Review by Sean Boelman

After the success of their first Neil Gaiman adaptation, The Sandman, it only makes sense that Netflix would want to get all-in on the Gaiman business. Based on characters introduced in the aforementioned comics before being spun off into their own series, Dead Boy Detectives brings a flawed but fun macabre noir to the streaming service’s library that will surely be the next obsession of young subscribers everywhere.

Dead Boy Detectives follows two ghosts who decide not to enter the afterlife, opting instead to stay on Earth and investigate supernatural crimes. If you split the difference between a spookier Sherlock Holmes and a campier X-Files, that’s about where Dead Boy Detectives falls. It’s dark and mature enough to entertain adults but not so edgy as to be too much for a pre-teen/teen audience. (It is TV-MA for some f-bombs, but it’s pretty tame as far as streaming series go.)

The show presents a series of interesting cases, and while some are more exciting than others, the duller episodes are nicely padded with other conflicts, like romance or an overarching supernatural threat. In this way, the show does an excellent job of capturing the anthology-esque nature of a comic adaptation while still giving us plenty to care about in the grand scheme of things.

Of course, a series like this is only as good as its leads, and the actors who play the eponymous duo are tremendous discoveries. George Rexstrew is a complete newcomer, with only a short film credit to his name, and Jayden Revri has only a few more. However, they bring charm and confidence to their roles that would rival the young leads of any major franchise. They are funny, likable, and have excellent chemistry with one another.

This is also the rare show that doesn’t pad its supporting cast with big names to steal the show — a wise decision considering how talented Rexstrew and Revri are. The most recognizable recurring star is Lukas Gage, who’s admittedly delicious as one of the show’s secondary antagonists. But the rest of the ensemble, including Kassius Nelson, Yuyu Kitamura, and Michael Beach, among others, all do a great job of infusing personality into their characters.

However, this large ensemble is also where the show begins to falter. Ultimately, Dead Boy Detectives juggles too many storylines. Between the leading trio’s overall arcs, the individual cases, and the arcs of several characters they meet along the way (from the butcher that rents our heroes their space to their dealer of magical antiques), there’s so much happening in the story that it feels hyperactive within the confines of an eight-episode season.

The series's below-the-line aspects also sometimes let it down. The world of any Neil Gaiman creation is incredibly rich, and show creator Steve Yockey and his staff of writers take some big swings with Dead Boy Detectives. Unfortunately, a few of those swings are held back by budget. Some of the set pieces have flagship-level ambition, but since this is the first season of an “untested” IP, they don’t get quite the scale they seemed to hope for, drawing viewers out of the world.

Nevertheless, Dead Boy Detectives manages to be a genuinely good time throughout the entirety of its eight-episode run. It has its fair share of cheese, but its world is so vibrant that viewers will be clamoring to spend more time with these characters. Hopefully, this will inspire Netflix to put even more behind the next season and future Gaiman adaptations.

Dead Boy Detectives is now streaming on Netflix. All eight episodes reviewed.

Rating: 4/5

Review by Sean Boelman

A movie with the pedigree of the Cronenberg name should really be making a bigger splash than Caitlin Cronenberg’s feature debut, Humane. Thus, with its relatively low-key release, it will come as little surprise to cinephiles that Humane is, frankly, not very good, suffering from wildly uneven writing by Michael Sparaga, who wastes the potential of his premise. 

The film is set in a near future, where humanity is on the brink of a collapse due to an environmental catastrophe, and a program has begun where people can be voluntarily euthanized in exchange for a substantial payment to a beneficiary. A family finds itself at a difficult crossroads when their father announces he plans to enlist in the program.

While this premise is incredibly intriguing, the novelty of the idea wears off after the first act, leading to a remaining two-thirds that’s extremely contrived — sometimes even laughably so. Although the antics are mostly entertaining, they’re so ridiculous that it’s hard to take the movie seriously. At a certain point, the lines between the intentional dark humor and the laughter it elicits from ham-fisted writing become indistinguishably blurred.

Humane is the type of movie that wears its message on its sleeve. No audience member will walk away remotely confused about the film’s environmentalist and anti-capitalist messages. While this horror-tinged sci-fi premise could have been a thought-provoking way to explore these themes, Sparaga’s script seems far less interested in provoking thought in viewers than telling them how they should think and behave.

However, the main area where Sparaga’s script falters is that it does not give the audience any characters to care about. There have been plenty of satires about rich, unsympathetic a**holes that have worked quite well, but Humane does not join those ranks. The intention is clearly to remind the audience of our need to reconnect with our humanity by showing us characters who are so egregiously severed from it, but it’s hard to really resonate with this decision if you’re rooting for most of the characters to die.

Still, despite the utterly flat archetypes of characters they are given, the talented cast manages to make the most of their roles. Jay Baruchel and Emily Hampshire are both gleefully over the top, and Sebastian Chacon is the most grounded of the cast. However, it’s the supporting cast that shines the brightest. Peter Gallagher’s turn is utterly commanding, carrying the first act (that ends up being the strongest portion of the movie), and character actor Enrico Colantoni is the only reason viewers will remain invested in the back two-thirds.

