Ken and Robin Consume Media: Nouvelle Vague, an Obscure New Wave Gem, and The Brain Stealers

November 25th, 2025 | Robin

Ken and Robin Consume Media is brought to you by the discriminating and good-looking backers of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff Patreon. Each week we provide capsule reviews of the books, movies, TV seasons and more we cram into our hyper-analytical sensoriums. Join the Patreon to help pick the items we’ll talk about in greater depth on a little podcast segment we like to call Tell Me More.

Recommended

The Brain Stealers (Film, Hong Kong, Umetsugu Inoue, 1968) A scientist’s daughter (Lily Ho) uses judo to protect him from a megalomaniacal supervillain intent on using his plant growth tech to create an army of giants. Fast moving entry in the Shaw Brothers cycle of kooky Bond tributes packs in enough outlandish plot elements for three normal movies. Mind switching! Snake charming! The acid pit! A giant attack owl!—RDL

Happy as Lazzaro (Film, Italy, Alice Rohrwacher, 2019) Beatifically naive young farm worker (Adriano Tardiolo) befriends the feckless son of the Marquise (Nicoletta Braschi) who has tricked his family and neighbors into believing they owe her their labor as sharecroppers. Evanescent portrait of rural life takes a turn into allegorical magic realism.—RDL

Love at Sea (Film, France, Guy Gilles, 1964) A trusting young Parisian office worker (Geneviève Thénier) corresponds with her brooding sailor boyfriend (Daniel Moosmann), who is stationed in gloomy Brest. Beguiling New Wave mood piece, stunningly photographed in both color and black & white, once a meditation on nostalgia for the present, now a time capsule of France at its epitome of cool.—RDL

Madame White Snake (Film, South Korea, Shin Sang-ok, 1960) An eager snake spirit in human form (Choi Eun-hee) wreaks unintended havoc when she falls for a human merchant (Jo Hyeong-geun.) This version of the oft-adapted legend casts it as a melodrama, with the divine laws separating the mortal and immortal realms standing in for the oppressive social conventions bringing suffering to the heroine. As discussed in Episode 642, the director and leading lady were later abducted by North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il.—RDL

Nouvelle Vague (Film, France/US, Richard Linklater, 2025) In 1959, frustrated critic Jean-Luc Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) gets his chance to direct his debut film, Breathless. Linklater shoots and cuts this love letter to Godard’s work in completely un-Godardian fashion (although in black-and-white and in French and in a 4:3 aspect ratio), which explains much of why I found myself engrossed in the story and sympathizing with the characters. Much of the rest is Zoey Deutch’s star turn as a frustrated Jean Seberg, who cannot believe she’s stuck doing this movie for this jerk.—KH

Paint, Gold, and Blood (Fiction, Michael Gilbert, 1989) The impecunious schoolboy Peter Dolamore stumbles over an art theft, and with his chum Stewart Ives eventually investigates. I am a sucker for all three of the strands of this novel: “boys’ adventure” school story, Hitchcockian “wrong man” thriller, and art theft, and by now I’m less surprised (though no less impressed) when Gilbert eventually but seamlessly weaves three seemingly random separate types of novel into one. As is common with Gilbert, the last quarter of the book clicks up into superb suspense.—KH

The Shanghai Free Taxi (Nonfiction, Frank Langfitt, 2019) Journalist portrays everyday life in Xi’s China by following the lives of people he meets by offering free car rides in Shanghai. Sympathetic first person social storytelling with an eye for illuminating detail.—RDL

Good

Moon (Film, Austria, Kurdwin Ayub, 2024) Washed-up MMA fighter (Florentina Holzinger) finds her new gig training the teen daughters of a wealthy family in Jordan increasingly troubling . Hard-edged observational drama from the point of view of a character unable to fully penetrate its core dilemma.—RDL

Ken and Robin Consume Media: Blue Moon, Only Murders in the Building, Bring Her Back

November 18th, 2025 | Robin

Ken and Robin Consume Media is brought to you by the discriminating and good-looking backers of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff Patreon. Each week we provide capsule reviews of the books, movies, TV seasons and more we cram into our hyper-analytical sensoriums. Join the Patreon to help pick the items we’ll talk about in greater depth on a little podcast segment we like to call Tell Me More.

