Movie Reviews
Late Night with the Devil movie review: haunted by an AI specter – FlickFilosopher.com

I first saw Late Night with the Devil at London Film Festival last autumn, and it has been embedded in my brain ever since, like an itchy splinter. I thought: This is an astonishing movie: uniquely fresh and original while also deeply lodged in the history of cinematic horror, with a powerful breakout lead performance from long-time “oh, it’s that guy” David Dastmalchian, who has been, onscreen, the most delightful weirdo — perhaps most notably as “Polka-Dot Man” in 2021’s The Suicide Squad; he also has small roles in that year’s Dune and the recent Oppenheimer — and here exudes true movie-star quality.
I wish I had reviewed this five months ago, but I’ve been dealing with my own mental-health issues that aren’t a million miles away the crisis of confidence that Dastmalchian’s troubled protagonist is coping with here. I couldn’t manage it, so I was happy that the film had scored a theatrical release on both sides of the Atlantic, which meant another opportunity to review it. But it’s all been a bit soured by the recent news that the filmmakers — the writing-directing team of Australian brothers Cameron and Colin Cairnes — utilized “AI” “art” in their production design.
I suspect that the general public doesn’t yet understand how programs erroneously dubbed “AI” are being deployed and the capacity this has to inflict enormous damage in both visual and written creative arts. In brief, computer algorithms that are nowhere near artificially intelligent have been trained on the enormous quantities of written text and visual art (drawings, paintings, photos, etc) available online to spit out what are essentially remixes of that preexisting material. These “AI”s do this in response to human-generated “prompts,” such as, for instance, “image of a walkable city with lots of greenery and beautiful buildings” or “write a literary essay exploring the themes in George Orwell’s novels.” But resulting text meant to sound natural is often stilted and rife with factual errors and references, such as to supposed scientific papers or legal decisions, that are outright inventions. Visual results meant to look realistic are often full of bizarre nonsense, like human figures with too many limbs or fingers, or impossible angles or lighting.
If you’re Extremely Online, as I am, you’ve already come across numerous examples of human writers, voiceover performers, and visual artists complaining about losing paying jobs to “AI,” including so-called deepfake video technology. (One of the issues behind last year’s Screen Actors Guild and Writers Guide strikes was studio use of these “AI” algorithms to replace their members’ work.) Even though there is no authentic creative effort or considered thought behind the output of these programs — they are incapable of conceiving anything new — they are already substituting, if poorly, for human innovation and inventiveness.
This is where Late Night with the Devil utilizes “AI”-generated visuals:
The movie is mostly set over the course of a single episode, which we’re told went out live on Halloween night 1977, of a (fictional) American late-night talk show called Night Owls, which aired on the (fictional) network UBC. The seasonally appropriate show logo (in this still from the trailer; it appears regularly in the film) was created not by a human artist but by “AI”: the wonky windows on the skyline building are a dead giveaway.
Here’s another of the show’s interstitials, a title card welcoming viewers back from commercials:
Here the missing fingers on the skeleton clue us in to the fact that the image has been generated by “AI.”
Now, you might be thinking, “What’s the big deal? It’s just a couple of images in the background.” There are many reasons why this is a big deal, perhaps not least: 1) the actual creative work of actual human beings was stolen without permission or recompense and repurposed by a computer program to concoct these images, and 2) actual creative artists were therefore not paid to work on this film in this capacity. It’s bad enough when money-grubbing, artist-denigrating megacorporate Hollywood studios do this — it’s not forgivable, of course, but it’s certainly well within their vampire-capitalist wheelhouse — but it’s far worse when a scrappy little indie production like this one does it. If the fire of human weirdness and invention is not appreciated by a pair of maverick brother filmmakers like the Cairneses, working so far outside of Hollywood that they’re literally on the opposite side of the planet — Late Night was shot in Melbourne — then what hope is there for anyone who just wants to be an arty freakazoid eking out a little living with their ingenious eccentricity?
I don’t know the Cairneses’ previous work, but I don’t understand how you can have the kind of deliciously disturbed imagination that rustles up the bonkersly off-kilter Late Night with the Devil and not understand that legitimizing the theft of bona-fide human imagination is so uncool. (Here’s a good Twitter thread on why this is a big deal and why it’s important to send filmmakers and studios the message that this is Not Okay.)

