In hindsight, it is not surprising that the film’s nostalgic rendition of 1962 Hong Kong left such an indelible influence on an entire generation of cineastes. In the 2000s, Wong’s formal and narrative restraint set him apart from the increasingly grandiose cinematic ambitions of both Chinese and Hollywood studios. During this period, his peers like Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou choreographed complex fight scenes on picturesque vistas, interspersed with charged moments of intense melodrama. Wong resisted any temptations towards manufacturing maximalist spectacles. Even compared to other works in his oeuvre, In the Mood for Love is noticeably lacking in kinetic frenzies of violence or bursts of passionate intimacy. Instead, the film consists of long takes where characters, no more than one or two at a time, appear in the shot: writing, eating or sitting in plumes of cigarette smoke. In close-ups, yearning stares and brief moments of physical contact are in full focus. In the wide shot, lonesome figures walk away into the distance.
Of course, the film’s lasting legacy is more than just a mood board reference. At the turn-of-the-century, Wong’s magnum opus exists in contradiction to the promises of a new age. As the internet instantaneously connected billions of users around the globe, In the Mood for Love realized an interpersonal connection that transcended the framework of forums, chat rooms or video calls. For 25 years, generations of viewers raised in cyberspace continue to resonate with a deceptively simple narrative of a love affair that never comes to fruition. In the wake of unfettered economic globalization and the explosion of WiFi access around the world, Wong swam against the tides of digital excess. Except for a few phone calls and a telegram, signs of modern technology are absent from the film. By placing us in the past, divorced from our connections to the distractions of the present moment, Wong mines for the raw essence of a feeling.
The protagonists never get to unleash their desires on screen. In the hands of another filmmaker, Leung and Cheung would’ve likely been directed to throw themselves into each other’s arms, undressing in a steamy climax to relieve the 90 minutes of simmering sexual tension. Against all conventions and instincts, Wong instead pulls his two star-crossed lovers apart. There is no scandalous affair, just a fleeting slip into a fantasy that never truly plays out. With the film’s conclusion in mind, all the instances of controlled affection, the silent stares, the late-night writing sessions and the tame re-enactments of adultery feel even more erotic. The couple don’t end up riding off into the sunset together, but the time they shared as neighbors has left a seismic impact on their lives. Like idealized memories that stray further from the truth each passing day, each of Wong’s images revel in the saturated shadows of a nostalgic mirage.
In the Mood for Love clearly bears an important personal meaning for its director. What was probably intended as a love letter to a bygone era of Hong Kong’s history, a construction of childhood scenes where gossiping family members played Mahjong all night long, has now mutated into a mournful treatise to luxuriate in fading pasts. Whether it is a person, a place, or a memory, every frame of Wong’s masterwork allows viewers to get lost in their own sinkhole of longing. Recent box office and critical hits like the Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once or Celine Song’s Past Lives are evidence that Wong’s impulse for nostalgia remains as widespread as ever. Though the former is far more direct in its homage to Wong’s film, both grapple with visions of what could’ve been. A vivid recall of fond memories and the invention of alternative futures might be our best recourse in dealing with an overstimulating, and overbearing present.
In The Mood For Love + In the Mood for Love 2001 will screen at venues across New York and London this summer.
Cinema Scholars reviews the new action/comedy Bride Hard, directed by Simon West. The film stars Rebel Wilson, Anna Camp, Anna Chlumsky, Justin Hartley, and Stephen Dorff. Magenta Light Pictures is releasing Bride Hard in theaters nationwide on June 20, 2025.
Introduction
It’s wedding season, so cue the annual onslaught of nuptial-centric movies. From Father of the Bride and Wedding Crashers to Bridesmaidsand the more recent You’re Cordially Invited, the enduring popularity of the subgenre means these films will continue to be churned out indefinitely. While these types of “chick flicks” may not be everyone’s cup of tea, it’s hard to deny the appeal of the universal themes of love, family, and friendship that make the stories so endearing.
Colleen Camp, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Gigi Zumbado, Anna Camp, Rebel Wilson, and Anna Chlumsky in “Bride Hard” (2025). Photo courtesy of Magenta Light Pictures.
When done right, that is. In other cases where the context and tone don’t quite meld, the result can be lackluster. Despite some clever wedding gags, a couple of tepid laughs, and incredible supporting performances from Anna Chlumsky and others, the new Rebel Wilson-starrer BrideHard could not be saved.
Synopsis
Sam (Wilson) and Betsy (Anna Camp) have been besties since childhood. Despite moving apart when the girls were just 11, they have managed to maintain a tight bond through the years. Naturally, when Betsy announced her engagement, she asked Sam to be her maid of honor.
Flash forward to the binge-fueled bachelorette party in Paris, where it is revealed to the audience that Sam has a double life as a secret operative for a clandestine organization. As she ducks in and out of the festivities to tend to her spy business, clueless Betsy and her fellow bridesmaids begin to question Sam’s loyalty.
Flash forward again to the weekend of the big event, held at the private island of Betsy’s soon-to-be in-laws. Despite their strained relationship, Sam shows up ready to celebrate her friend’s dream wedding. That is, until a gang of armed men interrupts the ceremony with guns blazing. Now it’s up to Sam to save the day and her friendship with her childhood bestie.
Rebel Wilson in “Bride Hard” (2025). Photo courtesy of Magenta Light Studios.
Analysis
Bride Hard tries and fails at being the raucous comedy we’ve come to expect from this kind of film fare. While there are certainly plenty of jokes throughout the film, the actual laughs are few and far between. In most instances, setups for funny scenes fall completely flat, and pithy one-liners lack punch. A few attempts at crass humor elicit more cringes than chuckles. Though the film does have its bright spots with clever wedding-themed gags and some comical sidekick antics, the action comedy falls short of big laughs.
The action aspect of Bride Hard isn’t quite the caliber we’re used to seeing in this kind of mid-budget flick. Still, there are some memorable sequences as Sam takes on the baddies around the estate. Creative kills with weaponized wedding decor give the movie points for originality. In addition to the ho-hum humor, the logic of the characters is as thin as the plot. While it might seem ridiculous to judge the merits of a silly action comedy, some of the emotional and narrative leaps just don’t compute.
