Author: Chris McCoy

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Film Features Film/TV

The ’Vous

Percy Norris and “Big Robert” Stewart in The ’Vous

The night The ’Vous won the Best Hometowner Feature Award at Indie Memphis 2022, director/producers Jeff Dailey and Jack Lofton missed the awards ceremony. The film had premiered that afternoon to a sold-out Playhouse on the Square, and the crew had trekked Downtown for a reception at The Rendezvous, the storied barbecue restaurant whose inner workings Dailey and Lofton spent seven years documenting. Figuring they had missed the awards ceremony, the duo headed to The Lamplighter, where my wife Laura Jean Hocking and I were hosting our annual filmmakers’ party. Naturally, the Indie Memphis awards ceremony went way over its allotted time, so Lofton was giving up and leaving the Lamp at the exact moment I was walking in the door. “We didn’t know where everybody was, so we were about to bail,” recalls Lofton.

“Where are you going? You won!” I half yelled at him.

It took a moment for the news to sink in, so I got to watch the realization that all their hard work had paid off play out on his face. It’s definitely a top-five Indie Memphis memory for me — and for Lofton, it’s number one. “Then Larry Karaszewski, the writer of Man on the Moon, walked in, and I said, ‘What are you doing here?’” Lofton continues. “He said, ‘Who the hell are you?’ And I said, ‘I’m the guy who made The Rendezvous documentary, The ’Vous,” And he’s like, ‘Oh my God! You won! Where the hell were you? I was supposed to give you the award!’ It was a great time. I respect him tremendously. He said some amazing things about the restaurant, and he called it [The ’Vous] ‘a beautiful American story.’”

Lofton and Dailey are both from Arkansas and have fond memories of eating at The Rendezvous while they were visiting Memphis with their families. “It was always for the farm convention,” says Lofton. “My dad was a farmer in Hughes, Arkansas, and we’d go to church in Memphis and eat at The Rendezvous.”

When they read a Commercial Appeal article about longtime Rendezvous servers “Big Robert” Stewart and Percy Norris retiring, Lofton and Dailey realized they had a story to tell. “It’s an institution, it’s about the people. What they’ve built there, the stories that they’ve lived, and these guys are stepping down, retiring, and passing the torch. We’ve got to get in there right now. So, within three days, we had — with Jeff and some of his friends and people that we knew — a full film crew down there.”

Filming would continue for years, with film crews acting as fly-on-the-wall observers for bustling nights on the restaurant floor, personal moments with the Vergos family, and endless stories about the history that happened in the restaurant. “We’re a seven-year overnight success,” says Lofton.

“A lot of the new films that are coming out these days, they don’t have the budget or the time to spend time with the participants, with their characters,” says Dailey. “What we wanted to do was immerse ourselves and get to know the people personally as well as professionally. Yeah, it’s a lot more challenging that way, but I think it’s a richer product in the end.”

Against the backdrop of famous diners and pivotal deals sealed over a plate of ribs was the everyday drama of a family business navigating change. “It’s an important story to tell when we were at the crossroads of a company during Covid and the retirement of some of our Rendezvous originals,” says Anna Vergos, whose grandfather founded the restaurant. “I’m proud to look back on this documentary and see how much growth we’ve all felt and continue to embrace.”

One of the film’s most compelling storylines regards Calvin, a novice busboy trying to get his foot in the door. “It just sort of wrote itself once we were down there,” says Lofton. “The story of the busboy, and how the institution works, and the family dynamics — it was all there.”

After a rapturous reception at Indie Memphis, The ’Vous completed a festival run that included a sold-out screening at DOC NYC, the biggest documentary festival in North America. This week, Memphis will get a chance to see The ’Vous when it kicks off its theatrical engagement at the Malco Paradiso.

“We were so fortunate that people across the spectrum of The Rendezvous, from waitstaff to the family to many others, opened their personal lives to us — you really can’t predict what’s going to happen when you dive into people’s lives! We’re just so grateful to them, and to the city of Memphis. It’s a place that we both love.”

The ’Vous is showing at Malco Paradiso through February 1st.

