Seattle Film Blog

LFF Dispatch #5: It Takes a Village in Fernando Eimbcke's Social Realist Charmer Moscas

2026-10-18T17:29:54.468-07:00

FLIES / Moscas

(Fernando Eimbcke, 2026, Mexico, 101 minutes)

"For a child, playing is a deeply serious matter. Children don’t need poetic dialogue or images; they are poetic in their very existence."--Fernando Eimbcke

Fernando Eimbcke certainly took his time following up Duck Season. His debut arrived in 2004, and here he is with the spiritual sequel 22 years later. Then again, he wrote the first draft of the screenplay 25 years ago. Not until he joined forces with novelist Vanesa Garnica was he able to get it right.

To prepare, I set out to rewatch his first film, also in black and white, but it isn't available to stream with English subtitles, and my Spanish comprehension isn't all it could be. I checked every possible streaming site, including foreign ones, and settled on Russia's Ok.ru, which offers an unsubtitled version (I later found another unsubtitled one on YouTube).

Fortunately, it isn't necessary to watch the earlier film to appreciate the latest, since they have little in common other than the setting and the black and white. Since Mubi picked up Flies after its Berlin Film Festival premiere, where it won the Ecumenical award, I hope they'll also pick up his debut.

Right: Duck Season, aka Temporada de Patos

Set in and around a brutalist Mexico City apartment complex located next to a hospital, his playful, visually inventive take on social realism begins with a buzzing fly waking up Olga (The Chambermaid's invaluable Teresita Sánchez). She does everything she can to shoo it toward an open window, but it just won't go.

Taciturn and slow-moving, Olga is a curmudgeon, but like most Eimbcke characters, she contains multitudes. When a couple in the unit above indulges in noisy sex while she's watching TV, she doesn't pound on the ceiling with a broomstick, but stops to listen before turning up the volume.

When she interacts with the world outside, however, she always has some kind of complaint. It doesn't help that she's been feeling poorly, so she visits a podiatrist about her foot pain, hoping for a quick fix, but the doctor tells Olga she needs nail surgery. Unfortunately, it costs 3,000 pesos she doesn't have, so she tacks up signs around the complex advertising a room for rent for family members of patients. The larger the party, the higher the charge.

A day laborer with a wife in the cancer ward spots one of Olga's signs and makes arrangements to rent the room. He has a few pesos to his name, but not a lot. Eimbcke and Garnica, who prioritize the present, provide no details about his background, other than to suggest that he's from a smaller town.

Tulio (sympathetic newcomer Hugo Ramírez) is polite and respectful, seemingly the perfect guest, while Olga is anything but the perfect host, sniffing, "I don't want to hear anything about your sick relative." There's another problem: Tulio has a nine-year-old son, Cristian (fellow newcomer Bastián Escobar, a wily, spirited presence who never seems to be acting), and he can't afford the landlady's rate for two guests, so he sneaks Cristian in to the duplex late at night and sneaks him out early in the morning.

Estela's health is so precarious that she can't have visitors, and children aren't allowed at all. At night, father and son gaze longingly at what they believe to be her hospital room window, waiting for her fortunes to improve.

Cristian is, for the most part, a happy-go-lucky kid, but he misses his mom just as much as his dad, and tries to communicate with her using the flashlight she gave him. He also writes "mommy" in the grime on the guest room window, something Olga notices when she starts to suspect that Tulio is hiding something.

Left to his own devices while his dad takes care of business, Cristian explores the neighborhood. A cop catches him peeing behind a tree, but the kid does a runner. He'll spend the rest of the film trying to evade an authority figure Eimbcke depicts from Cristian's low-to-the-ground child's-eye view, suggesting that the cop is some hulking, lumbering monster.

One of the defining features of Eimbcke's work is the way characters look through or are reflected in shiny surfaces. It isn't the same as breaking the fourth wall, since they're looking at something other than the camera in the context of the narrative. In Duck Season, they gaze into an oven and at a TV screen; in Flies, it's an arcade game screen and convenience store mirror.

Just as the teens in Duck Season play a football video game with great enthusiasm, Cristian is obsessed with the Space Invaders-like arcade game Cosmic Defenders. When it comes to his mom, he puts his faith in his dad, who pays her bills as best he can, and the medical team trying to help her get better.

He's just a kid, and there's nothing he can do, but when he plays the game, he's in control. As he vaporizes aliens, it's as if he were vaporizing the cancer cells invading Estela's body. The 2-bit game with its high-energy synth soundtrack serves as a sort of score, lending the film a 1980s feel, though Flies is set in the today of personal computers and cellphones.

With money running low, Tulio looks for work that will extend their time in the city, but when Olga spots the two eating lunch at a diner, she searches his suitcase and finds children's clothes, confirming her suspicion that Tulio has been hiding the kid from her. The next time they meet, she confronts him. "I let you into my home and this is how you repay me," she barks before demanding more money and ordering them to leave in two days. If they don't, she threatens to call the police. Tulio agrees to her terms before taking a temporary job that will leave Cristian alone with the curmudgeon.

Before he leaves, Tulio sets Cristian up with a cellphone. The boy does his best to avoid Olga by befriending vendors and shop keepers with whom he makes trades, and all of whom treat him with kindness, even if he tries their patience with his rambunctiousness. When he finds five pesos on the ground, he goes to town on Cosmic Defenders, racking up a high score, and when he finds that he can play the game on his phone, he struggles to tear himself from it.

When he isn't playing the game, he tries to figure out how to sneak a pair of slippers, which he pronounces "sleepers," to his mom (the Spanish word is zapatilla or pantufla). He can't do it on his own, especially with that annoying cop buzzing around, so he devises a plan that leads him to Isaac (Duck Season's pizza delivery man Enrique Arreola), a kindly laundry worker with whom he also plays Cosmic Defenders. More importantly, Isaac offers to bring the slippers to Estela, while cautioning that it could get him fired.

Cristian next goes to work on the female security workers who decide which visitors can and cannot enter the hospital. Despite his formidable charm offensive, they refuse to let him in, since they could get fired, too, but they offer to find his mom, so he'll know exactly which room she's staying in.

Without saying a word, Olga watches the boy come and go, feining disinterest as she plays online Sudoku, but he crosses a line when he makes a mess in the bedroom. She demands he clean it up, which is fair, but it doesn't scare him away. Though she insists he stay in the room when in her home, he sneaks out to watch TV after she falls asleep. She catches him in the act, and shoos him away, but not before he swipes a few pesos to play Cosmic Defenders.

Slowly, but surely, Olga starts to warm up to the kid. I saw it coming from a mile away, but that doesn't make the wearing down of her resistance any less satisfying as she starts to see the situation more clearly: Cristian needs help, and she has the means to provide it. She's also lonely as hell.

Soon, she's treating him to lunch and plotting how to get the slippers to his mom. They also find they have a few things in common, but I won't spoil the rather amusing surprise. All the while, Eimbcke also avoids specific details about her background, other than to suggest she might have had a son once, which helps to explain her resistance to such a likeable young man.

It isn’t until late in the proceedings that Olga finally cracks a smile. As an actress, Sánchez can look exceptionally dowdy and downcast, but she has the kind of smile that makes her entire countenance appear beatific. Olga even shares with Cristian her love of cha-cha-chá music, revealing the kind of person she might have been once before disappointment and delusionment took over.

Mostly, she does what she can to connect Cristian with his mom. As he faces the fact that she might not get better, Eimbcke turns to magical realism in a way that echoes Poltergeist and Videodrome, but in a much more dreamy, benevolent way. Suffice to say: Cosmic Defenders is involved. What might be just another arcade game in another film plays a thematic role here.

The indomitable fly returns at the end, and this time, Olga leaves it alone.

Of the films I saw at this year's London Film Festival, including two gala premieres, Flies was the most low-key. There was no hype, no lines filled with punters clamoring to get in, and no red carpets at Royal Festival Hall. It was also the funniest, most touching, and least ponderous. Granted, I was thrilled to see that Eimbcke had followed up Duck Season after all these years, even if the characters are different, but there were probably plenty of festivalgoers unfamiliar with it, not least since it's become so difficult to see in English.

A delight from start to finish, Flies ranks among my favorite Mexican films of the 21st-century–all set in a Mexico City that proves alternately foreboding and welcoming–along with Alejandro Gerber Bicecci's Dead Man's Switch and Alfonso Cuarón's Roma, both also shot in luminous black and white. In all three beautifully-acted features, working class people take center stage. If they don't necessarily triumph at the end, they’re neither broken nor bowed as their directors imbue them with the dignity and complexity they deserve.

And in Bastián Escobar’s Cristian, Eimbcke introduces a lovable scamp for the ages, just as Teresita Sánchez proves why she's one of Mexico's finest and most nimble performers. It's a worthy social realist successor to David Fortune's Color Book and even Vittorio De Sica's immortal Bicycle Thieves.

There are no more screenings of Flies at LFF, which ends tonight, and nor are any Seattle screenings scheduled, but it plays Portland's Latin American Film Festival, which begins today, on Nov 18. Considering that Fernando Eimbcke's fourth feature, Olmo (also cowritten with Vanesa Garnica), was released in the US in August, Flies probably won't see release until 2027. One way or the other, I'll update this post when I have more information.

Images from Variety (Hugo Ramirez and Bastián Escobar), IMDb (Daniel Miranda, Diego Cataño, Danny Perea, and Enrique Arreola), Moviepilot (Ramirez and Escobar), and IONCINEMA (Escobar and Teresita Sánchez).

LFF Dispatch #4: Land of Hope and Gory - Horror Shorts from the UK, France, and Canada

2026-10-11T16:49:29.227-07:00

I didn't arrive in London in time to cover the first screening of this horror-themed program--or programme, which looks classier--but it plays again on Oct 18, the last day of the festival. Lucy Luscombe's Meatmylk is the only film the LFF didn't include in their digital library, but I wrote about all others. Of the six films, the LFF has offered a content advisory for four regarding scenes of graphic violence or injury, nudity, and sex. Most horror fans wouldn't find any of these films too hard to handle, but the squeamish may want to take note. In alphabetical order.

ALL YOURS
(Sophia Di Martino, UK, 2025, 8 mins)

All Yours begins with a bit of foreshadowing as the lovely Audrey (Loki's Sophia Di Martino), a lonely homemaker, peels and eats a hard-boiled egg. That night, she finds herself scratching at her neck. The next morning, the scratching continues until she pulls a thin layer of skin off her entire body.

It's nothing like the self-mutilation of Marina de Van's unsettling In My Skin; it’s more like a snake doing what snakes do. Audrey looks the same afterward, but now a disgusting pile of skin covers her bathroom floor. She tries to tell her best friend, except Mora (Lady's Sian Clifford) only wants to talk about herself, so Audrey heads to the kitchen and gets to work.

What starts out as a disturbing development culminates in a metaphor for liberation, enhanced by filmmaker Di Martino's charming performance.

FISHBRAIN
(Max Vanderspuy, UK
2026, 22 mins)

Creature feature meets folk horror in Max Vanderspuy's Fishbrain.

Ori (Dune: Prophecy's Chloe Lea), a young woman in a fishing village, dropped out of school to look after her surly grandfather, Jeb (Red Riding's John Henshaw), after her grandmother died.

Something has been ailing the local fish population, but she swears she's serving him the good stuff. Once she's had enough of his shit, though, she turns to the bad stuff, but it has no effect on the old bastard. As their relationship continues to devolve, the toxic fish exert a more profound effect on her.

Vanderspuy shot the film in low light with frequent cutaways to slimy fish with squishy guts. After Tony, the seafood-centric film about Anthony Bourdain, I found myself craving fish and chips. After Fishbrain, I'd rather not look at a fish ever again, so I can't say it didn't make an impression.

THE LAST SNOW / La Dernière Neige
(Rodolphe Bouquet-Populus, France, 2025, 19 mins)

A night-skiing enthusiast gets separated from his companions in writer/director Rodolphe Bouquet-Populus's survivalist thriller The Last Snow.

With extra time on his hands, Guillaume (Guillaume Pottier) decides to take a chair lift up the mountain to watch a ski ceremony. He rides with Isabelle (Compartment No. Six's Dinara Drukarova), a mysterious Russian woman who tells him about a deadly bear attack and explains how the resort handles times of light snow. She also expresses an intense fear of heights, so I'm not exactly sure what she's doing on a chairlift in the first place.

Then they catch glimpses of alarming sights and sounds below them suggesting that an unhinged creature is on the loose, so Guillaume does all he can to persuade Isabelle to jump off the chair to run away, but she's as stubborn as hell, and things don't end especially well.

The actors are convincingly scared shitless and Bouquet-Populus builds tension effectively, but The Last Snow doesn't really go anywhere, other than to confirm that the tallest of tall tales can turn out to be true. And that night skiing probably isn't the best idea.

MAN EATING PUSSY
(Lee Lawson, Canada, 2026, 12 minutes)

Oh, those frisky Canadians!

When I received an email, shortly before the festival, about a film called "Man Eating Pussy," I thought there must have been a mistake. Was it spam? Was it pornography? No and no, as it turns out.

Actor and director Grace Glowicki, who first came to my attention in Booger and last graced Seattle cinemas with Dead Lover, plays a sex worker with a vagina for a face. In real life, even women would probably find that pretty horrible, but the terminally ill man who meets with her for a date seems more surprised than horrified, and the makeup effects are truly impressive.

I won't say more, other than that Glowicki and Julian Richings are pretty great and that the title has a different meaning than you might expect. This short would make for a particularly provocative pairing with Mitchell Lichtenstein's Teeth, a black comedy about a young woman (Jess Weixler) with teeth where one would not normally expect--or want--to find them.

THE SORROWS OF YOUNG CHARLOTTE
(Shir Ariya, UK, 2026, 13 mins)

Charlotte (Liv Jekyll) and Werther (Fabian Bevan) are longtime friends. Until recently, she was in a relationship and he was single, but after four years, her boyfriend dumps her, and she's devastated. Werther steps in to offer support, but he's really hoping to consummate a longtime crush.

Charlie is lonely and vulnerable enough to give in, but when he tries to perform, he can't. Then, he spots some potency pills in her medicine cabinet, and they're able to finish what they started. Afterward she makes it clear that this was a one-off, but it's too late: he's confessed his feelings, and the pills worked too well, leading to a darkly comic conclusion.

Although a man could have made this film, I knew a woman did, because Werther believes that Charlie's boyfriend is the only thing standing in his way--rather than that she's just not into him (though she could have let him down a little easier). Werther isn't necessarily a bad guy, but he's dangerously naïve, except instead of turning the object of affection into a victim, like in Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End or Curry Barker's Obsession, Shir Ariya, a Thai filmmaker based in the UK, ensures that the man gets his comeuppance. Though the makeup effects could have been more effective, The Sorrows of Young Charlotte offers a welcome corrective to the films in which a woman must pay for failing to live up to a man's expectations.

Above: a 52-second glimpse into Man Eating Pussy.

Land of Hope and Gory, an 89-min program, screens at LFF on Sun, Oct 18, 8pm at BFI Southbank, Screen NFT2. The screening is sold out, but tickets may be available at the door. Images from Film Affinity (All Yours poster), the IMDb (Fishbrain poster), the BIFFF (The Last Snow poster), and British Council UK Films Database (Liv Jekyll in The Sorrows of Young Charlotte).

LFF Dispatch #3: The Mother-Child Bond Proves Frightful in Finnish Horror Nightborn

2026-10-05T22:39:14.911-07:00

NIGHTBORN / Yön Lapsi

(Hanna Bergholm, Finland/Lithuania/France/UK, 2026, 92 mins)

"Fuck London."--a sentiment a father will come to regret

A baby is bound to be challenging for any new parents, except the little fellow in Hannah Bergholm's Nightborn, winner of the Cheval Noir--the top prize--at this year's Fantasia International Film Festival, isn't just different, but mysterious and inexplicable, almost like a creature from another planet.

In Bergholm's first feature, Hatching, a preteen gymnast with a tightly-wound mother cares for an egg that hatches into a strange and terrifying creature. She leaned on practical effects, like puppetry and animatronics, for her tactile take on suburban conformity and toxic parenting.

Right: Just a girl and her egg in 2022's Hatching

For her followup, again cowritten with Ilja Rautsi, she switches to English, for the most part, while exploring the mother-child bond from an entirely different angle. She also shifts from the suburbs to the Finnish countryside where newlyweds Jon (Harry Potter's Rupert Grint), a Brit, and Saga (Seidi Haarla) have arrived to start a family in her ancestral home.

The cottage may have been beautiful and sturdy in her late grandmother's day, but her mother (Pirkko Saisio), an academic, had no interest in it, and now the floorboards are literally rotting. She and Jon aren't discouraged, though. They'll fix it up and raise three kids, exactly as they had planned.

After exploring the house, they venture into the woods, where Jon notices that some of the trees have troll-like characteristics and seem to want to trip him up. He's a bit creeped out, but Saga finds it all very literally stimulating, and the next time Bergholm catches up with them, she's in labor.

Saga gives birth in a bloody spurt, after which the nurses spirit the baby away, and she doesn't understand why. Once she's had her rest, she meets the hairy, cranky, but otherwise healthy child. Bergholm doesn't show its face, so we have to take it on faith that it isn't monstrous. She and Jon proceed to name the little tyke Christian, which seems ironic, but Jon is a vicar's son.

After the birth, Saga's body starts to change in subtle and disturbing ways, and no matter what she does, Christian responds more positively to Jon. The same is true of her mother, sister, and in-laws, too, though not by much.

After several painful biting encounters while nursing, Saga comes to find that her offspring prefers blood to milk, but no one believes her. In fact, her nearest and dearest believe that she's the problem, especially her non-nurturing mother and resentful sister (Pamela Tola). Others find the aggressive fellow altogether off-putting, suggesting that this isn't a textbook case of post-partum depression or even psychosis, but whenever Saga tries to do non-mommy things, it cries out for her. (She thinks of Christian as more of an "it" than a "he.) She feels like she can't win, because she can't.

It's only when Saga gives the kid what he wants, that things change. It's just that Christian, whose name she spontaneously changes to Kuura (Finnish for "Frost") without consulting Jon, doesn't want normal things, driving a wedge between her and her normie husband as she finally bonds with the weird little being. Her mother and sister claim that she was once a weird little being, too, something Bergholm never explains, other than to suggest that Saga more closely resembles her grandmother.

Suffice to say, Saga's sister was the easy one, whereas Saga was also a difficult child. There are elements of Rosemary's Baby to the scenario, not least when Jon segues from supportive to judgmental, but the baby is neither demonic nor vampiric. I'm not sure exactly how to define it other than as a troll-like manifestation of Saga's fears about motherhood as much as the creature in Hatching was a manifestation of Tinja's repressed anger.

Rupert Grint, who next appears in Ebenezer, is quite good, even if it seems as if he aged into a middle-aged man overnight, since I've seen little of his work since the Ron Weasley days, but that's on me, though he has signed on to play the adult Ron in Broadway's Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

Seidi Haarla, however, who first impressed me in Juho Kuosmanen's terrific 2021 two-hander Compartment No. 6, goes for broke in a physically and emotionally demanding role. I couldn't say whether she drew from experience as the mother of three. Or whether Grint, the father of two, did the same.

If anything, Hannah Bergholm's film reminded me of Lynne Ramsay's Die My Darling in that Haarla, like Jennifer Lawrence's unhinged mother, ends up exposed in every way, snarling and crawling on the floor and doing everything possible to connect with her child. I was also reminded of Mary Bronstein's If I Had Legs I’d Kick You in that Kuura never stops crying and whining, and Bergholm waits until the very end to show his face in full.

While Hatching struck me as the more original proposition, Nightborn is well worth a look for anyone interested in Finnish cinema, folk horror, or spooky films about strange kids--and their freaked-out mothers--though pregnant people should think twice before subjecting themselves to Saga's...saga.

