A USEFUL GHOST -- Thoughtful, Funny Spectral Comedy Evolves to Incisive Capitalist Critique1/16/2026 Review by Daniel Lima  The distinction between clinging to a memory best left forgotten, and willful ignorance of what should be a lesson learned, isn’t always clear. Too often, it’s the ignorant who are too quick to leave their actions in the past, and those that need to let go that carry on the burden longer than they ought to. The Thai film A Useful Ghost is a dry and dark examination of these two instincts, and while it never quite reconciles the two, it is never less than compelling, thoughtful, and often quite funny. A man discovers that his newly purchased vacuum cleaner is haunted by a ghost. When the repairman diagnoses the haunting, he launches into the story of another poltergeist, a woman who dies while working at the factory her husband’s wealthy family owns. As her specter reconciles with her husband, his family seeks to drive them apart, as more and more hauntings begin to plague the bourgeois. At first, it appears that the story is poised to settle for a simple dichotomy, conservatism vs. progressivism, but interrogating it further reveals fascinating nuances. The spirit of the wife at first inhabits an appliance, though only her husband can see her and not the thing she possesses, a blending of folkloric belief and modern convenience. The rekindled relationship between her and her husband could be interpreted as a kind of conservatism — even death will not keep the two apart — yet the family sees it as an abomination, resorting to traditional methods to end things that themselves are undermined by the two sides’ dueling interpretations of what is “traditional”. Which is not to say that staring lovingly at a vacuum cleaner is within the boundaries of societal norms. There is an obvious tension between the happiness that the couple share with each other, and the ridiculousness of watching a man make out with an appliance. Is he not relegating himself to a life that never changes? How can he grow past the death of his wife if her apparition is constantly with him? If she is only hanging onto the mortal plane due to her love of her husband, how full an existence can she actually “live”? Does any of this matter if they’re happy?  As multifaceted as this central conflict is, A Useful Ghost remains a comedy, albeit a very restrained one. As zany as the premise sounds, the film is deliberately paced, with minimal camera movement, compositions that emphasize empty space, performances that are quite affectless, and long takes that drag out a scene. This approach emphasizes the absurdity of the situation, particularly in how matter-of-fact the entire situation is treated. It’s high praise that the film made me think of the work of Aki Kaurismäki.
Through the first half of the movie, there is something of an elephant in the room. The factory is being haunted by a different ghost, a man who had collapsed while working. The wife had died of a respiratory illness herself. While attempting to reunite with her husband, she makes friends with an influential man, who is able to return the favor purely based on his own class status. The man’s older brother has a husband, which the family did not approve of until that husband introduced the to business opportunities abroad. Clearly, there is a pragmatic limit to adhering to tradition. You just have to make yourself useful. Where the first half of the film was mostly about one relationship that crossed the veil, probing the individual desire to never let go of what was, the second half supercedes those concerns with a neoliberal, capitalist critique. The ghosts evolve from a personal metaphor to a politically charged one, as all of the questions raised before are abandoned because the structural forces of the world today do not allow them to be asked. What was once pure but complicated becomes immediately co-opted by profit-driven machinations, and the question goes from, “When should we forget,” to, “Who should be forgetting?” Sometimes, the ghosts of the past tell stories that reveal something about our present, and should inform our future. It’s a fascinating change, but not a dramatically satisfying one. There is a discontinuity between the two halves of A Useful Ghost that is hard to shake, particularly since in spite of the subdued performances of leads Davika Hoorne and Wittsarut Himmarat, their easy chemistry makes the romance work even without the thematic underpinnings. As broader ideas take center stage, their relationship loses narrative focus, and somewhere along the line the story stops being a romantic comedy altogether. Thematically appropriate, sure, but without that emotional foundation, the film’s conclusion leans more intellectually stimulating than profoundly moving or hilarious, where at first it was all three. A Useful Ghost is now in theaters. Rating: 4/5
