On an alternate timeline in an alternate America, a civil war with questionable sides rages on as everyday people try to survive by ignoring it. As the despot president begins to face his last few hours of life, the ubiquitous television network decides to hold a rather sketchy benefit concert for either the victims of the war or the promoter’s sizable debts, whichever comes first.

To play the show, they spring from prison the troubled troubadour of this timeline, Jack Fate. As he surveys the broken country with a wide array of name-brand actors, dropping abstract mantras and humanistic tantras, things continue to fall apart as Fate and his band perform some death-defying tunes in preparation for the last night of America as they seem to know it.

This remarkably prescient travelogue was conceived by (and starring) Bob Dylan, by the way.

One of the most woefully ignored films of the past 20 years, Masked and Anonymous is the dystopic present presented as a bitter song of broken hearts, hard-edged and mean-spirited in a way that refuses to give answers or, even worse, reasons for anything that it presents on screen and in theory.

And while that is usually something that might irritate most people, here, through Dylan and director Larry Charles’ acidic pen, it all seems like it was just two decades too early. With the threat of wars, pestilence, famine and death riding just over our own horizon, we don’t need to know the hows and whys anymore; we just gotta turn on the TV and figure out a way to survive it.

Dylan as Fate is, ironically, the movie’s Everyman; when he says, “I stopped trying to figure things out long ago,” it’s the only way to make sense of the shit that rolls down from on high, both in the film and in our own damnable lives, guaranteed no tomorrows. —Louis Fowler

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Fresh from a well-deserved Emmy win for the Netflix crime series Ozark, Julia Garner faces arguably more dangerous territory in — and as — The Assistant, set entirely within one workday. As the lowest rung of a Miramax-esque film company in New York City, her Mary stays busy making copies, fielding phone calls, washing dishes, balancing checks and fetching water — glass-bottled, of course. Across the movie’s 87 minutes, we watch her perform so many menial tasks, you may feel like you deserve three hours’ internship credit.

Most of The Assistant is as dull as Mary’s day, until signs of her boss – who’s heard but never seen — become more common. He’s the film’s ersatz Harvey Weinstein, a blustery, berating bully apparently more interested in chasing tail rather than talent. As Mary navigates this toxic environment, culminating in a futile meeting with an HR representative (Matthew Macfadyen, 2010’s Robin Hood), her soul slowly deflates like a balloon days after the party, air seeping from Garner’s perpetually sour pucker. Yet nothing really happens, in terms of story.

Unconventional documentarian Kitty Green makes her narrative debut with The Assistant, yet the pulse of her previous project, Casting JonBenet, cannot be located. Her film may have nailed the #MeToo timing, but is itself something of a quiet slog. In keeping the audience from hearing (except in select occasions) the other end of the movie’s many phone conversations, which constitute a good chunk of dialogue, Green keeps the viewer from engaging with her material. It’s an odd directorial choice — one I respect, although don’t necessarily like.

Make no mistake: The Assistant is not the finely tuned workplace thriller it’s expertly sold to be. Its themes of sexual harassment will attract the curious, only to yield wildly mixed results: cathartic for a few, a horror show to a few more, and baffling to most everyone else. —Rod Lott

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Who, we may ask, was Lon Chaney?

The classic Universal biopic Man of a Thousand Faces starring James Cagney tries most nobly to answer that question, but does so with such a press release-approved veneer of old Hollywood that, instead, it’s far easier to view this entertaining flick as more of a fictionalized take rather than a mildly hard-hitting expose on the life of a horror legend.

What’s most surprising about this movie, I think, is how surprisingly pro-deaf it is; apparently, in the first half of the 20th century, people with lack of hearing abilities were treated like monstrous abominations. When people learn that Chaney’s parents were deaf, they typically offer glareful glances and snarled lips; Chaney’s first wife, Cleva (Dorothy Malone), practically turns into an alcoholic shrew when she meets his parents on Christmas Eve, running from the dinner table screaming.

Still, despite this soundless adversity, Chaney’s path to greatness continues on, going from the halcyon days of vaudeville to the latest invention of moving pictures, working steadily as an extra alongside brutal Asian and Indigenous stereotypes. Using his incredible makeup skills, Chaney’s even able to take their meager roles away in various bit parts. Hollywood!

As Chaney works his way up the ladder of success, Cleva drinks a bottle of acid on stage and their son, the unfortunately named Creighton, is put in foster care. Using this as a catalyst, Chaney goes on to become the biggest star in Tinseltown, unafraid to place himself under tons of makeup and prosthetics, earning himself the nickname of the “man of a thousand faces.”

