‘Cloud’ (2024)
The new film by cult Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (“Cure,” “Pulse”), is a bit like a J-horror cousin to “Uncut Gems” (2019). Ryosôke Yoshii (Masaki Suda) is a small-time hustler who makes his living flipping knockoff handbags and other unscrupulously acquired goods and reselling them online under the username Ratel. Hoping to build a better life for himself and his girlfriend, Yoshii quits his day job and moves into an isolated house in the country, the better to manage his inventory. What Yoshii doesn’t know is that his scorned customers have been organizing in anti-Ratel online forums, looking to identify and punish the man who sold them dubious wares.
Kurosawa has a reputation as the grimmest of the J-horror auteurs; his 1997 serial killer creepfest “Cure” (which screened last week as part of the Brattle’s “Kōji Yakusho x4” series) gives “Se7en” (1995) a run for its money in terms of sheer bleakness. Yet there is an undeniable sense of jet-black humor that animates “Cloud,” giving the proceedings a slightly less acrid aftertaste. Following a slow-burn first act, events escalate rapidly, leaving Yoshii as baffled as he is terrified. The mob, which eventually seems to include everyone with whom he’s ever come into contact, is comically disorganized; one invader insists on wearing a sackcloth mask, much to the confusion of his teammates, while another is simply using this crusade as an excuse to continue a killing spree. The invaders seem to be animated as much by sheer mob mentality as by any desire for justice. In short, this is a fable for the Internet age, a wry exaggeration of the dangers that spring from the anonymity of online forums. Ghosts and curses are all well and good, but armies of Internet trolls? Now that’s scary. (Oscar Goff)
At The Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle St., Harvard Square, Cambridge.
‘The Naked Gun’ (2025)
Many over the years have tried to ape the joke-a-second farces of the team of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker (“Airplane!”), but come up short. Thankfully, director Akiva Schaffer (of the comedy troupe The Lonely Island) is clearly a student of comedy history, and if his reboot of the ZAZ team’s “The Naked Gun” doesn’t quite reach the heights of comic lunacy of the original, it’s more than worthy of the badge.
Liam Neeson fills the gumshoes of Frank Drebin Jr., son of the bumbling detective played by Leslie Nielsen in the original films. A loose cannon celebrating his 1,000th bad guy caught (there’s a cake and everything), Drebin’s drawn into a case involving a bank robbery, a mysterious death and a technological MacGuffin cheekily called the P.L.O.T. Device. Along the way, Drebin encounters the requisite femme fatale (Pamela Anderson, continuing her comeback tour), a technocrat villain (Danny Huston) and a very persistent snowman.
Make no mistake, “The Naked Gun” is stupid – but exactly the correct level and genre of stupid. Schaffer ably replicates the ZAZ mode of spaghetti-at-the-wall humor; in any given scene you’ll encounter 10 cartoonish sight gags, five groanworthy puns and a non sequitur pop cultural reference (“Did you read him his Miranda rights?” “No, Carrie writes. Miranda’s a lawyer.”). Neeson is an inspired choice to follow Nielsen (who, lest we forget, spent decades as a square-jawed dramatic actor before finding his calling in slapstick), and Anderson reveals a surprising knack for physical comedy and the improvisational singing known as scatting. There’s even a surprisingly subversive line of satire poking fun at Elon Musk’s manosphere takeover of Twitter, and a few pointed barbs at police corruption and brutality. (Called upon the carpet by his chief, Drebin scoffs, “Since when do cops have to follow the law? Who’s going to arrest me – other cops?!”)
Of course, this rapid-fire pace is difficult to sustain to feature length (even the ZAZ team really succeeded only a few times), and “Gun” flags as it goes into the big wrap-up. That said, at less than 80 minutes without the credits (hang on for them as, true to form, there are more jokes hidden there than some films pack into their entire running time), Schaffer’s “Naked Gun” mainly breezes by, uproarious by sheer force of will, as one of the funniest films this year so far. (Oscar Goff)
At the Landmark Kendall Square Cinema, 355 Binney St., Cambridge; Apple Cinemas Cambridge, 168 Alewife Brook Parkway, Cambridge Highlands near Alewife and Fresh Pond; and AMC Assembly Row 12, 395 Artisan Way, Assembly Square, Somerville.