Recommended

Alucarda (Film, Mexico, Juan López Moctezuma, 1977) Intense student Alucarda (Tina Romero) encourages new arrival Justine (Susana Kamini) to take part in a Satanic ritual, spiraling their convent school into an inferno of bloodshed. Which you’d think is a mixed metaphor but no. Sepia-toned psychosexual horror freakout reminds us that there’s no Catholicism more fervent than the transgressive kind.—RDL

Blue Moon (Film, US, Richard Linklater, 2025) On the opening night of Oklahoma!, lyricist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke) gives vent to jealousy and genius before and during a Sardi’s party for his former partner, composer Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott), where he hopes to win the love of Yale student Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley). A tour-de-force both interior and mannered by Hawke, for the only director who can bring that kind of performance out of him; Qualley and Scott match him in their paired rejection scenes. Occasional hey-its-that-guy intrusions (“Weegee, take a picture!”) and the weird “height wizardry” involved in depicting 5’10” Hawke as the 4’11” Hart briefly distract, but not fatally.—KH

Bring Her Back (Film, Australia, Danny Philippou & Michael Philippou, 2025) Orphaned teens, protective but volatile Andy (Billy Barratt) and his blind, independence-seeking stepsister (Sora Wong) move in with a seemingly empathetic foster parent (Sally Hawkins) who harbors a hidden necromantic agenda. Hawkins’ intense performance multiplies the horror of being trapped with a cruel and manipulative caretaker.—RDL

The Carter of La Providence (Fiction, Georges Simenon, 1931) Maigret investigates the strangulation of an English yachtsman’s wife in an area frequented by barge workers of the Marne. More of a policier than a puzzle-style whodunnit, focused on characters from a couple of contrasting sub-cultures.—RDL

The Killing of Katie Steelstock (Fiction, Michael Gilbert, 1980) Local girl become TV pop icon turns up murdered by the canal in her sleepy hometown, bringing “star of the Murder Squad” DCI Knott to the scene. Gilbert cleverly tells a Golden Age style “village mystery” through the lens and language of the police procedural, carefully seeding near-invisible clues to the surprising reveal.—KH

The Night of the Twelfth (Fiction, Michael Gilbert, 1976) When the third murdered boy turns up, DCS Jock Anderson heads up a task force to methodically quarter the country around the Trenchard School for the killer. Gilbert here combines the “school story” complete with enigmatic new “cool” schoolmaster, terrorism thriller (one of the students is the son of the Israeli ambassador), and police procedural to once more produce a sort of holographic Golden Age detection, all in a superbly controlled style running from near psychological horror to character-driven humor.—KH

Good

The Big Sky (Film, US, Howard Hawks, 1952) Enterprising frontiersman (Kirk Douglas) and his hotheaded traveling companion (Dewey Martin) join a cartel-busting riverborne fur trading mission through uncharted territory. Rhythm is everything with Hawks, here sabotaged by a visible studio hack job in the edit suite, but even so this unusually-set Western quest has its moments.—RDL

Only Murders in the Building Season 5 (Television, US, Hulu, Steve Martin & John Hoffman, 2025) Podcasting trio (Steve Martin, Martin Short, Selena Gomez) run into opposition from a billionaire squad (Christoph Waltz, Renee Zellweger, Logan Lerman) while investigating the murder of their building’s doorman Lester (Teddy Coluca). To my surprise, the derailing of the podcast pretense of the show also derails the narrative, as the mystery twists unsatisfyingly in the wind for the last six episodes with nothing very interesting to replace it.—KH

Of Historical Note

Mission to Moscow (Film, US, Michael Curtiz, 1943) As WWII looms, sensible American diplomat Joseph Davies (Walter Huston) fact-finds in Moscow and Europe. In a move it would later regret, Warner Brothers agreed to produce this film, aimed at drumming up support for its new Soviet ally, at the behest of the US state department. In the history of propaganda, this stands as a gobsmacking exercise in overreach, going so far as to praise the ‘37 Moscow trials as a needed blow against a Nazi conspiracy directed by Leon Trotsky. On a cinematic level, it highlights Curtiz’s ability to energize even the dullest script imaginable with motion, compelling framing and twinkling character moments.—RDL

