Coyote vs. Acme (2026)

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I’ve been going through a Marx Bros phase for the past week or so, which again has me thinking about how many Old Hollywood icons & archetypes were introduced to me via Looney Tunes as a child, long before I would’ve been exposed to their originating sources of inspiration. The wisecracking Groucho Marx is, of course, Bugs Bunny in human form. Bugs also borrowed his trademark carrot-munching technique from Clark Gable and would occasionally dip into Humphrey Bogart parody, in addition to his more overt Marxisms. Caricatures of Frank Sinatra, James Cagney, Cary Grant and Mice & Men-era Lon Chaney Jr. would frequently pop up in Looney Tunes shorts as well, as would, most famously, a beautifully warped caricature of Peter Lorre. There’s something especially subversive about Saturday morning cartoons exposing young children to Peter Lorre long before they’d have any personal interest in seeking out his iconic villain roles in M, Mad Love, The Maltese Falcon, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and titles otherwise alphabetized. Once Lorre was introduced as an in-universe character among other Old Hollywood celebrities, Looney Tunes animators had a ton of fun slapping his distinct mug on a wide range of characters: a Casablancan Tweety Bird, a fish with disconcertingly fleshy lips, and a mad scientist named Dr. Lorre, whom I was happy to discover plays a major role in the latest Looney Tunes feature Coyote vs. Acme, continuing the tradition into a new millennium.

Dr. Lorre serves as the Maltese Falcon-like MacGuffin of Coyote vs. Acme, a missing scientist who was violently disappeared by the insidious Acme corporation in a covert coverup effort. Finding Dr. Lorre means uncovering Acme’s crimes against the cartoon citizens who purchase its products, treating them like disposable animal test subjects despite their overt anthropomorphisms. The corporation’s most frequent victim, of course, is Wile E. Coyote, who is addicted to purchasing & deploying faulty Acme products in his deranged, single-minded pursuit to capture & devour the Road Runner. Sick of all the backfiring rockets, misleading magnets, and trickster dynamite fuses that have mangled his body over the decades, Wile E. Coyote finally decides to sue Acme for personal damages, employing an overwhelmed underachiever lawyer to plead his case, as portrayed by a live & in-the-flesh Will Forte. While researching Acme’s culpability in the cartoon coyote’s never-ending marathon of Sisyphean failures, Forte’s personal injury law firm accidentally undercovers a larger corporate conspiracy involving Dr. Lorre’s disappearance and the second-class citizen treatment of all toons everywhere. The resulting fight for truth & justice makes for the goofiest X-Files conspiracy thriller sendup since Disclosure Day, with Bugs Bunny putting in a crucial cameo appearance as the firm’s shadowy Deep Throat informant (in another classic movie reference to All the President’s Men, which was similarly parodied by fellow introducing-the-kids-to-the-classics cartoon series The Simpsons).

While Coyote vs. Acme goes out of its way to continue the Looney Tunes shorts’ caricatural celebrations of classic Hollywood iconography, it’s clear that Hollywood does not love the movie back. The film’s years-long struggles to reach theatrical distribution has been oddly storied & public. The initial blow was an announcement that Warner Bros was going to scrap the completed picture entirely, finding more value in recategorizing it as a tax write-off than in marketing it as populist entertainment. The upstart indie distributor Ketchup Entertainment then came to the rescue, buying the film out of oblivion so it can enjoy a full life outside a cyclical tax audit. That extratextual backstory is only relevant, really, because Coyote vs. Acme happens to be about shady corporate machinations that value profits over people, so that when Will Forte and his coyote client take Acme to court, it plays as if Warner Bros is also on trial for its crimes against its own IP. Screenwriter Samy Burch (May December) finds great inspiration & pathos in Wile E. Coyote’s stubborn persistence while taking on both Acme in court and the Road Runner on the road despite his repeated, hopeless failures, which brings the twinkle back to his schmuck lawyer’s long-dead eyes. It’s something worth keeping in mind once the inevitable reports of the movie’s box office disappointments hit national headlines; just getting the picture out to the public is a victory in itself, regardless of the result.

As admirable as I find Coyote vs. Acme‘s anti-corporate sentiments, and as charming as I find its classically minded participation in conspiracy thriller tropes, it’s difficult to claim that the movie ever rises above being, simply, cute. The jokes are consistently cute but never convincingly zany. Will Forte’s admiring relationship with his Sisyphean client is cute but never believably real nor tangible. Decades after Who Framed Roger Rabbit? mastered the form, there has yet to be another human-cartoon team up where the drawn & photographed characters share a physical space with the same movie-magic credibility. The textureless flatness of Coyote vs. Acme‘s computer animation does it no favors in that effort, nor does the choice to team Forte up with a mute character who can only communicate through exasperated grimaces & hand-written signs. We’re always aware that we’re watching a human actor speaking to no one but the camera, with his imaginary costar added later in post. More damningly, the film also struggles to replicate the madcap momentum of classic Looney Tunes shorts in its more stoic, procedural courtroom drama plotting. Just last year, Ketchup Entertainment distributed a much zanier, much more classically loony Looney Tunes revival in the fully animated The Day the Earth Blew Up, proving that it can still be done and making this secondary effort to keep the brand alive feel somewhat superfluous. It’s difficult to get too fired up about Coyote vs. Acme’s glaring shortcomings, though, since its very existence is an artistic fight against corporate greed and its overall effect is, not for nothing, cute.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Duck Soup (1933)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the classic Marx Bros war comedy Duck Soup (1933).

