Lists & Articles

Britnee’s Top 20 Films of the 2010s

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1. Hereditary (2018) – I can’t rave about this movie enough. Not only is it my favorite film of the decade, it’s one of my favorite films of all time.

2. Call Me By Your Name (2017) – A film that will literally transport you to the summer of 1983 in Northern Italy. This is by far the best romantic film to come out over the past decade. I will forever be in love the the slow-motion dance scene of Armie Hammer dancing to “Love My Way” by The Psychedelic Furs. Elio + Oliver 4 Ever.

3. Dogtooth (2010) – This is first Greek film that I have ever seen as well as the first film I’ve seen by Yorgos Lanthimos. It’s a bizarre social experiment that is so damn dark. I hate that I love it so much, which is what I think Lanthimos was going for.

4. The Artist (2011) – A throwback to the silent, black and white era of filmmaking. This is proof that a film doesn’t need a whole lot of razzle-dazzle to achieve perfection.

5. The Queen of Versailles (2012) – Lauren Greenfield’s documentary about a disgustingly wealthy family’s journey to building the largest home in the USA during the 2008 economic crisis. This film shows the good, the bad, and the ugly of a broken family made up of garbage people.

6. Knife + Heart (2019) – Queer giallo set in the porn world of 1979 Paris. It’s all I ever wanted in a movie.

7. Mandy (2018) – How can one movie be so metal? It’s a jaw-dropping experience that left me extremely satisfied. This is proof that Nicolas Cage can seriously act.

8. Midsommar (2019) – Daytime cult horror that takes place in the beautiful open fields of Sweden. What’s not to love? Ari Aster is killing the movie game. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.

9. Raw (2017) – Julia Ducournau’s debut feature film is a coming-of-age cannibal tale that I found to be strangely relatable. It has quite a few stomach-churning scenes that I still think about from time to time.

10. The Witch (2016) – The pinnacle of A24 horror. This is the film that gave us all the gift of Black Phillip, and I am forever grateful.

11. The Hundred-Foot Journey (2014) – When I don’t know what sort of movie I’m in the mood for, I pop in my DVD copy of The Hundred-Foot Journey and it always does the trick. This movie is always such a joy to watch and has a special place in my heart.

12. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011) – This film marked the end of the Harry Potter franchise, which is something that was a major part of my life since I was 9 years old. The standards for this movie were so high, and it exceeded every one of them.

13. The Shape of Water (2017) – I love that a romantic tale between a mute woman and a sexy fish man did so well at the 2018 Academy Awards.

14. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) – I love love love The Hobbit film trilogy. This is the one that started it all, and I still get goosebumps when I watch it.

15. Stranger by the Lake (2014) – I’ve only recently seen this within the past few months, but it immediately won me over. The majority of the film takes place on the side of a lake reserved for outdoor cruising, so it’s obviously a good time. What I loved the most is that it has some of the creepiest voyeuristic camera shots that I’ve ever seen in any film.

16. The Neon Demon (2016) – This movie is so stylish. I just want to wear it! It has quite a few disturbing scenes that I found to be unexpected. It’s fabulously fun trash.

17. Krisha (2015) – A heartbreaking film that takes place in the hell that is Thanksgiving with family. The director/writer, Trey Edward Shults, uses his real-life family and friends to play the characters in this film, so it feels extremely personal.

18. Souvenir (2016) – An older woman with a washed up singing career falls for a young, handsome boxer, and it all happens at a pâté factory! The story feels quite simple and nothing too insane happens, and I think that’s why I love it so much.

19. Black Swan (2010) – There’s nothing quite like a spooky ballerina movie. I still get full body chills when I watch Black Swan.

20. In Fabric (2019) – I love movies about killer inanimate objects. In Fabric gave me everything I could even want and more from a movie about a killer dress.

-Britnee Lombas

JLo: All-American Hustler

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It’s almost undeniable that the most All-American event on the cultural calendar is the Super Bowl: a championship football game adored for its TV ads, its excessive snack food rituals, and its pop music spectacle intermission. There’s a reason why so much emphasis is placed on who will sing the National Anthem that kicks off the game every year (and how well they did or didn’t perform); the event is just as much a celebration of American culture as it is a championship football game. I’ve gradually stopped watching football over the years as pro wrestling, the Oscars, and RuPaul’s Drag Race have replaced it as my competitive sports events of choice, but even I still tune in for the Super Bowl Halftime Show most years due to my overriding interest in pop culture at large. This year was a great one! Whoever booked the game’s intermission entertainment made great use of its Miami venue by featuring Latinx entertainers like Shakira & Bad Bunny, representing an often-overlooked facet of the American cultural fabric that’s been especially politically charged under the xenophobic reign of the Trump Presidency. The centerpiece of this celebratory Latinx protest display was a pop music medley from singer-dancer-movie-star Jennifer Lopez, whose section of the show took the biggest, most direct political jabs of the event – while also conjuring Lopez’s most recent onscreen persona as a modern marvel of Cinema in particular.