Apart from a few graphics — like fake newscasts and public service announcements — whose quality does begin to show the film’s budget, the below-the-line aspects of Humane are mostly solid. It’s not a particularly gruesome picture, with only a few short (but effective and impactful) bursts of violence. Instead, Cronenberg opts to build tension through claustrophobia and does so quite well within the confined setting.

It’s a shame that Humane is Caitlin Cronenberg’s feature directorial debut because she’ll be blamed for many of the movie’s problems that really lie with Michael Sparaga’s script. It’s really not possible to tell if she has the same juice as her brother (or her father, for that matter) until she gets her hands on a better script. As for the movie itself, it’s torn down by tedium and heavy-handedness.

Humane hits theaters on April 26.

​Rating: 2.5/5

Review by Sean Boelman

After his widely acclaimed Have a Nice Day made a splash there in 2017, animator Liu Jian returned to Berlinale with his third directorial outing, Art College 1994. Although there is much to admire about Liu’s artistic style, his latest outing is far too meandering in a narrative sense to appeal beyond an extremely niche core of cinephiles.

Inspired partly by the director’s own experiences, the film follows a group of art students on a Chinese art school campus in the mid-1990s as they wander through life in pursuit of purpose and the hope of creating something meaningful. As is often the case with semi-autobiographical movies, it feels like Liu really struggled to narrow down what the audience needs to see and what they won’t care about.

From the moment it begins with a quote from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, it’s clear what level of pretension Art College 1994 is functioning on. It’s a movie about a bunch of kids talking about things that are well beyond their wisdom. If you are willing to suspend your disbelief that every conversation these art students have is some profound meditation on art or life, you might get something of value out of this. However, for most, this slice-of-life film will feel more like an impersonation of life than a capture of life.

Because all of the characters in the movie are constantly regurgitating dialogue meant to be “deep,” there’s no variance in the ensemble. The characters all feel like vessels for the writers’ observations, lacking distinct personalities of their own. As a result, it’s difficult to buy into the friendship dynamic — the key element missing for the success of this as a hangout film.

Of course, as is the case with virtually every movie in the genre, the pacing of Art College 1994 is incredibly relaxed. The hour and fifty-odd minutes go down easy, even if they aren’t particularly challenging or entertaining. Shan Lin and Jian Liu’s script certainly has some moments that are charming or funny, but few are likely to stick with viewers after the film ends.

It also doesn’t help that the voice performances are incredibly monotonous. For most of the runtime, everyone in the movie speaks in a very cool, controlled voice. In a way, it makes sense, considering there’s not a ton of escalation in the conflict, but it doesn’t lend itself to a particularly engaging or cinematic watch.

Indeed, the only aspect of Art College 1994 that is likely to make a big impression on viewers is the animation. The general character design and settings are fine, but the movie really shines when it replicates different art styles. As the characters explore different movements and styles of art, the film begins to incorporate some of these elements — whether through the work they are creating or entire sequences of the movie, infusing it with much-needed personality.

Art College 1994 boasts some impressive animation, but its story and script are nowhere near as deep as they perceive themselves to be. Although it’s hardly a bad movie, and nothing is offensive or particularly off-putting about it, audiences are likelier to walk away from this film feeling indifferent than they are to be moved.

Art College 1994 hits theaters on April 26.

Rating: 2.5/5

Review by Daniel Lima

Those unfortunate souls suffering through the aggravating throes of insomnia need suffer no more; Dancing Village: The Curse Begins is here to cure you. An Indonesian horror prequel helmed by Kimo Stamboel (half of the Mo Brothers directing duo with Timo Tjahjanto), this follows in the ignoble tradition of both the director’s previous work and the original film by being ugly, slow, dull, and generally bereft of all the qualities one would want in a story.

KKN, Curse of the Dancing Village was based on a Twitter thread that went viral in Indonesia — a story about a group of college kids doing community service in a remote village inhabited by a variety of strange spirits, most notably, a woman draped in ornate clothes who compels people to sin and to enter her nefarious court to entertain her forever. While that film was a huge commercial success within its home country, it failed to generate any tension, horror, atmosphere, or empathy for its characters.

