A disgraced journalist (Lily Sullivan, Evil Dead Rise) attempts to rebuild her career — if not her credibility — by starting Beyond Believable, an investigative podcast on unexplained events. One night, the subject for a potential first episode falls in her lap via an anonymous email. Bearing the subject line “The Truth Will Out,” it contains only a name, a phone number and a cryptic reference to a brick.

As the saying goes, curiosity killed the podcaster, so she takes the bait. A couple of calls later, she’s nose-deep in the mystery — or conspiracy? —regarding these black bricks of unknown origin and composition, and containing odd symbols inside.

One unsolicited tip is all it takes to lead her down a rabbit hole. For a good while, the same holds true for Monolith viewers as well, thanks to Sullivan’s engaging performance — all but required when you’re the lone actor onscreen. Unlike the recent, similarly themed First Time Caller, the Australian Monolith benefits from its always-on lead character not being abhorrent.

As first-time filmmakers, directory Matt Vesely and Lucy Campbell take a lot of correct steps upfront. Ultimately, their conclusion’s dogged ambiguity could work against the film’s potential life span. Sci-fi viewers don’t demand complete, lock-and-key explanations — witness The X-Files — but for Monolith to pivot so hard to the abstract after an hour of Sullivan’s methodical info-gathering feels indolent. Nevertheless, I look forward to whatever they direct their energy toward next. After all, the truth will out. —Rod Lott

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Cobbled from episodes of the children’s TV series Masked Ninja Red Shadow, this Japanese feature has popped up under numerous titles in its lifetime. Thanks to importing, white people like me are apt to encounter it as Ninja Scope. Whichever name it bears, the flick packs a lot of action in a mere 52 minutes.

It pits the red-masked, swoopy-haired superhero Akakage (Yuzaburo Sakaguchi, Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx) and kid-ninja sidekick Akokage (Kaneko Yoshinobu, Watari) against a cult. Do you think the cult leader is cool with this? No, he is not, so he sends in his clowns to battle. By “clowns,” I mean creatures of all shapes and sizes and sativa-inspired designs, including a:
• rock monster
• giant, flame-breathing toad
• rectangle-faced goon with sawblade sandals

For these and other colorful storybook shenanigans in which our heroes find themselves, the matinee movie occasional pauses to allow Akakage to bust that fourth wall and inform audience members to don their 3-D viewers. With each fight sequence, Ninja Scope diverts to black and white to allow for anaglyph antics; while it’s kind of a bummer to lose color, when it comes to pushing objects toward the lens, the filmmakers didn’t dick around. 

With a pantyhose-headed puppeteer, exploding plums and a dude on a kite, Ninja Scope never rests to allow itself to get dull.  It’s as if your eyes ate 12 bowls of cereal in a sitting. —Rod Lott

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Although The Animal Kingdom won five of its 12 nominations for the Césars, France’s equivalent to the Oscars, don’t mistake it for homework. It’s a superb work of fantasy. With feet planted on terra firma as its head takes a flight of fancy, the picture draws influence from David Cronenberg’s The Fly to the X-Men franchise, while somehow pulling off the appearance of originality.

Director and writer Thomas Cailley (Love at First Fight) presents a world challenged by a new pandemic, in which people undergo zoological mutations that may as well be named for Dr. Moreau. “Critter” is considered a slur; they’re “creatures,” TYVM, and they grapple with adjusting to feathers, tentacles, scales and prehensile tails.

One of the infected is the wife and mother to, respectively, François (an excellent Romain Duris, 2022’s Final Cut) and teenaged Émile (How to Make Out’s Paul Kircher, quite the young find). She’s also vanished. François can’t face the prospect of losing her, although most would agree that, in a way, he already has.

Meanwhile, while searching high and low, Émile comes face to face with startling examples of evolution’s next step. Whether said step leaps forward or diverges off to the side, the path he’s shown goes further than he’s willing to follow. He may not have a choice.