Nightborn, which is now on Shudder in the States, premieres at LIFF on Oct 9 at Vue West End and plays again on Oct 10 at Prince Charles Cinema and Oct 14 at BFI Southbank, though tickets only remain available for Oct 9. Images from ICF via Moviejawn (Seidi Haarla), CSFD.SK (Haarla and Rupert Grint), Eye for Film (Haarla and Grint), and FirstShowing.Net (Haarla).

LFF Dispatch #2: NYC Duo Kevin Walker and Jack Auen Conjure Up the Past as a Living Thing in Their Directorial Debut Chronovisor

2026-10-04T10:53:21.830-07:00

CHRONOVISOR
(Kevin Walker and Jack Auen, USA, 2026, 99 minutes)

Sailin' away on the crest of a wave / It's like magic / Oh, rollin' and ridin' and slippin' and slidin' / It's magic.--ELO, "Livin’ Thing" (1976)

Béatrice Courte (Anne Laure Sellier, a French professor of behavioral science), a Columbia University researcher and philosophy professor, sets out to solve the mystery of the Chronovisor, a machine that can reportedly record the past, in this text-intensive metaphysical mystery from Cosmic Salon, aka Maryland/NYC filmmaking duo Kevin Walker and Jack Auen.

At the New York Society Library (actually a library at Johns Hopkins), her home away from home, Béatrice pores over books and periodicals and listens to audio recordings and at her apartment, she watches videos. She's often the only one in the library late at night, illuminated by the green glow of a banker's lamp (Leo Zhang shot the film in warm, soft-edged 16mm and excerpts from Holst's The Planets provide the stratospheric score).

Left: Kevin Walker and

Jack Auen

In the course of her research, she finds that Father Pellegrino Ernetti, a Benedictine monk born in 1925, claims that he created the device with the aid of 12 physicists. If this was a documentary, we would assume he was a charlatan. It isn't, though the vast majority of the names, claims, and facts presented are real.

But that doesn't mean Ernetti was on the up and up. Béatrice finds, for instance, an explanation for his most startling photograph: a closeup on a crucified Christ wearing an expression that recalls Maria Falconetti in Dryer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. According to Ernetti, the released photo was a facsimile, but that doesn't explain what happened to the original.

Further, Ernetti never explained how The Chronovisor works before he went missing, so the mystery isn't just about its inner workings, but about what happened to the device and to its inventor. Since then, conspiracy theories have proliferated, accompanied by Elvis-like sightings. Considering that the monk would be 101 in 2026, it seems unlikely that he he's still alive.

Béatrice reaches out to Ernetti's relatives and associates in hopes that they can provide some insight. In the process, she unlocks a treasure trove of additional materials.

Sellier, who resembles German actress Nina Hoss, isn't really an actress, and she doesn't really act. Instead, she listens, watches, and reads. As she does, Walker and Auen illuminate relevant text passages, sometimes translating them from the original French or Italian, languages Béatrice speaks. They also gave the subtitles a slightly aged look, a nice touch exemplifying their holistic approach.

In its early stages, the directors depict Béatrice having drinks with colleagues and speaking at a lectern before an academic audience, but she seems most comfortable, possibly even happiest, alone in the dark swimming in words. For better or for worse, I found that relatable.

Then she travels to Italy and transitions from observer to participant.

Though Chronovisor is an experimental film, it's easy to figure out what's going on at any given time. In Italy, however, Walker and Auen create painterly images that prove hard to decipher. Rough, colored outlines appear on a black background. Sometimes they're splotchy and mottled. At other times, they look like red and blue 3D images. This section, which concludes the film, does and does not solve the mystery. In that sense, I was reminded of Ivan Zulueta's sole feature Arrebato, Olivier Assayas's Irma Vep, and Laura Citarella's Trenque Lauquen. In all three films, the protagonists lose themselves in the mysteries they're trying to solve.

For the most part, though, Walker and Auen's directorial debut, which follows several shorts, is its own beast.

The biggest question, for me, wasn't whether the device did what Ernetti said it did, but whether it was a good idea in the first place. After all, he came to believe it was dangerous, leading the Vatican to get involved, which is never a good thing, but could have been worse if governments got ahold of it.

It also occurred to me that since cameras didn't exist thousands of years ago, it was up to artists to tell us about their times, and maybe that's how it's meant to be, not least when artists have fewer practical reasons to do so now when they can just pick up a camera phone or, worse yet, turn to Claude or ChatGPT, and when it's harder than ever to make a living from art.

Chronovisor, however, is art. No doubt about it.

Stream Walker and Auen's 2021 short film, "Marblehead," here.

Chronovisor plays Seattle's Northwest Film Forum, through Tues, Oct 6. It premieres in London at LFF on Oct 9 at BFI Southbank and plays again on Oct 11 at ICA. Both screenings are sold out, though some tickets should be available at the door. Images from Grasshopper via InReview Online (film still), Filmmaker - Substack (Walker and Auen), Woodstock Film Festival (the face of Jesus, supposedly), and Reactor Mag (Anne Laure Sellier).

LIFF Dispatch #1: The 2026 BFI London Film Festival - 70 Years Old and Still Kicking

2026-10-01T20:07:58.103-07:00

It's been years since I've attended the BFI London Film Festival, so this isn't my first, but it's hard to resist an anniversary, and this year, LFF turns 70.

By contrast, the Seattle International Film Festival, my hometown festival, turned 50 in 2024, the Toronto International Film Festival turned 50 in 2025, the New York Film Festival--which coincides with LFF--turned 60 in 2022, and the Cucalorus Film Festival, for which I've been serving on the narrative judging committee, turned 30 in 2024.

Compared to Cannes and Venice, LFF is relatively young, but of the festivals with which I'm most familiar, it's the oldest. If you haven't heard much about it, though, that's because it may have many high-profile films, but it doesn't have the highest-profile premieres. Instead, though it's a competitive festival--unlike NYFF--it's more about programming that culls from the best of the competitive festivals in a world-class city with ample opportunities to see actors and directors in person, whether at screenings, events, or as part of the Screen Talk series.

This year's jury presidents include Sam Pollard (MLK/FBI), Amir El-Masry (Giant), Sandhya Suri (Santosh), and Helen Simmons (100 Nights of Hero). The Official Competition includes judges Julie La Bassiere (DDA Global) and Mariano Llinás (the 808-minute La Flor), who will be at LFF with the 324-minute documentary Life of Jorge Luis Borges. Julia Loktev's 370-minute My Undesirable Friends: Part II - Exile will also be at LFF, though I doubt I'll have time for either. Jury award winners will be announced on Oct 18.

I don't arrive in London until Oct 8, so I won't be able to make it to the Oct 7 Talks with Sofia Coppola or Andrew Scott either, though I'm hoping to make it to Eleanor Coppola's documentary Making Marie Antoinette, which was completed by Sofia Coppola, and Simon Stone's Elsinore, the opening night film, in which Scott plays actor Ian Charleson, who gave his final performance in Richard Eyre's Hamlet before succumbing to complications from AIDS eight weeks later (I've been watching Netflix's Ripley to prepare).

Though LFF excludes the word "International," this year's festival includes 251 films from 88 countries, including 33 world premieres. Of those premieres, the most notable, from a PNW perspective, is Travis Knight's adaptation of writer/ musician Colin Meloy and illustrator Carson Ellis's 2011 fantasy novel, Wildwood, produced by Oregon animation studio Laika (Kelly Reichardt adapted stories from Colin's sister, Maile Meloy, into Certain Women).

This year's lineup also includes 109 female filmmakers or 43%, which is estimable, though 49% of SIFF 2026's filmmakers identified as female or nonbinary. I don't know if LFF counts female and nonbinary filmmakers in the same way, but I'm always happy to root for the home team when I can.

Though most of LFF's lineup includes films that haven't opened in the States, even if they've played other festivals, there are exceptions. If anything, I was surprised to find that Boots Riley's I Love Boosters hadn't opened in the UK. It opened SIFF in May, and I recommend it, unless you're allergic to bright colors, absurdist humor, or collective action. Riley came to Seattle with the film, but not with any of the cast members. Naomi Ackie, on the other hand, will be at LFF, though I don't know if she'll be at all three screenings. She's also doing a Screen Talk I hope to attend on Oct 10.

More: Lance Oppenheim's Primetime opened in the States on Sept 25; I wrote about it for The Stranger. (His Elizabeth Holmes documentary with Nathan Fielder, You Can See Everything, is also making the festival rounds, though it isn't playing LFF.) Hanna Bergholm's folk horror Nighborn, another new-to-the-UK title, opened in July and is now streaming on Shudder. I'll have more to say about Bergholm's second feature in a subsequent post.

There a few other films that fit this category, but there's something about seeing a film, any film, in a country other than your own that enhances or alters the experience, and I'm looking forward to seeing how that plays out.

LFF 2026 runs from Oct 7-18 at venues across London. Please see the festival site for more information. Poster images: the BFI and Kinoafisha

It's Punks Versus Skinheads in Jeremy Saulnier's Fast and Bloody Green Room

2026-09-26T13:04:36.418-07:00

A decade ago, A24 released Green Room. Somewhere along the way, my review for The Stranger got truncated, so here's the full version. Slightly revised from the original text.

GREEN ROOM

(Jeremy Saulnier, USA, 2015, 95 minutes)

There's a moment in many horror movies when the director breaks from the main story to show how the monster got so monstrous. Then they return to the action, but the stakes are raised, because the bad guy isn't as faceless as before. Jeremy Saulnier (Blue Ruin) has no time for that jive. Bad guys are bad guys. The goal is to escape their clutches by any means possible.

And so it goes for the punk band, the Ain't Rights, that ends up playing a gig at a white supremacist compound in Oregon--shades of Malheur--out of sheer desperation. The group, which includes Anton Yelchin (Star Trek's Chekov) and Alia Shawkat (Kelly Reichardt's Oregon-set Night Moves), raises a convincing racket, but they don't help their cause when they open their set with Dead Kennedys' evergreen 1981 anthem "Nazi Punks Fuck Off."

Then they witness a murder and the neo-Nazis (led by a chilly Patrick Stewart, the cast's other Star Trek veteran) give them the "Hotel California" treatment, i.e. "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave." From that point forward, it's punks versus skinheads set to a propulsive soundtrack of Bad Brains, Slayer, and Poison Idea.

In contrast with Tony Kaye's American History X and Shane Meadows' This Is England, Saulnier's skins play more like cold-hearted businessmen than pathetic fucks. The fun is in witnessing the ingenious ways the punks--including two turncoats--fight back using the crudest tools available.

It's fast, bloody, and when you least expect it: hilarious.

Postscript: A24 released Green Room on April 15, 2016. A little over a month later, Anton Yelchin was dead at 27 due to a vehicle malfunction (his family settled with the manufacturer out of court). A documentary about his life, Love Antosha, appeared in 2019, but I'm still not ready to watch it.

Left: Jeremy Saulnier with Aaron Pierre

On a happier note, Saulnier followed Green Room with the Netflix movies Hold the Dark and Rebel Ridge, which won the 2024 Emmy Award for Outstanding Television Movie. It was one of the year's best and introduced the world to Aaron Pierre, who first came to my attention in Barry Jenkins' adaptation of Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad. Pierre can now be seen on HBO's Lanterns opposite Kyle Chandler.

Also, I had no idea who Callum Turner was in 2016, and didn't mention him in my review (I didn't mention Imogen Poots or Macon Blair either). This year, Turner appeared in several features, including the inimitable Mark Jenkin's Rose of Nevada. He's also reportedly in the running as the next James Bond. And, oh yeah, he married pop superstar Dua Lipa in May.

Green Room plays Northwest Film Forum for one night only on Wed, Oct 14, as part of Seattle Film Critics Society's SFCS at 10 series. After the screening, Matt Oakes (Silver Screen Riot) will be conducting a live virtual interview with Jeremy Saulnier. We're working on other surprises, as well.

Click here for tickets and more information. We'll be following with David Eggers' The VVitch on Nov 19 and Barry Jenkins' Moonlight on Dec 9.

Images from A24 by way of Vox (Callum Turner, Alia Shawkat, and Anton Yelchin) and The Guardian (Patrick Stewart with Brent Werzner, Mason Knight, Samuel Summer, and Colton Ruscheinsky) and The Associated Press (Jeremy Saulnier with Aaron Pierre / credit: AP Photo / Chris Pizzello).

Begotten: E. Elias Merhige’s Debut Rises from the Dead to Freak You Out All Over Again

2026-09-21T15:25:41.979-07:00

BEGOTTEN

(E. Elias Merhige, USA, 1989, 72 minutes)

In its abstraction, E. Elias Merhige's directorial debut, Begotten, plays like a Gothic goulash of silent film fragments that have been moldering and degrading for decades.

The combination of rephotographed 16mm B&W reversal film, neutral-density filtration, musique concrète, and eerie sound effects conjures up a powerful sense of unease, enhanced by the lack of dialogue or intertitles.

The story involves three characters: God, Mother Earth, and the Son of Earth, all played by members of Merhige's stage company Theatreofmaterial. Through an open door, he begins with a masked, white-garbed God (Brian Salzburg) on a chair in a corner, spattered with deep black blood as he slices away at his midsection with a straight razor. As he slashes, God convulses while what sounds like a clock submerged in water ticks away on the soundtrack (other sounds arranged and composed by Evan Albam include thunder, buzzing flies and crickets, heartbeats, and persistent moans).

Gradually, entrails fall to the floor. Even after God takes a final breath and slumps to the side, the blood continues to flow until Mother Earth (Donna Dempsey), wearing a diaphanous dress with a mask covering her eyes, emerges from underneath the voluminous fabric and glides out of the room.

After spinning around, head tilted toward the sky, she returns to God where she proceeds to impregnate herself. It isn't necrophilia in the usual sense, but she takes what she needs to conceive. Most every image in the film is too nebulous to cause offense.

Merhige then shifts to a rocky hillside on which her naked, fully-grown, mud-encrusted son (Stephen Charles Barry), aka Flesh on Bone, writhes while nomads in threadbare robes watch impassively before carting him away on a makeshift stretcher to inflict more pain before dragging him to the top of the hill. Merhige probably wouldn't appreciate a comparison to The Passion of the Christ, but it definitely crossed my mind, since Mel Gibson's blood-drenched drama practically exults in Jesus's protracted, excruciating ordeal.

After the son is left to die, the mother returns to drag him away by an umbilical cord-like lead, but she doesn't get far before pants-free nomads arrive to torture her. As they drag away her lifeless body, the son can only watch helplessly. Then again, if she had dragged him much further, she might have strangled him. There's beauty in this film, but there's no love or tenderness. It simply doesn't exist in the pitiless world Merhige has created.

By the end, the bodies have been returned to the Earth. Considering that I watched this film back-to-back with The Life We Leave, it occurred to me that Merhige was ahead of the curve when it comes to terramation. He even ends with buds emerging from the soil as the nomads go about their business without a thought for the mulched-up victims of their violence.

Begotten is a singular experience, though it reminds me of things I would rather not think about, like Marilyn Manson. Merhige, a one-time collaborator, helped to shape Manson's image through videos and tour production. Then again, Trent Reznor was drawing from similar influences, like death-obsessed photographer Joel-Peter Witkin, and look at the two guys now: Reznor has gone from strength to strength, particularly in his film-scoring partnership with Atticus Ross, while Manson is now better known for the horrific abuse he inflicted on several women, including actress Evan Rachel Wood.

Merhige, I'm sure, couldn't have known what was to come, and the two last worked together 30 years ago, but I did my due diligence and watched the videos for "Antichrist Superstar" and "Cryptorchid." In the first, Manson plays a dirtbag fascist ranting from a stage in front of an adoring crowd. There's no trace of Merhige's personality, but the latter is a different story, since it plays like Begotten in miniature, not least because it includes footage from the feature. Even the crackling sound design is similar.

The director followed up with two studio pictures, 2000's Oscar-nominated horror satire Shadow of the Vampire and 2004's psychological thriller Suspect Zero, before making two short Begotten sequels, 2006's "Din of Celestial Birds" and 2022's "Polia & Blastema: A Cosmic Opera," and a final video for Interpol's "The Heinrich Maneuver." Since then, he's worked mostly in theater, though he supervised the 4K restoration of his first feature and has been working on a Leonardo DiCaprio-produced survival drama.

Though I hadn't yet seen Begotten in 2000, Merhige's reputation preceded him, and I made certain to catch his followup when I attended the Toronto International Film Festival that year, especially because he was in attendance with Willem Dafoe, who plays actor Max Schreck, John Malkovich, who plays Nosferatu director F.W. Murnau, and Catherine McCormack, who plays actress Greta Schröder. I found the film, which has all the humor Begotten lacks, pretty delightful.

Merhige's first and last film for Lionsgate presents a highly fictionalized behind-the-scenes look at the making of Murnau's 1922 masterpiece with Malkovich as a win-at-all-costs director and Dafoe in go-for-broke mode as a real-life, bloodsucking Count Orlock. No doubt Merhige had great fun recreating B&W sequences from the original film. If Begotten wasn't to my taste, Vampire definitely was, and I wish he had made more films like it.

To his credit, though, Begotten has garnered plenty of admirers. Village Voice critic J. Hoberman, who found the film "grotesquely pretentious," was not one of them, but the great cultural critic Susan Sontag was fully on board. At the very least, it's part of an experimental, late-20th-century lineage that includes such notable works as Bill Morrison's Decasia, Aleksei German's Hard to Be a God, and Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle.

Love or loathe it, Begotten is the kind of film every cinephile should see at least once. And for the Goth or Goth-adjacent: it should be required viewing.

9/30/26 update: J. Hoberman has had somewhat of a change of heart.

Begotten opens at New York's Film Forum on Oct 2; sneak preview on Oct 1 with the director in attendance. It opens in Seattle at Northwest Film Forum on Oct 23. Begotten images (featuring Donna Dempsey and Stephen Charles Barry) from Kino Lorber and Shadow of the Vampire image (Willem Dafoe and Catherine McCormack) from Lionsgate by way of Anti-Film School.

Sweaty Guys Who Smell Like Salmon: Dakota Fanning vs Alaskan Men in The Sun Never Sets

2026-09-13T13:54:44.711-07:00

THE SUN NEVER SETS

(Joe Swanberg, USA, 2026, 104 mins)

The Sun Never Sets isn't really about Alaska, but Joe Swanberg set his latest feature, his first in six years, in my home state.

I'm not sure why, because it isn't the easiest place to shoot a feature, independent or otherwise. The summer days are so long, the winter days are so short--and cold and icy--and everything is more expensive.

A film's budget will only balloon the more a director flies in actors, crew members, and equipment. I'm sure he used as many local resources as possible, but those are limited, so I would imagine it was still a challenge. Then again, maybe that's just what he needed to shake up his routine.

For these and other reasons, most films and TV shows set in Alaska, like Northern Exposure or Christopher Nolan's Insomnia, are filmed elsewhere, usually Canada or Washington, and I can always tell, since I grew up there.

Right: David Strathairn as a sweaty guy who probably smells like salmon in John Sayles' Limbo

Maybe most people can't tell, but it's always bothered me, so John Sayles' Limbo, a low-key 1999 thriller, and Sean Penn's 2007 Jon Krakauer adaptation Into the Wild felt like outliers. Granted, I wasn't completely surprised that Sayles and Penn would film on location, but Swanberg, the one-time Chicago King of Mumblecore? No, I did not see that coming.

I've long had a fraught relationship with the director’s work. Granted, I haven't seen all 20 features, plus streaming projects, but I've seen enough. Drinking Buddies (2013), however, marked a shift from the solipsistic, navel-gazey films that had come before.

In it, Olivia Wilde and Swanberg muse Jake Johnson play straight people who forge a Platonic friendship, and that's the gist of it. It isn't as common as you might think, since most on-screen friendships comprise women with women and men with men, not counting the gay best friend, since there's no possibility of romance–unless one of the straight people realizes they aren't so straight after all. The Sun Never Sets is a return to the loose-limbed relationship dramas with which Swanberg made his name, albeit on a slightly bigger scale and with a more experienced director at the helm.