The reason I’m talking about football & pop music on a movie blog is that JLo’s Halftime Show performance was greatly influenced by her recent movie-stealing role in the film Hustlers. Adapted from a New York Magazine article chronicling a real-life series of crimes, the film is a post-2008 Financial Crisis period piece about a ring of strip club employees who drugged & fleeced their wealthy Wall Street clientele for tens of thousands of dollars. Told in a flashback style directly borrowed from GoodFellas, the film is ostensibly aligned with the POV of its top-billed narrator character, played by Constance Wu. In practice, Wu is the lead performer in name only. As soon as Jennifer Lopez saunters onto the screen to perform a strip routine to Fiona Apple’s “Criminal,” the movie is entirely her show. Both the audience & Wu herself are fixated on the spectacle of the almighty JLo as she shows us the ropes – first on the gymnastic basics of working a stripper pole, then on the basics of fraudulently running up transactions on an unconscious client’s credit card. Some of Wu’s fixation on JLo’s Stripper Queen persona is explained to be a result of her character’s Mommy Issues (a refreshing change of course from cinema’s usual Daddy Issues fixation among macho narrators), but that almost feels like overkill. It’s self-evident; no explanation necessary. Even much-advertised cameo roles from major pop music personalities like Lizzo & Cardi B do little to distract from JLo’s nuclear charisma. She just casually walks away with the entire movie tucked into her overpriced designer handbag, never breaking a sweat.

Early in Hustlers, Constance Wu’s narrator pontificates that “This whole country is a strip club,” drawing a parallel between her industry’s sexual hustling to the “stolen money” of Wall Street’s own daily hustles. Nothing could better illustrate America’s function as the world’s largest strip club than JLo performing from atop a stripper pole at the Super Bowl Halftime Show. Bringing her newfound exotic dancer skills from the Hustlers set to that All-American pop music venue was a brilliant maneuver, as she then had an entire nation gawking at her in awe the way Wu & Hustlers‘s (much smaller) audience had already been on the hook. And what did she do with this amplified, captivated audience? She redirected our eyeballs to Latinx children posing in cages on the football field, peeling back the pop culture escapism of Super Bowl spectacle to refresh our horror with ICE’s abuses in the ongoing refugee border crisis. JLo even emerged from one of her many onstage costume changes during her short set in a fur coat/body suit combo outfit that directly recalled her Hustlers costuming, except redesigned to resemble the American flag. In the movie, she welcomes Constance Wu into the warmth of her coat, purring “Climb into my fur.” On the stage, she opens her All-American fur in the same fashion, only to reveal that it’s a Puerto Rican flag on its reverse side – further emphasizing the Latinx prominence in America’s DNA that’s often dismissed by the country’s falsely “patriotic” right-wing goblins. This whole country is a strip club, and it was wonderful to see it get so flagrantly hustled by a performer who’s been in her prime for decades, with no signs of slowing down.

The only way Jo’s Halftime Show performance could have been more blatantly political is if she had ripped a picture of Donald Trump in half, à la Sinead O’Connor on SNL (although the political effectiveness of either performance is up for debate). The only way it could have been more directly tied to her movie-stealing, Oscars-snubbed persona in Hustlers is if she had looked directly into the camera to ask the entire country, “Doesn’t money make you horny?” You can even see her Hustlers persona echoed in how easily she steals the show from Shakira, who’s just as capable of a singer & dancer as Constance Wu is an actor. Shakira is both a sex bomb & a total goofball, positively lighting up that Super Bowl stage with her spectacular hip gyrations, her to-the-camera tongue-wagging, and her comically over-the-top song selections (like choosing to open with the werewolf anthem “She-Wolf”). As the first & longest sustained performer on that stage, Shakira should technically be positioned as the central star of the Halftime Show, with Lopez slotted as a special guest star. Instead, as with in Hustlers, JLo’s blinding charisma easily overpowers Shakira’s own formidable presence – emerging as the de facto star of the show. If the Super Bowl is going to stand as an annual distillation of American culture, it’s only appropriate that the event acknowledge the country’s Latinx contingent through artists like Shakira & JLo as well as the hedonistic exploitation & excess detailed in Hustlers – both of which are American as fuck. It’s your patriotic duty to give it a watch even if you care way more about movies & pop music than you care about football:

