A Summer Tale

A man has fallen: Argentine director Matías Szulanski’s A Summer Tale opens with a classic noir setup, one rendered gorgeously in Sunset Boulevard, Le Jour Se Leve, Double Indemnity, The Killers, and too many other canonical texts to keep naming here. A metaphoric fall from great heights is an essential element of tragedy; opening with such a fatalistic visual trope poses a question the rest of the film hopefully answers: how can a man find himself descended so low? A Summer Tale, however, begins five seconds later than we’re accustomed to: we don’t see the fall, we just see a man getting up. He’s schlubby, drenched in sweat, a cigarette perpetually dangling from his lips, dressed in an ill-fitting suit over an awful mustard-yellow shirt. We never know what brought him down in these moments, and the look of confusion on his face tells us maybe he doesn’t quite know either, but what’s perhaps more important is the way he picks himself up and pushes forward, barely looking back. For the next 80 minutes, as one ill-conceived hustle after another goes wrong, we’ll keep wondering how Jorge (Fabián Arenillas) has the willpower to keep getting up, to push ahead when it’s so obvious to us that it will only end in defeat.

A Summer Tale is a film of perpetual forward momentum, and that is the only thing sustaining Jorge and, too often, the film itself. We spend most of the film’s scant 80 minutes watching him plow down the streets of Buenos Aires, briefcase in hand, stopping only to guzzle down a french fry-stuffed double cheeseburger with a side of coke or hassle a shop owner who owes money to his loan shark boss. After getting mugged mid-heart attack, Jorge finds himself $6,000 in debt and out of job unless he can recoup the money. Increasingly desperate, with no plan, no hope, and nothing but that endless forward momentum to keep him going, Jorge soon finds himself involved in an ill-conceived home invasion with a prostitute out for revenge on a teenage client who scammed her. It’s a plan so formless, so desperate, and so ill-conceived that the suspense comes from the question of not will it fall apart, but when.

If one were to guess, it would be reasonable to say Szulanski owes much of his kinetic hyperactivity, frantic cinematography, and dopey underworld flavor to the Safdie brothers, and A Summer Tale often risks coming across as little more than a watered-down version of Uncut Gems. It’s technically competent: Szulanski has no trouble stringing us along, making us feel each twist of the knife in Jorge’s back; the performances feel dynamic, filled with expressive yet ordinary faces; and there’s even a certain idiosyncratic absurdity to the proceedings that doesn’t fully flower until a late-film snake bite. Despite its charms, however, the film too often does come across as monotonous. The camera rarely wanders more than three feet from the characters’ heads; the propulsive synth score is excellent, but rarely strays far from the same tense tone; and there’s an overall slightness to things that often feels empty despite the film’s charms.

It’s not hard to perceive that Szulanski, who is credited with releasing five films in 2024 and 2025 alone, clearly shoots from the hip and works quickly on shoestring budgets. It’s partly what gives the film both its entertaining immediacy and disappointing lack of depth. It’s not a bad film, even if it is a slightly disappointing one. Hopefully Szulanski takes a lesson from Jorge’s non-stop chase to the gutter and slows down in the future, rethinks his choices, and makes a film with more deliberation. Like Jorge, he’s clearly crafty; it would be terrible to see his talents meet the same end.

Sisu: Road to Revenge

Action films might be the closest argument we still have for cinema as  a universal language. It’s the most exportable genre, with stars and filmmakers like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean Claude Van Damme, Jean Reno, John Woo, Bong Jong Ho, Jaume Collet-Serra — just to name a few obvious examples — continually crisscrossing the globe in an international network of familiarly paced, plotted, and structured, yet still regionally-flavored, carnage. Finnish director Jalmari Helander’s Sisu: Road to Revenge makes a compelling case that this might not be such a good thing. A little idiosyncrasy can go a long way, and for whatever Sisu has in terms of well-choreographed mayhem, it lacks a lot more in personality. It boils down the genre to its basest parts — it’s intensely, purposefully, linear, little more than one non-stop, gory, nearly dialogue-free, and characterless ride from point A to point B with few surprises in between — while doing little to add anything else to the mix. It could be an extended trailer for a video game or, if it were a little more bare-bones, laser-focused, and imaginative, an exercise in structuralist minimalism. It constantly feels as if it’s evoking something larger, some greater world or action set piece that could give meaning to it all, but that never quite materializes — and never really existed in the first place.