Performances
While the overall timing and narrative leave much to be desired, the strong performances in the film mercifully buoy Bride Hard. Rebel Wilson carries the project as best she can as leading lady Sam. Ever charming and affable, Wilson’s take on the duplicitous character is also sly and silly at the same time. As Betsy, Anna Camp is in full blushing bride mode throughout. Camp makes cliche look adorable as she perfectly portrays her character’s somewhat vapid goodie-goodness.
The real scene stealer of Bride Hard, however, is Anna Chlumsky as type-A sister-in-law Virginia. Chlumsky exudes a hilarious air of superiority with her wide-eyed disdain for Sam. Some of the funnier scenes of the film revolve around Chlumsky as her character’s intensely controlling nature is on full display.
Anna Chlumsky, Anna Camp, Gigi Zumbado, Rebel Wilson, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph in “Bride Hard” (2025). Photo courtesy of Magenta Light Studios.
Supporting Players
Other supporting performances include a pretty fun comedic turn for Justin Hartley as Chris, an entitled and conniving friend of the family. And Da’Vine Joy Randolph as raunchy bridesmaid Lydia brings some legit laughs.
Special kudos go to eternal bad boy Stephen Dorff, who further cements his status as the guy you love to hate. He brings his special brand of villainous gusto to Bride Hard in full force, providing a much-needed jolt of gravitas to the film.
Conclusion
In some comedies, nonsensical narratives are easily forgiven when matched with smart storytelling and big laughs. Unfortunately, even the strong performances and clever action of BrideHard can’t overcome an unlikely plot and humor that just don’t click.
In the terrifying horror thriller The Sound, a world-class group of climbers is granted access to the Forbidden Wall, a mysterious rock face that has been closed for decades. Among the climbers is Sean (Marc Hills), whose grandfather made an ill-fated attempt sixty-three years earlier. During the group’s ascent, they come face-to-face with a malevolent force that quickly turns their expedition into a harrowing battle for survival, hundreds of feet above the ground.
Interview
Cinema Scholars’ own Glen Dower recently interviewed writer and director Brendan Devane about his new horror/thriller, The Sound, starring William Fichtner and Jocelyn Hudon. The film is slated for limited release across the United States on June 27, 2025.
Lightly edited for content and clarity.
Glen Dower:
Mr. Devane. How are you, Sir?
Brendan Devane:
I’m good, Glen, how are you?
Glen Dower:
I’m really good, thanks. We are talking about The Sound, ‘Evil Dead Meets Cliffhanger’, what do you think?
Brendan Devane:
Yeah, there are a bunch of comparisons you can make. In my mind, I am a really big The Thing fan, you know, Carpenter’s great film from the early 80s? I was trying to play a little bit along with those kinds of themes of unseen alien jumps into people’s heads for that kind of psychological thriller, horror feeling that Carpenter had going on there.
Glen Dower:
Growing up, you spent a lot of time in Colorado after you finished college. And how did your experience there, plus Native American culture, come together for the story of The Sound?
Brendan Devane:
I moved to Colorado right after college. I made my parents extra happy to be a ski bum after that, and just learned how to operate in the mountains and got really into ice climbing and rock climbing, and all the other stuff that happens out there. And never really was thinking about filmmaking, I was just into live music production after that in Colorado, and started working my way into production.
And so it’s always been in the back of my mind to have something kind of exciting that I’d liked in the past, like Cliffhanger or Vertical Limit, which I think are entertaining films, but are not very authentic as far as the climbing and how it portrays the climbing. I mean, who doesn’t love Cliffhanger? But the climbing community doesn’t like it as far as what they did. Of course, they got sued by Black Diamond big time for what they did in that opening sequence. So that’s always been part of my, not plan per se, but to make something that is a little bit more authentic to the climbing community.
As far as Native American goes, as you can tell, I’m a big white Irish guy from upstate New York. But I did grow up in a town that is named after Iroquois words. And growing up in the 80s, we did a lot of studying about the Native American aspects of where I grew up in upstate New York, from a town called Saratoga Springs, which is Iroquois for land of the running water.
Rachel Finninger stars in “The Sound” (2025). Photo courtesy of Blue Harbor Entertainment.
Brendan Devane (cont):
So I’ve always had an interest in Native Americans. And I played lacrosse, which is their sport, since I was a little kid, and played in a lot of leagues with the Iroquois Nationals and stuff like that, and got to know them. When you’re like me, i.e,. Not Native American, you have to tread carefully, as it’s not my story to tell. So I brought the Native Americans in to bolster that storyline.
Glen Dower:
You mentioned Cliffhanger you mentioned Vertical Limit, which are the two films I noted. How did you maintain a level of authenticity that perhaps those filmed lacked in favor of entertainment?
Brendan Devane:
It’s the reality of big wall rock climbing. That’s kind of boring! It takes hours and hours, right? Even Free Solo, one of the most exciting documentaries I’ve ever seen, took him five hours or something to do that climb. They show what 10 minutes of it, maybe, right? So you have to look for little moments in this, trying to make it authentic, because an authentic climbing movie is kind of boring, except for little spots where they may be exposed to a fall or something like that.
It was a challenge to keep it authentic, while still providing scares or tension, or thrills like that, by involving little things where the lead characters are off rope, and he slips and he might, and he might fall or something like that, which is in the realm of possibility.
When Chris O’Donnell jumps from one peak to the other in Vertical Limit with his two ice axes, it’s fun and exciting, but it’s not real, right? What happens is he falls to his death, right? That’s what’s going to happen in real life. So it takes a balance to try to make things exciting, as far as a Hollywood movie can, while still also trying to be authentic to rock climbing. And that’s why I decided, you know, pretty early on in the process that I couldn’t film this with, like, necessarily a regular production crew, or with actors.
Turns out SAG doesn’t want you to put people a thousand feet in the air! So we made two separate movies. One was a straight rock climbing film with professional rock climbers and a professional rock climbing shoot team, and the other with actors and a professional production crew, and then kind of tried to meld them in post.
We see during the credits at the very end of the movie, we see scenes with the actors. So was that to imply these guys are legit, they work hard, as opposed to just name scrolling, to actually show them in action?
Brendan Devane:
I’m always thinking of doing cool things for credits that make it a little bit interesting than just a scroll. And those were all pictures of their personal lives. It wasn’t even having to do with the film. Most of the people who were cast in this as rock climbers are rock climbers in their personal lives, maybe not professional, but Mark, the lead, who plays Sean, is an accomplished rock climber. All of them are. And so I wanted to kind of like, add a little bit to the authenticity of showing them, you know, doing this sport where typically, you know, it’s an actor who doesn’t, that’s one of my favorite parts of the Truman Show where they tell the bus driver can’t drive away in the bus because he’s an actor, right?
