April Fools Challenge 2025 🃏
🤥 1. Trust Me…: Lying Liars and Their Lies

Quiz Show has made guest appearances in a handful of my past reviews, always with quiet reverence—because, to me, it’s one of the most unjustly forgotten slices of late-20th-century prestige filmmaking (nominated for four Oscars, including Best Picture, Director, and Adapted Screenplay, yet barely ed today). As it shines a light upon arguably the single most pivotal turning point in the erosion of public trust in the media, even if its events seem depressingly quaint by today’s standards, it instantly leaped out at me as the perfect review to kick off a month-long challenge about deception and the slow erosion of shared ideals. This true story also happens to involve a real-life figure I once knew (more on that below).

Long before the bots, deepfakes, and AI-generated psyops, we had Charles Van Doren—a real man, playing a fake genius on a rigged television quiz show that everyone in the country believed represented an honest shortcut to the American Dream. Quiz Show marked that critical moment when the veil slipped—and society saw just how polished, poised, and Ivy League-endorsed manipulation and deceit could be.

While Hearst may have printed us into the Spanish-American War with headlines like “ the Maine! To Hell with Spain!” and Welles stoked mass panic with his infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast, all in pursuit of profiting off what we today refer to as the “attention economy,” the 1958 quiz show scandal felt all the more insidious because it exposed a deeper rot—one sitting right there in our living rooms. These weren’t just anonymous headlines or disembodied radio voices delivering wartime comforts.

Television was considered a “public trust” because, for the first time in history, millions had allowed strangers, faces and all, into their homes through that magic, glowing box in the corner and built a type of deep psychological rapport not previously known as possible with people we didn't know. So, when that trust was broken, it felt like a distinctly unprecedented personal betrayal.

"I thought we were going to get television. The truth is... television is gonna get us."

Director Robert Redford trains a cool, cerebral lens on the quiz show scandal, crafting a post-mortem on American decency (or at least the appearance of it) nearly four decades after the fact—at the dawn of a new medium poised to replace television and usher in a whole new set of challenges few could’ve ever predicted. (Albeit, Verhoeven eerily came pretty damn close with Starship Troopers just three years later.) Redford resists forging moral binaries—there are no absolute heroes or villains here, only varying degrees of complicity. While the script takes a few liberties for narrative purposes, fixating on those details misses the forest for the trees—the truths the film exposes land way harder than how it reshapes the timeline.

The closest we get to a hero is protagonist Dick Goodwin (Rob Morrow), the ambitious, albeit pompously erudite, young Congressional investigator determined to crack the case open against NBC and the producers of the hit show Twenty-One. However, as he delves into whistleblower allegations, he comes to ire and befriend the show’s current reigning champion, fellow intellectual and Columbia literature instructor Charles Van Doren (Ralph Fiennes). Fiennes’ performance is terrific—his terrifying likeability and charm, grounded in initial moral reticence, marks a striking contrast from the chilling breakout role that introduced him to most audiences just a year prior in Schindler’s List.


Brilliant ing turns by a compendium of acting talent (many in cameo form that I’ll leave largely unspoiled) abound throughout, with special callouts needed for John Turturro (Barton Fink) as manic, jilted ex-contestant Herb Stemple, David Paymer (Mr. Saturday Night) as showrunner Dan Enright, but especially thespian powerhouse Paul Scofield (A Man for All Seasons) as Fiennes’ famous poet father, Professor Mark Van Doren. The emotional journey he undertakes with his son, particularly toward the picture’s end, is subtly devastating and gives the film its biggest gut punch, snagging him an Oscar nod in the process.

The thought of Congress investigating television for having criminally perpetrated a “public fraud” by rigging a game show and duping viewers into believing any of it was real must seem inconceivable to anyone who’s seen a single episode of any reality TV show over the past two decades. Television producers were simply chasing the profit motive of ratings—decades before TV news would morph from 30-minute evening loss leaders on the major broadcast networks into 24-hour channels engaging in the same shenanigans, further eroding the public’s trust. Those baby steps toward fragmentation of the truth only paved the way for today’s far more toxic replacement: algorithmic bias, influencers-as-news, weaponized virality, and performative outrage within echo chambers.

As a society, we began to mistrust institutionalized media on a mass scale with the events depicted in Quiz Show. Seventy years later, large swaths of the public actively prefer to be lied to—either inside their curated info bubbles or by networks that openly tailor coverage to placate their viewers' belief systems. When accused of libel by injured parties, these outlets now defend their programming as mere "entertainment," arguing—on legal grounds—that no rational viewer would mistake it for truth. And yet, as the last vestiges of legacy media slide into irrelevance, the Social Media era has turned *us* into the institution—chasing confirmation bias, dopamine hits, and misinformation, even as we unwittingly—or uncaringly—become vectors spreading the very manipulation we once feared.

FINAL SCORE:

- 1 point for making a guy throw the game on the answer of his favorite movie. That's Letterboxd violence.

+ 5 points for Martin Scorsese forgetting he’s from Queens long enough to drop the most borough-erasing line in film history

+ 5 points for Sex and the City’s Mario Cantone, showing up just long enough to remind us he’s always playing himself

+ 5 points for flagging grammatical errors in the statement meant to absolve the people manipulating you. Bold move, champ!

+ 7 points for that one Senator who still believed in truth, ability, and possibly unicorns... At least, that's how he'd be viewed today.

Hey, that makes 21! *pats self on back*

The fact that there are more LB logs of Maid in Manhattan in Ralph Fiennes’ filmography today is such a sad statement that we’re still paying more attention to JLow than to the existential problem at our feet. See it!

Grade: A-
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Stranger Than Fiction:
The year before ing Criterion in the late '90s, I had one earlier job in NYC working at an international business magazine. In that role, I occasionally interfaced with the publication’s outside counsel, a poised woman in her late 60s named Vivien Neering. Upon introduction, the name jumped out at me—this was just a couple years after Quiz Show was released, and one of its most memorable moments is when our anti-hero is unseated from his unprecedented run by a contestant with that exact same name. Same city, same profession, and—though the real-life events predate me by decades—she would’ve been around the right age at the time. All too perfect to be coincidence.

Throughout our time working together, I was dying to ask if she was *that* Vivien Neering. But given the nature of her victory in the show’s timeline, there was an unspoken implication that she might’ve been in on the hoax—something the film (and history) leaves murky. So I hesitated and never brought it up.

A few years ago, I looked her up. She had since ed, but in one of the posthumous write-ups I found, there was a note that she never publicly discussed her connection to the quiz show scandal and tended to bristle when the topic came up. So, I guess my instincts were correct to just keep my inquisitive little trap shut on that one. Chock one up for those etiquette lessons during my upbringing.

🍿 Guilty Pleasures... As Charged! #6

After the indignity of revisiting 2000’s Hollow Man and seeing a mutual currently working their way through director Martin Campbell’s filmography, it immediately sent me scrambling back to one of my standby comfort watches to remind myself the new millennium didn’t open in a salvo of cinematic disasters. At least not entirely.

Vertical Limit was the first film I saw on SF’s Metreon IMAX screen (then second-largest in the U.S.), and that theatrical experience has long carved a permanent home in a nostalgic little corner of my heart. From its mesmerizing sound design, James Newton Howard’s gloriously over-the-top score (which I contend remains among his very best), and the unapologetic hamminess of it all, it yields consistent returns on every revisit.


Of course, the plot is as threadbare as to be expected of this fare: estranged brother-and-sister climbers Chris O’Donnell (the most prominently nippled Robin in Batman history) and Robin Tunney (The Craft) are reunited at the base camp of K2 (really Aoraki/Mt. Cook in New Zealand + some dicey matte work) as she prepares to accompany a megalomaniacal billionaire (Bill Paxton) to the summit for a braindead publicity stunt to wave at the inaugural flight of his new airline. Obviously, everything goes awry and we’re treated to avalanches, crevasse falls, and rescue teams incredulously schlepping canisters of nitroglycerine in their backpacks like they’re in a remake of Clouzot’s Wages of Fear—for Dummies.

No deep analysis needed here—just a $140M (adjusted) popcorn flick that delivers exactly what it promises. Sure, some of the special effects don’t really hold up after a quarter century (Hell, maybe they weren't even all that acceptable at the time), but Vertical Limit remains a damn fine adrenaline rush. Acrophobics may want to steer well clear.

Paxton is clearly having a blast serving as the prototype for Elon Musk had he a single shred of self-awareness and didn't outsource his dirty work to bodyguards and a personal army of Reddit sycophants. Even as a villain, I miss Bill Paxton. Scott Glenn is also terrific in a ing role as a weathered climber still haunted by the disappearance of his Sherpa wife years earlier. And Aussies Ben Mendelsohn and Steve Le Marquand provide ample comedic relief as a couple of hippy climber brothers committed to serving as the mountain's resident Rosencrantz & Guildenstern. Alas, not all the performances sing—you’ll know 'em when you see 'em—but much like Congo five years earlier, they add a certain old-school matinee charm... without the martini-drinking, talking gorilla.

And to double down one last time on Newton’s score—it really does deserve a special callout. The music does so much of the heavy lifting; I’d probably have to dock this picture an entire star (perhaps more) in its absence. As melodramatic as it is, it’s perfectly attuned to the campiness of the picture, bombastic orchestral swells for sweeping helicopter shots of the severe terrain seamlessly giving way to bleeding emotional leitmotifs in the film’s more intimate moments. It’s really worth a listen on its own.

Vertical Limit was never destined for greatness, but it was wildly successful at the box office, and damn if it doesn’t claw its way to its own peaks with pure, unfiltered adrenaline. And that ending, even with it so clearly shot as a green-screen afterthought, still manages to tug the heartstrings every time I see it. Sure, it may look like a glorified Mountain Dew commercial at times, but it’s still miles better than cinematic brethren K2, Everest, and even fan-favorite Cliffhanger. Just hold your breath and enjoy the drop.

SUMMIT SCORES:

- 1 point for that flex of Lance Armstrong in Sports Illustrated not aging particularly well

- 2 points for numerous climbers smoking cigarettes at base camp

+ 3 points for that notably brutal opening in Monument Valley

+ 5 points for Ben Mendelsohn on that helicopter trying to kiss his ass goodbye

It’s loud, it’s dumb, it’s awesome—and I wouldn’t change a frame of it.

Highly recommended.

Grade: B+
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Note:
While Vertical Limit plays its K2 setting for high-stakes spectacle, owing to its reputation as the most dangerous climb in the world, real-life events sadly mirrored its tragedy not long after. On Aug 1, 2008, eleven climbers lost their lives on the same part of the mountain—many by eerily similar means. Though K2 had long claimed lives, that single deadliest event in the mountain’s history lends the film’s final act an unexpected emotional weight that’s harder to shake in its aftermath.

🎬 Verhoeven Ranked #17
Dead last, my friends…

Now I finally realize why Hollow Man is the only film in Verhoeven’s entire oeuvre that I had almost no recollection of, having just seen it once during its original theatrical run. And after rewatch, I’m stunned to find myself knocking it down a half-star into territory I thought he was incapable of reaching. Because if there’s one thing you never expect from Verhoeven—for better or worse—it’s that any of his work could be… utterly forgettable.

That’s the cardinal sin in Verhoeven’s universe—not being messy, not being offensive, but being so inert that it lands with no impact whatsoever. Nothing to hold onto. It’s a shockingly empty thriller about a horny scientist who turns invisible and immediately uses the technology to sexually assault women. That’s… the whole plot! Even his most infamous misfires, like the gloriously campy Showgirls and its far more explicit Dutch thematic sibling Spetters, left behind craters in their wakes. Hollow Man doesn’t even leave a dent. It’s sleek, pervy, and yet thoroughly pointless.

Verhoeven has since itted he sees almost nothing of himself in the film. Yes, the movie is horny as hell—but he’s always been horny. The difference is that he typically has something to say about it. In his most controversial work, Verhoeven’s exploitation has laser-trained purpose: it’s weaponized, satirical, and destabilizing. It digs into systems, into audience complicity, into the grotesque absurdities of violence and desire. His more salacious instincts always function as vehicles for commentary: a dismantling of masculinity, media, or power.

In Elle, he threads the needle with an impossibly risky narrative, sparking fierce debate in the process. Even Flesh + Blood—crude and excessive as it is—swings hard at the morally queasy intersection of victimhood and manipulation, using its medieval nihilism to muddy power dynamics rather than glamorize them. Here, the nudity and sexual violence exist solely because... well, that’s what some mid-level studio exec thought “edgy” thrillers needed to have at the time. It’s voyeurism without perspective. Sleaze without intent. For a director so renowned for lobbing ideological hand grenades into our laps, it’s just depressing for him to have nothing left to say here.

While Kevin Bacon gleefully leans into his douchey, aggro scientist-from-hell, Elisabeth Shue is left adrift in a role so underwritten it borders on negligence. She might as well be named Dr. Exposition Love Interest—there’s nothing for her to do beyond react, plead, and inevitably run. It’s especially galling because Verhoeven has almost always centered his work on complicated, powerful female protagonists or anti-heroines. It’s a hallmark of his pictures. Basic Instinct, Benedetta, The 4th Man, even Showgirls’ Nomi—love ‘em or hate ‘em, they at least all have agency. Instead, Shue’s a sideline prop in her own narrative—the kind of stock character Verhoeven seemed constitutionally incapable of crafting. That she exists at all in his filmography feels like a clerical error.

As an adult-oriented update to The Invisible Man, there’s nothing here you can’t find in better form—and with far more bite—in earlier iterations of the tale. Hollow Man has no authorial fingerprint, no thesis, no real reason to exist beyond its CGI showreel. And despite the clear amount of work and money that went into the special effects (>60% of the budget), even those have aged with the grace of having a Netscape homepage. You don’t come to Verhoeven for glossy emptiness. That’s what Brett Ratner is for.

And maybe that’s the most damning thing I can say: Hollow Man doesn’t feel like a Paul Verhoeven movie at all. There’s an understandable temptation to read it as the product of a director who’d simply had enough—who was over it. After the scorched-earth receptions to Showgirls and Starship Troopers—his most pointed, most misunderstood satire, and his overall best film—it’s no wonder a defeated and disillusioned Verhoeven retreated to Europe shortly after.

But what’s tragic isn’t just that he walked away from Hollywood. It’s that he did so with this: a studio-mandated sleazefest that mistook shock value for substance and turned one of cinema’s sharpest iconoclasts into a hired gun for brainless titillation and tech demos. Ironically, the precise sort of fare he built his entire reputation mocking.

People often wonder why this wasn’t just called The Invisible Man? Maybe it wasn’t intentional, but I’d argue Hollow Man is the aptest, most nakedly honest title imaginable—because by the time this film was made, that’s exactly what Verhoeven had become.

LAB NOTES:

+ 2 points for initially casting Robert Downey Jr. in the lead—until the insurance underwriters presumably had a panic attack

- 2 points for Jerry Goldsmith sort of phoning it in, recycling the limpest cues from his own scores to Basic Instinct and Sluizer’s epically misguided remake of The Vanishing

+ 2 points for Shue awkwardly smirking through most of the runtime—undoubtedly unable to contain her glee at snagging top billing over Bacon

- 3 points for Nobel-caliber scientists failing to solve Bacon’s insomnia due to invisible eyelids—because no one thought to buy him a $5 sleep mask?

- 5 points for the Director’s Cut adding even more meaningless cruelty to women and lab animals, as if that were the missing piece

I take no glee in saying this but: Worst Film of His Career.

Theatrical Cut Grade: D+
Director’s Cut Grade: D

🏛️ My 100 Essential Films #82
🎙️ Musicals for People Who Hate Musicals #1

I honestly can’t a time when I hadn’t seen Victor/Victoria. Initially, I was probably eight, catching it on cable, and instantly became obsessed. It felt like being whisked away to a 1930s Parisian theme park, where Mary Poppins swapped her umbrella for a tux and a top hat and, frankly, looked all the hotter for it. Did I grasp all the layers—the subversion, the gender play, half the jokes? Absolutely not. If I recall, I even had to look up the word “horny” afterward. But I was utterly transfixed anyway.

I’ve slotted this as #1 in the aforementioned list precisely because it’s the archetype of a musical that doesn’t ask you to like musicals. No whimsical plot devices forcing characters to burst into song-and-dance while grocery shopping. No need to suspend disbelief. Everyone’s singing because they’re supposed to be singing—on stage, in clubs, rehearsing acts. The songs are simply part of this Crazy World, not a fantastical break from it.

What really locked me in then—and still does—is how fully realized that world is. Instead of shooting on location as originally planned, budget constraints forced Edwards to recreate his entire period cityscape across 15 interconnected soundstages at Pinewood Studios. Lucky for us, it freed him up to design a Paris that feels like a cabaret-infused fever dream: neon-lit boulevards, gleaming Art Deco bars, bustling brasseries, velvet-draped nightclubs. Not a false front in sight—you could practically walk the whole set through its snowswept cobblestone streets. It’s the kind of place you want to crawl into and explore. Hell, I’ve been to the City of Lights plenty of times, yet I still want to book a weekend trip to Edwards’ version that I’m certain never really existed.

How do we land in this glittering magic box to begin with? Julie Andrews (The Sound of Music) plays Victoria Grant, a down-on-her-luck singer in Depression-era Paris, who, at the encouragement of her newfound gay friend Toddy (Robert Preston), decides to masquerade as a man impersonating a woman to land a gig. Cue gender confusion, mistaken identities, and enough romantic chaos to power half a season of Schitt’s Creek. And no, the illusion was never about perfect believability—it’s about the performance, the playfulness, the sheer joy of the con. Edwards lifted the concept from the 1933 German comedy Viktor und Viktoria, but to be clear, this remake leaves the original in the dust.

What’s even more impressive is how Victor/Victoria takes 1930s attitudes toward sexuality, filters them through early-80s sensibilities, and still winds up about 15 years ahead of most of Hollywood’s curve on the subject. All the more remarkable considering this was the same year Arthur Hiller’s Making Love came out and effectively ended careers in a cloud of moral panic. Edwards’ picture, by contrast, threaded the needle with audiences, walking away with statuettes and a permanent spot in cinema history.

But make no mistake—this is a comedy first and foremost, musical second. The gags land even harder than the high notes, with Edwards’ sharp timing letting everything from slapstick hotel farces to sly double entendres hit so well that the AFI still lists Victor/Victoria on their 100 Funniest American Movies of All Time. When the music does kick in, it’s woven seamlessly into the performances. “Le Jazz Hot” and “The Shady Dame from Seville” might be all-time bangers, but they never interrupt the narrative—they’re part of the show within the show, just another extension of the film’s playful wit.

Credit where it's due: Julie Andrews may deservedly command center stage, but it’s Preston and Warren who nearly walk off with the whole shebang. Robert Preston (The Music Man, Semi-Tough) deliciously shreds his 70s tough guy image, leaning full force into playing a flamboyant lounge singer, dropping quips like he’s been waiting his entire life to deliver them—playfully bitchy and perfectly timed. If there’s a patron saint of scene-stealers, it’s him. But it’s Lesley Ann Warren (Clue, Color of Night) who proves the film’s true secret sauce, nailing her ditzy moll character with surprising depth and charm. Her reaction to realizing that her macho gangster boyfriend, James Garner (The Great Escape, Maverick), was ogling a “female impersonator” throughout her debut performance is the stuff of legend.

The Academy wasn’t blind either—seven Oscar nods, including Andrews, Preston, and Warren, plus a win for Henry Mancini’s jazzy score. No wonder it holds up as the rare musical that can win over even the staunchest of genre skeptics—like me—because it’s not just a musical. It’s a perfect little world unto itself. Eight-year-old me never stood a chance.

ENCORE APPLAUSE:

+ 3 points for Graham Stark as perhaps the most memorable waiter in cinema history. Tip fully earned, my friend!

+ 3 points for casting Blake Edwards’ uncredited son to check out his own stepmom, calling her “divine” while she’s rehearsing as “Victor”

+ 5 points for ex-NFLer Alex Karras (aka Webster’s dad) fully going there in 1982. Proving that the quiet ones often land the wildest punches.

+ 5 points for NYT film critic Vincent Canby noting, “the only depressing thing about it is the suspicion that Mr. Edwards is going to have a terrible time trying to top it.” Indeed, he never came close.

+ 10 points for Bob Preston going for broke with that final number in a single, uninterrupted take with Edwards capturing the real-time reaction of the audience

If you only ever see one musical… well, other than The Wizard of Oz (practically required viewing at birth), this is the one it should be. A must-see film. Preferably with a libation in hand.

Grade: A

Also featured on:
Smoke & Mirrors: Impersonation & False Identities #6
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Note: Since Victor/Victoria is all about the art of the con, seems like the perfect time to plug my new Letterboxd challenge. Tailor-made for these times, the April Fools Challenge is a tight, 10-category lineup celebrating cinematic deception, disinformation, and outright baldfaced lies—including this film itself. If you haven’t caught it yet, Soderbergh’s latest, Black Bag, makes an appearance too—perfect fit. Official launch coming soon, but here’s a sneak peek. Fool me once? Try fooling yourself all month long.

🔁 So Nice, They Filmed It Twice #1
🍿 Guilty Pleasures... As Charged! #9

This earns a full extra star than it otherwise would've, mostly due to the enigma that it feels like two completely different movies awkwardly edited into one—because it is.

Exit to Eden is among the most legendarily bizarre production disasters in Hollywood history that never would've happened had director Garry Marshall not been given pretty much carte blanche after the runaway success of Pretty Woman. He initially filmed Interview with the Vampire scribe Anne Rice’s trashy dime-store novel (understandably written under a pseudonym) as a mostly straightforward rom-com about a secret S&M fantasy island resort—today, the Four Seasons Lanai—starring Dana Delany (TV's China Beach) and Paul Mercurio (Strictly Ballroom).

Test audiences puked all over the film's initial assembly. The studio panicked, hiring Rosie O’Donnell and Dan Aykroyd to replace the leads and turn it into a cops-and-robbers diamond heist screwball comedy that had nothing to do with Rice’s source material—while cutting most of the original film's footage in the process and shooting a handful of bridge scenes with the now-sidelined Delaney and Mercurio to connect the two storylines.