Dakota Fanning, most recently of Netflix's Ripley, plays Wendy, a 31-year-old heavy-machine operator whose married friends are starting to have kids. She can't relate, because it isn't where she's at, at least not yet. (Swanberg had two kids with filmmaker Kris Rey, from whom he is now divorced.)

Left: a more glammed-up Dakota Fanning in Ripley with Johnny Flynn

Wendy isn't single, though. For the past two years, she's been seeing Jack (Johnson, recently of Apple TV's Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed), a middle-aged hedge fund manager and part-time girls basketball coach with two kids of his own. His ex-wife (Anna Konkle) has moved on to a new partner (played by Swanberg) and new kid, but the director avoids soap operatics, since Jack doesn't resent his ex and the kids don't resent his girlfriend.

Wendy believes she's ready to settle down with a guy who doesn't want to remarry or have more kids, but Jack is skeptical, since she has interests, like camping and houseboats, that don't jibe with his. He's not wrong that she isn't ready, but his demand that they separate for six months, so that she can explore life as an unencumbered individual--a sort of Rumspringa for non-Amish adults--feels controlling, since he doesn't give her a choice, though he swears he'll be waiting for her if she decides to return.

If I were in her shoes, I wouldn't, because one-sided ultimatums don't bode well for lasting relationships, not least when her friends take his side. She also has the option of not seeing anyone and biding her time for six months, but she reenters the dating pool instead, both awkwardly and reluctantly.

Then one night, she runs into Chuck (Gotham's Cory Michael Smith), an old flame who has returned to town as a pilot for an air taxi company, and their chemistry is instant, even after three years apart (though Fanning and Johnson have an amiable rapport, there's more sexual heat between her and Smith). Jack didn't think she would hook up with another guy so soon, but she does, and he doesn't take it well. I can see why she might want to have fun while they're on a break, but Chuck immediately starts talking marriage, and she doesn't seem to find that premature.

Fanning is very good, and this is mostly her film, as much as Apple TV's Margo's Got Money Troubles was mostly sister Elle's show, but Swanberg treats her like a yo-yo. That's the point, but as the men increase the pressure, and she bounces between the two, both look like bad bets.

Alaska may offer its share of "sweaty guys who smell like salmon," but that's no reason to settle. The way Jack tells her he loves her over and over again comes to feel aggressive, especially since she rarely says she loves him back. I don't doubt that she does, but not quite as passionately.

Tired of being alone, Jack takes up with Sara (Karley Sciortino from Swanberg's Netflix series Easy and co-writer of Gregg Araki's I Want Your Sex), and the two couples even run into each other at her favorite watering hole for trivia night, but Swanberg doesn't play any of this for laughs, despite the way some viewers--though not me--have characterized the film as a rom-com. That tense evening, which leads to a series of shouting and laughing matches, serves as a catalyst, but not necessarily in the way I would have expected. I was certain the film would end in one very particular way, but it doesn't, and that's to Swanberg's credit, since these characters all have some work to do.

Though reviews have been all over the map, I liked the film more than not, and would recommend Richard Brody's unusual review, in which he explains how what might play like weaknesses in another film become strengths in this one. The Sun Never Sets can be repetitive, some actors handle the improvised dialogue better than others, and there's more mid-tempo singer-songwriter material on the soundtrack than any one film can use, some performed by Joe's brother James. None of it is bad, necessarily, and I'm always happy to hear former Seattleities La Luz, but it lends the film an adult contemporary sheen that works against the prickliness of the scenario.

I could also nitpick Swanberg's representation of Anchorage, nicely shot in 35mm by Eon Mora, except he's not far off the mark. Not everyone works as a pilot or a fisherman; there are lawyers and accountants, too, but that's never been Swanberg's milieu, so it makes sense that he would focus on less-corporate types, some of whom also paint or, like Wendy, work with wood. And it was fun to spot familiar locations, like Chilkoot Charlie's, Kaladi Brothers Coffee, and the Sunshine Plaza (above), where my mom worked as a pre-sentence reporter for the Alaska State Department of Corrections.

I wouldn't want to overpraise The Sun Never Sets, but it deserves better than it's gotten, and may well serve as the most accurate cinematic depiction of my hometown to date. I mean, the sky really is pearlescent white, not blue or grey, more often than not. It's the damnest thing, and probably has a lot to do with Cook Inlet, the body of water bordering the city, but when you see a film set in and around Anchorage featuring the bluest of blue skies, you can bet it was probably shot somewhere else.

The Sun Never Sets only played in Seattle on Sept 10, but it's playing IFC Center in New York through Sept 17. It's also playing Anchorage's Cinemark Century and Beartooth Theatre Pub, among other venues. Images: The Independent Film Company via Mark Reviews Movies (Dakota Fanning), Far Out Magazine (Fanning and Cory Michael Smith), 1A (Fanning and Jake Johnson), and the IMDb (David Strathairn and Fanning and Flynn).

Seattle Sound Flashback: Lynn Shelton's Conversations with Her 13-Year-Old Self

2026-09-07T16:10:03.451-07:00

Here is a revived version of a 2006 Seattle Sound piece about Lynn Shelton's directorial debut and a sidebar about the independent company that produced it. I'm not certain when the publication came to an end, but I contributed from 2006-2007, during which time it morphed into Sound. City Arts, also now expired, would rise from the ashes.

LYNN SHELTON AND LAURA VEIRS:

CONVERSATIONS WITH MY 13-YEAR-OLD SELF

For her first full-length feature, Lynn Shelton, who traded acting for directing several years ago, decided to revisit a time in her life that may be long gone, but still feels as fresh as last night's dream.

Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at 2006's Slamdance Film Festival, We Go Way Back is the captivating result. Dreams, in fact, play a big part in the story, as Kate (Cornish grad Amber Hubert), a fixture on the fringe circuit, finds her dream-life intruding upon her real life upon turning 23.

Offered the lead in Ibsen's proto-feminist drama Hedda Gabler, the Ballard actress should be thrilled, but instead she keeps re-reading letters she wrote to herself at 13. Meanwhile, the play's production grows increasingly convoluted, to the point where Kate must speak her lines in Norwegian, while everyone else gets to speak in English. Then there are all the not-great men she can't resist. Why? What happened to her self-confidence?

Kate dreams about the more self-assured young woman she used to be until that person--13-year-old Kate (Garfield student Maggie Brown)--comes to life. As Shelton explains in her director's statement, "At 13, I possessed a clarity of vision and a degree of self-confidence that I marvel at today."

Aside from the Northwest talent on both sides of the camera, We Go Way Back takes place in Seattle and the Key Peninsula and features an all-local soundtrack. Music supervisor Sean Nelson (Harvey Danger) helped Shelton round up a stellar line-up of artists, including the Decemberists and the Lights [Nelson would star in Shelton's followup, My Effortless Brilliance].

Local singer/songwriter Laura Veirs, however, provides the bulk of the score, and her evocative songs are a perfect fit for Shelton's expressive visuals.

As Veirs recollects, "Once I met her, I instantly connected with her and wanted to get involved. She showed me some of her previous short films, and I liked those a lot, so I dove right into the project."

Aside from a cover of 1930s standard "I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter," the rest of the material stems from Veirs' recordings Carbon Glacier and Year of Meteors. When we met to discuss the movie, Shelton enthused, "It's amazing. It just works so beautifully as soundtrack."

The experience of working together was so fulfilling that she followed up by shooting a video for "Magnetized," with plans to include it as a DVD extra.

A longtime Seattle resident, Shelton teaches at The Art Institute and expects to start shooting her second feature next summer. Veirs, meanwhile, looks forward to more movie composing. She acknowledges, "It's not something I'd done prior to working with Lynn." Now it's one of her main objectives.

As for her fall plans: "My band the Tortured Souls and I are touring the West Coast, and then we're making our fifth record together." [The result was 2007's Saltbreakers.] Sadly for Seattleites, she intends to relocate to Portland afterward, but don't count out further collaborations between these two talented Northwesterners.

We Go Way Back opens at Seattle’s Varsity Theatre on September 15.

THE PRODUCERS: FILM PRODUCTION IN SEATTLE

We Go Way Back was produced by Seattle studio The Film Company. Founded in 2004 by filmmaker Gregg Lachow (The Seven Mysteries of Life), it's not to be confused with the Capitol Hill cinematheque Northwest Film Forum, which produced and entered the world of distribution with Robinson Devor's critically acclaimed Police Beat. The two non-profits are separate entities, although a pre-Film Company Lachow was recipient of the NWFF's first "Start-to-Finish" grant for his 1999 feature Money Buys Happiness.

As Lachow explains, "[The Film Company] greenlights artists, not projects. We don't read scripts or hear pitches." So far, they have produced one short and four features. (NYC's Cyan Pictures is distributing We Go Way Back.)

Their next feature release is Canadian director Guy Maddin's Seattle-filmed, silent effort Brand Upon the Brain!, which premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival this fall. Then they'll begin working on The Part I Love the Best, to be directed by Lachow's wife, actress Megan Murphy.

Michael Seiwerath is NWFF's executive director, a post he took over from cofounder Jamie Hook in 2001. (Hook founded the organization with Deborah Girdwood in 1995.)

According to Seiwerath, "The NWFF has aided in the production of more than 500 films. Police Beat is the fifth Start-to-Finish feature film we have actively produced or co-produced, and we are in development on the sixth, [David Russo's] #2. We are looking to start a national art house film network, made of the cinematheques in North America." They are also working on a DVD release for Police Beat.

Endnote: I interviewed Lynn Shelton in person at Caffe Vita; Laura Veirs, Gregg Lachow, and Michael Seiwerath by email. We Go Way Back is available to stream on most every digital platform thanks to Factory 25. In case you're wondering what Maggie Brown has been up to, Paul Siple, who went to school with her at Garfield, provides the very cool answer.

Images: Rotten Tomatoes (Maggie Brown), MUBI (Amber Hubert), Mastering Modernity (a nightmarish Hedda Gabler), Always on the Run (Veirs in/around 2006), and The Criterion Collection (Brand Upon the Brain!).

My Need to Possess You Has Consumed My Soul: On Eckhart Schmidt’s 1982 Der Fan

2026-08-27T23:37:54.169-07:00

DER FAN / The Fan (aka Trance)

(Eckhart Schmidt, Germany, 1982, 92 minutes)

My need to possess you has consumed my soul

My life is trembling, I have no control

–Michael Des Barres and Holly Knight, "Obsession" (1983)

There's nothing more terrifying than a teenage girl.

Granted, teenage girls have been mooning over pop stars for decades, but the late German filmmaker Eckhart Schmidt took that basic idea and ran with it all the fucking way. His 1982 psychological thriller has now been restored in 4K and premieres in the US at New York's Metrograph on Friday.

Simone (17-year-old Luxembourg actress Désirée Nosbusch, who looks like '80s Diane Lane from some angles and '70s Jenny Agutter from others), a high school student, is crazy about new wave musician R (Rheingold singer Bodo Staiger, whose Düsseldorf band also performed the score), a mononym like Robin Scott, who recorded as M when he released 1979's "Pop Muzik."

Right: Lothar Manteuffel, Bodo Staiger, and Brigitte Kunze

of Rheingold

Schmidt presents Der Fan, his third film, from Simone's point of view as the mostly-silent superfan gives voice(over) to her every thought. It isn't just about loving R's chilly, synth-based music, which she listens to incessantly, but about loving the gentle, caring man who rules her fantasies, so she writes him letter after letter, undeterred by the fact that he never writes back--after all, plenty of other girls do the same--but she's certain he loves her; he just doesn't know it yet. (Rheingold's quintessentially Germanic music splices Kraftwerk with Bowie in Berlin.)

Compared to R, everything else falls away: school, parents, even food (every time Simone sits down to eat she's interrupted). The teen crush is a universal phenomenon, except Simone doesn't even share her obsession with friends, because she doesn't have any. She's a pretty young woman with adorably crooked teeth and an enviable wardrobe from a middle class, two-parent household, but she has little going for her personality-wise.

She even gets aggressive with the postman (Klaus Münster)--the closest thing she has to a friend--after weeks without a letter from R. She goes so far as to accuse the other postal workers of also keeping them from her.

Because of her looks, her leather pants, and her propensity to wander around Ulm unaccompanied, men of various ages try to pick her up, and she seems distinctly uncomfortable with the attention. Eckhart suggests she isn't interested in real men at all, just the fantasy version who lives in her head.

She confirms her lack of interest in reality when she throws her books away after daydreaming through her classes. After her dad threatens to send her to boarding school, she packs a bag and runs off to Munich, where she has more uncomfortable encounters with inferior men on her way to meet the superior R, who will surely sweep her off her feet. And he kind of does.

Simone waits outside a television studio where she knows he'll be taping an episode of "Top Pop," and one day he magically appears, but instead of asking for an autograph, like all the other female fans, she stares and stares…and faints. When she comes to, with R looking over her, she's in the studio, where he invites her to sit in the stands while he prepares. It's 40 minutes into the picture, and she finally says more than a few words when he comes over for a friendly chat before the performance while his assistant and sometime (or wannabe) girlfriend stares daggers at the two of them.

R follows up with a little private time in the green room where they share a kiss. More significantly, he leaves the studio after the taping with her and not the dagger-staring blonde. It's probably happened many times before, but Simone doesn't care; she's convinced she's the only one who counts.

Instead of his hotel, R takes her to the modernist home of an associate who's away in the US. This seems risky in the pre-cellphone era, not least when one of these people is more than a little sexually inexperienced.

Once they cross the threshold, Eckhart also slips into a more arty mode in terms of the staging, lighting, and camera work. It isn't psychedelic necessarily, but everything seems off-kilter. Clothes come off and the usual things happen, but this isn't The Wall. Simone is a teenager, yes, but R isn't aggressive, though the Rheingold score has an eerie, The Hunger vibe to it.

Simone was expecting a night of passion, except things end just as they were beginning to heat up as R suddenly announces that he needs to get back to his team to smooth things over, since he had left in a bit of a huff when they started to make demands he didn't feel like dealing with at the moment.

So, he gets dressed and prepares to leave while Simone remains undressed. He gives her the key and swears he'll be back, but he doesn't clock how agitated she's becoming as he appears to move ever so slowly towards the door. Then, she screams. And screams again, and makes her move. Suffice to say, now he's well and truly hers, because he isn't going anywhere. Ever.

What happens next plays out in darkness after Simone hears voices outside and turns off the light to evade detection. Tears roll down her face as she does what she does; you can make of that what you will. If you've read anything about the film, you'll have some idea what's in store, but I won't spoil the surprise, other than to say that Eckhart relies more on suggestion than special effects. Simone may be a poor student, but she's a clever girl.

In Keir-La Janisse's essential guide to cinematic women on the edge, House of Psychotic Women, she describes Der Fan as "more art film than exploitation film," and she's spot on, even as other writers have described it as Euroshock or various shades of horror. They're not completely wrong, but it does have a certain icy elegance that takes it into a different register.

Though Bodo Staiger never acted in another feature, he's convincing as a narcissist who sees the comely admirer as willing, yet fails to really see her or hear what she's saying. It may be a problem she's struggled with her whole life: no one ever really saw or heard her, so she turned inward and stayed there. When she's with her parents, for instance, they only seem concerned that she attends school, eats her dinner, and that's about it.

With R, Simone drops hints that she isn't just another fan, but he misses them, maybe wilfully. If he isn't as cold or as cruel as I expected, he's still an experienced adult man taking advantage of a vulnerable young woman.

The same could be said of Eckhart Schmidt, since Désirée Nosbusch spends an entire extended sequence in the altogether.

A known quantity in Germany at the time, she went to court to get the uncut version suppressed, but the filmmaker prevailed, leading to a falling out, though Eckhart got his, in a manner of speaking, since the film has suffered every imaginable indignity over the years, though the various adulterated versions have also helped to make it a curiosity, a collectible, and a cult classic.

Years later, Nosbusch and Eckhart would reconcile, but I can see why it was a difficult shoot and why she had regrets, and yet I can't imagine anyone else in the role. Simone is so closed-off to everyone except the man who lives in her head that she could have been off-putting, but she's magnetic.

After Der Fan, she continued to act for another five decades. Unlike Eckhart and Staiger, she's still with us (still exceptionally attractive, too). I hope she's made her peace with the film, because it's one in which a casually predatory man won't go on, because he can't go on, and a very hungry young lady will finally sit down at an elegant table to enjoy a hearty meal.

Der Fan was previously available on home video through Mondo Macabro, but the new Fun City Editions release marks the US theatrical debut. It's the star attraction in Metrograph's series That Most Taboo of Red Meats featuring House, In My Skin, Jennifer's Body, Raw, and Spider Baby. No Seattle dates yet, but if you're up for a road trip, Der Fan plays Portland's Hollywood Theatre on Sept 20. Images from the IMDb (Désirée Nosbusch, Nosbusch with Klaus Münster, and Simone Brahmann staring daggers), Spotify (Rheingold portrait), and Mondo Digital (Nosbusch with Bodo Staiger).

A Journey into a Mysterious Past with Carla Simón's Semiautobiographical Romería

2026-08-22T12:54:06.245-07:00

ROMERIA / Pilgrimage

(Carla Simón, Spain, 2025, 111 minutes)

With a pack on her back and a camcorder at the ready, 18-year-old Marina (newcomer Llúcia Garcia, who recalls Léa Seydoux) sets out in 2004 to track down her biological father's death certificate in order to apply for a scholarship to study film in Barcelona. And to solve the mystery of his relatively short life.

Catalan filmmaker Carla Simón (Summer 1993, Alcarràs) uses Marina's mother's diary entries, which cover a crucial four-year period, as an organizing principle, augmented by Marina's video images (32-year-old Catalan-Valencian actress Laia Manzanares reads the entries in voiceover).

Things get off to an awkward start when Marina visits the civil registry in Vigo and finds no record of her birth (her mother also died when she was young, but earlier). A clerk tells her they can correct the record with a sworn affidavit from her grandparents, so she goes on a sailing trip with her cousin Lois (Sex and Lucia's Tristán Ulloa, below), his wife, and their sons. Their final destination: her grandparents' home. On the phone, she tells her adoptive mother these people seem rich, though she isn't after money.

On land, she connects with aunts and an uncle. Though they're welcoming, she tells her mother she finds them odd, possibly because there's something they aren't telling her, like why her grandparents (Marina Troncoso and José Ángel Egido from Mondays in the Sun) warned her adoptive parents to stay away. A younger cousin also says they were told not to touch her, most likely because her father died from AIDS, though that's not how HIV+ transmission works.

As Marina learns more about her parents, she finds that a lot of it isn't good, but also that his family only made her father Alfonso's final years harder.

Aside from a few revelations, she mostly meets with evasions, especially from her grandparents. She finds an ally, however, in her cousin Nuno (fellow newcomer Mitch Martin, here billed simply as Mitch), though their physical chemistry isn't exactly ideal since they're, you know, cousins, but their relationship is convivial, conspiratorial, and thoroughly Platonic.

Then she meets a scruffy street cat, who leads her down a dark street and away from a bustling bar, at which point she steps into an entirely different realm. Considering the realism of the rest of the film, this extended sequence which takes place in the mid-1980s, isn't unwelcome, though it moves things in an entirely different direction, one filled with sex, drugs, full frontal nudity, and ghostly choreography as the diary entries Marina has been reading come to vivid, feverish life.

Simón, in her second semiautobiographical feature, returns to the real world at the end, and La Chimera DP Hélène Louvart handles both modes with ease. Marina sets out to find a document and to solve a mystery, but she also forces her family, as much through her resemblance to her mother as to her actions, to confront their past--and gets in a little harmless revenge, too--though I didn't realize until I looked up the credits that the diary entries aren't fictionalized, but come from letters written by Simón's mother, Neus.

Romería follows 2017's Summer 1993 in which Simón revisits the period in her childhood just after she lost her parents and as she adjusts to her new adoptive home. (I haven't yet seen 2022's Golden Bear-winning Alcarràs, which explores her Catalan heritage, but I plan to watch it next.)

