“Dead Souls”

For his self-proclaimed final film, cult warrior Alex Cox has laid his sights on Donald Trump, ICE, and AI. Not a bad hit list, but a little weird when you consider it’s a spaghetti western based on the 1842 book by Nikolai Gogol — where a shady bureaucrat who travels through provincial Russia trying to buy the names of dead serfs from landowners. Then again, Cox earned his edgy auteur mettle with mid-’80s jabs “Repo Man” and “Sid & Nancy.” Looking a bit like Tim Blake Nelson in “Old Henry” (2021),  a weathered Cox stars as Mr. Strindler, a preacher who claims to work for the American Census Survey when he drifts into a small Arizona border town circa 1890. The town is a pit of snakes ready to swallow the stoic Strindler alive, but in a gunfight with the local quick-draw “Kid,” Strindler gets lucky and takes out the sheriff, too. Strindler, like Gogol’s ghostly drifter, is collecting the names of Mexican workers who have died. Turns out there’s money to be made if the list is handed to the right magistrate riding through the territory. Unfortunately for Strindler, the one he gets could care less about Mexicans. As Strindler, Cox is a piquant olio of Harry Dean Stanton’s stiff repo man and Peter Sellers’ restrained Chance the Gardner. Given the film’s satirical mission, the anti-Trump, anti-xenophobic prongs land  deep. The AI/data center rift is shoehorned in, strange and devilishly weird. It works. That said, Cox’s “Dead Souls” occasionally flags under the weight of its hard-pushed aspirations and over-indulgence. It’s akin to Cox’s follow-up to “Sid & Nancy,” “Walker” (1987), staring Ed Harris as the renowned colonialist destabilizer — it’s also a western, but also chock-full of passion, packed with political punches, and a bit of a letdown compared to those indelible ‘80s films. Cox clearly has seen “The Wild Bunch” (1969) on repeat: Some of the final scenes feature nearly identical recreations of the waiting vultures at the end of Sam Peckinpah’s glorious ode to the closing days of the West. — Tom Meek

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Playing at the Brattle Theatre

Spider-Man: Brand New Day

Tom Holland slides into his fourth Spider-Man chapter with ease, but even better, this “New Day” is notably more mature and nuanced than Holland’s “Home” trilogy (“Homecoming,” “Far From Home” and “No Way Home”). The film more smartly weaves in bigger Marvel Cinematic Universe elements that should likely have a payoff in “Avengers: Doomsday.” Familiar faces from the Avengers and X-Men series show up here, as does Jon Bernthal as Frank Castle, a.k.a. the Punisher, who finally makes it to the big screen. (He’s been in several small-screen Marvel projects on Disney.) Thankfully,there’s no multiverse nonsense this time, though former love interest MJ (Zendaya) and bestie Ned (Jacob Batalon), both off at MIT, have had all their memories of Spider-Man and Peter Parker washed from their minds. The driving force in this “New Day” is a mysterious entity that can possess masses of people and wants to break into a fortified Manhattan institution known as The U.S. Department of Damage Control. What they do at the DoDC — in theory — is repurpose supervillain tech and power for beneficial uses (the DoDC lab facilities look like a set straight out of “The Boys”). All are susceptible to the mass mind meld (even support heroes) except Spidey — his arachnid DNA has been (for better and worse) morphing, making him more physiologically an eight-legged critter. Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton (“Short Term 12”), the pacing is lithe and nimble, and the action sequences are several cuts above a typical bang-bash CGI fest — there’s intent and consequence. Building on that emotionally is Spidey’s pathos: He’s revered (he cleaned up New York quicker than former mayor Rudy Giuliani) and he’s all alone, yearning to reconnect with MJ and Ned. “New Day” sheds the flimsy fandom that so imbued the “Home” series; it’s darker, leaner and more inward-leaning. It also marks a busy year for Holland and Zendaya, both onscreen in “The Odyssey,” and in “Doomsday,” still to come.  — Tom Meek

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