Between the unsettling visions of the great beyond and an unwavering devotion to depicting a dark, sad reality, The Sacred Spirit rides the line between unexplained phenomena and drastic sobriety. And not in the way you might think.

You see, Spirit is about the innocent layers of a fractured soul. Eventually, it gets to a rotten core that slashes and burns everything around. It’s a reverse ugly-duckling scenario that still shakes me after the credits rolled.

José (Nacho Fernández) is a simple guy who works at a small-time tapas bar with quirky regulars and personable clientele. After closing, he’s part of a UFO cult that believes spacemen are coming back — and very soon. While the community wrestles with finding a missing girl — José’s niece, mind you — he comes off like a somewhat dopey, but harmless crackpot.

Meanwhile, lamenting the loss of their beloved leader, the cult members trek to his grave on the town outskirts to pay their respects. There, José drops a child’s pink-bunny backpack into the river. While the police investigate, José takes his other niece, the missing girl’s twin, to an “astral plane” discussion, telling her stories about a UFO coming to take them away that evening to live in paradise.

It doesn’t happen, but what does is far worse.

At first, Spirit is about crazy UFO culture and their followers’ belief systems. But as the New Age group Sacred Spirit’s “Yeha-Noha” plays over the end credits, it’s methodically razed the whole area to ash in beauty and shame, purification and purification.

Chema García Ibarra’s bait-and-switch direction is close to the crazed realism depicted in Jose’s UFO books, with the Sphinx and other Egypt-centric items he imagines in his life. If you go into this wanting a flying saucer debate among the backroom crazies, sorry, it’s not here. The Sacred Spirit is a calm, almost mumblecore depiction of analog beliefs in a broken world. —Louis Fowler

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As played by Christopher Walken in the film Communion, with nary a Jesus cracker in sight, Whitley Strieber tries to write the Great American Novel. Because Strieber is a real-life author of The Wolfen and The Hunger, we know he won’t. But he does write the book Communion, the work of nonfiction — 😉 😉 — that ultimately will take his career to the stars.

Why? The answer’s in the butt, Bob. No Walken film is more Walken, for reasons that shall become apparent.

At a post-Christmas weekend visit to the family cabin from their NYC apartment, Whitley endures a sweaty nightmare of being visited by gray-skinned, big-eyed aliens from outer space. After returning home, his wife (Lindsay Crouse, The Arrival) notices he’s just not himself anymore — and for good reason, which surfaces under hypnosis by Misery’s Frances Sternhagen: That was no dream. And following that logic, that means the anal probe … gulp!

This causes a fissure in his rectum marriage, which may be for the best, considering the missus has a fashion sense I’d dub “Annie Hall meets Carmen Sandiego.”

The first glimpse we’re afforded of the alien is merely partial — and wholly terrifying. This bodes well for Communion. But as Whitley’s obsessions and breakdowns increasingly unhinge him from reality, Walken goes full Walken, and so does the movie! From the director’s chair, Philippe Mora (Howling II and III) approaches lucidity more liberally than his star tackles diction.

I don’t quite know how to convey the odd-as-a-$3-bill nature of Whitley’s experiences on the aliens’ ship. He parties with them in a pilgrim hat. They hang in a steam room. He high-fives an E.T. and then dances. I realize these sound like scenes from a stoner comedy where Seth Rogen might blow aliens’ minds with bong-hit lessons and, in exchange, they infuse his with, like, algebra and shit.

Seriously, these too-close encounters of the WTF kind feel as though Mora and Strieber (who adapted his own bestseller for the screenplay) are just fucking with us to see if we’re willing to swallow. I am not.

In fact, I’d steal Whitley’s ominous threat to public transit riders — “Let me tell you, you folks are in for a big surprise, one very big surprise” — and throw it right back at this maladroit movie, aiming to knock that goddamn pilgrim hat into a galaxy far, far away. That’s more action than the third section gives, and still no Jesus crackers. —Rod Lott

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Sun Ra’s Space is the Place is a cautionary, evolutionary and revolutionary tale of interplanetary spiritualism, interstellar revitalization and mnemonic congruence.