Simón could have become a novelist, or even a therapist, as a way of dealing with her past, but she became a filmmaker, just as Marina plans to do. Fortunately, neither film is solipsistic or self-pitying, not least when the stigma around AIDS persists, though not to the same degree as in the 1980s, during Spain's La Movida Madrileña, which gave rise to an increase in intravenous drug use and HIV+ infection.

I was particularly impressed by the naturalistic performance of Llúcia Garcia, who Simón's crew plucked from obscurity as she was returning from summer camp. She handles two roles with grace and seems comfortable with nudity and semi-nudity, since there's a lot of both. It's hard to believe Romería represents her first professional credit. I hope it won't be her last.

For all the time spent with biological family in the film, though, a significant subtext lies mostly behind the scenes, since Simón's adoptive brother composed the score, her adoptive sister appears in her films, and her adoptive parents read her screenplays and watch the edits. If Marina appears uncomfortable around her blood relatives, the making of Romería, in addition to Simón's previous films, honors the loving adoptive families who help to make the dreams of one-time orphans come true.

Romería plays SIFF Film Center through Sunday, Aug 23. Images from Janus Films via The New Yorker (Llúcia Garcia), the IMDb (Garcia with Tristán Ulloa), The Moveable Fest (Garcia with Mitch Martin), and Variety (Credit: Quim Vives; Garcia with Ulloa and Marina Troncoso).

Advance to Paradise with Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Murder Mystery The Samurai and the Prisoner

2026-08-16T21:59:58.440-07:00

THE SAMURAI AND THE PRISONER / Kokurôjô /

黒牢城,

(Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2026, Japan, 147 minutes)

True to its title, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's The Samurai and the Prisoner is a jidaigeki, or period drama, adapted from Honobu Yonezawa's 2021 novel Kokurôjô, with a warrior and a captive, but it's also an eastern proto-western and a murder mystery with all the trimmings.

In 16th century Japan, specifically during the Sengoku period, there will be mysteries aplenty and circumstances will make a detective out of Araki Murashige (Departures' Masahiro Motoki), lord of Settsu and enemy of brutal warlord Oda Nobunaga (Shingo Bandô), who aims to overtake Arioka Castle. Though merciful, Murashige will do what it takes to protect his holdings.

When Kuroda Kanbei (Cloud's Masaki Suda), a clever Nobunaga envoy and a member of the rival Harima clan, tries to persuade him to surrender by insisting he can't win, Murashige imprisons him, and when Abe Jūemon switches loyalties from Murashige to Nobunaga, his 11-year-old son Jinen asks to be killed, just as Kanbei had done. Murashige refuses, despite his wife's entreaties, but the boy ends up dead anyway. According to the bushidō code, it's less shameful to be killed than to be imprisoned.

Murashige suspects foul play, and sets out to determine the culprit by interviewing suspects, many of whom mention that Koori Juemon (Bright Future's Joe Odagiri) was wielding a longbow that night, though he swears it was to protect the castle from invaders. With no other leads, Murashige takes an unorthodox step by asking Kanbei, the prisoner, to help him solve the mystery. With his help, he does, but the film isn't over as the battle for Arioka Castle continues.

Though merciful (and possibly infertile), Murashige is hardly a pacifist, and when he feels it's time to attack Nobunaga's forces, he leads the charge, and his men successfully beat them back. In the melée, though he loses a favored warrior, and vows to keep an eye on his son. Considering Jinen's death combined with his wife's sorrow over their childlessness, I expected the boy to play a larger role, but Murashige never mentions him again.

The battle itself, though, produces another mystery regarding the death of Nobunaga commander Ōtsu Nagamasa and the role of two clans under Murashige's leadership, so he questions the Christian Takayama Dario (Ikkei Watanabe) and the Buddhist Saika Magoroku (Kiyohiko Shibukawa), just as he questioned the suspects in Jinen's murder, but the case remains unsolved until he seeks Kanbei's counsel, and once again, the prisoner delivers.

As the seasons change from winter to spring to summer to fall, there are more murders and further mysteries involving theft and arson, and Kanbei helps him to solve each one. Murashige offers to release him if he renounces his allegiance to Nobunaga and joins his war council. After all, that's what Murashige once did, and the prisoner has earned his respect. Kanbei agrees, but that doesn't mean he's trustworthy, not least when he says he's more interested in serving the man, whom he also respects, than the mission, which he believes is lost. Murashige also has his men to consider, since they're unlikely to accept a Harima member as a colleague. It's a conundrum with no easy answers.

Like a Watson to his Holmes, Kanbei points him in the right direction, but Murashige comes to find, on his own, that all these mysterious deaths are connected. His mercy was seen as a vulnerability and an impediment to Settsu's survival, so an associate took matters into their own hands, but no one could see the long game Murashige was playing quite like Kanbei.

If there's a lesson here, and I believe there are a few, it's that listening can be a leader's greatest asset. I won't say whether Kanbei proves trustworthy or not, but Murashige takes him as seriously as his closest advisors, and learns more from him than anyone else. If they don't exactly ride off into the sunset at the end, Murashige is better off for knowing--and saving--him.

I haven't seen all of Kurosawa's feature films, but I've seen a baker's dozen, and The Samurai and the Prisoner marks his first jidaigeki. He does the genre proud on every level, particularly the cinematography from Cloud's Yasuyuki Sasaki who works wonders with light and shadow, though it isn't his first historical effort, since the Ryūsuke Hamaguchi co-written Wife of a Spy, one of his few films to center on a female character, took place during World War II.

That said, it took me a while to ease into the richly-detailed world Kurosawa creates, because there are so many characters, and their relationships to each other are as vital as they are complicated, but the more I watched, the more it all made sense. The director's films aren't usually this densely populated, though the way this one boils down to the tension between two worthy opponents isn't especially unusual, and also powers previous films, like 1997 J-horror classic Cure, which took inspiration from the Starling vs. Lecter relationship in Jonathan Demme-by-way-of Thomas Harris's Silence of the Lambs. That captor vs. captive dynamic continues here.

Kurasawa has always been terrific at casting, and he's really upped the ante this time around, because every actor rises to the occasion, including Yuriko Yoshitaka, the sole woman, as Murashige's wife, Chiyoho, a Siege of Nagashima survivor who doesn't understand her husband's reticence to kill even as she's haunted by the blood-soaked, Nobunaga-fueled nightmares of her childhood.

Another notable performer, Yamato Kochi--a man with such a serious countenance that he tends to look a little loony when he smiles--who plays the crucial role of Settsu warrior Itami Ichirozaemon, may be most familiar to non-Japanese viewers, because he played "the walking man" in Genki Kawamura's Neon horror hit Exit 8, but Masahiro Motoki as Murashige makes the most significant impression as an idiosyncratic leader who doesn't owe his beliefs, in the film, to Christian or Buddhist teachings, but simply to the idea that there's nothing weak or unmanly about mercy, about knowing when to walk away, and about knowing how to make the perfect pot of tea.

The Samurai and the Prisoner plays SIFF Cinema Uptown through Thurs, Aug 20. Images from The Japan Times (Masaki Suda and Masahiro Motoki) and the IMDb (Motoki and Joe Odagiri and the defenders of Arioka Castle).

Original Maverick: James Garner, 1928-2014

2026-08-09T22:51:20.414-07:00

Here's the pre-obituary I wrote for Amazon's now-defunct blog Armchair Commentary in 2009. Garner would end up outliving this piece by five years.

"What was I qualified to do to make a living? Nothing. You don't need qualifications as an actor or a politician. And I didn't want to be a politician."--James Garner

Emmy Award-winning actor James Garner (born James Bumgarner) died on July 19, 2014 at the age of 86.

Star of screens both big and small, the tall, dark, and handsome Westerner made his biggest mark as the title character in popular programs Maverick on ABC in the 1950s and '60s and The Rockford Files on NBC in the '70s (followed by eight made-for-TV movies on CBS in the '90s).

Maverick slideshow with Bret (Garner) and his brother, Bart (Jack Kelly)

Born in Denver, Oklahoma, Garner served in the Merchant Marine, the National Guard, and the U.S. Army, receiving two Purple Hearts for injuries sustained in the Korean War. Despite his all-American good looks, Garner continued to struggle with serious health problems in the ensuing decades, culminating in quintuple bypass and knee-replacement surgery.

After his service career ended, Garner moved from the stage to advertising work to guest spots and would continue to act in commercials, most famously for Polaroid. While The Rockford Files, in which he played exonerated ex-con-turned-private eye Jim Rockford, cemented Garner's star status, the Emmy Award-winning show also served as a training ground for writer David Chase, who went on to create The Sopranos, and actor Tom Selleck, who followed in Garner's primetime footsteps as Magnum P.I.

Trailer for The Great Escape (1963)

During his career, Garner also earned an Oscar nomination for Murphy's Romance with Sally Field and appeared in Up Periscope, The Children's Hour with Shirley MacLaine, The Great Escape with Steve McQueen, The Americanization of Emily with frequent co-star Julie Andrews, Support Your Local Sheriff!, John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix, which kindled a lifelong enthusiasm for racing, HBO's Barbarians at the Gate, and Victor/Victoria (below), directed by Andrews' husband, Blake Edwards.

One of Garner's last hits was Nick Cassavetes' 2004 The Notebook, in which he played Ryan Gosling's character as a senior citizen. It was a stretch, but Garner made it work. In 2009, House creator David Shore announced that he would be adapting The Rockford Files for a new generation, though it's hard to imagine anyone who could possibly fill James Garner's shoes. (The Rockford Files with David Boreanaz will premiere on NBC in Fall 2026.)

While promoting Clint Eastwood's 2000 Space Cowboys, in which he re-teamed with the Maverick guest star, he told the BBC, "When I go, I want to finish the last shot of a picture and go directly off the set, like Spencer Tracy."

At the time of his death, James Garner was survived by Lois Clarke, his wife of 58 years, and daughters Kimberly and Gigi (Clarke died in 2021 at 98).

James Garner joins previous obituaries for Peter Falk, Sidney Poitier, and Norman Jewison. Images from The New York Times (Garner, circa The Rockford Files, DPA/Picture-Alliance via Associated Press) and Academy Museum of Motion Pictures (Garner and Julie Andrews in Victor/Victoria).

Not Everybody Does It But Everybody Should: In I Want Your Sex, Gregg Araki Returns to Give the Office Comedy a BDSM Makeover

2026-07-31T13:29:29.211-07:00

I WANT YOUR SEX
(Gregg Araki, 2026, USA, 90 minutes)

Part One: Gregg and Olivia

Sex is natural, sex is good
Not everybody does it
But everybody should
–George Michael, "I Want Your Sex" (1987)

It's been 12 years since iconoclastic director Gregg Araki's last feature film, White Bird in a Blizzard, with Shailene Woodley and Eva Green. Since 1987, he used to release a film every two to three years on average, and then he just stopped. I couldn't say whether it was due to a lack of funding, a lack of inspiration, or something else, but it's great to have him back.

Not that Araki ever went away, he just shifted to TV. He even created his own series, Now Apocalypse, for the Starz network, but it only lasted for one season (author and actress Karley Sciortino, the co-writer, also co-wrote I Want Your Sex). Considering that the uncharacteristically downbeat White Bird, an adaptation of Laura Kasischke's 2013 novel, wasn't his best work, I suspect he may have needed time to regroup, rethink, and recharge.

Right: Shailene Woodley and Christopher Meloni in White Bird in a Blizzard

Which brings us to I Want Your Sex with Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman. It premiered in Seattle at SIFF along with Wilde's acclaimed (and improved) adaptation of Spanish writer/director Cesc Gay's The Invite, which closed out the festival and continues at the Uptown through Aug 13. Both films are sex comedies, though Wilde's relies more on talk than action, and her sex-starved character is considerably less adventurous than Penélope Cruz's sexologist.

I was drawn to Araki's film by the director, but also by the actors, not least because I wasn't sure how a sex comedy with that pairing would work.

Well, the good news is that it does. The weird news is that Wilde already lived out an older woman-younger man scenario in public a few years ago.

At this point, I should mention that the average age of an Araki performer is 24; the youngest was Midnight Skin's 16-year-old Brady Corbet and the oldest was Nowhere's 31-year-old Rachel True. At 42, Wilde is the oldest by far, but lest Araki, 67, seem like a complete ageist, he hired Roscoe Lee Brown, 84, to narrate 2007's Smiley Face. It was Browne's final film.

Left: Wilde and Styles--those names!--in 2022

In Araki's film, Wilde plays Erika Tracy, the boss, and Hoffman plays Elliot, her employee. There's a 20-year difference between the two, but it isn't just about age or gender, but power: Erika has all of it, and Elliot has none.

While working on Don't Worry Darling, her followup to 2019's Booksmart, Wilde entered into a relationship with Harry Styles, a pop singer 10 years her junior. Granted, I wouldn't describe a global superstar as powerless, but he was the actor and Wilde was the director.

That fact combined with last-minute casting changes, leaked text messages, and a reportedly contentious set, made the film's release challenging for Wilde, even as older--sometimes much older--male directors have been getting busy with younger actresses since the dawn of motion pictures.

You'd figure Wilde would want to put that whole ordeal behind her, and yet I Want Your Sex plays like a super-powered satire about that same sort of dynamic. It's sexy, funny, and over the top in ways that won't be to all tastes, but it might also have been--for Olivia Wilde, at least--cathartic.

Part Two: Erika and Elliot

Araki opens on a scene from out of a very kinky version of Sunset Blvd. There's a naked woman floating facedown in the pool, and inside her modernist home is a young man clad solely in pink nylon lingerie with hair pointing every which way and blood and lipstick smeared all over his face.

Right: William Holden in Billy Wilder's 1950 Sunset Blvd

"Fuck, fuck, fuck," he wails. This is Elliot, a recent and rather aimless UCLA graduate in media arts, and the woman is (or was) Erika Tracy, a ridiculously glamorous artist more famous for her cynical, yet savvy pronouncements about modern art than for her cynical, yet savvy pieces of modern art.

Araki tries to have his cake and eat it, too--and mostly succeeds--because I Want Your Sex satirizes artists who get by more on their looks and their shock tactics than on their artistic talent, except Erika knows her art is bullshit and that her buyers are suckers. She just likes to be in control.

That time appears to have come to an end, so Araki backtracks to the, um, 9½ weeks before she ended up in the pool, and after he returns to the scene of the possible crime, he'll flash forward to trace the aftermath. Instead of causing confusion, the whip-pans back and forth, preceded by oversized on-screen text, add to the humor through their exaggerated portentousness.

Elliot meets Erika when he arrives at her studio to interview for an assistant gig. Compared to the pierced and tattooed young hopefuls gathered in the lobby, he's pretty normcore with his rock band t-shirts (Sonic Youth, Blondie), gas station attendant shirts, sneakers, jeans, and scraggly beard.

Inexplicably, Erika hires him after asking inappropriate questions, like, "Do you have a girlfriend?" He questions her questions, but lets her know that he does indeed have a girlfriend. Minerva (UK singer Charli xcx, cast against type), a medical student, spends nights in bed studying while wearing pajamas, glasses, and a high ponytail. It's not that she isn't attractive, it's that she finds sex--with Elliot, at least--a burden, and Charli mines laughs as the world's most bored and least exciting girlfriend (and her American accent only slips once).

Minerva is all business and no sex, while Erika is a little business and a lot of sex, starting with black, white, and red outfits made from leather, latex, and sheer fabrics that leave little to the imagination (her imperious office manager, played by Daveed Diggs, also rocks some fun fits). To understand how Elliot could be attracted to such a controlling figure, Wilde has to look hotter than hot, and she really does, thanks in part to costume designer Arianne Phillips (Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood), who gives Shirley Kurata's eye-popping getups in I Love Boosters a run for the money.

Elliot lives with his less glamorous, more down-to-earth friend, Apple (The Studio's Chase Sui Wonders, virtually unrecognizable from role to role), who is like his conscience in human form. Apple doesn't understand his attraction to Erika's work, though she finds his attraction to Erika easier to understand, especially since she's virtually naked in her video and photographic art.

Elliot also makes a friend of a kind in the narcissistic Zap (Scream's Mason Gooding), a gay studio assistant with a hyperactive sex life who’s nearly as cynical as Erika. He's a non-stop quip machine, and though not all of his zingers land--something I would say about the film as a whole--many do.

Zap warns Elliot that Erika tends to cycle through boy toys pretty rapidly, but he's too obsessed to pay attention. "I think about you all the time," he tells her, and much like Colin in Harry Lighton's BDSM dramedy Pillion, he finds that he likes to be dominated: "With you," he explains, "I don't have to make any decisions." In Pillion, though, Colin's dom, Ray, isn't also his boss. He isn't female either, though Araki has described I Want Your Sex as queer. I suspect he means that in the widest sense of the word, i.e. "differing in some way," according to Merriam-Webster, "from what is usual or normal."

Though his film starts out as a sex comedy, once things go to shit, Araki segues from genre to genre: erotic thriller, melodrama, noir, and horror by way of a procedural-like framing device as Detectives Zem and Zola (Johnny Knoxville and The Doom Generation's Margaret Cho) interrogate Elliot.

In the beginning, though, he's just an eager young employee trying to please a "brilliant" and demanding boss.

Elliot doesn't have a mean bone in his body, but he's not that different from Fred MacMurray's sap in Double Indemnity. His "wildest fantasies," he exclaims, are "coming to life," so he'll put up with anything, except Erika has a make-or-break show coming up, and she relieves her stress by putting Elliot in increasingly humiliating situations involving French artist Yvette (Kaboom's Roxane Mesquida) and the awkward, insecure Apple, who deserves better.

By the end, he's lost everything, but Erika has, too, albeit in different ways. Araki is hardly a moralist, but he was only going to let her get away with her abuse for so long, especially once Elliot learns what she was really up to. Against all odds, the director manages to conjure up a happy ending out of a scenario that began with a naked woman floating facedown in the pool.

Part Three: Gregg, Olivia, and Cooper

For all Araki's fun with genre, I Want Your Sex is a comedy at heart, and it's my favorite of the year next to Boots Riley's Boosters in which another ridiculously glamorous woman (played by Demi Moore) dominates and exploits her younger and more vulnerable employees. I wouldn't say these men are taking powerful women to task, though; just duplicitous ones.

I've seen Araki's 12th film twice, a good test for a comedy, because some aren't as funny without the element of surprise, but I found the funny stuff just as funny the second time around and the less-funny stuff--like Zem and Zola--just as less-funny. It's his best comedy since Smiley Face. If anything, the new film is a more substantial piece of work in terms of the concepts at play, like power dynamics and artistic intent, though Anna Faris, who grew up in Edmonds, Wash., gave a stoner-comedy performance for the ages.

Similarly, I Want Your Sex wouldn't work as well without the right leads, and Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman are absolutely up to the task, and bounce off each other with ease. Wilde doesn't just look right for the part, she's eminently convincing as a powerhouse who has it all, but lives each day knowing how quickly she could lose it--something with which Wilde has had at least a little taste--whereas Hoffman is eminently believable as an older version of the young adventurer he played in PT Anderson's semiautobiographical Licorice Pizza, once again under the sway of an older, more experienced woman, and once again: the chemistry is electric.

We know he should run away, but we also understand why he doesn't.

Make it an Araki Summer! I Want Your Sex opens today at Pacific Place and other AMC and Regal theaters. On Aug 11, it plays SIFF Film Center, by way of Grand Illusion Cinema. Then, on Aug 21, Araki's debut, Three Bewildered People in the Night, opens at Northwest Film Forum, followed by the new 4K restoration of his 2004 masterpiece, Mysterious Skin, on Aug 23.

Images from The Playlist (Charli xcx and Cooper Hoffman making like Claude Jade and Jean-Pierre Léaud in Bed and Board), BACKGRID / People (Olivia Wilde and Harry Styles in Italy), American Cinematographer (William Holden as seen by John F. Seitz), Empire (Wilde and Hoffman), Indiewire (Wilde with a wink), and RIOTUS (Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville).

There's a Chick Who's Paid to Be My Slave: Sex and Scams in Georgia Bernstein's Night Nurse

2026-07-24T20:50:02.557-07:00

NIGHT NURSE

(Georgia Bernstein, USA, 2026, 95 minutes)

And if I'm feelin' edgy

There's a chick who's paid to be my slave

But she'll hit me with a needle

If she thinks I'm trying to misbehave

–James Taylor, "Knocking 'Round the Zoo" (1968)

In my time, I've seen plenty of films featuring medical staff and their charges, including films set at retirement communities, like Sarah Friedland's masterful Familiar Touch, but I've never seen a film involving elderly residents that takes a more overtly sexual approach than this one.

Debut director Georgia Bernstein, a producer on Alex Phillips' films, opens on a closeup of a coiled telephone cord, quickly establishing that Night Nurse may or may not be set in the past. She'll continue to scramble the orientation ever so slightly to the extent that I don't recall any cell phones, but that doesn't mean there aren't any. This is just a very hermetic world.

DP Lydia Nikonova's camera then travels up to reveal a pale neck, then stiff white fabric, before moving down again as the speaker explains that she's "in trouble, really bad trouble," though she sounds surprisingly calm. This is our protagonist, Eleni (Turkish actress Cemre Paksoy, with whom the director went to Northwestern), a wide-eyed nurse at an upscale retirement community in Illinois with an assisted living wing. "Grandpa," the man on the other end of the line, doesn't offer to help this damsel in distress, but instead encourages her to go on. Whatever this is, he's enjoying it.

When Bernstein reveals Eleni in full, days earlier, she's watching the pool from behind a glass partition as Mona (actress and casting director Eléonore Hendricks), a sandy-haired woman, guides Douglas (Bruce McKenzie, a more grizzled Will Patton type), aka "Grandpa," through the shallow water.

There's something unexpectedly sexual about her movements. As in Charlie Polinger's thriller The Plague, the pool seems vaguely mystical, especially when Sam Clapp and Steven Jackson's dreamy flute and piano score wafts across the screen. (I was also, unavoidably, reminded of Cocoon.)

Eleni, who has little nursing experience, has arrived for an interview. The assignment involves Douglas, whose wife concluded he has early on-set dementia when he started hitting on their housekeepers, confusing them with her, except he may have only been pretending or joking--if so, she didn’t find it especially funny. In any case, facility director Dr. Mann (the always-welcome Mimi Rogers) says she has a good feeling about Eleni and hires her on the spot.

It may be coincidental, but all of the nurses are quite comely. Chances are good the male patients, regardless as to their cognitive abilities, are appreciative. When Eleni meets with Douglas for the first time, she attempts to assess his mental fitness, but he just smokes and smiles enigmatically, though not necessarily because he's incapable of answering her questions.

While Mona, her roommate, watches over Douglas during the day, Eleni serves as his night nurse. Both women claim they want to be helpful, though Douglas tells Eleni he would like to take care of her. He doesn’t explain what he means by that, though, since 1) he does seem to need help, 2) he's a habitual liar, and 3) he may be confusing the nurses with his wife.

In movies about inexperienced young women entering into situations that aren't quite what they seem, they often turn out to be smarter, more sexual, or more mentally unstable than they at first appear, and Eleni is definitely hiding something. She tells Mona she was fired from her previous job over a misunderstanding, but it sounds like she disappeared afterward, i.e. "I wasn't myself for awhile," she says, suggesting time under psychiatric care.

Initially she seems more cautious than crazy, though she brings a nervous, yet seductive energy that recalls Sondra Locke, prior to her time with Clint Eastwood, particularly in A Reflection of Fear. When Eleni watches over Douglas, who has his own spacious suite, he stares at her the whole time, and Paksoy's expressive face indicates that she can feel his eyes on her.

It isn't as obvious whether she likes it or not. Then, one night, he pretends to be an attorney or bail bondsman while on the phone with a parent. Eleni tries to get him to hang up, but he overpowers her in a distinctly sexual way. It isn't assault, but he treats her as if she's the girl in question. Either he's asking a real person to send him $10,000 or the whole thing is a charade.

Right: Sondra Locke in 1973's A Reflection of Fear

At first, she lets him do his thing, but after he hangs up, she tells him she finds him disgusting before she starts to get into it--only for him to reject her. It's all very weird and confusing, and this back-and-forth will continue until the final sequence. Whatever he's up to, he's got her wrapped around his little finger. Disturbing tales abound of doctors and nurses abusing patients, but this is something else altogether.

After the encounter, she tells Mona she's changed, but instead of questioning how she's become "a different person," her roommate rolls with it, explaining that she's helping Douglas, and Mona has probably "helped" him, too, both sexually and by joining in on his phone scams. Soon, he's swanning about like Hugh Hefner with low-buttoned top, gold chain, and ever-present cigarette. He's like a vampire after a fresh infusion of blood.

They're one of the world's weirder sex triangles, though Douglas seduces even more nurses, crushing Eleni who only wants to share him with Mona.

Facility leadership, meanwhile, finds out about the telephone scam, but they believe a predatory community member is targeting their vulnerable residents, and not that a predatory resident is targeting vulnerable community members, but Douglas isn't off the hook, since his wife, who has already cut off his access to their accounts, decides to stop paying for his care. It seems unlikely he can continue to pay for his place in this posh facility with his phone scam.

So, Dr. Mann makes some changes, though it isn't clear if she's on the up and up either. She could just as easily want to destroy Douglas, Nurse Ratched-style, as to save him, and maybe she even feels left out, since he's the kind of guy who doesn't seem to notice women her age, accustomed as he is to his sexy young harem--even his wife appears to be much younger.

Considering the seductive thrillers she's made throughout her career, like Full Body Massage, it's a delight to see Mimi Rogers in freaky-deaky mode, at least momentarily, after years in television, most recently as upright--though not uptight--lawyer Honey Chandler on Bosch (Mimi's daughter, Lucy Rogers, a childhood friend of the director, co-produced the film).

Eleni isn't exactly pleased about Dr. Mann's changes, so she takes matters into her own hands, but no matter where you think things are going, you're probably wrong. I love when that happens.

I didn't love everything about this picture, which can get pretty repetitive, but Georgia Bernstein brings things home in fine style, her custom-fit cast rises to the increasingly-strange occasion--even risking some unintentional silliness--and it totally won me over by the end, even as it isn't always easy to spend time with Eleni or Douglas.

Granted, Bernstein doesn't punish Eleni for her kinks--the film is like The Duke of Burgundy or Pillion in that respect--but she offers a unique take on the blurry lines between consent and control and madness and manipulation that plays like a post-millennial variation on dreamy 1970s chillers 3 Women, The Stepford Wives (without the robots), and Death Dream with Sondra Locke, Colleen Camp, and Seymour Cassel (without the flying food).

Weird as fuck, though not in the ways I expected, it's a startling debut.

I recommend this interview for more on Georgia Bernstein's inspirations.

Night Nurse plays Northwest Film Forum for one night only, July 27, thanks to Grand Illusion Cinema. Images from Independent Film Company via Filmmaker Magazine (Cemre Paksoy), Oklahoma Free Press (Paksoy and Bruce McKenzie with cord), Mark Reviews Movies (Paksoy and McKenzie), Film at Lincoln Center (Sondra Locke), Movies Thru the Spectrum (Eléonore Hendricks, Paksoy, and McKenzie), and IFC (twisted poster image).

All I've Got Is a Photograph: Looking Back at Lisa Cholodenko's Sad, Sultry Debut High Art

2026-07-21T00:45:23.370-07:00

HIGH ART

(Lisa Cholodenko, USA, 1998, 101 minutes)

Every time I see your face

It reminds me of the places we used to go

But all I've got is a photograph

And I realise you're not comin' back anymore

--Ringo Starr, "Photograph" (1973)

High Art is either the best or the worst title Lisa Cholodenko could have chosen for her debut feature. On the one hand, it's accurate, since she set her story in the world of fine art photography and prestige publishing.

On the other hand, it's also a cruel joke, since by high she means, well, high, and most of the characters in her film are stoned out of their minds.

Our entry into this rarified world is through Syd (smooth-faced 21-year-old Australian actress Radha Mitchell with a credible American accent), who isn't a druggie, but a young woman--somewhat new to the city, like the Los Angeleno director--who's open to novel experiences. She works at a New York photography journal called Frame, and she's just been promoted from an intern to an assistant editor.

It sounds like a step up, but that isn't exactly the case. There's no raise, and she's still expected to fetch coffee for her condescending superiors (played by model and artist Anh Duong and Office Killer's James Thornton), but now they're more likely to listen to her ideas, and she's desperate to be heard.

In the conversation with Karyn Kusama included with the new Criterion Collection release, Cholodenko admits she put a lot of herself into Syd.

(Beyond the fact that they're longtime friends, Kusama's brother-in-law, Jeffrey Kusama-Hinte, produced High Art. He would go on to produce Laurel Canyon and The Kids Are All Right, which took inspiration from Cholodenko's family life with Revolution guitarist Wendy Melvoin of Wendy and Lisa.)

It isn't a very flattering self portrait, though Mitchell plays Syd not as a victim or a villain, but as an over-educated, if painfully naïve striver. In college, she studied critical theory, and she inelegantly punctuates her conversation with academic terminology.

Syd shares a bunker-like apartment in Williamsburg with her boyfriend (Revenge's Gabriel Mann, also a model), who seems to think they have a good thing, but that changes when someone more compelling comes along. Cholodenko wrote James as a chef, but decided to leave that out of the film. It's an interesting detail, but it isn't necessary to explain their dynamic.

Syd (who lacks a last name) meets Lucy Berliner (Ally Sheedy, who told the director she also saw a lot of herself in her character) when she notices a leak above the tub. She knocks on the door of the loft above, and a thin, androgynous figure answers the door. From the look in both women's eyes, it's clear that each finds the other intriguing. It isn't love at first sight--in fact, it's a little uncomfortable--but there's definitely a spark of something.

Though Syd could have contacted the superintendent, he isn't known for the fastest response time, hence her more direct approach, which Lucy appears to respect, since she doesn't hesitate to lead Syd toward the bathroom. On the way, they pass her black leather-clad girlfriend, Greta (Patricia Clarkson with a smoky-sleepy German accent), splayed across the couch.

Greta barely reacts, but the way she looks at Syd--who had interrupted a moment of intimacy--is anything but welcoming, and there's no reason it should be. A slightly older, but still sultry actress, the permanently unemployed Greta sponges off her girlfriend, who hails from a wealthy Jewish family (theater actress Tammy Grimes, Christopher Plummer's ex-wife, plays Lucy's perpetually disappointed mother), but that doesn't mean the two women don't love each other, and that's the problem. The baggage tied to that love spells possible doom: drug addiction, lack of ambition, co-dependence.

In a way, it's almost as if they've been waiting for someone like Syd to come along to break up their comfortable, if monotonous routine, which can't continue indefinitely. At the very least, they've made themselves vulnerable to the influence of a young, sensuous, hyper-ambitious interloper.

To Cholodenko's credit, however, she doesn't spell any of this out. Her plugged-in cast suggests all of these things, though Sheedy's Lucy holds her cards closest to her chest and gives away the least, which may be why she received a disproportionate--though not undeserving--share of the praise, even as most everything plays out from Syd's perspective, and from today's vantage point, Mitchell deserves more credit than she got in 1998.

It can't have been an easy role to play, since Syd can be pretty unlikable, and though the dialogue fits the scenario, it isn't what moved me so much as the way the characters, Syd and Lucy above all, look at each other.

Considering that this was Cholodenko's first feature, she could be forgiven for extraneous exposition, except there isn't any. I suspect she pared the dialogue down during production, since she never explains more than necessary, to the extent that even she admits, in the interview with Kusama, that the ending is more ambiguous than she intended, because she knows what happens and why, but doesn't show it--only the before and after.

Meanwhile, though, there's a leak, which Syd traces to the floorboards under the tub in which Greta likes to soak for as long as she can--a propensity which leads to the film's most harrowing sequence. (Syd, by contrast, likes to read in her tub, not drift off to oblivion.) Later, she returns to plug the hole, and that isn't a sexual reference, although I can't say what was on Cholodenko's mind when she devised this excuse to bring two people together who might not otherwise meet, despite their physical proximity.

Every other time Syd drops by the loft, Lucy and Greta are joined by louche hangers-on played by Bill Sage, Sarita Choudhury, and friends of the director draped across the furniture like deflated clocks in a Dalí painting.

If the leak was the extent of that first encounter, the situation might not advance much further, except Syd notices the photographs of friends and lovers on the walls, asks Lucy about them and startles to find that she took them. Syd thinks they're fantastic, and explains why in grad student-like terms. When Lucy quips, "I haven't been deconstructed in a long time," it sounds as much like a statement of fact as as a joke at Syd's expense as a sly come on.

Though several photographers inspired the character of Lucy, namely Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin, and though 16 photographers contributed to the film, JoJo Whilden, co-producer Susan Stover's partner, took Lucy's photographs.

Fittingly, Goldin would get her own starring role in Laura Poitras's Oscar-nominated 2022 documentary, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which traces the links between her art and activism, since Goldin channeled her fury at the friends, lovers, and photography subjects lost to opioid addiction into a successful campaign to stop the Sackler family from using art institutions to pinkwash Purdue Pharma's fraud and deception (unlike Lucy, Goldin struggled with and overcame addictions to fentanyl and Oxycontin).

Right: Nan Goldin as seen by Nan Goldin in 1998

Lucy neither deflects nor basks in Syd's ostentatious praise, explaining that photography is something she used to do, and still does, but she "stopped doing industry work a decade ago" for mental health reasons.

Cholodenko implies that the only thing compelling Lucy's art is the act of photographing, which makes her a true artist, but in the real world, artists need shelter, medical care, and other quotidian, life-sustaining elements, except her mother has enabled her to avoid paid work, sellout or otherwise, and infantilized her so completely she can't imagine living any other way.

Concerns about selling out persist, and always will, but they reached a fever pitch in the 1990s as major labels went on a feeding frenzy to sign as many independent acts as they could, and fans accused many of them of selling out, not least when they cleaned up their image, made videos for MTV, and appeared in the sorts of glossy print pictorials that could pay Lucy's bills dozens of times over, except her sensibility would never allow for it.

Granted, Cholodenko makes no direct reference to any of these acts or the so-called heroin chic associated with Calvin Klein's unisex CK One campaign, or closer to home, the "lesbian milieu," to quote B. Ruby Rich's Criterion essay, "of the East Village," even as she built her film around these 1990s concepts, though filtered through a 1970s aesthetic, which extends to Shudder to Think's glass harp-like score, which is never overtly psychedelic or somnambulant, but frequently hazy and appropriately spiky when it needs to be, much like Tami Reiker's warm, 35mm cinematography.

Left: Kate Moss and cohort as seen by Steven Meisel for CK One

In her interview, Cholodenko cites Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces, which I can kind of see, though Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra Kant, a claustrophobic all-woman chamber piece, makes more sense, particularly since Cholodenko wrote Greta as a one-time Fassbinder player who can't stop referencing a tremendous talent who succumbed to his own excesses (later in the film when Lucy wants to hurt her, she spits, "Fassbinder is dead, Greta!"). Plus, all of the women in the film eschew foundation garments, which brings '70s films like Klute to mind…among hundreds of others from the burn-the-bra era.

Consequently, Cholodenko also avoids pop songs, celebrity imagery, and the like. Whether or not she was aiming for timelessness, she comes closer than most other 1990s films, with the exception of Cindy Sherman's Office Killer, another 1998 independent feature from a female first-timer--also set at a New York publication--which killed Sherman's directorial career in an instant, but at least she had something to fall back on: fine art photography.

And fine art photography drives Syd, though Lucy becomes her other great passion. It's just that the two become inseparable, and that's never a good thing, especially when drugs are involved. Though it isn't clear, when she sees them for the first time, if Syd can tell that Lucy and her associates are strung out rather than just relaxed, she doesn't hesitate to try a line when Lucy offers (it's possible she thought it was coke). And though a needle appears toward the end, Cholodenko avoids most of the tropes associated with heroin, preventing High Art from becoming just another addiction drama, though Syd's attraction to Lucy plays like a form of addiction.

Since Cholodenko introduces Syd with a boyfriend, she initially scans as straight, though she may have already had relationships with women or has at least considered the possibility, and I wouldn't blame anyone for describing the film as a queer coming-out story, whether that means she's lesbian or bisexual, not least since Cholodenko is lesbian and has often made films centering on lesbian characters, though straight women, like Mitchell and Sheedy and Julianne Moore and Annette Bening in The Kids Are All Right (below), have often played these lesbian characters.

It's reasonable to assume Syd realizes she likes women the minute she sees one she likes, but I believe she sparks to Lucy because she sparks to Lucy.

She doesn't know, for instance, that Lucy is a photographer, but once she does, her attraction morphs into something more ambiguous, but just as powerful, because Lucy isn't only a potential lover, but a career opportunity, and not just any career opportunity, but one that could make her name.

We often think of heroin addicts, like Greta--who has it worse than Lucy--as users, because they are. Not just users of the drug itself, but vampiric creatures who will do whatever it takes to feed their hunger--pun intended. Without Lucy, Greta might have to try acting again, but with her, she doesn't have to. As Neil Tennant once sang, "But look at my hopes, look at my dreams, the currency we've spent, I love you, you pay my rent" (Derek Jarman directed the video). And just as Lucy and Greta seem to genuinely care about each other, the same becomes true of Syd and Lucy, but that doesn't mean they aren't using each other.

Connection established, Syd tells Anh Duong's Dominique, the chief editor, and James Thornton's Harry, her immediate superior, about Lucy, except they've already heard of her--Syd doesn't know as much as she thinks she does. To them, Lucy is a photographer of some talent who disappeared 10 years ago, and they haven't heard a thing about her since. They certainly don't know whether she still has the goods, and they aren't especially interested, but they agree to humor Syd if she can bring them a book.

So, Syd asks Lucy if she has a book, and she produces a well worn copy for her to show her employers, though she doesn't share Syd's enthusiasm, and Cholodenko doesn't explains her openness, after a brief period of resistance, to Syd's entreaties, but she's certainly curious and possibly bemused. Mostly, her life has gotten stale, and Syd has awakened something in her.

As Syd hangs out with Lucy, Greta, and their friends, she inhales more heroin, and this confluence of events drives a wedge between her and James, who becomes a bit of a whiner, though I wouldn't be thrilled if my partner started hanging out with heroin addicts either, no matter how chic.

Greta, similarly, tolerates Syd's presence, but would prefer to have nothing to do with her. As she tells her early on, "I live for Lucy" before quickly correcting herself to say, "I mean, I live here with Lucy," and though Clarkson's interpretation of this faded glamor gal brings coquettish humor to an otherwise solemn film, in that moment: she's deadly serious.

Syd should take it as a warning, and it is, but she doesn't, and not because Greta is vindictive, but because she can see which way the wind is blowing. She may seem like she's out of it more often than not--to the extent that she nods off at restaurants--but Clarkson plays her as a woman of perception and intelligence who hasn't let drugs completely addle her brain.

Fortunately for Syd, Dominique and Harry are sufficiently taken with Lucy's decade-old work to give her a shot at the cover, but if she can't produce a new series worthy of publication, they have Dieter, a male photographer on deck, happy to give them what they need, so Syd can't fuck it up, or they may never listen to her ideas again. It's possible they might even fire her.

No one actually says that, but the threat hangs in the air, exacerbated by the fact that receptionist Debby (model Charis Michelsen) often peppers Syd with questions--Cholodenko suggests that she's eager to take her place.

Beyond the fact that Frame gives Lucy the go-ahead, she in turn insists that Syd, and not Harry, the journal's editor, fills that role. Otherwise, she'll walk, so they accede to her demand. I'm not sure they believe their lowly assistant can actually pull it off, but it's a gift Lucy doesn't have to give, and yet she does so freely.

