Guilty Bystander (1950)

It seems like most of the reviews on Letterboxd and other places say that Guilty Bystander is middling or disappointing. I feel precisely the opposite about Joseph Lerner's weird little film noir. In fact, it fairly blew me away. I don't think I've seen a noir quite this seedy before. The only thing I can compare it to for nihilism is Blast of Silence and that's from 1961 not 1950. The flophouses, the warehouses, and the bars in this are frankly disgusting. Even the bannisters are covered in some kind of muck, as we learn in one of the film's first moments; in Guilty Bystander cigarettes fall lazily from characters' mouths onto floors, and no one even stubs them out. This film is set in the underbelly of underbellies. There's an extraordinary fight sequence in which our anti-hero has to wrestle a guy with one arm because he's been shot. It's bracingly realistic, almost tedious. Guilty Bystander is no studio picture.

The acting is not great, however. J. Edward Bromberg gives a kind of low-rent Peter Lorre that works fine, but Faye Emerson is quite boring (one never truly believes she might be part of a double cross), and Mary Boland should really be a lot better than she is. But Kay Medford does excellent work here, and Sam Levene and Harry Landers are great in their smaller parts. Zachary Scott... well I don't think I've decided how I feel about him yet, mostly because I hate his mustache, but I think he might be good in this.

Guilty Bystander was restored from a print—apparently no negative exists anymore—through funding from Nicolas Winding Refn. I'm so glad it was. This is B-movie gold, and I found it to be a compelling portrait of New York petty crime. I don't think I've seen anything quite like it. 

Hamlet (2025)

I confess that as much as I love Riz Ahmed, I found this Hamlet baffling and frequently downright boring.

I’ll start with things I thought worked well. The play within the play, “The Mousetrap”, was really cool. It was intriguingly filmed and it was innovatively staged. I also loved the way Gertrude chose to drink the poison in the play’s fifth act. I loved the way the ghost spoke Hindi but Hamlet answered him in English.

Otherwise, however, I didn’t think this adaptation made much sense at all. We are in England but Elsinore is some sort of corporation or something, maybe a bank? And Fortinbras is the leader of a kind of occupy movement. Or something? Unclear. And anyway, the politics here have nothing to do with what happens in the story; they’re only decoration—a nod to a politics that Hamlet itself cannot deliver (being, after all, 425 years old and concerned with politics in Elizabethan England and not the one ruled by Charles III). 

This Hamlet (हेमलेट) dispenses with Horatio, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, dividing their lines up between Laertes, Polonius, Ophelia, and Hamlet himself. This made for confusing character development to say the least. I wasn’t sure why anyone was doing anything in this. 

The screenplay is a real head-scratcher throughout. Some lines are invented from whole cloth—a fine choice, honestly, but I kept wondering why they kept any of the original text at all? The screenwriter (or director?) obviously found the Shakespeare lacking at so many points. Lines are altered, made (apparently) easier to understand (for whom? And really?). But why? Why does “the proud man’s contumely” need to be replaced by a newer phrase whereas “who would fardels bear” doesn’t? This happens dozens of times. Why replace one word or phrase but not another? Why change "when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin" to "when he himself might his quiet end make with a dull dagger"? Is quiet end so much clearer to newer ears? It's not; it sounds just as weird.

This 17th century language already doesn’t make any sense in 21st century English, so just commit to it! Or go ahead and rewrite the whole thing! Call it a translation. Set it in an England ruled by the formerly colonized. Or get a budget together and set it in the Mughal empire. Do anything you like! But this kind of patchwork Shakespeare, I find confusing. The new words don’t make the play any clearer, and to my own ears, these stray words that Shakespeare didn't write are constant reminders that what we are hearing isn’t actually the play at all. 

And don't get me started on the fact that they kept in the absurd "that's a fair thought to lie between maid's legs / Nothing" joke from act three. Why? Ahmed performs this (with the help of a phallus–microphone) with the kind of  hammy level of indication I'd expect in a first-year Shakespeare studio or a bad college production. Cringe-worthy stuff.

How does this Hamlet end, you ask? There’s no sword-fighting; Laertes and Hamlet just sort of look at each other and cry. There’s barely a confrontation! Why does Hamlet kill Laertes? I don’t get it. 

And then, of course, the film chooses as its final words… an invented non-Shakespearean line. And a very strange one at that: the king says "I loved your father". This is the most important line in the film? It's how Aneil Karia has decided to end things? Is the implication that perhaps the king didn't kill Hamlet's father after all? Are we supposed to be unsettled with ambiguity like with the ending of Lee Chang-dong's Burning? But if so, why has the king tried (successfully) to kill Hamlet? Why did he freak out during "The Mousetrap"? I just didn't understand this.

I wish they had just taken the entire text of Shakespeare’s play and given it a rewrite. Just make a whole new script; use the plot of Hamlet and make it do what you want it to do and do that well. Instead, we get a faux fidelity to the Shakespearean original that isn't faithful at all: a no-fear Shakespeare and a nearly incomprehensible plot.

How to Make a Killing (2026)

John Patton Ford's movie should have been so much more fun. Zach Woods, Topher Grace, and Ed Harris seemed to know what movie they were in—and this was the real potential of How to Make a Killing: a series of hilarious and flamboyant heirs that our hero kills off in various humorous ways before he kills the big bad at the top.

Unfortunately that isn't how How to Make a Killing shakes out. Ford has overburdened his comedy-thriller with loads and loads of sentiment and moralizing. It felt like I was watching a movie made in the 1980s when Hollywood apparently thought that all of the capitalists who voted for Reagan need to be told that what "really matters" is family and having someone to love you, and that money isn't everything if you can't enjoy it. Giving this film a moral center corrupted this movie from the inside out.

But the real killer here is that How to Make a Killing just isn't very much fun despite the obviously winning presence of Glen Powell. Topher Grace and Zach Woods get some good laughs here, but although it was not his fault at all, this was a dreary Glen Powell vehicle and didn't live up to its considerable promise.

The Drama (2026)

Kristoffer Borgli's film is a romantic comedy, first and foremost. And it works very well as that, with plenty of laugh-out-loud moments. (Jeremy Levick had me cackling.)

The Drama tries for something more than this, though, and it mostly succeeds, skewering today’s culture of moral superiority. It also manages to be a really intriguing critique of our American eroticization and affection for guns and gun violence. I’m not sure the film does more than open these topics, but I guess I’m not sure it needs to. 

I certainly haven’t left a theatre talking with my companions quite this much in a while. It gave us lots to chew on: What would you do? How would you feel? Why didn't he recover more quickly? We would feel very differently if it was him and not her, wouldn't we? 

The one thing that I think we can all agree on is that Alana Haim’s character is the worst person—and the worst thing that character did is much worse than the worst thing anyone else did. I am of two minds about the horribleness of Alana Haim's character, though. On the one hand, it feels good to feel morally superior to her. She's just so awful, and so clearly in the wrong about everything. On the other, it seems to me that one of the film's central points is, perhaps, that we ought not to be so invested in moral superiority as such.

In any case, I quite enjoyed The Drama. It's worth seeing and it's worth talking about.