Historical fiction is what’s happening at the movies this week, with a side serving of current events in two more features. The big, plush beach-read epic among them is The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas’ adventure classic being given an extravagant new three-hour visualization by the French writing-directing team of Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de La Patelliere. Pierre Niney of Frantz and Yves Saint Laurent plays Edmond Dantes, a sailor of humble origin made good, until a jealous rival has him framed as an agent of the exiled Napoleon. Years later, he escapes an island prison and poses as a wealthy foreigner to insinuate himself into the worlds of the three men (Bastien Bouillon, Laurent Lafitte, Patrick Mille) who’d orchestrated his fate—and have profited from more crimes since.
Even with its narrative somewhat altered and compacted from Dumas’ sprawling original (which was first published as a serial between 1844-46), this remains a flamboyantly old-fashioned tale of credulity-stretching intrigue and coincidence. We seldom see its like on the big screen anymore—or maybe we do, but these days it’s more likely to take the overtly fantastical form of a Batman movie or the like. This lavish production does not shy from going over-the-top in its ostentatious settings, flashy drone shots or bombastic orchestral score. Still, it all pretty much works, particularly once the elaborate revenge scheme kicks in around mid-point.
It’s period popcorn entertainment on a grand scale, no less enjoyable for being more than a bit theatrically shameless. The Count of Monte Cristo begins opening around the Bay Area on January 3; likely SF venues (not yet confirmed at presstime) were the AMC Kabuki and Metreon.
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As strikingly bleak in its handsome B&W austerity as The Count is eye-candy colorful, The Girl With the Needle from Danish director Magnus von Horn (whose prior Sweat we reviewed here) weaves fictional elements around a shocking criminal case from a century ago. In 1919 Copenhagen, Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) is a clothing-factory seamstress whose husband hasn’t come back from WWI service, and may well be dead. She is seduced by her wealthy boss (Jorgen Fjelstrup), but any dreams of a wealthy, stable future with him get squelched by a first/last meeting with his imperious mother.
Now pregnant and desperate, with legal abortion not an option, Karoline finds herself aided by a stranger met by chance. Middle-aged Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm) seems to be in the business of helping just such poor young women, and placing their unwanted children in “good homes.” But it is not until she’s become an integral part of Dagmar’s ongoing operation that Karoline realizes her benefactress is secretly a monster—a sort of matricidal equivalent to Sweeney Todd. It is that figure who’s based on a real-life one, her trial leading to major changes in child-protective laws; and the formidable Dyrholm is impressive as always in the role.
But primary focus here is on fictive Karoline, who is not very interesting or even terribly sympathetic. The facts on record are so much more powerful than what von Horn chooses to portray, his choices end up seeming rather inscrutable, despite the film’s compelling atmosphere and aesthetics. It’s an arresting exercise in many respects that nonetheless proves somewhat frustrating. Girl opens Fri/3 at SF’s Roxie, with other Bay Area venues to follow.
Taking place a few years earlier on the far opposite ends of Eurasia is Harbin from South Korean writer-director Woo Min-ho, of prior hit political thrillers Inside Men and The Man Standing Next. It’s set in 1909, four years after a multinational treaty forced Korea to basically become a colony of Japan following the latter’s winning the Russo-Japanese War. Abandoned by allies (including the US), nationalists formed resistance groups to combat the encroachment of further Japanese imperialism, among them the Korean Independence Army. Ahn (Hyun Bin) is fighting in their ranks when they score a combat victory over some surprised Nippon troops. But he insists on honoring international war-crimes rules by not executing some captured personnel, despite his own men’s objections. That turns out to be a bitterly regretted decision, because spared high-ranking officer Mori (Park Hoon) soon seizes an opportunity to massacre nearly all Ahn’s comrades.
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To redeem himself, Ahn decides he’ll make it his mission to assassinate Japan’s Prime Minister as he travels across China to meet with Russian diplomats, orchestrating deals that will secure Korea’s subjugation. This involves a labyrinth of undercover intrigue, arms acquisition, betrayal, shootouts, and so forth, with a mole conveying most of these planned guerrilla actions to the relentless Mori before they can occur.