Little time has passed. Syd still lives with James, Lucy still lives with Greta, and no one has agreed to an open relationship, so Syd and Lucy are cheating on their partners. When the two arrange to go upstate for the weekend, so that Syd can oversee Lucy's photo shoot, Cholodenko sets the scene for everything to blow up in ways either wonderful or terrible.

In the days before they leave, Lucy gives every indication she's ready for a different kind of life, one without the needy lover, the domineering mother, or even the clingy friends, like Bill Camp's Arnie--who's as hospitable to Syd as Greta--and this cool customer starts to make her dissatisfaction known.

Lucy even stops doing drugs when Syd asks, but Cholodenko never spells out exactly what she wants, and it's among the film's biggest strengths. I didn't need to know, other than that it isn't fame or riches, and that Syd allows her to imagine a possible, if not completely preferable alternative.

This was a first-time watch for me, and a second when I listened to Cholodenko's 2004 commentary track, so I didn't know what would happen at the end, and I won't spoil it for anyone else, but she splits the difference between wonderful and terrible (by contrast, I watched Laurel Canyon, The Kids Are All Right, and the excellent Netflix series Unbelievable upon their original release). I wasn't sure whether the director would pull it off, but for the most part, she does, though a second watch went a long way.

Robert Altman used to say that films don't end; they just have stopping points. That means if the filmmaker creates a truly compelling character--and if they don't die--you can imagine a future for them, because they'll go on after they make their last appearance. By High Art's conclusion, Syd appears changed; less naïve, but also less hopeful. It's possible she's straight, it's possible she's gay, it's possible she'll become another Dominique, and it's also possible she'll abandon photography altogether.

Going forward, I would hope she treads more carefully before inserting herself into another person's life for professional gain. Just because Lucy lets her in doesn't make it right, but it doesn't make it completely wrong either.

It's more that Syd can't or won't see the whole picture; she can only imagine a future in which she returns Lucy to art world prominence and goes on to discover more talents she can exploit. After all, she isn't the artist, and it's unlikely she ever will be, no matter how close she gets to one.

High Art is out now on The Criterion Collection in a new 4K edition including a richly contextual essay from B. Ruby Rich, new interviews with Radha Mitchell, Ally Sheedy and JoJo Whilden, and Lisa Cholodenko's 1997 short film, Dinner Party, featuring Sarita Choudhury. Images from the IMDb (Mitchell, Sheedy, Patricia Clarkson, and Bill Camp), Rotten Tomatoes (Lisa Cholodenko), Amazon (Mitchell and Gabriel Mann), The Film Experience (Clarkson), Fraenkel Gallery (Nan Goldin, Self-portrait in the mirror, Hotel Baur, Zürich, 1998), CaFleurBon (CK One ad), and The Guardian / Cinetext /Allstar Collection / Focus Features (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore).

Lost and Found Film Reviews: Love Crime, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, and Weekend

2026-07-09T21:16:55.899-07:00

This is the latest in a continuing series of film reviews that have disappeared from the internet.

I reviewed Love Crime for SIFF and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (R.I.P., Louise Lasser) and Weekend for Amazon. All three are slightly revised from the original text.

LOVE CRIME / Crime d'Amour

(Alain Corneau, France, 2010, 106 minutes)

Two formidable actresses square off against each other in the late filmmaker Alain Corneau's clever corporate twist on Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve. In this case, instead of actresses, a mousy executive becomes her manipulative mentor's biggest foe both at the office and in the bedroom.

Drawing on her work with Claude Chabrol and François Ozon, Ludivine Sagnier plays dedicated executive Isabelle, who reports to powerful president Christine (Kristin Scott Thomas). Together, their chemistry teeters between the sexual and the convivial. Sometimes, as when Christine offers the younger woman fashion tips, they even seem like mother and daughter

At the office, the mousy Isa comes up with ideas for which her superior takes credit, saying to her in private, "You have real talent," but Isa tells her assistant, Daniel (Guillaume Marquet), that she doesn't mind. Then, on a trip to Cairo, she has a fling with Christine's lover, Philippe (Patrick Mille).

When they return to Paris, Christine threatens to go public with his firm's creative bookkeeping, while Daniel encourages her to collaborate with him on a secret project. When Isa finally garners the recognition she deserves, Christine turns to humiliation, so Isa finds a devious way to get even.

If anything, she seems to be setting herself up for a fall, but things are not quite what they seem, and the mouse will transform herself into a lion.

MARY HARTMAN, MARY HARTMAN
(Joan Darling, Jim Drake, USA, 1976, 564 minutes)

Long before David Lynch introduced the world to Twin Peaks, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman turned the soap opera inside out. Produced by All in the Family's Norman Lear, the syndicated serial centers around gingham-clad housewife Mary Hartman (Louise Lasser, a one-time Woody Allen mainstay).

The saga begins with Mary agonizing over her floor's waxy yellow buildup when her neighbor, Loretta Haggers (Emmy Award winner Mary Kay Place), bursts in to announce that a mass murderer is on the loose in Fernwood.

That might be enough to fuel any drama, except it isn't Mary's only problem. The magic has gone out of her marriage to Tom (Greg Mullavey) and her grandfather is revealed as the Fernwood Flasher. And that's just the pilot.

At first glance, Mary Hartman Mary Hartman resembles a daytime soap with five-night-a-week airings, frame-filling close-ups, and syrupy score, but everything is off-kilter. When Mary isn't looking at other characters as if they're speaking in tongues, she appears to be on the verge of laughter or tears--maybe both at once. She's the ultimate desperate housewife.

Aside from Grandpa Larkin (Victor Kilian), regulars include Mary's preteen daughter Heather (Claudia Lamb), younger sister Cathy (Debralee Scott), and parents, Martha (Dody Goodman) and George Shumway (Philip Bruns).

In addition, there's Sgt. Foley (Bruce Solomon), who has the hots for our sexually unsatisfied heroine, and Loretta's hapless husband, Charlie (Graham Jarvis), who works with Tom and George at the plant. Mrs. Haggers, an aspiring country singer with voluminous hair, loves her Baby Boy "more than a hundred billion frozen Milky Ways."

The first set of this groundbreaking series features 25 episodes. Between 1976-1978, a whopping 325 were produced, some as Forever Fernwood when Lasser left in 1977, reportedly due to exhaustion. That year, the series spun off the Alan Thicke-produced talk show satire Fernwood 2Nite with Martin Mull and Fred Willard, which would develop a cult following of its own.

WEEKEND

(Andrew Haigh, 2011, UK, 97 minutes)

Most everyone has had the experience of meeting someone new and feeling an instant connection. Transferring that phenomenon to the screen, however, tends to fall flat when the cast or screenplay aren't up to task. Much as in Richard Linklater's thematically similar Before Sunrise, however, filmmaker Andrew Haigh, in his sophomore feature, has no such problem.

Russell (Tom Cullen), a Nottingham lifeguard, spots Glen (Chris New) at a bar, and the attraction is immediate, but what might have been a one-night stand soon turns serious. Though Russell is out to his straight friends, he prefers not to draw attention to his sexual orientation in public, while Glen, an art gallery worker, has no such qualms, but while one believes in gay marriage, the other views it as a heterosexual construct. Philosophical differences aside, they enjoy each other's company and share a similar sense of humor--Russell thanks Glen for rescuing him from the "hobbit" at the bar.

As they spend the next day talking, texting, smoking, and drinking, Russell confides that he thought he was "out of his league," but Glen assures him that was hardly the case. As Saturday becomes Sunday, they get to know each other on a more intimate level (there's nudity, but nothing explicit).

Then, Glen announces that he's leaving on Monday to study abroad. It would be easy for Haigh to amp things up at this point, but the dilemma plays out in a believable manner, which is all the more touching for feeling so true.

Love Crime and Weekend are on Kanopy. Images: the IMDb (Kristin Scott Thomas / Photo by Pascal Chantier © SBS, Scott Thomas with Ludivine Sagnier, and Mary Kay Place), Sportskeeda (Louise Lasser, Greg Mullavey, and Claudia Lamb), and The Guardian (Tom Cullen and Chris New).

Stranger Flashback: Gianfranco Rosi's Golden Bear-Winning Documentary, Fire at Sea, Remains Heartbreaking and Harrowing

2026-07-04T10:08:17.535-07:00

A decade ago, Gianfranco Rosi made Fire at Sea about the migrant crisis in Lampedusa. I wrote about it for The Stranger, but my review has gotten truncated.

I was reminded of the film when I saw that Pope Leo XIV opted to pray for lost migrant lives in Lampedusa instead of traveling to his native United States during our 250th anniversary celebrations. Highly recommended--the film and the recognition of migrants' sacrifice in search of a better life.

FIRE AT SEA / Fuocoammare

(Gianfranco Rosi, 2016, Italy, 114 minutes)

Eritrean-Italian filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi shot his fifth documentary, Fire at Sea, with such care that it often feels more like a narrative feature than a non-fiction film (Rosi also served as cinematographer and sound man).

Then again, there's something alien and strange about the rocky terrain of Lampedusa, an island 70 kilometers from the African coast that has admitted over 400,000 refugees. Like the Cuban exiles who have sunk beneath the waves while rafting towards the America Dream, 15,000 refugees have perished over 20 years while attempting to cross the Strait of Sicily.

Right: The Pope at Lampedusa

Other than a few opening inter-titles, Rosi eschews narration, focusing instead on ordinary Lampedusans engaging in their daily activities: an elderly woman doing chores around her idol-filled home, a DJ playing soothing songs for his hard-working audience, a doctor running a scan on a pregnant woman, and a little boy whittling a stick. While they go about their business, the soundtrack gives way to distress calls from refugees fleeing Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, and Syria.

Rosi gradually narrows his gaze to 12-year-old Samuele, the whittling boy. He's a bright, energetic child with a lazy eye who slurps spaghetti, imitates bird calls, and constructs slingshots to torture innocent cacti.

Rosi juxtaposes his mostly-daytime perambulations with the mostly-nighttime rigors of refugees entering the continent by boat. In one sequence, rescue workers give the shivering arrivals gold Mylar blankets. As they wait for processing, they glimmer and sparkle in the evening light. It's a lovely image followed in a later sequence by limp, dazed refugees suffering from severe dehydration. Worse yet: body bags wrapped in twine.

The message is clear: water gives life and it takes it away. It helps a 6,000-person fishing community to put food on their tables, it provides the possibility of a better future for migrants fleeing dictatorial rule, and it kills thousands of others who will never know the freedoms Samuele enjoys.

As one Nigerian refugee who survived the journey puts it, "It is risky in life not to take a risk, because life is a risk." Rosi's remarkable film won the Golden Bear, the top prize, at the 2016 Berlin International Film Festival.

Rosi's new film, Pompei: Below the Clouds, is now streaming on Mubi.

Fire at Sea is available for free on Kanopy and for a nominal cost on Apple TV+ and Prime. Images from The Playlist (the top image), Film Inquiry (migrants arriving by overcrowded boat), and The Vatican (the Pope).

Lilian T. Mehrel's Sweet, Funny Directorial Debut, Honeyjoon, with a Superb Amira Casar

2026-07-03T13:11:10.518-07:00

HONEYJOON

(Lilian T. Mehrel, 2025, USA/Portugal, 75 minutes)

From the self-provided description of Lilian T. Mehrel's directorial debut, which involves a middle-aged mother, a thirtysomething daughter, and a handsome twentysomething man, I feared I wouldn't like it. The film could have easily been too cutesy or too sentimental, but it isn't either.

Logline at the IMDb:

June and her Persian-British mom Lela travel to the romantic Azores for a grief anniversary, with contrasting ways of coping. A hot-and-deep surfer takes them on a tour as we surf the waves of life, loss, flirting - an unforgettable ride.

The gimmicky title wasn't a big selling point either, though it makes sense. In order to save money, June (Ayden Mayeri) books a honeymoon package for her and her mother--who was widowed a year ago--since there are no rules about the relationship status of paying couples. Granted, this leads to some gently humorous moments as the two single women find themselves surrounded by happy loving couples enjoying a romantic getaway.

The narcissistic, American-born June, who I found off-putting at first, seems well aware of her attractiveness, but some of that self-centeredness melts away during a trip to Portugal's Azores Islands with her Iranian-British therapist mother, Lela (Amira Casar, a one-time Catherine Breillat mainstay).

Azores was meaningful to June's father, and it looks like a lovely place, not least because it hasn't yet been overtaken by tourists. The film itself could have come across as a tourist board commercial thanks to Inés Gowland's evocative cinematography, except Mehrel pays special attention to the island's cultural traditions and morés and not just the pretty scenery.

During the trip, June gains new insights into her late father's life and into her mother's Persian-Kurdish heritage. Lela, for instance, is particularly inspired by Iran's "Woman, Life, Freedom" (Jin, Jiyan, Azadî) movement, because she grew up under a much more repressive regime.

June has grown up at a different time and place, and hasn't always appreciated how far her mother has come to live as a sensual, self-possessed woman in the 21st-century. I would imagine that Mehrel is familiar with Casar's sexually explicit work for Breillat--Romance, Anatomy of Hell, and The Last Mistress--since she brings echoes of that background here, including a brief nude scene (in this case, it's the younger woman who remains mostly clothed).

The two become three with the addition of João (José Condessa, from Pedro Almodóvar's Strange Way of Life, who brings a certain soulful quality to a comparatively small role), a tour guide, who isn't just part of the scenery.

At its worst, his dialogue can be hackneyed, but he brings the requisite sincerity to his delivery. The women visit João's invitingly humble home and meet his gracious grandmother, and there's an unforced chemistry between the characters, whether they speak each other's language or not.

As an only child who has traveled abroad with a single mother, I found Honeyjoon relatable, regardless that I have no connection to Iran and have never, alas, been to Portugal. You can love someone, and still find them unbearable, and there's believable bickering between the women. One even goes missing at a certain point, which happened when I visited Tallin with my mom. She was there one minute, and then she wasn't. It's a long story, but we eventually reconnected. It's really scary to be in that situation.

Mehrel's debut is a sweet and funny film that viewers of any gender could enjoy, not least since she doesn't demonize men--though patriarchy lurks around the fringes--but women are likely to get more out of it. In that sense, it recalls Payal Kapadia's All We Imagine as Light (which, admittedly, cuts deeper).

In this case, the sisterhood isn't between three unrelated women, but between a mother and daughter learning to see each other clearly once it's just the two of them, free from the distractions of their day-to-day lives.

I suspect there's a fair amount of Lilian T. Mehrel in June, since she took inspiration from the loss of her own beloved father, and you can feel her working through some of that grief. As she explains in the production notes, "When my beautiful, life-loving dad died, I wondered--could I ever really enjoy life again?" Her film handily answers that question in the affirmative.

Honeyjoon opens at SIFF Film Center on July 17. Writer, director, and coproducer Lilian T. Mehrel is scheduled to attend the opening night screening for a Q&A. Notably, Mehrel funded her $1 million film the same way David Fortune funded 2024's Color Book: by winning AT&T's Untold Stories, a collaboration between the company and Tribeca Festival. For my money, that's two terrific selections in a row. Images: Alliance of Women Film Journalists (Amira Casar and Ayden Mayeri), Pop Culture Press (Casar and Mayeri), and Tribeca Festival (Casar, Mayeri, and José Condessa).

A Restless Spirit on an Endless Flight: Canadian Filmmaker Avalon Fast’s Enchanting CAMP

2026-06-26T21:51:42.254-07:00

CAMP

(Avalon Fast, 2025, Canada, 111 minutes)

Echoed voices in the night

She's a restless spirit on an endless flight.

--Don Henley and Bernie Leadon, "Witchy Woman" (1972)

Throughout the current decade, the under-30 set has been making a hell of a mark on horror, led this year by 21-year-old Kane Parsons' mindbending Backrooms--released before he was legally able to consume alcohol--and 26-year-old Curry Barker's pitch-black Obsession, both of which topped the US box office before making significant inroads in other territories.

There are other examples, but that one-two punch left the industry reeling--and eager, no doubt, to sign more talented boy wonders with fresh ideas.

By contrast, their female counterparts have made more of an impact at film festivals and indie cinemas with work that's overtly queer, remarkably collaborative, and reminiscent of riot grrrl in both attitude and approach--none of which is intended as a knock on Parsons or Barker, who established their DIY bonafides by way of YouTube before savvy studios came calling.

Right: Fast and Alexandra McVicker in The Serpent's Skin

Australian filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay, 21, is currently in production on her seventh feature, and Canadian actor/director Avalon Fast, 26, appeared in her film The Serpent’s Skin, in addition to 32-year-old Canadian filmmaker Louise Weard's Castration Movie Anthology. More recently, Fast appeared in and has been working on a documentary about New York filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which opens in Seattle in August (Mackay and Schoenbrun, an elder stateswoman at 39, also appear in Weard's sprawling anthology).

Fast was all of 19 when they shot their directorial debut, Honeycomb, and 22 when it premiered in 2022 (it's available on Blu-ray and streaming exclusively through their website). Their dreamy, surrealistic followup, CAMP, premiered at last year's Fantastic Fest, where it won the Next Wave Best Feature, and in the end credits, they thank every one of the trans filmmakers listed above. I missed the film when it premiered at this year's SIFF, so I was happy to see that it plays Northwest Film Forum in July.

CAMP, which is anything but campy, begins with its protagonist in a terrible place, which gets worse before it gets better--or does it? Not everything is what it seems, and nor does Fast provide a definitive answer to that question. "Worse" is indisputable, but "better" is in the eye of the beholder.

Emily (newcomer Zola Grimmer, low-key in an Aubrey Plaza kind of way), a college dropout, is having a less-than-stellar time at a house party when a few partygoers suggest a game of truth or dare. When Emily shares her biggest regret--that she accidentally killed a four-year-old when she was 16--it really brings the temperature down. It also helps to explain why she's been flailing and failing ever since.

The rest of the party isn't any more fun. Except for her best friend, Charlie (Giselle Morison), Emily finds the people--and even the drinks--boring. With her deadpan affect, Emily seems like someone who finds most things boring, though excitement, of the least desirable kind, has a way of finding her.

On the ride home, Charlie, the passenger, takes a snort of Emily's coke--and promptly dies. Emily is horrified. (Later in the film, she explains that the coke appeared to be laced with something lethal.) She isn't a murderer, but it's the second time her actions have inadvertently led to a casualty.

Right: Fast as seen by Fast

These are fictional characters in a fictional scenario, and Emily isn't a stand-in for the filmmaker, though the sense of loss is rooted in reality, since Fast took inspiration from a close friend with whom she grew up on Vancouver Island (much like Blue Heron's Sophy Romvari). Maia died in an automobile accident when she was 19, leaving Fast spiralling. As she told Letterboxd's Katie Rife, "Honeycomb's not about me. CAMP isn't about me. There are parts of me in there, but both films are about watching the world around me."

Afterward, Emily tells her dad (Mike Tan) that she isn't necessarily suicidal, but she worries, with some justification, that she's a danger to others. He suggests she become a counselor at a camp for troubled kids. Maybe she can do them some good. With no other options, she takes his advice, though she's concerned that it's a "God camp," and she isn't a believer.

It isn't, exactly. The train lets her off in the middle of nowhere. She walks through a field until she finds a sign that says CAMP, which seems foreboding, though the other counselors, like her pot-smoking roommate Sophie (Cherry Moore), are welcoming (Fast shot on location at Camp Horizon in Alberta). Camp leader Dan (Austyn Van De Camp) is all about God, but the others, with the exception of Jo (Sophie Bawks-Smith, who appeared in Honeycomb), don't seem to care, and the non-believers accept Jo into their fold. They just want to party as soon as the campers go to bed.

Things seem normal at times, but at other times, they don't.

Emily loses time, can't tell the difference between waking life and dreams, and sees visions of people who may or may not be there. It's as if the train brought her to a place suspended between the physical and spiritual realms, not least since the ride itself was pretty bizarre. Enhanced by composer Max Graham's rumbling score, Fast and cinematographer Eily Sprungman, in her first feature, encourage the confusion through mists from petroleum jelly-smeared lenses, slowed-down motion, and light sources that glow like sparkling stars.