00:00 Welcome
02:26 Under Capricorn (1949)
09:50 The Samurai and the Prisoner (2026)
19:45 The Others (2001)
25:21 Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972)
29:12 Maniac Cop (1988)
35:58 Saccharine (2026)
50:05 Tony (2026)
59:16 Maddie’s Secret (2026)
1:15:39 Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026)

01:33:33 Duck Soup (1933)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

The Samurai and the Prisoner (2026)

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The latest Kiyoshi Kurosawa picture is a period piece, set during a military coup in 16th Century feudal Japan. For a director who’s best known for making low-budget genre exercises that inevitably climax with sparsely populated warehouse shootouts (Cure, Cloud, Doppelganger, etc.), that setting suggests a substantial escalation in scale of production. The sprawling cast of period-costumed actors alone presumes a larger budget than what Kurosawa usually works with, even if those actors spend most of the runtime talking in rooms instead of actively waging war on the battlefield. The Samurai and the Prisoner is a rare instance where it’s justified to mention Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s name in the same breath as Akira Kurosawa’s, whereas they’re usually only grouped together by mistake (like how Paul Haggis’s 2004 film Crash is frequently referenced in error while attempting to cite the 1996 Cronenberg classic of the same name). Here, Kurosawa courts the comparison, working in the same samurai warfare genre his elder filmsman mastered long ago in titles like Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, and Throne of Blood. Once the audience adjusts expectations for what the phrase “a Kurosawa film” usually conjures, though, the payoffs are just as slyly playful & sinister as the low-budget, high-concept thrillers that have gradually made him a cinephilic favorite.

Masahiro Motoki stars as an unusually merciful lord turned self-appointed general, leading a small rebellion against a monstrously bloodthirsty warmonger who constantly threatens to invade the castle where his men take refuge. During his slow-moving political maneuvers to join forces with other rebellions against the villainous warlord, the uneasy general’s men quietly undermine his power, mostly in response to his moralistic refusal to behead prisoners of war in accordance to samurai custom. The more prisoners he holds hostage or sets free—heads attached to necks—the worse morale becomes, leading to a series of mysterious murders on castle grounds. In addition to his new duties as a general, Motoki finds himself playing detective to these puzzling crimes, which each include a seemingly supernatural element that shields those responsible from suspicion: a strike of lightning, an invisible arrow, a disappearing tea urn, and the contorted face of a severed head. To help solve these mysteries, he privately enlists the counsel of his wife (Yuriko Yosthitaka) and his most intelligent prisoner (Masaki Suda), who both offer great insights into the logistics of each crime and expose great vulnerabilities within the man struggling to keep his dwindling militia alive.

If there’s any easy, contemporary comparison for The Samurai and the Prisoner to be found outside either of the Kurosawas’ filmographies, it’s in the recent Chinese murder mystery Full River Red, directed by Crouching Tiger‘s Zhang Yimou. In Full River Red, the mystery of a traveling diplomat’s murder within a guarded military compound leads to a series of shadowy political double-crossings while the walls close in on the warrior-detectives chasing down clues. Both films sidestep the expected excitement of onscreen bloodshed to instead tell their stories of violent political intrigue as high-style stage plays. Whereas Zhang’s film ultimately comes across as a nationally propagandistic hip-hop music video, however, Kurosawa’s aims are much more coldly philosophical, as is typical of his work. The climactic reveal of how these faux-supernatural murder mysteries are connected is chilling, with grander implications about how the selfish desires & revenges of human beings are often hidden behind the religious justification of “divine punishment.” There’s also a hypocritical tension throughout in the differing morality of individual murders vs. battlefield slayings, which weighs heavily enough on the titular samurai’s conscience that he starts to question whether truly honorable warfare is either possible or worthwhile. As always, Kurosawa has a lot on his mind, and he expresses those large ideas through the smallest of gestures. The major deviations from his usual tactics here are all trivial matters of genre, scale, setting, and costuming.

-Brandon Ledet

Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026)

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I made several mistakes before attending a screening of the latest MCU corporate product, Spider-Man Brand New Day. The first was re-watching Spider-Man: No Way Home, a film that I gave 4.5 stars to upon my initial viewing, which was at a drive-in theater on top of a parking garage, continuing to observe COVID protocols in late 2021. In the years since its release, I’ve seen many people online attempt to revisit this film, only to discover that it fails to work at all outside of a theatrical experience, because the film has clear pauses for the audience to react to the return of characters from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films as well as those starring Andrew Garfield in the lead role. I never paid much attention to that criticism. After all, I hadn’t experienced it in a theater, and I found myself sufficiently pleased with the choices of who to include, and I was appropriately emotionally invested. Upon rewatch five years later, however, I could hardly believe how utterly bored I was. The first half hour meanders endlessly as we watch Peter Parker (Tom Holland) deal with the fallout of the exposure of his secret identity (and his being framed for the death of Mysterio) before the first returning villain, Arnold Vosloo’s Doc Ock, enters the narrative. I was still sufficiently moved by Garfield’s Peter’s emotional response to saving MJ (Zendaya) when he couldn’t save his own love, but otherwise, the stakes couldn’t have felt lower or more disinteresting; even the death of Aunt May lacked any kind of resonance this time around. No Way Home is nearly 2.5 hours of film-making so emotionally hollow that it did the opposite of making me excited for Brand New Day. 