‘Together’ (2025)
In this claustrophobic, psycho-horror thriller written and directed by first-timer Michael Shanks, there’s much to impress – but it doesn’t, at least to the degree it should, through familiarity; once into it, “Together” plays like an homage to Ari Aster’s art-house horror hits “Heredity” (2018) and “Midsommar” (2019) with a few pages lifted from Brandon Cronenberg’s growing catalog of body-horror and Coralie Fargeat’s gloriously grim “The Substance” (2024). “Together” is conceptually and ideologically about codependence the way “Get Out” (2017) was about racism. We embed with real-life husband and wife Dave Franco and Alison Brie – who together starred in the 2020 Vrbo-from-hell thriller “The Rental” – as Tim and Millie, who move to a remote area for Millie’s new job as a schoolteacher. Tim, a slacker man-boy with only part-time gigs as a guitarist, tags sheepishly along. We know the couple’s got issues, as Millie tells a friend at their going-away party that Tim doesn’t like to “do it” anymore, and when she proposes to him at party, on bent knee with a mimed ring in a jewelry box, he balks. In the quiets near their new woodsy abode, they go for a hike and end up slipping through a sinkhole into a cave with a well seemingly designed by crew from the “Alien” films. “Don’t drink the water,” you shout silently at the screen. But they do, and when they pass out, waiting for the light of day to find a way out, they wake up, joined at the hips – kinda. Some rending, a little bit of pain and a few small tear wounds solve it. Tim writes it off as mildew, but later, back home at night and in bed, Millie’s hair starts to grow down Tim’s throat; when Tim finally gets up his nerve with Millie, he can’t pull out postcoitus. The sticky situations mount, while Millie’s passive-aggressive colleague just down the lane seems to be holding out on critical information. The performances by Brie and Franco, as a capable woman angling for adulthood and cuck in need of a clue, forge seamless onscreen chemistry. What doesn’t quite work is a third act in which revelations fall literally out of the closet with clunky awkwardness. Not worth a long-term commitment. (Tom Meek)
At the Landmark Kendall Square Cinema, 355 Binney St., Cambridge.
‘High Rollers’
Is Hulu following Netflix’s footsteps by stuffing its catalog with bad thrillers featuring A-list actors for the clicks? John Travolta stars in this slight casino caper copying “Oceans Eleven” more in the cinematic-mediocrity mode of “Battlefield Earth” (2000) than anything he’s done with Quentin Tarantino (“Pulp Fiction”) or Elmore Leonard (“Get Shorty”). He plays Mason Goddard, leader of a high-tech group of thieves – cool, but not as cool as Danny Ocean, and his team of diversely skilled operatives lacks the quirky, hip and fun nature of Ocean’s crew. Early on, Mason’s no-nonsense significant other (Gina Gershon) is taken hostage in a commando raid orchestrated by an international crime lord (Danny Pardo), who demands that Mason execute a job for him: Raid the vaults of the high-security casino that his brother (Demián Castro) runs, and Mason’s betrothed will be returned. Travolta, Gershon and especially Castro and Pardo relish and deliver their two-dimensional roles with conviction, which adds a sense of credibility to the scenes they’re in. But there’s uninspired, sloppy plotting and a flaccid script, which is exacerbated by woefully inept direction (and editing) by Randall Emmett, whose credits include the equally dull “Midnight in the Switchgrass” (2021). The smooth, cool caper this could have been is instead a garbled criminal offense. (Tom Meek)
On Hulu.
Oscar Goff is a writer and film critic based in Somerville. He is film editor and senior critic for the Boston Hassle and his work has appeared in the monthly Boston Compass newspaper and publications such as WBUR’s The ARTery and iHeartNoise. He is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Boston Online Film Critics Association, and the Online Film Critics Society.
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