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Review by Daniel Lima  My earliest memory of learning about the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle was reading about it in an elementary school history textbook, sandwiched right at the end, with precious little context for a young mind to understand what they were actually about. Looking back now, living through the repercussions of the failed promise of this “End of History” mindset, it is startlingly clear how the protests were a prelude not only to other incidents of civil unrest and uprisings, but how prescient all the people out on the streets truly were. WTO/99 is a stirring recounting of these four days, weaving a narrative with a clear perspective without ever sacrificing fidelity to the truth. The film is assembled almost entirely from archival footage, using real video shot by protesters and media camera crews on the ground to show every possible angle of the chaos, from peaceful yet impassioned rallies to violent police actions to people simply caught in the crossfire. Clips from broadcast news and entertainment such as Real Time with Bill Maher (if you could call that entertainment) provide the context for how the nation at large is reacting to what they are seeing, or at least the establishment narratives that were pushed at the time. It would be all too easy for a project like this to focus on the breakdown of order, to admonish dangerous anarchists breaking windows and the heavy-handed police response, without ever engaging with why people were on the streets to begin with. To the immense credit of director Ian Bell, WTO/99 never loses sight of the discontent motivating the protesters. Every step of the way, the film takes time to hear from regular people (as well as prominent voices like Michael Moore and Alan Keyes) who, in spite of wildly different ideologies, are united in their concern and disdain for the looming neoliberal world order.  From college students to farmers to union organizers to Republican presidential nominees, everyone voices a fairly coherent set of grievances about globalization, as embodied by the World Trade Organization. They complain that it removes trade barriers through an opaque process that removes the average citizen from the political process; that it would inevitably lead to offshoring labor to countries with nonexistent labor laws, harming both the American middle and working class as well as those foreign workers; that it would similarly allow corporations to skirt environmental regulations meant to protect both the global ecosystem and public health. This broad cross section of society vary in how eloquently they express their discontent, but there is a clarity that undermines the line that these disaffected people are all out on the street just to create trouble. The film wisely juxtaposes these searing yet coherent testimonials with news coverage of the protests, much of which implicitly sides with the police and the WTO. The chumminess between CNN anchors and WTO officials, the callousness of the officers who refuse to hear a word about police brutality, the lack of any TV coverage that makes the government’s use of force or the negative repercussions of these nebulous free trade agreements, all make for an infuriating contrast with the people who are attempting to make their voices heard in the face of violent suppression. The sight of armed, masked men firing weapons into crowds of unarmed people will never cease to be horrendously sickening, even as accustomed to such footage as we seem to be becoming. Perhaps more chilling than that overt violence is the ease with which they are deployed, with government officials often saying the quiet part out loud. An aside about the police being there to defend property, or the police chief in a press conference insisting that use of force is justified even as a reporter tells him that he personally witnessed chemical agents used on seated protesters, is almost as viscerally repugnant as these acts, of which there is ample video evidence.  At the end of the film, there is a quick denouement that regales the audience with the fallout of the protests: Occupy Wall Street, the economically disaffected voters that elected Donald Trump, the brutal response to the Black Lives Matters protests. It is perhaps the film’s biggest misstep, as anyone tuning into WTO/99 can likely draw those comparisons themselves, and anyone who cannot would also likely not be able to connect the dots with how quickly. Infinitely more haunting are the interviews done with protesters after the conference ends, the pride they take in what was accomplished and their hope for the future. To anyone following the news in 2025, it’s heartbreaking to know that all their greatest fears have been validated. I wonder how they’re all doing now.
