Ronin (1998)

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I’m a simple man. If Robert De Niro whips out a bazooka in the middle of a car chase, I’m going to cheer like I’m watching sports and my team just scored. If he whips out that bazooka a second time, I’m going to fondly remember that movie for a lifetime, like my team won a championship. There’s something crassly, meatheadedly American about the 1998 espionage thriller Ronin, despite its distinctly European setting. On an intellectual level, there’s nothing any more complex to the film’s international power struggle between The Irish and The Russians on the streets of France than there is between any two teams in a Sunday afternoon NFL game. Both sides struggle for possession of a mysterious briefcase like it’s a football, running it up and down the proverbial field in their European sports cars. The main difference between these two sports, of course, is that the combatants of Ronin are free to fire bullets & missiles at each other in order to score easy points, which is something that would likely appeal to American football audiences if it weren’t for the mess of human causalities it would leave behind.

A lot of people die in Ronin; most of them just happen to be background actors, not main characters. Even Sean Bean manages to survive the vehicular gunfire mayhem, and he’s notorious for playing characters who bite it onscreen. It’s the poor bystanders shopping at fruit stands & fish markets, playing tourist at ancient ruins, and watching innocent figure skating exhibitions who get it the worst here, gunned down while trying to enjoy the Old World backdrop the high-speed gunfights are set against. Robert De Niro stars as the only participant in those gunfights who actively diverts his aim away from those potential victims, often pausing his mission to retrieve the MacGuffin briefcase to save a couple nameless bystanders along the way. He’s characterized as a noble murderer in that way, as indicated by his titular designation as a “ronin,” a masterless samurai who has taken to mercenary work but still abides by the high-minded principles of his disciplined training. So, when he fires a bazooka at a moving car, you know it’s for a just cause, not just because he likes to watch explosions as much as the slack-jawed audience watching at home. That bazooka saves lives, in a counterintuitive way.

Already in his mid-50s by the late-90s, De Niro was starting to appear a little old & creaky for this kind of lone-hero action thriller, which asks him to show off swift warrior reflexes and make out with young ingénues between the more plausible car chase sequences. However, the creakiest aspect of the script is the hero worship that puts him in that position in the first place. Ronin starts as a Reservoir Dogs-style heist plot where several international mercenaries who do not know each other are gathered on one uneasy team, feeling each other out as they put together a plan to retrieve their target MacGuffin. An ex-CIA operative turned masterless samurai, De Niro quickly proves to be the most competent and the most principled of the bunch, humbling the rest of the crew with stock bootstrap phrases like, “You’re either part of the problem, you’re part of the solution, or you’re part of the landscape.” From then on, every single scene is staged in service of making sure we know he is the smartest, toughest, coolest, classiest, handsomest hero to ever drive down the streets of Paris & Nice, while his new partners in crime can only gaze at him in awe. He is the star quarterback, and the rest of the team is only there to make sure he looks good.

Meanwhile, the actual hero of Ronin is director John Frankenheimer, who could’ve directed a cardboard cutout of Robert De Niro to the same thrilling effect. No star quarterback can thrive without the right coach calling the plays. Despite the muted browns & greys of the film’s Old World color scheme, Frankenheimer works overtime to bring an exaggerated cartoon vibrancy to the screen. De Niro’s briefcase-heist team is introduced in cartoonish widescreen closeups in their initial meetings, often framed in exaggerated split-diopter blocking. For the car case set pieces, Frankenheimer straps the camera to the front bumper, inches above the gravel that rushes past the audience to simulate a pure rollercoaster thrill. There’s a Friedkinesque approach to car-chase mayhem here, often driving down impossibly tight alleys and against highway traffic to cause as much demolition derby damage as the budget will allow. It’s unclear to me whether Frankenheimer was hired to direct French Connection II because he had already honed the skills needed to match Friedkin’s car chase expertise or if that’s the project where he learned the craft himself. Either way, he was shooting chases as well as the best of ’em by the time he made Ronin, which really goes the extra mile with its bazooka gags.

-Brandon Ledet

Time of the Gypsies (1988)

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In its opening act, the 1988 coming-of-age drama Time of the Gypsies appears to be an “Eat your vegetables” proposition, the kind of middlebrow Euro arthouse fare that immerses international audiences in the daily toils of a cloistered ethnic community, learning a little empathy along the way. Our teenage Romani protagonist, Perhan (Davor Dujmović), is having a tough go of it. His grandmother can barely house him with the money she makes as the village faith healer; his young sister needs serious medical intervention the family cannot access; and his shit-heel uncle constantly threatens to destroy their modest home with his drunken gambling. Worse yet, Perhan doesn’t have enough money to charm the mother of the girl he wants to marry, leaving his best chance for romance on the backburner until he can get his life together. Most VHS-era international dramas would’ve kept their stories close to home, tracking Perhan’s uneasy maturation into a young man as he navigated the big, eccentric personalities of his village. Instead, director Emir Kusturica finds inspiration in Romani nomadism and takes his story on the road, where Time of the Gypsies quickly shifts gears and becomes a Scorsesean rise-to-power, fall-from grace crime story. It’s like a Romani prototype for Goodfellas, except that Henry Hill got in trouble by trafficking cocaine instead of trafficking human beings.