After test audiences trashed it *again*, the studio scrambled to reshoot parts of the reshoot. Problem was, O’Donnell—who’d lost considerable weight for the role originally—had already gained most of it back. On her eponymous 90s talk show, she repeatedly begged people not to see the movie, frequently airing montages poking fun at her character's glaring weight fluctuations in skimpy outfits from shot-to-shot within a given scene. She even invited Anne Rice (who publicly distanced herself from the film) onto the show to issue a formal apology for having appeared in it.

Let’s be real—none of it gels. The S&M elements are played dead serious, while the smuggling subplot feels like a half-baked improv sketch, with O'Donnell and Aykroyd slapsticking their way through the most off-the-rails SNL cold open ever. It’s constant tonal whiplash—two incompatible genres leaving both narratives dead in the water. Poor Dana Delany’s fighting for her career, but the movie keeps yanking us back to Dan Aykroyd in a leather gimp outfit—and not in a good way. It's as if someone tried to splice together Fifty Shades of Grey and The Naked Gun without warning the cast upfront.

Marshall, O’Donnell, and Aykroyd have all gone on record calling Exit to Eden the worst thing they’ve ever done. Considering some of their later career choices, that’s really saying something.

ARBITRARY & PETTY AS HELL:

- 3 points for trying to off a Pillsbury Crescent Roll as a freshly baked French Quarter croissant

- 3 points for the incessantly annoying violins and French horns in Patrick Doyle's wildly inappropriate score

+ 1 point for the delightful Delany treating this like her shot at becoming the next Julia Roberts. Honestly makes me curious to see the original edit before they gutted her entire storyline—but I'm not holding my breath.

+ 5 points for O'Donnell's last-minute voiceover capping the film with: "No matter what your sexual preference, true love is still the ultimate fantasy." Eight years before she publicly came out. And good for her.

A bewildering disaster—but strangely gawk-worthy.

Grade: C-

Also featured on:
How Did These Movies Just... Disappear? #65
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Note: I still own the lousy pan-and-scan DVD, but this one's surprisingly tricky to find outside of random internet rabbit holes. Honestly, it deserves better preservation treatment for its freakish production history alone. That's NOT an endorsement for The Criterion Collection if you're wondering.

🤡 If You Didn’t Laugh, Who Hurt You? #1
🍿 Guilty Pleasures... As Charged! #5

And the category is... Midwest Mayhem Realness

Drop Dead Gorgeous was always destined for cult status—it just took a while for the judges (i.e. the world) to catch up. In 1999, audiences and critics alike recoiled at its gleefully mean-spirited tone, perhaps forgetting that satire isn't supposed to be polite. This was just two years after everyone so epically misinterpreted Verhoeven's Starship Troopers as fascist propaganda instead of condemnation, after all. But let’s be honest: its box office failure had less to do with offended sensibilities or lack of critical thinking skills and more to do with New Line having no clue how to market something this gloriously deranged. Over the past 25 years, the film has evolved into one of the funniest, most beloved cult comedies of its era precisely because it's so unapologetic about its targets.

JUDGES' SCORESHEET

Opening Statement Score: 9/10
This isn’t just a lampooning of Midwest beauty pageants—it’s a scorched-earth takedown of *everything*: American exceptionalism, class warfare, casual racism, gun culture, nepotism, the tyranny of bake sales, the unchecked power of local furniture store magnates… No one leaves this movie unscathed. The humor is dark, absurd, and wildly un-PC in ways that would undoubtedly get it canceled today—except the entire point is to expose just how insanely hypocritical small-mindedness can be in the first place. And yet, there remains an odd affection for this world, or at least for the people who can survive it.

Interpretive Dance & Talent Score: 10/10

The film lives and dies by its deadpan delivery. Its cast proves unbelievably game, each one leaning into their Minnesota accents with Olympian commitment. Kirsten Dunst (Spider-Man, Melancholia) plays it straight—a contestant with a moral com and an earnestness Diane Sawyer herself might envy. Denise Richards (Starship Troopers, Wild Things) pushes the spoiled pageant queen archetype into full sociopath mode, cementing one of the best Mean Girl performances of the 90s. Ellen Barkin (Sea of Love, The Big Easy) is perfection as a beer-guzzling, trailer park matriarch who spends the majority of her screen time waving a charred Bud Light can permanently fused to her hand. Mindy Sterling (Austin Powers) fires off one-liners like she’s trying to take out the entire cast, while Brittany Murphy (Clueless, 8 Mile), in one of her most effortlessly endearing performances, has a single line about her brother Peter that makes for a rare sweet moment in the film.

And then there’s The West Wing’s Allison Janney, who just walks away with the whole damn thing. If you ever wondered why Hollywood didn’t immediately start casting her in every greenlit comedy after this, same here. She devours every scene she’s in, a cigarette-wielding, one-woman Greek chorus capable of spinning even a throwaway line into gold. Janney herself has since said that, among the entirety of her prolific career, this is the role fans reminisce about with her the most. Even Amy Adams (Arrival), in her film debut, makes a mark despite having little material to work with. Meanwhile, Cheers’ Kirstie Alley is ironically just playing a heightened version of her later IRL self—less a performance than, sadly, a premonition.

Evening Gown Elegance Score: 9/10
Featuring production and costume design that looks straight out of an art class assembly, every parade float, set piece, and outfit appears held together by duct tape, hairspray, and ive aggression, which is both the joke and the aesthetic. The sheer camp brilliance of staging an entire pageant by a PTA Committee hopped up on Jell-O shots and latent trauma? Bless their hearts.



Swimwear & Sportswear Score: 8/10
Technically, no one's strutting around in a one-piece or Velcro tearaways, but every contestant (and townsperson) is decked out in the cultural equivalent: blaze orange hunting vests, sequined flag ensembles, and donning Aqua Net mall bangs capable of weathering a hailstorm unscathed.

Poise and Public Perception Score: 11/10

This simply isn’t a movie that could be made today, but that’s exactly why it works. Through all the carnage (literal and otherwise), the film builds a strange, devoted camaraderie among those who "get" it. If you know, you know. It’s not endorsing anything up on screen—it’s exposing just how "normal" all of it was... and, in some circles, how little that’s changed. If you're *not* offended by portions of Drop Dead Gorgeous, then congratulations, you're part of the joke. That’s what makes it so biting. That’s what makes it last.

BONUS ROUND: Added Points & Deductions

Talent: + 3 points for Loretta’s cigarette magically never burning out, physics be damned

Spirituality: + 4 points for Denise Richards' Jesus-on-a-cross choreography (Peak American Christ-core)

Styling: - 2 points deducted for lutefisk in your hair… and split ends

Creativity: + 5 points for fatal accidents involving farm equipment and parade floats


Patriotic Spirit: + 10 points for the World's Biggest Ball of Twine making you proud to be an American

Soderbergh is back in full vintage form—his signature sharp framing, impeccable eye for production design, whiptight pacing, and mainstay composer David Holmes, all ed for. It’s like Ocean’s Eleven trimmed down on Ozempic—lean muscle, no fat.

Featuring a fraction of his typically sprawling cast size, Black Bag emerges as sexy and sleek and delivers an invigorating punch wrapped up in a taut 90-minute package—more of those, please! Obviously, none of the plot should be divulged in advance, so I’ll keep this relatively short (for me). What starts as a juicy, slow-burn dinner party setup—where I half-expected the entire film to unfold Invitation-style—quickly pivots into an almost chamber-piece MI6 workplace thriller, where allegiances blur, motivations unravel, and boundaries get obliterated.

The entire cast turns in pitch-perfect performances. Michael Fassbinder may just be playing android-adjacent from his work on the Alien films, but his calculating iciness pairs beautifully here with a shockingly ripped Cate Blanchett, determined to meet him beat-for-beat. Naomie Harris (aka Moneypenny, Moonlight) and Regé-Jean Page (Bridgerton) are radiant, while Tom Burke (The Souvenir) and Marisa Abela (Amy Winehouse in Back to Black) make for the most fascinating pair, fully owning the undercurrent of black comedy that pulses underneath the constant tension felt by all.

Is it absurd that half of British Intelligence appears to be sleeping with the other half while the agency simply turns a blind eye? Naturally, but if that type of predicate detail is likely to ruin the movie, much of this entire genre should be considered off-limits to you. It’s best to turn off your brain and just lean into the proceedings regardless.

Black Bag never tries to reinvent the genre—and frankly, it doesn’t need to. It may feel somewhat slight, but it’s tightly wound, crisply written, and paced with the confidence of filmmakers who know sometimes all we want is a brisk, stylish spy yarn to chew on.

MISSION DEBRIEF:

+ 1 point for Abela knowing how to punctuate a dinner party

+ 3 points for Pierce Brosnan conveying rage through the single twitch of an eye bag

+ 5 points for teaching the world a novel benefit of Kegel exercises

Less ‘thinkpiece,’ more centerpiece of a damn good time at the movies. Highly recommended.

Grade: B+

🔍 How Did These Movies Just... Disappear? #5

If Luis Buñuel and John Waters got locked in a room and dared each other to write the most debauched comedy of errors imaginable, you’d probably get something akin to Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills—a movie where class warfare isn’t fought with money or politics, but with witty repartee, a dead man’s horny ghost, and bottomless mimosas.

Paul Bartel (Eating Raoul) wrote, directed, and co-starred in this scathing, campy, borderline sociopathic satire, where the elite don’t just exploit the help—they seduce, blackmail, and cuckold them first. It’s Bartel at his most unhinged—a film where every tryst feels like an act of socio-economic sabotage and self-destruction of the wealthy looks downright operatic.

“What a horrid, fabulous thing to say!”

The setup? Aging sitcom star Clare Lipkin (Jacqueline Bisset), freshly widowed, hosts a weekend gathering at her Beverly Hills estate, where an assortment of guests promptly spiral into an arms race of betrayal, manipulation, and questionable decision-making.

The house staff, led by Ray Sharkey (Wise Guys, The Idolmaker) and Robert Beltran (Star Trek: Voyager, Night of the Comet), weaponize their proximity to the upper class by making a depraved wager: whoever seduces their boss first wins. Meanwhile, Paul Mazursky (yes, the director of Down and Out in Beverly Hills) plays a recently deceased auto-erotic asphyxiation victim who somehow remains one of the more rational characters among the ensemble.

Bartel brings back his Raoul partner-in-crime Mary Woronov, a woman who could dissolve weaker souls with a single deadpan line delivery. She’s the acidic core of the film, prowling through the chaos with the venomous grace of someone born to destroy lives with spiked heels. Watching her wield language like a blunt-force weapon is worth the price of ission alone.

Wallace Shawn (My Dinner with Andre) revels in his era of comedic character-actor stardom that hit its peak with The Princess Bride and Heaven Help Us, getting to fire off some of the film’s most cutting barbs this side of a briar patch. But, understandably, Bartel still keeps some of the best lines for himself.

“Look, I don't care who you talk to—when you get a bunch of rich, fat people determined to get thin at any price, some of them are going to die! It’s just a rule of thumb.”

This isn’t just rich people behaving badly—this is rich people wielding sex and status like nuclear deterrents. Bartel weaponizes soap opera tropes to expose class hypocrisy, turning the entire house into a pressure cooker of affairs, extortions, and Jacqueline Bisset rolling her eyes mid-orgasm. In a film where everyone is ethically bankrupt, the only character with a moral com is Bojangles, the family dog. Aunt To-bel, however, remains in a class entirely of her own.

Child actor Garrett Oliver (The NeverEnding Story, Cocoon) makes his final screen appearance here before retiring from acting. The film also carries a bittersweet footnote: it marks the last role of Rebecca Schaeffer of TV’s My Sister Sam fame, tragically murdered by a stalker a month after this movie’s release, just the night before she was to audition for The Godfather Part III. Her presence here, as Bisset’s daughter, adds an unexpected layer of poignancy—a final role in a film that, beneath all its filth and chaos, is about the fragility of status, life, and the illusions we build around both.

It’s Dynasty if it had the self-awareness to be hilarious. It’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie if everyone got naked. It’s the sharpest and most absurd bedroom farce about capitalism ever put to screen. And, sadly, it’s been largely forgotten.

BAD BEHAVIOR SCORECARD:

+ 2 points for garnishing a dead maid on the kitchen floor with ferns and lobsters


+ 5 points for the brunch sequence devolving into an utter demolition derby of insults


+ 5 points for Bojangles making new friends

+ 10 points for Beltran even taking that bet in the first place

Long overdue for cult status based on its endlessly quotable dialogue alone. Highly recommended.

Grade: B+

Also featured on:
Movie Titles That Go Hard #190
Hidden Gems & Overlooked Classics #315
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Note: While physical copies of the film can be tough to track down (my DVD is a German import), it's pretty easy to find online today.

🍿 Guilty Pleasures... As Charged! #112

"Giant insects infiltrate suburbia, get addicted to sugar, and self-destruct trying to pose as a ‘prototypical’ American family. I cannot explain it. I can only confirm its existence."

After Heathers made Michael Lehmann a cult sensation but before Hudson Hawk turned him into an industry pariah, he directed Meet the Applegates—a film that almost no one saw, but everyone who did probably needed therapy afterward.

The premise? A family of giant Brazilian beetles, disguised as suburban WASPs (as in, the acronym), move to small-town Midwest America to sabotage a nuclear power plant before humanity destroys their rainforest… knowing that their species will be the only one to survive the fallout. If that sounds like The Americans meets a Kafka-esque nightmare as written by a sleep-deprived Greenpeace activist, that’s because it is—just filtered through Lehmann’s Heathers-tinged sense of humor, in which brutal satire and grotesque body horror share the same dinner table.

Where Meet the Applegates gets *really* subversive is that, unlike most "aliens hiding among us" stories, the family doesn’t simply struggle to fit in—they study American demographics to blend flawlessly. And therein lies their undoing. They don’t fail because they can’t maintain their cover. Their downfall is due to their effort to as a statistically "perfect" family, only to succumb to every toxic pillar of American excess—rampant consumerism, suburban greed, adultery, teen pregnancy, addiction. The longer they stay, the more they mutate, not into their proper form, but into actual Americans.

It’s a rare example of an "invader" film in which assimilation is the real horror. The Applegates don’t get exposed because they’re bad at pretending to be human—but because they go too deep into the bit. What starts as a covert eco-terrorist mission turns into a full collapse of "family values," where the only thing more dangerous than the bugs themselves is the American Dream. In other words, their mission to destroy America ends the same way everything does in this country—corrupted, commodified, and spiraling into paralytic dysfunction.

And yet, for all its sicko appeal, Meet the Applegates is funny as hell. The running sugar addiction gag alone deserves its own thesis—these bugs aren’t just enjoying human food; they’re mainlining Butterfingers and maple syrup like their exoskeletons depend on it. Stockard Channing (Grease, Six Degrees of Separation), as the mom, commits fully—her Stepford-esque delivery crackles at just the right moments, as if she’s one repressed emotion away from full-blown metamorphosis. Meanwhile, the perenially-moustached Dabney Coleman (R.I.P.) spends a chunk of the movie in drag as colony leader “Queen Bea,” with the exact level of enthusiasm you’d expect from a man who probably lost a bet.

It’s no surprise this film flopped—too weird for the multiplex, too off-putting for mainstream comedy audiences, and too smart-assed for horror fans. Despite Heathers’ recent runaway success, the picture was shelved for over two years, partly due to financial woes at New World Pictures and partly because they simply had no clue how to market the damn thing. It sat in home video limbo for decades, living mainly through VHS tapes unrewound by the last stoner to rent it and via confused word-of-mouth. But now that it’s resurfaced on streaming, it’s rightfully earned the minor cult gem status it's long deserved—a relic from a time when studios still greenlit things this deranged.

ASSIMILATION CHECKLIST:

+ 1 point for managing the “Save the Rainforest” credo a hell of a lot better than The Forbidden Dance the same year


+ 2 points for positioning Scientific American as masturbatory material


+ 4 points for all employees at the nuclear power plant pronouncing it “nuke-u-lar”

- 3 points for composer David Newman apparently recycling his earlier score for The War of the Roses practically note-for-note

- 1 point for doing Spot like that


Thoroughly twisted and highly recommended.

Grade: B+

Also featured on:
How Did These Movies Just... Disappear? #12
If You Didn’t Laugh, Who Hurt You? #11
WTF Did I Just Watch? #75

🎬 Verhoeven Ranked #10

The best sci-fi films don’t just predict the future—they accidentally engineer it. Total Recall may not have seemed like Paul Verhoeven’s most prophetic film at the time, but three decades later, it plays like an absurdly violent preview of billionaire-led space colonization, the privatization of natural resources, and a world where implanted memories and AI-driven identity crises are reaching for our fingertips. It’s equal parts satire, cyberpunk fever dream, and pure action spectacle, cementing itself as one of the most exhilarating blockbusters of the early ‘90s.

Schwarzenegger stars as Douglas Quaid, a blue-collar worker in a marriage too perfect to trust, dreaming of a life beyond his dead-end routine. His obsession with Mars (Oh, hey, there, Elon!) leads him to Rekall, a company offering memory vacations—why deal with the hassle of an actual trip when they can just implant the experience? Naturally, everything immediately goes haywire, and Quaid finds himself on the run from corporate assassins, piecing together a past that may not even be his. Is he a brainwashed superspy? A pawn in a conspiracy? Or just a man trapped inside the world’s most elaborate delusion?

Total Recall thrives on this ambiguity, planting just enough doubt at every turn of events to keep you guessing and never slowing down long enough to provide an answer. While Verhoeven plays with heady sci-fi concepts, he keeps them buried under layers of pure chaos—elaborate chase sequences, exploding heads, and some really inventive practical effects. If RoboCop was a dissection of American corporatism, this is a jackhammer to the brainstem.

What’s most remarkable about Total Recall today is how it unintentionally mirrors the real-life obsessions of a certain tech billionaire. The film envisions a future where Mars isn’t governed by nations but by corporate overlords profiting off oxygen itself. Cohaagen (Ronny Cox, once again in full-on capitalist scumbag mode) isn’t just a villain—he’s a terrifyingly familiar figure in an era where the same people investing in off-world colonization are also developing brain implants. Verhoeven may not have been trying to predict the Musk pipeline of Mars expansion and mind-hacking, but watching the film today, one can’t help but feel like he accidentally did... or perhaps inspired it.

While most of Verhoeven’s other Hollywood efforts delivered razor-sharp satire, Total Recall’s political jabs are more of a side dish than the main course. The themes of corporate control, media manipulation, and authoritarian rule are all still present, but they’re secondary to the film’s sheer kinetic insanity. There’s a reason it remains one of the most rewatchable sci-fi films of its era—few movies embrace their absurdity so unabashedly. This is a film where Schwarzenegger disguises himself as an animatronic woman whose head literally splits in half. That’s the kind of cinema we should all aspire to.

The practical effects, while kitschy, remain endearing, with Rob Bottin’s makeup work giving the Martian mutants a level of realism hard to replicate in CGI. The film is packed with so many unforgettable images—the bulging eyes of vacuum-exposed humans, Kuato emerging like a parasitic messiah, Michael Ironside losing limbs with cartoonish ferocity. And, from the opening credits, Jerry Goldsmith's score still bangs. If, like RoboCop, you saw this too young, congratulations—your nightmares were Verhoeven’s gift to you.

If Total Recall has a weakness, it’s that its satire is more muted, its ideas messier than Verhoeven’s very best work. RoboCop and Starship Troopers were meticulously engineered critiques; this is a glorious wrecking ball of a movie. But when that wrecking ball goes this hard, does it even matter?

REKALL CLIENT FILE SUMMARY:

+ 1 point for predicting brain implants but not a digital nail color applicator. Priorities, people!

+ 3 points for Sharon Stone’s roundhouse kick to the kidneys

- 3 points for not predicting that autonomous taxis would be far less creepy without Howdy Doody as an animatronic driver voiced by Bob Picardo

+ 5 points because, in the year 2084, we may still not have accessible space travel, but we’ll definitely be arguing about who deserves oxygen

Way more fun than I it being—a relentless, gory sci-fi spectacle that remains a smarter film than it lets on. It may not be Verhoeven’s most biting satire, but it’s undoubtedly one of his most entertaining.

Highly recommended.

Grade: B+

I couldn’t help but walk away from director Bong Joon-ho’s much-anticipated follow-up to his masterpiece Parasite thinking I’d just witnessed a sloppy amalgam of nearly all his previous features combined. Mickey 17 is like an unthawed turducken dunked straight into a deep fryer—the kind of overstuffed mess that still mesmerizes in spectacle despite ruining the overall meal and risking burning down the house in the process.

Now, context is crucial here. I consider Parasite to have been such a towering cinematic achievement that it remains one of only two films made in the entire decade of the 2010s to be given a full five-star rating—by my criteria, elevating it into the realm of the 50 best movies I’ve ever seen. And, as Bong is well aware, attempting to one-up a picture of that quality is a fool’s game. Anything to come after it is likely to suffer in assessment due to the unintentional yet irresistible comparison. So, I’ve pushed back hard against those instincts to evaluate the picture instead as a standalone entry far more in line with his earlier work. And yet, while there’s so much to ire here, I still can’t help but be disappointed.

To its credit, Mickey 17 is a hugely ambitious undertaking, boasting the dystopian nightmare fuel of Snowpiercer, the social satire and class commentary of Parasite, the misunderstood/feared “other” from Okja, and even some of the existential dread of Mother. But while those films threaded their ideas with razor-sharp precision, here the satire is so broadly applied that it blunts its own impact. (Full disclosure, I’m currently wrapping up my retrospective on Verhoeven, as with Boon one of the greatest film satirists of my lifetime, so this hit at a rough time for comparisons.)

People keep comparing this to Groundhog Day, but the real parallel is Happy Death Day, as the terminally depressed and unskilled Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) isn’t just stuck in a loop, he’s getting killed for our entertainment. As an Expendable—an engineered underclass whose sole purpose is to serve as human cannon fodder—Mickey pathetically exists only to ensure the safety and prosperity of his space colony’s elites, dying over and over in a cycle he can’t escape. It’s a premise that cuts deep into themes of class oppression, identity and dehumanization, teasing inherent ethical and moral dilemmas, but instead of aptly tying it to the broader societal theme of xenophobia explored elsewhere in the film, that connection remains oddly unexplored.

Where Parasite was a scalpel, Mickey 17 wields a sledgehammer. The film’s class and racial dynamics are unmistakable, yet they lack the layered nuance Bong typically brings to such topics. Mark Ruffalo, as the colony’s bloated, self-important, orange-tinged leader, is practically a caricature—a grotesque fusion of Trump’s narcissism, Musk’s techno-messiah complex, and the performative piety of a televangelist. If that’s where Bong wanted the satire to land, that’s fine, but it veers so far into cartoon villainy that it tempers the bite. When his sycophantic followers don red baseball caps, it’s impossible not to be reminded of Megalopolis’s similarly too-on-the-nose attempts at contemporary allusion last year, though Mickey 17 thankfully emerges far less bruised than FFC’s endeavor. Toni Collette, another actor I utterly adore, is painted similarly buffoonish, playing Ruffalo’s wife and confidante whose role sadly never extends beyond panicked exasperation and obsession for material gain.

The remainder of the cast fares a bit better. Steven Yeun (Burning) and Naomi Ackie (Blink Twice) turn in solid performances, despite underwritten roles, injecting much-needed depth into a world that often feels constructed more for its ideas than its people. But Robert Pattinson does the real heavy lifting here, stretching his range across multiple versions of himself impressively, even if he seems derivative of a self-aware, post-modern Forrest Gump. It’s not easy to capture the horror of a man realizing his own uniqueness while the world sees him as instantly replaceable—let alone mine dark humor from the absurdity of it.

But even as Pattinson breathes life into Mickey’s existential dilemma, the world around him struggles to feel as tactile. Visually, the film is striking, if somewhat cold. Bong and cinematographer Darius Khondji (Se7en) craft a believable off-world colony, its sterile futurism lying somewhere between the materialistic and structural hierarchy of Snowpiercer and the shadowy industrial doom of Memories of Murder. But whereas those films felt alive, full of gravitas, Mickey 17 feels oddly weightless—its atmosphere thematically rich but strangely hollow, lacking the visceral texture that made many of Bong’s previous settings so immersive and hypnotic. And that hollowness isn’t just aesthetic—it extends to the film’s social critique, which frequently gestures at weighty ideas but struggles to ground them with the same precision or impact.

And that may be the film’s ultimate weakness. Mickey 17 wants to be an incisive critique of class hierarchy, dehumanization, and the vile politics of unbridled aggrandizement, but instead of weaving them into a singularly focused satire, it spreads itself too thinly. Bong has never been one for subtlety, but his best films channel that bombast into a core driving thesis. Here, the narrative strains under the weight of too many competing allegories—corporate greed, imperial entitlement, racial exploitation, existential crisis—without packaging them into a singular gut punch of a statement. The result is a film bursting with fascinating ideas yet curiously lacking in urgency. As satire, we can see it aiming for the jugular with every weapon in its arsenal—but sadly failing ever to twist the knife.

CLASSIFIED EXPENDABLE REPORT:

+ 2 points for clearly having been completed under the assumption that the 2024 presidential election would turn out quite differently than it did (The multiple references to Ruffalo’s *two* consecutive electoral losses, anyone?)

+ 3 points for Ruffalo mocking the native population’s speech patterns while simultaneously ratcheting his own voice into a screeching, racist rant that lands with ironic perfection.

- 2 points for Ruffalo’s capped teeth making him look like Matt Dillon in There’s Something About Mary

- 3 points for my friend noting afterward that Pattison was serving MADtv’s Michael McDonald as Stuart Larkin throughout… and now I’ll never unsee it

Marginal recommend—if you walk in with tempered expectations. There’s some Bong brilliance buried in here, but Mickey 17 struggles to bring its strongest ideas to the surface, leaving its ambition more compelling than its execution.

Grade: C+

🎬 Verhoeven Ranked #3

Few filmmakers could take a script about a half-man, half-robot crimefighter and think, "Ah, yes, the perfect vehicle to draft an obituary for the American Dream." But Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct), ever the provocateur, saw RoboCop for exactly what it was: a Trojan horse wrapped in Reagan-era excess, smuggling within it a vicious takedown of his newfound home in America, with its unabashed corporate greed, reckless privatization, media-driven desensitization, and law enforcement’s slide toward militarized authoritarianism.

On its surface, RoboCop is a brutally efficient ‘80s action flick. It’s got all the necessary ingredients: a towering, titanium-plated hero, grotesquely over-the-top villains, and enough squib-laden shootouts to satisfy even the most bloodthirsty of sci-fi fans. But, lying underneath, Verhoeven dissects a late-stage capitalist hellscape where corporations own everything—including the police force—giddily turning society’s problems into profit-making machines. The judicial system has been replaced by summary executions and entertainment reduced to brainless titillation, while your friendly neighborhood megacorp, Omni Consumer Products (O), positions itself to privatize entire cities.

Verhoeven, who was raised in Nazi-occupied Netherlands, doesn’t just satirize this dystopia—he parades it in front of us unapologetically. Everything is commodified, from organ transplants to nuclear war, a world where suffering is just another revenue stream. The “Old Detroit” of RoboCop isn’t some far-flung Orwellian fantasy—it’s America dialed to an 11, where cities are run for corporate gain, public services are handed over to the highest bidder, and cost-cutting takes priority over human lives. The real Detroit of a decade ago indeed proved a cautionary tale of unchecked privatization—from water shutoffs that left thousands without access to billionaire-funded security patrolling the streets to for-profit schools replacing public education—proof that Verhoeven’s vision was a long-past warning that we failed to heed.

Peter Weller’s Alex Murphy is, at least on paper, the perfect cop: honest and dedicated to serving a department that’s already halfway privatized by O. That is, until he’s spectacularly gunned down by crime boss Clarence Boddicker (a gleefully over-the-top Kurtwood Smith of That ‘70s Show-fame), only to be resurrected as RoboCop: a product, an asset, a corporate tool. His humanity is no longer his own—it belongs to shareholders. Weller plays the cyborg with brilliant rigidity, making every mechanical movement feel like a man fighting against his own programming in a way that could only tease the ethical dilemmas faced today as we grapple with advancements in artificial intelligence.

And yet, RoboCop never devolves into self-serious cyberpunk brooding. This is Verhoeven, after all, and his satire is deliberately exaggerated. The film’s mock-news segments (hilariously featuring anchors like Entertainment Tonight’s Leeza Gibbons) chuckle their way through nuclear proliferation and California wildfires, fully embracing infotainment long before competing 24-hour news channels leveraged real-life misery as monetized spectacle. Turning his sights on corporate America, Verhoeven underscores its absurdity when O’s much-hyped crimefighting monstrosity, ED-209, malfunctions so catastrophically during a boardroom demo that it pulverizes a young executive into Del Monte tomato paste. Every scene pushes the satire just beyond absurdity, as though Verhoeven wanted to ensure that his message couldn’t be ignored—or forgotten.

The film is ultraviolent in a way that makes today’s CGI blood-splatter look like a joke. Murphy’s execution, in particular, remains among the most shocking acts of brutality in mainstream sci-fi—a sequence so grotesquely prolonged that it feels more torture porn. The film originally garnered an X rating for numerous scenes, most notably an even longer version of Murphy’s slaughter and extended carnage of the boardroom mishap, before Verhoeven reluctantly trimmed them for an R, with the footage not restored domestically until Criterion’s 1995 LaserDisc Special Edition. But while the practical gore still holds up, the stop-motion effects—particularly in ED-209’s janky movements—haven’t aged quite as well. In what seems an intentional wink, there’s even a fake in-universe TV ad juxtaposing a hokey stop-motion dinosaur attacking Verhoeven in a blink-and-miss-it cameo, as if he was already poking fun at the limitations of the tech.

Unlike Starship Troopers, whose satire was almost entirely misread upon release (to the point where many critics bafflingly thought Verhoeven was promoting fascism), RoboCop landed far better in critical and audience assessment. It was hugely successful at the box office, understood by many as satire, even if not fully appreciated by all as such. The film’s warning about the dangers of privatization and unchecked corruption was easy enough to spot, but its deeper commentary on the ethics of algorithmic morality and the limits of human empathy for machines—and, I dare say, even for each other—now feels like a decades-early prediction of our current crisis.

OMNICORP PERFORMANCE REVIEW:

+ 2 points for deg ED-209 with the price tag of a Harrier jet and the dexterity of a Roomba

+ 3 points for predicting the deregulation of direct-to-consumer Big Pharma ads an entire decade before America became one of only two countries dumb enough to encourage its citizens to self-diagnose and shop for doctors to obtain drugs they’re marketed on TV

- 2 points for inspiring an astonishingly inappropriate Saturday morning kids' cartoon, conceived by studio execs willing to become part of the joke as long as there was money to be made

+ 5 points for Verhoeven clearly instructing Elizabeth Berkley to channel Kurtwood Smith’s same unhinged bloodlust for a task as mundane as applying ketchup to a basket of french fries in Showgirls

Few movies have ever walked the tightrope between satire and spectacle as effortlessly as RoboCop, even if it retrospectively feels like a bit of a lower-stakes dry run for the existential threat he’d later warn us of in Starship Troopers. It’s brutal, hilarious, and has proven so prophetic that what once seemed like hyperbole now reads like a headline.

An important watch, particularly to see Verhoeven finally hit the satirical stride that would become the director's trademark.

Grade: A-
------------------------------
Note: For those Criterion trivia buffs out there, while we’d already released a RoboCop Special Edition on LaserDisc, we also had a CD-ROM (not VCD) version of the set ready to ship at the time the studios began their DVD rollout in 1997. It was to only a handful of films, like A Hard Day’s Night and A Night to , that Criterion’s then-parent company Voyager had slated for CD-ROM to appeal to non-LD consumers. But with DVD offering double the resolution and ~8x the bit rate, the new format rendered the product obsolete overnight, and the disc never went out the door. Later that year, Voyager and its CD-ROM catalog were sold to a German publishing house, with Criterion spinning off into its own company for the first time. The Criterion conversion of RoboCop to DVD subsequently hit the streets in late 1998.

🎬 Verhoeven Ranked #14

A transitionary picture for Paul Verhoeven in every sense of the word, Flesh + Blood was clearly an ambitious undertaking but remains among the weakest features of the controversial Dutch director’s lengthy career.

As Verhoeven dipped his toes halfway across the pond into international features for the first time, he yet again headlined the project with his longtime male muse, Rutger Hauer, whose own career was on the rise in the aftermath of his star-making turn in Blade Runner a few years prior, ed by a sprawling cast from around the world. While primary funding for the film came from Hollywood’s Orion Pictures, it was still supplemented by European investors and shot entirely on location in Spain.

The film itself plays like an unsanitized medieval epic. By design, it's a nasty, grimy, smarmy counterpoint to the chivalric romances Hollywood peddled in the genre for decades. Flesh + Blood revels in its brutality, painting a portrait of a dog-eat-dog world driven by greed, betrayal, and opportunism—territory that would soon be perfected with RoboCop’s corporate dystopia. However, while Verhoeven’s penchant for subversion is undoubtedly present, particularly in his focus on religious hypocrisy, it’s muddled and never fully congeals, leaving the film teetering between historical adventure and something more caustically satirical.

Hauer leads a roving band of mercenaries, double-crossed by their former employer and left to carve out a life of pillaging and survival. The film's power struggles, particularly between Hauer's Martin and Tom Burlinson as an idealistic nobleman, provide a compelling throughline, though the execution often feels disted. Jennifer Jason Leigh delivers a fearless performance in a role that demands more than the screenplay fully allows her to explore, likely because the romantic angle featuring her character was an unplanned, studio-mandated addition against Verhoeven’s wishes. The moral ambiguities Verhoeven always enjoys playing with are present but again unfocused—this is less a sharply honed critique of feudal brutality and more an exercise in his trademark excess that sometimes seems unsure of its own intent.

Behind the scenes, Flesh + Blood was as tumultuous as its narrative, with the filmmaker still claiming it to be the most miserable shoot of his career. The production was plagued with difficulties, from weather conditions to budget constraints, but the most considerable fallout came between Verhoeven and Hauer. Their longtime collaboration, which had spanned from Verhoven’s roots directing Dutch TV to the national cinematic treasure Soldier of Orange, came to an end here, with Hauer reportedly angered by the film's cynical worldview and his character’s lack of heroism. It was a fundamental ideological split: Verhoeven wanted to portray an amoral, cutthroat world with no room for heroes, while Hauer still had one foot in classical leading-man sensibilities and felt the film as made would pose a career risk. The rift was never entirely repaired, marking the close to one of European cinema’s great actor-director pairings.

Visually, Flesh + Blood impresses with lavish set design and a tactile sense of filth that enhances its raw aesthetic in a way that would make John Waters proud. Basil Poledouris’ score swells with an operatic intensity that almost elevates the material beyond its narrative shortcomings, even if it appears oddly similar to his music for Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers a dozen years later. But for all its ambition, the film struggles with pacing and tonal consistency. It’s far too grim to function as a rousing adventure, yet not incisive enough to rank among the filmmaker’s most compelling satires.

As Verhoeven's first foray into English-language filmmaking, Flesh + Blood perhaps poetically feels like the work of an artist caught between two worlds—both geographically and stylistically. The seeds of his later Hollywood masterpieces are clearly visible, but the execution is patchy and it’s ultimately depressing as hell... even if that was the point. Still, a fascinating, if frequently uneven, endeavor.

MERCENARY LEDGER:

- 1 point for kicking off by doing a nun like that. C’mon, man.

+ 2 points for there apparently being hot tubs in 1501 A.D. Italy

+ 3 points for the audacity of casting Bruno Kirby and Simon Andreu as Orbec and Miel, a gay couple fully integrated into the band of medieval mercenaries

- 3 points because anyone triggered by the brief, but utterly unnecessary rape scene in Showgirls should never even think about watching this film

+ 10 points for bombing at the box office, which drove Verhoeven to the U.S. to study American culture, resulting in his best work while satirically tearing it to shreds

Marginal recommend—worth seeing mainly to trace Verhoeven’s artistic progression fully, but not a film that aptly capitalizes on all of his strengths.

Grade: C+

🏛️ My 100 Essential Films #1
🎞️ French New Wave: A Crash Course #2

The 400 Blows epitomizes, perhaps more than any other film, the reason why I limit my five-star reviews to just the 50 best of the last 130 years of cinema. Movies like this *need* a class of their own.

A picture that helped define the French New Wave, The 400 Blows was François Truffaut’s first time behind the camera after years spent as one of the most famously opinionated critics at Cahiers du Cinéma. A self-confessed former juvenile delinquent himself, Truffaut had been merciless in his attacks on the stale, literary "tradition of quality" dominating French cinema at the time. Films like The Earrings of Madame de… or The Great Maneuver were beautifully crafted but, to him, represented a lifeless, studio-bound art that had completely lost touch with reality. He had no interest in polite, overly scripted drama—he wanted films that felt alive, aggressively individualistic, and emotionally urgent. And The 400 Blows was his manifesto.

The film follows 14-year-old Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), a boy navigating an indifferent world that seems intent on misunderstanding him. ed between disinterested parents and a rigid school system, Antoine is constantly pushed aside, his petty rebellions snowballing into something more menacing as he drifts further toward the margins. He isn’t a bad kid—just a neglected one, making it all up as he goes. Truffaut, drawing from his own troubled youth, doesn’t judge him. Instead, the film observes Antoine with a kind of detached sympathy, never sentimentalizing his struggles, and that quiet remove makes them all the more devastating.

The 400 Blows was a radical break from traditional French filmmaking. Truffaut discarded the polished studio look of past generations in favor of a freer, more spontaneous vérité style. Shot on location in the streets of Paris, with natural light and handheld camerawork, the film pulses with energy and immediacy. Its use of freeze-frames, sudden cuts, and long, unbroken takes—all of which would become hallmarks of the French New Wave—give it an organic, unpredictable rhythm. This was cinema rebelling against convention, favoring deeply personal storytelling over literary adaptations and theatrical performances.

Léaud, in his first of many collaborations with Truffaut (including five total turns as Doinel over two decades), is extraordinary, giving one of the most naturalistic child performances ever put to screen. His expressive face does most of the heavy lifting, shifting between defiance, mischief, and profound loneliness. Truffaut’s direction is similarly unforced, capturing moments of quiet joy, casual cruelty, and fleeting freedom with an observant, unvarnished touch. He makes every moment feel natural, whether it’s Antoine playing hooky at the movies or his futile attempts to find warmth in a world that offers him none.

Premiering at Cannes to immediate acclaim, The 400 Blows wasn’t just an artistic triumph—it was a declaration of a new kind of cinema. It won Truffaut Best Director and quickly cemented itself among the greatest works of all time, a permanent fixture in the canon of world cinema. Its influence is impossible to overstate today. The film's DNA runs through everything from The Last Picture Show to Moonlight, the latter giving us a direct homage to its unforgettable freeze-frame ending. That final shot—Antoine, running toward an uncertain future, looking straight into the camera—was shocking in its ambiguity at the time. Today, it’s legendary.

More than six decades later, The 400 Blows remains one of the most quintessential coming-of-age films ever made, its emotional power undiminished. It’s an achingly personal story, yet it is universally understood. The fear of being lost, of being failed by the very people and systems meant to protect you, of realizing childhood is over before you even knew it—it’s all here, as piercing as ever. And in an era where people engage in online misdeeds just to be noticed, where social media encourages acting out simply to garner attention, Antoine’s small acts of rebellion feel even more relevant. He lies, steals, and lashes out—not for gain, but simply to be seen. Kids may act out in different ways today, but the need to be noticed, to push back against a cruelly indifferent world, is timeless and uniquely human.

REMARKS ON FILE:

+ 3 points for Truffaut scrapping his original idea of Antoine drowning at the end—because nothing says ‘love letter to childhood’ like a tragic death at sea. Good call, Frankie!


+ 5 points for Henri Decaë’s stunning cinematography, which makes 1959 Paris feel both vibrant and suffocating in equal measure


+ 10 points for crafting an ending that wasn’t just bold—it was improvised. Truffaut wasn’t sure how to close the film, so he told Léaud to “just run." And it became one of the most iconic final shots in the history of motion pictures.


A cinematic essential and a mainstay in my Top 10 Films of All Time.

Grade: A+

✈️ Movies to Inspire Wanderlust #288

There’s an argument to be made that actor-turned-director Zalman King (Two Moon Junction, Red Shoe Diaries) at least understood eroticism as a cinematic language, but here, it feels like he just discovered Carnival, a fog machine and the saxophone and figured that combo would sufficiently turn us on. Wild Orchid is much less a film than it is a smarmy, two-hour perfume commercial where boatloads of beautiful people dripping in sweat stare off into the distance looking vaguely lost. Mickey Rourke broods, Carré Otis pouts, Jacqueline Bisset wonders how the hell she got there (Rio is, indeed, nice that time of year), and Bruce Greenwood proves that all solid character actors had to start their careers somewhere.

Originally, the film was set to star Brooke Shields, but she was considered too ‘classy’ for the material after her mother/manager requested a body double for all her nude scenes. Anne Archer, who had recently gained notoriety from Fatal Attraction, wisely bailed on the project during pre-production in a row over the handling of the film’s sexuality and the decision to replace Shields. Fortunately, King's personal friend, Bisset, stepped in to take Archer’s place. Ultimately, the lead role landed on the lightweight shoulders of Otis, a runway model and non-actress whose primary qualification seemed to be that she was dating Rourke at the time. A woman allegedly fluent in six languages, her character is so mindblowingly naïve and makes life choices so consistently baffling you start to wonder if linguistic skills and basic human awareness cancel each other out. Each line delivery is a bizarre mix of breathy awe and deer-in-headlights confusion, like someone who just woke up from a coma and is trying to piece together their restored cognition in real-time.

And then there’s Rourke. Fresh off Walter Hill’s hugely underrated Johnny Handsome, where he played a heavily disfigured prison inmate given a miraculous plastic surgery transformation, he sadly showed up in Rio facially altered in real life, swollen from having just received cheek and chin implants. (Now, *that's* method, folks!) The tragic irony? He had just spent the entire decade as one of the most naturally handsome men in Hollywood, only to inexplicably start surgically sabotaging himself into an entirely unrecognizable physical form, as if he originated the cautionary tale of A Different Man. Here, in a film that’s supposedly all about desire, Rourke has all the sexual energy of a tranquilized housecat. The signature move of his mysterious millionaire is to stand around in expensive suits, inventing mumblecore, and occasionally peering at Otis with what might be interest but could just as easily be indigestion. It’s hard to believe the pair were in an off-screen relationship and yet remained incapable of displaying even the slightest hint of romantic chemistry together.

Upon release, Wild Orchid was incredibly controversial for receiving an X rating and having to be trimmed for its theatrical run just six months prior to the creation of NC-17, but all that supposed risquéness is wasted on a film that barely has a discernable plot. Whatever’s happening with the shady business deals, Bisset’s weirdly maternal lawyer/part-time pimp, or anything involving Bruce Greenwood’s filandering rival evaporates into thin air because, in the end, it’s all about the Big Scene™—Rourke and Otis finally going at it in birdseye view on the floor of a dimly lit hotel room. And then? Roll credits! No resolution, no tying up loose ends of any narrative thread. Just the filmmaking equivalent of, “Welp, did ya get off yet? Great, let’s all go home.”

Adding to the film’s reputation was the publicity-machine debate over whether the climactic sex scene was real or not, which is one of those tedious, manufactured controversies that completely misses the point. Who cares? If it was real, then congrats, you just filmed two people who were already a couple having sex. If it wasn’t real, congrats, you made yet another forgettable softcore erotic fluff-piece just like everyone else and their grandma in the late ’80s. Either way, nothing was interesting or titillating about it.

Despite occasional sumptuous cinematography of Brazil, a vibrant color palatte, and an appropriately atmospheric soundtrack, which do pretty much all of the heavy lifting here, Wild Orchid emerged an overall limp and lame effort. The controversy may have helped the film at least recoup its budget, but critics annihilated it, and any hopes of rekindling the magic from the husband-and-wife screenwriting team’s first coupling with Rourke in 9 1/2 Weeks fizzled on arrival.

HOTEL CHECK-OUT COMMENT CARD:

+ 1 point for being the first film since WWII to be released concurrently in East and West Berlin—instantly showcasing what they’d been missing behind the Iron Curtain all those years

- 3 points for Otis complaining about being out-of-sorts because of “jetlag” after her flight from NYC to Brazil and its one-hour timezone change. Yeah, that’s not it, sweetie!

- 3 points for Givenchy launching a perfume of the same name as a promotional tie-in. My guess is it smelled like a mix of vanilla, regret, and whatever was left on that hotel room floor.

+ 5 points for Jacqueline Bisset’s line, “Ask him if he understands what tremendous pleasure women get looking at naked men,” proving what we’d already known for years… that she’s the honorary gay uncle we all wish we had and that’s why we adore her even in crap movies.

Blech!

Grade: D+
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Note: In a fitting final insult, the so-called Wild Orchid II: Two Shades of Blue wasn’t even a sequel at all—just another random Zalman King flick with the title tacked on last-minute for cheap name recognition.

As I mentioned in my far more positive, strangely popular review of last year’s Longlegs, Oz Perkins’ films tend to be uncomfortable watches for me. Not that they’re overtly scary, but because they so clearly function as unfiltered excavations of his own personal trauma. His dad, the iconic Anthony Perkins, died of AIDS when Oz was just 18. Nine years later, his mom was aboard the first plane to hit the World Trade Center. His movies bleed this pain, and watching them sometimes feels like uncomfortably eavesdropping on a personal therapy session. Whereas Longlegs explored the sacrifices one makes to protect those they love, The Monkey fixates on the inevitability and randomness of death—when, how, and, elusively, why it comes for us all.

But backstory aside, does The Monkey work on its own as a horror picture? Not really. I’d heard in advance that the film leans more toward dark comedy than straight-up horror. Maybe it’s my inability to separate it from Perkins’ own baggage, but I just couldn’t find much to laugh about—even if some of the kills are so gleefully absurd and wildly over-the-top that they’re clearly begging you to chuckle along. The problem is, they play out too rapidly, while the film’s pacing is so languid as to frustrate genre fans looking for a solid dose of tension and carnage.

No shame—I could probably watch Theo James wash dishes for twice this picture’s length and still emerge a happy man. (Casting agents, if a gender-reversed remake of Jeanne Dielman is ever in the cards, take note.) But James feels miscast in his dual role as terminally depressed twins—one jittery and insecure, the other a mulleted, malignant narcissist rendered so profoundly unattractive that the on-set hairstylists deserve an award for their work in achieving the unthinkable. It’s not that James isn’t a capable actor; he stretches himself here well beyond his typical wheelhouse and fares mostly well. He just feels like a square peg for this particular material. Also, delaying his actual appearance until the back two-thirds of the movie? A choice.

On the kill front, yeah, gore hounds will get their occasional fix. But to build horror and suspense, the audience needs something—anything—to be invested in. And with virtually zero character development outside of James’ dual role and their younger counterparts, we’re left with next to nothing. 90% of the deaths are of nameless characters who barely exist long enough for us to their faces before getting turned into crime scene decor. So what’s at stake, exactly?

It’s unfortunate because I was genuinely looking forward to The Monkey—especially given King’s well-publicized, effusive praise for this adaptation of his short story. Oddly, it takes its place among the most middling of his screen translations. A curious tonal misfire, but unless you're a die-hard Perkins devotee, there's little reason to let this monkey on your back.

UNCLAIMED PERSONAL EFFECTS:

+ 2 points for the framed, embroidered sampler on the wall reading, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people,” mere seconds after an unattended shotgun renders someone spaghetti sauce

+ 1 point for Perkins giving himself an onscreen exit so undignified that it feels like a personal dare

+ 3 points for the real danger at Benihana not being the flying shrimp

- 5 points for the biggest jump scare being the reveal of James’ late-stage haircut

Mediocre and not a recommend.

Grade: C

💎 Hidden Gems & Overlooked Classics #258

R.I.P. Gene Hackman (1930-2025)

He will never *not* be ‘Popeye’ Doyle, Harry Caul, Royal Tenenbaum, and most obviously, our quintessential Lex Luthor, and, sadly, we’ve been deprived of more since his retirement 21 years ago, but it kind of floored me yesterday to review Gene Hackman’s Letterboxd filmography and see Narrow Margin so low on the totem pole in of logged watches. Seriously, less than 8k of you have ever seen this film?!?

Now, ittedly, I’m a sucker for both Gene Hackman and trainbound thrillers (make of the latter ission what you will), so director Peter Hyams (Timecop, The Relic) already had a leg up with me even before the lights dimmed. While not bringing anything terribly original to the table, Narrow Margin is a nifty, tightly told slice of suspense with a game cast, and it shouldn’t be relegated to the dustbin of forgotten cinema. Though clearly not among Hackman’s most memorable roles, Narrow Margin easily ranks among the best of Hyams’ output, 15% of which is comprised of Jean-Claude Van Damme movies.

A remake of the beloved 1952 RKO pulp noir potboiler The Narrow Margin, Hyams reshapes the picture into more of a standard cat-and-mouse thriller dripping with atmosphere and benefitting immeasurably from its isolated setting aboard an overnight train barrelling through the pictureque Canadian Rockies. A Los Angeles deputy district attorney (Hackman) learns the remote wilderness location of a murder witness in hiding (Fatal Attraction’s Anne Archer), who’s capable of taking down a reputed mob boss whom he's been trying to nab for years. Unfortunately, while attempting to cajole her into returning to LA to testify, he unwittingly tips off the villains to her whereabouts, resulting in the two stowing aboard a sleeper train to Vancouver with the mobsters riding along in pursuit. The hitch? While they obviously know Hackman, the bad guys have no idea what the witness looks like.

It’s a fun setup. Archer always excelled at playing damsels in distress, even if stronger-willed women were thankfully more the norm by this point in cinema. (Ironically, Marie Windsor was a much more assertive presence in the original nearly four decades prior.) And the remainder of the cast is delightful, with brief but memorable turns by brilliant character actors M. Emmet Walsh (Blade Runner, Blood Simple) and the gone-too-soon J.T. Walsh (Good Morning, Vietnam and Needful Things), as well as James B. Sikking (best known from TV’s Hill Street Blues and as Doogie Howser's dad) and Nigel Bennett (TV’s Forever Knight) as the heavies in pursuit. Playing off his typical good-guy reputation, Sikking is particularly effective as he methodically turns the rail cars upside down in the quest for his mystery target. Harris Yulin, always great at playing a scumbag (Scarface, Ghostbusters II), also gets a juicy little bit as the menacing crime boss.

Although the film received mixed-to-positive critical that appears to have improved in reassessment over the years, it was not a financial success, recouping only about half its production budget during its brief theatrical run. Ebert dismissed the picture as an example of the ‘Idiot Plot,’ in which everyone acts like a moron simply to propel the narrative, which likely contributed to its failure. While some logic gaps and coincidences indeed stretch credulity, it’s nowhere near as egregious as true offenders of that label. Narrow Margin was never destined to be a classic, though it’s unfairly overlooked and makes for a fun ride through its exhilarating finale.

OBSERVATIONS FROM THE DINING CAR:

- 1 point for the interior design of that suite at the Four Seasons. The hue 'salmon' really had its moment in the sun in the late ‘80s, huh? Yeeesh.

+ 1 point for that random rocking chair in the middle of the outdoor crawl space underneath Archer’s cabin hideaway as they’re escaping. What the hell was that doing there?

+ 3 points for Archer getting freed up to do the film after pulling out of the part played by Jacqueline Bissett in Wild Orchid over a sleazed-up turn in that film’s pre-production script and the recasting of Brooke Shields with Carré Otis

+ 3 points for tall women

Recommended and farewell, king.

Grade: B

🎩 Screwball Comedy: A Crash Course #7

Trying out something a little new here, specifically for classic cinema. I’ve crafted a series of “Crash Courses” comprised of 15 movies each that I consider to be seminal works in their given genre, film movement, and/or artistic discipline. The goal is to illustrate each film’s groundbreaking contributions to the craft, help uninitiated viewers gain an appreciation for different types of films, and perhaps assist in plugging a few crucial viewing gaps. Think everything from Giallo to French New Wave to Production Design, but I’m kicking it all off with one of the most beloved and influential of all genres… the Screwball Comedy.

It certainly wasn’t the first, and it’s not even the best of its class, but there’s no denying the indelible mark imprinted on the world of entertainment by Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday. I’ll confess that the first time I even attempted to watch this picture, I abandoned it within the first ten minutes. With its breakneck-speed dialogue, paired with the era-defining, affected Transatlantic accents of leads Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, I found it to be complete sensory overload and instantly tired in trying to keep track of everything being said. Unfortunately, I hadn’t realized that I was witnessing the advent of Overlapping Dialogue and that it’s simply a fool’s errand to try and for it all on first watch. The rhythmic chaos *is* the point.

Armed with a comedy about a domineering newspaper editor looking to convince his quitting ace reporter to stay on the job, Hawks had the idea to remake The Front Page nine years after the first screen adaptation of the 1928 play, with its already signature rapid-fire dialogue. But after staging a reading of the play for laughs during a dinner party in his Brentwood home where he asked a woman to stand in for the part of the reporter, he decided (with the aid of his co-writer) not only to gender-reverse the role but also turn her into the editor’s ex-wife—just the right level of subversion to transform the piece from traditional buddy-comedy to full-blown battle-of-the-sexes and elevate the material into unforeseen territory. That move turned out to be genius. In turning the character into a woman while retaining the equal professional and intellectual footing between the two leads, Russell emerged as one of the strongest female characters in Hollywood history, opening new pathways for actresses generations before the Sexual Revolution would break down the rigid societal constraints so commonly hoisted upon them.

The authenticity and energy afforded by Hawks’ introduction of Overlapping Dialogue that mimicked real-life as the pair traded their constant, sharp-tongued banter proved enormously successful almost overnight, and not just within the realm of comedy. Orson Welles even employed the practice the following year (in a *very* different context) with Citizen Kane, and it quickly became a favored screenwriting trope until director Robert Altman stretched it to absurdist perfection in the 1970s and beyond with the advent of Polyphonic Sound Design whereby different onscreen conversations have to compete for audience attention, becoming one of his signature career trademarks. The practice reverberates throughout entertainment in countless ways today, influencing film directors from Scorsese, Tarantino, and the Saffie Brothers to television shows like The WIre, The West Wing and Veep. And it all began with His Girl Friday.

That’s not to say that the practice of layering dialogue correctly is an easy one. In the case of His Girl Friday, it required meticulous rehearsal from the cast while Hawks pushed them to a whiplash average line delivery of 240 words per minute (WPM), timing it all with a stopwatch. That’s 60% faster than everyday conversation! In later years, to manage the task more efficiently, TV shows like Moonlighting would develop Columnar Scripting, whereby each character’s dialogue is presented side-by-side to illustrate the intended beats each actor had to hit. But Grant and Russell had only their improvisational vaudeville training, supreme gift for comedic timing, and Hawks’ infamous attention to detail as their guides. Still, with the exception of brief bursts of dialogue in films like The Social Network and In the Loop, which sured His Girl Friday’s maximum WPM rate, 85 years later, no film has yet managed to beat this picture’s record-setting pace as consistently and intelligibly.

While not always a veritable knee-slapper, the dialogue is cutely barbed enough to consistently amuse, aided by fantastic physical flourishes (particularly by Grant). It’s a delightful film with a signature style that one simply needs to lean into without concern for catching it all in a single viewing. Getting occasionally lost in the delivery is the key to why audiences cherish His Girl Friday so much, returning frequently to discover surprising new elements hidden within.

EDITOR'S NOTES:

+ 3 points for Grant remarking that Ralph Bellamy’s finacé character looks exactly like… “Ralph Bellamy”

+ 3 points for the easter egg of Grant dropping a meta-reference to his real birth name

+ 5 points for Hawks lucking out when Jean Arthur, Katherine Hepburn, Claudette Colbert, Carole Lombard and Irene Dunne all turned the film down—because Rosalind Russell was made for this role

+ 10 points for inspiring an entire generation of women to pursue careers in the male-dominated journalism industry, including Gloria Steinem and a pre-screenwriting Nora Ephron. Russell’s trailblazing female reporter even served as the prototype for Superman’s Lois Lane (introduced in comics just two years prior) to quickly transform into the hard-hitting, tough-nosed, fast-talking career woman she’d become renowned for in radio, television, and film.

A must see.

Grade: A-
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Note: I chose to revisit this film following its recent prominent usage in the rom-com/slasher mashup Heart Eyes. Would make for an apt watch prior to checking that flick out, if so choosing.

See also:
Satire: A Crash Course
Slapstick: A Crash Course

I’ll promise to refrain from any obvious puns involving the film’s title in reference to its more than three-and-a-half-hour length, primarily because The Brutalist kept me consistently engaged throughout and surprisingly never felt overlong—an apt testament to its strengths in documenting the punishing struggles of the immigrant experience.

While epic in scope, the film fascinatingly manages to construct among the most intimate portrayals of humanity in recent memory. Adrian Brody (The Pianist) is simply astonishing as fictitious Hungarian emigré Lázló Tóth—perhaps as Oscar-worthy of a performance as I’ve ever seen. Still, I’ll it that I emerged with profound respect for the ambitiousness and vision execution of actor-turned-writer/director Brady Corbet (Melancholia,, the US remake of Funny Games) even if I wasn’t entirely blown away from the overall experience.

Much like the Bauhaus style of architecture employed by Tóth, the project appears deceptively cold and seemingly inaccessible (even its running time is a testament to this), masking the painstaking intricacy with which it has clearly been designed. This allegorical set-up reveals hidden thematic layers of craftsmanship in constructing a treatise on identity, trauma, ambition, and displacement that becomes increasingly evident the longer we spend with it.

In addition to Brody, Felicity Jones (A Theory of Everything) shines as usual in the part of Tóth’s tortured, ailing wife. Though she doesn’t even show up until after intermission, she’s central to the back half of the picture and owns a couple of the most powerful sequences. However, Guy Pearce (Memento, Priscilla Queen of the Desert) makes for the biggest surprise, delivering perhaps his career-high performance thus far as Tóth’s wealthy benefactor who helps him to retake the reins of his once-beloved profession. It’s a beautifully complex and nuanced character for a ing role; then again, he likely had more screen time than most leads would get in a standard-length feature.

As with 2023's Oppenheimer, my primary area of criticism is in the tonal mismatch of how The Brutalist handles sexuality relative to its narrative. The film’s most controversial scene, which I won’t divulge and, unlike some, take no issue with, at least appears important in its presentation of sex as a transactional method of control and power. It’s a theme that Corbet teased early in the picture with a surprisingly frank sequence between Lázló and a prostitute upon his first arrival in the States. At first, I didn’t make much of the inclusion of that initial scene. However, in retrospect, when coupled with a late-picture love-making session between Brody and Jones that carries little narrative benefit and is so jarringly graphic that it appears to have required body doubles, the approach simply felt exploitative, unnecessary and, most critically, inorganic enough that it belonged in a different film.

Thoroughly belying its $9.6M budget, Corbet has fashioned an old-school throwback to the type of prestige epic we haven’t seen in decades, perhaps with the exception of Paul Thomas Anderson’s output. The old-school VistaVision cinematography is delightful, repeatedly introducing unexpected flourishes also emblematic of our protagonist’s design aesthetic. The score by Daniel Blumberg is so deliberate and striking that it genuinely emerges as its own character.

Much like the architectural style explored within, The Brutalist may feel overwhelming and unapproachable, but it's a deceptively deep character study that manages to hit at core elements of the human experience among a nation comprised almost entirely of immigrants. Not a bad time to remind ourselves of that.

STRUCTURAL NOTES:

+ 1 point for setting nearly the whole picture in the United States and then shooting almost exclusively in Hungary, quite ironically, the same country from which our protagonist escaped

+ 3 points for that finger bowl gag at a fancy dinner party—an unexpectedly highbrow homage to Melissa McCarthy in Spy. At least, that's *my* preferred read.

+ 5 points for an architect critiquing a kid's crayon drawing of a house over structural feasibility

Highly recommended.

Grade: B+

Featured on:
John Waters’s Top 10 of 2024 #3

I’m probably being overly generous by a half-star here. Still, there were enough elements of Heart Eyes that I genuinely ired, even if they weren’t executed as successfully as they should’ve been.

It’s sort of crucial, however, to walk in with the understanding, or at least quickly realize (as did I), that Heart Eyes is pure satire. It leans HARD into every absurd trope and eye-roll-inducing cliché of both the horror and rom-com genres with such reckless abandon that it’s completely impossible to take any given scene seriously. Unfortunately, due to somewhat lackluster editing choices, many attempts at sending up the worst elements of its cinematic brethren aren't quite sharp enough that I wouldn’t blame audiences for failing to comprehend that it’s all just mockery. The OG Scream, this isn’t.

Also not to blame are leads Olivia Holt (Totally Killer) and Mason Gooding (Booksmart, the rebooted Scream films) who make for possibly the most appealing screen couple I’ve ever seen in a horror film. Holt is stunning enough to get us to forgive her insufferable jadedness and self-sabotage repeatedly. And, though Gooding never entirely jumped out at me with ing roles in his earlier films, he’s undeniably swoon-worthy here and makes for a compelling leading man. Both actors have the It-factor in spades, and I now count myself as a fan. It’s not just their appearances and charisma, either; they’re bona fide fine actors even while handily juggling the often ridiculous dialogue and situations they’ve been given.

Although the absurdist opening alone should’ve communicated the film’s playfulness and lack of serious intent upfront, it also remains the most gruesome part of Heart Eyes in a way that may disappoint formula fans. The picture struggles with pacing, which isn’t entirely surprising given its attempt to fully embrace two distinct genres, though hardcore horror aficionados may reasonably take issue with such an approach. That’s not to say that the film doesn’t bring the gore when needed—it does—but I’d actually give Heart Eyes credit in constructing two characters whose relationship I cared about in a way rarely seen in horror. I’d venture far enough to say that, while the love story aspects often take a far back seat in most genre entries, Heart Eyes is probably more successful in its romantic elements than as a slasher film.

Those who’ve read my earlier reviews of horror may be familiar with my frequent railing against the trope of “Talking is a Free Action” or the “Lethal Speech Impediment,” whereby characters inexplicably pause amid life-threatening situations to share heartfelt emotion and/or provide often unnecessary backstory, most egregious of late in Radio Silence productions like Scream VI and Abigail. This film repeatedly dials that absurdity to an 11 in ways that, while not always successful, are frequently laugh-out-loud funny if you’re so inclined. Although perhaps less polished than Radio Silence’s recent efforts, Heart Eyes is a more unique and overall better movie than any of that team’s output since Ready or Not and, as a result, earns its extra half-star.

LEFTOVER BONBONS:

+ 3 points for having your marriage proposal interrupted by your boyfriend's custom ringtone... and it's the theme song to Magic Mike

- 1 point for me not realizing that was Devon Sawa until the credits rolled

- 3 points for not enough of the illuminated eyes on the ittedly nice mask design—that’s night-vision mode and it’s only employed briefly

+ 3 points because her jewelry ad campaign featuring doomed lovers, while ill-timed, was actually *really* inventive

- 5 points for some conspicuous rating trims that ruined a couple of the central kills


Deserving of a “Be Mine” candy—but only because they’re chalky and borderline inedible. Cute in presentation, sweet in theory, but kind of a rough swallow. More Valentine’s Day-themed horror films, please! Recommended.

Grade: B-

First up, kudos to Nicole Kidman for taking on such a daringly provocative role. Hell, she must clock fifteen minutes of screentime simply faking orgasms—proof that even prestige acting can make for a *really* good day at the office. More importantly, Kidman excels at showcasing her incredible range while navigating the highly schizophrenic back-and-forth duality of her character. An icy, domineering CEO by day and a loving, ive family woman at night before discovering an untapped fetish for subjugation that’s cracked open by a handsome and insightful young intern at her company, she earned those Best Actress awards at Venice and National Board of Review, even if the stuffy Academy refused to recognize her performance.

Sure, Babygirl, at times, feels strongly derivative of Adrian Lyne’s 9 1/2 Weeks, a fact of which director Halina Reijn (Bodies, Bodies, Bodies) is intensely self-aware—there are several obvious and somewhat humorous hat-tips to that film. However, Reijn appropriately modernizes the approach, toning down the sleaziness of the male gaze while more deftly exploring the power dynamics and underlying motivations that propel Kidman’s character to engage in behavior that brings imminent risk to everything in her life.

Risk is the entire point here. Kidman’s Romy repeatedly behaves in ways so profoundly irrational that it’s apparent her masochistic compulsion can only possibly result in her undoing. What begins under the guise of sexual exploration quickly reveals itself to be keyed in subjugation and the subversion of authority. The socio-economic power and sense of invulnerability wielded by Romy in her everyday life is the very tool that drives her to seek relinquishment of that power or at least its threat simply in order to release herself from the stressful burdens of her reality. She has fetishized powerlessness and finds gratification in leveraging her own power to get a taste of it.

In addition to Kidman, Harris Dickinson is appropriately cold and calculating as the intern who’s also playing a dangerous game in manipulating his mentor for questionable motivations, and Sophie Wilde is especially solid as her equally ambitious right-hand woman. But the real surprise in Babygirl is Antonio Banderas as Kidman’s husband, who turns in a stellar ing nod, particularly as the film develops. The man’s performances just get finer and finer with age.

ittedly, it’s hard not to roll one’s eyes during many of the anachronistically styled love scene montages set to 80s and 90s-era hits from the likes of George Michael and INXS that were so cliché during that era—until we realize that Romy is precisely of that time, and, as such, we gain a nuanced glimpse into into her emotional state of sexual satiety as once idealized to the MTV Generation. It’s all accompanied by a seductively evocative score from Emmy-winner Cristobal Tapia De Veer (composer of HBO’s The White Lotus).

Can’t say I found the film as earthshattering as most of Kidman’s climaxes apparently were, but for the performances, aesthetics and overall impressively mature approach to exploring some still fairly taboo subject matters, it’s a solid recommend.

SAFEWORD-APPROVED POINTS:

+ 1 point for a better analysis of the Power Paradox than the lousiest sequel thus far this century: Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction

+ 3 points for a sharper understanding of the reasons a CEO would seek out BDSM than Exit to Eden

+ 5 points for best use of milk since Cecil B. DeMille’s Sign of the Cross

And now I’ll never see that AMC bumper promo in quite the same way ever again.

Grade: B

Featured on:
John Waters’s Top 10 of 2024 #9
Yes, Virginia, It's *Also* a Christmas Movie #103

In short, this is the movie M3GAN should’ve been. It’s far more successful in the delivery of much-hyped carnage but also surprisingly far smarter in its subversive take on the cautionary tale of the dangers inherent in the rapid advancement of AI.

From the get-go, director Drew Hancock’s playful, kitschy aesthetic strikes the perfect tone to lean into the rollercoaster twists and turns offered up by Companion. I entered his proverbial funhouse as blind as possible, though I still managed to upset my viewing companion when I mentioned upfront that all I really knew about it was that the main character was an android that goes amok. But, if you’ve seen the trailer (hell, if you've even looked at the poster?!), that much, and probably way too much more, is made abundantly clear even though the filmmaker clearly intended that to be a significant (albeit somewhat early) reveal. However, I will purposefully avoid further substantive plot details as the film is definitely best experienced cold.

A grocery store meet-cute between our two leads quickly segues into a friends’ getaway at the lavish, isolated vacation home of an enigmatic Russian billionaire—before spiraling into a full-blown cat-and-mouse thriller. The success constructed out of such a seemingly mundane and cliché setup lies primarily in Hancock’s incredibly witty script that crackles with humor while satirizing everything from fear of technology to the stereotype of Gen Z entitlement and victimhood. He’s aided in no small measure by a rockstar performance in Sophie Thatcher (Heretic, Yellowjackets) as Iris, the titular “companion” to Jack Quaid’s manbaby whose sudden sentience to her own artificiality arrives with devastating results.

Companion deftly explores themes of identity, individuality, morality, self-empowerment, and equality in a way that evokes everything from Barbie to Bicentennial Man and then wraps it up inside of a cheeky, blood-soaked nightmare. Hancock’s glimpse into the ethical minefield of AI and its imminent dangers, coupled with rapidly advancing technological developments in other areas, is more terrifying than anything he could have put on screen—and he knows it.

We’ve already witnessed societal division on an unprecedented scale rapidly emerge from social media consumption that has constructed an entirely false “reality” for the vast majority of its s. Large swaths of the population have devolved to perceive reality largely as reflective of the content generated by an extreme minority in the influencer class (representing less than 0.1% of s) that bears little resemblance to the experiences of nearly anyone else on the planet and is algorithmically programmed to feed their fears, desires, and confirmation bias addictively. Aided by jealousy, FOMO, and heaps of generational angst, the impossible standards of beauty, wealth, knowledge, fame, and privilege that have emerged from such a terrifyingly skewed perception of reality have driven a deep psychological wedge that’s given rise to resentment among some and, for others, the aspirational pursuit of effortless instant gratification to achieve their sense of a “reality” to which they believe they’re entitled.

Hancock brutally skewers the current state of our societal dysfunction and the means by which we’re quickly adapting technology to meet the unrealistic demands caused by it. We see these changes unfolding everywhere: the rise of digital nomads working remotely while traveling the world, "citizen journalists" spreading questionable research amounting to disinformation, and romance chatbots replacing human connection for emotional need. Hancock’s simply taken the next logical step, which we all know is just around the corner, and pontificates the myriad ripple effects.

By anthropomorphizing Iris to be virtually indistinguishable from a real human being, coupled with Thatcher’s gonzo performance, Hancock smartly builds audience empathy for her. He wickedly gets us cheering for the AI instead of humanity in a move that he knows is bound to create controversy. But he’s not doing it to push some hidden technocratic agenda; he’s doing it to hold a mirror up to ourselves and our own collective, self-imposed mess.

INCEL DELIVERY CHECKLIST:

+ 2 points for Harvey Guillén’s unique fashion sense

- 1 point for electric wine bottle openers with motors stronger than a Mitsubishi Mirage

+ 2 points for everyone apparently reverting to flip phones in the near future

+ 5 points for best-ever usage of the typically ridiculous marketing slogan “From the studio that brought you…” The Notebook?!?!? Hilarious!

I can’t say I’ve had quite this much fun in the theater since Challengers. Consistently funny, surprising, and horrifying in equal measure.

It may not hold, but right now? This is likely to make my top 10 of the year.

Grade: A-

🕵️‍♂️ Film Noir: A Crash Course #10

Among the cornerstones of classic film noir, Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat maintains its hallowed position as a genre essential primarily because it’s so shockingly dark and brutal for its time.

Based on a dimestore detective novel by William P. McGivern, Lang pulls absolutely no punches in constructing the once-idealized 1950s “nuclear family” led by Detective Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford) before ripping it to shreds as victim of unbridled corruption run rampant among the very authorities and institutions entrusted to ensure its safety. After a police colleague offs himself, Bannion is assigned to write a routine report until the victim’s mistress emerges from the shadows to reveal that he’d recently been planning to leave his wife. When the paramour also winds up dead, propelled by a growing suspicion of injustice, Bannion embarks on a mission to uncover the truth in the face of ever-escalating intimidation tactics to shut him down.

Despite a lengthy history in Hollywood, including handily carving out his own prolific slice of noir leading men roles, at least in my book, Glenn Ford will simply *never* not be Superman’s dad (or, I suppose, adoptive dad if you want to get technical). But as the moral backbone of The Big Heat, what makes Ford’s portrayal so memorable isn’t just his steely resolve—it’s the subtle unraveling of a man fighting to stay true to his principles in the face of alienation and personal loss. His portrayal lays bare the quintessential noir hero: stoic, driven, and morally unyielding, yet human enough to comprehend the weight of his decisions. His ability to balance barely controlled fury with moments of vulnerability sets him apart from his more widely known yet cynical anti-hero contemporaries like Robert Mitchum or Humphrey Bogart.

"Well, you're about as romantic as a pair of handcuffs."

Ironically, though, it’s the women of The Big Heat who steal the show and consistently emerge as the true heroes. They're led by a spectacular Gloria Grahame as Debby Marsh, seemingly ditzy arm candy to local mid-level mafioso Vince Stone (Lee Marvin), a scumbag with a predilection toward abusing women. Illustrative of the title’s double-entendre, no fewer than four female characters get burned (literally and figuratively) over the course of the picture—courtesy of cigarettes, cigars, a car bomb, and most famously, a full pot of scalding coffee. As victim to the latter, a facially disfigured Grahame pivots from lollygagging around her apartment giddily slinging cocktails and sharp-witted barbs into avenging angel of death in one of the genre’s juiciest femme fatale transformations. Lang’s choice to shoot her repeatedly in profile to accentuate the duality of her character and fractured identity is one of the best uses of blocking as a narrative device ever employed on screen.

Fritz Lang already had decades of experience crafting industry-defining mise-en-scène through pictures like Metropolis and M, but his use of chiaroscuro (the balance of shadows and light) and shot composition was at its pinnacle in The Big Heat. He also proved masterful here in lulling his audience into a sense of false security through innocent setups depicting tenderness, lightheartedness, and affection between characters, only to punctuate them with sudden, horrifying busts of violence—an ittedly manipulative but nonetheless effective practice that proved hugely influential to future filmmakers from Scorsese to Tarantino.

CASE NOTES:

+ 1 point for speedreading your husband’s five-page suicide note

+ 3 points for casting Marlon Brando’s sister, Jocelyn, as Bannion’s wife. She’s awesome, but someone, please get her a new baked potato recipe.

+ 5 points for subverting period masculine norms via bathrobe-clad henchman George Rose handing local crime boss Mike Lagana the phone and a lit cigarette in bed. Hello there, Hays Code!

- 1 point for not letting Grahame secretly swap out Vince’s freshly brewed coffee with Folgers Crystals because, frankly, he deserved that much and worse

Taut and stellar noir.

Grade: A-

Happy New Year, everyone!

As we embark on yet another lap around the sun, I thought I'd kick off 2025 by writing my first review of Paint Drying and posing a question to you all:

Do you prefer longer, in-depth reviews posted less consistently or shorter, more frequent takes? Or does it entirely depend on the writer?

I ed Letterboxd in late 2022 after the Twitter takeover and that product's rapid decline as an effective platform for ive consumption (hey, that’s how 90% of us utilize these networks). Even by posting this as a content creator, I know I'm in the minority. Since then, I’ve loved using this space to document my thoughts, engage in discussions, and discover recommendations from all of you.

Over my first months here, I experimented with different writing styles but gravitated toward long-form reviews—among the longest I've seen on this platform. While I'm aware they’re not great for engagement (goodbye, dopamine hits), they’ve been far more personally satisfying than generating quick hot takes—though I enjoy reading those, too!

However, after participating in some summer challenges and churning out near-daily long-form reviews, I burned out by mid-year. Coupled with what I found to be a lackluster slate of Fall films, some of you noticed that my posting slowed. But, as I play catch-up a bit with my watchlist, I’m curious about what *you* find most valuable when consuming my content.

In the broader media world, there’s an unwritten rule: articles longer than 500-600 words or four paragraphs see a sharp drop in engagement. The social media-driven attention economy has only dropped these limits further. But as a hyper-targeted network of film enthusiasts, Letterboxd is an interesting beast. I’ve noticed many of you seem to appreciate deeper analysis and discussion, even if it takes longer to read. That can be a challenge to generate consistently, and I’ve emerged from this experience with a newfound respect for those here who keep at it!

So, what type of reviews do you think make for a better Letterboxd to you? Any other suggestions for me to help enrich the community here in 2025?

If we don’t cross paths here again this year, I hope you have a fantastic year of film-watching on this, the 130th anniversary of the silver screen. And don’t forget to your local movie theater whenever you can—they need us now more than ever!

Drew

I’ll confess that I was at three stars on Conclave for the vast majority of its runtime; a solid recommend, but it all just unfolded a bit too expectedly to elevate it above enjoyable, well-crafted, albeit reasonably standard, thriller fare. Then, the last five minutes hit, and with it came a flood of whiplashed emotions—first gasping in shock, segueing to thrilled laughter at the audacity, before tearing up and applauding at the profound import—as the true scope of the picture came into full view for the first time.

ittedly, like many, I have a complicated relationship with the Church. Having received eight years of Jesuit education throughout high school and university, I haven’t considered myself d with any institutionalized religion since college. If I had to categorize myself, I suppose I’d say I’m agnostic, for lack of a better term, though I’m not entirely unappreciative of certain guidance I gleaned during my upbringing.

However, the institutional failings of the Church, the extent of which only revealed itself to mainstream consciousness over the past couple of decades, proved so unsettling to me as I entered early adulthood and witnessed policies and teachings so morally unconscionable and personally indefensible that I viewed continued direct affiliation to constitute tacit approval. (For instance, the explicit condemnation of condom usage as inherently sinful to those whose religion was their only education in the face of rampant spread of HIV throughout sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s, when the Church knew that contraceptive measures could’ve saved millions of lives, remains stomach-churning. This doctrine was hugely responsible for the region contributing 70-80% of the global death toll of AIDS at the time, approximately 65% of whom were women and children.) Still, I know of many within the Church (including clergy) who share many of these same criticisms and levels of disgust and choose to stay within the institution to fight for reform and I’m not here to judge them. It’s the embrace of this sort of context that Conclave does such an irable job of laying bare for audiences who’ve proven increasingly unappreciative of nuance and reliant solely upon binary judgment and moral absolutism.

The more I’ve reflected upon Conclave, I’m increasingly impressed with how stealthily it covers a wide swath of challenges inherent in not just the Catholic Church but the arenas of politics and society more broadly. While most ecclesiastical-themed films tend just to lean into the sensationalistic aspects of mysticism or the supernatural, the suspense here is driven by the dichotomy between innate human fallibility and the artificial construct of institutionalized authority. That is a universal problem in any hierarchical system. Yet, it is pronounced perhaps nowhere more ironically than in the case of the sole human being officially declared capable of invoking infallibility on matters of faith and morality: the Pope.

Armed with such an apt framework for philosophical wrangling, director Edward Berger (All Quiet on the Western Front) stocks his sequestered College of Cardinals choosing the successor to the papacy with a dream cast the likes of Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Sergio Castellitto, Lucian Msamati and Isabella Rossellini, all of whom deliver powerhouse performances. But Ralph Fiennes once again shows us that he’s capable of impressively upstaging even his own illustrious career highlights as the cardinal entrusted to oversee the warring factions of his peers in search of a new Pope. With every tortured facial countenance, he offers us a glimpse into vulnerability, self-doubt, and frustration with humanity’s seeming incongruous match to the herculean task of moral leadership to 1.4 billion people.

Performances aside, the other standout is the spectacular photography by French cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine (A Prophet, Elle, Ammonite). His composition is so deliberate and camera so finely trained that one could freeze just about any given shot and hang it on a gallery wall without any patron being the wiser. The striking visuals are supplemented by Volker Bertelmann’s tense, minimalistic score that aptly invokes a slow-burn anxiety attack inside a confession booth.

Progress versus tradition, ability versus forgiveness, inclusion versus tokenism, ego versus humility, performance versus authenticity, pack mentality versus critical thought—Conclave covers a wide array of societal indeterminates and their downstream implications of tribalism, prejudice and discrimination. The film is mature enough to approach these topics observationally rather than through proselytizing or stereotyping. Each character realistically embodies moral ambiguity and operates with abstruse intentions, irrespective of our initial judgment of them as good or bad. Like the individuals who comprise them, institutions such as the Church are similarly rife with contradictions that demand nuance for an informed understanding. We should all be continually (self-)assessed by the confluence of our intentions and actions, which is rarely a straightforward proposition. But attempting to rectify the inherent trappings of the human condition never really is.

SMOKE SIGNALS:

+ 1 point for a script with more $10 vocabulary words than the Scripps Spelling Bee. Scrabble fans, take note.

+ 1 point for the Castellitto vaping needle drop

+ 1 point for deg the Vatican theatre seats as evocative of The Zone in Tarkovsky's Stalker

- 1 point because the Piazza del Risogimento (outside Vatican City) is 1/3 mile (1/2 kilometer) away from the Sistine Chapel, so those stained glass windows wouldn’t have blown out

+ 5 points for casting a complete unknown (Mexican architect Carlos Diehz) as the late-arriving cardinal. That approach worked wonders.

A top 10 of the year.

Grade: A-

Having perhaps scored a new record for the number of eye-roll-inducing cinematic sins crammed into its mind-numbingly overlong two hours of runtime, I’ll concede that the smorgasbord of celluloid junk food that is Carry-On is at least intermittently entertaining. It succeeds best in the few moments in between its conspicuously glaring faults that jostle us out of our postprandial somnolence and back into the realm of reality in which no one connected to this production has clearly ever visited in their entire lives.

To be clear, Carry-On is the epitome of braindead entertainment. Aside from a few cute quips (most of which are sadly regurgitated in the trailer), this script contains some of the worst writing I’ve seen in recent memory. The narrative hinges almost entirely upon two of the laziest tropes in screenwriting parlance, namely the “As You Know, Bob…,” approach of having one character explain another’s backstory to their own face for no other reason than to provide exposition to the audience, and numerous instances of “Evil Gloating,” whereby, despite otherwise meticulous planning, the villain monologues their way into conveniently divulging key elements of their master plan to our protagonist (and his allies) so that knowledge can later be exploited in saving the day. It’s all strung along by neverending coincidence, incredulous logic gaps, and more narrative holes than a Guinness record-setting block of Emmental.

On the positive front, Taron Egerton makes for a damn good action star, as earlier evidenced primarily by his turn in the first Kingsman picture, which I feel like I’m perhaps denigrating by even mentioning its existence in relation to this film. Alas, Egerton’s everyman character in Carry-On is given little to do aside from running ad nauseum from one end of the airport to another until the film’s climax. And while casting against type doesn’t always work for villain roles (ahem, Kingsman: Golden Circle), Jason Bateman completely pulls it off with aplomb here. His cap-clad mullet alone instantly defined him as the embodiment of everything wrong with the world. Likewise, it’s refreshing to see Egerton’s love interest (Sofia Carson) emerge as a strong, independent force soundly eschewing relegation to a clichéd damsel-in-distress.

Despite all of the film’s shortcomings, director Jaume Collet-Serra (Jungle Cruise, Black Adam) keeps the tension amped for most of the picture, aided in no small measure by a surprisingly noteworthy score by Lorne Balfe (the Mission: Impossible and Bad Boys series). Without contributing an original bone in its body, Carry-On successfully channels old-school airport thrillers like the far better Die Hard 2: Die Harder coupled with real-time suspense of films like Joel Schumacher’s underappreciated Phone Booth and the underwhelming Johnny Depp-vehicle Nick of Time. It may only manage to combine the worst aspects of all three pictures but packages it up in an easily consumable mid-flight snack box that isn’t entirely satisfying in value or benefit.

PACKING LIST:

+ 1 point for a red baseball cap being the key identifier of a domestic terrorist. Subtle.

+ 3 points for agents competing against each other with “TSA Bingo Cards” and, though I can’t say I’ve ever tested the policy, since when are dildos considered contraband? And why?

+ 3 points because, while I adore George Michael, Last Christmas is the most gratingly annoying and overplayed holiday song of all time and using it as the backdrop of an extended car crash is 🤌 *Chef's Kiss*

- 2 points for firing an agent for drinking on the job by smelling only their coffee and not their breath or bothering to ister a breathalyzer test

- 5 points because cargo holds can’t be accessed that way from inside an aircraft cabin

A trifle of a thriller with oodles of problems, but if you place your brain in park mode, perhaps you’ll get some fun out of it.

Grade: C+

Cast aside the inevitable surface comparisons to The Substance from earlier in the year and lean into the delightfully unique tone constructed by director Aaron Schimberg that channels the quirkiness of vintage Woody Allen blended with the somatic horror of David Cronenberg.

When struggling New York actor Edward Lemuel, whose neurofibromatosis is the cause of significant facial disfigurement, is given the opportunity to participate in a clinical study for an experimental cure, he jumps at the opportunity. After experiencing a rapid (and ittedly disturbing) physical transformation, his tumors melt away to reveal the handsome mug of Sebastian Stan (Captain America and I, Tonya). With newfound confidence afforded by his revised appearance and a new identity as “Guy Moratz,” he finds professional and social success until the acting role of a lifetime comes along, which ironically requires him to be his former self.

The genius behind A Different Man’s deconstruction of the cautionary “Monkey’s Paw” trope lies in consistently defying audience expectations in pursuit of its exploration of identity, morality, and emotional fulfillment. While creating “a different man” for himself, Edward has both literally and figuratively killed off his former self to unintended consequences that become increasingly severe as he witnesses his professional and romantic goals be overtaken by Oswald (Adam Pearson), another man inflicted with the same disease. Unlike Edward, Oswald has instead embraced his affliction as an integral part of his identity and emerges far more authentic, charismatic, and, again, ironically, successful than the new person that Edward has reinvented himself to be.

Beautifully acted by all three leads, but it’s beginning to beg the question whether there’s as repeatedly surprising and undersung an actor these days as Sebastian Stan. Even without the heavy prosthetics, the man is a chameleon. Having fully graduated from his Marvel phase, he frequently chooses incredibly challenging projects that showcase his emotional range and command of the craft. Who knows, maybe he’ll even prove to be the only actor who could possibly get me to sit through a Trump biopic.

Director Schimberg, who himself was born with a cleft palate, explores the intricate psychological layers of being perceived as “different” and the ramifications of embarking on pathways toward a level of perfection that can only exist in the mind of the self. He revels in the opportunity to play with stereotypes and expectations in a way that turns the type of common morality tale that frequently emerges as saccharine into a highly thought-provoking study of humanity. The whole affair is supplemented by a pitch-perfect score by Italian composer Umberto Smerilli that deftly channels the growing vacuity and disconcert felt by our protagonist on his existential journey.

MIRROR CHECK:

+ 1 point for the proper pronunciation of Ålesund, Norway. I’ve been there and yet still didn’t know that was how it was pronounced.

- 1 point for one-upping the bathroom mirror scene in Poltergeist

+ 2 points for also functioning as a meta-commentary on representation and casting equity

+ 3 points for Sebastian Stan quickly becoming the new Ewan McGregor

Touching and darkly humorous. A top 10 of the year.

Grade: A-
--------------------------------
Note: Look for a small role by former child actor Charlie Korsmo (Dick Tracy, Hook) in his second project by Schimberg after retiring from the craft nearly three decades ago.

P.S. Happy New Year, everyone!

🍿 Guilty Pleasures... As Charged! #142

Though he’s certainly had some competition over the years, there perhaps remains no other director as wildly uneven in quality of their cinematic output than the late, great Robert Altman. His career ebbed and flowed numerous times over his decades in Hollywood, punctuated by peaks in the 70s and early 90s (Nashville, The Long Goodbye, The Player, Short Cuts) and the lowest of valleys in the 80s and aughts (Health, O.C. & Stiggs, Beyond Therapy, Dr. T & the Women). However, he always remained a favored “actors’ director” throughout, handily assembling the types of sprawling talent ensembles that would be the envy of any other filmmaker on the planet. Everyone seemed to love working with him and revel in the creative freedom that he bestowed upon his casts—and, even at his worst, at least in part, that magic translated to the screen. Case in point: 1994’s Prêt-à-Porter.

With Altman’s first career renaissance after a decade of disappointments, the early 90s brought us two of his very best features in the form of the ultimate Hollywood satire in The Player and the hugely ambitious Raymond Chandler anthology adaptation of Short Cuts (the latter of which I consider to be tied with Nashville as his best film). Alas, the expectations were in the stratosphere in 1994 when he crashed Paris Fashion Week to film an all-star satire of an industry that the world over was deeply aware well deserved a proper ribbing. So, when the project arrived on screen as a nearly plotless, bloated, slapsticky mess with the sardonic bite of a pair of baby teeth, Prêt-à-Porter seemed more like the type of vanity project audiences were expecting Altman to mock rather than offer up himself.

As usual, Altman weaves numerous barely connected mini-story arcs, this time completely failing to assemble them into a cohesive whole. At its core is a thoroughly worthless “murder mystery” involving Olivier de la Fontaine (Jean-Pierre Cassel), head of ’s governing Fashion Counsel, who accidentally chokes on a ham sandwich in the company of an unknown Russian (Marcello Mastroianni) who was decades ago first love to Fontaine’s spiteful wife (Sophia Loren) in their youth. As a panoply of supermodels, designers, journalists and actors descend upon Paris to celebrate the triviality of their very existence, Altman runs around filming it as more of a celebration than condemnation, wrapping it all up with a final “statement” that’s about as deep as a bird bath and tantamount to a light slap on the wrist followed by kisses on each cheek.

The saving grace of Prêt-à-Porter is Kim Basinger’s roving fashion TV reporter, Kitty Potter, who, in covering the proceedings, serves as the sole connective thread between (most of) the plotlines. Armed with her comically strong Texas drawl and overly steadfast approach to her job without any deep understanding of the subject or the ironies that underly it, she’s a joy to watch throughout. The film’s best moment is an impromptu interview she conducts with the late CNN Fashion Editor Elsa Klensch in the basement of the Louvre.

Elsa Klensch: Now, we all know that short skirts are back. And short skirts are going to be back for the rest of the 90s; that’s my bet… You must Lacroix’s “pouf” skirt. We were pouffed and pouffed and pouffed. Well, it could be that we’re going to pouffed again before the turn of the century.

Kitty Potter: Will *you* be pouffed?

Elsa Klensch (disappointingly): I doubt it.

The rest of the segments range from the lightly enjoyable, a trifecta of warring fashion magazine editors (Tracey Ullman, Sally Kellerman, Linda Hunt), to the thoroughly disposable, a Chicago fashion director (Danny Aiello) whose wife (Teri Garr) surreptitiously shops for oversized women’s clothes across Paris to satisfy her husband’s penchant for cross-dressing as a comedic device. However, the gobsmackingly tone-deaf segment involving Julia Roberts and Tim Robbins, two American reporters, strangers, stuck in the same room at a sold-out hotel for the entire film, signals just how far Altman overshot here. The running “joke” is that Roberts is an alcoholic who drops her pants at the mere pop of a bottle cork, so Robbins ensures a steady stream of liquor is delivered to the room throughout their stay. Gross.

With the exception of the aforementioned massive miscalculation, while still a mess, it’s hard not to derive some pleasure in watching the menagerie of stars leaning in to enjoy bouncing performances off of one another, even if it appears they were perhaps swept up in the belief that Altman’s newly re-emergent mastery of the craft would eventually pull everything together into something profound. It wouldn’t. Unlike audiences of the mid-90s, if it’s possible to approach with low expectations today, it's not quite the end-to-end disaster that most , though it certainly signaled the director's downward slide toward another slump.

WARDROBE NOTES:

- 5 points for the most prevalent gag of nearly every male character stepping in dog poop at some point

+ 1 point for the old-school CDG announcement chime that we sadly lost in the mid-2000s. Most iconic airport sound ever.

- 3 points for cheating on your wife with her twin sister

- 3 points for retitling it Ready to Wear for American audiences believed to be intimidated by the French fashion term

+ 5 points for the reunion of Mastroianni and Loren parodying their roles in Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow thirty years prior, with Loren recounting their love affair, decreasing her age by a year with each subsequent line of dialogue.

Mediocre and aimless, but not entirely without laughs. Great soundtrack, too.

Grade: C

I have to applaud Luca Guadagnino for tackling such challenging material as William S. Burroughs’s 1952 unfinished sophomore work despite the author never wanting his manuscript published in the first place—and for good reason. By his own ission upon its much delayed 1985 release, as important as it remains a historical document for the time in which he wrote it, it’s not a particularly good book. The author characterized his tale as profoundly personal and overtly “painful” but also “badly written and disted.” Granted, this adaptation of Queer improves upon the novel in some critical ways that make it more palatable as a feature, but not nearly to the extent needed to turn it into great cinema.

We initially encounter William Lee (Daniel Craig), Burroughs’s tortured fictitious alter-ego, as an aimless, awkward, middle-aged, bon-vivant expat in 1950s Mexico City. Guadagnino has streamlined the non-linear structure of the book into three distinct acts that begin with our protagonist’s unrequited obsession for dashing, enigmatic Euguene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a recently discharged sailor half Lee’s age who, while making himself physically available, remains emotionally anything but. As Lee’s struggles with the unobtainable overtake him, his compulsion expands to the search for a mystical drug, yagé (ayahuasca), in the South American jungle and the reclusive American doctor hidden within (a seemingly direct HT to Kurst in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) who provides his best chance of obtaining the hallucinogen and its rumored telepathic powers.

Queer would’ve significantly benefited had Guadagnino (or anyone, for that matter…) first adapted Burroughs’s better received Junkie, the author’s debut novel and prequel that introduced our protagonist at the center of both stories as well as the follow-up tale Naked Lunch. Instead, the first book’s events are quickly explained away as troubles Lee experienced back in the States. Burroughs intended Junkie as a book about addiction and its effects on his personality, while Queer was consequently about withdrawal and desperation—both literal and figurative. And had audiences been plied with that critical context upfront, it could’ve translated to a more successful narrative here.

Both works were written at a time of existential crisis and paralytical torment for Burroughs in the aftermath of his accidental shooting and killing of his wife, Joan Vollmer, during a drunken party game (an event indirectly referenced in the film). Burroughs’s pursuit of both metaphorical and physical escape thus became a pivotal component of Queer and remained a common theme throughout his writing. Whereas the book was only partly successful in conveying this aspect of Burroughs’s psyche, Guadagnino takes it much further by manufacturing a postscript that nails the point home, albeit in surrealist form that impressively channels the author's later, more acclaimed stylistic trademark. However, this jarring tonal shift is likely to frustrate those unfamiliar or unappreciative of Burroughs's better-known work.

As it stands, too many of the flaws inherent in the source material have made their way into Queer, namely a lack of character development on behalf of several key personas, including Lee, whose identity is fleshed out primarily in the pages of the unadapted first book. By the time this story rolls around, it’s assumed we’re pretty well familiarized with him—yet we’re not. Lee’s on-screen presence is best characterized as frenetically schizophrenic throughout the picture, explained by the effects of his health condition. However, while Allerton’s lack of proper exposition lends an air of cold remove and enigma to his character, it also proves frustrating to an understanding of the motivational underpinnings of his actions and why he even entertains Lee’s advances in the first place, beyond perhaps fleeting physical curiosity.

Queer fares better on the performance front, anchored by some very fine work from Craig, including his masterful handling of Burroughs's, at times, juicy prose (albeit in considerably cleaned-up form). But it’s a nearly unrecognizable Jason Schwartzman in a small recurring role as Lee’s fellow queer expat friend who’s the standout and much-needed comedic relief for an otherwise boundlessly depressing picture. Likewise, a perhaps even less recognizable Lesley Manville is a bit of inspired casting, appearing totally against type as the downright feral jungle doctor of whom Lee is in pursuit. It’s as if Mrs. Harris developed an obsession for dope instead of Dior and hopped a plane to the Amazon instead of Paris. She’s a surprising late-stage addition and a joy to watch every minute she shares the screen.

Perhaps Queer is best viewed from within the context of Lee’s head alone, swimming with disparate non-connective thoughts and crippling self-loathing that definitionally doesn’t require the coloring in of anyone else because the audience encounters them much the same as Lee—vague outlines that serve only to propel his insecurity, disconnectedness, and existential dread. Still, that’s probably too esoteric of an approach to turn this material into essential viewing.

POSTCARDS FROM EXILE:

+ 2 points for whimsical art direction that can only be described as Wes Anderson-lite

- 2 points for a snake that makes the CGI in 1997’s Anaconda appear to have held up quite well

+ 2 points for the anachronistic music choices that remind us of the constant displacement felt by our lead. While I often find Guadagnino’s pictures uneven in quality, the music choices are always on point.

+ 3 points for a highly distinctive, repetitive sound cue featured during the love scenes and at the conclusion. I swear it’s a sampling of The Machine from Robert Zemeckis’s as the device idles to transport Jodie Foster to unknown space and time in the search for existential truth. Later, coupled with Lee's celestial arrival on a beach and the film’s final shot, I’m not convinced that similarity is a coincidence—and it certainly works thematically.

+ 10 points for MUBI planning Queer as the opening feature at their sold-out MUBIFEST in Istanbul in early November, only for the picture to get banned by authorities on the day of screening. MUBI's response: 'Fine. Then we're canceling the whole f**king film festival.' And good for them.

A marginal recommend if you’re in it for the actors or just as a vibe. Whereas Guadadigno’s CMBYN was a stronger film, it didn’t quite live up to the strength of the novel. Ironically, while Queer is an improvement on its source material, it still doesn’t altogether gel.

(And, no, that wasn’t a prosthetic.)

Grade: C+
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Note: I see my assessment comes in at the lower end of most of my Follows' takes. I'll be interested to read all of your thoughts on it.

Featured on:
John Waters’s Top 10 of 2024 #2

It takes some major chutzpah to envision a comedy about a Holocaust tour of Poland for the descendants of concentration camp survivors. But what writer/director/producer/star Jesse Eisenberg has crafted with A Real Pain is a remarkably mature, quite funny, and incredibly touching picture that’s about as good as anything you’ll likely encounter in the theater this year.

Estranged thirty-something cousins David and Benji (Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin, respectively) embark on a Polish heritage tour in honor of their recently deceased Holocaust survivor grandmother, with whom Benji was particularly close. They are polar opposite personality types: David is introverted and reserved, while Benji is overly gregarious and wears his emotional volatility on his sleeve. Their clash of styles is repeatedly displayed in front of their fellow tour participants and guide, with results that range from cringe-worthy to all-out laughter to misty-eyed comion.

Eisenberg’s dialogue completely crackles while he and Culkin each deliver Oscar-caliber performances. (You’ll instantly recognize the inevitable awards clip from Eisenberg’s monologue mid-picture.) Ironically, I was rewatching the second season of The White Lotus last week and wondered what became of Aubrey Plaza’s husband, Will Sharpe, as I hadn’t seen him since—well, here he is in a subtly effective turn as the group’s non-Jewish tour guide, a scholarly British expert on Eastern Europe struggling to deal with Benji’s erratic and confrontational style respectfully and professionally. Particularly effective as well are fellow tour participants Jennifer Grey (Dirty Dancing) as a wealthy recent divorcée and Kurt Egyiawan (House of the Dragon) as a wise Rwandan refugee who converted to Judaism on the path to healing the trauma from his own survival of genocide.

At its core, A Real Pain is indeed a film about pain; pain as experienced by all of the characters, but most notably, David and Benji. They simply manifest their pain in incompatibly different ways and the resultant conflict is the source of frequent humor and valuable insight. Eisenberg has us laughing at all the right beats by playing off the pain with humor much the way many cope with the emotional burden in real life—as such it remains painstakingly respectful to the seriousness of its subject while also opening up its lessons to the universality of the human condition and how each of us processes torment.

SOUVENIRS & OBSERVATIONS:

+ 2 points for the lovely scenery of Poland, which is rarely seen in major international productions

+ 2 points for the double, or is that triple, entendre of the film’s title?

+ 2 points for strategically scoring most of the picture with pieces by Polish composer Frédéric Chopin

+ 3 points for that joke about Ricola

+ 5 points for Eisenberg’s assured directorial hand identifying and leaning into the power of silence… and not just in the obvious parts

A Top 10 of the Year. Personally, I think the guy deserves a trifecta of Directing, Writing and Acting nods for this—a beautiful film.

Grade: A-

I genuinely wanted to give this a chance, curious if much of the critical was likely the result of unrealistic expectations owing to its lofty pedigree combined with the well-known controversies surrounding its long-storied gestation… but, sorry, Megalopolis is an unmitigated disaster.

I originally intended to see the film in IMAX but was left bristled when it was pulled from large-format locally after just its first weekend, shuffled into smaller theaters and replaced by additional showings of The Wild Robot by Monday morning. And now I understand why. As per the rumors swirling around its Cannes premiere last spring, Megalopolis couldn’t attract a buyer as it indeed resembles experimental cinema far more than a traditional commercial release (Coppola listing Mike Figgis's Timecode as an inspiration has me convinced this was intentional). I believe there are still elements of a watchable audience picture buried somewhere within, perhaps not a particularly good one. Still, there are hints of something intelligible, if not altogether enjoyable, supplemented by some ittedly striking imagery; it’s simply surrounded on all sides by such boring dreck. As it stands, Megalopolis plays like Gatsby meets Caligula, without the porn, written by Ayn Rand and featuring editing courtesy of Cuisinart.

The new prototype of a “vanity project,” Megalopolis is a structural and narrative mess propelled by a sprawling all-star cast that frequently reminded me that I was watching something akin to the very worst version of a Robert Altman ensemble. It is glacially paced, clumsily scripted and features ham-fisted performances by nearly everyone in the cast not named Aubrey Plaza. While the panoply of stars marching around uninspired sets seem to believe they’re appearing in a modern-day Hamlet with all of the jaw-clenching gravitas required of such a production, Plaza is the only actor who seems to have gotten the joke. If the entire exercise had embraced the playful, satirical bent she brought to her role, we could’ve at least had some fun with the movie. Instead, the remainder of the cast approach their performances with such overbearing seriousness and pomposity that it reeks of a level of pretension that inspires parody instead of reveling in it.

For a $120 million picture, I was stunned to find that most special effects appear jarringly unfinished and, at times, borderline unprofessional. Apparently, the original visual effects team was fired while the production designer and art department abandoned the production along the way—all of that behind-the-scenes melodrama, unfortunately, makes it up onto the screen. Coppola hired operatist Osvaldo Golijov to craft the score, which was highly deliberate but emerges as thoroughly unremarkable in a way that somewhat signals his misguided approach to the project as a cinematic opera. Particularly in its first half, Megalopolis carries the feel of a filmed stage production of the sort oft seen on Bravo in the days prior to the advent of Real Housewives. Read: It simply looks cheap.

It’s ironic that Coppola has been trying to make Megalopolis since the 1980s, as the project is more manufactured for this particular point in U.S. politics than perhaps any time in cinema history. Unfortunately, the allegory of updating the Catillarian conspiracy of a fascist government overthrow spearheaded by a populist politician from 1st Century BC Rome to 21st Century “New Rome” is about as blunt as dropping an anvil on our heads. Shia LaBoeuf is woefully over-the-top as fascist seditionist Claudio Pulcher (a sloppy incantation of Trump, as if he could one-up the man’s real-life buffoonery), replete with exaggerated mullet and commanding throngs of street ers wearing red baseball caps emblazoned with “Make NEW ROME Great Again” before they assemble to storm City Hall. There's still a powerful message lurking within about the harm wrought in impeding progress by corrupt forces placating the public with false salves of traditionalism and exploitation of fear. However, the history of the past offering a stark warning over the dangers of the present is far too important and would’ve been much more potent if it weren’t all treated so literally and with cornball sentimentality.

It remains clear that Coppola put a great deal of thought (likely overthought) into the myriad components of Megalopolis. Unfortunately, in his decades-long insistence to self-finance and keep the project out of the meddling hands of the studio system, the unintended side-effect was that he remained so close to the project for so long as to be incapable of taking a giant step back and view the picture holistically as the bloated, jumbled, borderline unintelligible tragedy that it ultimately became.

POSTMORTEM:

- 1 point for choosing the title as a play on Fritz Lang’s seminal Metropolis. The resultant comparison does it absolutely no favors.

+ 2 points for Chloe Fineman’s on-stage Melania Trump impersonation in front of Coppola at a comedy show, landing her a role

+ 3 points for Plaza convincing me, perhaps more than ever, that she can elevate even the most lifeless of projects

- 5 points for hiring two editors and giving each of them half of the film as an artistic exercise, only for the discrepancy in styles to result in a glaringly disted mess

+ 1 point for getting FFC to Letterboxd so he could give his own picture a five-star review. He'll need all of 'em he can get.

The botched Lionsgate marketing campaign, which attempted to head off negative criticism by positioning the visionary director’s previous works like Apocalypse Now and The Godfather as also initially misunderstood for their genius lacked acknowledgment that Megalopolis is one thing none of his prior masterpieces could ever be accused of being: silly.

Grade: D+
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See also: Coppola's Letterboxd list of 20 Films that Inspired Megalopolis

It appears the U.S. may have found its very own version of Goran Stolevski.

Prior to seeing the film, I’d read multiple reports comparing National Anthem to the Australian director’s excellent Of an Age, one of my favorite films of last year. While there are definite stylistic similarities, director Luke Gilford’s semi-autobiographical feature debut is far closer narratively to Stolevski’s Housekeeping for Beginners from just a few months ago—though I found this to be slightly more focused and an overall better film.

An affecting tale of a 21-year-old loner from rural New Mexico, Dylan (Charlie Plummer, All the Money in the World, Lean on Pete), who balances long days in day-labor construction with his responsibilities as primary caregiver to his young brother in their mom’s emotional absence, National Anthem is surprisingly refreshing in its originality and tact. When one of his jobs transports him to a remote working ranch owned and staffed by a queer extended found family, Dylan begins to wonder if he’s finally stumbled upon community when he shares an instant connection with libertine beauty Sky (Eve Lindley, After Yang, Bros) despite her longstanding relationship with ranch boss Pepe (Rene Rosado, The Conners), who also has eyes for Dylan. After the group invites Dylan on their monthly excursion to the region’s gay rodeo, he discovers a world of acceptance and belonging that he never knew existed or so desperately needed.

Much akin to Housekeeping, the group has fashioned their own requisite safe space, here an idyllic desert Shangri-La named The House of Splendor, free from the surrounding adversity that is barely touched upon though always feels lingering in the background. In refusing to rigidly define or even discuss any character’s sexuality or gender identity, Gilford novely treats his audience as mature adults capable of processing the narrative unassisted. (If I recall correctly, the words 'gay,' 'trans,' or any other label for that matter, are never once uttered in the film.) He operates under the assumption that every aspect of our humanity lies on a spectrum, and precise detail doesn't need to be stated in order to understand its implication. He’s skillfully playing off of our expectation of tragedy simply based on our assumption of the circumstances and emerges as astutely observant of human emotion.

The film is a natural extension of Gilford’s 2020 photographic book of the same name in which he documented the lives of the queer rodeo circuit, which itself was inspired by his father’s involvement in rodeo and a year in which Gilford lived and worked on a queer-run farm in Tennessee. As a trained photographer, first and foremost, the director’s approach to storytelling is driven by his achingly beautiful visuals that evoke the pain typified by country music. It’s just stunning that he was able to capture such an artful approach on an extremely tight 17-day production shoot.

While the intimate cinematography by Katelin Arizmendi (Swallow, Monica) lends the quiet air that likely reminisces audiences of Stolevski’s work, the terrific performances are the picture’s standout appeal. Plummer seamlessly yet subtly transports us along every emotional twist and turn during his voyage of discovery and awakening, while Lindley is beguiling and makes the audience immediately connect with the aspects of her personality that prove so irresistible to Dylan. I’d first noticed Lindley in Netflix’s 2019 sequel to Tales of the City, in which she factored into the origin story of Anna Madrigal as part of the trans found family that welcomed her into their arms upon arrival to San Francisco in the 1960s. That episode was one of the best hours of television of the entire year, crammed with outstanding performances by the likes of Jen Richards (Mrs. Fletcher) and Daniela Vega (A Fantastic Woman), and yet Lindley still shined bright enough in a small role to be instantly memorable. Key ing turns in National Anthem by Rosado and Mason Alexander Park (Hedwig in the Broadway national tour of Hedwig and the Angry Inch) are also both particularly noteworthy.

After Dylan’s first day on the ranch, he’s picked up at the end of work by his mom (Robyn Lively, Teen Witch), only for her to remark about the Pride flag flying at the homestead entrance and how he needs to “be careful of these people.” That was all the information Guilford needed to provide in order to convey the atmosphere of dread driven by fear of the unknown in a conservative society and perfectly set up the later payoff that gives the picture its name. National Anthem emerges as neither maudlin nor saccharine but hits just the right tone to leave us feeling that we’ve witnessed something quite new while being dealt with honestly.

OBSERVATIONS FROM THE TRAILHEAD:

+ 1 point for the little brother’s intellectual curiosity and mad skills at makeup removal

+ 2 points for mushroom tea and its aftereffects

+ 2 points for using all real-life of the International Gay Rodeo Association for relevant sequences

+ 5 points for pitch-perfect music accompaniment by Nick Urata and Perfume Genius

Sharktacular Challenge
14. A Conservation Documentary

Global annual average over the past 20 years:

- Sharks Killed by Humans: 100 million +
- Humans Killed by Sharks: 5.9

I can’t think of a more appropriate film to round out a shark-themed challenge than this insanely underseen, extremely well-made, and aptly titled conservation documentary by gore hound Eli Roth.

ittedly, I’m not much of a fan of Eli Roth films. His work has never really evoked much of a response from me. I just don’t find torture porn like the Hostel series and The Green Inferno effective horror or particularly scary, with little left to impress aside from perhaps the skill of his make-up departments, although I was pleasantly surprised by some of the subversive cheekiness in his recent Thanksgiving.

So, imagine my surprise when Roth had me in tears within the first five minutes of Fin. By the 20-minute mark, I had stopped the movie four times already, unsure of whether I could manage all 100 minutes of it. Therefore, *massive* upfront trigger warning: If witnessing frequent graphic animal abuse, shown for the purpose of awakening the world to such shocking levels of inhumane cruelty, would be completely inaccessible to you, steer clear. While outright avoidance is certainly understandable, it’d be a shame because Roth’s intent here is to share the level of visceral anger that he experienced throughout making the film, which he knows is critical to bringing about necessary change.

Roth employs a highly effective and captivating narrative structure as we follow him crisscrossing the globe from Mexico to Liberia, Hong Kong to the Bahamas, to educate viewers about the true nature of sharks, their critical place in the ecosystem and downstream implications on human survival, their rapidly approaching extinction threat and the extreme unnecessary brutality with which they’re slaughtered en masse for human consumption.