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Film Features Film/TV

Music Video Monday: “Seeds” by Tony Manard

“Don’t know if I still qualify as a Memphis guy since I moved to Ripley, Mississippi, but this one was recorded here at Five and Dime and Buntyn Presbyterian,” says Tony Manard. “Overdubs and mixing were done in my little home studio I built in a school bus.”

Yes, Tony, Memphis still claims you! You may have moved the “Cuss Bus” out of the city limits, but can’t get away that easily. Especially when you make a good music video! The gorgeous stop motion production features Andrea Manard’s paintings and collage work.

“I wrote the song with Michael Graber,” says Manard. “Stax legend Willie Hall is on drums. It was released New Years Day. I chose that date because its about setting intentions and growth.”

If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.

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American Fiction

Jeffrey Wright’s virtuoso performance complements the virtuosic writing in American Fiction.

Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) has a big problem in American Fiction. He’s a writer and English professor, but his latest book is not going over well with publishers. It’s long and complicated, full of mythological symbols and classical references. Not exactly a recipe for a bestseller, but he’s got an audience, and it’s enough for Monk to get by in the publish-or-perish world of academia.

That’s not enough anymore, says Monk’s agent Arthur (John Ortiz). It’s got to be bold, direct, honest, from the street. That’s what readers want from Black authors these days — realness. But the trouble is, Monk’s book is honest and from the heart. His family is all well-to-do professionals. His sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) and brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown) are both doctors, and his retired mother Agnes (Leslie Uggams) lives on Cape Cod. His “real life” isn’t what people expect from a Black writer.

He is painfully reminded of what they do expect when Arthur suggests he attend a reading of the latest bestseller by Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), We’s Lives In Da Ghetto. The narrative is wall-to-wall Black trauma porn. The almost impenetrable dialect Sintara writes in is nothing like her reserved urbane speaking voice. It’s all a put-on by someone trying to fake authenticity by giving the predominantly white audience’s own preconceptions back to them.

Monk is jolted out of his professional bubble when Lisa dies unexpectedly from a heart attack, and he is forced to help arrange her funeral with his cokehead brother and Agnes, who is showing the first signs of Alzheimer’s. He takes a little comfort with Coraline (Erika Alexander), the lawyer who lives on the beach next to his mom.

To vent his frustrations, Monk bangs out a sloppy potboiler filled with stories of urban poverty, crime, and social dysfunction told in transparently fake street slang. He submits it to his agent as a final raised middle finger to the publishing industry. But to his surprise, Arthur loves it. When he shops My Pafology around to publishers under the name Stagg R. Leigh, a bidding war erupts. Since Monk’s terminally square appearance would undermine the “authenticity” of the product, he claims to be a gangsta on the run from the law and refuses to make public appearances. Stagg R. Leigh’s book advance is staggering — which is good because Monk needs the money to pay for his increasingly frail mother’s care.

Monk’s bitter kiss-off has become the biggest success of his career — and a publishing sensation. But Monk soon realizes that he can’t tell anybody he’s Stagg R. Leigh, or the whole bubble will burst. Even worse, isn’t he now just perpetuating and profiting from the same harmful stereotypes he was raging against in his satire? At what point does “satire” end and “realistically absurd” begin?

It’s that last question that American Fiction ultimately applies to itself. Monk gets cold feet and tries to sabotage his fictional career with increasingly outlandish pronouncements and behavior. But each escalation is met not with condemnation but rapturous applause. Writer/director Cord Jefferson, who won an Emmy for his writing on the 2019 HBO series Watchmen, adapted Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure into American Fiction, which just goes to show you that the complex questions of representation and stereotyping have been knocking around long before the moral panics of the 2020s.

Jefferson keeps it balanced between the outlandish and the real by going back and forth between Monk’s personal travails — a deteriorating family life and a fraught new romance — and the increasingly outrageous, yet plausible, arc of his meteoric writing career. Then finally, like his protagonist, the movie tries to sabotage itself to see how far you’ll go along. It’s a virtuosic writing job which wouldn’t have worked without a virtuoso performance by Jeffrey Wright. American Fiction is at its funniest when it’s all too real.

American Fiction opens in theaters this Friday.