My second mistake was probably the most common one for filmgoers, which was that I failed (or rather chose not) to do the homework. And the homework that I did do didn’t even help! Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) is in this film, not as the “Smart Hulk” we last saw on the big screen in Endgame, but as his normal, collegiate professor self, with Hulk repressed via a wrist-worn device that exists solely so that it can be damaged later for dramatic purposes. I’m one of the dozens of people who watched She-Hulk through to its conclusion (there is nowhere on this earth that Tatiana Maslany can lead that I will not follow), and even I had completely forgotten about the inhibitor device being a plot point on that show. Even then, the last time we saw Hulk on screen, it was in the final episode, and he was still in his merged Smart Hulk form. So why are we back to a Banner/Hulk Jekyll/Hyde paradigm that hasn’t been the status quo since 2018? I don’t know, and the corporate overlords behind Brand New Day didn’t bother to make up a reason. They know you haven’t been able to keep up with all of this, and that as a result, you’re going to assume something happened on one of the shows you couldn’t be arsed to watch. If there really is a reason that I’m not aware of, please leave a comment on this post. 

The third, and perhaps biggest, mistake that I made was being an X-Men fan. The biggest comic book movie news heading into the weekend last week was the casting of Samara Weaving as the MCU’s Emma Frost, which was both (a) perfect casting and (b) incredibly awful optics at the very least, given that the announcement of the casting of “The White Queen” coincided with the quiet cancellation of both the long-delayed MCU Blade film starring Mahershalah Ali and the TV series Wonder Man, which also had a Black lead. The ongoing win-them-back campaign that the MCU corporate product machine has been working on over the past year has reeked of sweaty desperation for cultural relevance, from the return of Chris Evans and Robert Downey, Jr. in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday to the near-daily announcements of who’s-been-cast-as-who for the upcoming addition of the X-Men to the franchise. One of said announcements turned out to be something of a major spoiler for this movie, which really seems to indicate that the left and right hands of this greater enterprise aren’t entirely coordinated with one another. 

Enough preamble. It’s been almost five years since we last saw Peter Parker, who enlisted magical assistance in trying to reclaim his secret identity, ultimately requiring that he sacrifice all of his familial connections in order to save the multiverse. In the interim, he’s become New York’s beloved masked hero, taking on countless well-known villains and working with both NYPD detective DeWolff (Liza Colón-Zayas) and Bill Metzger (Tramell Tillman), the head of the so-called “Department of Damage Control,” a former S.H.I.E.L.D. sub-unit created by Tony Stark for post-battle clean-up. Although his once-girlfriend MJ and former best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) no longer remember him, Ned’s frequent social media posts have allowed Peter to keep up with their day-to-day lives. It’s a solitary existence, and it’s taking its toll on Peter, who begins to manifest black eyes and further mutation of his body (including the development of organic web shooters) even before he has a run-in with the film’s villain, a body-hopping consciousness that can move from person to person with ease but can’t possess Peter himself. Things come to a head when Peter learns that MJ and Ned have moved back to NYC after graduating from MIT, putting them in danger from the latest super-threat. 

If you thought that the pauses to allow audiences to whoop and holler when they recognized something that they saw on screen in No Way Home were distracting and unnecessary, you’ll really find yourself taken out of the moment when it happens here. Besides the aforementioned returning Hulk (who one must imagine is a deadbeat dad since there’s been no mention of his space son from She-Hulk in the last four years), there’s also new Black Widow Yelena (Florence Pugh) and Frank “Punisher” Castle (Jon Bernthal) in the mix. These amount to little more than cameos in which Pugh is given nothing to do but make unfunny jokes about the varying sizes of the metaphorical “potatoes” that she and Peter are tasked with (Bernthal is better integrated and better used). The reveal that the villain of the piece is someone that we know from other superhero media is also one of these moments, and although there was a gasp in my theater (second in volume only to the audible excitement at the appearance of Michael B. Jordan in the trailer for the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair), I had a much different experience with this revelation. 