-Brandon Ledet

Laura Dern’s Oscar Story

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Back when we covered Alexander Payne’s abortion-themed political satire Citizen Ruth as a Movie of the Month, it occurred to me that it’s dispiritingly rare to see the great Laura Dern in a genuine leading role. Between Citizen Ruth, Rambling Rose, and Inland Empire, I could only find three feature films in which Dern was top-billed as the lead actor, despite decades of fine work on the big screen. Unfortunately, that means the full power of her consistently compelling screen presence largely goes unnoticed & unrewarded, relegated only to her value as a supporting player. Last year, Dern was at least utilized as a potent supporting actor in two major Oscar contenders: Marriage Story & Little Women – which were, interestingly enough, directed by both partners in a married couple (Noah Baumbach & Greta Gerwig, respectfully). Dern’s efforts have been rewarded with a nomination for Best Supporting Actress for Marriage Story in particular, her first nomination since she was recognized as a potential Best Supporting Actress for Wild in 2015 (a statue she lost to Patricia Arquette for Boyhood). What I find interesting about this year’s Dern nomination is how it’s been framed in some online criticism circles as a career-merit award or somehow just Industry recognition for Dern’s recent work on popular television programs like Big Little Lies & Twin Peaks: The Return. The nomination is being discussed as if Dern’s performance in Marriage Story isn’t especially awards-worthy, that she’s being recognized for her contributions to cinema at large. That’s bullshit.

Laura Dern is genuinely fantastic in Marriage Story, totally reshaping the texture of the entire film with just a few scenes of onscreen dialogue. In the film, she plays a high-priced divorce lawyer who escalates the stakes & tone of the central couple’s painful separation. As the films’ two leads, Adam Driver & Scarlet Johansson are allowed to really pick apart the emotional textures of that separation at length (for which they’ve both been nominated as Best Leads). It’s Dern’s thankless task to establish the much harsher, colder tone of the legal arena where that separation will reach its fever pitch. It’s a world that relies on calm doublespeak & practiced artifice, which clashes spectacularly against the raw, confessional emotions of the star combatants. Other lawyer characters played by Ray Liotta & Alan Alda in the film help sketch out the extreme boundaries of that legal hell world, but it’s Dern’s job to welcome Driver & Johansson’s leads through the hell’s front gates, opening up their intimate detangling to a Kafkaesque legal labyrinth that stretches the entire length of the country. Marriage Story is just as much about the cruelty & confusion inherent to navigating the legal system in the process of divorce as it is an intimate drama about a romantic meltdown. In that way, Dern’s supporting role as the first & most prominent lawyer featured onscreen greatly affects our perception of the battlefield where the central conflict unfolds.

Dern’s self-confident power lawyer enters the film by apologizing for her “schleppy” appearance, despite being dressed to the nines in designer jeans & drastic heels. We’re immediately aware that her words & her body language are expressing an entirely different sentiment than what she’s actually communicating. When she offers Johansson, a potential client, to take home cookies from her office, it’s a sly advertisement for her services, as Johansson will continue to keep her in mind long after she leaves the office as she snacks on those treats. When Dern quotes a Tom Petty song in casual conversation, it’s only so she can advertise that she negotiated his ex-wife’s divorce from the singer for a large sum. Of course, these textual subtleties are largely a result of Baumbach’s sharply written screenplay, but Dern is visibly having fun with the material onscreen, selling the full impact of the role in a way few other performers could. Her performative version of active “listening” while Johansson is recounting the details of her failing marriage is as tense as watching a snake coil in grass, waiting to strike at a potential meal. One of the film’s most outrageous moments is when Dern removes her blazer in court as if she’s overheated, entirely just to distract from the opposing counsel’s arguments by showing some skin. She warns her client that “This system rewards bad behavior,” and over time proves to exhibit most of that bad behavior herself, proudly. Laura Dern makes a spectacle out of this seemingly minor role, drawing subtle contrast between the meaning of her body language and the meaning of her spoken dialogue that only becomes more exponentially significant the longer you dwell on its details.