Sensing a kindred spirit, Emily offers support to Eden (Izza Jarvis, another newcomer), a morose girl with a punk vibe, but the mercurial child, who possibly represents a version of her younger self, alternates between grateful and resentful. There's also the sense that the other counselors, including Sophie and Clara (Alice Wordsworth), aren't telling her everything.

When the women meet in the forest at night and make wishes, for instance, they proceed to come true. Does that make them witches? Does it make their wishes spells? Yes, as it turns out, it does, though Fast avoids much of the stereotypical black-robe-and-broomstick iconography around witchcraft.

Emily goes with the flow until she realizes there's a cost to the spells, though not as bad as the price Bear pays when he makes a monkey's paw-like wish in Obsession, a truly horrifying film that leaves a sadistic aftertaste. CAMP has elements of horror, but Fast doesn't fully embrace the gorier end of the spectrum.

To Emily, the other women are a little vampiric, even if she genuinely enjoys their company, especially Clara, a romantic foil who started out as a camper before she grew into a counselor. The others, who have also known each other for years, include Nev (Lea Rose Sebastianis) and Hope (Ella Reece).

Though some critics, women especially, have described the ending as happy, I wouldn't go that far, and that isn't intended as criticism of the film or its admirers. It's great to find your tribe, and to be accepted for who you are, but when your happiness involves the misery of others, it isn't exactly a happy ending for them. I also read that realization as a metaphor for adulthood, since it's nearly impossible to live life on your own terms without hurting other people along the way, no matter how hard you try not to.

I would have liked to learn more about their varied backgrounds, since the actresses are all so compelling, especially Moore and Wordsworth, though we do learn that Sophie had a baby, and appears to have given it up for adoption. Grimmer, by contrast, plays a more recessive character, though she's never less than fully engaging, especially relative to her inexperience.

Like Emily, I was confused at times, and I couldn't always tell when this was intentional on Fast's part and when they were just throwing bizarre--if visually intriguing--ingredients into the mix simply because they could.

Both CAMP and Honeycomb have been compared to Sofia Coppola's directorial debut, The Virgin Suicides, an impressively faithful adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides' haunting 1993 novel, and Fast hasn't disavowed the comparison, citing both Coppola and Greta Gerwig as inspirations.

I get the Virgin Suicides comparison, since Fast's features revolve around groups of girls, but I was reminded more of the the dreamy, surrealistic coming-into-female-power films of French directors Lucile Hadžihalilović (Innocence) and Léa Mysius (The Five Devils). If Avalon Fast conjures up more questions than answers, CAMP casts a captivating spell all its own.

To quote actor/director Vera Drew, another friend and collaborator, "This movie feels like a smear of time and space in a way that so few movies do."

Editor's note (that's me, I'm the editor): Avalon Fast appears to have switched from she/her to they/them between the release of Honeycomb and CAMP, though several recent reviews and interviews use the former.

CAMP is now playing in limited release at IFC Film Center in NYC, Laemmle Glendale in Los Angeles, and all Alamo Drafthouse locations, and opens in Seattle at the Beacon Cinema on July 24 and Northwest Film Forum on July 25. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma opens at the Uptown on Aug 13. In the years to come, maybe the two films will screen together.

Images from Dark Star Films (Zola Grimmer and Alice Wordsworth and the coven in their element), Film Threat (Alexandra McVicker and Avalon Fast in The Serpent's Skin), and Fast's Twitter/X profile picture (self portrait).

Silas Howard and Harry Dodge Put a Queer Spin on the Buddy Comedy in Charming San Francisco Picaresque By Hook or by Crook

2026-06-17T22:26:16.424-07:00

BY HOOK OR BY CROOK
(Silas Howard and Harry Dodge, 2001, USA, 100 minutes)

"I'm a special; a two for one."
--Valentine (Harry Dodge)

Co-directors Silas Howard and Harry Dodge's By Hook or by Crook opens with home-movie footage of a father playing with a boyish tyke in a Superman cape. In voice-over, Shy (Silas Howard, who also co-produced) explains that he was that kid, and that he just wanted to jump, to fly.

In the present, things haven't quite worked out that way. His loving father recently passed away--he never really knew his mother--and he has just received notice that their Hoxie, Kansas home is being repossessed. Shy, a loner who likes to smoke, lift weights in a "Simply the Best" muscle tee, and "jam out to Sabbath," as he puts it, has 48 hours to find new digs.

Though Shy's neighborhood seems more downmarket than not, Go Fish cinematographer Ann T. Rossetti, shooting in MiniDV, shows it to its best advantage. It isn't so much about glamorizing an un-pretty place, but finding the beauty in the quotidian, like a freight train glowing in the sun.

Left: Guinevere Turner and V.S. Brodie in Go Fish

Silas earns his keep by washing dishes, and he's barely scraping by. While watching a news report one night about a heist involving an attractive, dark-haired thief (Joan Jett!), he comes up with a solution. Soon, he puts on a suit, packs a bag, and hitchhikes to San Francisco, where he aims to put his plan into action. I'm not sure where the suit, which he pairs with a glittery shirt, comes in, but it's a good look.

Shy meets Valentine (Dodge, an author and visual artist who uses he/him pronouns in real life), a butch dyke with an odd little beard, when he steps in to stop a bully from beating her up. Val, who has been on her own since she was 13, starts following Shy around, talking a mile a minute, fueled by a combination of gratitude and the recognition that he's also a gender outlaw, to borrow a term from trans elder Kate Bornstein. When a little girl asks Shy, "Are you a boy or a girl?," he smiles and says, "Both," without hesitation.

If the actor/directors have an instant rapport, it could be down to acting, but they had also been friends for 15 years by the time they made their feature, even running a tiny Bay Area café and performance space called Red Dora's The Bearded Lady where cabaret duo Kiki and Herb frequently performed.

Right: Harry Dodge and Silas Howard at the Bearded Lady

Shy and Val proceed to spend a night on the town, eating crullers and visiting lesbian bar The Lexington, also long gone, filled with every kind of person.

There's a neat montage in which customer after customer poses for the characters or for Rossetti's camcorder--both, really--and it's clear that the new friends fit right in.

Shy, however, still has money--or the lack thereof--on his mind, and ghosts Val while she's dancing up a storm, making sure to pick a customer's pocket on the way out, but he reconnects with Val and his girlfriend, Billie (Stanya Kahn, Dodge's longtime artistic collaborator), the next day. The first thing they do is to run a scam on a clerk at a hardware store after which they enjoy a rather unusual homemade dinner.

While planning and plotting other ways to make money, they get to know each other better. Though Val's motormouth, physically-expressive affect is amusing, and somewhat reminiscent of Dustin Hoffman's Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy--also made by a queer filmmaker--she isn't simply cute and quirky, but mentally imbalanced, and admits she's spent time in a mental institute. Val appears to be schizophrenic; I wasn’t sure, but she can be sad and weird in ways that don't/aren't meant to make complete sense.

When Shy finds out that Val is committed to finding her birth mother, he decides to help, which proves personally advantageous. If Val starts out as the one with a lady love, Shy hits it off with a no-bullshit Vital Records staffer (Carina Gia). While mainstream 1990s films with queer characters tended to be rather skittish about sex, Howard and Dodge give the people what they want, which is satisfying sexual experiences for their characters.

Billie also joins in on some of their schemes, but it's Shy and Val who attract the wrong kind of attention, leading them to put the planning and plotting on hold as the narrative briefly enters One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest territory before ending on a considerably more positive note.

If anything, the ending is especially touching for keeping things understated after a few sequences that felt overstated.

Beyond the chemistry between the leads and the sensitive cinematography from Rosetti, the film has an absolutely kick-ass soundtrack, filled by music from composer Carla Bozulich of the Geraldine Fibbers featuring the ace guitar-playing of Nels Cline, who would join Wilco just three years later.

Bozulich also served as music supervisor, and she did an incredible job. I swear I'm not biased, though I've met a few of these musicians, since she includes Pacific Northwest acts Jessamine and the Mono Men, in addition to Tom Robinson, the Make Up, Low, Blonde Redhead, and of course, Tribe 8, the Geraldine Fibbers, and Joan Jett--you can guess what song she covers.

By letting Shy and Val be who they are, rather than trying to define them, By Hook or by Crook feels not necessarily timeless, but less frozen-in-amber than I would have expected. Even the terms I've mentioned, like queer, trans, and bull dyke, don't appear in the film (unless I missed them).

Nonetheless, Dave Kehr, in his New York Times review, wrote, "It is, indeed, hard to keep track of the fluid genders in this independent feature shot on digital video, which proclaims itself ''a movie about butches by butches'."

For my money, there's nothing confusing about that fluidity. It helps that the film hews to a certain 1970s aesthetic, though I couldn't say whether that was intentional or not, but I was reminded of Jerry Schatzberg's Scarecrow, in addition to Barbara Loden's Wanda and John Huston's latter-period literary adaptations, like Fat City and Wise Blood, more in terms of the working-class milieu than the hetero characters or downbeat narratives.

Right: Al Pacino and Gene Hackman in Scarecrow also smoking up a storm

Other latter-period films that came to mind include Allan Moyle's Times Square--which also boasts a kick-ass soundtrack--and Annette Haywood-Carter's Joyce Carol Oates adaptation Foxfire.

Significantly though, both films had to tone down the queer content due to studio pressure. Berkeley filmmaker Jenni Olson, who served as a consulting producer on By Hook or by Crook, has done some of the best writing on Times Square as a queer text, so I was happy to see that she lent her expertise to a film, made outside of the studio system and largely funded by friends, that doesn't play things quite so safe.

Until this year, I hadn't heard of the film, though I'm familiar with some of the projects on which the principals have worked, like Transparent and Pose for which Howard served as a director, so I kept my expectations in check, though I took the number of prestigious entities behind the 4K restoration, especially the UCLA Film & Television Archive, as a promising sign.

By Hook or by Crook also won the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature at 2002's Sundance Film Festival--and has received praise from discerning critics, like Willow Maclay, coauthor of Corpses, Fools and Monsters--so I'm even more surprised that I hadn't heard of it, but Altered Innocence, which specializes in LGBTQ films both new and old, has been getting the word out in a big way, and the filmmakers have been doing all they can to support the re-release. Mostly though, it’s just really good.

Though the filmmakers would part ways geographically when Silas Howard moved to New York and Harry Dodge moved to Los Angeles, they remain connected--Howard is godfather to Dodge and Maggie Nelson's son Iggy.

Unstreamable presents By Hook or by Crook at Northwest Film Forum from June 17 through June 21. A DVD, Blu-ray, and digital release will follow later this summer. Images from Altered Innocence, The Guardian (Go Fish), Lost Womyn's Space (Bearded Lady friends), and the IMDb (Scarecrow).

I'm Tense and Nervous, and I Can't Relax: On Cindy Sherman's Underappreciated Office Killer

2026-06-12T23:59:07.751-07:00

OFFICE KILLER

(Cindy Sherman, USA, 1997,

82 minutes)

Cindy Sherman has been photographing herself in various cinematic modes since the 1970s, so it only seemed fitting when she turned to directing in the 1990s, but Office Killer, her first and only feature film, defied expectations in ways that weren't especially welcome at the time.

First of all, she turned to horror, and instead of something hip and arty, like Michael Almereyda's Nadja from just a few years before, she made a smart, if lurid B picture, the kind that might have played on a grindhouse bill in the 1960s or '70s--and that's hardly a knock. In retrospect, the lack of pretension seems refreshing, but that isn't how critics saw it in the 1990s.

As a film critic, I'd rather evaluate films than criticism, but whether you consider hers a smashing success or not, 25/100 ("splat!") at Rotten Tomatoes and 5.2/10 at the Internet Movie Database just seems mean.

Right: portrait of the artist

as a younger woman

Fortunately, the tide has been turning over the past 30 years, and screenings of the new 4K restoration have expanded from the art house to arts venues, like the Museum of Modern Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art--in addition to the expected theatrical suspects--the same institutions that have displayed Sherman's photography in the past.

Unlike those photographs, though, she cast someone other than herself in the lead. In light of Carol Kane’s filmography, especially Joan Micklin Silver's Abraham Cahan adaptation Hester Street--for which she received an Oscar nomination--it seemed wise to cast an experienced actor, unlike the director, who has never attributed her varied characterizations to "acting." It could be seen as a step in that direction, though the expressions in her work tend to be ambiguous, the better to let observers decide for themselves what she's saying and what her characters might be thinking.

Granted, Office Killer, like some of her photographs, is as much satire as horror, though critics responded more to the blood and guts than to the perceptive take on office politics. On the other hand, if she had released the film after Office Space or the original UK version of The Office, she might have also been dinged for unoriginality. Instead, she beat them to the punch, though something similar could be said of Jill Sprecher's 1997 non-horror Clockwatchers, which also focused on female office workers and garnered more respect on the festival circuit than in regular release.

Just as Sherman didn't cast herself, she didn't write the screenplay, but hired notable talents to transform her story idea into a feature. Tom Kalin, who made a splash with the Leopold and Loeb-inspired Swoon in 1992, co-wrote the screenplay with journalist Elise MacAdam and Todd Haynes, another architect of the New Queer Cinema, though only Kalin and MacAdam receive on-screen attribution; Haynes is credited with "additional dialogue," even as several reviews and film listings describe him as a co-writer.

Left: the killers of Swoon

By 1997, Haynes had already directed two full-length features, Poison and Safe, while Kalin wouldn't direct another until Savage Grace, another deadly drama, with Safe lead Julianne Moore.

Christine Vachon--and Pamela Koffler--who named Killer Films after Office Killer, produced all four features. If I wouldn't describe Office Killer as a queer film, it absolutely would not exist without these queer collaborators.

Sherman's debut begins as Constant Consumer magazine, beset by declining ad sales, cuts costs by reducing full-time jobs to part-time and distributing computers for remote work. Kane's Dorine, caretaker for her mobility-impaired mother (Alice Drummond), isn't exactly thrilled about spending even more time at home–"I hate her!," she declares in voice-over.

This part of the film reminded me of Daniel Mann's Willard in which Bruce Davison also plays a bright, hard-working loner with a demanding, bedridden mother (Elsa Lanchester!) and an asshole of a boss. Like Dorine, he's a ticking time bomb, but while she's a cat person, he's…a rat person.

Though valued for her dedication and intelligence, Dorine doesn't socialize with her colleagues, who find her weird. They have no idea.

While some, like Norah (Jeanne Tripplehorn, who had recently appeared in Waterworld), the office manager, treat her with respect, others, like Kim (Molly Ringwald, relishing her bitchy role) and Virginia (Fassbinder ensemble player Barbara Sukowa), the publisher, make little effort to disguise their contempt.

Dorine proceeds to divide her time between home and office. She's working after hours one night when Gary (Cyndi Lauper's guy David Thornton), another of her more condescending colleagues, is accidentally electrocuted while trying to stop her new computer from buzzing. Anyone else would be horrified, but Dorine isn't anyone else. "You are not a very pleasant man!" she upbraids the newly-minted stiff. Though she does call 911, she hangs up without saying a word, shoves his body onto a cart, takes it down to the garage, puts it in her car, and drives away, presumably to dispose of it.

Unlike her gossipy, bed-hopping colleagues, Dorine masters email in a flash–to the extent that she can imitate other people. They express concern when Gary stops coming into the office, so she finishes his assignments and sends updates from his address, assuring them that he's just working from home.

Though she inadvertently contributed to his demise, it emboldens her to take a more direct approach going forward, and she proceeds to eliminate most everyone who has ever done her or the magazine founded by her late father wrong.

Granted, Dorine gets so fired up, she even takes out a few innocent bystanders. Sherman handles this in a way I found more humorous than not, but it might have been a bridge too far for some 1990s viewers.

There's also a victim that doesn't fit any of these categories, and it's his interest in pornography that appears to set her off. In flashbacks, Sherman introduces Dorine's problematic father (played in a persuasively lascivious manner by Eric Bogosian). He has everything to do with her skittishness around men, women, and even the most innocuous physical contact, since she visibly flinches when anyone touches her on the arm or shoulder.

In taking charge of her environment, after a lifetime of ill treatment from colleagues and family members, Dorine changes both inside and out. At first, she sports dorky buns on each side of her head and crookedly drawn-on eyebrows--Sherman, who drew them on each day, expresses regret in the exclusive Vinegar Syndrome interview that she didn't do a better job.

With each kill, Dorine's confidence grows, and she incorporates items from each female victim's wardrobe, like a pair of chunky gold earrings and a pearl necklace. She even lets her hair down in all senses of the term, while wearing her new acquisitions brazenly. The fact that no one notices proves just how invisible she has been to her coworkers for the past 16 years.

If you've seen J. Lee Thompson's Happy Birthday to Me, you can guess what she does with all of the corpses. I won't give the game away, other than to say that, as Covid-19 proved: some people aren't meant to work from home, which wasn't common in 1997, but now makes the film seem prescient, especially in conjunction with a dying print publication, an overburdened caretaker spending more time on a relative than herself, and the replacement of phone calls and in-person conversations with email. Just add Slack, Zoom, smart phones, and laptops, and this could be today.

If Office Killer were a different kind of film, cops might come sniffing around, but before things get to that point, Dorine comes up with a solution. Granted, Kim suspects her from the start, but she can't prove it, not least when Dorine finds a way to keep her as far from the action as possible.

The epilogue borrows a trope from 1944's Double Indemnity–though it could be coincidental–except Billy Wilder was limited by the production code. Even Daniel Mann, in Willard, provided the kind of ending with which the censors would approve, but Sherman, by way of her collaborators, provides an ending for a new era, specifically the one that gave us Cypress Hill's "How I Could Just Kill a Man," Nick Cave's Murder Ballads, and Sonic Youth's Goo with its Raymond Pettibon-designed spree-killers cover.

Another 1990s phenomenon: Sherman's shift from fine art to commercial filmmaking around the same time as several other NYC gallery stars. Robert Longo, her former partner, adapted William Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic in 1995, David Salle adapted the play Search and Destroy the same year, and Julian Schnabel wrote and directed Basquiat, a portrait of the late graffiti artist-turned-painter, in 1996. Coincidentally enough, Longo and Barbara Sukowa--though now divorced--were married during the Office Killer shoot.

All four attracted experienced actors, producers, and distributors, but poor reviews and box office results doomed three, whereas the Oscar-nominated Schnabel, a better filmmaker than fine artist, kept going, and his new Netflix film with Oscar Isaac, The Hand of Dante, opened in Seattle on Friday.

Right: two exes and ex-directors in 2014

I don't believe it benefited Sherman, the only woman in the group, to be associated with other feature films that were described variously as "trash," "shabby," "desultory," "off-putting," "slack and derivative," "undramatic and unexciting," "breathtakingly derivative," and "a disaster in every way," but that's what happened.

Thirty years on, it's easier to appreciate her film for what it is rather than what it isn't, and it bears closer comparison with other chillers about lethal loners, like Willard, George Romero's Martin, and especially Lucky McKee's May than anything with pretensions towards grand artistic statements.

Not everything works perfectly, but a talented, game-for-anything cast goes a long way. Kane, Tripplehorn, Ringwald, Sukowa, and Michael Imperioli as a kindly computer tech all deserve credit for taking chances on an inexperienced director, especially after working with heavy hitters, like Hal Ashby and Martin Scorsese, though Tripplehorn, in her open-hearted interview, acknowledges that she approached Sherman to let her know she would do literally anything to be able to work on her film. She says she loved working on it, and has maintained a friendship with her ever since.

Left: Barbara Sukowa as, essentially, Arianna Huffington

The other extra features include a freewheeling conversation between Sherman and Ringwald, a detail-rich interview with cultural critic Dahlia Schweitzer (Cindy Sherman's Office Killer: Another Kind of Monster), a superfan like Tripplehorn--who once wrote to the artist for career advice and proceeded to take it--and a commentary track from programmer and film historian Heidi Honeycutt (I Spit on Your Celluloid: The History of Women Directing Horror Movies).

