Remember, as a kid, going to a friend’s basement and being surprised by how many rooms were down there—and how oddly they were configured? If you ever had that sort of experience, you know what it’s like to watch Backrooms, the feature debut from director Kane Parsons, based on a series of shorts that he distributed on YouTube (themselves extensions of a longstanding Internet trend involving images and videos of eerie, mostly empty spaces).

Backrooms, which Parsons wrote with Homeland and Westworld screenwriting vet Will Soodik, stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark, a struggling discount furniture store owner who is processing his professional and personal distress with a therapist, played by Renata Reinsve (Sentimental Value, The Worst Person in the World). When Clark discovers a portal in the basement of the store that leads to an endless and increasingly odd series of rooms—all mostly empty, save for strangely discarded furniture—the tension escalates for the characters and the audience.

Backrooms has been linked with the likes of Exit 8, Skinamarink, and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair as examples of Internet-inspired, liminal-space horror, where the environment itself is the main threat. (Perhaps The Shining is ground zero for this subgenre?) Indeed, Parsons proves to be an expert manipulator of space with the camera. We enter the store’s sickly yellow, low-ceilinged “backrooms” four times in the movie, and he employs a variety of techniques—first-person POV, found footage, handheld camerawork, forced perspective—to destabilize us in different ways, making us feel deeply uneasy in this fractured, yet familiar, setting. There’s no need, really, to amp up the horror elements as the movie unfortunately does during its final third. The “explanation” for the backrooms is inspired, but the execution of it—particularly in a haphazardly gruesome dinner scene—reeks of desperation and a desire to give the movie hard horror cred.

Liminal horror proves to be disturbing enough on its own, particularly, it seems, for younger audiences. What might explain this generational pull? Perhaps it’s because audiences now in their twenties grew up watching public spaces like shopping malls slowly depopulate, due to online shopping and the recession of the late 2000s. This phenomenon was slowly exacerbated by social life in general moving online (keeping more people indoors), all of which was dramatically escalated by the 2020 pandemic. In essence, the world has uncannily emptied during the youth audience’s formative years; movies like Backrooms cleverly bottle up the peculiar anxiety of that experience.

(6/8/2026)

Leave it to Martin Scorsese, in his second feature as director, to pull out a split diopter shot in the first minute of what is essentially a Bonnie and Clyde knockoff for producer Roger Corman. The face of David Carradine, playing railroad worker and labor activist Big Bill Shelly, dominates the right foreground of the frame, while equally focused in the left background is Barbara Hershey’s Bertha, the young woman he’s been admiring while laying tracks. Boxcar Bertha—a Depression-era, pro-labor, crime drama, in which Bertha and Bill eventually lead a team of railroad robbers—features a handful of such stylistic flourishes: sliding into black and white for the opening credits; the camera spinning from Bertha’s face to her point of view when she unwittingly walks into a brothel; a stunning final shot, with the camera fixed to the side of a train, that evokes Mary Magdalene (whom Hershey would play in Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ) at the foot of Jesus’ crucifixion. As Bertha, Hershey has an easy smile, an impish spirit, and a hardy soul. (She tells Bill early on that she plans to survive on “guts and luck.”) She helps Scorsese carry over some of the feminist concerns that distinguished his debut, Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, though overall this is a far less personal project, marred by leering sex scenes and some awkward action set pieces. On his next picture, Mean Streets, Scorsese would get his groove back and then some.

(6/5/2026)

“It’s no sign of health to be well adjusted to a sick society.” That sentiment, commonly traced to spiritual philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, would not seem to be a guiding principle for an animated lark, but Alberto Vazquez’s Decorado is a work that runs on the sort of dark, adult humor and chaotic energy that captures existence amiss. In a city governed by a corporation called ALMA (Almighty Limitless Megacorporative Agency), an unemployed mouse named Arnold teeters on the verge of personal despair, until he begins to suspect he may be the victim of a vast conspiracy. There is no logical throughline to the world Vazquez has envisioned (along with the anthropomorphic animals, there are also talking mushrooms, as well as a cavorting demon and mermaid), yet the lack of stability seems to be the point. In Decorado, reality and fantasy blend in a world that’s being controlled on its population’s behalf. This is all captured in psychedelic visual flourishes, defined by pulsating colors and the occasional bursting eyeball. It becomes overwhelming, even at 95 minutes (this might have worked better as an episodic series). Still, Vazquez has undoubtedly captured the dissociative jitters of living in a time when an entity like Amazon, Inc. seems to increasingly govern every move we make.