Not much is different here. Though set decades before the events of the first, it follows the same general template: a group of young people enters the village, a series of strange encounters occur, and two hours later, the movie ends. The group only includes four people rather than the six in the original, but they receive even less characterization. They are not entirely unaware of the threats that dwell within this distant outpost, yet they still foolishly blunder about from terror to terror without ever naturally reacting to the lunacy happening around them. The hamlet is almost identical to how it looks forty years later, squandering the opportunity to cast it in a new light. It’s almost surprising how little this film adds to the world. ​​

One would hope a notable director would at least deliver on genre thrills. That would mean one has not seen any of Kimo Stamboel’s work; if DreadOut and his The Queen of Black Magic remake are any indication, he lacks the imagination and command of the craft to deliver a genuinely frightening or disturbing horror film (he also is the director of Sewu Dino, the second film in the series, but there are only so many hours in the day). With the exception of one moment of grisly practical effects work, every sequence meant to evoke terror instead inspires boredom: lots of screaming in reaction to a figure suddenly appearing — in full view, with no attempt at building suspense — and shot-reverse shots attempting to string out what was already a lame attempt at a scare. Add to this a bland visual language only occasionally spiced up with some color, and you end up with a horror film that lurches forward at an agonizing pace.​

If there’s any defense to offer the film, it’s that there might be aspects that simply do not translate. In the first film, the antagonist is referred to as a djinn by a devout Muslim; no one calls her that here. Perhaps something is being explored in the relationship between Islam and Indonesian folk beliefs. Of course, they are still photographed in a way that robs them of any weight, and all the fantastic elements of this film were imported from the previous works. It is possible, however, that some of this material will go over the heads of international audiences. 

Absent that possible context, however, Dancing Village: The Curse Begins is almost wholly without merit. If one is not lulled to sleep from the sheer level of inactivity, this is bound to be an interminable chore of a watch. For those interested in contemporary Indonesian horror, I would respectfully recommend the Tjahjanto’s May the Devil Take You films, as it seems that half is where the talent of the Mo Brothers lies. ​

Dancing Village: The Curse Begins hits theaters April 26.

​Rating: 1.5/5

Review by Camden Ferrell

After writing The Fault in Our Stars, which sold 23 million copies and was adapted into a hugely successful movie, young adult author John Green followed this up with his next novel Turtles All the Way Down in 2017. This adaptation is being helmed by director Hannah Marks and written by the duo behind movies like Love, Simon and I Want You Back among several television credits. This teen movie features a stellar lead performance and interesting creative choices that can often elevate it past the common pitfalls of the young adult genre.
 
Aza is a high school girl struggling with severe OCD that causes issues with living in her daily life. Alongside her best friend Daisy, Aza finds herself trying to navigate friendship, love, and happiness all while dealing with her mental health. This coincides with Aza reconnecting with her childhood crush after his billionaire father goes missing. This is a simple story of adolescence that tries to tell a familiar story through the eyes of a protagonist we may not be used to seeing in media. There’s not much that stands out about the premise of the movie, it does have room to uniquely explore the main character’s mental health issues.
 
Elizabeth Berger and Isaac Aptaker have proven to be strong writers of romantic comedy, and that comedic touch is present in this film as well. Some of the jokes may be forced, but the characters do have their own distinct personality that comes out through their interactions. I’d say the biggest problem is when they try and pivot to the more serious aspects of this story. When the movie goes into dramatic territory, it can be hit or miss. Some moments feel emotional, earned, and warranted while others can feel clunky. This typically seems to be the problem when adapting John Green’s source material. He occasionally makes great observations about adolescence, but in digging beneath the surface, he can often come off as pretentious and unnatural at times. This is a characteristic that is present throughout the movie and somewhat sticks out. In trying to be a more thought-provoking young adult film, it sometimes backfires as it makes big swings at many central themes and doesn’t always hit.

The most impressive part of this movie is the leading performance from Isabela Merced who plays Aza. She is one of the more interesting teen protagonists I’ve seen in the last few years, and Merced is able to take on that burden wonderfully. Her moments of stress, indifference, and paranoia come across clearly, and she definitely fits nicely in both the comedic and serious moments of the movie. Cree (formerly known as Cree Cicchino) co-stars alongside Merced as Daisy. Her character isn’t nearly as three-dimensional, but she still brings plenty of life and personality to the role. It’s a nice contrast to Aza, and she brings a naturally vibrant and effortless energy to the role that is exciting to watch. For such young actresses, both Merced and Cree have demonstrated great talent that shines even when the material isn’t the best.
 
In my experience, I have always been a bigger fan of Hannah Marks as a writer as opposed to a director, but this is probably the best she has ever been as a director. There are some interesting creative choices that she makes regarding how to best recreate the feeling of Aza’s mental illness for the audience, and it’s quite interesting. Like the script, she can occasionally struggle in her attempt to transcend typical young adult fare. While it’s refreshing to see writers and directors make earnest attempts to make young adult stories more mature, it just doesn’t always work out. Regardless, there are plenty of moments where Marks’ direction and vision shine and should be commended.
 
Turtles All the Way Down has some great moments supported by its talented cast and entertaining writers. It doesn’t always land, and it still has the John Green brand of Tumblr-esque quotes that probably work better on a younger audience. Despite its flaws, this movie is more entertaining than not and feels mostly unique in the young adult genre and should be commended for its exploration of teenage mental health.
 
Turtles All the Way Down is streaming on Max on May 2.

Rating: 3.5/5