Dense with background details and explication that may be somewhat daunting to non-Korean audiences, Harbin nonetheless maintains interest with a somber, tense mood spiked by occasional outbursts of violence. It’s handsomely produced on impressive locations, from spectacular mountain and desert landscapes to myriad interiors whose dark look amplifies the surreptitious nature of the characters’ activities. A history lesson framed as heroic action-suspense tale, Harbin may for Western viewers recall starry big-budget WW2 espionage epics of the 1960s like Where Eagles Dare and Von Ryan’s Express—though it’s a bit less heavy on the swaggering machismo. It opens in Bay Area theaters Fri/3.
Another fact-inspired new drama has gotten a divisive response, with raves and awards from some quarters, while others have found it curiously alienating. I’m sorry to say I landed on the debit side of that divide—sorrier still because the source material seemed such a natural for the screen. Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning 2019 novel The Nickel Boys provided a succinctly powerful portrait of slavery long after the official end of slavery, via abuses visited on boys at a very long-running fictive Florida boys’ reform school (in real life the now-shuttered Dozier School). Its protagonist gets sent there unjustly as a juvenile in the early 1960s, and is lucky to survive the experience. Much later, he lives to see the institution investigated, uncovering decades of brutality including rape, beatings, and the unmarked graves of former wards who supposedly “ran away” or simply “disappeared.”
Nickel Boys (the “the” has been dropped) is a first narrative feature for RaMell Ross, who previously had turned his sojourn teaching photography in rural Alabama into a fine poetical documentary of life there. Hale County This Morning, This Evening was oblique but evocative, offering little in the way of concrete storytelling yet providing heady, lyrical insight into a place and culture.
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But Whitehead’s book is full of vivid incident, character dynamics, and historical context; it’s not the sort of thing that lends itself to flavorful abstraction. Whatever led Ross to make the decisions he makes, they didn’t work for me: He has shot this intensely dramatic story entirely in the first-person, initially limited to the perspective of teenaged Elmwood (Ethan Herisse), then also that of Turner (Brandon Wilson), who becomes his only real friend at the dreaded “Nickel Academy.”
Their travails rendered murky by a POV in which we see the abuser, but not the abused (Ross and Joslyn Barnes’ screenplay tends to leave those acts to our imagination anyway), this is a movie whose high-minded experimentalism ends up only muffling the impact of its material. The effect is rather like reading a novel entirely written in the second person: It’s a gimmick that can be pulled off, yes, but why would you want to? The performers (also including Daveed Diggs, Hamish Linklater, and Jimmie Fails) are good, albeit handicapped by the alienating technique. Some, like Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Elwood’s grandmother, succumb to overstatement when repeatedly asked to play entire scenes directly to the camera, rather than a fellow actor.
The external threads Ross weaves in (often utilizing archival footage) involving the concurrent Civil Rights movement, “space race” etc. do ultimately pay off in making this long sit achieve a kind of complex, essayistic dimensionality. But those 15 minutes or so of Chris Marker-like montage succeed at the cost of The Nickel Boys, which will have to wait for a more straightforward future translation to realize the impact that fairly leapt off Whitehead’s pages, and which should have provided no obstacle to replication in this medium. It opens in Bay Area theaters Fri/3.
More direct depictions of grave present-tense injustices are on display in two more new films. Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev’s Porcelain War centers on three Ukrainian artists living in the vicinity of devastated Kharkiv, very near the Russian border. Originally they’d all lived in Crimea, yet another “life stolen from us by Russia’s occupation.” Finding themselves in a new war zone, they maintain their disciplines as a form of protest: Cinematographer Andrey Stefanov keeps filming, including the mines and IUD’s now littering their countryside, while married couple Leontyev and Anya Stasenko continue creating ceramic miniatures that now offer commentary on this nation’s appalling day-to-day reality.