It might be easy to reduce Laura Dern’s Oscars attention for Marriage Story to a glib assumption that it’s a lifetime achievement award rather than recognition for this performance in particular. Between her limited screen time and her highlight-reel monologue where she rants about how “God is absent father” while the Virgin Mary is unfairly upheld as a maternal ideal, there’s plenty of fuel to feed that kind of cynicism. I just don’t think it’s fair to downplay the impact Dern’s presence has on the film at large. She is a gussied-up power lawyer who shapes audience perception on both the communal vanity of Los Angeles and the cutthroat mind games of courtroom etiquette: two major factors in how the marital drama in the forefront develops. The only truth to the argument that she would have gotten this same nomination for any role (say, her interpretation of a silently angry Marmee in Little Women) based on her career’s work at large is that Laura Dern would have killed any role Hollywood tossed her way. She always delivers. The true shame about her nomination this year is that wasn’t for a Best Leading Performance, since Hollywood so rarely affords her top-bill opportunities that she never really has a chance to earn that accolade. If we’re relegating Laura Dern’s powerful screen presence to Supporting Player status only, she might as well earn her first Oscar for her movie-stealing role in Marriage Story. Hopefully she’ll win, and more prominent lead roles will follow.

-Brandon Ledet

The Swampflix Guide to the Oscars, 2020

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There are 38 feature films nominated for the 2020 Academy Awards ceremony. We here at Swampflix are conspicuously more attracted to the lowbrow & genre-minded than we are to stuffy Awards Season releases, so as usual we have reviewed fewer than half of the films nominated (so far!). We’re still happy to see so many movies we enjoyed listed among the nominees, though, including four titles from our own Top 10 Films of 2019 list. The Academy rarely gets these things right when actually choosing the winners, but as a list this isn’t too shabby in terms of representing what 2019 cinema had to offer.

Listed below are the 16 Oscar-Nominated films from 2019 that we covered for the site, ranked from best to . . . least-best, based on our star ratings. Each entry is accompanied by a blurb, a link to our corresponding review, and a mention of the awards the films were nominated for.

1. Parasite, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Editing, Best International Feature Film, and Best Production Design

“Money is an iron. For the Parks, it is the metaphorical iron that makes life smooth and effortless, and the iron strength of the walls that separate them from the riffraff below. For the Kims, it is the iron of prison bars that keep them in a metaphorical prison of society and, perhaps, a literal one; it is the weight that drags them down, a millstone to prevent them from ever escaping the trap of stratified social classes.”  – Boomer

2. Avengers: Endgame, nominated for Best Visual Effects

“This is the perfect capstone for this franchise. If there were never another MCU film, it would be totally fine, because as a finale, this is pitch perfect. Every important and semi-important character gets a moment to shine, as the Snap is undone (come on, you knew it would be). There’s even a moment where every living lady hero from the entire MCU is onscreen at once, and it is delightful, although I’m sure the internet is already full of comments about how it was ‘forced’ or ‘cheesy,’ but I don’t feed trolls and I try not to cross the bridges that they live under, so I wouldn’t know.” – Boomer

3. Knives Out, nominated for Best Original Screenplay

“I’ve long been a fan of comedy pastiches and homages of genres that function perfectly as examples of those genres despite humorous overtones; my go-to example is Hot Fuzz, which I always tout as having a more sophisticated murder mystery plot than most films than most straightforward criminal investigation media (our lead comes to a logical conclusion that fits all of the clues, but still turns out to be wrong). Knives Out is another rare gem of this type, a whodunnit comedy in the mold of Clue that has a sophisticated and winding plot.” – Boomer

4. Little Women, nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress (Saiorse Ronan), Best Supporting Actress (Florence Pugh), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Costume Design, and Best Original Score

“This is a beautiful film, a timeless piece of literature made fresh once more with a cast overbrimming with talent and filmed with an eye for chromatic storytelling and such beautiful Northeast scenery that when I tell you I was there, I was there. This is also such a talented cast that they breathe a new life into characters that, in the original text and in previous film incarnations, were at times sullen, unlikable, or intolerable.” – Boomer

5. The Lighthouse, nominated for Best Cinematography

“Packed to the walls with more sex, violence, and broad toilet humor than you’d typically expect from high-brow Cinema. If you can push past the initial barriers of Eggers’s patient pacing & period-specific dialogue, the movie is a riot.” – Brandon