Notably, Henry Hill also did not have telekinetic superpowers and, to public knowledge, was never visited by the ghost of his pet turkey. Time of the Gypsies deviates from the genre expectations of the Euro coming-of-age drama and the organized crime picture by dabbling in some light magical surrealism. Beasts of the Southern Wild director Benh Zeitlan introduced the film as a major source of inspiration during a recent screening at Gap Tooth, and it’s easy to spot the influence. This is a story about a young, naive person on an adventure to bring their family back together, getting in over their heads in the wider world of magical wonder & poverty-driven crime. Unlike in Beasts of the Southern Wild, however, Perhan is an active participant in both of those larger forces; he can move small objects (like kitchen utensils) with his mind, and he quickly works his way up the ranks of a crime organization that traffics children to cities like Rome & Milan to work as petty street hustlers. If you’ll excuse yet another Western cultural reference for this Yugoslavian artifact, there’s a Max Fischer impishness to Perhan’s personality that makes it easy to overlook his flaws, but the behavior he learns from the men in his immediate circle unavoidably influences him to grow up into a criminal lowlife himself. If you’ve ever seen a crime story before, you know what fate awaits him at the end, but rarely will you have such a magical time getting to that predetermined destination.

Okay, let me toss off one more Western reference, just for kicks. Time of the Gypsies could’ve just as easily been titled Three Weddings and a Funeral, given how much of the runtime is spent celebrating various Romani marriages, every last one of them doomed because of the drunken brutes acting as grooms. My Western-brained movie references are at least somewhat supported by the text, which features onscreen references to Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin and, most improbably, Richard Gere. Emir Kusturica conveys a true cinephilia here, not only in the crime-story genre shift at the top of the second act, but also in his obvious love for “movie magic,” both literal & figurative. In addition to the aforementioned telekinesis & turkey-spirit visits, Kusturica is constantly playing with real-world logic of various scenes merely by moving his camera in unexpected ways. Characters will appear at two opposite ends of a single pan shot, impossibly occupying two places at once. Perhan enters a village festival from the sky, clutching his beloved turkey while being gently lowered to the ground via camera crane. A home is lifted into the sky by another crane while a family cowers below, their entire lives hanging over their heads. It’s often impossible to know whether we’re watching a dream sequence or an actual occurrence until its effect plays out in a subsequent sequence. Meanwhile, constant Eastern European folk music scores each transition from the magical world to the real one, suggesting a fluid, meaningless barrier between them.

In some ways, the communal story told by Time of the Gypsies will always be distorted through translation for me. In a very direct way, its recent Gap Tooth screening was distorted through the translation of shoddy subtitles, which were so half-considered that they refer to Perhan’s young girlfriend interchangeably as “Sorry” and “Excuse Me,” as both a frustratingly literal translation of the name “Azra” and, seemingly, as an open apology. The movie fully immerses its audience in a Romani world at the outset, though, overwhelming us with a nonstop soundtrack of accordion tunes, crying babies, gobbling turkeys, thunder, and top-volume drunken arguments. Once we’re fully rooted in that world, Kusturica shifts into more West-accommodating genre tropes, staging the Romani version of The Godfather across multiple years & countries. It’s a much more thrilling, lyrical journey than you might expect in the first few minutes, where it seems we’re settling in for a broad family dramedy about Old World village life.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Universal’s silent-era adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera (1925), starring Lon Chaney as The Phantom.

00:00 Welcome
03:30 Forbidden Planet (1956)
11:34 The Drama (2026)
23:55 Blue Heron (2026)
30:08 Mother Mary (2026)
40:14 Erupcja (2026)
45:22 The Beekeeper (2024)
51:08 Ronin (1998)

58:15 The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

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

Il Posto (1961)

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It goes without saying that a critic’s personal biases can have a major effect on how they rate a film. So, it’s probably best to be honest about those biases up front, rather than pretending that you’re reviewing films from a purely objective perspective. Personally, the bias I find the most difficult to get past is an embarrassingly simple one: setting. No matter when a movie is set throughout history, I find it’s far easier to lose myself in a story set in a city, rather than the great rural outdoors. No matter whether it’s in the blazing heat of the dusty Old West or on the icy crags of a European mountaintop, I always have to work a little harder to care about stories set outside The City, where my simple urbanite mind longs to be. At least, that’s what was on my simple mind while watching films by Italian neorealist Ermanno Olmi, whose two most famous titles are rooted in the Italian countryside. Olmi’s 1977 Palme d’Or winner The Tree of Wooden Clogs profiles the daily lives and toils of sharecroppers in rural Italy at the turn of the 20th century, forever held down by predatory landlords. It’s a remarkably thoughtful, righteously political work, but I’d be lying if I said spending so much time in the mud & muck of daily farm life didn’t test the endurance of my half-open eyelids. In his 1961 breakout film Il Posto, however, a young man who lives in the Italian countryside actively seeks employment in nearby Milan, hoping to break away from his parents’ small-town control over his daily life by exploring some newfound urbanite freedom. Now, that’s a story I can easily relate to, especially by the time all of his hopeful, youthful momentum crashes into the brick wall of a bureaucratic desk job, where all youth & hope goes to die.