I want to tread lightly around this subject, since this might come as a pleasant surprise twist to others, and who am I to steal that joy? This doesn’t appear to be a well-protected spoiler; my barista friend from whom I got coffee this morning already knew it and he’s going to see the film later this week. If you Google this movie, perhaps to see showtimes in your area, the performer and their character are the first result in the “cast” widget, even before Holland or Zendaya. Nevertheless, I’ll touch on this as lightly as I can. Early in the film, the villain’s ruthlessness and casual disregard for human life is made clear as they pilot a stolen tank through the streets of the city causing mass destruction and certain implied death, Peter’s last minute rescue of an awestruck child notwithstanding. After realizing Peter can’t be taken over, when surfing from body to body, the villain deliberately walks the person it’s possessing into the street to be hit by a car; later, the villain compels a possessed MJ to throw herself off a building. In the end, with the reveal that the obviously nefarious operation was unsurprisingly doing nefarious deeds (I’m sorry, what do you mean that the death cult works for you now?), we get a maudlin flashback that explains the character’s trite little origin story. In the moment that Peter turns his monitor around and says, “I’ve identified [them], [their] name is [major spoiler],” I didn’t get the little thrill that the interconnectedness of this universe used to inspire; my first thoughts were a simple “Really?” followed by an image of Don Corleone saying “Look at how they massacred my boy.” They made [redacted] a murderer right out of the gate! What are we doing here? In the same way that the promotional and productive arms of this behemoth don’t seem to be communicating with each other very much, the first and second halves of this film don’t cohere into a whole because our callous, murdering villain of part one is an innocent victim in part two, but you can’t have all that collateral damage early on and not grapple with it later. It’s maddening! 

With the rising tide of more, new Christopher Nolan discourse in the wake of The Odyssey, one of the talking points it appears we failed to leave in the past was whether or not Nolan was arguing for or against a fascist mass surveillance state in his Batman trilogy. The scenes in question revolve around Batman creating a network of cameras for tracking down criminals, and his trusted mentor Lucius telling him that this is a dangerous technology that should never be used. And he’s right! In this film, we get an “I didn’t hear that” reaction from Detective DeWolff when Peter admits that he’s created this very thing, and it’s just a passing joke. It’s not even plot-relevant, since that’s not how Peter manages to get an image of [redacted]’s face; he gets their photo with his goggles. I’m sorry if you thought that you could blissfully take a little excursion into the Marvel Cinematic Universe again and catch up with your old friends without getting soft Flock camera propaganda. Hey, look over here! Don’t think about how those cameras in your neighborhood are being used by cops to stalk women, misread license plates and create deadly situations as a result, or being used to monitor you with no reason and without a warrant. Get used to them being around all the time, because they’re not going anywhere (unless you do something)! They’re a totally normal thing that we’re joking about in your Spidertwunk adventure to normalize it, not a careful, constructed step into a full-blown surveillance state!

This movie is fine. It’s fine. Everything’s fine. We’re fine. Peter saves the day by opening up his mind and letting the villain get a pep talk from a memory of Aunt May (Marisa Tomei), because why not have the cake of milking the main character’s mother figure’s death for all it’s worth in the last movie and also eat it too by having her show up the very next outing. It cheapens the emotional stakes and impacts of both movies, but that’s fine. It’s fine. It would be nice if Peter had a few memories of May reminding him to eat a vegetable from time to time, but if I could subsist on nothing but label-to-camera Little Caesars and look like Tom Holland I wouldn’t bother with leafy greens either. Some extra iron might have helped with his spider-puberty, though.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #270: The Rose (1979) & Bette Midler

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Welcome to Episode #270 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Britnee discuss the early film career of stage performer Bette Midler, starting with her breakout debut The Rose (1979).

00:00 Welcome
02:38 I Want Your Sex (2026)
07:20 Strung (2026)
10:12 Blue Heron (2026)
13:49 Monterey Pop (1968)
15:10 Gimme Shelter (1970)

22:08 The Rose (1979)
37:11 Divine Madness (1980)
46:06 Ruthless People (1986)
56:14 Big Business (1988)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

I Want Your Sex (2026)

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Gregg Araki’s entire promotional campaign for his latest candy-coated slacker comedy has been focused on how Gen-Z is not having as much sex as Gen-X was at their age, a common online-discourse talking point you’ll hear echoed throughout the film itself. Araki will tell any interviewer who’ll listen about how kids these days aren’t fucking enough, that they’re robbing themselves of essential life experiences by being too socially timid during the most precious years of their sexual prime. Olivia Wilde acts as Araki’s Millennial mouthpiece for that complaint about the youth of today’s sexual cowardice in I Want Your Sex, while Cooper Hoffman acts as an ideological punching bag who has to suffer her blows, begging for forgiveness on behalf of his entire generation of anxious, undersexed dweebs. The only thing that saves this intergenerational dynamic from coming across as the “Old man yells at cloud” screed of a prurient 60-something curmudgeon is context & framing. Coming from Wilde’s onscreen persona as an art-scene dominatrix pushing her younger subordinate onto the mattress for a vigorous fuck session, Araki’s position shifts from a schoolhouse scolding to a form of negging dirty talk. It’s a way of teasing Gen-Z into having more sex with their elders in particular, not just each other, by turning that discourse into a degrading roleplay game all of its own — a playfully selfish maneuver.

