Reading in 2026

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"Imprimis," October 2025, Volume 54, Number 10
"Imprimis," November 2025, Volume 54, Number 11

(Updated January 10, 2026)

Film Review: "Puzzle" (1974)

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This Italian film tells the story of a man with amnesia who he may not have been a perfect angel in his former life. It's a reliable trope, and in this case, is silly and campy enough to make a passable time waster.

Ted (Luc Merenda) has been in a clinic in England with no memory of who he is. He is discharged, and almost killed by a man who is murdered after he tells Ted what a horrible person he is ("a dirty son of a double-crosser; a two-bit con artist"). Ted is summoned to Italy by his wife, swimming instructor Sara (Senta Berger). Ted had been missing for almost a year just after their whirlwind romance and marriage, so she barely knows her husband. Strange underworld types begin stalking Ted and Sara, threatening the couple. Ted is having flashbacks to murdering people himself, and what is in "the package" everybody is certain Sara has and that they are willing to kill for?

This isn't a complicated, labyrinthine story. Berger, an international star at this point, and Merenda, the main protagonist of the film, must figuratively wrestle for the audience's attention. The action scenes are pedestrian, with one fight scenes involving karate chops that had me laughing. The version I viewed was dubbed and not subtitled, and is a perfect example of plot development being lost in translation. The dialogue is melodramatic, confusing, and unintentionally funny. I figured out the twist pretty quickly, there's a convenient plot point involving a preteen (who sounds like he's voiced by Ernest Borgnine) and his camera, so I settled back for the film's seriousness and peek-a-boo, naughty glances at Berger.

I could plead that "Puzzle" was ripe for a remake, but it's like every other "amnesia victim does good" film out there. Also known as "L'uomo senza memoria."

Stats:
(1974) 92 min. (6/10)
-Directed by Duccio Tessari
-Screenplay by Bruno di Geronimo and Duccio Tessari and Ernesto Garaldi, Story by Roberto Infascelli
-Cast: Senta Berger, Luc Merenda, Umberto Orsini, Anita Strindberg, Bruno Corazzari, Rosario Borelli, Manfred Freyberger, Tom Felleghy, Carla Mancini, Vittorio Fantoni, Duilio Cruciani
-(US: R)- Physical violence, gun violence, gore, some profanity, brief nudity, some sexual references, adult situations, alcohol use
-Media Viewed: Amazon Prime Video Streaming

Film Review: "Drop" (2025)

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I appreciated so many aspects of this tight thriller that I'm disappointed that I was disappointed in the final product.

Widow Violet, who was in an abusive relationship with her late husband Blake (Michael Shea), decides to date after being a single mother to Toby (Jacob Robinson) for many years. Violet counsels abuse survivors, healing vicariously through them, and decides to take the next step herself and go out with too-good-to-be-true photographer Henry (Brandon Sklenar). Smart aleck sis Jen (Violett Beane) comes over to babysit, and Violet meets Henry at an impossibly beautiful restaurant that's located in a towering skyscraper.

The couple goes through the awkward first date motions as Violet begins receiving threatening AirDrops (labelled as something else) on her phone. I'm not gonna lie, I had to look up exactly what the heck these were, and I never thought of myself as technically inept. Someone in the restaurant wants Violet to kill Henry, or else a mysterious masked man now in her home will kill her sister and son. The game is on as Violet tries to figure out who in the restaurant is terrorizing her without telling Henry too much.

I read a few reviews where Fahy's performance was criticized, but I thought she did a fantastic job as the formerly abused Violet. During the more threatening, angry aspects of the mystery dropper's campaign of terror, Violet would remove herself from the situation- putting on a blank expression and pulling inward- and her performance was very effective. Sklenar as Henry is very good and they have a great chemistry, but this is Violet's story and we spend the most screen time with Fahy. The restaurant locale is a triumph of set decoration and design. Along with the fantastic cinematography, the restaurant, bar, cage-like entry tunnel, and even the bathroom are memorable and menacing. I also appreciated that director Landon or the screenwriters did NOT have Violet read her messages out loud to herself so the audience would know what was happening. The film makers made great use of text and images onscreen, reading what was being sent while watching Violet react to the messages as we were reading them. Violet is not former special forces/commando, so that was another plus.

Unfortunately, as with many films of this ilk, the filmmakers could not maintain the intensity of the opening act as things began to get more ridiculous. I started to question character motivations and scene placement- there's a strange man beating your sister and child at home, but we're going to pause to open up about our feelings to our new date? Are we going to circle around to the immediate danger later, after dessert and coffee? The final few minutes of the film are especially disappointing, losing me and my timeline belief suspension completely.