6. I Lost My Body, nominated for Best Animated Feature Film

“This is two films for the price of one. And it’s a very low price at that, considering its 80min runtime. As with all two-for-one bargains, however, one of the two complimentary films on this simultaneous double bill is far more satisfying & impressive than the other. To fully appreciate I Lost My Body, then, you have to appreciate its two dueling narratives as a package deal. The stronger movie in this combo pack carries the lesser, even if just by the virtue of their pairing.” – Brandon

7. Marriage Story, nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor (Adam Driver), Best Actress (Scarlett Johannson), Best Supporting Actress (Laura Dern), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Original Score

“A superb breakup story about how you can love somebody so much, and create a life with them that you love, and it still has to dissolve. It specifically illustrates how hard it can be for parents when their child arbitrarily prefers one over the other. The way those formative childhood phases affect permanent legal repercussions is devastating, as is the realization that you might not actually be best parent for your own child.” – The Podcast Crew

8. Joker, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Joaquin Phoenix), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Editing, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Original Score, Best Sound Editing, and Best Sound Mixing

“None of the endless months of vitriolic complaints against its honor resonated with me in the theater, where I mostly just saw a creepy character study anchored by an effectively chilling performance. If anything, the fact that a movie this unassuming and, frankly, this trashy was somehow causing chaos in the Oscars discourse only made it more perversely amusing.” – Brandon

9. Missing Link, nominated for Best Animated Feature Film

“Very cute in its slapstick humor, and often stunning in its visual artistry. It’s about on par with The Boxtrolls all told, which is to say it’s mediocre by Laika standards but still on a level far above most modern children’s cinema.” – Brandon

10. 1917, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Original Score, Best Production Design, Best Sound Editing and Sound Mixing, and Best Visual Effects

“The video game mission plot might not make for especially complex drama between its solider protagonists, but the way those babyfaced boys contrast against the unearthly gore, rot, and decay of the war-torn earth beneath them is viscerally upsetting. There are many ways in which the long-take gimmick is a distracting technical exercise, but it does force you to stew in that discomfort for long, uninterrupted stretches. It’s surprisingly brutal in that way.” – Brandon

11. Once Upon a Time . . . In Hollywood, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Leonard Dicaprio), Best Supporting Actor (Brad Pitt), Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Production Design, Best Sound Editing, and Best Sound Mixing

“I appreciate this movie most as a passionate argument for a sentiment I could not agree with less. I have no love for the traditional machismo & endless parade of cheap-o Westerns that clogged up Los Angeles in these twilight hours of the Studio Era. Still, it was entertaining to watch an idiosyncratic filmmaker with niche interests wax nostalgic about the slimy, uncool bullshit only he cares about.” – Brandon

12. The Irishman, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Al Pacino and Joe Pesci), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Editing, Best Production Design, and Best Visual Effects

“Finds plenty more to say about the corruption & violence of organized crime that Scorsese has not addressed in previous efforts. Unfortunately, it allows that new material to be drowned out by an overwhelming flood of the same-old-same-old.” – Brandon

13. Jojo Rabbit, nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress (Scarlett Johannson), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Costume Design, Best Editing, and Best Production Design

“Works best as a maternal parallel to the paternal drama of Boy. The difference is that I left Boy marveling at how he pulled off such a delicate tonal balance with such confident poise, whereas I left Jojo Rabbit wondering if I had just seen him lose his balance entirely and tumble to the floor for the first time.” – Brandon

14. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, nominated for Best Original Score, Best Sound Editing, Best Visual Effects

“Look, Rise of Skywalker is good. It’s not great like The Force Awakens or passable like The Last Jedi, but it’s also not that spectacular either. It doesn’t take the chances that TLJ took, and I was glad that the return of JJ Abrams meant that we went back to mostly practical FX for the aliens (those stupid chihuahua horses from TLJ will haunt me to my goddamned grave) even if the resultant film felt like he was trying to railroad the ending back to his original concepts after not liking how another director played with his toys.” – Boomer

15. Ad Astra, nominated for Best Sound Mixing

“Has all the building blocks needed to achieve something great; they’re just arranged in a confoundingly dull configuration. Worse, there’s literally not one thing about its combination of vintage sci-fi pulp & faux-philosophical melodrama that Interstellar didn’t already achieve to greater success, so there’s constantly a better viewing option hanging over its head.” – Brandon