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Music Video Monday: “Visions!” by Joybomb

Happy New Year from Music Video Monday! If you were out-with-the-olding on New Year’s Eve, you might have seen Joybomb tearing it up at Black Lodge or Memphis Current (RIP).

If you missed out, you can get a taste from their new music video “Visions!” Vocalist and guitarist Grant Beatty says, “I began writing this song on the heels of significant breakup and consequent re-evaluation of the role I played and my priorities. The frustration, intensity and immediacy you hear in the main riff and reoccurring lyrical turns (“She’s got a vision!”) are rooted in weather-wornness and obvious salty emotions. But as I spent more time developing the verses and chorus, “Visions!” took on a larger narrative. We, as individuals, perceive our intentions and interactions so subjectively;
people see what they want to see and in the face of dealing with stark objective realities, we protect ourselves through self-deceit and changing our lenses. I wanted to combine lyrical and visual themes of wonder, disillusionment, perception and paranoia. Our director Nick Hein and I collaborated to bring these concepts to the screen, having worked together on Joybomb’s episode of Station 8’s ‘The Hum‘ previously. The video takes you on a journey through the mind of someone grappling with two contrasting faces — the inner turmoil versus the outward smile. Tension in our character is brought forth through the use of mirrors, devices and the gaze of the ever-present “audience.” It’s a narrative that’s both deeply personal and universally relatable.”

If you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.

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The Year in Film 2023

From Barbie to Spider-Man, Across the Spider-Verse to Killers of the Flower Moon, the art of cinema in 2023 was triumphant.

The movie business was in chaos in 2023, but the art of cinema was triumphant. Audiences rejected expensive corporate blandness in favor of films that took chances and spoke from the heart. But before we get to the best of the year, let’s talk about the other end of the spectrum.

What’s worse than one Ezra Miller? Two Ezra Millers.

Worst Picture: The Flash

2023 was the year the superhero bubble finally burst. Warner Bros. scrapped Batgirl to bet the farm on walking PR disaster Ezra Miller. They lost $200 million on what is easily the worst film of the decade so far.

The King of the Monsters tearing up the club in Godzilla Minus One.

Best Performance by a Nonhuman: Godzilla

It was looking like Cocaine Bear’s year until the King of Monsters dropped an all-timer. The big guy dazzled in Godzilla Minus One by getting back to his roots — punishing mankind’s hubris with cleansing atomic fire.

Teo Yoo and Greta Lee tug heartstrings in Past Lives.

Best Original Screenplay/Best Ensemble: (double tie) May December, Past Lives

Todd Haynes and Celine Song both constructed delicate hothouse dramedies around a core of three fantastic actors. In Haynes’ May December, Natalie Portman is an actor researching a juicy role who discovers her subjects, played by Julianne Moore and Charles Melton, can’t be reduced to two dimensions. In Song’s Past Lives, Greta Lee and Teo Yoo are childhood sweethearts in China separated when one family immigrates to America, and John Magaro is the husband caught in the middle when they reunite 24 years later. Both stories are told with remarkable economy, and perfect performances.

The gang starts a fight club in Bottoms.

Best Comedy: Bottoms

College friends Emma Seligman, Rachel Sennott, and Ayo Edebiri teamed up for this wicked high school satire about a pair of loser lesbians who start an after-school fight club to get laid. The young cast is razor sharp, and it features the year’s most unexpected comedic performance by NFL legend Marshawn Lynch.

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer. (Courtesy Universal Pictures)

Biggest Bomb: Oppenheimer

We’re not talking box office — Christopher Nolan’s three-hour experimental film about a nuclear physicist who loves Hindu literature made $954,000,000 — we’re talking actual explosive devices. The Barbenheimer phenomenon proved that audiences are hungry for something different and are smarter than studio execs give them credit for.

Nicholas Cage kills as Dracula in Renfield. (Courtesy Universal Pictures)

MVP: Nicolas Cage

Cage has frequently been the best part of uneven films. In 2023, he was an uncanny Dracula in the otherwise forgettable Renfield and a reluctant psychic celebrity in Dream Scenario. The man’s a national treasure.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Best Animated Film: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

An astonishing visual achievement requiring a record 1,000 animators, the film escaped the superhero doldrums with a witty script and the best cliffhanger in recent memory.