Landon's direction is certainly enthusiastic and interesting, and I was glad we didn't try to stretch this tight little story into a two and a half hour running time just because we could. I was hoping to get a lean-and-mean tone, but "Drop" will probably drop out of my memory as soon as I post this review.

Stats:
(2025) 95 min. (5/10)
-Directed by Christopher Landon
-Written by Jillian Jacobs & Chris Roach
-Cast: Meghann Fahy, Brandon Sklenar, Violett Beane, Jacob Robinson, Reed Diamond, Gabrielle Ryan, Sarah McCormack, Jeffery Self, Ed Weeks, Ben Pelletier, Travis Nelson, Saoirse Hayden, Fiona Browne
-(US: PG-13)-(UK: 15)-(Au: MA15+)- Physical violence, gun violence, some gore, some profanity, adult situations, alcohol use
-Media Viewed: Amazon Prime Video Streaming

Film Review: "Meteor" (1979)

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If Hollywood award gold is your benchmark for excellence in cinema, "Meteor" should have been one of the greatest films of all-time. The first nine credited cast members were all Oscar and Emmy nominees and winners sometime in their careers before and after the movie's release, with more golden talent further down in the cast list, credited and uncredited. Likewise with the director, screenwriters, soundtrack composer, cinematographer, editor, production designer, set decorator, and costume designer. It was nominated for an Oscar itself for Best Sound- the film's only nomination for any award from any awards group (getting beat by "Apocalypse Now"). However, the film craters thanks to an uninterested cast, hilarious special effects, screenplay padding, and its arrival a few years too late in the cooling disaster film subgenre.

Paul Bradley (a terminally angry Sean Connery) is called back in to his former employer NASA. A giant meteor is headed for Earth, arriving in six days. Paul was involved with the installation of nuclear missiles in space to thwart such a situation that will never happen, so instead the United States pointed the missles at those Commies in the U.S.S.R. As luck would have it, the Russians had their own system, and likewise pointed theirs at the United States. Neither country has the necessary firepower to destroy the meteor, but if we can just work together (any Cold War kid/Generation Xer remember détente?) we can defeat a common enemy and save this crazy screwed-up planet!

There's a germ of a good idea, copied many times later for straight-to-video and basic cable television pablum. A little online reading shows that some of the special effects companies involved were hired and fired, with the budget shrinking each time. I give plenty of leeway when it comes to special effects from the films and television of my childhood, but I couldn't help but shake my head at a lot of this. The production company was American-International Pictures, a studio known for its low budgets. It looks like their money was spent entirely on the cast. Natalie Wood doesn't appear until a third of the way through the picture but is involved in the best scene featuring duelling Russian translators. For a big piece of rock traveling at 30,000 miles per hour, this is one slow moving meteor. The nuclear missiles also move at a snail's pace, adding a few precious minutes to the running time. The underground command center looks like something out of a Bond film, disconcerting when you consider the film's lead. There's an argument during a Cabinet meeting that had me muttering "you can't fight in here, this is the war room!" as Landau portrays a typical Hollywood unhinged military officer, more concerned with the Russkies finding out about our missiles than trying to save the planet. Speaking of typical Hollywood unhinged military officers, a surprising amount of supporting cast members also guested on the television series "M*A*S*H," a show whose episodes I have seen many times over thanks to syndicated blocks of programming on over-the-air stations.

Like the previous year's "Avalanche," "Meteor" comes at the end of the disaster film cycle, which gave us classics like "The Poseidon Adventure," "Airport," and "The Towering Inferno," and the genre was skewered a year later by "Airplane!" The Best Sound Oscar nomination was a surprise, but considering the Special Visual Effects Academy Awards nominees for that year, there was no way "Meteor" was going to score anything else- Visual Effects winner "Alien," and nominees "The Black Hole," "Moonraker," "1941," and "Star Trek: The Motion Picture."

I remember wanting to see "Meteor" when it was released (I was eleven and already a rabid film fan, recognizing most of the cast names), and then when it appeared again on HBO. I never seemed to get to it, not even clips, so watching it on a streaming service was a bittersweet nostalgia.

Stats:
(1979) 108 min. (2/10)
-Directed by Ronald Neame
-Screenplay by Stanley Mann & Edmund H. North, Story by Edmund H. North
-Cast: Sean Connery, Natalie Wood, Karl Malden, Brian Keith, Martin Landau, Trevor Howard, Richard Dysart, Henry Fonda, Joe Campanella, Bibi Besch, Clyde Kusatsu, Peter Donat, Sybil Danning, Philip Sterling, Johnny Yune, Roy Edward Disney, John Spencer
-(US: PG)-(UK: PG)-(Au: PG)- Physical violence, mild gore, profanity, alcohol use
-Media Viewed: Amazon Prime Video Streaming

*Academy Awards*
-Best Sound (lost to "Apocalypse Now")

Film Review: "Objects" (2021)

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This short documentary is misunderstood almost as much as its three subjects.