16. Rocketman, nominated for Best Original Song

“The narration continually reassures the audience that Elton John’s life was ravaged by sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll, but everything we see onscreen is musical theatre kids playing dress-up in squeaky clean sound stage environments.” – Brandon

-Brandon Ledet & Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Brandon’s Top 25 Films of the 2010s

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1. The Wild Boys (2018) – Adult femme actors play unruly young boys who are punished for their hedonistic crimes in a magical-realist fashion that violates their gender & sexuality. It looks like Guy Maddin directing a wet dream, and it has the nightmare logic of erotica written on an early 20th Century mushroom trip. Both beautifully & brutally old-fashioned in its newfangled deconstruction of gender.

2. 20th Century Women (2016) – An ensemble drama anchored by small, intimate performances that somehow covers topics as wide-ranging as punk culture solidarity, what it means to be a “good” man in modern times, the shifts in status of the American woman in the decades since the Great Depression, the 1980s as a tipping point for consumer culture, the history of life on the planet Earth, and our insignificance as a species in the face of the immensity of the Universe.

3. The Duke of Burgundy (2015) – The least commercial movie about a lesbian couple in a BDSM relationship possible. Although prone to cheeky pranksterism & confounding repetition, it excels both as an intentionally obfuscated art film and as a tender drama about negotiating the balance between romantic & sexual needs in a healthy relationship.

4. The Lure (2017) – A mermaid-themed horror musical that’s equal parts MTV & Hans Christian Andersen in its modernized fairy tale folklore. Far from the Disnified retelling of The Little Mermaid that arrived in the late 1980s, this blood-soaked disco fantasy is much more convincing in its attempts to draw a dividing line between mermaid animality & the (mostly) more civilized nature of humanity while still recounting an abstract version of the same story.

5. The Neon Demon (2016) – This neon-lit fairy tale of a young fashion model being swallowed up by The Industry is exquisite trash, the coveted ground where high art meets id-driven filth. It skips around an amoral minefield of female exploitation, competition, narcissism, and mystic power, but Nicolas Winding Refn makes the exercise so beautiful and so callously funny that those thematic discomforts amount to a joyful playground for intoxicatingly ill-advised ideas.

6. We Are the Flesh (2017) – A Buñuelian nightmare in which doomed siblings seek shelter from a post-Apocalyptic cityscape in a forbidden man-made cave of their own design. Disorients the eye by making grotesque displays of bloodshed & taboo sexuality both aesthetically pleasing and difficult to thematically pin down. The subtle psychedelia of its colored lights, art instillation sets, and unexplained provocative imagery detach the film from a knowable, relatable world to carve out its own setting without the context of place or time.

7. We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) – Tilda Swinton & Ezra Miller square off as a combative mother-son duo in a cerebral chiller about the scariest, least noble crises of parenting. Now that I’ve seen each of Lynne Ramsay’s features at least twice, I believe that a convincing argument could be made that any one of them are her career-best, but this remains the clear stand-out for me. One of the great works about the horrors of motherhood.

8. Upstream Color (2013) – Shane Carruth’s mind-control whatsit is the most impressively edited film of the decade, considering how it communicates an exponentially complex sci-fi narrative through a jumble of disjointed imagery and yet its basic outline is crystal clear for every minute you afford it your full attention. Its closed loop of human connection & subhuman exploitation is a deeply weird trip for as long as you allow yourself to remain under its spell.

9. Midsommar (2019) – A humorously traumatic nightmare comedy about a Swedish cult’s destruction of a toxic romance that’s far outstayed its welcome. Its morbid humor, detailed costume & production design, and dread-inducing continuation of Wicker Man-style folk horror improved a lot of things I liked but didn’t love about Hereditary, quickly converting me into an Ari Aster devotee.

10. Double Lover (2018) – This erotic thriller’s doppelganger premise relies on a familiar template, but as it spirals out into total madness there’s no bounds to its prurient mania, which is communicated through an increasingly intense list of sexual indulgences: incest, body horror, gynecological close-ups, bisexual orgies, negging, pegging, “redwings,” erotic choking, and nightmarish lapses in logic that, frankly, make no goddamn sense outside their subliminal expressions of psychosexual anxiety.