Emma Stone turns in a career performance as Bella in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things.

Best Performance: Emma Stone, Poor Things

The Best Actress category at the Academy Awards is going to be awfully competitive. My favorite was Emma Stone as a creature with the body of a grown-up and the brain of an infant. Her progression from peeing on the floor to discussing philosophy in the salons of Europe is as technically challenging as it is emotionally compelling.

Margot Robbie as Barbie.

Best Director: Greta Gerwig, Barbie

Directors wear many hats, and none wore them better than Gerwig, the first woman to ever helm a billion-dollar picture. Balancing the satirical edge of Barbie with pathos and empathy while also staging sweeping musical numbers and recreating the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey is a rare feat. How did she get all that stuff past the studio?

Lily Gladstone, Robert DeNiro, and Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon.

Best Picture: Killers of the Flower Moon

In an extraordinarily good year for cinema, Martin Scorsese’s epic of love and betrayal among the Osage stood above the rest. What started as a story about the birth of the FBI opened into an examination of the soul of America. At the center of this maelstrom of greed and exploitation is an unlikely love story between Leonardo DiCaprio’s thick-headed bushwhacker and the extraordinarily coy Lily Gladstone as the wealthy Native American woman his Machiavellian uncle, played by Robert DeNiro, has marked for death. Scorsese switches genres at will, going from romance to Western to howcatchem to courtroom drama, and nailing every beat. Along the way there are several deeply committed performances by Native American actors, and stunning cinematography which shows the 81-year-old Scorsese is still eager to experiment.

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Poor Things

Emma Stone turns in a career performance as Bella in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things.

Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, is regarded as the first true science-fiction novel. Shelley’s themes and tropes have echoed for more than two centuries: The brilliant scientist is so consumed by the intellectual challenge of discovery that he doesn’t consider the costs; the question of what, exactly, it means to be “human”; and even Stan Lee’s mantra, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Recent readings have emphasized Shelley’s personal life to explain its unsettling tone. The story’s mixture of horror and fascination with the creation of new life came from an author whose mother had died in childbirth and who personally had multiple miscarriages, and buried two babies before their third birthday.

In Shelley’s original novel, the Creature is not the hulking figure with an abnormal brain and limited vocabulary, familiar from the Universal horror films. He is intelligent enough to recognize his own monstrosity, and cunning enough to plot complex revenge on his creator. The novel’s middle passage, told from the Creature’s POV, presents a critique of humanity’s hypocrisies from an outsider’s perspective.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things remixes the Frankenstein elements to foreground the outsider perspective, with spectacular results. Emma Stone stars as Bella, whom we meet as she is throwing herself off a bridge. Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) is a Frankenstein-esque surgeon who carries the scars of his own father’s brutal experiments on his face. He finds Bella’s body in the river while it’s still warm — and discovers the fetus she is carrying in her womb is still viable. He repairs her lightly damaged body and implants the baby’s brain in her skull. When he reanimates her with “galvanic energy,” she awakens an infant’s mind in an adult’s body.

Dr. Baxter locks his subject in his stately mansion, both to keep her secret from the torch-and-pitchfork crowd who can’t understand his genius and to control this grand experiment into the nature of humanity. He hires one of his most gifted medical students Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) to record Bella’s every move and chart her development. But Baxter (or “God” as Bella calls him) can’t keep her a secret forever, and she attracts the attention of his attorney Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) right around the time she discovers sex — or as she calls it, “furious jumping.”

Baxter knows he can no longer stop her from experiencing the world, so he grudgingly consents to Bella running off with the worldly attorney. They embark on a comedically debauched tour of a steampunk version of Victorian Europe, where dirigibles roam the skies and architecture runs amok. Bella continues the pattern of outgrowing one mentor after another as she tries to forge her own identity and correct the wrongs of the world.

Stone’s always been a trouper, but she is absolutely fearless as Bella. In a career-high performance, she finesses Bella’s growth from peeing on the floor to debating philosophy, progressing ever so slightly from one scene to the next until she’s the one performing experimental surgery. It’s an extreme performance, but Lanthimos directs everyone around her so big, Bella seems like the most grounded person on screen. Ruffalo looks like he’s having the time of his life as the rakish Wedderburn, who awakens something in Bella no one can control. Dafoe is so matter-of-fact in his deranged sociopathy that you find yourself instinctively nodding along to even his most outrageous pronouncements. Kathryn Hunter, who stole the show as the witches in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, slithers and shines as a brothel madam who takes Bella under her tattooed wing.

With a visual palette wild enough to match the story’s shenanigans, Lanthimos has created a fresh and daring film about what it means to be both a human and a woman. As Bella searches for answers about existence, her crazy world starts to feel awfully familiar.

Poor Things
Playing at Malco Theatre locations beginning December 22nd

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Music Video Monday: “Details” by Above Jupiter

Today’s Music Video Monday comes from an act that got together at the Stax Music Academy. Above Jupiter is Noah Hand on bass, Graham Burks III on drums and vocals, Zariya Scullark on guitar, and Desmond Coppin on keys.

“Details” is a super catchy rock song about “going off the rails” if you don’t have the basics nailed now, which these kids definitely do.

The video was directed by Hand, a recent Indie Memphis Youth Film Festival alum who learned to animate at Cloud901. Justin Burks filmed the performance footage. You can see them in action at their record release party on Friday, January 12 2024 at the Hi Tone.

If you’d like to see your music video on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.

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Southeastern Film Critics Association Names Best Films of 2023

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer. (Courtesy Universal Pictures)

The 89 members of the Southeastern Film Critics Association (SEFCA) have named Oppenheimer as the best film of 2024 in their annual poll.

“2023 will be remembered by many as the year that featured the commercial, critical, and cultural phenomenon known as Barbenheimer,” says SEFCA Vice President Jim Farmer. But it was also a season that offered a stunning amount of high-quality films, with master filmmakers near the top of their games, fresher faces making strong impressions, and performers showing new dimensions. It was a pleasure to take in all that 2023 had to offer.”

Oppenheimer proved to be an overwhelming favorite with the critics, who awarded Christopher Nolan Best Director laurels. The entire acting ensemble was honored, Cillian Murphy earned Best Actor for his portrayal of the father of the atomic bomb, and Robert Downey Jr. won Best Supporting Actor. Hoyt Van Hoytema was recognized for Best Cinematography, and Ludwig Goransson for Best Score.

“This fall featured three big films from three grandmasters of cinema,” says SEFCA President Scott Phillips. “Martin Scorsese released Killers of the Flower Moon. Ridley Scott brought
Napoleon to the big screen and Michael Mann hits theaters next week with Ferrari. Despite this bumper crop from heavy-hitting auteurs, Christopher Nolan’s film from six months ago is walking away with eight SEFCA awards. Oppenheimer is a stunning cinematic achievement. Our members recognized that in July, and they are rewarding it in December.”

Here is the complete slate of 2023 awards from SEFCA:

Top 10 Films of 2023

  1. Oppenheimer
  2. Killers of the Flower Moon
  3. The Holdovers
  4. Past Lives
  5. Barbie
  6. Poor Things
  7. American Fiction
  8. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
  9. Anatomy of a Fall
  10. The Zone of Interest

Best Actor

Cillian Murphy, Oppenheimer

Best Actress
Lily Gladstone, Killers of the Flower Moon

Best Supporting Actor
Robert Downey, Jr., Oppenheimer

Best Supporting Actress
Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers

Best Ensemble
Oppenheimer

Best Director

Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer

Best Original Screenplay
David Hemingson, The Holdovers

Best Adapted Screenplay
Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer

Best Animated Film

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Best Documentary
Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie

Best Foreign-Language Film
Anatomy of a Fall

Best Cinematography
Hoyt Van Hoytema, Oppenheimer

Best Score
Ludwig Goransson, Oppenheimer

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Music Video Monday: “Mirth” by HEELS

“Yes, another video from our album ‘Pop Songs for a Dying Planet’,” says Josh McLane, drummer for the folk-punk powerhouse HEELS.

This is number four by our count, after “Dread”, “Last Man”, and, of course, the immortal “Box Of Porn In The Woods.”

This time, McLane and Brennan Whalen appear on a TV show that seems transmitted from a dark shadow world where it’s still 1959.