(5/28/2026)

In how many movies is production design the star? Always a crucial element, the craft rarely takes center stage (it probably shouldn’t, considering it’s literally meant to be background). Yet that’s the ingenious aspect of Exit 8, adapted by director Genki Kawamura from the 2023 video game. Set almost entirely in the white-tiled corridors of a Japanese subway station, the movie turns its limitation—the restrained setting—into its most compelling element. After receiving a distressful call from a former girlfriend as he steps off the train, a man finds himself unable to exit the subway, as each turn he makes brings him back to where he just was. Eventually he notices a set of rules on a poster: if he notices an anomaly, he should turn around; if everything seems the same as before, he should proceed, bringing him one step closer to the exit of the title. The movie then is essentially a game, but Kazunari Ninomiya brings an exasperated humanity to the lead role, while Kawamura—who wrote the screenplay with Kentaro Hirase—layers the mechanics with a psycho-thematic thread related to that phone call. Still, the way art director Ryo Sugimoto, set decorator Yutaka Motegi, cinematographer Keisuke Imamura, and others contributing to the design both establish the nightmarish banality of these hallways and then intermittently disrupt it—from modifying signage to altering lighting—makes Exit 8 a thriller in which the space itself is the bad guy.

(5/21/2026)

Can a movie be inspired by a tree?

That seems to be the case with Silent Friend, a film in which a 200-year-old Gingko biloba is something of a main character, presiding as it does over three narratives, across three different time lines, each unfolding on the campus of a German university. Underneath its expansive branches and vast canopy, we first meet a visiting neuroscientist in 2020 (Tony Leung Chiu-wai). When the pandemic hits and his research stalls, he turns to measuring the potential consciousness of the tree to pass the time. The film soon brings in two other stories: that of the university’s first female botany student in 1908 (Luna Wedler), followed by that of a lonely student in 1972 (Enzo Brumm) who finds companionship with a geranium.

Written and directed by accomplished Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi, Silent Friend ponders ideas of connection and consciousness with a touch that can only be called botanical: slow, serene, sensuous. Flora is featured in almost every frame—often the gingko itself, as when it can be seen in the background of a shot through the windows of the university library. Enyedi and cinematographer Gergely Pálos offer multiple compositions in which a plant or insect is in focus in the left foreground of the frame, while one of the characters appears blurred in the right background. The technique doesn’t exactly diminish human presence, but it does cause us to question our ordering of biological priorities.

To delineate among the time periods, Enyedi employs bright, crisp digital imagery for the 2020 segments; rich, 35mm black-and-white for those set in 1908; and slightly fuzzy, 16mm color for 1972. At the same time, she often transitions between eras—and seasons—by way of quiet, delicate dissolves. These are mirrored by Leung’s tranquil, monk-like performance, which ultimately anchors the film in an aura of authority and curiosity. At one point Leung’s scientist describes research as “an attempt to find metaphors for the phenomena of the world.” Movies, of course, do the same—at their best, as beautifully as Silent Friend.

(5/20/2026)

There is a melodramatic moment in No Regrets for Our Youth that represents a postmodern shift in Japanese cinema. Yukie (Setsuko Hara), a young woman trying to find her place amidst militaristic Japan of the 1930s, is being praised for finishing an intricate, traditional flower arrangement. Suddenly, she tears her creation apart, exclaiming, “This isn’t me!” She then drops a few, forlorn blossoms in a bowl of water—the leftovers of a deconstructed artwork, meant to represent her re-forming identity as a woman (and Japan’s as a nation).

No Regrets for Our Youth, then, also functions as a political project. Made immediately after World War II’s end, in the midst of American-enforced demilitarization, the movie traces the anti-imperialist resistance efforts that took place within Japan before and during the war. The framing for this is another melodramatic touch: a love triangle, with Yukie negotiating between a government-friendly lawyer named Itokawa (Akitake Kôno) and an underground resistor named Noge (Susumu Fujita). 

With No Regrets for Our Youth, director Akira Kurosawa nudged Japan both politically and aesthetically into a new era. The movie begins by employing familiar, silent-movie film grammar, clearly communicating the dynamics of the love triangle by employing blocking and close-ups as the trio crosses a river while on a hike together in their student youth. From there, the film grows more experimental and sophisticated, never more so than a montage of a distraught Yukie striking dramatic poses against a door, the image transitioning from one to the other with a dissolve.

As Yukie, Hara gets a head start on the “Noriko trilogy” she would make with director Yasujiro Ozu (Late Spring, Early Summer, and Tokyo Story), where she plays similarly named single women who gently push back against societal expectations in varying ways. Here, her Yukie matures into just such a woman, with Hara registering the transformation via delicate facial expressions and telling gestures. The performance becomes more broad—back to silent-movie strokes—for the film’s extended final section, in which Yukie banishes herself to the difficult life of a rice farmer in a rural village. It registers not so much as a step forward as a punishing regression—a melodramatic symbol of a nation paying for its recent sins.