Okay

The Wrath of Becky (Film, US, Matt Angel & Suzanne Coote, 2023) When white supremacist losers murder her landlady and steal her dog, off-the-grid teen Becky (Lulu Wilson) returns to form as a vengeance machine. Retains the kicky spirit of the original but skimps on the basic building blocks of action-suspense sequences.—RDL

Ken and Robin Consume Media: Del Toro’s Frankenstein, Silver Nitrate, and Ken Finds a New Mystery Writer to Binge

November 11th, 2025 | Robin

Ken and Robin Consume Media is brought to you by the discriminating and good-looking backers of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff Patreon. Each week we provide capsule reviews of the books, movies, TV seasons and more we cram into our hyper-analytical sensoriums. Join the Patreon to help pick the items we’ll talk about in greater depth on a little podcast segment we like to call Tell Me More.

Recommended

Death in Captivity (Fiction, Michael Gilbert, 1952) One of the most original premises for a “locked room” mystery ever: in an Italian POW camp in 1943, a possible informer turns up dead in an escape tunnel that takes four men to open. Gilbert (who actually spent time as a POW in Italy) interweaves a fair-play murder mystery with a classic prison-camp story complete with heroic escape plans, all of it complicated by the fact that the Italian authorities have their own schemes to which the detective is not privy, and their own POW to frame for the crime.—KH

John Candy: I Like Me (Film, US, Colin Hanks, 2025) Documentary profile of the revered comedy star shows why he was beloved on and off screen, while gently exploring the paradox of his quiet self-destruction.—RDL

Silver Nitrate (Fiction, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, 2023) When forgotten cult horror director Abel Urueta involves almost-has-been actor Tristán and struggling sound editor Montserrat in a sorcerous ritual he filmed 30 years before at the behest of a Nazi occultist, things get better for all of them. Until, as one might suspect, they get much much worse. Moreno-Garcia has total mastery of her Mexico City ‘90s milieu, and invests her characters with complete believability, which puts this “lost magical film” novel well ahead of most of its rivals.—KH

Smallbone Deceased (Fiction, Michael Gilbert, 1950) An annoying trustee turns up dead in a deed box, throwing the august London firm of solicitors into a tizzy, since their senior partner (also deceased) is the prime suspect. Inspector Hazelrigg (and a new hire who can’t have done it) investigate this beautifully constructed classic mystery. Like Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise, the office byplay and incisive characterization carry a whole extra novel with them, allowing Gilbert to enliven the story with dry wit aplenty.—KH

The Taste of Things (Film, France, Anh Hung Tran, 2023) Revered Belle Époque food writer Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel) fears for the health of his longtime cook (Juliet Binoche), who despite his adoration refuses to marry him. With a mastery of light and sound design, establishes itself as one of the greatest food films of all time, which opens up into a sublime, bittersweet contemplation of love, pleasure, and the inevitability of grief.—RDL

Good

Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (Film, Spain/Italy, Jorge Grau, 1974) A petulant counterculture antiques dealer (Ray Lovelock) and stressed young woman (Cristina Galbó) are forced to remain in a sleepy English town when its reactionary police sergeant (Arthur Kennedy) accuses them of killings committed by the walking dead. Culturally dislocated horror depicts chauvinist dismissiveness as the contributing factor to gut-munching mayhem. Aka The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue.—RDL

Longlegs (Film, US, Osgood Perkins, 2024) Withdrawn psychic FBI agent (Maika Monroe), guided by veteran superior (Blair Underwood) hunts the weirdo serial killer Longlegs (Nicolas Cage), who appears to cause family annihilation incidents by power of suggestion. Like other recent tributes to horror classics, underwhelms when it comes time to upshift from pervasive dread to climactic resolution.—RDL

Okay

Frankenstein (Film, US, Guillermo del Toro, 2025) Petulant mama’s boy Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac, overacting badly) is hired by weapons magnate Heinrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz, overacting well) to build a living Creature (Jacob Elordi) out of corpses … but who’s the REAL monster, eh? Who? Who? Perhaps the real monster is the filmmaker who gives us 20 minutes of Frankenstein’s daddy issues and no Bride. Del Toro’s patent visual sumptuousness (padded out by some terrible CGI) brings the color his script and characters should have had: Mary Shelley deserves better than this two-dimensional travesty stitched together from her novel and Tumblr.—KH

Troll (Film, Norway, Roar Uthaug, 2022) Determined paleontologist (Ine Marie Wilmann) estranged from her eccentric folklorist father (Gard B. Eidsvold) becomes unlikely point person when a 40-foot troll released by a tunnel blast stomps toward Oslo. Every story point is hit squarely on the nose in this transposition of the kaiju genre to Nordic mythology.—RDL

Ken and Robin Consume Media: Bugonia, Freaky Tales, and Junji Ito’s Cat Diary

November 4th, 2025 | Robin

Ken and Robin Consume Media is brought to you by the discriminating and good-looking backers of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff Patreon. Each week we provide capsule reviews of the books, movies, TV seasons and more we cram into our hyper-analytical sensoriums. Join the Patreon to help pick the items we’ll talk about in greater depth on a little podcast segment we like to call Tell Me More.

Recommended

Elegant Beast (Film, Japan, Yuzo Kawashima, 1962) A family of con artists living in a cramped apartment looks for an angle when the ambitious but dim son (Manamitsu Kawabata) is outmatched by his unflappable ex (Ayako Wakao) in an embezzling scheme. In a visual scheme mirroring the maneuverings of the characters, this satirical drama of post-war moral rot shoots its confined space from every angle. Also known under a much worse English title, The Graceful Brute.—RDL

Freaky Tales (Film, US, Anna Biden & Ryan Fleck, 2024) Four interweaving stories featuring anti-Nazi punks, up and coming rappers, a weary leg-breaker (Pedro Pascal), a corrupt cop (Ben Mendelsohn), and a katana-wielding basketball hero (Jay Ellis) celebrate the spunky underdog culture of 80s Oakland. Genre-hopping hometown valentine nods to the less frequently stolen pages of the Tarantino playbook.—RDL

Junji Ito’s Cat Diary: Yon & Mu (Comics, Junji Ito, 2015) Horror mangaka Junji Ito depicts the incursion of new cats into his life: “cursed face” Yon and new kitten Mu, both courtesy of his fiancée “A-ko.” The slim manga serves as self-parody both of Ito’s own style and of the emotional over-commitment of even “normal” cat owners, all under absolutely quotidian tales of escape, vet visits, and weird feline emotional availability. A small delight with a hidden bite, much like its subjects.—KH

Queen of the Deuce (Film, Canada, Valerie Kontakos, 2022) Biographical documentary tells the jaw-dropping story of Chelly Wilson, an indomitable figure who fled Salonika’s Jewish enclave one step ahead of the holocaust, arrived in America with five bucks in her pocket, and parlayed a hot dog counter into a lucrative pornography business in wild 70s New York as theater owner and film financier, becoming a doting if eccentric grandmother along the way.—RDL

Good

Black Magic (Film, US, Gregory Ratoff, 1948) Faith healer Cagliostro (Orson Welles) uses his hypnotic powers for revenge against the count who had his parents hanged, embroiling himself in a scheme to embarrass Marie Antoinette (Nancy Guild) with a faked jewel purchase. Wildly ahistorical even by 40s Hollywood standards and stitched together with narration to cover connective scenes missed in principal photography, this gothic swashbuckler is worth a look for Welles’ magnetic journey from anti-hero to monster.—RDL

Death of a Borgia and The Duke and the Veil (Fiction, Caroline Stevermer, 1981) As “C.J. Stevermer,” fantasy author Caroline Stevermer started her career writing detective novels featuring the English alchemist Nicholas Coffin, living in Rome under the Borgias. (The occasional visit to a reclusive Nicolas Flamel aside, the novels have no fantastic component.) Rome and Cesare Borgia are competently sketched, the mysteries play basically fair; this is good journeyman work by someone who switched genres to find her true metier.—KH

The Green, Green Grass of Home (Film, Taiwan, Hsiao-Hsien Hou, 1982) As an idealistic new grade school teacher (Kenny Bee) settles into his new small town post, his three least ruly students get into a series of scrapes. Episodic slice of life drama with an overbearing, sentimental score at odds with its gentle, observational tone, made before the director adopted his characteristic slow cinema style.—RDL