Unfortunately, that kinky reframing of Gen-Z libido discourse is the only truly inspired idea in I Want Your Sex. The rest of the film swirling around it is just mildly naughty sitcom antics, with Cooper Hoffman playing Wyle E. Coyote to Olivia Wilde’s Roadrunner. Hoffman stars as a fresh-out-of-college slacker who’s openly groomed to become the next sexual plaything of his art-world celebrity boss, played by Wilde. Wilde pontificates through every conversation as if she’s always talking to press about her upcoming gallery show, exclusively communicating in platitudes about the philosophy, politics, and aesthetics of sex, which she’s built an entire career around commodifying in self-parodic pop art. The movie starts as a parody of Sunset Boulevard, with Wilde’s nude body floating face down in her own mansion’s swimming pool, which Hoffman’s befuddled underling has to explain to police detectives (Margaret Cho & Johnny Knoxville) in a classic noir flashback structure. Despite that tease of inevitable violence, the mood remains light & cartoony, to the point where even the S&M games between Wilde’s Norma Desmond dom and Hoffman’s Joe Gillis sub are too goofy to be taken seriously. Most of the kink in I Want Your Sex is comically gestured at instead of depicted in earnest. The seduction period where Hoffman is introduced to his boss’s dirty games is skipped entirely, with the edit jumping straight into depiction through montage rather than building genuine erotic tension scene to scene. The dialogue makes constant references to the act of pegging, but the only time a character straps on a harness onscreen is when they’re too drunk to figure out how it’s supposed to be worn. It’s a funny gag, but it’s also an indication that Araki may have lost some of his own sexually anarchic nerve as the decades have gone by. In his 90s indie days, he would’ve fully gone there instead of just talking about it.

For all of Araki’s preloaded discourse about the diminished returns of each generation’s sexual adventurism, the real story here is the diminished returns of each generation’s cinematic imagery. Araki recently gave an interview with GQ Magazine where he admitted that he vastly prefers the look & feel of digital cameras over the bulky analog film equipment of his early years, stating, “I love digital. I love the way it looks. I love the things you can do with it. I hate sprocket holes. I hate dealing with the labs.” It’s easy to see how that shift in format might’ve made Araki’s job easier & more fun, but he doesn’t seem to realize how detrimental it’s been to the overall quality of his work. I Want Your Sex‘s most pronounced visual idea is the contrast between the candy-colored pop art of Wilde’s art studio, the breakfast cereal commercial production design of Hoffman’s man-child apartment, and the grim, grey blandness of his checked-out girlfriend’s place, which is supposed to represent the sexless, passionless monotony of Gen-Z living (with Charli XCX playing its against-type spokeswoman). The problem is that, because it’s shot on digital cameras, there’s no richness or vibrancy to the colors in the more cartoonish spaces, and they end up looking a little bland as well, undercutting the point of the contrast. Some of the best touches of Araki classics like Nowhere & The Doom Generation are the absurd pops of color in the teenage fashion & interior decor, which is now being sacrificed for the convenience of digital filmmaking (an excuse that gets a little flimsy when you look at the high-contrast cartoon imagery of last year’s Araki-inspired, digitally shot Rats!). The unintended result is that I Want Your Sex often looks & feels like a straight-to-streaming comedy from an anonymous hack rather than the latest pop-art provocation from an indie cinema legend. Gregg Araki wants I Want Your Sex to read as a grand statement on the current moment in intergenerational sexual politics, but it instead mostly reads as a cute but inessential workplace comedy with a few more onscreen dildos than usual.

-Brandon Ledet

Tony (2026)

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Canadian prankster extraordinaire Matt Johnson has been taking a much-deserved victory lap all year, having brought his cult sitcom Nirvanna the Band the Show to the big screen, his chilling found-footage comedy The Dirties to adoring Bleak Week audiences, and his burgeoning career as a go-to director for lowkey biopics up to the A24 tier of marketing & distribution. So, it’s a little surprising to find him hitting such a bummer note in his latest tale of rambunctious male bonding, a coming-of-age biopic about Anthony Bourdain’s college years. Tony finds Matt Johnson entering his sad boy era. He carries over all of the bro-ey, sinister scheming of his run & gun days shooting The Dirties, Operation Avalanche, and Nirvanna the Band, but now his buddy-comedy antics are soured by more hangovers, artistic pretension, and pensive brooding than ever before, due largely to the looming legacy of his latest subject. There’s an unavoidable sadness in depicting Bourdain’s life as a young man, given that the globally loved & respected suicide victim described himself at that age as being a “spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking,” in a quote that Johnson dutifully transcribes in an opening title card. Some audiences might be surprised to see the notoriously swaggering Bourdain portrayed as such a scrawny, conniving little twerp in Tony, but the depiction feels true to how he portrayed himself in his career-making memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. Matt Johnson appears to see a kindred spirit in the way that vulnerable little kid in Bourdain was masked by his more boisterous, smirking surface, and the recognition of it bums him out.

