away from this story of sex, violence, money and the state. Anything it suggests we already know.