The remarkable thing about urban living is that—unlike farm work—it never really changes all that much. Il Posto is set a half-century and an entire continent away from where I’m living & working today, and I recognized so much of my daily joys & indignities reflected back at me from the screen. Our scrawny desk-jockey hero Domenico (Sandro Panseri) timidly learns his way around a public transit system, a busy coffee counter, an awkward office party, and an endless labyrinth of path-blocking street construction in his early days as a shy, soft-spoken urbanite in the exact ways that I remember them in New Orleans. Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before: He goes looking for a job, and then he finds a job; heaven knows, you know the rest. In Il Posto‘s most surprising sequence, we briefly leave Domenico’s POV to catch a glimpse of the quiet home lives, petty workplace grievances, and go-nowhere artistic projects of his older, more established coworkers, who’ve long ago settled into the exact daily routine that’s soon to take over his entire life. From there, the film mostly amounts to a catalog of small character quirks & warmly human interactions found in a cold bureaucratic environment, determined to discourage such comradery through staggered lunch breaks and other interdepartmental barriers. Our little country boy’s big city dreams are adorable at first, as he smirks his ways through all the little indignities of modern urban living with the charming boyishness of an Italian Timothée Chalamet. When an older coworker who’s deluded himself into thinking he can live a full life by sneaking in some writing sessions on the clock between work assignments suddenly dies, however, it’s clear the paper-pushing desks Domenico is working towards are just one-man prison cells, each carrying a life sentence. At least, that’s what’s resonating with this humble office worker who’s currently sneaking in a writing session on the clock between work assignments.

Structurally, Il Posto follows the basic plot beats of an eternally popular urbanite genre: the romcom. Our adorably hopeful office worker quickly falls in love with the very first cute girl he meets in the city (Loredana Detto), then spends the rest of the picture trying to capitalize on that romantic spark while ignoring the thousands of other potential matches surrounding him in Milan. Their will-they-won’t-they relationship is undeniably cute, but it’s also undeniably naive, considering how many obstacles daily labor puts between their potential to socialize and how many other people are hanging around as unengaged romantic competition. Eventually, the film’s labor concerns overwhelm its romantic ones, crushing Domenico’s spirit at the very last minute with a kind of heartbreak he was too infatuated to see coming. So, what we effectively have here is a romcom setup to a bleak labor-politics punchline, ultimately making Il Posto just as much of a neorealist political screed as the rural, landlord-bashing Tree of Wooden Clogs. If I could write about film objectively, I might be lauding Wooden Clogs as the more technically impressive work over this scrappy tale of youthful disillusionment, or I might cite this duo as ideological equals in their shared themes of labor exploitation. Since I write subjectively, however, I have to say that the film that most drove home just how long I’ve been hopelessly crushed under the expectations of daily, dehumanizing labor is the one where the main character does the same kind of meaningless work that I do, arrives to his desk via the same city-owned vehicles that I do, and approaches his personal relationships with the same kind of dorky earnestness that I do — ignoring the vast social potential of modern urban living in favor of more immediate loyalty & intimacy. Such is the life of a city boy with a desk job.

-Brandon Ledet

Smells Like Dean Spirit

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James Dean has been on my mind a lot lately, and not entirely by choice. New Orleans is lucky to now have two weekly repertory programs in Gap Tooth and Rene Brunet’s Classic Movies, where until recently we only had the latter. The two series both operate in their own hermetic headspaces, and their weekly film selections rarely speak to each other in any discernible way. So, it was a little jarring that the same week Gap Tooth screened David Cronenberg’s Crash, in which Elias Koteas restages James Dean’s vehicular death as an act of ritualistic foreplay, The Prytania happened to program Dean’s major bid at traditional movie stardom: the 1955 Steinbeck adaptation East of Eden. This was a coincidence, of course, as the two films are only truly linked in their shared highlight of James Dean as an Old Hollywood icon – a status solidified by Eden and later perverted by Crash. What struck me about that coincidence was a reminder during Harry Griffin’s introduction to East of Eden that Dean had only filmed three major film roles before his shocking death at age 24, two of which received posthumous Oscar nominations after his infamous car wreck. It was simple math, but I couldn’t help but dwell on the equation as the pre-film Looney Tunes short rolled . . . If we had already covered James Dean’s performance in the epic melodrama Giant a couple years back, and I was about to see his most prestigious performance in East of Eden, that means I’d only have one Dean role left to see to complete the trio. Wait a second, how had I gotten that far into his filmography without having seen his most iconic role in Rebel Without a Cause, the one that made him a star? Isn’t it a little weird that I’ve repeatedly watched James Spader get a boner at the thought of Dean’s death in Crash, or Tommy Wiseau whine “You’re tearing me apart!” at top volume in grotesque Dean caricature in The Room, but I’ve never bothered to witness Dean in all of his teen-rebel glory first-hand? I felt some deep shame about this realization all the way through East of Eden‘s blank-screen overture, making a mental note to finish my homework as soon as I got home.