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Occasionally bringing those whimsical figures to “life” via animation, Porcelain Nation can seem a bit twee, particularly when compared to the many more bluntly powerful documentaries about Ukraine the last couple years. But in its second half, the film acquires some power of its own, as we watch Slava train as a weapons expert for the Ukrainian Special Forces, and Andrey must cope with sending his children into exile for their own safety. There’s even gritty you-are-there footage of combat missions. Ultimately, the film’s strength lies in showing how art can retain its relevance, and artists their artistry, under the most antagonistic circumstances.
Likewise, From Ground Zero: Stories From Gaza is not the most hard-hitting of recent features about Palestinians’ plight, but it benefits from a diversity of approach to a grim subject. Conceived by Rashid Masharawi, the project brings together 22 filmmakers for as many individual contributions to a nearly two-hour omnibus reflecting everyday life in Gaza. As amply demonstrated here, that life is to a large degree now spent in refugee camps, or combing through the debris of homes newly bombed to rubble—sometimes still hoping to find survivors buried beneath.
There are sequences that are straight documentary reportage, others more in the realm of personal essay, plus a fair number of dramatized vignettes. In lighter moments, we see a standup comedian provide some escapist relief for refugees; animation and marionettes are utilized elsewhere.
Not everything here is good, with a wince-worthy moment or two, as during a bit that’s like a tacky amateur music video on YouTube. But the immediacy of so many voices in front of and behind the cameras does generate considerable insight. It would take a heart of stone not to be moved when at one point various children are interviewed, and one notes that her baby brother hasn’t yet acquired the power of speech—his experience to date has only taught him to imitate the sound of an ambulance siren.
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Porcelain War and From Ground Zero both open Fri/3 at SF’s Roxie Theater, the former also at the Rafael Film Center in Marin.
by Sean P. Aune | January 10, 2026January 10, 2026 10:30 am EST
Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1986 was an exciting year for films giving us a lot of films that would go on to be beloved favorites and cult classics. It was also the start to a major shift in cultural and societal norms, and some of those still reverberate to this day.
We’re going to pick and choose which movies we hit, but right now the list stands at nearly four dozen.
Yes, we’re insane, but 1986 was that great of a year for film.
The articles will come out – in most cases – on the same day the films hit theaters in 1986 so that it is their true 40th anniversary. All films are also watched again for the purposes of these reviews and are not being done from memory. In some cases, it truly will be the first time we’ve seen them.
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This time around, it’s Jan. 10, 1986, and we’re off to see Black Moon Rising.
Black Moon Rising
What was the obsession in the 1980s with super vehicles?
Sam Quint (Tommy Lee Jones) is hired to steal a computer tape with evidence against a company on it. While being pursued, he tucks it in the parachute of a prototype vehicle called the Black Moon. While trying to retrieve it, the car is stolen by Nina (Linda Hamilton), a car thief working for a car theft ring. Both of them want out of their lives, and it looks like the Black Moon could be their ticket out.
Blue Thunder in the movies, Airwolf and Knight Rider on TV, the 1980s loved an impractical ‘super’ vehicle. In this case, the car plays a very minor role up until the final action set piece, and the story is far more about the characters and their motivations.
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The movie is silly as you would expect it to be, but it is never a bad watch. It’s just not anything particularly memorable.
1986 Movie Reviews will continue on Jan. 17, 2026, with The Adventures of the American Rabbit, The Adventures of Mark Twain, The Clan of the Cave Bear, Iron Eagle, The Longshot, and Troll.
A still from ‘Song Sung Blue’.
| Photo Credit: Focus Features/YouTube
There is something unputdownable about Mike Sardina (Hugh Jackman) from the first moment one sees him at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting celebrating his 20th sober birthday. He encourages the group to sing the famous Neil Diamond number, ‘Song Sung Blue,’ with him, and we are carried along on a wave of his enthusiasm.