“We started out as another lazy-ass AI-made video,” says McLane. “We threw that in the trash and then Eric Huber came up with this and we couldn’t be happier. This video is about the only thing we all share, Screens and Sadness with moments of Hope.”

You can see HEELS in action at the Lucero Family Christmas show this Saturday, Dec. 16 at Minglewood Hall.

If you’d like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com.

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Godzilla Minus One

You probably think of Godzilla as a lovable giant pet lizard with a crew of equally freaky frenemies who tear up Tokyo when they get into tiffs and occasionally fight aliens with questionable fashion sense. 

But that was not the creature who appeared off the coast of Japan in 1954. Director Ishiro Honda’s Gojira is an anti-war tract disguised as a monster movie.  Godzilla was a symbol of natures wrath, awakened and mutated by American nuclear bomb testing in the Pacific. The scenes of fiery devastation as Godzilla levels Tokyo with his atomic fire breath would have been familiar to the millions of Japanese who had lived through the American bombings at the end of World War II. Considered in this context, the ending, where a scientist creates a super weapon to defeat Godzilla, then kills himself to prevent the technology from falling into military hands, becomes especially poignant. 

The King of the Monsters may have lost his edge a bit over 37 features by a number of studios, endless merchandising, and a big budget series from Apple TV, but director Takashi Yamazaki was determined to take the big guy back to his roots with Godzilla Minus One. The picture opens with the familiar spectrum logo of Toho. The Japanese studio that pioneered kaiju movies 70 years ago recently regained the rights to make Godzilla movies from Legendary. It’s 1945, and a battered Zero lands on a ruined Pacific runway with a bomb still conspicuously attached. Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) is a kamikaze pilot who refused at the last minute to kill himself for an obviously lost cause. Around the time mechanic Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki) figures out that Koichi was faking technical issues, a monster attacks the airfield. The locals call it Godzilla, but it’s much smaller than the building-smashing bruiser we love. It’s just a regular-sized T. Rex, which is scary enough to kill the entire garrison except for Koichi and Takibana, who witnesses our hero run instead of taking a shot at Godzilla with his plane’s 20mm cannon. 

Koichi (Ryunosuke Kamiki) and Noriko (Minami Hamabe) contemplate the folly of man in Godzilla Minus One. (Courtesy Toho Studios)

After the war, Koichi returns to find Tokyo in ruins, and his family dead. The poor souls scavenging through the wreckage don’t let him forget he was supposed to die in the war. He takes in a street urchin named Noriko (Minami Hamabe) and Akkiko (Sae Nagatani), an orphan baby whose dying parents entrusted to her. Over the next few years, they build a life together, as Tokyo struggles to return to normal. Koichi gets a lucrative but hazardous job clearing mines from the harbor in a wooden boat in order to build a home for Noriko and Akkiko.

This long middle passage resembles the social realism of Yasujiro Ozu, whose masterpiece Tokyo Story was released the same year as Godzilla. Just as you’re getting attached to Koichi, Noriko, Akkiko, and their eccentric, long-suffering neighbors, a newly mutated Godzilla shows up and threatens to burn it all down again. If there’s one thing that makes this film different from all the other giant monster movies, it’s that this one has real stakes. It’s fun to watch a guy in a rubber suit stomp on a model train set. It hits different when the little people who live there just had you over for a delightful dinner. 

Yikes! (Courtesy Toho Studios)

Giant monster/robot films are not exactly noted for their acting, but Kamiki carries the film on his back with a committed, harrowing performance as a man wracked by guilt, looking for redemption, and finding very little. Yakazaki’s script is sharp and political. When Koichi’s minesweeping job puts him on the vanguard of the fight against Godzilla, the director turns a Jaws riff into an indictment of blind patriotism. Asked to once again risk their life for Emperor and country after surviving a brutal war, a weary sailor mutters “This country never changes. Maybe it can’t.” 

Most impressive of all, Yakazaki does it all on a budget of just $15 million. For comparison, Legendary’s vastly inferior Godzilla vs. Kong cost $200 million in 2022. Godzilla Minus One is the best kaiju film since Ishiro Honda’s 1975 swan song, Terror of Mechagodzilla. When it comes to big lizards, sometimes less is more.