Political media often ends up being labeled as “propaganda”, implying that in attempting to create a narrative that adheres to a certain ideology, facts must necessarily be distorted to the point that such media would be cheap and dishonest. The obvious rejoinder to this is it is impossible to cover any topic with zero bias, and such an attempt would merely be reinforcing whatever the status quo of a given culture is (for instance, all the news media captured here). More valuable is a work that constructs an argument from a clear point of view that is supported by fact. WTO/99 is a triumph of storytelling prowess. To cull what must be thousands of hours of preexisting raw footage into a concise package that captures the breadth of what had happened, while offering a perspective on these events, without resorting to a talking head explicitly explaining things to the audience, is a remarkable feat. If only mainstream media was as forthright. WTO/99 is now in theaters. Rating: 4/5 Review by Daniel Lima  On paper, there’s nothing separating Prisoner of War from plenty of great examples of martial arts action starring Scott Adkins. Military man, check; martial arts expert, check; unflappable and unstoppable in the face of adversity, check. Directed by his former The Debt Collector co-star Louis Mandylor, one would expect that this would fertile ground for Adkins to lean into his particular capabilities as an action star, combining affability with agility to deliver the kinetic thrills that made him a modern-day legend. Sadly, it is Mandylor’s creative instincts that sink the film, rendering inert what should be exhilarating fun. Adkins plays an RAF pilot shot down over the Philippines who is captured and placed in a Japanese POW camp. He quickly displays his knowledge of Eastern martial arts, singling him out to the camp commander and earning his enmity. With the Allies closing in and the depraved Japanese forces growing more violent by the day, Adkins must team up with his fellow captives in order to escape from their clutches. Mandylor is no stranger to the Pacific front of the Second World War, his last two films having been set there as well. Reviewing 3 Days in Malay, I noted that his desire to make a fun action crowd-pleaser was at war with his sense of reverence for the sacrifices made by men in uniform. It seems that the latter instinct has won out, and so Prisoner of War ends up a dour, po-faced portrait of camp life that fails to earn the dramatic weight is so clamors for.  One could generously attribute the lack of characterization of both the Western prisoners and Japanese jailers as an attempt to show they not so different as patriots willing to sacrifice anything for their country. The end result, however, is none of these characters have a single distinct personality between them. One American can kind of speak Japanese, one guard is sympathetic to their plight, but these qualities are not elaborated on beyond servicing the procedural plot. It is genuinely incredible that for all the time spent with this limited ensemble, by the end there is nothing to distinguish one from the other. This in turn cripples any sense of danger or emotional stakes, as there is nothing to engender the audience to any one of these people. In fairness, that would already be undercut by the film’s structure. For some unfathomable reason, the opening scene is Scott Adkins storming into a Japanese dojo after the war, by himself, angrily asking to see the man who had tortured him back in the Philippines. On the one hand, no one who would watch this movie would ever doubt that Adkins would survive to the end; on the other hand, to confirm this from the jump, in addition to showing the survival of his compatriots will ultimately not affect the finale, adds absolutely nothing to the unfolding drama in the camp. It’s a baffling choice that only hurts the narrative. Once Adkins is captured, the film idles into a familiar routine: the Japanese commit some casual war crimes, Adkins shows off his martial prowess, he collaborates with the fellow prisoners in building an escape plan. Beyond the thin characters, a key issue is developing the escape plan is not thrilling in its own right. Adkins’ own invulnerability is assured, but the film also studiously avoids putting any of the other Westerners in any real danger, even though the Filipino prisoners are killed with impunity. Each new step towards freedom is taken with precious little effort or complexity, and so the movie idles forward with no sense of intensity or momentum.  The closest Prisoner of War comes to actual character is in the relationship between Scott Adkins’ downed pilot and Peter Shinkoda’s camp commander, though even this is mostly down to the two actors’ performances rather than how they are written. Scott is a bona fide star, and remains a compelling screen presence even when saddled with nothing to work with. Shinkoda brings gravitas to his role, but it can only go so far when the motivations of his character as so ill-defined. This Japanese officer is a brutal, deranged thug whose devotion to his nation’s imperialist project supersedes any conventional sense of morality, yet he cannot bring himself to actually kill the man who brings him nothing but trouble because he’s impressed with how well he knows Eastern culture? A better script might interrogate that contradiction, but here it exists merely due to convention.