And this particular movie, I wanted to make sure the actors were a part of the skills, like the original Point Break when Catherine cast those surfers, she looked for surfers with SAG cards, instead of teaching actors how to surf, those background ones, obviously not Swayze or Keanu, but so I approached it the same way. I was looking for rock climbers who were also actors.
Glen Dower:
Let’s talk about some of the supporting actors as well. You’ve got William Fichtner, who is one of those actors who just brings the gravitas with the undercurrent of menace or mystery, and Kyle Gass as well! How did those two guys come to be involved?
Brendan Devane:
Well, when you’re talking about a film like this, you’re always looking for angles to be able to promote and market the film, right? If you’re not building a film in pre-production that you can market later, you’re probably doing something wrong as a filmmaker because, without the business, there’s no show, right, as the old saying goes. So that role was always earmarked for maybe a more ‘visible’ actor. And it turned out that the actor Gabe Greenspan, who’s Jason Alexander’s son, did an amazing job, was represented by the same agent who represents Bill.
And after I booked Gabe, I’m a big fan of ‘What’s the worst that can happen. They can say no,’ right? It’s like, ‘hey, I see you represent Bill. Would Bill be interested in this part?’ And he read the script and was in it. And so we got him into the film. And what an amazing actor and person to work with, and just an all-around great guy outside of the business.
Really, it was an absolute pleasure to work with Bill, and I feel very fortunate that he joined the project. As far as Kyle, I’ve always been a big Tenacious D fan. I worked with them when I was a roadie 25 years ago, back when they were first starting. And who doesn’t love Elf and Kyle’s turn as Eugene Dupree? So that was another serendipitous thing where I was working with Kyle’s agent, who at the time represented David Clennon, and Jocelyn Hudon, who also makes an appearance in the film.
William Fichtner stars in “The Sound” (2025). Photo courtesy of Blue Harbor Entertainment.
Brendan Devane (cont):
And so I kind of bundled those three actors, like a disc, ‘hey, if I cast these two people, I get a discount on Kyle?’ So, a lot of times that’s how this casting goes when you’re not necessarily looking for auditions and your normal casting director is going through all the tapes and stuff, and I’m just looking to fill roles. You know, a lot of it just kind of comes together. And it’s about working relationships with people in the business, the agents who are getting these people to work. So that was very helpful to be able to kind of one-stop shop those casting decisions.
Glen Dower:
I’m also a big fan of what’s the worst they can say, apart from ‘no’. And we just have to talk about David Clennon. I’m so glad you brought up John Carpenter’s The Thing at the very start. I saw his name in press release, and if people are reading, if I just say, “You gotta be fucking kidding…” Yes, Palmer is in this movie! I like to think this is Palmer had he not died in The Thing. So it must have been a thrill for you. Because for me, The Thing is up there in my top two favorite, perfect movies, along with Predator.
Brendan Devane:
Absolutely. When I saw The Thing, I think I was 10, and it scared the shit out of me! It just stuck. It’s one of those films that just sticks with you. I don’t throw around words like ‘invent’, but Carpenter kind of started the ‘contained horror’ before that was a thing. Nobody was talking about contained horror, but there it is. 12 people are stuck in a base in Antarctica. And that’s where, for me, the tension is derived from. They can’t escape each other. And they don’t know who’s infected.
There’s a lot of gore and blood and disgusting stuff in The Thing that we don’t necessarily get into. But I tried to bring a little bit of that tension of the unknown. It’s difficult when you’re on a big wall rock climb because the people are in proximity to each other, like they are in The Thing. When you’ve got five people sitting around a little room, and they’re testing the blood, one of my favorite scenes of all time, when they’re testing the blood to see who’s infected. I tried to do a little throwback to that, where they’re testing on the radio to see what it is.
I combined The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and that standoff there at the end between Angel Eyes, Blondie, and Tuco with that test. Hopefully, people catch it when Dave says, ‘It’s not like Antarctica down there’, because I did want to give him a little bit of a throwback to Palmer there. I can’t say enough great things about Dave. He became a good friend, and we still text. He’s coming to the premiere in Vegas. He’s an all-around stand-up person and a tremendous actor who I’m extremely grateful to for joining the project.
Glen Dower:
I just want to ask about that line. Was that line in the script before he was on board, or written for him?
Brendan Devane:
That was written for him. I had to sneak that one in for him. The character’s name is Kurt Carpenter. Now, that never really comes out, he’s called Kurt. And I combined Kurt Russell with John Carpenter there to give him a little thing. I think he’s called Kurt once in the film. But yeah, that’s just one of those little details, right, that make me chuckle that no one else will hear.
Glen Dower:
There we go, that’s the exclusive. I love that. Now, we don’t want to give too much away, but there are possibilities for a follow-up? Do we have plans for More of The Sound?
Brendan Devane:
Well, you always like to think so, right? But a lot of times this is determined on, you know, like somebody gives you a bag of money to go film a sequel, right? We’ll see how people respond to this and whether I do have a script written and an idea that just basically picks up from the ending of this. It goes a little bit bigger, filming in Norway and Italy and around the world as a higher kind of a higher budget thing. Part of this doing the sound is that we had to learn how to shoot a rock climbing feature horror, which I’m sure someone out there has done something.
Alex Honnold stars in “The Sound” (2025). Photo courtesy of Blue Harbor Entertainment.
I firmly believe that every movie has ever made in the 1950s was made by some French person, right? We’ve all got recycled ideas here. So, we had to learn how to do this at our budget level. It’s a little bit different from a hundred million dollars. Then you can use digi-doubles, you can green screen everything, right?
You can make it look like Mission Impossible, but on our budget, you know, it takes a little bit more ingenuity to pull some of this off. Hopefully, we can continue the story. You never know. I’m a big fan who isn’t of Christopher Nolan and the way that he kind of likes to leaves some of his films that little up in the air of like, is the top still spinning, or is he still in the dream, or is he not in the dream? I kind of like to leave things a little open-ended at the end so that people can imagine if there’s no more, if there isn’t a sequel, people can at least imagine that the story continues in whatever way that they think that it might go.
Glen Dower:
Perfect. The Sound is in theaters and on digital on the 27th of June. Brendan, thank you very much for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Brendan Devane:
Thanks so much, Glen.
The Sound is in theaters and on VOD from June 27, from Blue Harbor Entertainment.
Rather than a triumphant replay of the old hits, Jurassic World: Rebirth is a bit more like Malibu Stacy with a new hat. It’s a repackaged product with a couple of superficial bells and whistles that its makers believe audiences will want to see purely to remain in the loop with all the dino-based shenanigans.
Its numerous flagged/underscored/exclamation-pointed call-backs to the ’90s originals work double duty as balmy-eyed nostalgia and a tragic reminder that this is a franchise that hasn’t been able to whisk up an original thought since the credits rolled on the Steven Spielberg’s OG mega hit over three decades ago. And you know things are bad when you’re watching a summer blockbuster that’s part of the vaunted Jurassic Park IP and thinking, “Ho hum… I wonder what’s going on over at Skull Island right now…”.
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Veteran screenwriter David Koepp, who penned the first sequel, Jurassic Park: The Lost World, in 1997, returns to the DNA-splicing fray, and this new film feels every bit the rejected proposal from those salad days, a script whose dog-eared pages have been salvaged from the filing cabinet/waste bin of his old office. Often bracingly generic in its characterisations, its deployment of exposition and the occasional slow beat where someone will idly reminisce about the past, it’s baffling that someone who has worked on all varieties of film and at every level in the industry could deliver something so utterly devoid of interest or originality.
Aside from its shoddy conceit, it’s a script that does the dirty on its cast, in particular Mahershala Ali as the mercenary-for-hire Duncan who is given the remit to be recklessly impulsive when it’s revealed that he’s suffering from deep family-based trauma. Scarlett Johansson, meanwhile, has a nice line in cocky smirking as covert opps maestro Zora. She’s given the absolute non-dillemma of whether she’ll toe the corporate line as strictly set out by linen-suited weasel Krebs (Rupert Friend*), or score the winning goal for global morality and heed the wisdom of dashing palaeontologist Dr Loomis (Jonathan Bailey).
The plan here is that Krebs has offered Zora silly money to capture blood and tissue samples from three live dinosaurs employing technology created by Loomis. The snag is that their targets – representing land, sea and air – all now thrive in a tropical microclimate along the equator that also happens to be the island that was used as a testing ground for dinosaur cross-breeding. We all know it’s not going to be the quick “pop in, pop out” escapade that they all think it will be, and our gang also have to deal with the mightily naffed off “D‑Rex”, which is exactly like if a T‑Rex had been smashed in the face with the world’s largest frying pan.
The film struggles to find a justification for its existence, and we’re told that the world has grown weary of the spectacle of dinosaurs. Which in itself is a completely cynical assumption in line with saying, say, that humanity will one day grow tired and yearn for the extinction of panthers. Krebs and his deep-pocketed paymasters believe that this flashpoint of collective apathy is the time to make their play and do a little bit of under-the-radar dinosaur vivisection in order to produce a cure for heart disease, which they can charge a small fortune for once they have the patent.
The “human interest” element to the story is bolted on in the form of superdad Reuben (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) and his two daughters (Audrina Miranda as pre-teen Isabella and Luna Blaise as late-teen Teresa) and Teresa’s charming slacker boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono) as they heedlessly attempt to sail through dino infested waters in the name of family adventure. And this is two minutes after being told repeatedly that this area is a human no-go zone as death will likely be imminent. So sympathy levels are a tad hard to come by, even if the level of performance and character depth is a little bit higher/deeper on this side of the playing field.
What saves the film from the summer doldrums is the typically stellar work by director Gareth Edwards, who, despite the quality of the materials he’s been given to work with, proves once more that he’s one of the most interesting and original artists in Hollywood when it comes to creating CG set pieces. There’s one sequence at the film’s mid-point that pushes the technology to satisfying extremes by having digital dinosaurs intersecting with human characters while being flung down some river rapids.
Edwards’s involvement was the one thing keeping the candle aflame in terms of our hopes that this moribund, never-ending franchise might have turned a corner. Yet even working at full pelt, there’s just too much that’s wrong and silly and derivative about this tired, tired run-out. The actors are competent; there are a few tasty zingers; the effects are seamless. But the whole enterprise just feels like the same thing we’ve seen over and over again, and that the addition of a “new hat” has been deemed more of an irritant than a gift to create something fresh.
*I’d like to make readers aware of a pertinent comment that was made on the LWLies private group chat by my esteemed colleague Hannah Strong, who noted that, “He was v much Rupert Foe in JW”. It felt right to include the observation in this, our official review of the film. Thanks.
Does anyone get excited for the birth of their fourth child? Or seventh? Or is it more like that feeling you get when you fit piece number 2000 in that last hole in the jigsaw puzzle? You know what I’m talking about. You’re excited when you dump the pieces out of the box and find all of the edges. You’re still pretty into it as you assemble the major features of the picture.
But when all that’s left is the monotonous portions of sky and water, you grit your teeth and methodically try to fit every single remaining piece into every single remaining opening, silently cussing every time a piece doesn’t fit. As that last piece settles in, you feel relief at finishing it, mixed with the thought, “I’m never doing a puzzle again.” Is this still an analogy to having kids? You decide. Bet you’re wondering how many kids I have.
That’s also the entirety of the Jurassic Park/World franchise. Jurassic Park was new exciting, and awesome. Every film after that has been increasingly disappointing to the point where you have to question your sanity for continuing to go back for more. You’ll even lie to yourself that number four (Jurassic World) was better than most. Am I still actually talking about kids? You know you’re thinking it.
Jonathan Bailey and Scarlet Johansson star in “Jurassic World Rebirth” (2025). Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures.
Jurassic World: Rebirth is what happens when you’ve run out of ideas. Scratch that, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is what happens when you run out of ideas. Rebirth is what happens when you have a midlife crisis and don’t care that you ran out of birth control. Despite its title implying a reboot of the franchise, Rebirth is just another sequel in the franchise.
Synopsis
To be fair, it does kinda-sorta reboot in that it’s five years later and Earth’s climate has killed the vast majority of the dinosaurs not living around the equator. The military isn’t trying to weaponize them, nobody is trying to sell them on the black market, and there isn’t a prehistoric locust to be found anywhere. There isn’t even a third attempt to build an amusement park or zoo around them. That leaves pharmaceuticals.
That’s right folks. This time around, dinosaurs are going to cure…checking notes…heart disease? That’s it? Nothing lofty like cancer or Alzheimer’s? And, they’re not even really going to cure it, just treat it so people can live ten to twenty years longer? I guess from a how-do-we-make-as-much-money-as-possible angle, treating heart disease would be rather lucrative. Those GLP-1 medications are making boatloads of money.
If you’re confused, dinosaurs aren’t ‘literally’ curing heart disease. However, that would be an interesting scene – a velociraptor wearing a lab coat and stethoscope walking toward a patient with a syringe. Wasn’t that a Dr. Who episode? [Googles for five minutes] Anyway, pharmaceutical executive Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) puts together a team to go on a quest to obtain blood samples from three of the largest dinosaurs to ever live.
Like all good video games, each dinosaur inhabits a different biome, providing a different setting for each MacGuffin. In this case, sea, land, and air. Why the largest animals? They lived the longest and had the biggest hearts. Why three different species? Diversity, I guess. And to make sure you understand how video-game-like this all is, two of the three dinosaurs are the kind that want to eat them.
Discussion
It’s not that the filmmakers couldn’t have made an exciting movie featuring the team hunting for one elusive herbivore. Or even getting close enough to the land dinosaur (Titanosaurus) by overcoming a bunch of sharp teeth-related obstacles. They just chose to go with the most obvious excuse to include harrowing scenes featuring a Mosasaurus (sea) and Quetzalcoatlus (air) – to send the team of humans to the carnivores.
The team itself is a by-the-numbers quest team. In addition to the money guy, there’s the wheelman – boat captain Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), the brains – paleontologist Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailer), the muscle/dino chow (Ed Skrein, Bechir Sylvain, Philippine Velge), and the team leader – mercenary Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson). All this sounds like a perfectly fine summer action blockbuster, right?
Bechir Sylvain, Jonathan Bailey, and Scarlet Johansson star in “Jurassic World Rebirth” (2025). Photo courtesy of Universal Pictures.
Here’s where it gets redundant and pointless – a second group of people gets tangled up in the mission. Reuben Delgado (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) is sailing across the ocean with his two daughters, Teresa (Luna Blaise) and Isabella (Audrina Miranda), and Teresa’s stoner boyfriend Xavier (David Iacono).
After the Mosasaurus capsizes their boat (and inexplicably doesn’t finish the job and eat them), they are rescued by Zora and crew. When they all get to the island, the two groups are separated, and the film jumps back and forth between the fetch quest crew and the stupid family drama. And all because there is a clause in the franchise contract (or so I’m told) that requires children to be put in peril. Don’t pretend you aren’t rooting for these annoying vestigial screenplay organs to become a dinosaur’s late-night indigestion.
Further Analysis
Here’s where it gets worse. In a nod back to Jurassic World, Jurassic World Rebirth features more mutant dinosaurs. One is a cross between a raptor and a pterosaur, and the other is a cross between a xenomorph and a rancor. No, I’m not mixing my movies. The Distortus Rex (a name I didn’t makeup) looks like if Return of the Jedi and Alien got drunk and, nine months later, the result was a baby no mother could love.
And that just about sums up the movie as a whole. Okay, so maybe that’s a little harsh. Jurassic World Rebirth isn’t the worst movie in the franchise. That’s because Jurassic World: Dominion exists. And this latest film does have a few really fun action sequences, including our old friend the T-Rex. And, Johansson, Ali, Bailey, and Friend give pretty good performances when they easily could have phoned them in and nobody would have noticed or cared.
Conclusion
Between the unnecessary Delgado family, the insipid and lazy mutant dinos, the film consisting largely of rehashing stuff from its preceding films, and two Titanosaurs getting to second base with each other as the humans watch in awe, Jurassic World Rebirth inspires the same question as every family with several children – are we done yet?
Rating: Ask for seventeen dollars back and call your doctor if you experience blurred vision, bleeding from the ears, involuntary eye-rolls, memory loss, a severe drop in IQ, or a strong desire to throw Junior Mints at people who unironically clap at the end of this movie.
White Men Can’t Jump is about as graceful as pop filmmaking can be. On the surface it’s a touch formulaic – the basketball movie as buddy comedy, with Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes bickering in pursuit of streetball greatness. But there’s a unique grace to the game’s form that makes it perfect when transplanted to the cinema, and despite its intended standing as comedy box office fare, the film is the purest distillation of the fluid beauty of basketball’s movement that I can name. The configuration of a classic jumpshot; pirouetting circus passes; lay-ups that kiss the backboard and fall through the net, barely bothering it: basketball just looks right when it’s projected big in a way that other sports don’t. You only need to look at any instance of football on screen to understand that simply replicating the action in film form won’t cut it; there is yet to be an accurate depiction of the game in over a century of cinema. But basketball’s action can be isolated, as in White Men Can’t Jump, where Snipes and Harrelson trade simple, perfect-form jumpers for five minutes, the camera God’s‑eye as it watches the ball arc through empty air and into the clanking metal of a chainmail net.
Elsewhere, you only need to read the title to understand that White Men Can’t Jump is a provocation acting as a joke, and while the film does climax with Harrelson eventually dunking the ball to win the game, it remains that woven within the cliched architecture of the film is a loaded back-and-forth – deployed as rapid repartee between the leads – about the race relations that dominate any serious off-court discussion about basketball. The remake is of course risible.
Not all of the 90s output was as vital and savage, however; if it seemed harmless at the time – and was a child’s gateway to the game in the manner of Air Bud and Like Mike after it – Space Jam presaged so much about where both basketball and cinema were going, a puerile endeavour more concerned with money and merch, that eventually reached its nadir with Air, which knows how contemptible its fawning over naked avarice is because it feels the need to add a note at the end stating that Phil Knight has donated $2 billion of his sneaker money to charity. (What it leaves out is that this is mostly to his own charitable foundations and that it comes in the form of appreciated Nike stock.)