We spend the summer of 1975 with a college-age Bourdain on the beaches of Provincetown, Massachusetts, the same year Jaws turned that East Coast setting into an iconic moment in American pop culture. Dominic “Holdovers” Sessa plays the future celebrity chef as the saddest boy in America: an aimless, sniveling punk with no discernible motivation in life other than following around his Vassar campus crush like a puppy dog . . . until he’s hit with the realization that she already has a boyfriend. He sells himself to anyone who’ll listen as a writer of great future importance, always on the verge of writing the great American novel but never actually seen sitting in front of a typewriter. His self-aggrandizing lies & schemes in Vassar’s literary circles leave him stranded & penniless in Provincetown for the summer, where he drunkenly falls backwards into a kitchen job washing dishes for an enigmatic Brazilian chef, played by Antonio Banderas. Bourdain’s discovery of a latent love for cooking brings him to life in that kitchen, giving him something to care about other than getting the girl, pissing off his parents, or always being recognized as the smartest prick in the room. Between endless staff meals, beer runs, dirty dishes, and oyster shuckings, he forgets his scheming pursuits of his nearby crush just long enough to develop a personality that she might actually be attracted to, and it saves him from his own self-loathing inertia in the process. A Matt Johnson movie adapting Kitchen Confidential’s later chapters about Bourdain going feral in the backrooms of New York City restaurants might’ve been more fun to watch, but it also would’ve been more expected. Here, Johnson plays his usual tune entirely in minor notes, portraying Bourdain less as a one-of-a-kind culinary mind than as a textbook example of what it’s like to work in kitchens when you’re dangerously young & aimless, finding both romance and sorrow in the precarity of that state.

Once upon a time, Kitchen Confidential was the official Bible for the bro-iest chefs with knife tattoos you’d ever work alongside in professional kitchens, and Tony makes no apology for the homophobic name-calling, homoerotic horseplay, and general juvenile machismo that pervades that industry. That’s exactly what makes it fit in so snuggly with the rest of Matt Johnson’s filmography, which is just as romantic about toxic, obsessive male bonding as it is disinterested in the women who decorate those men’s lives. Johnson seems to be telling these stories from a position of personal self-examination, at least, constantly picking at whatever fragments of male adolescent psychology are still leftover in his overgrown adult-child persona, with little interest in or insight into anyone else’s worldview. Other overt Johnsonisms carry over here from previous films too, most notably in the wall-to-wall needle drops from setting-appropriate bands like The Modern Lovers, which are only occasionally interrupted by a near self-parodic score of sappy piano twinklings from longtime collaborator Jay McCarrol. Much like in BlackBerry, the period setting puts some limitations on how much of Johnson’s trademark street-level spontaneity can be carried over from his sitcoms to his biopics, and most of that job is left to comedian Stavros Halkias as Bourdain’s most obnoxious, Bluto-like coworker (a task marked clearly by his billing in the final credits as playing himself). Without those auteurist touches echoing from previous Matt Johnson works, Tony largely looks & acts like a fairly thoughtful, well-behaved biopic on an indie budget, which is how most audiences will inevitably receive it. In that context, its lowkey mood, its limitation in scope, and its pronounced disinterest in lionizing its subject all speak well to its success as a tasteful film about Bourdain’s life, when it’s all too easy to imagine what a tasteless one would look like. As a result, it’s more likely to charm than to wow. The biggest reaction it got out of the audience at its advance screening in New Orleans was in a scene when Bourdain attempts to shuck an oyster without holding it in a rag to protect his hand, a moment that the local, oyster-familiar crowd treated like a horror movie jump scare. It became clear in that moment that an overwhelming majority of the room had likely worked in kitchens at some point in our lives and, thus, could see some version of ourselves in this “spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout” — a position of quiet recognition rather than one of celebrity hero worship.

-Brandon Ledet

Saccharine (2026)

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Saccharine is the latest supernatural horror film from Natalie Erika James, who previously directed Relic. Midori Francis stars as Hana, a queer medical student who struggles with her weight. While out one night with classmate Josie (Danielle Macdonald), Hana runs into her high school acquaintance Melissa (Annie Shapero), who was overweight in adolescence but has now slimmed down significantly. She offers Hana a couple of capsules of “Grey,” a new non-government-approved weight loss supplement that she says did wonders for her, although she warns her that the medication is extremely expensive. Hana, who has a crush on Alanya (Madeleine Madden), a personal trainer at the university gym, sees rapid progress in her weight loss journey after only one capsule, but when she learns that the price for Grey is five thousand dollars, she opens the second capsule and runs it through spectroanalysis, at which point she discovers that the miracle drug consists of human cremains. She sneaks back into the cadaver lab and retrieves some biowaste from her class group’s assigned corpse (cruelly nicknamed “Big Bertha” by one of her groupmates because of the dead woman’s obesity), cremates it, and begins taking it. By the time she realizes that in so doing she has made herself the object of haunting by Bertha’s restless (and hungry) ghost, it might be too late for her. 

There was some discourse last year with the sudden appearance of Ozempic/GLP-1s on the market as a weight loss medication, with many relating the too-good-to-be-true results of the treatment and the abject horror of seeing perfectly healthy celebrities and athletes appearing in advertisements for it to the 2024 film The Substance. The Substance is a film about a culture that prioritizes aesthetic conformity to a Eurocentric beauty standard upheld by a porn-addled populace over real “health,” pre-saging Ozempic, and is about the kind of world that creates the “need” for GLP-1s. Saccharine is a film that lives in the post-Ozempic world, a character study into a person whose lack of control over their binging episodes leads them to sacrifice their health in more ways than one in order to have the body that they want. It’s indirectly grappling with GLP-1s, but it’s also casting a wide enough net that its central metaphor can also easily be seen as a parallel to a fad diet or bulimia. It’s not exactly breaking new ground, but it’s also well-studied in the way that it treats the characters who struggle with their weight, often as the results of coping mechanisms and self-destructive habits that they have very little conscious control over. 

