There's been some buzz online for Green Room, Jeremy Saulnier's upcoming feature that has Patrick Stewart playing a neo-Nazi. Interested parties would do well to check out Saulnier's prior offering, a festival darling called Blue Ruin. This spare, bloody film chronicles one man's quest for revenge as he finds himself pulled into an old-fashioned blood feud. It plays almost like an inverted version of Drive, where that film's icy, synthesized cool is replaced with leafy, Confederate pastoralia. Both films share the western's sense of violent grace, and its pinpoint focus on isolated outsiders who dispense a merciless form of premodern justice. But what gives Blue Ruin such a unique frisson is Macon Blair's turn as the hapless antihero Dwight: in contrast to Ryan Gosling's cool, consummate Driver, Dwight is a pathetic, marginal fuck-up, eating garbage and struggling to scrounge up enough cash for a gun to kill his enemies with. He is a figure of genuine pathos, closer to Gollum than Steve McQueen, but shot through with lethal purpose nonetheless. Blue Ruin is beautiful and strange, bloody and haunting. Highest recommendation.
Werewolves often seem to play second fiddle to vampires, but being so close to a silver medal just seems to make them hungrier, as werewolf movies often work harder to put a twist on the mythos. Such is the case with Wer, a wolfen murder mystery set in present-day France. A.J. Cook plays Kate, an American expatriate lawyer who takes up the case of Talan Gwynek, a towering, taciturn bumpkin believed to have torn a hapless family of campers to shreds. But there's more going on than meets the eye (isn't there always?), and Wer does a nice job of confounding expectations. What really puts it over the top are the startlingly violent action sequences, which are staged with a splattery, bone-crunching brutality that's downright refreshing in such well-worn mythical terrain. Wer presents the wolfman as he should be: a true force of nature, red in tooth and claw. The modern vampire has been fighting domestication ever since Anne Rice gave us the tortured Louis Pont du Lac, but Wer is proof positive that their hairy cousins remain as wild and untamed as ever.
I really can't say enough good things about the V/H/S series. Undeterred by the increasingly shrill horde of found footage detractors, V/H/S and V/H/S/2 not only made anthology movies cool again, but delivered a passel of stylish and imaginative shocks along the way, courtesy of young hotshots like Adam Wingard (You're Next), Ti West (The Innkeepers), and Gareth Evans (The Raid and The Raid 2). Unfortunately, many are going to point to V/H/S: Viral as the series' shark-jumping moment, but it's not nearly as bad as you might think. The main thing that separates this one from the first two is tone: where the earlier entries had a hard-edged, illicit vibe that felt like a cleaned-up version of August Underground, V/H/S: Viral is pure B-movie, drive-in cheese. Once you accept this, though, it's also a blast. The opening salvo, concerning a stage magician with a bloodthirsty enchanted cloak, is a terrifically endearing piece of schlock, and the follow-up vignette about a scientist who builds a dimensional gateway in his basement follows suit. But the best short is the third, about a group of skateboarders who travel to Tijuana and wind up with more than cuts and scrapes. It channels Larry Clark, Jackass, and Adrián García Bogliano's awesome Here Comes the Devil in nearly equal measure, and it feels closer to "classic" V/H/S than anything else here. I'll admit that I hope this is more of a spin-off, and that we get a V/H/S/3 in the gritty, analog style of the first two—but if you can accept that V/H/S: Viral is a different kind of film, you'll have a lot of fun.