If this trainer-talk seems beside the point, then know that the modern game is reliant on its apparel endorsements, and that wrong decisions of this sort can be bad for your career, as shown in Lenny Cooke – the basketball film the Safdie brothers made before Uncut Gems – where we see Lenny show up at an Adidas training camp in a pair of Jordans. This is one of a number of negligent moves on Lenny and his money-hungry entourage of wish-promising agents’ part, and the player (who was rated the best young star in the country) ends the film a decade later watching his rival LeBron James on TV. Lebron – the star of Space Jam 2 in the way Jordan was for the original – is still playing today, undoubtedly one of the greatest players of all time. But Lenny Cooke was said to be as good as him, perhaps even better. The tapes of a young Lenny which make up the first half of the film were shot in 2001 by Adam Shopkorn, designed to be a text on the ascension of a great young talent. Instead, the Safdies picked up the footage a decade later, and completed the filming of a very different documentary. As critic John Semley writes: “Hoop Dreams was meant to be a warning against all of this: the exploitation of young black athletes, the false promises of bootstrapping upward mobility through sports, the lies that dangle on the stick of American nationhood.”
No discussion about the cinema of basketball would be complete without something on Spike Lee, the sport’s most ardent film-world fan since Jack Nicholson stopped being seen courtside at every Lakers home game (Nicholson made his own basketball film in 1970, his raucous directorial debut Drive, He Said).
The recent NBA playoffs again saw Spike cheering on his beloved Knicks at Madison Square Garden, still alternately raging and rejoicing like he was seen doing in Reggie Miller vs The New York Knicks, a 30-for-30 documentary depicting the Knicks/Indiana Pacers rivalry that has at times seen Lee cast in a more prominent role than some of the players. His is a true devotion, though, melding sport and art at multiple times throughout his career, including directing the commercials for those first Nike-backed Jordan sneakers and a vital documentary for ESPN called Kobe Doin’ Work, a day-in-the-life type thing that has become especially poignant in the years since Kobe Bryant’s death in 2020.
Most importantly, Lee directed He Got Game, in which he cast NBA player Ray Allen in the lead role opposite Denzel Washington. Real life players had often shown-up in basketball movies – Blue Chips had Shaquille O’Neal’s name on the poster the same size as Nick Nolte’s – but in truth these were as supporting roles in smaller films, or stunts. If He Got Gamedid have a precedent, it was in Cornbread, Earl and Me, an underseen but influential film that starred NBA rookie-of-the-year Jamaal Wilkes as the titular Cornbread, gunned down by white policeman in a case of mistaken identity. But Lee’s film puts an amateur on screen for about as much time as its star, and much of it hinges on Allen’s ability to go one-on-one with Washington, the estranged father of a family freighted with the tragedy that landed him in prison.
Rebecca Lenkiewicz adapts Deborah Levy’s best-selling novel, but the result is lacklustre.
This icy psychodrama of deep familial discord plays out on the powdery-hot sands of the Spanish coast (although the film was shot in Greece) and sees the astonishing codependence of a mother and daughter come to a violent head. Sofia (Emma Mackey) has a permanent scowl on her face, and it’s easy to see why. She has to tend to her ailing mother, Rose (Fiona Shaw), who has a strange affliction where she is unable to walk, but has no physical issue and, indeed, can occasionally just hop out of her wheelchair. Hoping that a visit to a new-age clinic will get to the bottom of this issue, Rose receives pseudoscientific treatment while Sofia hooks up with Ingrid (Vicky Krieps), an extrovert handicrafter whose flighty demeanour is hiding some really dismal formative traumas.
The film charts Sofia’s increased torment as she is unable to find calm, simple normalcy in anyone she meets, although she’s not an entirely likable character herself to be frank. Dramatically, the film (which is adapted from a 2016 novel by Deborah Levy) pulls in too many different directions to be truly effective, and director Lenkiewicz doesn’t do enough to really convince that any of these people deserve a modicum of happiness. Still, it’s atmospherically shot by Kelly Reichardt regular, Chris Blauvelt, and boasts an effectively glitchy ambient soundtrack care of Matthew Herbert.
The hype was real leading up to the worldwide rollout of director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland’s long-awaited film, 28 Years Later, on June 19, 2025. 28 Days Later (2002), directed by Boyle and written by Garland, reinvigorated the undead sub-genre of horror by reimagining the concept of the zombie in a raw, visceral, and contemporary way. Unlike the traditional slow-moving, undead corpses popularized by George A. Romero’s ‘Dead’ films, Boyle’s infected were fast, feral, and driven by rage.
Shot on digital video, the film’s gritty, documentary-style visuals added a sense of realism and urgency. 28 Days Later also influenced a new wave of horror, paving the way for movies like Dawn of the Dead (2004), [REC] (2007), and World War Z (2013), all of which adopted the fast zombie trope and leaned into viral outbreak narratives. The sequel film, 28 Weeks Later (2007), didn’t capture the lightning in a bottle of its predecessor. And it also featured a new director (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo) and new writers. Still, it was largely seen as a commercial and critical hit.
The plan to make 28 Months Later was always there. But, like so many other projects, it was stuck in development hell. Mired in years-long battles as to who controlled the IP rights, all creative parties did what they always do. They moved on. In late 2022, however, Cillian Murphy (star of the original film), Boyle, and Garland put on a United front in their desire to see the third film finally get made. With Boyle directing, Garland writing, and Murphy acting as executive producer, we were off to the races. But was it worth the wait?
Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Alfie Williams in “28 Years Later” (2025). Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Releasing.
Synopsis
28 Years Later (repackaged from 28 Months Later) opens with a group of children in the Scottish Highlands watching an episode of the “Teletubbies.” Their enjoyment is interrupted when a horde of ‘rage’ infected flesh eaters bursts through the doors and windows of their cottage. The slaughter is brutal and quick. However, one child, Jimmy (Rocco Haynes), escapes, running to his father, a Priest, ready to embrace the salvation that is coming. Jimmy is given a crucifix and told to run before his father – the Father – is overtaken and consumed by the undead.
Forward to…28 Years Later (keeping in line with the first two films), and we are transported to a water-surrounded little hamlet in Northumberland, England, called Holy Island. There, 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) resides with his mother, Isla (Jodie Comer), and father, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Isla suffers from ‘episodes’ that periodically send her into hallucination-like states. Spike and his father leave the safety of Holy Island to go on a foraging mission (via a long causeway) on the mainland—mistake number one.
While Jamie is content to live humbly in this new communal society, young Spike knows that Mom needs a doctor. The only way to find one is for the pair to venture back to the mainland and seek out the fires that burn in the distance. There, the apparently crazy Dr. Kerson (Ralph Fiennes) awaits, covered in iodine. Along the way, there will be rage-infected ‘runners’ trying to stop Spike from saving his mom. Boyle and Garland have also come up with bloated and crawling ‘Slow Lows” and steroidal and evolved Alphas to make things all the more horrifying and difficult.