Saccharine’s greatest weakness is in its pacing. At 112 minutes in length, it moves pretty quickly in its first and final acts, but the middle tends to drag, with the scenes of Bertha-possessed-Hana eating in a fugue state beginning to feel redundant. The storytelling in Act I is very economical, giving us a lot of story visually without any of it feeling expository. We learn that Hana’s a med student, that she has a crush on Alanya, that she struggles with her weight, that she has a tendency to binge eat, that she’s a lesbian, and that she over-identifies with the morbidly obese corpse she and her classmates are tasked with dissecting (they even wear the same nail polish) — all within the first ten minutes of the film. But after the half-hour mark, the pace slows to a bit of a crawl. There is also a mostly well-done subplot about her parents’ marriage from which we infer a lot about Hana’s childhood. Her mother Kimie (Showko Showfukutei) is a typically overbearing mother whose parental concern takes the form of constantly monitoring her daughter’s weight and food intake and providing unwanted housekeeping; her father remains completely offscreen except as a shambling cryptid-like presence in the periphery, a shut-in who has grown too fat to leave the house. In the one real scene with him, Hana visits him while her mother is out of country (perhaps having left him for good) and lambasts him for “giving up” and the way that this affected his family. As a “the monster is the metaphor” horror film, this one comes a little too close to reaching Smile’s “oops, too obvious” territory in these scenes, and can be particularly frustrating at this point since the narrative seems to be spinning its wheels, but the final act manages to get the energy back on track to reach an interesting conclusion. The film’s unwieldy length results in an epilogue scene which follows the climax feeling less like a well-considered final rug-pull and more like a tacked-on extension, which wouldn’t be the case in a film that was ten minutes shorter. In a film with this subject matter, it’s hard to resist the urge to make a joke about trimming some of the fat around the middle, but it really would have helped the film overall. 

One of the things that I thoroughly enjoyed about Saccharine was that it also explores some largely uncovered ground by having its main character be a scientist, someone not only capable of finding out what’s in the miracle pills and replicating it but also who tackles her apparent haunting with scientific rigor; the film smartly explores this rigorousness as an almost pathological means for Hana to take some agency and control in her life, when she doesn’t have control over her body. That’s good stuff! One also initially gets the sense that Alanya will be more of an antagonistic presence: a hot, mean, physically attractive woman who will inevitably reject or otherwise hurt Hana. Instead, she becomes the film’s love interest, and she’s also both reasonable in her concerns that Hana is losing weight too quickly and compassionate about Hana’s compulsive night eating (which is actually Bertha acting through her, but Alanya can’t know that). I also really liked the relationship between Hana and her best friend Josie, who is a breath of fresh air every time that she appears. Although there are moments where her dialogue threatens to become a little too Afterschool Special, like when she tells Hana “You say ‘fat’ like it’s a bad word!”, she’s pretty well characterized throughout. Although the film wastes some time at other points, we don’t have to sit around waiting for Josie to believe Hana about the ghost that’s haunting her, since Bertha makes her presence known while Josie is there pretty immediately. All of that works, and works well. Perhaps most surprisingly, the film decides to suddenly become much funnier in the final act, which is a bit of tonal whiplash but which I appreciated, since it helped jump-start things again after the slothful midsection. 

This one is not quite as subtle or meaningful as Relic, and admittedly, I don’t think it’s trying to be. Moving away from the mostly single location setting of that film to the more varied environments of this one creates more opportunities for visual flourish. That’s mostly successful, as there are beautifully composed shots of triangular university stairwells and other fascinating images, and the more immediately apparent supernatural premise of this film means that we get to see some great ghost images early on. I also want to shout out the end credits, which are some of the coolest that I have seen in a long time. I’m not sure how I feel about some of the more regressive depictions of overeating, however. There are images of a mouth (presumably Hana’s) gorging in the opening, and many more throughout, and it feels very Shallow Hal to have the area around our lead actress’s mouth smeared with jelly and grease when she’s gorging herself during her “fat” period, slovenly and intentionally off-putting, then have her scarf just as much when she’s got her haunted metaphorical tapeworm taking the brunt of it in her “slimmed down” appearance. It’s not a deal-breaker, but it’s worth mentioning. All in all, this one isn’t quite as smart as some of the director’s previous work, but it’s making up for that by dialing up the style and expanding the scope of the lens. I look forward to her next one, and I hope it’s a little bit more concise.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Her Private Hell (2026)