Thinking back on it now, my lack of urgency in catching up with James Dean’s filmography might be that I felt as if I already knew everything I needed to know about him from still photographs. This assumption was, of course, ludicrous. In my mind, James Dean was a cool, laidback bad boy, forever leaning on a nearby tree with a cigarette hanging causally from his lips. That’s what he conveys as a photographic model, anyway: 1950s devil-may-care machismo. His actual movie roles tell an entirely different story. In both Rebel Without a Cause & East of Eden, Dean is a gnarled knot of dorky teenage emotions, more hormones than man. His brow is forever furrowed in some internal debate about what to do with his awkward body next, seemingly always on the verge of sex or violence but choosing to whine in agony instead. His infamous “You’re tearing me apart!” line reading where he contorts his face in Mad Magazine-style caricature arrives mere minutes into the film’s opening sequence, not its emotional climax. We meet Dean as a rich-boy teen reprobate spending the night in his local police station’s drunk tank until his mentally checked-out parents arrive to throw money at the problem, bailing him out. Sure, he looks cool in his iconic red bomber jacket, which director Nicholas Ray transforms into a pop-art fashion piece just as iconic as Dorothy’s ruby slippers or that little squiggle on Charlie Brown’s t-shirt. Dean’s road-to-ruin antics as a teen rebel in peril are just far more anguished & whiny than you’d expect from the movie’s still frames. Onscreen, he expresses way more of the hormone-addled anxiety of being an actual teenager than he does the idealized teen-rebel cool you’ll see him exude as a still image on dorm room posters. I have to assume that’s a major factor as to why he was so popular with the youth of the era. The basic concept of a “teenager” was a Boomer-generation invention in the wake of WWII, and James Dean was there at ground zero to embody the exact puberty-pained animalism that defines that state of being – just as much of a hormonal monster as The Teenage Werewolf.

There’s some exciting tension in watching Studio System directors like Nicholas Ray & Elia Kazan attempt to match Dean’s off-kilter method actor energy in their filmmaking style. For his part, Ray goes full pop art, blowing up the Roger Corman teen crime picture to blockbuster scale. Elia Kazan is a little more subdued in East of Eden, taking the historical literature origins of its source text just as sincerely & somberly as George Stevens does in Giant. That is, until you get to the scenes in which Dean fights with his father. Surprisingly, East of Eden is just as much of a “Parents just don’t understand!” teen screed as Rebel Without a Cause, except instead of Dean’s internal crisis being triggered by his own participation in a deadly game of chicken, he’s challenged by the discovery that his estranged mother is not, as he was originally told, dead; she’s just the madame of a popular brothel one town over. This puts the sheltered farm boy at direct odds with his overly pious father, who’s always treated him with an unspoken disgust as the product of his mother’s sins. The film is grandiose in scale, using its wide CinemaScope framing to capture the great rural expanse of turn-of-the-century America. Then, in scenes where Dean’s protagonist confronts his father in domestic squabbles, that same CinemaScopic frame feels wildly inappropriate. Kazan (in collaboration with cinematographer Ted McCord) tilts the camera at extreme Dutch angles during their indoor power struggles, matching Dean’s off-kilter emotional state with a literally off-kilter camera. It’s an outright perverse use of the CinemaScope format, especially during a third-act fight when Dean menacingly lunges at his father from a tree-rope swing and the camera see-saws in either direction with every sway. It’s so disorienting that it’s nauseating. Ray pulls a similar trick in Rebel Without a Cause, often shooting Dean from an extreme low angle that emphasizes the potential for violence in his character’s big teenage emotions and newly embiggened teenage body. The fact that Dean was visibly in his 20s playing these roles only makes the images more confusing & grotesque.

All of James Dean’s teenage whininess, awkwardness, and animalistic capacity for violence are front & center in these leading-man roles, and they do nothing to diminish his sex appeal. In East of Eden, he unwittingly woos his brother’s buttoned-up fiancée, who finds herself jealous of the sexual freedom the local “bad girls” get to enjoy while following him around like puppies. In Rebel Without a Cause, he goes out of his way to woo a local bad girl, and he happens to pick up a homosexual admirer along the way in Sal Mineo, who likewise makes puppy eyes at his chosen master. These wayward teenage girls (& boy) sense a kindred spirit in Dean’s open-hearted rebelliousness, admiring the way he expresses their internal emotional torment on his movie-star-handsome exterior. He wasn’t explosively popular because he looked cool smoking a cigarette; he was popular because he was wildly uncool – overheated, even. In retrospect, that makes the perversion of his iconography in Crash even funnier in retrospect, given that Cronenberg’s characters are all deliberately stripped of any discernible human emotion, making them the philosophical opposite of the idol whose death they worship. It’s the rare occasion where one of our weekly local classic movie screenings helped directly inform the other, instead of acting as cross-town counterprogramming. I thought more about James Dean that week than I previously had in my entire life, and I feel like I get him now. I can also now definitively confirm that, yes, East of Eden is his most accomplished performance, if not only because there’s so little competition.