The Animal Kingdom operates on multiple levels of allegory: mortality, minority, puberty — take your pick! Cailley holds such tight control over his material, he’s able to steer deftly from moments of compassion to comedy (a visual gag involving kayaks slays) with no swerve feeling false. One memorable scene nails the tricky balance of conveying both heartbreak and joy as François and Émile drive through the forest at night while blasting their missing matriarch’s favorite song in hopes of triggering recognition.

Irony exists in The Animal Kingdom having the most humanistic viewpoint among movies in recent memory. Technically impeccable with seamless effects, it makes the case for Cailley being his country’s Steven Spielberg. A feel-good film about a bad hand dealt to all involved, it ends not in a cop-out, but a triumph. —Rod Lott

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As the titular physician, Gang Won-dong (Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula) ditches psychiatry for a more lucrative living: as the charlatan behind an exorcism startup. With YouTube prankster Kang (Lee Dong-hwi of Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden) hired for technical trickery, Dr. Cheon chases bank via the gullibility of a desperate citizenry.

Soon, a young woman (Esom, The Queen of Crime) offers them $100,000 to rid the demonic presence lurking inside her little sister (Park So-yi, Lingering). Easy cash, right? It would be, if the possession weren’t legit.

More than a little spirit of Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters lives within Kim Seong-sik’s Dr. Cheon and the Lost Talisman — right down to the ghost traps, even! But Dr. Cheon’s no Dr. Venkman. Rather than ape Bill Murray’s wiseass act, Won-dong exudes the cucumber cool of Sherlock-era Benedict Cumberbatch.

Meanwhile, Volcano High’s Huh Joon-ho plays the doc’s nemesis, a villainous mage who looks not unlike Ian McShane. In Lost Talisman’s best set piece, the mage conjures a blue light that hops from villager to villager, ordering them upon contact to attack Dr. Cheon.

As with the aforementioned American blockbuster, this South Korean film mixes the mythic and the mirthful, with first-rate effects that serve the story. The result? Serious franchise potential. —Rod Lott

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Five years after South Korea’s first moon mission proved a spectacular failure, another generation bravely steps up to try again. Poignantly, among this new trio is Hwang Sun-woo, whose father was among the astronauts who perished in that original endeavor.

The new astronauts’ rocket launches without incident. But just when they’re about to enter lunar orbit, a solar flare knocks out comms. While attempting to fix it, Sun-woo’s zero-grav colleagues are killed in an accident, leaving him in the command module all alone. With a meteor shower en route and an oxygen supply ever-dwindling, Sun-woo’s only hope for survival is the first mission’s flight director and capsule architect, Kim Jae-guk, aka the man he holds responsible for his dad’s death.

As our heroic astronaut trapped on the dark side of the orb of green cheese, Kyung-soo Do is fine, if a bit too wiry for a believable space-cadet build. He seems to have been cast more for looks than acting, which may be the case, as I’ve since learned he rose to fame as a former member of the K-pop boy band Exo. The film’s true emotional weight comes from Sol Kyung-gu (2012’s The Tower) as Jae-guk, doing his damndest to right a past wrong and assuage his own guilt. Essentially, he’s in the Ed Harris role of Apollo 13, with fewer degrees of separation to those above.

It’s impossible to credibly discuss The Moon without mentioning Apollo 13 or The Martian, as writer/director Kim Yong-hwa (the Along with the Gods duology) cribs liberally from both. And that’s fine since he does it so skillfully, accentuating his ticking-clock narrative over expensive effects (impressive though they are) because having Things Go Boom shouldn’t be No. 1 on the call sheet. With technical gabber adding realism (or a convincing approximation) to a precarious situation veering from “all systems go” to “no” and back again, The Moon rises into an intelligent crowdpleaser — hard sci-fi with a soft human touch.

Sometimes that touch is too soft, as when characters lock into awestruck Spielbergian stares, mouth agape. Can you imagine The Martian concluding with Jeff Daniels congratulating his NASA colleagues across the room with Taylor Swift’s hands-in-shape-of-heart gesture? —Rod Lott

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