Dedicated movie fans are engaging in personal boycotts of this movie over the “AI” issue, they feel that deeply that this is a huge problem, and I am very much on their side. I debated with myself whether I should even give the movie what small exposure a review from me would bring it. I decided it was worth it in order to highlight this issue for the vast majority of movie lovers who are not Extremely Online. Because letting mindless computer algorithms built on the hijacked work of creative human beings is going to be very very very bad for anyone who cares about the work of creative human beings, such as movies. We are at the narrowest edge of a horrible wedge, and the time to push back is now.
Here’s the incredibly ironic thing about Late Night with the Devil: it is, at its heart, a story about a creative man who is, as I mentioned earlier, suffering a crisis of creative confidence and also, most likely, creative burnout. Dastmalchian’s late-night TV host Jack Delroy, a former Chicago radio personality, just cannot seem to make enough of a dent in the popularity of his competition: ur–late night TV host Johnny Carson and his The Tonight Show. We learn this in the mockumentary opening of the film, which sets the stage for the 1977 Halloween broadcast: Delroy is a man who has been on a roller coaster of personal tragedy and professional success and intrigue all around: he’s a member of an arcane secret society — of, natch, white men — known to make or break careers. Delroy’s career isn’t quite broken, but it’s not as solid as it could be. Maybe there’s a way he can bolster himself and his show? Via, like, some arcane stuff? *gulp*

Oh, so, why burnout? In 1977, The Tonight Show ran for 261 episodes, one for basically every weeknight of the year. It’s a grueling schedule. Night Owls would have had a similar run. (Watching this movie at London Film Festival was a surreal experience for me, as a transatlantic type, for more reasons than the uncanny stuff happening onscreen, because there is no British equivalent of the American late-night-talk-show ecology; perhaps the closest thing in the 2020s is the solitary example of The Graham Norton Show, which airs only once a week, not nightly, and then only typically for half the year.) Late-night is a meatgrinder of American television. Like, no wonder someone might turn to the supernatural for an assist.
Wait, what?
The faux-documentary-style narrator informs us that we are about to be treated to the “recently discovered master tape of what went to air that night, as well as previously unseen behind-the-scenes footage.” It was, we are told, “the live-TV event that shocked the nation.”

What we witness in its ersatz-70s glory is late-night American TV at its cheesy apex. Guests for Delroy and his goofy punching-bag sidekick Gus (Rhys Auteri) include Uri Geller–esque psychic performer Christou (Fayssal Bazzi: Peter Rabbit), who does hilariously terrible (from our 2020s perspective) cold-readings on the studio audience; paranormal skeptic Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss: The Matrix Revolutions), clearly modeled on James Randi, who throws cold water over Christou; and parapsychologist June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon: Foe),who’s just written a book about her work with a teen Lilly D’Abo (Ingrid Torelli), a waif rescued from a “satanic cult” and allegedly in the grips of a “psychic infestation” — Ross-Mitchell prefers that term over “demonic possession.” It’s all so very late-70s: this was the era of Amityville Horror paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, of The Omen and The Exorcist. This was the cultural stew from which the so-called satanic-panic bullshit of the 1980s would spring.
Now, the mockumentary conceit falls down in the behind-the-scenes stuff, which purports to show what is happening backstage at the Night Owls studio while the live feed goes to commercial break. But we never understand who is shooting this material, or why… and it certainly never makes sense that these people would be having the conversations that they’re having if there was a camera there recording them. I don’t mind that much, because a breakdown of the documentary style is necessary for the ambiguous ending to work… which it does.

I found it all a perfectly pitched nightmare of overegged ambition and an anything-for-success drive, and a sly twisting of the cosy familiarity of late-night TV, meant to soothe its viewers at home into sleep and not do, er, what this episode of Night Owls does. The entire cast is terrific, but this is Dastmalchian’s showcase, and he is marvelous: he nails the quirky but easy charisma late-night demands.
But the triumph of Late Night with the Devil is absolutely marred by the Cairneses own little deal with the AI devil. “It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way,” Jack moans as his Halloween episode goes to credits. It’s a shame that the same could be said about this film.
more films like this:
• The Last Exorcism [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV]
• What We Do in the Shadows [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | BBC iPlayer UK | Shudder UK]

Movie Reviews
Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Sinners’ on VOD, Ryan Coogler's ambitious vampire epic set in the segregated South of the 1930s