-Brandon Ledet

Blue Heron (2026)

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Art really is all one big continuum. However lazy the practice may be, it’s always tempting to review movies by breaking them down into lists of other works they recall. For instance, I spent the entirety of David Lowery’s haunted-dress popstar fable Mother Mary making a mental list of other recent (and, frankly, superior) titles it visually & thematically resembles: Vox Lux, In Fabric, Suspiria (2018), etc. I could write an entire review of that film just by listing titles, suggesting that most genre filmmaking is just simple recombinations of preexisting material, à la collage art. Often, though, a movie can really surprise you with its combinations of preexisting pop art, bringing together disparate influences that no one else would ever think to combine. Sophy Romvari’s debut feature Blue Heron is very likely the only movie I’ll see in my lifetime that prompts me to think about Pearl Jam & Jeanne Dielman at the same time, for whatever that combination is worth. On the Jeanne Dielman end, Romvari tracks the daily, lonely domestic labor performed by a young mother, at one point sitting down to peel a pile of potatoes in direct homage to Chantal Akerman’s slow-cinema classic. The Pearl Jam connection is much more direct, and yet, possibly unintentional. The reason that overworked, underslept mother (Iringó Réti) is so close to her wit’s end is because she’s struggling to raise an unruly, maladjusted teen (Edik Beddoes) who she’s convinced is capable of committing an act of violence that threatens the family home, with no systemic help to prevent it. The fact that the story is set in the 1990s and the violent teen shares the name “Jeremy” with the eponymous school-shooting subject of Pearl Jam’s melodramatic 90s hit likely means nothing to Romvari, but it’s a connection I can’t help but make as a viewer. Some homages are intentional; others are uncontrollable happenstance.

As long as I’m playing the movie-connections game, Blue Heron‘s two most obvious points of comparison are other recent critical favorites in which first-time directors confront uneasy childhood truths from their own Millennial past: Annie Baker’s Janet Planet and Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun. When Romvari restages the potato-peeling scene from Jeanne Dielman, she adds a second character to the frame in a fictionalized version of her childhood self (Eylul Guven). In that way, the observation of her mother’s labor becomes the film’s subject instead of the labor itself. The same goes for that child’s observation of Jeremy’s teen-in-crisis behavior, later diagnosed by social workers as “Oppositional Defiance Disorder.” Romvari never fully divulges to the audience what childhood tragedy Jeremy is responsible for, even though this is her second film on the subject, after her self-documentary short “Still Processing.” All she can muster the strength to do is observe it from a distance, mediated through the camera gadgetry her emotionally-checked-out father (Ádám Tompa) documented his family with in the 1990s and again through her own autofictional documentation in the 2020s. She observes Jeremy twice here, both as his younger sister who only understands that he’s putting unbearable stress on her parents and as an adult who’s presumably been through years of post-trauma therapy, and yet still struggles to understand why he acted the way he did. For a slightly clearer idea of what real-world harm the fictionalized “Jeremy” caused in Romvari’s family, it helps to have seen “Still Processing” before watching Blue Heron, but both films are left as intentionally incomplete as the short’s title suggests. Like Wells & Baker, Romvari can only convey these mysterious adult-world crises through her own childlike observations as she remembers them, now even further distorted by the passage of time and the limitations of narrative filmmaking.

It’s not entirely fair to discuss Blue Heron through comparisons to preexisting works, at least not in its second half. After the familiar reexamination of her childhood confusion & trauma in the first half, Romvari then takes a much more direct approach with the project. She casts a second actor to play her current-day adult self (Amy Zimmer), who’s making her own movie about what went wrong with Jeremy and what, if anything, could’ve been done to prevent it. In the movie’s most excitingly original idea, Romvari literalizes her project by treating the past as a geographic place that can be traveled to and physically accessed, at least within cinema’s internal logic. Her adult avatar returns to her childhood home to directly interact with her family as they were in the 1990s (including her younger self), using the autofictional drama as a mundane form of time travel. All of the first half’s nostalgic immersion Windows ’95 user interface, Ron Popeil infomercials, and oversized cargo pants are ultimately just a method to distinguish the film’s two timelines, which impossibly crossover in the second half. While content to leave the audience unsure of exactly what tragedy Jeremy triggers in his family and how autobiographical that tragedy is to her real family’s story, Romvari appears to be clear-eyed in what she’s accomplishing here. She is confronting some half-remembered, semi-fictionalized version of her past through cinematic devices, so why not send her onscreen avatar directly to ground zero to assess the damage first-hand? I can’t say that I found that device to be as formally radical or as emotionally devastating as the film’s festival-circuit hype suggests, but I do at least appreciate its clarity in method & intent. I should’ve known going in that this wouldn’t hit especially hard with me, based on the similar public hype & personal response disparity of Janet Planet & Aftersun—two widely beloved films I also liked just fine—but I really do try to go into movies with no preconceived notions or comparisons clouding my view. I try, and I fail, because all of these things really are in conversation with each other, intentionally or not.