Song Sung Blue (English)
Director: Craig Brewer
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Kate Hudson, Michael Imperioli, Ella Anderson, Mustafa Shakir, Fisher Stevens, Jim Belushi
Runtime: 132 minutes
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Storyline: Mike and Claire find and rescue each other from the slings and arrows of mediocrity when they form a Neil Diamond tribute band
We learn that Mike is a music impersonator who refuses to come on stage as anyone but himself, Lightning, at the Wisconsin State Fair. At the fair, he meets Claire (Kate Hudson), who is performing as Patsy Cline. Sparks fly between the two, and Claire suggests Mike perform a Neil Diamond tribute.
Claire and Mike start a relationship and a Neil Diamond tribute band, called Lightning and Thunder. They marry and after some initial hesitation, Claire’s children from her first marriage, Rachel (Ella Anderson) and Dayna (Hudson Hensley), and Mike’s daughter from an earlier marriage, Angelina (King Princess), become friends.
Members from Mike’s old band join the group, including Mark Shurilla (Michael Imperioli), a Buddy Holly impersonator and Sex Machine (Mustafa Shakir), who sings as James Brown. His dentist/manager, Dave Watson (Fisher Stevens), believes in him, even fixing his tooth with a little lightning bolt!
The tribute band meets with success, including opening for Pearl Jam, with the front man for the grunge band, Eddie Vedder (John Beckwith), joining Lightning and Thunder for a rendition of ‘Forever in Blue Jeans’ at the 1995 Pearl Jam concert in Milwaukee.
There is heartbreak, anger, addiction, and the rise again before the final tragedy. Song Sung Blue, based on Greg Kohs’ eponymous documentary, is a gentle look into a musician’s life. When Mike says, “I’m not a songwriter. I’m not a sex symbol. But I am an entertainer,” he shows that dreams do not have to die. Mike and Claire reveal that even if you do not conquer the world like a rock god, you can achieve success doing what makes you happy.
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ALSO READ: ‘Run Away’ series review: Perfect pulp to kick off the New Year
Song Sung Blue is a validation for all the regular folk with modest dreams, but dreams nevertheless. As the poet said, “there’s no success like failure, and failure’s no success at all.” Hudson and Jackman power through the songs and tears like champs, leaving us laughing, tapping our feet, and wiping away the errant tears all at once.
The period detail is spot on (never mind the distracting wigs). The chance to hear a generous catalogue of Diamond’s music in arena-quality sound is not to be missed, in a movie that offers a satisfying catharsis. Music is most definitely the food of love, so may we all please have a second and third helping?
In 1977, a man named Tony Kiritsis fell behind on mortgage payments for an Indianapolis, Indiana, property that he hoped to develop into an affordable shopping center for independent merchants. He asked his mortgage broker for more time, but was denied. This enraged him because he suspected that the broker and his father, who owned the company, were conspiring to defraud him by letting the property go into foreclosure and acquire it for much less than market value. He showed up at the offices of the mortgage company, Meridian, for a scheduled appointment regarding the debt in the broker’s office, where he took the broker, Richard O. Hall, hostage, and demanded $130,000 to settle the debt, plus a public apology from the company. He carried a long cardboard box containing a shotgun with a so-called dead man’s wire, which he affixed to Hall as a precaution against police interference: if either of them were shot, tackled, or even caused to stumble, the wire would pull the trigger, blowing Hall’s head off.
That’s only the beginning of an astonishing story that has inspired many retellings, including a memoir by Hall, a 2018 documentary (whose producers were consultants on this movie) and a podcast drama starring Jon Hamm as Tony Kiritsis. And now it’s the best current movie you likely haven’t heard about—a drama from director Gus Van Sant (“Good Will Hunting”), starring Bill Skarsgård as Tony Kiritsis and Dacre Montgomery as Richard Hall. It’s unabashedly inspired by the best crime dramas from the 1970s, including “Dog Day Afternoon,” “The Sugarland Express,” “Network,” and “Badlands,” and can stand proudly alongside them.