Robert Krulwich is a journalist and reporter who has amassed a few things from his years in front of the camera and microphone. One of those treasured items is a handful of dead grass he brought home when he was a teenager, remembering a date with his girlfriend to Central Park. Heidi Julavits is an author whose crowded apartment is what you picture an author's apartment to be- books everywhere. Also there are some of the belongings of the European actress Isabelle Corey, and she begins imagining the life of the actress who suddenly turned her back on stardom for a life of anonymity. Rick Rawlings' family was constantly on the move thanks to his father's job. One day, he had been invited to a birthday party on the same day they were leaving town, so he stopped to say goodbye to the friend whose party he couldn't attend. The friend handed him a sugar egg, and Rick held onto that fragile piece for forty years, keeping it in a wooden box whose construction through materials of his childhood is also wrapped in memories.

I have a checkered history with objects. Stuff. Things. I've been married twice, and both marriages saw me bring absolutely nothing into my new households. You might think that due to my upbringing, I didn't have a lot of stuff and that is partly true, but I was also raised in a household(s) where physical items took precedence over familial relationships. When moving overseas (two tours in Japan, one extended visit/stay in the United Kingdom), it usually fell upon me to get ride of my "unnecessary" stuff first through forced garage sales or simply tossing items away. The Air Force would pay for a certain weight of household possessions before charging the personnel with the overweight total, and I don't think we ever made the cut off point before Dad would have to shell out money for items we "couldn't live without." Dad was an officer, so appearances had to be kept up, but with the deaths of my parents within the last few years, I got an inside look at their possessions before they were dismissed into the world through internet auctions and garbage. I gave up my cherished books, comic book collection, toys, record albums, journals, drawings and more, so Mom could drag a broken grandfather clock across three continents for six decades on the hope that one day it would be repaired. It wasn't, and sold at an online auction for sixty dollars. That was just the tip of the iceberg. For thirty years of my adult life, I had four photos of myself from when I was a child. It took my parents' deaths before I got my hands on more pictures. Even then, the photographs inexplicably stop at about the time I was ten. I went to eight different schools from first grade through twelfth grade, and only have yearbooks from Grades 4-6, and 12th; granted, I threw out my 8th grade yearbook because no one would want to relive the kind of traumatic year I was having except through intenstive therapy.

This film is unfairly maligned for being boring, and highlighting three weirdos who are holding on to innocuous items that no one cares about but them. In such a disposable society, I can see that point of view, but to the three individuals their objects are remembrances of a happier or different time, and really aren't hurting anyone. I used to watch hoarding shows on cable television, having absolutely no sympathy for the hoarders, thanks to my upbringing. My childhood households would never be considered a hoarded household (remember, appearances were everything- including a clean house), but I totally sympathized with tearful family members who realized the hoard was being chosen over them. Thanks to therapy, I was able to come to terms with being second best (and fourth best in the sibling pecking order), and didn't have to witness the chaotic descent of my family after retirement set in. I stayed on the opposite side of the country, built a life, and suffered through parental annual visits (complete with the delivery of more stuff that I did not want), before the parents were too old to drive to visit.

Krulwich, Julavits, and Rawlings are a little sheepish and apologetic when showing off their objects. I'm sure they've heard it all before, and shyly explain why the objects mean so much to them. It's their interests, their objects, and they aren't hurting anyone. When one of the subjects lets their object go for a badly executed idea and it gets destroyed, I felt almost as bad as the object's owner and the people responsible for the object. I knew the pain of being told you had to get rid of something, or worst yet, it being wrenched away from a life you were trying to build on your own. There was life and memories in these objects, but once you go (the old saying "you can't take it with you"), who's going to take care of the tuft of grass, the sugar egg, or Isabelle Corry's sweaters and make-up mirrors? This is why minimalism is all the rage right now- cluttered house, cluttered mind, and so on. I do have belongings, but often unintentionally refer to our possessions as my wife's possessions (I sleep in her bed, etc.). I have about a thousand films on physical media, another thousand books, but as a stay-at-home dad to three kids under the age of eight (one with special needs), there is absolutely no time to watch those films or read those books. Thanks to this documentary, the three subjects are able to explain how they got their items and what they mean to them. There are millions of people out there who don't get that chance, and when they pass away, it's up to family or strangers to get rid of the items. This probably explains why I'm also obsessed with reselling, collecting, urban exploration, and abandoned storage unit videos- I sometimes see something I owned as a child and teen, and then look upwards as if my departed parents were seeing the same thing- "Good thing I had to throw out that Japanese toy robot, it's only worth two thousand dollars today." I try to imagine an abandoned building back when it was a home. I never had a hometown until I finally labelled the town I spent the most time in as if I grew up there.