-Brandon Ledet

Erupcja (2026)

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The Year of Charli continues, uninterrupted. There’s seemingly a new movie featuring Charli XCX out in theaters every week this year, ranging from soundtrack work (Mother Mary, “Wuthering Heights”) to minor acting roles (Faces of Death, The Gallerist, I Want Your Sex) to a full-on feature length self-portrait (The Moment). During the recent Brat Summer hype cycle, the British pop singer proclaimed herself a cinephile, sharing her personal Letterboxd account for wide public scrutiny and flashing the names of buzzy auteurs (David Cronenberg, Ari Aster, Joachim Trier, etc.) at her Coachella audience in her trademark nightclub font. It wasn’t until this year’s Charli Movie deluge that the attention flowed the other direction, though. Cinephiles are now confronted with the pop star’s screen & soundtrack presence on a weekly basis, whether we’re actively seeking it or not. All of her various 2026 projects were planned & produced at different times, but they’ve collected at the dam of film distribution to release all at once in one mighty flood. So, if this Charli onslaught is going to continue (for as long as it takes for the new Gregg Araki & Cathy Yan movies to come out, anyway), it is comforting to know that there’s at least one title in that flood that’s both stylishly cool & dramatically compelling, suggesting that she has a longer movie career ahead of her once this wave of post-Brat cinephilia naturally crests.

Erupcja stars Charli XCX as a Londoner on holiday, dragging her milquetoast boyfriend (Will Madden) to Warsaw, Poland after suspecting that he was planning to propose to her in Paris, France. The reason she chose Warsaw in particular is because she has a semi-sordid history of partying there, thanks to a long term on-again-off-again toxic friendship with a local slacker (Lena Góra), who works the counter at an inherited flower shop. Ever since they were teens, the two directionless women have felt a thrillingly volatile connection with each other, seemingly confirmed by news reports of a major volcanic eruption coinciding with every time they meet. So, whenever Charli’s immature party girl pops back into Warsaw to check in on her favorite ambitionless florist, it’s because she’s feeling the urge to blow up her entire life again, leaving only ash & rubble behind. They drink, they dance, they ghost the baffled boyfriend until he gets the picture and abandons his proposal plans. Despite all of its allusions to grand-scale natural disasters, Erupcja is intimately tiny in scope, trailing behind a clique of unimpressive thirtysomethings as they party through a series of romantic meltdowns while playing tourist in Warsaw. The overall mood is ecstatic, though, evoking big feelings through small gestures. It’s also the first instance I’ve seen where Charli XCX shows genuine dramatic chops as an indie-scene movie starlet, rather than just using The Movies as a multimedia brand extender. Whenever she’s offscreen, the audience deeply misses her.

For all of my Charli XCX blabbering here, I was most interested in Erupcja due to the growing name recognition of writer-director Pete Ohs, whose career in low-budget indies has been a constant, pleasant hum in recent years. I was first impressed with Ohs’s editing work in the Gen-Z gun violence drama Beast Beast, and his name has continued to pop up in exciting works like the supernatural stalker thriller Jethica (as a writer-director) and the video game fantasy adventure OBEX (as co-writer, editor, and cinematographer). Ohs’s background in music video work shows in each of his projects’ ability to find high style in cheap scenery, in this case searching for glimpses of laidback urban cool on every Warsaw street corner. The narration echoes that Eastern European setting by mimicking the cadence of a vintage propaganda film, reporting on the thirtysomething hangabouts’ emotional states by dryly stating how they’re feeling and what they’re dreaming between their petty arguments. Ohs also directly illustrates his characters’ emotions in flashes of muted, chalky pastels that serve both as mood-ring insights and as easy scene transitions. Like his work in Beast Beast, there’s also some thoughtful acknowledgement of how much of these young people’s lives are anchored to their phone screens, often flashing back to memories of absentminded late-night scrolling as if it were just as dramatically significant as any offline, real-world event.

It speaks well to Charli’s interest in cinema as an artform that she’s been taking the time to collaborate with up-and-coming filmmakers like Pete Ohs & Daniel Goldhaber instead of leveraging her pop star notoriety to exclusively work with more established names like Gregg Araki & David Lowery. Despite the explosive energy suggested by its title, Erupcja will mostly register as a quiet rumbling on the cinematic Richter scale, while more aggressively advertised projects like “Wuthering Heights” & The Moment will guide most of the loudest Year of Charli discourse. There’s something quietly extraordinary about Erupcja, though, like watching a volcanic eruption through news reel footage on your smartphone. It’s such a small container for such a big personality, and that contrast makes her presence all the more compelling.