Like most undead films, their writers and directors love to inject their product with social commentary. George Romero, Lucio Fulci, and Danny Boyle had plenty to say concerning the state of the world. In 28 Years Later, Boyle’s at it again with undertones to a post-COVID world and a post-Brexit Britain. The problem is that his third entry in the series just isn’t that interesting. It lacks the energy and excitement of the first film. It also doesn’t help that Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s character is wholly unlikable and makes one bad decision after another.
On the plus side is Alfie Williams as Spike. He’s fantastic and will for sure be front and center in the 4th film, due out in 2026, titled 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. Also, if you love Ralph Fiennes, then you won’t be disappointed. Fiennes and Williams take over the final third of the movie. They elevate what was, essentially, a coming-of-age/family melodrama for the first hour. Jodie Comer as Isla is fine. But she seems like she’s in a different film. Which is understandable, considering she’s mentally checked out for much of this one.
There’s no denying that Boyle is a master filmmaker. He filmed 28 Years Later wholly on iPhones. Albeit tied into the most insane-looking camera rigs you’ve ever seen. Still, compared to the first film, which came out almost a quarter century ago, 28 Years Later doesn’t measure up. The colors are (purposely) muted and dull. And the set design is, for the most part, bland and unoriginal. A Swedish soldier (Edvin Ryding) joins the final third of the film for comic relief and, just when the characters seem to be finding their groove, he quickly disappears.
Ralph Fiennes stars in “28 Years Later” (2025). Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Releasing.
Conclusion
Maybe it’s that for the last twenty-five years we’ve been oversaturated with all things undead. Perhaps we simply expected a pair of OGs (Boyle and Garland), who are throwing their hat back into the ring, to deliver something truly unique and exceptional. 28 Years Later is a perfectly “OK” undead/horror movie. It’s got some top-notch camera work and fine acting. Especially Alfie Williams and Ralph Fiennes. However, to have one jump scare in the entire film shows you how much Boyle has changed direction.
It’s just not on the same level as the now beloved classic that is 28 Days Later, and not as “big” and epic as Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later. There’s also an ending scene in the new film that’s completely out of left field and off the rails. It’s a call back to the film’s beginning and sets up the sequel rather nicely. However, it likely will piss off some Boyle/Garland loyalists.
Currently, 28 Weeks Later has grossed about $67 million on a whopping $60 million budget. For some perspective, the original 28 Days Later made over $80 million on a minuscule $8 million budget. When all is said and done, this polarizing threequel will make its money back and then some. The fourth installment has already finished filming and has promised to bring back Cillian Murphy’s ‘Jim’ character in some fashion, with Murphy having a supposed major role in the third and final film in this new trilogy.
28 Years Later, starring Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ralph Fiennes, and Alfie Williams, is directed by Danny Boyle, written by Alex Garland, and playing in theaters globally. It’s being distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing.
With 55 years in the business and 23 films to his name, David Cronenberg has made an indelible mark on the face of cinema. Not only is it impossible to imagine horror as a genre without him, his far-ranging interests, tenacity as an independent filmmaker and unmistakable sense of humour have solidified him not only a favourite among critics, but audiences and fellow filmmakers as well. His latest film, The Shrouds, is his most personal to date, inspired by Cronenberg’s own process of mourning after the death of his wife. To celebrate the film finally reaching UK audiences via Vertigo Releasing, we hopped on a call with one of Canada’s most beloved exports for a chat.
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LWLies: I was in Cannes last year when [The Shrouds] premiered, and it was a real delight to be there. I feel like seeing a Cronenberg at Cannes is kind of the peak for me, as a Cronenberg fan.
Cronenberg: Hey, it is for me too.
I always love the names that you give your characters. There have been some real classics over the years. We had Saul Tenser in Crimes of the Future, we had Bianca O’Blivion in Videodrome, and now Karsh Relic. I would love to know where you find inspiration for your names, and do you keep a list every time you hear a name that you find interesting?
I do. I often do. I’m struck by a name, and I will make a note of it. I have a little file for names, and then I put a little note, if it’s a real person whose name it is, or whether it’s a compound name. Maybe I like Karsh for the first name, and Relic for the second name, and they come from two different notes that I made. It’s really just a matter of texture. It’s not significant, symbolically, let’s say. I mean, Karsh Relic obviously is not a Western, Anglo-Saxon type name, and that’s meant to indicate that his genealogy comes from someplace else, which he mentions in the movie at the beginning. It just adds something. If the character doesn’t have the right name, it feels to me like it won’t work.
It’s funny, because with Stephen King, once I had read ‘The Dead Zone’, and the lead character’s name is Johnny Smith — that’s a very extremely common sort of cliched name — and I said to a journalist, “I would never do a movie where there was a character named Johnny Smith.” Then, of course, I ended up adapting ‘The Dead Zone’, and I didn’t want to change the name because it was Stephen King’s name for his character. So yes, I have made a movie with a character named Johnny Smith.
It particularly strikes me in Crash, there’s some great names as well, so it feels like you and Ballard were on a kind of same wavelength with great names for characters.
Yeah, it took me a while to realize that Ballard and I were on the same wavelength, because I didn’t have a very good reaction to ‘Crash’ when I first read it. But then, a year later, I realized that I did get it, and I did like it, and wanted to make the movie. One of the things was, it was Ballard’s dialogue that first really attracted me. It was quite unique and tough and simple and disturbing. And then, of course, his imagery. So I realized eventually that there were a lot of things that he and I had in common, even though we came from very different places. And so it came together in the kind of fusing of our blood in the movie, which he did like a lot and supported it when we were being criticized by everybody in the world.
I was going to mention this later, but I think the fact that something like Crash was so reviled when it came out – and people were really quite vehement – and now the kind of things that get passed are so far beyond what is in Crash. I’m 32, and there’s a lot of people younger than me that are massive fans of your work. I’m curious to know if you found that younger audiences through the years have been more receptive to the ideas that are in your films.
Well, I think Crash is a good example, because when we showed it at Venice many years later, it was just a couple of years ago, because there was a new 4K version of it, and we screened it at Venice, and the audience there was very young. And they were totally not shocked and not outraged and not mad at me. And they all stayed for Q&A, and they were very welcoming and totally seemed to get the movie perfectly. Times do change, and reactions to art traditionally. I mean, Shakespeare was not well thought of in the Victorian era, and now he is a god. So if you live long enough, you will see some reversals in terms of the way your work is received.
