Night Patrol, 2025.

Directed by Ryan Prows.
Starring Jermaine Fowler, Justin Long, Phil Brooks, Dermot Mulroney, Freddie Gibbs, RJ Cyler, YG, Nicki Micheaux, Flying Lotus, Jon Oswald, Mike Ferguson, Evan Shafran, Zuri Reed, Kim Yarbrough, Nick Gillie, Dennis Boyd, Colin Young, Brionna Maria Lynch, Dartenea Bryant, Reed Shannon, Leonard Thomas, and TML.

SYNOPSIS:

An L.A. cop discovers a local task force is hiding a secret that puts the residents of his childhood neighborhood in danger.

There is a storm brewing between the Zulu gang and LAPD, particularly the titular racist night patrol comprised of officers who conspicuously only come out at night. They feed on the blood of Black people, typically poverty-stricken ones driven into gang culture under the impression that no one will care.

Within the first five minutes of co-writer/director Ryan Prows’ Night Patrol, that unit (which is spearheaded by Phil Brooks’ Deputy, better known by his wrestling name CM Punk, putting that assertive and aggressive showmanship to work even if his limitations as an actor are limited and on display) is killing unarmed Black civilians minding their own business, notably the girlfriend of RJ Cyler’s Wazi, previously seen in a flash forward opening impaled and bloodied in an interrogation room, setting the stage that, yes, all-out war is inevitable.

That’s all well and good with a tantalizing horror concept ripe for sociopolitical commentary, except Ryan Prows and his crowded team of screenwriters (Tim Cairo, Jake Gibson, and Shaye Ogbonna) seemingly have no idea what to do with it or say that hasn’t already been made clear from the first 15 minutes. This is most evident in the three-act chapter structure, which switches perspectives from LAPD officers to night patrol to the project housing that becomes the battle stage, where it becomes confounding who the protagonist is supposed to be.

Justin Long’s Ethan Hawkins seems like an upstanding cop partnered with Xavier (Jermaine Fowler), the brother of Wazi, who had grown tired of the African mysticism their mother, Ayanda (Nicki Micheaux), relentlessly preaches and jumped sides to the police force. However, Ethan isn’t afraid to let out his corrupt, racist side if that’s what he has to do to get in with night patrol and bring them down from the inside.

At times, the filmmakers can’t decide how much they want the supernatural and African mysticism aspects to influence the action and the story. Although the visual effects are impressive (containing everything from exploding heads to regenerating bodies), the entire stretch of battling is bogged down by characters rambling about rules and what they are possibly dealing with, while throwing in other pointless thoughts. This is also a film that goes out of its way to make its villains damn near impossible to kill, only for the reveal of how that must be accomplished to come across flat, with the final fight specifically being a severe letdown after some otherwise serviceable violent carnage.

As mentioned, Night Patrol is aimless, sometimes too comfortable switching perspectives, even if it means killing off a main character, simply because the filmmakers have no idea what else to do with them. At one point, a character mentions culture (among other things) being the only way to fight back against these supernatural beings, but it’s yet another aspect that comes across as a thought rather than an explored concept. One of last year’s best films already did that with much more profundity, style, and absorbing entertainment. As for this disjointed and scattered genre exercise, one can get everything out of it from a rudimentary understanding of the premise and concept.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★

Robert Kojder

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Thalaivar Thambi Thalaimaiyil Movie Synopsis: A village panchayat member tries to broker peace when a wedding and a funeral collide on the same morning.Thalaivar Thambi Thalaimaiyil Movie Review: Nothing strips civilization off grown men faster than a scheduling conflict. Thalaivar Thambi Thalaimiyil understands this. It parks us in a remote village for one long night where two neighbors go to war over whose event gets the morning slot, and watches as every attempt at reason bounces off their egos like rubber balls off concrete.Jeevarathinam (Jiiva) is the local panchayat head, summoned to oversee a wedding. The bride’s father (Ilavarasu) treats the whole affair like a personal coronation. Next door, an old man dies, and his son Mani (Thambi Ramaiah) decides mourning means asserting dominance. Both want 10:30 AM. Neither will move. Jeevarathinam tries to mediate, fails, tries again, fails again. The man cannot land a single compromise.Nithish Sahadev, making his Tamil debut after the well-received Malayalam film Falimy, makes an interesting call with Jiiva’s character. Jeevarathinam isn’t portrayed as bumbling or clueless. He’s smart, reasonable, level-headed in conversation. The problem is that when situations escalate beyond discussion, when Mani starts swinging a giant sickle in the air and someone needs to physically put him down, Jeevarathinam just... doesn’t. He’ll talk, he’ll reason, he’ll negotiate. But that extra step required to actually resolve things is not in his toolkit. It’s a curious limitation to build a protagonist around, and while it generates some dry humor, you do wonder if the film needed him to be quite this passive for quite this long.The laughs come through texture rather than big setups: a reaction held just long enough, the specific cadence of village dialect landing a punchline, two patriarchs puffing their chests like they’re settling ancient blood feuds when they’re really arguing about procession routes. The director understands that comedy lives in small beats, even when the material itself rarely surprises.Jiiva commits to the energy without overplaying it: a man who keeps hitting walls he won’t climb over. Ilavarasu and Thambi Ramaiah deliver their usual reliable work. TTT draws considerable mileage from its rotating cast of village characters. The groom and his brother have an amusing accent they really play up. Mani’s bedridden father gets a couple of funny moments before shuffling off. Jenson Dhivakar is a total weasel, meaning he did his job. A lot of small characters perform one or two well-timed bits before fading into the background. Not all of it lands, but enough does.TTT asks for too much credit eventually. Once a woman chases a persistent suitor into the forest with a blade, once shotguns emerge, once ruffians lob homemade grenades at wedding decorations, the make-believe world you’d accepted tips into something sillier than it can support.You likely won’t recall much of the film in a few days, but it is a good festival watch. There’s craft in knowing your lane and staying in it.Written By: Abhinav Subramanian