-Brandon Ledet

Mother Mary (2026)

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Mother Mary is a film that’s probably going to be a miss for a lot of people. It’s a bit messy, with a gossamer thin narrative that’s more gestural than structural, but it’s nonetheless very beautiful, a high concept two-hander that gives both of its leading ladies something to really sink their teeth into. The film takes place over the course of a single night when internationally famous pop diva Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway) goes to the fashion house of her former best friend and stylist, Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel). For the first act, the film seems like it’s going to be a fairly straightforward drama, a kind of stage play about a woman seeking out the one person in all the world who despises her more than any others but who also has the most unique perspective to understand her. Sam’s resentment for Mary is clearly deep, while Mary’s public image has been tarnished by a very public embarrassment that there’s some evidence might have been a suicide attempt, and the first thirty minutes set up the promise that these events will be teased out over the rest of the runtime. 

I was perfectly content to watch the film that I thought I was going to get, watching two powerhouses bare their souls and their grief to one another and to those of us in the audience. The film caught me off guard when it took a turn toward the spooky as the second act opens, as each woman reveals that in the wake of their schism, both had an experience with something inexplicable. The same night that Sam realized she had come to be on the outside of Mary’s life, looking in from a distance, she witnessed some kind of phantasm that seemed to have left her body via an open wound; later, when Mary hires an occultist to do some sleepover witchcraft on the night of her birthday, that same ephemeral thing makes contact with her, setting her literal and metaphorical fall in motion. Visually, the film was beautifully shot and sumptuous from the beginning, but as Mary and Sam relate these anecdotes, things get a little more surreal and we get to see the imagery thereof elevated and re-enacted in real time. Sam opens the doors of her “Mrs. Haversham” barn/studio, and the camera pushes in to follow her into the crowd at Mary’s show; Mary and Sam walk over to a lavish hotel room that has appeared like a giant set in Sam’s space, and then the fourth wall closes around the action. It’s wonderful stuff, very stylish in a way that feels theatrical but effortless. 

David Lowery, who wrote and directed the film, has proven to have a masterful hand at this kind of thing. The final act of A Ghost Story (as much as that film could be said to have “acts”) was similar; as the point of view ghost loses touch with all his earthly ties, time “skips” so that he moves from the house we’ve been haunting with him to a lonely office building that eventually rises on the same place. Brandon wasn’t a fan, but I was; it remains to be seen whether the implementation of this same transitional environmental storytelling technique will be more effective this time around for other viewers. At the very least, Mother Mary is a film about dwelling in a way that doesn’t try one’s patience the way A Ghost Story did (for others). Where I expect this film to lose most general audience members is in just how literal the metaphorical ghost becomes while the film itself leaves the metaphor itself rather ambiguous. No one gets up and gives a big speech about what trauma the amorphous ghost represents; no one names “grief” or “resentment” as monsters that can be overcome with forgiveness and reconciliation. The film’s choice to leave one with questions and different potential interpretations is going to raise the dander of people who can’t abide ambiguity in their art and need something concrete and easy to grasp. Some of the people for whom that element is a feature and not a flaw may find the way that the metaphor becomes explicit off-putting. 

I was on board for all of that, utterly caught up in the whole thing. The only thing that didn’t quite work for me was the music. Thrillers centering around major pop acts have become a bit of a trend lately (see: Smile 2, Trap, Lurker), and I often find the musical acts therein to be virtually indistinguishable from the radio pop hits that I hear at the club (or, more common at my old age, the grocery store). We get to hear a few of Mother Mary’s hits, and none of them really have any staying power; there’s a not-quite-fully realized bit of religiosity to her music, as her stage name evokes Catholicism (as does Sam’s surname), one of her songs is called “Holy Spirit,” and she has a stigmata-like wound at one point, but it never comes together in a meaningful way. The connection I found myself thinking of most while watching this wasn’t Madonna or Lady Gaga, but last year’s The Testament of Ann Lee, because Mother Mary’s body of work was as monotonous and repetitive as that film’s hymnal remixing. When we talked about Lurker on the podcast last year, there was some dismissal of the film’s bedroom lo-fi tracks as forgettable, but I’ve found myself returning to “Snakes in the Garden” quite a lot since last September, and I don’t think I’ll ever feel the need to revisit Mother Mary’s “Burial” or “Dark Cradle.” 

The songs were written by FKA Twigs (who also appears in the film) with some arrangements by celebrity producer Jack Antonoff. I’m ambivalent about FKA Twigs (if I’ve ever heard more than one of her songs to completion, I wasn’t aware of it) and generally positive about Antonoff’s work with his band Bleachers, and Hathaway has demonstrated a lovely singing voice in the past. Nevertheless, whatever their individual talents, what coalesced on screen was unremarkable. The scene in which Hathaway, in a modest space, performs the silent interpretive dance of her stage choreography for her newest song blows every one of the on-stage performances out of the water. What really makes this movie shine is Coel. She’s absolutely excellent here, delivering my favorite performance of the year so far. It’s nuanced and layered, and worth the price of admission alone. It won’t work for everyone, but will definitely resonate with some.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #263: The Double Life of Véronique (1991) & Marionettes

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Welcome to Episode #261 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a selection of films that feature marionette puppetry, starting with the French-Polish fantasy drama The Double Life of Véronique (1991).