11. Mandy (2018) – Less of a revenge thriller than it is a Hellish nightmare; a dream logic horror-show that drifts further away from the rules & sensory boundaries of reality the deeper it sinks into its characters’ trauma & grief. Nic Cage may slay biker demons & religious acid freaks with a self-forged axe in a neon-lit, alternate dimension 1980s, but this is not headbanging party metal. It’s more stoned-and-alone, crying over past trauma to doom riffs metal.

12. The Witch (2016) – A haunting, beautifully shot, unfathomably well-researched witchcraft horror with an authenticity that’s unmatched in its genre going at least as far back as 1922’s Häxan. It immerses its audience in 17th Century paranoia, making you feel as if fairy tales like “Hansel & Gretel” and folklore about wanton women dancing with the Devil naked in the moonlight are warnings of genuine threats, just waiting in the woods to pick your family apart and devour the pieces.

13. Black Swan (2010) – Darren Aronofsky amplifies the supernatural horror undertones of the classic ballet industry melodrama The Red Shoes to a giallo-esque fever pitch. A terrifying (even if familiar) tale of a woman who’s controlled & infantilized in every aspect of her life to the point of a total psychological break, confusing what’s “real” and what’s fantasy onscreen in the most unsettling way.

14. Your Name. (2017) – A post-Miyazaki anime that resurrects the 1980s body swap comedy template for a new, transcendent purpose. From its tale of star-crossed, long distance romantics to its mildly crude sexual humor, bottom of the heart earnestness, supernatural mindfuckery, and pop punk soundtrack, this was the distilled ideal of a teen fantasy film in the 2010s.

15. Dirty Computer (2018) – A feature-length anthology of music videos with a dystopian sci-fi wraparound, this “emotion picture” delivers on the genre film undertones promised in Janelle Monáe’s early pop music career while also advancing the visual album as a medium to a new modern high. It’s defiantly blunt in its tale of a queer black woman navigating an increasingly hostile world that targets Others in her position, to the point where a tyrannical government facility is literally draining the gay out of her in tubes of rainbow ooze before she rises against them in open bisexual rebellion.

16. Knife+Heart (2019) – A cheeky giallo throwback set against a gay porno shoot in late 1970s Paris. Picture Dario Argento’s Cruising. And it only improves on repeat viewings, as the disjointed imagery from the protagonist’s psychic visions gradually start to mean something once you know how they’re connected, and not being distracted by piecing together the mystery of its slasher plot allows you to soak in its intoxicating sensory pleasures.

17. Us (2019) – A surreal reimagining of C.H.U.D. that reflects & refracts ugly, discomforting truths about modern American class divides. Both of Jordan Peele’s feature films are self-evidently great, but I slightly prefer the nightmare logic looseness of this one to the meticulously calibrated machinery of Get Out – if not only because it leans more heavily into The Uncanny. It’s like getting twenty extra minutes to poke around in The Sunken Place.

18. Stranger By the Lake (2014) – An explicit tale of a heavenly public beach’s gay cruising culture being disrupted by the world’s most gorgeous serial killer. Equally a despairing drama & an erotic thriller, conveying a melancholic dynamic between physical desire & intimate connection. Haunting in its exploration of how we’re subservient to our own lusts & erotic obsessions.

19. The Florida Project (2017) – Captures a rebellious punk spirit that laughs in the face of all authority & life obstacles among the children who run wild in the extended-stay slum motels just outside the Disney World amusement parks. Doesn’t dwell on or exploit the less-than-ideal conditions its pint-sized punks grow up in, even when depicting their most dire consequences; it instead celebrates the kids’ anarchic energy and refusal to buckle under the false authority of adults.

20. Boy (2012) – Taika Waititi’s best work to date is a deeply personal coming-of-age film. Perfectly captures the fantasy-prone imagination of young children’s minds in a way that feels wholly authentic & endearing. Also pulls off the neat trick of starting as a hilarious knee-slapper of a childhood-centered comedy, but then gradually laying on a series of escalating emotional wallops that leave you wrecked.

21. Wetlands (2014) – Most likely the cutest movie about an anal fissure you’ll ever see, this plays as if Marquis de Sade had written a formulaic 90s romcom. If there’s a particular bodily fluid, sexual act, or unsanitary pizza topping that you absolutely cannot handle this may not be the movie for you. However, like its 18-year-old protagonist Helen (expertly played by Carla Juri), the film’s hardened shock-value exterior is only a front for a big old softie lurking just under the surface.