Jodie Foster plays a self-assured psychoanalyst whose composure unravels after a patient unexpectedly dies in the genre-bending French film “A Private Life.”

Rebecca Zlotowski’s latest, in theaters Friday, is part noir, part comedy of remarriage, and part Freudian fever dream about past lives.

This is a film that does not abide by rules or play into any easy expectations about what it should be, resulting in big swings, tonal shifts and even a lurking Holocaust through-line. Also, oddly enough considering such grave themes and subjects, it’s all done with a relatively light touch set, in part, by the cheeky needle drop at its opening: the Talking Heads song “Psycho Killer.” Some parts work better than others, but you can’t help but admire the go-for-broke originality and unabashed femininity of it all. And anchoring it all is Foster, using the full force of her star power and impeccable French to make “A Private Life,” unwieldy and complex as it is, go down as easy as a glass of gamay.

Foster’s character, Dr. Lilian Steiner, is an American expat living and working in France. She’s an accomplished, sophisticated woman who believes she has a grasp on people and the world around her, recording and cataloging all her private sessions with clients on meticulously organized CDs. This act in and of itself is a little odd — her son wonders why she doesn’t just use a more modern method, for instance. But it also kind of gets to the heart of why, perhaps, despite her evident intelligence, there’s a cold disconnect between analyst and subject. Is she even listening to them?

Lilian starts to wonder this herself after she receives a call that her client Paula ( Virginie Efira ) has died by suicide. Paula was not someone she believed was capable of this. Instead of looking inward, she goes back to the tapes to begin an amateur investigation to find some other explanation: It must be murder, she concludes. Suspects include Paula’s daughter Valérie (Luàna Bajrami) and husband Simon (Mathieu Amalric).

She also enlists a sidekick in her sleuthing, her ex-husband Gabriel (a delightful Daniel Auteuil ) who is more than happy to go along for the ride, to listen to her conspiracy theories over several bottles of wine, to be a decoy distraction so that she can snoop through Simon’s house, and, ultimately, to just be there for her, no matter how unhinged she’s becoming. You can just see the love and admiration in his attentiveness. He’s not off put by the crazy; it’s just part of what makes her, well, her. Their rekindled relationship, so effortlessly lived in, so mature, so fun, is by far the highlight of “A Private Life.”

It’s a shame that their romance is basically a side show to the more convoluted rest, which involves a hypnotist and a revelation of a past life in which Lilian and Paula were members of the same WWII-era orchestra and lovers torn apart by jealous exes and Nazis. One of those Nazis is Lilian’s son (Vincent Lacoste), which she awkwardly, drunkenly tells him at his birthday dinner to try to explain why they’ve never been that close. She’s also completely disinterested in her grandchild, which might be one “let’s unpack that” too many in this film. In other words, there’s a lot going on in “A Private Life,” which Zlotowski co-wrote with Anne Berest.

One thing there’s not enough of is Efira. She gets some moments in flashback, but most of them teeter on the “dead wife montage” cliche. It’s not that Zlotowski wasn’t aware of what she had in Efira (case in point, their poignant, tender work together in “Other People’s Children”), but perhaps she was counting on our familiarity to fill in the gaps.

“A Private Life” is ultimately Foster’s show anyway and she seems to relish the tricky assignment. The tone around her might be on the lighter side, but for Lilian, the stakes are grave with the very essence of her self-worth and life’s work on the line. It’s a fascinating portrait of a woman essentially forced to rethink and revise all of the rules she’d lived by, the facts that she made sense of the world with and submit herself to the idea that some things might just be unknowable — even for a know-it-all psychoanalyst.

“A Private Life,” a Sony Pictures Classics release in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “language, graphic nudity, brief violence, some sexual content.” Running time: 105 minutes. Three stars out of four.