If you know what any of that means, you are in store for the low-budget, mind-bending delights this long-lost Afrofuturist film offers. In other words, if Rudy Ray Moore became an avant-garde musician and wanted to preach the world of his gospel, you still don’t even know what you’re in for.

A cult jazz icon, Sun Ra and his Arkestra put his science-fiction testament on true celluloid, one that the public wasn’t ready to see. It sat on the shelf for two years and even then was barely released. I guess the money men tried to dismantle, disentangle and destroy the very word.

More of an irreligious fever dream at the end of the world, a chant begins as a dildo-onic starship sails though the cosmos. The ship’s denizens including Sun Ra in a thrifty but stylish futurist/neo-Egyptian garb. He has a monologue about the impending doom of the planet Earth, then teleports his body and soul through the interstellar plane on musical vibrations. At least that’s what we are told …

Unexpectedly, we are in Chicago 1943, where Sun Ra creates freeform avant-garde jazz with a bevy of beautiful strippers. As the world rattles and smoke emanates through his fingers, we meet the villain of this piece, the pimpish Overseer (Ray Johnson, The Human Tornado).

In the desert, the two play a game of cards to decide the fate of the world. Sun Ra’s wobbly starship comes to Earth. With the help of his Arkestra, he gives the world a musical message at a concert the next day.

Meanwhile, the Overseer snaps a guy out of a coma, then proceeds to inseminate the attending nurses. That’s okay, because Sun Ra had formed a cosmic employment office, complete with a revolving door of hopefuls who, sadly, do not like the pay.

With the youths debating whether Sun Ra is a sell-out, a couple of whiteys kidnap him and try to brainwash him with stereotypical big-band music. The doubting teens find him and get him off the stage to “30 million galaxies” on tap for his message. 

It ends with the world burning in a globe-melting fire, for real.

To be fair, those are just some of the highlights from a film that has a million of them. While Sun Ra is a remarkable musician — and quite the character — he retains a god-like veneer that seems like its riding the line between celebrated messiah and apoplectic cult leader.

Good thing, because no matter what his ethereal bag is, it’s a truly complex, utterly bemudded and completely mesmerizing body of soulful work. And, as far as the movie goes, to see Sun Ra and his Egyptian birdmen driving around town in a stylish convertible as unsuspecting passersby look … well, that must been amazing to view and, years later, watch on television.

If anything, I want to get into Sun Ra’s selected discography. If anyone have strong recommendations, either for physical media or metaphysical waves of sound vibrations, let me know … —Louis Fowler

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Let’s get the biggest letdown out of the way: Unfortunately, Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 doesn’t feature the 1981 pop hit “Mickey” by Toni Basil. The flick does, however, have Toni Collette (Hereditary) obsessing over various sauces. I guess that’s a decent enough consolation.

Beyond the sauce, Mickey 17 is a compelling, yet quite a bit weaker satire from South Korea’s best-known director. While it certainly won’t receive the same critical celebration as 2018’s Parasite, it still holds a comfortable place among a stellar filmography. That said, if you’d sooner watch Mother or Memories of Murder over Okja or Snowpiercer, this one might not be the Joon Ho joint you’d hope for.

Mickey 17 is a fairly close adaptation of Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel, Mickey7 (minus the 10 extra Mickeys, of course). On the run from a powerful mobster with a chainsaw fetish, Mickey (Robert Pattinson, The Batman) and his “friend” Timo (Steven Yeun, Nope) get jobs with a commercial space cruiser bound to colonize a mysterious ice planet. While Timo negotiates for a position as a pilot, Mickey becomes the ship’s only “expendable.” Possibly the worst gig imaginable, Mickey is employed to die and get reprinted so he can effectively gauge the dangers of space travel and colonization.