Okay

Bugonia (Film, US, Yorgos Lanthimos, 2025) Conspiratorial fanatic (Jesse Plemons) kidnaps lingo-spouting pharma CEO (Emma Stone), believing she’s an alien infiltrator poisoning the planet. Nihilist provocation shows that just because you can make a more emotionally real version of the 2003 Korean grand guignol black comedy Save the Green Planet doesn’t mean you should.—RDL

Ken and Robin Consume Media: Gothic Giallo, Satanic Piano, and a Hallucinatory Steppe Quest

October 28th, 2025 | Robin

Ken and Robin Consume Media is brought to you by the discriminating and good-looking backers of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff Patreon. Each week we provide capsule reviews of the books, movies, TV seasons and more we cram into our hyper-analytical sensoriums. Join the Patreon to help pick the items we’ll talk about in greater depth on a little podcast segment we like to call Tell Me More.

Recommended

The Last Black Man in San Francisco (Film, US, Joe Talbot, 2019) Aided by his aspiring playwright best friend (Jonathan Majors), melancholy nurse Jimmie Fails (Jimmie Fails) sets up a squat in the gorgeous Fillmore District house where his family once lived. Big music cues, poetic shot composition, and an initially Beckett-like dialogue rhythm build a haunting style for a story of loving a city that doesn’t love you back.—RDL

Qas (Film, Kazakhstan, Aisultan Seitov, 2022) Afraid to leave him unprotected during the 1931 famine, a gravedigger takes his eight year old brother on a mission across the trackless steppes to seek aid in the district capital. Strikingly composed hallucinatory survival quest.—RDL

Good

The Killer Reserved Nine Seats (Film, Italy, Giuseppe Bennati, 1974) Relatives, lovers, and hangers-on of the rich aristocrat Patrick Davenant (Chris Avram) arrive at his family’s ancestral mansion, now a long-disused theater, and trigger its murderous curse. Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians provided the basic outline of several Italian “someone is killing these rich jerks” movies; Bennati’s version aims for gothic horror that begins as undertone beneath the giallo murder mystery and ends up as the key note. Less gory than most gialli (modulo one murderous crucifixion), this one prefigures the American slasher with ample nudity, weirdly masked killer, and idiotic victim behavior. Carlo Savina’s score is a real standout, adding lush theatricality to the sordid goings-on.—KH

The Mephisto Waltz (Film, US, Paul Wendkos, 1971) Music critic Myles Clarkson (Alan Alda) allows himself to be cultivated by dying piano maestro (and secret Satanist) Duncan Ely (Curt Jürgens) despite the misgivings of his wife Paula (Jacqueline Bisset). This Rosemary’s Baby knockoff has great potential, sadly mostly squandered by Alda and producer Quinn Martin, who over-indulges his TV-movie sensibilities. The hip Satanic cult swaps Duncan’s soul into Myles’ body, but Alda is smarmy with either soul in him. Bisset completely out-acts Alda, and Paula outclasses Myles so much as to deform the story. There are some great scenes of Satanic party goings-on, and Jerry Goldsmith turns in a score (of increasingly atonal Liszt riffs) far better than this movie deserves, enough in fact to give it a solid Good rating.—KH

Tigers are Not Afraid (Film, Mexico, Issa Lopez, 2017) A girl whose mother has been disappeared by the local cartel joins forces with kid orphans of the drug war — and a source of dark supernatural vengeance. Strong performances from a preteen cast drive an uncompromising social realist ghost story.—RDL

Okay

Psycho Beach Party (Film, US, Robert Lee King, 2000) Perky teen Chiclet (Lauren Ambrose) pursues her surfing dreams despite sexist beach bums, a serial killer rampage, and her latent multiple personalities. Easy-target spoof turns the gay subtext of the beach party movies into text. Adapted from his stage play by Charles Busch, who appears as hardnosed cop Monica Stark.—RDL

Not Recommended

Customs Frontline (Film, Hong Kong, Herman Yau, 2024) In tandem with his bipolar mentor (Jacky Cheung), a duty-bound customs officer (Nicholas Tse) takes on the heavily equipped forces of a ruthless arms dealer. Gigantic action sequences held together by morose, catharsis-deficient melodrama and an earnest anti-war message about a conflict between made-up countries.—RDL