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Anytime I catch myself wondering “Where have they been?” about a specific actor or director, the answer is always television. Nicolas Winding Refn has produced two high-end TV series since he last graced cinemas with the best film of 2016, which from my limited perspective means he’s spent the last decade enjoying an early retirement. Then, out of nowhere, he premiered his new film Her Private Hell at this year’s Cannes, once again baffling & frustrating fans & critics alike with another slow-motion adventure into his own neon-lit subconscious. Her Private Hell presented an opportunity for a grand Refn comeback tour, dragging the acquired-taste auteur out of the hazy obscurity of luxury TV streaming series and back into the glamorous spotlight of festival-circuit red carpets. Instead, he chose to double down on the prickliest, most alienating aspects of his work with no apparent urge to gain new fans or win over old haters. It’s like the 50-something filmmaker skipped the middle period of his career so he could rush directly into his “late style” era. Imagine if Coppola had fucked off for ten years after making The Godfather and then immediately came back with Megalopolis, or if David Lynch had jumped straight into Inland Empire after Blue Velvet, without laying the decades of artistic & thematic groundwork that earns an audience’s trust & good will. Older, venerated filmmakers of that stature are given a lot of leeway to go big and go vague without guiding the audience along the way with the usual handholding tactics of Narrative, Structure, Entertainment, and Taste. There’s something extremely bratty about Refn acting as if he’s entitled to that same reverence & grace at such a relatively young age, and so long since he last pleased a crowd with his jacket-and-soundtrack-selling hit Drive. As always, I admire the audacity.

Structurally, Her Private Hell combines the two most alienating titles from Refn’s back catalog—The Neon Demon & Only God Forgives—into a crude, volatile mash-up where they never quite gel into a new singular work. Sophie Thatcher stars in the Neon Demon half, playing a jaded, sneering actress in a sci-fi dystopia who gets back at her emotionally checked-out father by sexually pursuing his wife (and her former bestie, played by Havana Rose Liu). Charles Melton headlines the Only God Forgives half, playing an American bruiser in post-WWII Tokyo, who’s willing to crush infinite skulls and suffer infinite tortures in his pursuit to get his daughter back from gangster kidnappers. How these two temporally dissonant stories are related is anyone’s guess; they share a thematic impulse to reunite broken families, but they’re otherwise rigidly segregated. Certain sequences of the edit suggest that Melton’s buff, shirtless soldier of a forgotten neon-noir past has been entirely dreamed up by Thatcher’s lonely, horny actress from our neon-melodrama future, as the story often shifts to his perspective at the exact moment that her head hits a pillow. More directly, they are connected by a mysterious mist that hangs heavy over both of their rotten cities, physicalizing the ambiguity of the temporal & geographical settings Refn sketches out here. Another figure who emerges from that mist is an entity known only as The Leather Man: a hulking presence dressed head to toe in black leather, studded with diamonds, who occasionally rips women’s chests open with his bare hands as if he’s spatchcocking a turkey. If the mist is a physical manifestation of the film’s ambiguity, The Leather Man is a physical manifestation of its dread – a walking, stalking avatar of Bad Vibes. All three of these central figures are really just isolated figments of Refn’s imagination, relegated to their own distinct movie realms, only accessed by dreams, only connected by mist.

While Her Private Hell mostly operates on post-giallo dream logic, it announces itself as a futuristic fairy tale with a wry Hans Christian Andersen name-drop in its very first scene. Instead of the usual driving synths that provide a sense of momentum in Refn’s otherwise static tableaus, this outing is scored by old-timer Pino Donaggio with the fluttering harps & strings that usually accompany bedtime fairy tales, marking the exact moment that a character falls asleep and drifts into a magical other-realm. Thatcher’s attention-starved protagonist makes that framing clear in her direct references to her love interest (and familial rival) as her “Wicked Stepmother,” while debating whether to fuck or kill her as retribution for the betrayal of marrying her father. If Her Private Hell is a bedtime storybook, though, it’s one that’s only suitable for overly patient perverts who’ve already flipped through all of the available Bertrand Mandico, Yann Gonzales, Jane Schoenbrun, Amanda Kramer, Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani titles on the shelf and are looking to add one just more neon spotlight to their oncoming dream. When The Neon Demon first hit theaters a decade ago, there was a “What am I even looking at?” quality to it that has since faded as so many other, hungrier auteurs have made names for themselves playing Refn’s game. The diamond & leather studded killer and the characters who are named after punk icons like Johnny Thunders & Nico can’t help but recall Mandico’s work in particular, even if Refn was already doing his thing well before The Wild Boys. Appreciation of Her Private Hell requires an appreciation of all beautifully lit, eerily empty film genres, as exemplified by Thatcher & company seemingly working on a Planet of the Vampires remake in-between their semi-incestuous sexual rivalries and inert fashion magazine editorials, adding 60s sci-fi kitsch to the already sky-high pile of retro genre references. Refn is in some ways very giving here, offering the audience a whole lot of everything while, paradoxically, lulling us to sleep with a cold, mystifying sparseness. Everything he loves is carefully arranged on the screen but rarely set in motion, with little care for whether there’s an audience out there who loves him back.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: The Hairy Bird (1998)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the ensemble-cast boarding school comedy The Hairy Bird (1998), a.k.a. All I Wanna Do, a.k.a. Strike!

00:00 Christopher Nolan
14:00 The Odyssey (2026)
33:00 War and Peace (1965-1967)
37:48 Conan the Destroyer (1984)
40:40 Red Sonja (1985)
46:30 The NeverEnding Story (1984)
53:20 Her Private Hell (2026)
1:00:11 The Taste of Tea (2004)
1:04:55 Millennium Actress (2001)
1:10:46 The Invite (2026)
1:20:12 After Hours (1985)

1:27:20 The Hairy Bird (1998)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew