DUST BUNNY(USA 2025) ***½
Directed by Bryan Fuller
Like many children, Aurora (Sophie Sloan) fearfully believes a monster lurks beneath her bed. And she has good reason to: her foster parents have been eaten by one. Fortunately, she arrives at a practical solution. She will hire the enigmatic hit man who lives next door (Mads Mikkelsen) to slay the beast. But procuring her neighbour’s services will not be easy, for he believes her family was mistakenly dispatched by an assassin’s bullets that were meant for him.
So what is a dust bunny, and why is the film entitled such? Dust bunnies (or dustbunnies) are small clumps of dust that form under furniture and in corners that are not cleaned regularly. They are made of hair, lint, flakes of dead skin, spider webs, dust, and sometimes light rubbish and debris and are held together by static electricity and felt-like entanglement. The DUST BUNNY in the film is the monster under Aurora’s bed, assumed, used as an analogy for the accretion of cosmic matter in planetoids.
The film boasts two stars who love to take on weird character roles. One is the Dane actor Mads Mikkelsen (THE LAST VIKING, LAST CALL, THE PROMISED LAND) and Sigourney Weaver (ALIENS, WORKING GIRL). But it is the writer/director Bryan Fuller who is the architect of this somewhat fresh take of adult and child horror that meshes together reality and horror imagination.
Bryan Fuller is an American writer, TV producer, and film director, best known for creating the television series Pushing Daisies (2007–2009) and Hannibal (2013–2015). Fuller is also known for his work as a showrunner for the first season of the show American Gods (2017–2021), a writer on the Star Trek television series Voyager (1997–2001) and Deep Space Nine (1997). He also wrote the recent PREDATOR: BADLANDS, though credited for "additional literary material (not on-screen).
What is admirable about the film is the blend of fantasy and reality. Aurora believes that the hit man kills monsters, thus hiring him with her limited child funds to kill the monster under her bed. She follows the hitman, her neighbour, one night to Chinatown, where he kills some evil people that he calls monsters. She sees him fighting the lion as in a lion dance and believes he can kill monsters. During their meeting, he believes that she is imagining the monster under her bed, but it turns out that the monster is real, and the monster erupts to eat people who have their feet on the floor.
The film’s last 30 minutes turn up to be a large action set-piece, complete with special effects and a large encounter between monster and victim(s). All this could be taken as a giant metaphor as well as tongue-in-cheek, and Sigourney Weaver is excellent at playing tongue-in-cheek.
DUST BUNNY, though uneven at times, has a fairy tale, nightmarish feel with emotional undercurrents, and its balancing act between horror and wonder is impressive.
DUST BUNNY had its world premiere at the.2025 Toronto International Film Festival in its Midnight Madness program on September 9, 2025 and its U.S. premiere at American Cinematheque’s Beyond Fest on September 30, 2025. The film opens widely in theatres on December 12th.
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PETER HUJAR’S DAY (USA 2025) ***
Directed by Ira Sachs
The film is set in December 1974 in New York City and is about the photographer Peter Hujar and his friend Linda, with Sachs telling IndieWire it is "a film about what it is to be an artist among artists in a city where no one was making any money".
There are a few celebrities one should be familiar with when watching this film. This puts their reputation in place for a greater appreciation of their effect on the film’s subject.
One is Susan Sontag. Susan Lee Sontag (January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was an American writer and critic. She mostly wrote essays, but also published novels; she published her first major work, the essay "Notes on 'Camp' ", in 1964. Sontag was active in writing and speaking about, or travelling to, areas of conflict, including during the Vietnam War and the Siege of Sarajevo. She wrote extensively about literature, cinema, photography, media, illness, war, human rights, and left-wing politics. Her essays and speeches drew backlash and controversy, and she has been called "one of the most influential critics of her generation.”
The other is the subject, Peter Hujar. Peter Hujar (October 11, 1934 – November 26, 1987) was an American photographer best known for his black-and-white portraits. Hujar's work received only marginal public recognition during his lifetime, but he has since been recognized as a major American photographer of the 1970s and 1980s.
Another is Linda Rosenkrantz. Linda Rosenkrantz was born and raised up in the Bronx, New York, the daughter of Samuel, a garment industry executive, and Frances, an artist. She is a graduate of the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan and the University of Michigan. In 1974, Linda Rosenkrantz embarked on another tape-centric project. She asked a number of her friends and acquaintances, including artist Chuck Close and photographer Peter Hujar, to write down everything they did on one particular day, then to meet with her to report and record in conversation the events of their day. Forty years later, in 2021, a transcript of the Hujar chapter was published in book form by Magic Hour Press as Peter Hujar's Day. The book was adapted into a film, Peter Hujar's Day, directed by Ira Sachs and starring Ben Whishaw as Peter Hujar and Rebecca Hall as Rosenkrantz.[
Director Ira Sachs is a gay filmmaker, and so is his subject Peter Hujar. Hujar does talk about sucking cock at one point in the film. Sachs makes impressive, often gay themed indie films.
The film is obviously not for everybody. It is a two-handler with all talk - and talk that might not appeal to or interest everybody, even though the talk might intrigue those interested in photography or writers. The film is all about, as intended, a day in the life of the photographer, which can be described as getting up, preparing for an interview and then going back to bed. Peter talks about his musings, and Linda, who has not much to say in the film, basically reads and makes sight comments. It is all about PETER HUJAR’S DAY.
Trailer:
RESURRECTION (China/France 2025) **
Directed by Bi Gan
In a future where humanity has surrendered its ability to dream in exchange for immortality, an outcast (Jackson Yee) finds illusion, nightmarish visions, and beauty in an intoxicating world of his own making.
If the above premise sounds like an artsy-fartsy film. RESURRECTION, touted as a science fiction drama written and directed by Bi Gan, surely is, and a complete mess of a meandering narrative that it is. The film runs an unbearable 160 minutes, and though the cinematography is stunning, reminiscent of the Wong Kar-wei classics, the film is a chore if not a torture to sit through.
So who is this filmmaker known as Bi Gan? Apparently, he is a rising art and drama director. Bi’s feature directorial debut, KAILI BLUES (2015), earned him Best New Director at the 52nd Golden Horse Awards, Best Emerging Director at the 68th Locarno Film Festival (Locarno being a venue for a lot of art films), and the Montgolfière d’Or at the 37th Three Continents Festival in Nantes. His follow-up feature, LONG DAYS JOURNEY INTO NIGHT (2018), was selected for the Un Certain Regard section at the 71st Festival de Cannes and earned him a Best Director nomination at the 55th Golden Horse Awards. RESURRECTION is Bu Gan’s third movie, and despite its flaws, it premiered in Competition at the 78th Festival de Cannes and was presented with a Special Award by the jury.
The movie is set in a future world where humanity has abandoned the ability to dream. The beginning of the film is basically a silent film, complete with titles, to indicate what is happening. The central characters are Shu Qi as “Miss Shu” and Jackson Yee as a mysterious “inhuman creature” (or “dream-entity”). Miss Shu discovers that this creature is one of the few beings still able to dream — something lost to almost all of humanity. The film moves into romantic drama of an extra weird level, in which vampires suddenly appear on the floor.
The film, already at the 2-hour mark, stretches it way past the tolerance level with the two lovers on a boat moving off the dock and then goes on and on and on, as if never-ending.
The film’s narrative is not straightforward. Resurrection is divided into six chapters, each corresponding to one of the five human senses — supposedly, though never made clear, sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch — plus the “mind.”
RESURRECTION can be more accurately described as an experience than a conventional story: a “dream made film,” where one feels rather than one can understand. Act its best, it is a bold and ambitious film, successful or not, which is debatable.
The film is shot in Mandarin and a little Cantonese.
All flaws aside, Bi Gan is still a gifted filmmaker and a talent to be reckoned with. It would be excellent if he delivers a more disciplined work with a strong narrative, perhaps controlled by the studio executives.
RESURRECTION premiered in the main competition at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2025 — and won the festival’s Special Jury Prize. The film opens in Toronto on December 12th.
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