As an auteur who’s fashioned an entire career out of grossing out audiences by staging the mutilation of human beings for entertainment purposes, there’s probably no better person on Earth to shine a light on the repulsive real-life practice of the global shark finning industry, whereby the animals are snatched aboard ships, have their “valuable” fins cut off and are dumped back into the water alive. Roth even remarks at one point that a particular event is the most disgusting thing he’s ever seen—which, coming from him, speaks volumes. Sharks have nerve endings in their fins and are notably intelligent, so it’s a practice that causes pain analogous to human dismemberment without anesthesia. The animals then subsequently suffer a slow death from asphyxiation because, without fins, sharks can no longer swim, making it impossible for their gills to extract the oxygen from the resultant water flow that they need to survive.

Roth’s crowning achievement with this exposé is showcasing the acute idiocacy of the entire shark trade in the first place and how human greed and narcissism have propelled a 71% decline in shark populations in the past half century since the release of Jaws, with some species like Hammerheads now critically endangered. As one of the planet’s oldest living creatures and the oceans' apex predator, sharks never evolved to reproduce at a rate that can withstand humanity’s sudden newfound appetite for them despite sustainable alternatives to all of the components for which they’re slaughtered. Much like the byproduct of making soap finding its way into the manufacture of Hostess Twinkies, the list of items containing shark parts is long and even more self-defeating in its direct harm to human health.

I’ve spent many years diving with various shark species around the world and, much like Roth, instantly came away with an appreciation for how uniquely beautiful and fascinating the animal is. The director even snuck in one last opportunity to turn on the waterworks, showing the joy on the faces of hospital-bound kids given the opportunity to swim with them through the magic of VR headsets. There’s a reason the largest category of this entire shark challenge was “Mutant Sharks,” because at least those filmmakers operated from a baseline acknowledgment that sharks don’t hunt humans and would almost always require behavioral modification in order to make them attack us out of anything other than in self-defense or by mistake.

+ 3 points for the pitch-perfect needle drop of the theme song to Cannibal Holocaust
+ 5 points for highlighting that shark fin has no flavor at all and bowls of shark’s fin soup command upwards of $100 as a “luxury item” for no other reason than as a means of human bragging rights among the irredeemably stupid
+ 5 points for showing us what it takes for Eli Roth to want to vomit on camera
+ 10 points for Bob Barker

Easily the most terrifying film Eli Roth has ever made and an invaluable service to our planet.

Grade: A-

Currently streaming on Max. And that's a wrap on this challenge. Fin.

Sharktacular Challenge
13. A Pre-Jaws Shark Film

Six years prior to release of the summer blockbuster that would forever solidify sharksploitation as its own genre, film noir mainstay Samuel Fuller (Pickup on South Street, Shock Corridor) made this Burt Reynolds-as-potential-fish-food vehicle on the cheap in Mexico doubling as Sudan.

Based on the 1955 novel “His Bones Are Coral” by Victor Canning, god only knows what possessed the filmmakers to abandon a title that marvelously pulpy for something as mundane as Shark!—then again, the picture was first titled “Twist of the Knife,” and subsequently “Caine,” after the lead character, so I guess we all have our battles to pick. After a couple of European shipwreck treasure hunters lose their local Sudanese diver in a shark attack, they hire on-the-lamb American gunrunner Reynolds, who’s found himself stuck penniless in a remote Red Sea fishing village as his replacement, to help them accomplish their mission. Unfortunately, the wreck is guarded by a consortium of sharks that are apparently even more attracted to money than Melania Trump.

Narratively, the film plays out like a poor man’s version of Pépé le Moko meets The Deep, with Louis Gossett Jr. replaced by dastardly ex-pat professor Arthur Kennedy (Lawrence of Arabia, High Sierra) and his buxom blonde accomplice Silvia Pinal (Viridiana, The Exterminating Angel), who appears not unlike a badly dubbed Chloë Sevigny in false eyelashes. Although thankfully short, the pace intermittently moves like molasses on a cold winter’s day. However, I was pleasantly surprised by a gleefully twisty ending that reads somewhat like Fuller stretching his legs a bit with the Hays Code recently having been left in the rear-view mirror.

The at-times novel lens work by frequent Buñuel cinematographer Raúl Martínez Solares is completely undermined by producer-supervised editing that’s so jarringly incompetent that Fuller tried to have his name removed upon seeing their version of its assembly. Unfortunately, the famed director was a few months shy of being replaced with “Alan Smithee” because while the DGA had already crafted the soon-to-be notorious pseudonym intended for disowned films, they didn’t yet have a process for implementing it and thus rejected Fuller’s request. While Shark! went out the door as a Samuel Fuller picture, it was only three months prior to directors Robert Totten and his mid-production replacement, Don Siegel, successfully distancing themselves from Death of Gunfighter in May 1969, thus giving birth to auteur-du-crap “Alan Smithee” on the silver screen.

Granted, I’ll give Fuller some credit for at least filming the shark sequences underwater, even though, unlike Spielberg, he didn’t understand that it wasn’t quite necessary to instill fear in an audience, given the proper level of artistry. As slapdash as most of the production seems, the underwater footage is particularly poorly shot. Scenes with the sharks look like they're intercutting nature footage of ittedly dangerous bull sharks with significantly more docile nurse sharks whenever in the presence of any humans, with the one attack sequence filmed having been accused of using a dead or unconscious animal.

“This film is dedicated to the fearless stuntmen who repeatedly risked their lives against attacks in shark-infested waters during the filming of this picture…”

That opening tribute was apparently part of the producers’ sleazy marketing ploy to spread rumor of stuntman Jose Marco’s death, in which he was allegedly disemboweled by a shark on camera during the film’s opening, prior to ing away in hospital two days later. When Life magazine published photos and an exposé on the accident in the months leading up to the film’s release, the publication’s cover was then co-opted as a movie poster to promote the film. However, subsequent investigations revealed no record of any such occurrence ever happening or even the existence of a stuntman named Jose Marco. (Probably should've bothered to stick his name in the credits somewhere.) Life later conceded that they were likely victim of a hoax. But at least they had good company, along with audiences duped into thinking that Shark! was quality entertainment.

+ 1 point for “Introducing Carlos Barry as Runt”
+ 2 points for even finding a straight razor that didn’t want anything to do with Burt Reynolds
- 5 points for repurposing footage of Jose Marco’s “death” during both the opening and closing attacks

Meh.

Grade: C-

Sharktacular Challenge
12. Feeding Frenzy

I wish I could say that the biggest problem with U.S.S. Indianapolis: Men of Courage is that it’s abundantly clear that they were attempting to make a $150M movie on a $40M budget. Sadly, what appears to be genuine in its intent as a historical tribute is also scuttled by a lousy script, loose adherence to fact, and shark attack sequences that are so irrationally exploitative that they unintentionally make the whole effort instead appear disrespectful.

The sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis remains the single most significant loss of life at sea in U.S. Naval History. The San Francisco-docked ship, having been surreptitiously assigned to transport the payload of uranium that would ultimately be used to assemble the Little Boy nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, was torpedoed on July 30, 1945, by a Japanese submarine on its unescorted onward journey from the Northern Mariana Islands to the Philippines.

Approximately 300 of the ship’s 1,195 crew were killed in the initial sinking, with nearly 900 left clinging to wreckage and the few life rafts available while awaiting rescue. However, given the top-secret nature of their mission, distress signals were ignored as potential enemy entrapment, and it was nearly five days until the sailors were spotted in the water by a ing U.S. bomber aircraft. In the meantime, two-thirds of the initial survivors perished from a variety of factors, including shark attacks likely drawn by blood from injuries among the crew.

Despite a promising opening that depicts a kamikaze air raid on the Indianapolis, showcasing the work of Tarantino’s original cinematographer Andrzej Sekula (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction), most of the remainder of the film has the notable feel of a “very special” Lifetime movie. Cornball dialogue and hammy acting by a mostly unknown cast amount to a wasted opportunity overall. Even though the movie is more than 1/3 over by the time the ship sinks, the script proves remarkably inept at properly developing its characters during the narrative setup, making it difficult to differentiate between most of the crew while witnessing their struggle to survive. Save for two sailors who are involved in an unnecessary love triangle with a lady-in-waiting back home, we barely learn anything meaningful about any one of them, including the Captain (Nicolas Cage) and his Chief Petty Officer (Tom Sizemore). U.S.S. Indianapolis had the luxury of its lengthy runtime to assemble all of the emotional table stakes required for the disparate characters we’re intended to keep track of in the water, but they simply dropped the ball.

Director Mario Van Peebles portrays the ship’s sinking as literally a sped-up, shot-by-shot ripoff of the final moments of Titanic sans Rose and Jack in a way that is completely inaccurate in its depiction of how the ship sunk. But the far bigger issue is that he then turns the remainder of the film into an Agatha Christie version of Jaws with sailors getting picked off one by one by “great whites.” Nice try, but great whites are not at all in this part of the Pacific. The actual sailors lost to shark attacks were victims of much smaller oceanic whitetips and perhaps tigers, but they were *not* a primary cause of death for those in the water. While the film does depict other sailors expiring from exposure, dehydration, injury, etc., as most did in reality, it’s clear that Van Peebles much preferred to employ notably bad CGI sharks unrealistically jumping out of the water to snatch people out of life rafts rather than maintain logic or historical accuracy.

Though this film isn’t the first to portray the real-life incident, overhyping the shark element for sensationalistic purposes feels particularly tasteless. The true story, on its own, is well worthy of memorialization in a significantly better picture.

- 1 point for Antebellum mansions flanked by Spanish moss in Napa Valley, California
+ 1 point for filming aboard the Alabama, the same ship from Under Siege, but minus two points for being the wrong class of vessel and looking nothing like the Indianapolis
- 3 points for completely glossing over the fact that the military was still segregated at the time
- 5 points for ultimately turning into an overly melodramatic courtroom drama à la White Squall

Mediocre, but at least it’s better than Van Peebles’ previous encounter with sharks on the other side of the camera in Jaws: The Revenge.

Grade: C-

Aside from gifting audiences with one of the most perfect performances in horror film history, Anthony Perkins also bestowed upon the world a bonafide artist in command of the genre he helped reinvent in the form of his son Oz.

I went into Longlegs largely blind, having only encountered the trailer theatrically once several months ago, so I successfully avoided a lot of the upfront hype and expectation build, as is typically best for psychological thrillers. And what writer/director Oz Perkins was so successful in crafting here left me largely numb and disturbed in its wake, as well as touched by its profoundly personal motivation (covered in the Notes below). To be clear, that’s a compliment and was his express design from the start. As we grow increasingly jaded the more films we consume, crafting something this consistently disquieting is never easy and bears proof of his level of talent.

From the opening sequence of a young girl encountered outside of her rural Oregon home by an unrecognizable Nicolas Cage as the titular character, we’re intentionally only shown the lower half of the figure's pale, swollen face. Coupled with his decision to play the character as purposefully androgynous, Cage instantly one-ups the trope of “the Unseen,” perhaps most recently famed from the sewer intro of It’s Pennywise. Given the villain’s partial reveal, our subconscious fear of the unknown backfills any further detail with imagination propelled by our own anxieties. That approach proves far more horrifying than a traditional introduction. Perkins has instantly knocked us off balance and then painstakingly plays off of it by a variety of methods throughout in order to maintain that effect.

For the likely few readers as blind to the plot as I was walking in, I’d prefer not to destroy any of that benefit by mentioning much plot detail. Suffice it to say, the inevitable comparisons to Silence of the Lambs are somewhat apt, given the overarching narrative of a rookie female FBI agent assigned to a serial killer cold case that’s recently begun to claim new victims. Her display of psychic prediction and a level of uncanny pattern recognition that suggests she falls somewhere on the spectrum provides her unique insight into helping solve the crimes.

Lead Maika Monroe (It Follows, Watcher) gives a subtly affecting performance as she wrestles with her own past trauma and an emotionally distant relationship with her mother, powerfully played by 90s "it girl" Alicia Witt (Urban Legend, Orange Is the New Black). Witt, who tragically lost both parents a couple of years ago while she was battling breast cancer herself, has noted that the production required her to inhabit psychological spaces so unpleasant that she has no intention of ever watching the film. That’s a bit of a shame because she really does knock it out of the park here. Meanwhile, in constructing what he’s described as a “possessed Geppetto,” Cage is trademark over-the-top but memorably disconcerting in a way sure to haunt many a future nightmare.

Perkins’ playful approach to framing and camera techniques contribute to the unsettling atmosphere he claustrophobically traps us within for 101 minutes. The haunting score credited to Zilgi (a pseudonym for his brother Elvis, who’s scored a couple of his earlier films) is masterful in its sense of suspense and homage to classics of the genre. While the technical chops are firing on all cylinders, it should be noted that Longlegs is a slow burn, perhaps too much so for some audiences—the guy next to me I could hear fell asleep at least twice mid-picture before the score jostled him back awake.

I think adding to my sense of discomfort over Longlegs is the knowledge that Oz Perkins himself has wrestled with some very dark periods in his life, first famously losing his father from AIDS at age 18 and then his mother aboard the first plane to hit the World Trade Center on 9/11, just one day prior to the 9th anniversary of his dad’s ing. He’s even described the horror genre as “self-help movies about dealing with death.” As such, when he takes us to these places, we know we’re witnessing someone’s processed anguish, making it all the more difficult to watch.

In the film’s aftermath, I was immediately reminded of Siskel & Ebert's 1986 review of Aliens, one of my all-time favorites. Roger Ebert ended his assessment with only a marginal recommendation, his main takeaway being, “In the end, I felt really bad… it took me a little while to get back to normal again… it really did upset me. As a movie critic, I’m giving the movie a thumbs up,… but if I were talking to a friend, I think I’d say, ‘Hey, I’m not sure you really want to see this movie.’” His colleague then outright panned the film for the exact same reason. They were channeling audiences unaccustomed at the time to a level of emotional distress through subversive filmmaking that really only occurs perhaps once or twice in a generation in a way successful enough to leave a lasting legacy on their genres. I don’t think Longlegs is a film of quite such import, but its uniqueness certainly echoes that effect. It deserves respect for being capable of evoking such a visceral response, one that I don't think should ding its rating as long as we acknowledge that the overall experience isn’t necessarily a pleasant one.

+ 1 point for differentiating historical scenes through Polaroid-shaped 4:3 ratio shot on 35mm. The old-school rounded corners on these tightener presentations are a particularly elegant touch.
+ 2 points for the not-so-subtle hat tip to Argento’s Deep Red
+ 3 points for purposefully setting the film during the early 90s in honor of Silence of the Lambs, but jumping ahead a couple of years simply to swap out George Bush’s photo at the FBI with Bill Clinton instead
+ 5 points for the needle-drop of The Price Is Right theme song to indicate that we’ve officially entered Hell on Earth. Love it, you sick bastard.

Expertly crafted, and if you’re a fan of psychological horror, it’s a solid recommend. But, personally, not a film I’m looking to revisit.

Grade: B+
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Notes: If you missed the four-part 2022 documentary series Queer for Fear on Shudder, the most rewarding part of the whole affair is the latter half of the second episode, in which Oz Perkins pays loving tribute to his dad and the impact of Psycho on him as a person, his family, and the horror genre.

Perkins has since claimed that he designed Longlegs in honor of his late mother, a detail that may strike most viewers as odd and perhaps a bit creepy. However, if we view the film through the lens of a testament to the sacrifices one makes to protect those they love, his emotional reasoning is instantly laid bare. The doc details the extent to which his mom exemplified selflessness on numerous fronts to shield her family throughout her life. It also illustrates the means by which Hitchcock repeatedly exploited the torment of his actors' closeted queerness to extract realistic performances, most notably with his dad in Psycho. Without judgment, an argument could be made that Perkins likewise purposefully cast Witt here in order to mine her own recent personal trauma.

As such, Queer for Fear is somewhat essential viewing to comprehend the full scope of Longlegs.

Sharktacular Challenge
11. Mano-a-Dento

Aside from its brief final act, Great White is perhaps most notable as a waterlogged snoozefest that almost single-handedly redefines the concept of the pacing problem. Featuring a thrilling final 15 minutes, including the sequence depicted on the poster, it’s incredibly unfortunate that we need to wait that long even to get our first proper view of the shark.

Legit question for my Aussie friends: Is broad usage of the F-bomb an automatic “R” rating as it is in the States? Because not since Knock at the Cabin have I seen a picture so otherwise unnecessarily flubbing the opportunity that rating provides. It’s always a bizarre choice for a horror movie that knows it’s operating in solidly R-rated territory simply due to language to then go completely limp on violence, as the makers of both films did. In Shyamalan’s slightly better picture, it at least appeared as an artistic choice; here, I can’t figure it out at all, beyond perhaps the constraint of its $5M budget.

The requisite sharksploitation opening kills are extremely underwhelming; in a way, they telegraph the rest of the film’s biggest problems. The attacks occur off-camera, and we’re only shown their aftermath, while one of the two victims is thrown into the water from a boat due to the absurd coincidence of a frayed sheet line snapping to release the swinging boom at the exact moment they climb aboard to escape the animal. The remainder of the film is then propelled by such similar folly and disappointment.

The narrative set-up is actually fairly promising, if simplistic. A struggling couple, Kaz and Charlie (30 Rock’s Katrina Bowden and Aaron Jakubenko, who looks not unlike McConaughey when wet), operate a tourist seaplane charter on the stunningly picturesque North Queensland coast when they’re hired for a day trip to the remote offshore Hell’s Reef. The clients are a wealthy husband-wife pair looking to spread the ashes of her recently deceased grandfather, who was the legendary sole survivor of a shipwreck after which the reef was nicknamed. Upon encountering one of the victims from the film’s opening on the beach, the group searches for their boat and the possibility of survivors in the surrounding waters, only to have their plane attacked and sunk by the shark, leaving them adrift in a liferaft for the majority of the runtime.

It’s sad, really, because Great White otherwise contains reasonably impressive production quality (including mostly decent CGI and practical effects), solid acting work, and an effective, if overly manipulative, score in constant search to compensate for the frequent lulls in suspense. There’s one particularly effective shot of the camera trained at surface level, briefly bobbing below water to reveal the circling shark below. We’re teased by the possibility of more such footage, but the film struggles to maintain tension as the shark conveniently (and ridiculously) decides to follow the raft toward shore in search of its next meal.

For the most part, it’s quite clear throughout who will live and who won’t. There's one character portrayed as so comically unlikeable that he’s perhaps the most clearly telegraphed fish food that I’ve ever seen in any shark thriller. But I love that the not-so-subtle act of witnessing him toss an empty plastic water bottle over the side of the raft is the final straw that seals his fate. The other characters look at him as if they were Serial Mom, and together with the audience, we all instantly decide that he indeed deserves to die.

Overall, way too little on the shark front, making this an oddly squandered opportunity and, at times, a struggle to stay awake.

+ 1 point for the stunning poster art miraculously being drawn from the movie (sort of). Almost unheard of in this genre.
- 1 point for magically appearing/disappearing sunburns, as if the make-up department decided to show up on some days but not others
- 3 points for sharks that roar like lions and sing like whales
- 5 points because that’s not at all how R works

Zzzzzzzzzz.

Grade: C-

Sharktacular Challenge
10. Sharksploitation Parodies

For an entire genre that owes its very existence to varying degrees of “bad CGI” over the past 30 years, given endless parades of low-budget schlock, it was inevitable that someone came along to mine it as a source of parody.

Thirtysomething real-life brothers Jason and Matthew Ellsworth, having long harbored a ion for torturing themselves with every zero-budget shark-themed movie that I’m thankfully only getting a taste of with this challenge, decided at the height of the Sharknado craze that they might as well make their own movie too—a tongue-in-cheek, self-aware parody of the formula tropes to which nearly every entry seems to religiously adhere.

Bad CGI Sharks was shot guerrilla-style over the course of three weeks in Burbank in the summer of 2017, but the two brothers and their collaborator Matteo Molinari, having dubbed themselves MaJaMa, spent two years in post-production prior to finally unleashing the project after a total cost of $6,257.34.

Bad CGI Sharks is obviously somewhat of a labor of love and the fulfillment of a childhood dream for the pair, and as such, I take no joy in mocking their work as I would had this been one of the countless lazily-assembled genre entries they’re satirizing which amount to little more than cinematic clickbait intended to make a few bucks off of an unsuspecting audience. In comparison to Noah's Shark, this thing emerges looking like Lawrence of Arabia. But it’s not a good movie.

Apparently, the trio assembled three vastly different approaches to the narrative during the lengthy pre-production, with the first almost entirely comprised of fourth-wall breaking before paring that element down to a mere subplot of a movie director painstakingly walking the audience through all the ways in which this parody follows the checklist of cliché plot turns. Unfortunately, that element is the film’s most cringeworthy weakness and should’ve been discarded entirely in favor of simple on-screen graphics communicating the in-joke to viewers instead. That could’ve been funny; sadly, this isn’t.

Bad CGI Sharks follows a non-Christmas-themed plot highly similar to Santa Jaws, whereby the two brothers collaborated on a shark-themed script during their teenage years only to have the movie to spring to life around them in adulthood, courtesy of a magic pen. It’s all just self-aware meta-commentary supplemented by ironically slightly better (but still bad) CGI than the majority of the genre they’re pointedly mocking. However, most of the humor falls flat, except for Jenn Liu, a computer animator who gets all of the film’s best lines.

Surprisingly, the two brothers are relatively decent actors, again belying genre expectations, and the film is at least somewhat technically competent, particularly for not having a budget. However, it needed to be far more rigorously edited, with many shots lingering way beyond necessary and frequently belaboring unfunny jokes to the point of absurdity. I also can’t help but imagine this probably would’ve worked far better as a short than a 93-minute feature.

+ 1 point for making your dream project actually happen
- 2 points for inadvertently spinning up a whole new crappy sub-genre with other filmmakers' recent creations of Bad CGI Gator, Bad CGI Werewolves, etc.
- 3 points because gender affirmation surgery isn’t a source of humor… certainly not twice in one movie
+ 1 point for putting Snapchat filters on a CGI shark

I get what they tried to do here, but it doesn’t work.