00:00 Jazz Fest
06:55 Peter Pan’s Neverland Nightmare (2025)
13:13 Yeast (2008)
17:33 The Birdcage (1996)
22:12 Michael Clayton (2007)
24:42 Agon (2026)

30:15 The Double Life of Véronique (1991)
54:10 A Rat’s Tale (1998)
1:12:34 Strings (2004)
1:26:42 The Vourdalak (2023)

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

Ruthie the Duck Girl (1999)

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One of New Orleanians’ most treasured pastimes is to complain that the city ain’t what it used to be, waxing nostalgic about all the people & places that “ain’t dere no more” as time has marched on without them. I tend to roll my eyes at this hyper-local brand of cynicism, because it’s very obvious to me that the city’s greatest charm (and most glaring fault) is that it never really changes, so when people get romantic about “the New Orleans that used to be” I assume they’re mostly just personally nostalgic for being in their twenties. Every time I have an especially great day in the Quarter, at Jazz Fest, or watching a second line from my front porch, I find myself getting emotional about how the people & culture of New Orleans have remained the same for at least as long as I’ve been alive. The city is just as beautiful now as it’s always been. Sometimes, I can even get verklempt about that much-debated fact while watching locally produced documentaries, such as the gay Mardi Gras doc The Sons of Tennessee Williams, the year-in-the-life party doc Always for Pleasure and, most recently, the late-90s documentary profile Ruthie the Duck Girl, which the New Orleans Film Society recently screened at The Broad. Looking at the French Quarter through director Rick Dulaup’s camcorder lens, I was overwhelmed by the comforting feeling that it’s just the same now as I always remembered it, and seeing local legend Ruthie the Duck Lady on the screen felt like running into an old friend while day-drinking on Decatur Street — sublime.

I would have known & caught glimpses of Ruthie the Duck Lady exactly as she appears in this documentary, drinking & smoking away her 60s in the late 1990s & early 2000s. As this documentary’s title suggests, however, her history goes back much further back in New Orleans’s past, back to Ruthie’s girlhood. Ruthie started her lifelong performance-art project as a humble Duck Girl, purposefully attracting attention by wearing a garish Easter bonnet and shepherding ducks around the Quarter. She was an eccentric by nature, but she was also one by choice, making a modest living out of selling autographed postcards of her image. By the time I would’ve seen her, the ducks were long gone, and the bonnet had evolved into a much more elaborate fashionista ensemble, covered in promotional buttons and accessorized with a ratty fur coat, no matter how hot or humid. Ruthie no longer needed to sell postcards; she’d get by just fine on free Budweisers & Kools, generously provided by the fine folks of New Orleans who were just happy to see she’s still around. If you stepped into her orbit at that time, like I did, it might be unfathomable how she had developed her character over the decades, like jumping into the Dune series by reading God Emperor first. This documentary does its best to answer the basic questions you’d have about Ruthie’s life & art, which were one & the same, preserving it for posterity in the process. The city that made her story possible might’ve continued on unchanged, but she only held on for another decade. So, it’s a gift to see her frozen in time here, exactly the way the Ain’t Dere No More cynics wish everything could remain.

Aesthetically, Ruthie the Duck Girl is the kind of New Orleans culture documentation you’d expect to see on local PBS affiliate WYES. Even so, it’s the WYES equivalent of Grey Gardens, spending time getting to know a larger-than-life character while she was still alive to contribute to her own legend. Ruthie even occasionally waves around a miniature American flag like Little Edie, modeling her “costume for the day” with the full intent of making herself a fabulous spectacle. The biggest revelation of this profile was just how aware Ruthie was of her public perception, using it as both a modest source of income and a shield for some of her riskier behaviors (such as kicking tourists she found annoying in the shins with her roller skates). You’d expect a documentary profile of a local eccentric to go out of its way to humanize its subject, but Ruthie’s humanity was apparent to anyone who spent time talking to her instead of gawking at her. What’s much more compelling is puzzling through how much of her persona was a deliberately constructed character, to the point where she tests out new catchphrases like “That did it!” and “Can I get a beer for later?” on-camera, as if Delaup were shooting a sitcom pilot in front of a live studio audience. Revisiting Ruthie did feel like stumbling across an episode of some long-forgotten sitcom I haven’t seen since I was a child, a feeling amplified by the movie’s spotty distribution as an occasional cultural event outside the streaming market. Much like Ruthie herself, you can only see it by leaving your house and spending time around the city’s cultural hubs, occasionally catching a glimpse of the artist at work.

-Brandon Ledet