This leads to the elephant in the room: this movie is deeply Orientalist. The Westerner who knows the mysterious Eastern ways better than the Asian savages is a trope that is only rarely played with sincerity these days, and for good reason. Yet here it is, as pure an example as any of the ninja films of the 1980s. The villain’s fascination with the Caucasian hero, the way he completely dominates everyone he’s up against, the fact only the white prisoners are given any dialogue and only the Asian prisoners are allowed to die, the beautiful Asian nurses brought in as a prize for the Westerners. If this were a schlocky action film like Ninja: Shadow of a Tear, this element might go down easier, but the complete lack of any humor or self-awareness makes the bile taste of white racial supremacy hard to ignore. That said, there are plenty of action movies with questionable politics and weak writing that skate by on the strength of their action. This does not manage that feat. Every fight take place on an open, barren space, leaving no room for incorporating the environment and offering little to differentiate them visually. Scott Adkins is an impressive physical performer even pushing fifty years old, and what he does here is especially impressive knowing he tore his hamstring shortly after production began, but the choreography similarly looks the same from fight to fight, maintaining the same rhythm and intensity with no deviation. Worse still is the camera, purposelessly circling around the fighters, capturing all the action clearly but doing nothing to accentuate any of the violence. It’s rare that an Adkins vehicle have such forgettable fights, but it’s just one failing among many. Prisoner of War seemed like a layup, the kind of project tailor made for both its star and the audience he has cultivated for himself. Actually watching it made me feel sadder than anything else, as the realization that it would not measure up to even Adkins’ middle-of-the-road work dawned on me. At least the fans have Diablo and Day of Reckoning from this year to enjoy instead. Prisoner of War is now in theaters and on digital. Rating: 2/5 Review by Daniel Lima  Michael Strassner and Liz Larsen in Jay Duplass’s THE BALTIMORONS. Sometimes a film comes out at just the right time to be appreciated for what it is. Ten or fifteen years ago, the prospect of an airy, weightless romcom running entirely on charm and vibes from one of the mumblecore guys would have made me break out in hives. In the cinematic landscape of today, however, The Baltimorons stands out simply by portraying a complicated, messy world grounded in reality. It’s hard not to get swept up in it, even as the flaws are readily evident. Taking place over one long Christmas Eve in Baltimore, the film follows a man who, after an emergency dental visit, ends up spending the day with his dentist. He is a genial thirty-something recovering alcoholic who has abandoned his creative ambitions for a “real job”; she is an acerbic middle-aged divorcee who finds herself alone for the holiday. Through a series of mishaps and misadventures, the two grow closer, revealing parts of themselves to each other they never thought they’d reveal to a complete stranger. Anyone with a passing familiarity with the work of director Jay Duplass, and the mumblecore subgenre he helped define, will know what to expect here. Emerging in the 2000s, mumblecore films were typified by low budgets, naturalistic dialogue, nonprofessional actors, location shooting, handheld camerawork, aimless plots, and directionless characters. They provided an antidote to slick artifice and twee sentimentality of both studio comedies and the kind of indie that would go over well at Sundance, affecting a realism that reflected the lives of the filmmakers producing them. The Baltimorons follows these conventions to a tee. Though the dialogue isn’t improvised, it clearly is meant to mimic how people talk to each other in real life rather than the stylized patter of a Judd Apatow or Diablo Cody. Stars Liz Larsen and Michael Strassner (the latter also getting co-writer credit) are practically unknown, as is most of the rest of the cast. The city of Baltimore is captured warts and all, shot on location with unfussy handheld camerawork that shows the city as it is. The plot is mostly an excuse to hang out with these characters and share their world, making only a cursory attempt to fit things within a traditional narrative structure. In just about every way, this is classic mumblecore. The beating heart of the film is the chemistry between Larsen and Strassner; if they have no spark, there is no movie. Fortunately, the two bounce off each other beautifully. Strassner provides the kind of genuine, understated warmth that could thaw even the most ornery spirit, and Larsen is as good capturing that ornery spirit as she is the excitable, bubbly person underneath it. The material they have to work with is less than stellar, a consequence of the adherence to how real people talk rather than a comedy film, but they inject it with such verve that even though there’s precious few laugh lines, spending time with them was constantly pleasant.  If the film had the look and feel of a modern comedy, that might not be the case. Unlike the textureless, airbrushed streaming slop that makes up most romcoms today, The Baltimorons feels like a snapshot of a real place. The ensemble is not made up of beautiful celebrities, they are a diverse group of people that are reflective of the average citizen. Their living spaces have the familiar clutter that always accumulates, their hangouts are the cozy places you could imagine spending hours in, and scenic nightlife is photographed with the same detail as a dingy repo yard in an underpass. That the film moves so lackadaisically, with none of the urgency of a traditional narrative, goes a long way in selling the character of the setting.