Set just after WWII, the film opens on a sentimental note: grey, bearded, weary-faced Finnish ex-Army commando Aatami Korpi, or The Immortal as the Soviets call him (Jorma Tommila), crosses the border into ex-Finnish land recently seized by the Soviet Union. He’s there to visit his old house, and after taking one long nostalgic look around, he tears the entire log cabin apart, loads it onto the back of his truck, and heads back toward the border to rebuild it in Finland. The Soviets, however, won’t let things go so simply. They want him, and the legend that has materialized around him, dead. They spring ruthless killer Igor Draganov (Stephen Lang, with an atrociously hammy Russian accent) from Siberia, give him a small army, and put him on Korpi’s trail. What follows is one long chase across soviet Russia as Korpi takes down all manner of motorcycle, jeep, tank, plane, and train out to destroy him.

In its relentless forward momentum and vehicular-based action, the film almost deliberately evokes George Miller’s masterpiece Mad Max: Fury Road. Yet where Miller surrounded the destruction with imaginative Campbellian worldbuilding, precise political allegory, and at least a patina of character development, Sisu: Road to Revenge aims for little more than cartoonish displays of over-the-top gore delivered with a Looney Tunes-esque sense of physics and a gear-headed fetish for 1940s war technology. There’s almost no development beyond the initial setup, and Korpi is not only completely dialogueless throughout the film, but his facial expression rarely changes from the bug-eyed constipated look Tommila deploys anytime an enemy approaches. Even the white labradoodle Korpi takes with him across his journey fails to add more than a generic and quickly tiresome cuteness. It’s all entertaining enough, but it’s never more than that, and Helander lacks the personality or perversity to render any of the fight scenes as anything other than smoothly delivered and lightly clever. And the closest thing one can grasp onto as a theme is the anti-Russian overtone that is incredibly empty, propagandistic, and even laughable. If there’s any upside to the lazy light topicality, it at least makes war look not so fun, not so interesting, and not so noble as one would expect — and hope — a movie like this would manage.

Fränk

Misery isn’t a genre, but it’s a motif and an emotion that many independent and arthouse films seem to think is the defining state of life. Or, if not life — and one can argue that many filmmakers don’t know enough about the world to think of life in so broadly — then at least of cinema. It’s an easy way of making a film come across as real, unsparing, honest, and unafraid without having to truly take stock of the world’s many contradictions and complexities. Tõnis Pill’s Fränk is like an Estonian version of Los Olvidados, only without much of the irony, distance, absurd comedy, social consciousness, or poetry of Luis Buñuel. There doesn’t seem to be a single character in the film who doesn’t either get beaten up, almost get beaten up, or beat somebody up. It’s about a gang of 13-year-old boys, all of whom are relentlessly abused by their neglectful parents, and the terrible antics they get up to in small=town Estonia. That it’s also a hopeful film, ending on an inspiring message, should either be a big surprise or entirely predictable based on how tuned in you are to the clichés of the form.

Our hero is Paul (Derek Leheste), a stoic blonde tween dropped at his uncle’s house while his mom returns to the city to work up the nerve to leave Paul’s abusive father. Friendless and thick-skinned, Paul soon falls in with a motley gang of hooligan boys who spend their days beating each other up, huffing glue, and abusing the local mentally disabled man, Fränk (Oskar Seeman in heavy prosthetics, overdoing Fränk’s disability in a performance that would make Tugg Speedman proud). A gentle soul at heart, Paul secretly starts to form a secret, off-kilter friendship with Fränk even as he publicly throws rocks and paint at him with the rest of the gang. But when the group starts to fracture after Paul publicly humiliates Jasper (Tõru Kannimäe), the ostensible and highly abusive leader, and another member goes into catatonic shock after huffing high-strength glue, things take a turn for the even more grimy and violent.

Say what you will about this genre of atrocity exhibition, and this writer generally has very few good things to say about it, what makes Fränk work as well as it does is that it allows itself to become increasingly more horrible long after it seems to have hit bottom. It also, miraculously, doesn’t feel emotionally manipulative even while treating viewers to scene after scene of children almost killing one another. It’s a well-framed film, subtly capturing the beauty of Estonian summer, and it’s stylistically precise enough to move at an even clip, each moment sinking in without knocking you over the head with melodramatics. It’s dubious whether viewers will learn or feel as much as the film would seem to like, but perhaps that’s an issue of who the target audience for the film is. The opening credits warn us that what we’re about to see is uncomfortable but honest, and according to a few Estonian friends this writer made at this year’s Black Nights Film Festival in Tallinn, that claim of authenticity holds up. The film also did make a little splash when it premiered nationally last summer, so, of course, there might always be something that a viewer — this one included — may miss through jaded cynicism, or otherwise. Unfortunately, those who fall in that camp will likely feel a little too dispirited with the whole endeavor to look again and find out.