From the opening sequence, which scores the high-strung Tony’s pre-crime prep with Deodato’s immortally groovy disco version of “Thus Spake Zarathustra” played on the radio by one of Tony’s local heroes, the philosophical DJ Fred Temple (Colman Domingo); through the expansive middle section, which establishes Tony as part of a thriving community that will see him as their representative in the one-sided struggle between labor and capital; through the ending and postscript, which leave you unsure how to feel about what you’ve seen but eager to discuss it with others, “Dead Man’s Wire” is a nostalgia trip of the best kind. Rather than superficially imitate the style of a specific type of ’70s drama, Van Sant and his collaborators connect with the essence of what made them powerful and memorable: their connection to issues that weighed on viewers’ minds fifty years ago and that have grown heavier since.
Tony is far from a criminal genius or a potential folk hero, but thinks he’s both. The shotgun box with a weird bulge, barely held together with packing tape, is a correlative of the mentality of the man who carries it. His home is filled with counterculture-adjacent books, but he’s a slob who loudly gripes during a brief car ride that his “shorts have been ridin’ up since Market Street,” and has a vanity license plate that reads “TOPLESS.” His eloquence runs the gamut from Everyman acuity to self-canceling nonsense slathered in profanity . He accurately sums up the mortgage company’s practices as “a private equity trap” (a phrase that looks ahead to the 2008 financial collapse, which was sparked by predatory lending on subprime mortgages) and hopes that his extreme actions will generate some “some goddamn catharsis” for himself and his fellow citizens, and “some genuine guilt” among Indianapolis’ lending class.
He’s also intoxicated by his sudden local fame. The hostage situation migrates from the mortgage company to Tony’s shabby apartment complex, which is quickly surrounded by beat cops, tactical officers, and reporters (including Myha’La as Linda Page, a twenty-something, Black local TV correspondent looking to move up. Tony also forces his way into the life of his idol Temple, who tapes a phone conversation with him, previews it for police, and grudgingly accepts their or-else request to continue the dialog and plays their regular talks on his morning show.
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Despite these inroads, Tony is unable to prevent his inner petty schmuck from emerging and undermining his message, such as it is. He vacillates between treating Hall as a useless representative of the financial elite (when the elder Hall finally agrees to speak with Tony via phone from a tropical vacation, Tony sneers to Hall the younger, “Your daddy’s on the line—he wants to know when you’ll be home for supper!”) and connecting with him on a human level. When he’s not bombastic, he’s needy and fawning. “I like you!” he keeps telling people he just met, but Fred most of all—as if a Black man who’d built a comfortable life for himself and his wife in 1977 Indiana could say no when an overwhelmingly white police force asked him to become Tony’s fake-confidant; and as if it matters whether a hostage-taking gunman feels warmly towards him.
Ultimately, though, making perfect sense and effecting lasting change are no higher on Tony’s agenda than they were for the protagonists of “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Network.” Like them, these are unhinged audience surrogates whose media stardom turned them into human megaphones for anger at the miserable state of things, and the indifference of institutions that caused or worsened it. These include local law enforcement, which—to paraphrase hapless bank robber Sonny Wirtzik taunting cops in “Dog Day Afternoon”—wanna kill Tony so bad that they can taste it. The discussions between Indianapolis police and the FBI (represented by Neil Mulac’s Agent Patrick Mullaney, a straight-outta-Quantico robot) are all about how to set up and take the kill shot.
The aforementioned phone call leads to a gut-wrenching moment that echoes the then-recent kidnapping of John Paul Getty III, when hostage-takers called their victim’s wealthy grandfather to arrange ransom payment, and got nickel-and-dimed as if they were trying to sell him a used car. The elder Hall is played by “Dog Day Afternoon” star Al Pacino, inspired casting that not only officially connects Tony with Wirtzik but proves that, at 85, Pacino can still bring the heat. The character’s presence creeps into the rest of the story like a toxic fog, even when he’s not the subject of conversation.