Grade: D+

Sharktacular Challenge
9. Sharks with Supernatural Powers

Having just gushed over the surprisingly funny Santa Jaws with 2.5 stars, if Ghost Shark is indicative of the typical level of craftsmanship of SyFy originals shark-themed fare, I’d like never to repeat the experience.

I suppose this can be viewed as a vague mashup of Jaws and Ghost Dad without the latter’s benefit of being directed by Sidney Poitier. Designed as an unrelated companion piece to the first Sharknado, audiences clearly chose the correct feature to whip into a social media frenzy and spin into an entire franchise because, for as lousy as the silly sharks-in-a-tornado series was, Ghost Shark is boring, humorless, worthless trash.

In the third shark-in-Louisiana feature thus far this challenge (damn, they must have some insane tax breaks), we find yet another small tourist town on Lake Pontchartrain inexplicably besieged by a great white outside of its natural habitat. After being sadistically tortured and slaughtered by trashy father/daughter sport fishermen simply because it ate their prize amberjack during reel-in, the shark’s carcass conveniently drifts into a supernatural cave where it is magically resurrected Scooby-Doo-style into a glowing, transparent ghost intent on enacting revenge on its murderers. However, following its bloody payback, the ghost shark then strangely decides to eat everyone in the town indiscriminately.

The quirky hook intended to provide Ghost Shark with its camp cred is that, as a ghost, it’s no longer bound to large bodies of water and can instead use any form of moisture as a transportation mechanism to attack its prey. So, backyard swimming pools, bikini car washes, and even an office water cooler are all fair game for ghost shark. It’s, therefore, up to a group of rascally kids and the local lighthouse keeper (Richard Moll, Night Court) to save the day.

As promising as that concept may sound to a thankful few individuals on this planet, Ghost Shark is so incompetently made that most of the key kill sequences are either missing critical set-up shots or were so poorly edited that what exactly transpired in the death of each character is indiscernible and reliant on assumption to piece together. I’ve certainly seen that happen in other films, even within this challenge, but it’s usually the result of ratings trims and only occurs, perhaps, once in a picture. Here, more than half of the shark attacks are ruined simply because they lack the required footage to properly illustrate the situation to the viewer. I don’t readily recall another movie that received as much as even a television release to so consistently and conspicuously lack such basic filmmaking skills.

The acting throughout is almost universally terrible, except for Dave Davis (The Vigil, True Detective), who has since graduated to far more worthy fare. There’s literally one other character here, and she’s a bit player in an early scene, who has a remotely human reaction to the death of friends or family. Everyone else reacts with the disappointment of a traffic light turning yellow before they reach an intersection.

On the gore front, a single gruesome sequence may appeal to its target audience, which features a side character who consumes a glass of water and subsequently gets split in half from within by ghost shark. Everything else is either too quick-cut or otherwise a casualty of the aforementioned shoddy craftsmanship. Sadly, there are several sequences of young children being graphically dismembered that obviously, as with the rest of the film, are played for (unsuccessful) laughs. Even makers of the worst dredges of cinematic garbage typically know to steer well clear of going anywhere near there… unfortunately, these clowns didn’t.

+ 1/2 point, I guess, for thankfully not having anything to do with Bill Cosby and Ghost Dad
- 3 points for repeatedly obscuring shots with water splashed all over the camera lens
- 3 points for prominently featuring “Kenner Police” cars (as in where New Orleans' airport is located) in the fictitious town of Smallport
- 10 points for the only two things sparing it from the dreaded half-star being Letterboxd's absence of a zero-star rating and the existence of Mark Polonia

Perhaps only redeemable as a lesson for filmmaking students of how *not* to spend $1.8M making a movie.

Grade: D
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Note: The “sequel” Ghost Shark 2: Urban Jaws released two years later is apparently a completely unrelated New Zealand production that was a riff on a fake YouTube trailer that predates this picture.

Sharktacular Challenge
8. A Winter Wonderland of Sharks

This couldn’t be more of a Christmas movie if Bruce Willis rode in on the shark’s back screaming, “Yippee-kai-yay, muthaf**ka!”

Despite all my better judgment, I’m giving this film a marginal recommendation, partially because it looks like such hot garbage at first glance, yet it’s so much more. Make no mistake, it is an objectively bad movie. That said, Santa Jaws is the funniest, most self-aware sharksploitation film I’ve ever seen—yes, more so than either of the two Sharknados that I’ve watched, despite costing a fraction of those films’ budgets.

A SyFy Channel original production designed to air during Sharknado Week 2018, this $700k horror/comedy screams TV movie in every aspect imaginable, from the barely able production values to terribly written dialogue to (mostly) hackneyed performances. But at least it's professionally made by Misty Talley, the first-ever female director of a SyFy film, which gives it a major leg up relative to huge swaths of this genre.

The simplistic plot involves two teens who’ve collaborated on a horror comic called “Santa Jaws” only to find that their shark creation has come to life thanks to a mystical pen gifted to lead Reid Miller (Joe Bell) by his grandfather and has begun to terrorize their small bayside town. As the death toll rapidly rises, they discover that the great white is roaming local waters with a Santa hat on its dorsal fin, string lights around its tail, and Rudolph’s glowing red nose as eyes. Luckily, the killer fish is easily lured by anything Christmas-themed (eggnog, sleigh bells, holiday muzak) but can also only be fought by related measures (candy cane spears, ornamental explosives, etc.). It almost sounds like a very special episode of South Park because that’s kind of what it is, only in live-action form.

The largely practical effects are comically awful, but they’re a hell of a lot preferable to the bad CGI typical of the Sharknado series (though there’s some of that here, too). It all ostensibly resembles a kids’ movie, albeit with frequent comedic gore, like graphically dismembering drunk elves, making it wildly inappropriate for its TV-PG rating. Personally, that’s just yet another reason to scrap the classification system altogether in favor of straightforward content warnings.

The sprinkle of nutmeg on top of Santa Jaws lies in the frequent homages throughout to invoke memories of cinema classics from years past. I suppose they were inspired by the cultural impact of Stranger Things at the time. In addition to its titular namesake, the narrative clearly channels both Home Alone and Wizard of Oz, while Kevin Manthei’s playful score dials in various childhood favorites ranging from the Culkin holiday classic to Harry Potter, Back to the Future, Mrs. Doubtfire and others. See if you can spot ‘em all.

Though I clearly missed the social media moment this film spawned, which led to a wide split of opinions from irredeemable trash to cult masterpiece, with many even lobbying for a sequel, rest assured that it’s neither. If you’re incapable of appreciating camp, steer well clear with a wide berth. But Santa Jaws is that rare shark-themed parody that deserved its moment in the sun. It just didn’t need a sequel.

+ 3 points for that "Ave Maria" needle drop. I may have actually shed a tear laughing.
- 2 points for futilely catapulting roast turkeys at Santa Jaws as hidden bomb vessels. Christmas is *HAM*, you culturally bereft fools!
+ 5 points for attracting the shark with chum composed of crumbled-up Christmas sugar cookies instead of fish guts

A gloriously low-budget oddity that’s way more enjoyable, at least as a single-time watch, than it had any right to be.

Grade: C+

Sharktacular Challenge
7. Sharks on Drugs

Within the first three minutes of Deep Fear, it becomes painfully evident that the filmmakers know next to nothing about sharks or diving, begging the question of how they spent all that time filming underwater, as well as why they chose to operate in the genre in the first place.

(a) Sharks are *not* attracted by bubbles from divers’ regulators. It’s the exact opposite; they’re typically scared of them. Unfortunately, a critical plot point is later dependent on that error.

(b) Much more importantly, you can’t ascend to high altitudes immediately after diving. One character surfaces from a dive and rushes to a departing helicopter. Real people die that way because they either ignore or are ignorant of the risks. It has no bearing on the narrative and is irresponsible even to show an audience.

Deep Fear’s aerial and underwater footage are both visually striking at times, despite the former being comprised mostly of purchased drone footage of Caribbean islands the production never bothered to visit. Unfortunately, the 90% of the film that takes place at surface level amounts to a brain-dead ripoff of Dead Calm, with the Billy Zane menace replaced by brother-and-sister drug runners instead.

When our protagonist, Madalina Ghenea (House of Gucci), sailing solo from Guadeloupe to Grenada, rescues stranded survivors of a shipwreck off Martinique, they almost instantly take her hostage, forcing her to help recover the $1M cocaine stash on their sunken boat below, which is unfortunately guarded by two great white sharks. (Note: Totally the wrong shark species for these waters. Should’ve picked whitetips instead.) On their first attempt, one of the sharks bites into the payload during an attack, releasing a huge white plume of coke that the shark consumes.

Regrettably, the tantalizing premise of becoming “Cocaine Shark” is never mined for the potential it was so clearly handed for the taking, in favor of remaining a bargain-basement thriller that repeatedly chooses cliché over novelty. The shark effects are mostly respectable, but nothing ever wow-worthy. While the film features the first realistic attack sequence I’ve seen in any shark picture of recent, namely breaching the surface from beneath, unaware that its victim is human, it’s somewhat spoiled by the worst CGI in the film.

Where Deep Fear stumbles most severely, however, is in its script and acting departments. I don’t like speaking ill of individual actors, but Ghenea’s lead performance is genuinely bizarre, as if she were on sedatives throughout. Ed Westwick (Gossip Girl), as her boyfriend, literally radios in the majority of his performance remotely and isn’t given much to do until the film’s final act. The Latin American smugglers are borderline racist stereotypes typical of a mid-80s episode of Miami Vice. Even if there’s the slightest service paid to explain the cartel’s victimization of the villains themselves, that’s quickly cast aside to turn them back into cartoonishly evil buffoons.

Although Deep Fear has a few promising aspects, it still sadly feels overlong at less than 75 minutes sans titles. And that should speak volumes.

- 1 point for Westwick mispronouncing Dominica. It’s “doh-mee-NEE-kah.” Say it with me, Ed!
- 3 points for neither great whites nor their prey inhabiting waters this warm
- 5 points for sharks knowing how to open a ship’s cargo bay doors
- 5 points because the filming location of Valletta, Malta, doesn’t look anything like St. George's, Grenada, or anywhere else in the Caribbean for that matter. Not remotely. Nice container ships, btw. Hope you enjoyed your tax breaks.

And to think that if they’d done literally anything with the cocaine effects on the shark, they could’ve likely had a minor camp hit on their hands. Alas, they were *this* close but just didn’t see it—such a waste.

Grade: D+

Sharktacular Challenge
6. Sharks on a Plane

A mixed bag of a creature-feature with sharks attacking a sunken plane crash that pleasantly surprises in the aesthetics and suspense departments, even if it remains somewhat underwhelming on the killer fish front.

From the opening credits, it’s clear that the modest $15M budget for No Way Up was well spent to yield significantly above-average production value for its subgenre. The picture is simply a joy to look at, supplemented by an effective score by Andy Gray. The filmmakers’ choice to invert the text of each credit shown on screen prior to coming into full view, in an apparent nod to the most dangerous of shark species having ocular rotation to protect their eyes during attack, is a particularly nice touch. It also channels the pending disorientation and chaos in store for us.

No broad narrative sweeps here, the setup is simple: The graduate student daughter (Sophie McIntosh) of California’s governor is heading out on vacation from L.A. to Cabo with her jock boyfriend (Jeremias Amoore) and his buffoonish jerk of a best friend (Will Attenborough, grandson of director Sir Richard and great-nephew of naturalist Sir David) when their scarcely populated plane experiences a bird strike mid-flight and crashes into the Pacific Ocean, quickly becoming submerged and besieged by a nasty set of tiger sharks intent on eating everyone on board.

The crash sequence is quite well executed and certainly shouldn’t be viewed by aerophobics in the absence of anti-anxiety meds. It’s essentially a more harrowing version of Airport ‘77 with the added theatrics of Final Destination and Alive/Society of the Snow to up the body count. The compromised fuselage, with a huge hole in its side, quickly floods, trapping a handful of survivors in an air pocket at the back of the 45-degree-pitched plane, and ultimately comes to rest at the precipice of an underwater cliff in a clear hat-tip to The Abyss. It’s as if the makers watched every waterlogged thriller of the past forty years and said, “Oh, yeah, let’s add that part too!”

Aside from the absurdity of the overall premise of sharks purposefully hunting humans for food, completely glossing over that those submerged and recognizable as non-prey carry less than 1/10 the risk of someone on the surface, there’s nary a logical bone in the film’s body. Bird strikes don’t happen at cruising altitude. The Sully-esque controlled ditch to land intact on the open Pacific instead of the Hudson River is exceptionally unrealistic. And while aircraft are designed to withstand the pressure differentials of high altitude, they can’t endure the strain of even shallow submersion. I’d guess the plane rests somewhere around 100 meters down—that’d be 20x the pressure of flight and, to partially quote the title, “No way.”

Since most folks are only g up for the gore anyway, it’s important to note that the majority of the shark attacks take place off-camera in a very odd choice for a solidly R-rated horror film. There are gruesome bits, to be sure, but they’re largely relegated to the horrifying aftermath. As a result, there isn’t a ton of shark footage, even if what’s little to be found is respectable on the effects end.

The acting is surprisingly strong, with clear standouts being Downton Abbey alum Phyllis Logan as a trapped survivor with critical first aid skills from her past as a field nurse and Colm Meaney (Star Trek: TNG, Con-Air) as the lead’s longtime accompanying security detail. Unfortunately, they’re not aided well by a pretty hamfisted script that fumbles exposition with the "As You Know, Bob" trope of characters recounting each other’s backstories solely for the viewer's benefit.

And, without giving much away, if you took issue with lead Bérénice Bejo surviving the opening events of the recent Under Paris, the ending of this picture is so absurd that it seems these guys watched their competitor film first and said, “Hold my beer!” It involves a non-stop emergency ascent from at least 300 feet after hours of the human body building up nitrogen while submerged. Hard no; they’d be dead—full stop.

However, for its subgenre, Swiss director Claudio Fäh (Hollow Man 2) does a surprisingly good job with all of the absurdist material he's been handed. As long as you shut off your brain cells for 90 minutes, No Way Up can make for a reasonably fun ride. Although I’m more looking forward to seeing how Renny Harlin (Deep Blue Sea) returns to the genre with this exact same premise, given quadruple the budget, in a few months’ time with Deep Water. Two “Sharks on a Plane” films in one year? Yippee, bring it!

+ 1 point for Colm Meaney’s nearly 360-degree peripheral vision (just like a shark!)
+ 2 points for shrapnel in your butt setting off airport metal detectors
+ 3 points for casting openly gay actor Attenborough as a rabidly homophobic douchebag, the most clearly telegraphed to become fish food from the moment he opens his mouth
+ 10 points for the best justification to sit at the back of an airplane EVER

Not great, but if you're a genre fan, not a total wash either.

Grade: C+

Sharktacular Challenge
5. Uncharted Waters

Billing itself as the first 3D shark film since 1983’s Jaws 3-D and partially fulfilling the 2015 promise of that holographic “Jaws 19” billboard in Back to the Future Part II four years early, at least Shark Night attempts to make a bona fide stab at reinvigorating the subgenre in the waning days before Sharknado would turn it into an irredeemable joke. Unfortunately, it simply doesn’t work.

From the maker of Snakes on a Plane comes this every-bit-as-absurd tale of seven Tulane University students vacationing at a freshwater lake in rural Louisiana only to find it inhabited by a plethora of deadly sharks. Aside from the requisite opening kill, an unabashed homage to Jaws (at least, I hope that was its intent), the first 1/3 of Shark Night is completely actionless. We’re introduced to a cartoonishly drawn cast of stereotypes—the jock, the nerd, the slut, the prude, etc—all while learning practically nothing meaningful about any one of them. The MTV-style editing of rapidly sped-up, quick-cut footage only serves to remind us that even the director is aware that the set-up runs overlong and doesn’t accomplish its intended purpose. Thankfully, the attractive cast does a reasonable job on the acting front, and it’s always a pleasure to see Joel David Moore (Dodgeball, Hatchet, Avatar) pop up in a movie.

When the carnage finally does arrive, Sinqua Wells (Friday Night Lights, White Men Can’t Jump), cast as the “token black guy,” is the first victim in a move that’s so universally understood as problematic cliché that it’s almost always deployed only as parody anymore. Here, they just play it straight and think it’s still okay; it's not. Pacing continues to be a problem, however, because it’s nearly another half hour before the action resumes with the reveal of the film’s overarching premise only in the final act. Without giving too much away, Shark Night is essentially a mashup of Jaws and Hostel.

While it’s almost always a fool’s errand to argue the science of a subgenre that predicates its existence on the folly of sharks as natural hunters of human beings, Shark Night is particularly beyond redemption in a way that makes it fit snuggly within this challenge category. Early on, one of the locals, upon learning of the shark presence, rightfully concludes that it’s likely a bull shark swept into the lake by flooding during hurricane season. That’s actually a semi-believable premise because bulls are indeed the only shark species in North America that can traverse between salt and fresh water, on top of being relatively aggressive.

Unfortunately, this 15-20 foot deep lake is populated by various sharks, including great whites, hammerheads, threshers, tigers, and cookie cutters—all of which are saltwater fish, meaning that they’d be dead within hours of entering freshwater. Of course, none of them would survive long anyway because, even if they did hunt humans, we’re still a *really* poor food source for them in the absence of larger, fattier prey. The “tiger shark” that appears late in the picture is actually a “sand tiger,” otherwise known as a grey nurse, which you’ve likely seen in aquariums. They look menacing as they swim with their mouths partially open, but they’re largely harmless. And there’s a reason you’ve never seen a thresher or cookie-cutter shark in this genre before—they’re deep sea dwellers that also pose no threat to human beings, if for no better reason than we can’t even reach the depths in which they live. Why they didn’t just make them all bull sharks to begin with is anyone’s guess.

Scientific absurdity aside, gore hounds are likely to be particularly frustrated by the relative scarcity in that department, owing to the film’s PG-13 rating. Most of the kills are off-camera and shown from above water, with characters just getting dragged under in a red cloud of blood. What should’ve been a fairly gruesome finale is frustratingly hobbled by conspicuous heavy editing, depriving the audience of key shots that assumably never made it past the MPAA in a way that could still dupe kids into flocking to theaters.


The creature effects were done by the same digital team that made Deep Blue Sea, begging the question of why most of the shark footage looks worse than a movie made a dozen years prior. Not all of it is bad, but most of the CGI movement is kind of cringe, and that hammerhead looked like a rubber mold. On the plus front, unlike the following year’s slightly better and far bloodier Bait, the 3D effects are never really distracting and, with only a couple of notable exceptions, blend pretty seamlessly into the picture.

Director David R. Ellis apparently wanted to retitle the film “Untitled Shark Thriller 3D,” assumedly in a bid to recapture the bottled lightning effect of added kitch that propelled his lackluster snake-themed picture to box office success. Coupled with the studio’s decision not to screen Shark Night in advance for critics, it seems everyone involved knew that they didn’t exactly have a winner on their hands.

+ 1 point for quoting Nietzsche as justification for feeding people to sharks
- 2 points for the wince-inducing post-credits music video with cast rapping to the theme song
- 5 points for employing five different shark species, only one of which is remotely dangerous to humans
+ 3 points for, in its own weird way, forcing home the message that our own fellow species is far more of an ongoing threat to us than sharks

A neutered dud of a genre entry.

Grade: D+

The French New Wave (La Nouvelle Vague) wasn’t just a movement—it was a revolution. In the late 1950s and '60s, a group of young critics-turned-filmmakers rejected the old rules, embracing handheld cameras, jump cuts, naturalistic performances, and existential themes. This crash course traces the films that defined the movement—from its rebellious spark to the innovations that reshaped global cinema.

And in the last slot? A modern ripple. The New Wave’s DNA is everywhere in film today—from The Worst Person in the World to Aftersun—but this particular chaos agent doesn’t just echo the movement—it picks up the camera and runs with it.

PRECEDED BY:
🇮🇹 Italian Neorealism: A Crash Course — Its raw authenticity, street-level realism, and nontraditional storytelling directly inspired the New Wave’s break from studio tradition.

PAVED THE WAY FOR:
🍸 New Hollywood: A Crash Course — Its spirit of experimentation and auteur-first mindset shaped a generation of American directors who fused artistic freedom with narrative disruption.
🔥  Erotic Thrillers: A Crash Course — The New Wave’s fixation on desire, power, and moral ambiguity filtered into Hollywood’s glossiest genre of obsession and taboo.
🌈  Queer New Wave: A Crash Course — Its embrace of personal storytelling, aesthetic play, and outsider perspective helped shape a new generation of LGBTQ+ filmmakers in the indie boom of the ’80s and ’90s.

1. Handsome Serge

   Often considered the first New Wave film, Chabrol's debut foreshadowed the movement’s themes of alienation, provincial decay, and psychological introspection.

2. The 400 Blows

   A landmark in autobiographical filmmaking. Truffaut’s tale of youthful rebellion introduced the movement to the world and gave cinema one of its most iconic endings.

3. Hiroshima Mon Amour

   A radical experiment blending documentary realism with fragmented memory, setting the stage for the movement’s intellectual ambitions.

4. Breathless

   The ultimate New Wave manifesto. Godard’s jump cuts, improvisational energy, and deconstruction of genre cemented him as the movement’s enfant terrible.

5. The Good Girls

   Chabrol brings Hitchcockian suspense and social critique into the New Wave, offering a darker take on Parisian youth.

6. Shoot the Piano Player

   A genre-bending mix of noir, comedy, and tragedy that showcases the New Wave’s playful irreverence toward Hollywood tropes.

7. Paris Belongs to Us

   An enigmatic, conspiracy-laced narrative that captures the New Wave’s intellectual and improvisational spirit.

8. Cléo from 5 to 7

   A feminist New Wave masterpiece, blending real-time storytelling with existential dread and capturing Paris with documentary-like immediacy.

9. Le Petit Soldat

   A political thriller banned for years, marking Godard’s shift from playful rule-breaking to ideological provocation.

10. Jules and Jim

    A lyrical, bittersweet love triangle that epitomizes the movement’s free-spirited romanticism while foreshadowing its darker turns.

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.