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) gets 2025’s One Hell Of A Movie award. Free from the confines of franchise filmmaking – although he didn’t fail to show his acumen as a storyteller with Rocky-adjacent story Creed and two Black Panther films for Marvel – he concocted a genre-mashing action-horror-drama about life and death, good and evil, and how music bridges those dichotomies, set in the 1930s Deep South. Oh, and it’s a vampire movie. Coogler produces, writes and directs, once again casting his muse/creative partner Michael B. Jordan to lead the charge. Two things here are self-evident: One, it connected with a passionate audience, grossing $350 million worldwide. And two, you have no choice but to admire his ambition.
SINNERS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Music: It can create and reflect joy. Same goes for pain. And as Sammie (Miles Caton) explains in voiceover, It lives right on the thin line between various extremes of the human experience. We meet Sammie in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1932. He looks a little worse for wear – bloody, ragged clothes, holding a broken guitar neck, his face slashed and bleeding and bearing the visage of someone who saw too damn much. He’s the son of a preacher (Saul Williams) who warned him about all that, the devil and Hell and yada yada, and all that’s pretty much the too much that he saw. It’s morning, and the congregation’s gathered in the church, gawping at the state of this young man. Then we jump back 24 hours.
It’s a hot day. The fields are full of people picking cotton, and driving past them are Smoke (Jordan) and Stack (also Jordan), twin brothers returning home after fighting in The War to End All Wars, and some further toughening up as Chicago gangsters. They have fat rolls in their pockets and a satchel full of cash, and it’s best not to ask where it all came from. They hand the satchel over to a grotesque, tobacco-spitting white man who lies through his nasty stained teeth that “the Klan don’t exist no more” before giving them the keys to an old sawmill. Smoke and Stack are going to fast-track the building into a juke joint with music, dancing, food and booze. It’ll open tonight, and it’ll be hot and delirious and ecstatic.
And this is feasible because it’s the 1930s in a rural area so nobody has anything going on. Smoke and Stack’s first recruit is Sammie, who can play glorious slide guitar and sing with his big, deep well of a voice that belies his youth, much to his father’s chagrin. They wave booze and cash in front of pianist Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) so he’ll play, too. Storekeepers Bo (Yao) and Grace Chow (Li Jun Li) will tend bar, the burly Cornbread (Omar Miller) will mind the door. Will the woman Sammie’s sweet on, a singer named Pearline (Jayme Lawson), come by? Almost certainly. Same for Stack’s ex, Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), who passes for White; they have lingering lusty urges to reconsummate. Smoke’s ex, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), will fry up some catfish for everyone – and stir painful feelings, as he visits their baby’s grave.
Now, what’s this party missing? That’s right: trouble. There’s a big difference between fun and too much fun, and Smoke and Stack sure seem to be magnets for the latter. But that’s why this movie is titled Sinners, you know. Midway through the evening, a trio of White folk arrive with their fiddles and banjos, hoping to stir some bluegrass and Celtic flavors into the mix, but they’re met with suspicious eyes. As it should be, since we met their leader, Remmick (Jack O’Connell), in an earlier scene, R-U-N-N-O-F-T-ing from Choctaw vampire hunters, then converting a couple of Klansfolk into fellow bloodsuckers like he, and at this point you’re thinking boy it’s a good thing Annie is a Hoodoo practitioner, so somebody around here will believe what they’re seeing. Anyway, these party crashers want to taste blood in that juke joint tonight. But will someone invite them in?
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Sinners finds the sweet spot between Jordan Peele (it’s more Us than Get Out) and From Dusk Till Dawn.
Performance Worth Watching: Jordan continually comes to life when Coogler directs him, and the supporting cast – Steinfeld, Lindo, Mosaku especially – is just as good. But the breakout is Caton, a first-time actor who finds depth of character via his tremendous singing voice.
Memorable Dialogue: Stack gives a sales pitch for the juke joint that nobody can resist: “Y’all ready to eat? Y’all ready to drink? Y’all ready to sweat til y’all stink?”
Sex and Skin: There’s some rampant horniness here via a few steamy sex scenes, but none of it is particularly graphic.
Our Take: Choose your prefix: over-, uber-, extra-, they all apply. Sinners bursts with style, characters and worldbuilding, and it’s a minor miracle that Coogler corrals it all just enough so it makes thematic, visual and tonal sense. His ideas burst the bag and run in all directions – spirituality and religion, racism, crime, infidelity, trauma, creativity, art and music, social politics. It’s a lot, and I struggled with the uneven pace; the more-is-more narrative tends to sap the dramatic momentum and dilute the suspense. It seems Coogler aimed to generate a boiling kettle of provocation, but it never reaches a roll. It simmers atop a blue flame though, and it’s still hot enough to burn flesh.
I can see fuddy-duddies tut-tutting the potentially awkward marriage of Serious Period Drama with splattery horror, and I say LET THEM TUT. That’s just Coogler’s blacksploitation influence showing. Vampires are forever a rich metaphor, appropriate for a time and place where aggressors accumulated power by extracting the lifeblood, so to speak, from the less powerful – one bite, and you’re Uncle Tom. More compelling, though, are Coogler’s ruminations on the potential for music to illuminate the inexplicable, its place in the social and historical structures of a people. That’s the film’s richest idea, one that the filmmaker could have explored in great detail in a more traditional story, instead of brushing up against it. But that wouldn’t be as much fun.
Coogler spends the first 45 minutes building to the big party, and it takes another 15 for it to get saucy. Sinners truly takes flight when Sammie takes the juke joint stage to sing and strum, and Coogler choreographs a stunning unbroken shot winding through the revelers, inserting musicians from different eras, from African percussionists to Funkadelic-style electric guitarists and Chinese dancers. Such robust storytelling seems incongruous with the inevitable corn syrup-drenched vampire showdown, but Coogler makes it work through force of will, and the ability to make us feel intoxicated with the film’s energy and impressive visionary overtures. Music is love and danger and life. Music is for sinners, and that, of course, is all of us.
Our Call: Sinners ain’t perfect. But you have to see it anyway. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Movie Reviews
Parvulos: Children of the Apocalypse: Mexican horror movie may be the best of the year