With his frizzy grey toupee, self-satisfied Midwest twang, and punchable smirk, Pacino is skin-crawlingly perfect as an old man who built a fortune on being good at one thing, but thinks that makes him a fountain of wisdom on all things, including the conduct of Real Men in a land of women and sissies. After watching TV coverage of Tony getting emotional while keeping his shotgun on Richard, Jr., he beams with pride that Tony shed tears but his own son didn’t. (Kelly Lynch, who costarred in another classic Van Sant film about American losers, “Drugstore Cowboy,” plays Richard, Sr.’s trophy wife, who is appalled at being confronted with irrefutable evidence of her husband’s monstrousness, but still won’t say a word against him.)
Van Sant was 25 during the real-life incidents that inspired this movie. That may partly account for the physical realism of the production, which doesn’t feel created but merely observed, in the manner of ’70s movies whose authenticity was strengthened by letting the main characters’ dialogue overlap and compete with ambient sounds; shooting in existing locations when possible, and dressing the actors in clothes that looked as if they’d been hanging in regular folks’ closets for years. Peggy Schnitzer did the costumes, Stefan Dechant the production design, and Arnaud Poiter the cinematography, all of which figuratively wear bell-bottom pants and platform shoes; the soundscape was overseen by Leslie Schatz, who keeps the environments believably dense and filled with incidental sounds while making sure the important stuff can be understood. It should also be mentioned that the film’s blueprint is an original script by a first-timer, Adam Kolodny, with a bona-fide working class worldview; he wrote it while working as a custodian at the Los Angeles Zoo.
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More impressive than the film’s behind-the-scenes pedigree is its vision of another time that unexpectedly comes to seem not too different from this one. It is both a lovingly constructed time machine highlighting details that now seem as antiquated as lithography and buckboard wagons (the film deserves a special Oscar just for its phones) and a wide-ranging consideration of indestructible realities of life in the United States, which are highlighted in such a way that you notice them without feeling as if the movie pointed at them.
For instance, consider Tony’s infatuation with Fred Temple, which peaks when Tony honors his hero by demonstrating his “soul dancing” for his hostage, is a pre-Internet version of what we would now call a “parasocial relationship.” An awareness of racial dynamics is baked into this, and into the film as a whole. Domingo’s performance as Temple captures the tightrope walk that Black celebrities have to pull off, reassuring their most excitable white fans that they understand and care about them without cosigning condescension or behavior that could escalate into harassment. Consider, too, the matter-of-fact presentation of how easy it is for violence-prone people to buddy up to law enforcement officers, especially when they inhabit the same spaces. When Indianapolis police detective Will Grable (Cary Elwes) approaches Tony on a public street soon after the kidnapping, Tony’s face brightens as he exclaims, “Hi Mike! Nice to see you!”
And then, of course, there’s the economic and political framework, which is built with a firm yet delicate hand, and compassion for the vibrant messiness of life. “Dead Man’s Wire” depicts an analog era in which crises like this one were treated as important local matters that involved local people, businesses, and government agents, rather than fuel for a global agitprop industry posing as a news media, and a parasitic army of self-proclaimed influencers reycling the work of other influencers for clout. Van Sant’s movie continually insists on the uniqueness and value of every life shown onscreen, however briefly glimpsed, from the many unnamed citizens who are shown silently watching news coverage of the crisis while working their day jobs, to Fred’s right hand at the radio station, an Asian-American stoner dude (Vinh Nguyen) with a closet-sized office who talent-scouts unknown bands while exhaling cumulus clouds of pot smoke.
All this is drawn together by Van Sant and editor Saar Klein in pop music-driven montages that show how every member of the community depicted in this story is connected, even if they don’t know it or refuse to admit it. As John Donne put it, “No man is an island/Entire of itself/Each is a piece of the continent/A part of the main.” The struggle of the individual is summed up in one of Fred’s hypnotic radio monologues: “Let’s remember to become the ocean, not disappear into it.”