More so than Joon Ho’s other sci-fi satires, Mickey 17 excels in its casting. Pattinson channels his inner John C. Reilly to deliver a hilarious and endearing performance. His attention to physical comedy also excels, appropriately matching the energy of his character’s existential (and interplanetary) nightmare. Plus, Mark Ruffalo (Poor Things) and Collette carry the antagonism as the colony ship’s insufferable, corporate power couple.

That said, the film’s attempt at satire also works against it. Kenneth Marshall (Ruffalo) obviously pulls from Donald Trump and Elon Musk, but unfortunately, Joon Ho doesn’t say anything interesting about that. Sure, Marshall is a bumbling idiot who has more power than he should have ever been granted, but the film fails to actualize the consequences of that in a meaningful way. As entertainment, the character operates fine. As something genuinely interesting and resonating, on the other hand, he fails miserably.

While that miss eclipses most of Mickey 17’s commentary that lands, it doesn’t completely ruin it. The film’s critique on automating and replicating human capability to extinction works. And though the monstrous centipede-buffalo stand-in for Indigenous societies feels a bit gross, at least where the film’s heart lands doesn’t. In other words, it flounders as a modern, pointed satire, but saves itself as a dystopian black comedy.

Certain sequences thankfully save the film when awkward flashbacks and hallucinations cause it to stumble. It isn’t that those achronological scenes should’ve been removed outright. Rather, their presentation makes the film noticeably stumble toward its crescendo. Which feels bizarre, given the montages and dialogue push the movie forward so well.

To be clear, Mickey 17 is an entertaining, worthwhile ride. It just winds up among Joon Ho’s weaker works, fighting for a knife in the slush with Snowpiercer. Ultimately, that’s still pretty high praise. —Daniel Bokemper

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Most of Southern California being on fire reminds me Demolition Man, but, of course, with different results. The movie begins with the Hollywood Hills on fire, a dire prophecy that has come to pass, sadly — especially since Sylvester Stallone is now an “emissary” to Hollywood by Donald Trump. (Truthfully, I didn’t see that coming, palling around with other has-beens like Mel Gibson and Jon Voight. Yeccccch!)

With hits like Rocky, Rambo, and Rhinestone, Stallone was one of the biggest actors in the world. However, Demolition Man is Stallone’s absolute triumph: a somewhat smart, pretty inventive sci-fi-action film with enough explosives and unmatched machismo to create a spandex-clad gumbo — in other words, one of 1993’s most underrated and unappreciated films!

In an alternate 1996, L.A. is a total war zone. Beefy cop Sgt. John Spartan (the beefy Stallone) goes into the inner city to take down terrorist mastermind Simon Phoenix (the fully engaging Wesley Snipes) and is penalized for his trouble: He is cryogenically frozen. Wowza!

In a future 2032, L.A. is renamed San Angeles, a utopian megalopolis with no violence, hunger or, apparently, working toilets. That all changes when Phoenix and Spartan are revived and compete in the world’s biggest dick contest. Of course, the peaceful members of society get murdered, killed and executed, all at the same time.

In between exhibitions at the MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum, artist Marco Brambilla directed the film. His swerves on the well-paved road between precise critiques of pop culture and disparate art culture serve the purpose to entertain.

And, really, it’s not that dumb. I can’t stress this enough!

The movie also casts the charming Sandra Bullock and the grating Denis Leary, and they serve their comical purposes. But, once again, the penile swagger of Stallone and Snipes create a dream team of ethical counterpoints, trading stereotypical non-PC lines and acts of brutality in a two-hour time frame.

In other words, it was a smart movie from stupid people. Right?

Demolition Man, with its end credits song by Sting — always a banger — is a fully satisfying film and one of Stallone’s last major works. Two years later, all that goodwill was tossed in the trash can with Judge Dredd and, well, we all know how that turned out. —Louis Fowler

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