He soon dies of bronchial lung cancer for his troubles.

Directed with a well-earned heavy hand by Joseph Pevney, Man of a Thousand Faces is, like much of Chaney’s work, most enjoyable when Cagney is behind the wonderfully redesigned makeup himself, allowing the actor to emote behind the various masks. Sadly, much of the film — practically an hour and a half — is instead dedicated to Chaney’s war with his wife, which really kind of reeks of cinematic revenge porn.

But, you know, when I say it out loud, “porno revenger” is a role that I’m sure Chaney could have made his own as well. —Louis Fowler

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The sensational Mexican newsmagazine ¡Alarma! is legendary for the graphic violence and tremendous sex contained within in its bestselling pages, with images of severed heads and mutilated corpses right on the cover, usually in blazing full color. I’ve got a couple of old copies if you really want to take a look at one.

In 1986, the fotonovela titled Casos de ¡Alarma! made it to the big (well, big in Mexico) screen in a film subtitled SIDA or, as it’s more popularly known in America, AIDS. Of course, it’s a highly melodramatic and deeply pungent story that, even for the time, is hilariously uninformed about the disease. But, I guess if you’re watching a film from the makers of ¡Alarma!, you’re really not looking for integridad periodística.

A moody young man named Rodolfo (Servando Manzetti) comes to a small rural town, with uncomfortable flashbacks to an apparent murder as he looks out the window wistfully on the bus. Seems he’s confused about his sexualidad ever since a kid (who resembled a young John Candy) molested him at boarding school, leading to a life of being taken advantage of by old men and, for the most part, he didn’t really hate it.

However, when he meets atractiva clothes-washer Carolina (Alma Delfina), it energizes the fuerza de vida machista pura inside him, but, consequently, he gives her SIDA. Then, despite the romantic ranchera musical numbers by the mayor’s son, Ausencio (Julio Aldama), to her, he vengefully sexually assaults Carolina and that gives him SIDA, too, which apparently has a gestation period of three months before you die a horrible death on a tractor.

At two hours, the thing is surprisingly filled with dumb comedy, tired gay stereotypes and plenty of punishing filler. Regardless, it’s still very much like the death-obsessed magazine, from a bordello of breast-heaving prostitutas to the bloody gundown of Carolina from an angry padre; this first volume of Casos de ¡Alarma! is remarkably trashy and fully exploitative of the absolute temor surrounding SIDA at the time. —Louis Fowler

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Many people today remember Johnny Cash mostly for his angsty Man in Black persona, but I’ll always remember him for his dumb Chicken in Black character. People tend to forget that Cash wasn’t always the dark and dreary troubadour that he’s portrayed as on licensed Hot Topic tees these days; instead, he lived most of the ’80s high on novelty tunes, chronic relapses and made-for-television movies like the wonderfully saccharine The Pride of Jesse Hallam.

Cash headlines as the titular Jesse, a good ol’ boy from Muhlenberg, Kentucky, who recently had to sell his farm and move to the big city because his daughter has a back disease, see, and needs an operation at the Children’s Hospital. Between enrolling his son in school, being hassled by an stereotypical cop and trying to find a job before the cash runs out, it slowly comes to light that Jesse has a big problem: Everyone in Cincinnati hates Kentucky trash.

Oh, and he can’t read.

For most of his life in Kentucky, he’s gotten along pretty good, always commanding a good attitude toward work, with plenty of down-home witticisms and a genuine “aw, shucks” demeanor that endears him; too bad that doesn’t really fly in the big city, as he’s forced to load fruit trucks in the middle of the night, at a business run by an old Italian stereotype (Eli Wallach, Baby Doll).

Jesse eventually confronts his illiteracy with the help of a toned-down Brenda Vaccaro (Airport ’77), eventually reading to his daughter (kinda) as she lay in a hospital bed; it’s an act that inspires both him and his somewhat illiterate son to take a GED class. As Cincinnati punks play rock music and create general chaos in the night class, Johnny sets them straight, letting them know he’s there to graduate, darn it, and nothing’s going to stop him.

Broadcast on CBS in the spring of 1981, Cash, though no actor, still has a commandeering screen presence that works for a by-the-numbers drama like this as both Wallach and Vaccaro happily take their paychecks; the soundtrack also contains plenty of high-quality Cash tunes, but, alas, no soundtrack album was made available.

Directed with a flat flair by Gary Nelson, who may remember as the guy behind the Gary Coleman theatrical vehicle Jimmy the Kid, which was, surprisingly, based on a novel by Donald Westlake — a book that I hope Jesse Hallam wasn’t too proud to read. —Louis Fowler

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