It's a great package, well worth your time and money, though I regret that none of the other principal players got involved. I hope it's because they were too busy, and not because they regret their participation in the film.

Carol Kane, above all, really delivers, since it's always clear through her body language and vocal inflections what Dorine's thinking, a quality she's brought to such diverse roles as the sweet, timid Gitl in Hester Street--who also loosens her hairstyle by the end--and the sensual, forthright Carla in Between the Temples. She's also consistently entertaining, frequently quite funny, and among few performers able to master a character who so fully transitions from a "freaky little mouse," to quote Kim, into something else entirely--and if you really want to see Kane get freaky, Kier-La Janisse favorite The Mafu Cage, also directed by a woman, is the film for you.

Though I knew Cindy Sherman by reputation, I had seen a few of the bad reviews, and took a pass when Office Killer came to Seattle's Grand Illusion during its original run, even though I lived just down the street. I wasn't particularly interested in horror cinema then either, but times have changed and so have I.

In Sherman's conversation with Ringwald, with whom she appears to have forged another long-term friendship, she lets it slip that she might finally be open to directing another feature. Whether she does or not, I'm glad she's finally getting the accolades she deserves. Not all one-shot directors have been so lucky, and if you've ever worked in an office, you're likely to relate to Dorine on some level, whether you care to admit it or not--and it's probably for the best that you don't. At least not on the company Slack.

Office Killer is out now on Blu-ray/UHD via Vinegar Syndrome. Additional features include an interview with cinematographer Russell Lee Fine (Pamela Koffler's husband) and video from Jeanne Tripplehorn's personal archives.

Images from the IMDb (Carol Kane in closeup and with Alice Drummond plus Eric Bogosian, Molly Ringwald, and Barbara Sukowa), International Center of Photography (Cindy Sherman; no photographer credited, but presumably a self portrait), Jonathan Rosenbaum (Daniel Schlachet and Craig Chester in Swoon), Stephanie Berger / The Hollywood Reporter (Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo at the Kitchen), and R.L. Terry ReelReview (guess who).

Lost and Found Film Reviews: Gus Van Sant's Milk and Malcolm Ingram's Small Town Gay Bar

2026-06-07T15:01:22.959-07:00

Pride Month seemed like the ideal time to revive these Amazon reviews that dropped off the site over the years, since both queer-oriented films are well worth watching.

Milk is one of Gus Van Sant's best films, and I'm still amazed that the counterintuitive casting of Sean Penn pays such dividends. He isn't the first actor who would've come to my mind to play Harvey Milk--and not because Penn is straight, but because his vibe is completely different, whereas his uber-macho posturing in P.T. Anderson's One Battle After Another proved less surprising and led to his third Oscar after Mystic River and Milk.

Lightly revised from the original text.

MILK

(Gus Van Sant, USA, 2008, 128 minutes)

When a famous person, like the nation's first openly gay male city supervisor, inspires an acclaimed book (The Mayor of Castro Street) and an Oscar-winning documentary (The Times of Harvey Milk), a biopic can seem superfluous at best. Taking over from Oliver Stone and Bryan Singer--who were attached to the project at various points--Gus Van Sant, whose previous motion picture was 2007's lower-budget, more experimental Paranoid Park, directs with such grace, he renders the concern moot.

Unlike Randy Shilts' Milk biography, which begins at the beginning of his life, Dustin Lance Black's Oscar-winning screenplay starts in 1972, just as Milk (Sean Penn, in a finely-wrought performance) and his boyfriend, Scott (James Franco, equally good), move from New York to San Francisco. Milk opens a camera shop on Castro that becomes a safe haven for victims of discrimination, an experience that convinces him to enter politics.

With each race he runs, Harvey's relationship with Scott unravels further. Finally, he wins, and the real battle begins as Milk takes on Proposition 6, which denies equal rights to homosexuals. He does everything he can to rally local politicians, like George Moscone (Victor Garber) and Dan White (Josh Brolin).

While Mayor Moscone is willing, conservative board member White has serious reservations, and after Milk fails to back one of White's pet projects, the die is cast, leading to the murder of two beloved Bay Area figures.

If Van Sant captures Milk in all his complexities--he was, for instance, a very funny man--Milk also serves as an enticement to grassroots activism, showing how one regular guy elevated everyone around him, notably Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch), the ex-street hustler who created the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial. Released in the wake of Proposition 8, California's anti-gay marriage amendment, Milk is inspirational in the best of ways: one person can and did make a difference, though the struggle is far from over.

SMALL TOWN GAY BAR

(Malcolm Ingram, USA, 2006, 76 minutes)

It's easy for city dwellers to take gay bars for granted, but Bear Nation filmmaker Malcolm Ingram presents the other side of the picture. Social opportunities are considerably more limited for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender individuals in rural America. With production assistance from Kevin Smith, Ingram focuses on several communities in Mississippi.

While some gay-themed documentaries are depressing and others inspiring, Small Town Gay Bar is a bit of both. Rick Gladish, for instance, owner of Rumors nightclub in Shannon, created an oasis for the local LGBTQ community, but remains closeted from his Pentecostal parents. Scotty Weaver, on the other hand, was open about his sexual orientation. And brutally murdered because of it (Ingram speaks with Weaver's family).

As Gladish notes, "As far as being gay in Mississippi, it's hard, it's very hard." Proof comes in the form of Reverend Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church, who states categorically, "God hates fags." Other subjects include patrons, bartenders, drag performers, and strippers. In addition, Ingram looks back on bars that have closed over the years, which lends his debut documentary a nostalgic air, though he concludes with new beginnings for two of them.

Small Town Gay Bar isn't as heart-wrenching as Jennie Livingston's Paris Is Burning or Daniel G. Karslake's For the Bible Tells Me So, which cover similar territory, but that doesn't make its voices any less valuable--and a soundtrack filled with Canadian alternative acts like the Hidden Cameras and Broken Social Scene is a nice touch. Extra features include unbridled commentary from Ingram and chats with Smith and editor Scott Mosier.

Milk is on Prime Video; Small Town Gay Bar is unavailable to stream.

Images from the IMDb (Sean Penn, Emile Hirsch, and James Franco in Milk), Netflix (Small Town Gay Bar), and Filthy Dreams (Rumors, R.I.P.).

Bob Fosse, Lenny Bruce, Honey and Kitty Bruce, and Fosse’s Bleak as Hell Biopic Lenny

2026-05-26T23:59:00.000-07:00

LENNY

(Bob Fosse, USA, 1974, rated R,

111 mins)

"He never served any time, and he never paid any fine. He only paid with his life."--Howard Solomon, owner of the Cafe Au Go Go

Kitty Bruce, the only daughter of Lenny Bruce, passed away this month at the age of 70. Like her father and mother, Kitty struggled with drug abuse, but unlike Lenny, she kicked the habit and went on to become the keeper of his flame, overseeing every project involving his work with tact, taste, and understanding. Lenny was unlucky in many ways, but he was fortunate to have a devoted daughter who looked after his legacy with such care.

Whether he was lucky to be immortalized by Bob Fosse, in a film released eight years after his 1966 death from a morphine overdose, is another story. Kitty, as a character, plays only a small role in the biopic, but it's an authorized portrait, and both daughter and ex-wife served as advisors.

Fosse's third feature, an adaptation of screenwriter Julian Barry's 1971 stage play, begins with a pale, frame-filling closeup of a narrow-lipped mouth. Lenny's fame rests primarily on the things he said--things that offended straight society and small-minded vice cops--so it must surely be his mouth. It isn't. The mouth belongs to Honey, played by former showgirl Valerie Perrine.

This bait-and-switch establishes that though Fosse will be focusing on Lenny, the more famous member of the duo, he prioritizes Honey's perspective, and not due to any feminist impulse on his part, but because she outlived her ex-husband, and throughout the film, she reflects on their relationship to a tape recorder wielded by an unseen interviewer--voiced by Bob Fosse.

Harriet Jolliff, aka "Hot Honey Harlow," was working as a stripper in 1951 when she met the former Arnold Schneider (Dustin Hoffman back for more grit after Straw Dogs), who was working as a comedian, but the screenplay neglects to mention that he was also serving in the Merchant Marine after a stint in the Navy. (Tony Award winner Cliff Gorman, Broadway's "Lenny," played the Lenny-via-Hoffman standup comedian in Fosse's All That Jazz.)

Two months before Kitty, Valerie Perrine passed away at 82, whereas her now-88-year-old costar remains active, most recently appearing in Daniel Roher's Tuner (though accused by several women of sexual harassment in 2017, Hoffman has faced no significant repercussions). Most Perrine obituaries led with Richard Donner's Superman, in which she played Lex Luthor's main squeeze, and it's understandable--the 1978 movie was her biggest hit--but Fosse gave her her best role. For her efforts, she was awarded Best Actress at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival.

It wouldn't have been in character for the director to depict Lenny's childhood, and he doesn't. Consequently, I don't recall any mention of his UK-born, podiatrist father, Mickey. Instead, Fosse introduces him as an aspiring standup emceeing strip shows around New York (much as Fosse did, in Chicago, in his younger days). It wasn't Lenny's ultimate goal, but he enjoyed looking at the scantily-clad ladies, so it wasn't exactly the worst gig in the world, and without it, he wouldn't have met his first and only wife.

Fosse also presents Lenny's ancestral home as one dominated by women, especially his supportive mother, Sally Marr (Jan Miner), also a comedian.

Sally shares her flat with his aunt, who isn't as supportive of his use of profanity or his shiksa stripper fiancée, leading to moments of levity in a film that isn't all that funny--including Lenny's act, which plays like on-screen narration, since it's so intensely autobiographical. (As Fosse told Hoffman when he asked, "I don't think Lenny Bruce is funny.") I mean, Roger Ebert wasn't wrong when he wrote, "We get, instead, a sort of hostile therapist who preaches liberation through the defusing of highly charged words."

The results are insightful, to be sure, and Hoffman is a convincing stage performer, but Lenny has got to be one of the least funny A-list films about a comedian ever made, and not just because of the bleak, tabloid way he died.

True to Fosse's form, though, it's never boring! It's also beautiful in its ugliness. Bruce Surtees, who received one of the film's six Oscar nominations, shot the entire thing in high contrast black and white, and many sequences--especially the last--play like crime-scene photographs come to life. Fosse also peopled Lenny's stripshow audiences with sweaty, leering, pock-marked faces, recalling Diane Arbus's queasy work. To quote Sean Baker, "B&W cinematography and production design is A+...and the editing by Alan Heim has the rhythm of a Lenny Bruce stand-up show."

Initially, Honey is the star, and Surtees shoots an early striptease from a low angle as if she were a goddess. Perrine shines like a diamond, much as Jessica Lange would in Fosse's All That Jazz five years later. Or Mariel Hemingway in 1983's Star 80, his final film. In the early-1950s, though, Lenny was just a schlemiel, a schlimazel--to quote Laverne & Shirley--stumbling through showbiz impressions for an audience of hard-drinking, chain-smoking manly men who just wanted to watch ladies disrobe. The well scrubbed, mixed-gender, collegiate record buyers would come later.

It isn't an auspicious start, but Honey finds Lenny "cute" and "huggable"--and he can't take his eyes off the statuesque glamor gal. There's a sequence in a diner in which he stares and stares, but what should be creepy really isn't, even as Honey, dining with an older comedian, coyly pretends not to notice.

Fosse presents their entire courtship as intensely romantic--rooms filled with flowers and the whole bit--amidst the squalor of their surroundings.

In short order, they put together a double act, but it doesn't really take off, so Honey returns to stripping despite Lenny's increasing discomfort with the male attention she attracts. They need the money, and though it isn't exactly an excuse, he understands the impossible situation he has put her in, admitting on stage, "That's where the conflict starts! We all want for a wife a combination Sunday school teacher and $500-a-night hooker."

He may have old fashioned notions about women, but Lenny's no-holds-barred approach to comedy proves so far ahead of its time that older comedians, like a Milton Berle-type, insist he clean up his act. In the film, he does nothing to curry their favor, which might have helped his prospects, except he's honest to a fault and refuses to kiss up to sleazy old men who grope his wife, so it's fortunate he has an agent, Arnie (producer Stanley Beck), to look out for him (Barry based the character on Alan Sobel).

Lenny's rise through the ranks is marked by more downs than ups.

When he and Honey are in a serious automobile accident, for instance, and she lands in the hospital with her pretty face bandaged-up like Rock Hudson in Seconds--and where she develops a taste for morphine--he has a fling with a candy striper. Fosse doesn't depict anything untoward, but Honey figures it out soon enough.

She recovers, and the two push on to Detroit before ending in California. By this point, they're both addicted to heroin. In 1955, Harriet gives birth to Kitty, but their marriage continues to falter, and they split two years later.

Left to her own devices, Honey's life completely unravels, and she ends up serving a two-year bid for possession. Fosse proceeds to depict Lenny as his daughter's caretaker, which wasn't the case at all--his mother took her in.

While Honey is doing time, Lenny releases records and buys a house in the Hollywood Hills--thanks to Steve Allen and Hugh Hefner, he also makes several television appearances, which Fosse omits--but the high times don't last long. Just as Honey is getting her shit together, he starts to lose his.

Other than one disastrous gig that plays for an uninterrupted seven minutes, Fosse speeds through this period mercifully quickly--unlike Robert B. Weide's detail-oriented 1998 documentary--though Lenny's troubles went on for years. It isn't just the drugs, but a string of arrests for narcotics and obscenity that exacerbate his paranoid tendencies. Granted, he had every right to feel persecuted: one arrest was for saying the word "schmuck" on stage--schmuck! In truth, it wasn't so much about the profanity so much as his outspoken opinions about the Vietnam War and the Catholic Church.

It's hard to watch, and Fosse has no interest in exploring the politics of the situation--I don't recall any mention of the War or the Church–but the reality is even worse than the bummer he depicts. At the end of his life, Lenny wasn't slim and trim like Hoffman, but bloated and barely comprehensible.

Fosse's film ends when Lenny does: with the comedian, naked, stretched out on the floor of the house he was about to lose. Though alone when he died, he had a housemate and a fiancée, except they're excised from the picture, and Fosse doesn't even cushion the blow with an intertitle or two.

I was 10 when I saw Lenny for the first time.

My father, a fan of the comedian, took me to the film upon its original release. Near as I can tell, it never occurred to him that it might not be suitable for a child--and thank God for that. I only saw my divorced dad, who lived on the Left Coast, once a year, and I welcomed any insight into his preoccupations, no matter how dark. Nor was it a passing phase. Thirty years later, he gifted me with Lenny Bruce - Let the Buyer Beware, a six-CD boxed set compiled by Hal Willner with assistance from Kitty Bruce and Lenny producer Marvin Worth.

So, I've always had a special place in my heart for this grim, if beautifully-crafted picture. Dad held truth-to-power guys, like Lenny and Richard Pryor, in high regard, and it's especially sad to think that today's truth-tellers are facing similar reprisals--not so much through the courts, but through politically-motivated cancellations--simply for describing things as they are.

After Lenny's death, Honey Bruce published a 1976 memoir, remarried, and built a new life for herself in Hawaii. None of this is mentioned in Lenny. It all happened years later, and doesn't have much to do with the story Fosse chose to tell: the story of a man as seen, primarily, by the woman who loved and lost him. But the love continued in its way as Honey and Kitty, with the assistance of petitioners Richard Pryor, George Carlin and Robin Williams, worked to clear his name, and in 2003, they secured a posthumous pardon from New York Governor George Pataki. Honey died two years later.

With the passing of Kitty Bruce, who didn't have any children, Lenny's bloodline comes to an end, but Lenny lives on as an acid-tinged portrait of the vital necessity--and terrible fragility--of free speech rights in America.

Lenny, in a new 4K digital restoration, is out now on The Criterion Collection on Blu-ray and 4K+Blu-ray with a 2015 commentary track from Nick Redman and Julie Kirgo (from the Twilight Time release), a new interview with Alan Heim, a new essay from Mark Harris, and archival interviews with Bob Fosse in print and Dustin Hoffman and Valerie Perrine on French TV.

Images: the IMDb (Hoffman's eyes, Perrine's mouth, the two together, Perrine with Jan Miner, and Perrine in the hospital), Valerie Perrine / Facebook (on stage), and Dangerous Minds (Honey, Kitty, and Lenny Bruce).

Lost and Found Family-Oriented Film Reviews: Graduation and Rachel Getting Married

2026-05-23T20:43:04.414-07:00

I wrote these now-revived reviews for Amazon and

The Stranger.

The review of Rachel Getting Married dropped off Amazon after awhile, though several versions of the DVD remain for sale; this tends to happen with consistently re-released home videos. Graduation, on the other hand, remains on The Stranger site, but the last third got cut off for some odd reason.

GRADUATION

(Cristian Mungiu, Romania, 2016, 128 minutes)

It's tragic that some kids don't get enough love. It's even more tragic that some don't get any at all, but Romanian master Cristian Mungiu's Graduation takes on a father whose love turns toxic when put to the test.

The shift from benevolent protector to poisonous antagonist occurs after an unknown assailant attacks Eliza (Maria Dragus from Michael Haneke's anti-fascist fable The White Ribbon). Granted, Romeo (Adrian Titieni, who recalls Belgian everydad Olivier Gourmet) is less of a model citizen than he appears. He's a control freak and an adulterer, but Eliza is one scholarship away from attending Cambridge, and she has to ace her exams, so the respected physician calls in favors and encourages her to play along.

It goes against everything for which he and his perma-fatigued librarian wife, Magda (Lia Bugnar), raised their only child: to reject the corruption that characterizes Romania, a country Mungiu portrays as a post-communist wasteland of Brutalist buildings and parched greenery.

Just as Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne directed Gourmet as the ultimate bad-good dad in 1993's The Promise--with Jérémie Renier as his son--DP Tudor Vladimir Panduru frequently depicts Romeo from the back such that his body speaks for him in a way his face and voice can't, reinforcing the constraints of his environment (fittingly, the Dardennes served as co-producers).

Graduation isn't as harrowing as Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days or Beyond the Hills, but it's just as unsettling in a more restrained register.

RACHEL GETTING MARRIED

(Jonathan Demme, USA, 2008, 108 minutes)

Pitched somewhere between Robert Altman's A Wedding and Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding--but more cautiously optimistic than either--Rachel Getting Married marks a change in course for Jonathan Demme. Granted, few Oscar-winning directors have walked a more diverse path.

After a series of documentaries and remakes, The Silence of the Lambs filmmaker tries his hand at the intimate chamber drama, and with the help of actress Anne Hathaway (The Devil Wears Prada) and actress-turned-screenwriter Jenny Lumet, daughter of director Sidney, he pulls it off.

The festivities kick into high gear once Kym (Hathaway, with smeared eyeliner and unkempt, blunt-cut hair) takes a break from rehab for her sister's big day. It soon transpires that Kym, who hides her wounded soul behind a veil of sarcasm, serves as the Buchman's resident black sheep. The problems go deeper than drugs to a tragedy in which she played a part.

As Kym, Rachel (Mad Men's Rosemary DeWitt), their parents (Bill Irwin and Debra Winger), groom Sidney (TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe), and the rest of the bohemian Connecticut brood struggle with the past, the nuptials continue, graced by performances from past Demme collaborators, like Sister Carol East (Something Wild) and Robyn Hitchcock (Storefront Hitchcock). The hours between the reception and after-party toggle between humor, affection, and painful revelation.

In the film's production notes, Demme claims that he and cinematographer Declan Quinn (In America) attempted to make a film that looked like "The most beautiful home movie ever made." By using handheld cameras and focusing on believably flawed characters, they've done just that.

Images from the IMDb (Adrian Titieni and Maria Dragus in Graduation and Anne Hathaway, Rosemary DeWitt, Tunde Adebimpe, and Mather Zickel in Rachel Getting Married) and RogerEbert.com (Hathaway and DeWitt).