(5/14/2026)

I’m probably too far behind to fully appreciate the scruffy comic charm of Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol, considering Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is my first exposure to them, even though it’s an expansion of the 2017-2018 streaming show that was based on their 2007-2009 web series. Draggy, with a thin joke density, this certainly seems like something that would work better in a condensed package. Still, the conceit is ambitious—their hopelessly naive, wannabe indie rock duo gets sent, Back to the Future-style, to 2008—allowing the blending of guerrilla documentary, expert fakery, improv, and idiocy to take on a veneer of philosophy. And I defy anyone to resist the pair’s commitment to their bits, many of which involve hidden-camera work on the streets of Toronto—or above them. The movie is bookended by dizzying scenes atop the CN Tower, for which the filmmakers reportedly didn’t get permits. Funnier is the sight of them pushing a wheelbarrow along the sidewalk, from which a giant extension cord—supposedly attached to the top of the tower—unspools as they make their way to connect it to a fuse box in order to power their time-traveling RV. The passersby are bewildered, but Doc Brown would be proud.

(5/12/2026)

Movies should be better than most art forms at capturing and evoking memories, yet as Blue Heron delicately demonstrates, the past always seems to elude us, no matter what tools we bring to bear on it.

The feature debut of Canadian writer-director Sophy Romvari, Blue Heron cleverly tries to remember a young woman’s childhood—and, in particular, her troubled older brother—in two ways. The movie’s first half is a fairly familiar, if finely observed, family drama, in which a girl named Sasha (Eylul Guven) quietly observes her parents’ struggle to manage and help their teenage son Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), whose increasing bursts of defiance suggest some sort of psychological disorder. Then, for its second half, Blue Heron shifts to the perspective of the adult Sasha (Amy Zimmer), now a filmmaker trying to piece together her memories of those years by reviewing old photos and video recordings, as well as meeting with social workers and child psychologists in search of retroactive answers. 

Romvari imbues both halves with their own observational elegance, at once soft and searing. She has a knack for the incisive, off-kilter image: a shot from the dark inside of the moving truck as the family arrives at their new home, a single horizontal slit of light at the bottom of the door; a close-up of a bowl of potatoes as we listen to Sasha’s mother (Iringó Réti) tell her that she can’t have a friend over for dinner because Jeremy might embarrass her; the blurred, doubled reflection of the parents in a mirror as they meet with a social worker, a symbol of the movie’s attempt and overall failure to visually reproduce memories that will explain everything.

Eventually, Blue Heron begins to blend past and present even more fantastically. There is a strange, disorienting scene in which the adult Sasha appears at the door of her childhood home, presenting herself to her parents—who appear at the same age as when she was a girl—as a social worker. During the visit, the adult Sasha sees her younger self and whispers something in her ear. Astute viewers of astonishing debuts may be reminded of Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun here, yet the two films are crucially different. Aftersun collapses past and present like a hammer in its final moments (it’s a movie from which I’m still recovering), while Blue Heron gently leans into the convergence of timelines as it goes on. Both are masterfully imagined attempts to wrangle their various memories, even as such memories slip, like grains of sand, through their hands.

(5/8/2026)

The French Lieutenant’s Woman takes its time getting interesting, even though its provocative postmodern structure is clear from the start: we’re watching both a Victorian period piece about an English gentleman (Jeremy Irons) who falls disastrously for a woman with a sordid reputation (Meryl Streep) and a contemporary drama about the actors who are playing those parts in the movie, while engaged in their own affair. (Harold Pinter adapted the John Fowles novel for director Karel Reisz.) The choppy, back-and-forth structure makes it difficult to invest in either narrative or for any of these figures to feel like full characters. And you almost wonder if the period movie within the movie is supposed to be bad—a florid hothouse bodice-ripper. Irons plays his scenes like a flustered foghorn and even Streep seems uncharacteristically unsteady (in both the accent work and the emphatic nature of her line deliveries). At any rate, Streep’s period character makes a turn in the film’s second half that upends both narratives in compelling ways, allowing The French Lieutenant’s Woman to become the feminist rug-puller it had always intended to be. I just wish it hadn’t taken quite so long to get there.

(5/7/2026)

Constructed, out of necessity, with a ramshackle neorealism, yet pulsing with the tension of an espionage thriller, Rome Open City emerged from immediate, post-war Italy to chronicle the suffering, betrayals, and bravery experienced by the everyday people living under Germany’s occupation. Directed by Roberto Rossellini, who wrote the script with Federico Fellini and Sergio Amidei, the movie’s street scenes and nonprofessional supporting actors helped to establish key components of the neorealism movement. At the same time, it’s the experienced conviction—one quiet, the other loud—of Aldo Fabrizi and Anna Magnani as a priest and single mother surreptitiously aiding the resistance movement that gives the film much of its emotional power. (A bit more theatrical is Harry Feist as the Nazi commander searching for the resistance leader hiding in the parish.) Rossellini’s camera has an itchy nervousness, never more so than when scurrying up or down the central staircase of the building where Magnani’s Pina lives. Spinning around the corners, offering dizzying perspectives looking up or down, these sequences capture the sense of disorientation that must have dominated daily life in that time and place. At the same time, the film’s philosophical orientation is sturdy, emphasizing justice and—somewhat shockingly, given how fresh the wartime wounds were when this was made—forgiveness. Everyone struggles with this, even Fabrizi’s priest in an excruciating climactic moment, yet Rome Open City still holds to forgiveness as the only path toward healing.

(5/6/2026)