And it can go the other way; it could be considered great and powerful, and then later considered inconsequential. That has happened to many artists also, so you never know. That’s why when I hear that Quentin Tarantino is mulling three or four options for what he says is his final film, the film that will establish his legacy — and I think you don’t have control over your legacy. In fact, you might not even have a legacy. The other aspect of that is it might be significant to you because you’ve decided it’s your last film, but your fans later, I’m sure they won’t know which film came when. If they love your films, they’re not going to worry about which was the last one, and which was the middle one, you know. So it’s, to me, not worth worrying about that sort of thing, because you really don’t have control over it.
This is so interesting. A few weeks ago I was interviewing another filmmaker, and he said that he thinks about legacy a lot, and particularly since he had a daughter, he thinks about it, because she will one day be responsible for everything that her father has created. And he said that he does think of his films as a sort of complete vision, a complete body of work that’s in conversation with each other. But I’m curious for you, you’ve been doing this a considerable amount of time now, and you’ve made so many films. Do you think of them as an entire organ with many limbs? Or do you think of them as separate kind of things that occasionally will interconnect with one another?
I actually don’t think of them. [laughs] I really don’t. They’re wayward children who, once they grow up and they’re out in the world and have their own life, maybe they’ll send me a text every once in a while, but that’s it. I know they’re linked, of course, because of my sensibility. Each time I make a movie, I really think of it as the first movie I’ve ever made, honestly. And I focus only on it and making it work. I know that there are directors who are self-referential and deliberately make references to their other work very consciously. If I have references that work that way, they’re definitely unconscious.
I’m not thinking about them. Obviously things that I’m interested in, that fascinate me — I hesitate to use the word “obsessed” because I think of an obsession as a very specific, powerful thing, and I think the word is used in places where it really doesn’t belong because they’re talking about more superficial connection. When people say I’m obsessed with the body, well, I mean, everybody’s really obsessed with their bodies, you know? Because that’s what we are. So you better be, you better pay some attention to your body, because other people will, including microbes and viruses. So you’ve got to think about it.
But yeah, I really don’t think about my other movies. I’m forced to. I don’t watch them. I don’t think about them. Like I say, if they’re alive and they have a life, then they have a life of their own, which is the way children should be. And interestingly, talking about knowing that your kid is going to be taking care of your legacy, well, your kid might not; your kid might say, “Whatever happens to my father’s work is not my job.” It’s not their job to nurture your legacy in the world to come. To me, that’s actually quite a strange attitude.
That’s a good way to talk about The Shrouds, because obviously Vincent Cassel and you have worked together before. I am always really curious to know when a director chooses to work with someone that they’ve worked with before, if that is something that comes out of happenstance, or if they have been working on this project with the person in mind. So, was Karsh written with Vincent in mind, or did it just kind of happen that way? And is that something you tend to do or tend to try and avoid?
No, I deliberately avoid thinking of an actor when I’m writing, because at that point I think I would unconsciously start to shape it for the strengths of that actor, and that might not be the best thing for the character. So I deliberately shut that part of my mind off when I’m writing; I don’t think about what actor would be best for it. Only once the character has really come to life on the page, then I try to match that character with an actor who will bring more things to it. You know, Vincent wasn’t the only one I considered, because there are many aspects to casting that most people don’t know, and they don’t need to know.
For example, what is the actor’s passport? That’s a crucial thing. This movie was a Canada-EU coproduction — basically a Canada-France coproduction. So, naturally, I started to think about some French actors. If I had wanted someone from the US, it would have been a big problem because they’re deliberately shut out of that. And unfortunately, Brexit has made the UK be also country non grata for the kind of coproductions I do. It’s really too bad. I had to work, shape everything in a particular way to get Guy Pearce in the movie because he’s Australian. When I work with Viggo, it’s not a problem because he has a Danish passport as well as an American one, so he works on his Danish passport.
These are things, as I say, that are crucial to making a movie. I often tell film students, I point out to them that casting is a crucial part of directing. It’s not very well publicised, it’s not very glamorous, but you have to consider all of these things, financing and nationality and passports and coproductions, before you even can start to think of the actor as an actor. Half your battle as a director is over if you cast the right person. And if you cast the wrong person, you are in big trouble, just creatively, if not otherwise, emotionally and psychologically. So I pay a lot of attention to the casting. It’s never frivolous, but there’s a lot that’s very subjective also. Someone else who would have thought of directing the script of The Shrouds would have come up probably with very different actors, you never know.
Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I think that those considerations you’re talking about, about visas, about scheduling, about all the other things, they’re unglamorous, but they’re so interesting to hear about, particularly as a filmmaker who has had to navigate your way through the industry in a very particular way, because you don’t have access to kind of a Spielberg budget or a Christopher Nolan budget. You’re working within independent filmmaking constraints, which is a tricky thing to do. And I think for film students, maybe there’s sometimes this notion that when you get to make a film with a studio, that’s kind of the end of the problem. But it’s like, well, then all these other considerations that come in and ways that you have to try and save money and ways that you have to work around constraints, or work with constraints.
Yeah, no, absolutely. A lot of it starts with, “Gee, I would love to be a director. I’ll be on the red carpet in a tuxedo, and it’ll be really fun, be very glamorous.” But there’s a lot that goes before that. And of course, I started off as a completely independent filmmaker, and I’ve always been. I mean, my interactions with the studios have been very — there’s always been a distance, there’s always been a producer, a strong producer, between me and the studio, like De Laurentiis on The Dead Zone, and Jeremy Thomas on Crash, and so on. I’ve never really made a pure studio movie. I think maybe A History of Violence might come closest to it with New Line. But even then, New Line wasn’t sort of the same as Universal or Paramount – it was a minor studio, let’s put it that way.
Yeah, talking about budgets, a very sore point these days, it’s even harder now. The budget of The Shrouds was half the budget of Crimes of the Future. There were more special effects involved in Crimes of the Future, but still, it’s very difficult to maintain the budget levels right now that we had some time ago, even for independent films. It has to do with the pandemic, with streaming, and Netflix, and all kinds of other things that are in the global economy in general. Cinemas are closing, distributors are going crazy. That’s very difficult. So even the fact that I’m talking to you now after the movie has already opened in most of Europe and North America has to do with finding the right distributor or even a distributor for the UK.