Parvulos: Children of the Apocalypse is a story about family and change in a world that has been ravaged by a deadly virus. Three brothers live alone in an isolated house deep in the woods. They live off of the land and depend on each other for survival. But in the basement they house a dark secret whose discovery can change the lives of anyone who comes in contact with it.
It may sound like a straightforward tale, but there is a lot happening here. The cold open gives an idea of the harshness of the new world. It is only one lonely part of the entire planet, but it is enough to let audiences in on how desolate things have become. There is no electricity or running water and it appears as if the siblings are the only ones to have survived. The brothers also talk about a monster that can kill them at any time.
Parvulos has three distinct acts that are tied together in a melancholic tale of kinship, trust, and coming of age. The first part includes the film’s biggest revelation and begins to shape its narrative about familial bonds. Though it is filled with darkly cute and funny moments, it is never lighthearted. Even during these happier times there is a constant sense of dread.
The importance of family continues to be an important theme during the middle portion of the movie when a stranger stumbles across the brothers’ home. It is a tense and uncomfortable night for the boys and threatens to drive a wedge between them. Again, there are touching moments that see the trio forced to face difficult decisions. Much like the earlier act, everything that happens leads to the thrilling finale.
The final act is the most action packed while also being filled with some of the saddest moments of Parvulos. All the talk of family and each choice made earlier come to a head in the last minutes. It is in the end, that the strength of the writing is seen. There has been no wasted motion leading up the climax as even newer characters will resonate emotionally with anyone watching. A well done epilogue brings a sense of closure to it all.
Parvulos: Children of the Apocalypse is an intense watch filled with heart. After beautiful shots of forest animals, the rest of the film takes on a faded look that matches the ruined world. The gorier scenes are well spaced out and always effective. It is surprisingly relatable as its story of family and monsters deals in real life scenarios that have been ratcheted up to eleven. This is easily one of the best horror movies of the year.
Parvulos: Children of the Apocalypse comes to on demand June 17.

Movie Reviews
‘Dangerous Animals’ review: Sharksploitation serial killer film is tense and exciting

Dangerous Animals brings together two of horror’s most popular sub-genres. Zephyr (Hassie Harrison, Yellowstone) is a rebellious surfer who is not interested in anything on land. She is the perfect victim for Tucker (Jai Courtney, The Suicide Squad), a serial killer obsessed with sharks. When she finds herself trapped on his boat, she must find a way to escape before becoming food for the sharks.
It is the perfect premise for an over the top comedy horror. Surprisingly, the film is a tense and creepy affair that is never played for laughs. The premise means there are some wild moments, but Dangerous Animals is a tight psychological horror. The writing does an excellent job of building tension. The plot is constantly moving forward once Zephyr is brought into Tucker’s world. It is an exciting watch that is helped by set pieces which adds to the terror.
The characters are a mixed bag. Courtney is fantastic as the unhinged Tucker. Initially, he is cold and calculating. It is the kind of attitude in serial killers that some mistake as charisma. He commands the screen in every scene that he is in. Things change in the third act following an incident following one of his most cherished possessions. He loses all sense of control and the calm he exuded earlier is replaced by the mania that was hinted at. Tucker is downright frightening.
There is nothing wrong with Harrison’s performance, but her character may be a little too much for some. She lives her life on the edge and makes sure to constantly let anyone who asks know. It can be overbearing and corny at times. That being said, there is a sense of self-awareness, like in the moment when she quotes Point Break to explain her life. She is also a fantastic Final Girl, resourceful and willing to take any risk in order to survive.
It all comes together in an exhilarating watch. Dangerous Animals never tips its hand and each shocking reveal works to full effect. It is the rare twist-free horror movie that unpeels layers of its characters. Instead, fantastic sound design and well-shot shark action bring all the fear.
Dangerous Animals releases in theaters June 6.

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