Of course, mumblecore did go somewhat out of fashion for a reason. Over the years, the same traits that made these films unique ossified into a style in its own right, paradoxically making the effort to get away from the cliches of more mainstream fare into a cliché itself. As novel as something like this is today, it hews so closely to the template of those earlier films that it can hardly be called “fresh”. That besides, the attempt to strip away Hollywood artifice also rendered many of these films little more than a stylistic exercise, offering little beyond the feeling of being immersed in an insular little world. That constraint is certainly felt here, as the film has little going on under the surface. If you aren’t bought into this burgeoning relationship, there’s nothing here. Which isn’t to say there is no character drama. Though the film is largely a two-hander, it is Strassner who gets a complete arc, as he grapples with both his sobriety and the adult responsibilities he has on the horizon. Strassner has said that the script is rooted in his personal experience, and while the attempt to explore it like this is commendable, The Baltimorons is at its weakest when it is directly addressing his turmoil. These are the parts where the film looks the most like a conventional indie dramedy, and the gear switch into that from the deliberately unconventional mumblecore trappings is not smooth. Some scenes work better than others, and there is at times a certain inelegant beauty in watching the characters fumble their way through deeply emotional conversations, but it largely ends up casting off the best aspects of the movie. Yet these aren’t the moments that stand out when thinking about watching this. It’s the joy on the faces of two strangers who have met someone they can connect to. It’s the lived-in feeling of the Baltimore streets they walk across, the coziness between them driving through an icy winter’s day. Perhaps I would be less kind to The Baltimorons if I were watching this in 2012, but today, I find myself won over. How lucky we would be if more films were content in just being this human. The Baltimorons is now in theaters. Rating: 3.5/5 Review by Daniel Lima  “They just don’t make them like they used to.” These days I find myself thinking this about almost everything: cars, electronics, news publications, social policies. This particular lamentation feels the most powerful when I watch an old Hong Kong action movie, see the ornate choreography and death-defying stunt work, and realize that silly notions like unions and workplace safety mean these could never be made today. The closest that contemporary cinema comes to scratching that itch are the mainland Chinese streaming releases. Nine-Ring Golden Dagger is the latest example to get a stateside release from Well Go, and another solid example of recapturing a bit of that past glory. The Generals of the Yang Family is less an individual epic story, and more a collage of different fictional accounts of the life of the very real General Yang Ye and his descendants across the 10th and 11th centuries. In this particular tale, two of his daughters seek to recover his blade from the enemy forces that killed him. Pursued by this foreign army, they hole up at an inn owned by a sympathetic wine seller, and plan an escape home. It is important to note that General Yang Ye served the Han-ruled Northern Song Dynasty, and died fighting the Khitan-ruled Liao Dynasty (the Khitans being a nomadic steppe people that later assimilated into the Mongols). The film uses the term “Northern Expedition” to define the war he fought in, a term more commonly used for the war for reunification waged by the Republic of China in the 1930’s. Thus, the film makes a connection between the border wars of dynasties past, and the building of the modern nation state of China.  I freely admit that I am by no means an expert on Chinese history or culture, and plenty may have gone over my head. That being said, it is clear that this film furthers the notion of Han ethnic supremacy within China, and the idea that China is a distinct Han nation state. For centuries, the steppes people and other ethnic minorities within China have been portrayed as barbarian, and in this film the Han that administered the Han-dominated southern part of the Liao territory are treated as traitors of kind and country. It strikes me as an ahistorical way of framing this history, more interested in toeing present-day nationalist rhetoric than capturing life at the time.
If it seems I’m more overly concerned with the political messaging of the film than the characters, there’s a reason for that: so is the movie. Largely a cast of unknowns and supporting players who have been working the past couple decades, the actors are given precious little to work with in bringing these people to life. The bad guys are unambiguously evil, the good guys are valiant and very concerned with honor and national pride, and the one comic relief guy bumbles around oafishly. It’s not even worth learning their names. Fortunately, a good chunk of the film is just action set pieces, and on that front it delivers. Though the film takes place almost entirely in one location, there is clear thought in differentiating the fight scenes through the goals of the fighters, the weapons they use as well as how they manipulate the environment, and the tone of the bouts. Rather than the steady, long take medium shots that have to typify the best American action direction for the past decade, the film hearkens back to an older tradition: close ups to emphasize attacks, cutting to generate a sense of momentum, a mobile camera. Most importantly, the wushu-based choreography is beautiful to behold, and every instance of wire work brought a smile to my face. It may not stand out too much among its mainland Chinese DTV peers, but it’s certainly a cut above its contemporaries here. It might seem like this is very faint praise for an otherwise problematic movie, but it must be emphasized that at about ninety minutes, most of Nine-Ring Golden Dagger is devoted to the action. The fact that it succeeds in artfully delivering some gratifying fights at a time when so few films do is enough keep it constantly engaging. Though the aims of its propaganda are insidious to say the least, even then there is something interesting in how history from over a millennia ago is adapted to reflect modern values, as defined by the CCP. Even if its hard to stomach, there’s nothing like a three-on-one spear and sword fight to provide some relief. Nine-Ring Golden Dagger is now available on digital and home video. Rating: 4/5 |