By film's end, I was fascinated by these objects. I have almost nothing from my childhood, and the accumulation of items since I reached adulthood and independence doesn't provide the same rose-colored memories that these three documentary subjects have. If anything, I am still bitter about the things I was brought that weren't my own, and have been on a quest to get rid of them for decades now. When my parents passed on, a lot of their stuff passed out of my house, too- donated, recycled, or thrown since I didn't need anyone's permission to get rid of them anymore. They meant nothing to me, and nothing to them since they dumped them on me. I hope Julia, Rick, and Robert hold onto their items and memories of how they made them feel, but like the internet meme of a horrified adult grandchild in front of a giant china hutch full of dishes, "Swedish death cleaning," and a popular decluttering book tells us- "nobody wants your shit."

Stats:
(2021) 63 min. (9/10)
-Written and Directed by Vincent Liota
-Featuring Robert Krulwich, Rick Rawlings, Heidi Julavits, Isabelle Corey
(US: Amazon Prime Video Rating 18+)- Mild profanity
Media Viewed: Amazon Prime Video Streaming

Film Review: "Seth" (2015)

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Actor Zach Lasry steps behind the camera for this funny short film.

Seth (a very good Logan George) wakes up and resolves to complete all of his goals in one single day. With the urging of his stuffed animal friends, he does indeed eat more corn, and reads inspirational Michael Jordan quotes. He checks each item off the list, and celebrates with a party before being called out by a stuffed bunny named Christopher for one uncompleted goal- Seth didn't impress his stoic father (Emmett Smith). Dad is attuned to Seth's bizarre behavior, and tolerates it for the most part, admitting he doesn't think much of his obviously disturbed son. Seth sets out to complete his goal anyway.

Because the running time is just fifteen minutes, Lasry jumps into the madness, not giving the viewer a chance to breathe. George is hilarious, embracing the character with little benefit (to us) of a back story. Smith is also great, and he and George work well together. The humor is bizarre and fast-paced. We even get a musical montage while watching the preparation Seth goes through. Not everyone will think this kind of thing is funny, but it caught me on the right day and mood. On the technical side, the film is flawless. A clear picture, nice editing, perfect sound recording- all of it scores. I don't know if something like this could be expanded to a feature length idea (think "The Jerk" on acid), but the likable two-man cast is fun to watch. You could do worse than spare it a quarter hour.

Stats:
(2015) 15 min. (8/10)
-Written and Directed by Zach Lasry
-Cast: Logan George, Emmett Smith
-(US: NR)- Mild physical violence, some profanity, brief nudity, sexual references, strong adult situations
-Media Viewed: DVD screener

Film Review: "Forgiven" (2016)

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Another mild Christian movie is presented to an unsuspecting public, as many faith film producers wring their hands and wonder why their entertainment is not connecting on a larger scale.

James (Casey Fuller) gets in a fight with his girlfriend, shooting her. Now armed, he runs and finds himself hiding out in a church with a pastor (Steve Flanigan) and his two daughters Elizabeth (Jenn Gotzon) and Naomi (Allee Sutton Hethcoat). James takes the trio hostage, and police lieutenant Morgan (Kevin Sorbo) arrives. Cell phone negotiating commences, as Morgan fights to keep his officers back, and Elizabeth starts telling James about God's capacity to forgive.

I honestly wanted to like this film, its heart seems to be in the right place, but it isn't even eighty minutes long, and there is absolutely no tension. Flenory is saddled with way too many lines about "ending this thing" to the point where it was unintentionally funny, more so when other characters mentioned "ending this." There seems to be little research into actual hostage negotiations, and it was frustrating to watch the production flounder with a small budget and uninspired script. The two stand-out performances are from Gotzon and Fuller, their scenes together generate a small amount of drama, and the film makers should have had more of that, instead of Morgan and Flenory's character pointing at the same diagram of the church for the hundredth time while background characters smile and pretend to talk on their phones.

"Forgiven" falls into the same trap that a lot of Christian films fall into. They are in such a hurry to get to the message, they forget to give the audience a reason to go along for the journey.

Stats:
(2016) 79 min. (3/10)
-Directed by Kevan Otto
-Written by Kevan Otto & Lloyd S. Wagner
-Cast: Kevin Sorbo, Jenn Gotzon, Casey Fuller, Allee Sutton Hethcoat, Steve Flanigan, Reegus Flenory, Kelsey Sanders, Renee LeeA Horton, David G. Baker, Glenn Cartwright, Marie A. Garton, Ben Graham, Maggie Schneider
-(US: TV-14)-(UK: 12)-(Au: M)- Mild physical violence, mild gun violence, some adult situations
-Media Viewed: streaming