22. Unfriended (2015) – This laptop-framed live chat horror flick is so ludicrously invested in its gimmickry that it comes off as a joke, but its commitment to the bit leads to genuinely chilling moments that remind the audience a little too much of our own digital experiences online. As a dumb horror flick filmed entirely from the first-person POV of a gossipy teen operating a laptop, it’s both more fun and way creepier than it has any right to be.

23. Girl Walk//All Day (2011) – Stealing its soundtrack & candid reactions from outside sources and operating around permitless film shoots, this Girl Talk fan video & modern dance showcase has an inherent sense of danger at its center, forfeiting its right to officially exist. Yet, its star dancer Anne Marsen broadcasts a childlike exuberance that overpowers its earthquake-shaky legal ground and should earn it the right to be officially exhibited out in the open—uncleared music samples or no—instead of suffering its current state of being periodically removed from sites like Vimeo & YouTube.

24. The Future (2011) – With the benefit of retrospect, Miranda July’s time-obsessed breakup drama feels like the official, miserable on-screen death of Twee Whimsy – which I mean as a compliment. It’s that hard post-youth stare in the mirror when you realize you’re not special and life is largely pointless & devoid of magic, a painful but necessary rite of passage.

25. Local Legends (2013) – Backyard filmmaker Matt Farley’s crowning achievement is essentially an infomercial for his own back catalog – tripling as a narrative feature, a documentary, and an essay film on the joys & embarrassments of amateur art production in the 2010s. Stunning in its bullshit-free self-awareness as a small-time regional artist’s self-portrait, something I strongly identify with as an amateur film blogger & podcaster in our own insular, localized community.

-Brandon Ledet

Swampflix’s Top 10 Films of 2019

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1. Midsommar – A cathartic breakup drama disguised as a gruesome daytime horror. This traumatic nightmare-comedy about a toxic romance that’s far outstayed its welcome is distinguished by its morbid sense of humor, its detailed costume & production design, its preference for atmospheric dread over traditional jump scares, and its continuation of occultist, Wicker Man-style folk horror into a new generation of genre nerdom.

2. Parasite – Bong Joon-ho’s masterpiece is a twisty, crowd-pleasing thriller about class resentment, with a particular focus on how Capitalism forces its lowliest casualties to fight over the crumbs that fall from on high. It’s a genuine phenomenon that such a savage commentary on class politics has become so universally popular, earning sold-out screenings & ecstatic critical praise for months on end as its distribution exponentially spreads. When was the last time such a wide audience embraced a movie that features *gasp* subtitles, much less such a tonally explosive expression of economic anger?

3. Knife+Heart – This is fantastic smut, especially if you happen to enjoy classic slashers & gialli. Picture Dario Argento’s Cruising. Set against a gay porno shoot in 1970s Paris, it really turns the usual male gaze & female victim empathy of those genres on their head in a fascinating way. And it only improves on repeat viewings as its psychedelic flashback imagery and its Goblin-inspired synth soundtrack from M83 sink further into your subconscious.

4. In Fabric – A tongue-in-cheek anthology horror about a sentient killer dress. Fully indulging in the Theatre of the Absurd, it’s a fun watch, but it also makes fashion photography, corporate employment, and romantic loneliness legitimately menacing. Especially recommended for anyone who’d be enticed by an arthouse remake of Death Bed: The Bed That Eats, as it could easily be read as both over-the-top camp and a deadly serious creep-out.

5. Knives Out – A modernized Agatha Christie-style whodunnit comedy in the mold of Clue that manages to deliver both a sophisticated, winding plot and pointed class politics. Like Get Out before it, it mocks a specifically Left version of political ignorance vis-à-vis latent and uninspected racism among the privileged class. Stumbling upon something this fun and this fiercely political feels like finding a rare gem in the cinematic wilderness.

6. The Lighthouse – Willem Dafoe & Robert Pattinson costar as a lighthouse-keeper odd couple who gradually grow insane with hate & lust for each other. A black & white period drama crammed into a squared-off aspect ratio, this functions as an unholy, horned-up mashup of Guy Maddin & HP Lovecraft as well as a seafaring, swashbuckling mutation of Persona. It pushes the basic tenets of traditional masculinity and macho bonding rituals into the realm of a hallucinatory fever dream.

7. Us – A surreal reimagining of C.H.U.D. that reflects & refracts ugly, discomforting truths about modern American class divides – mostly in the way that escaping the darkness of poverty is often impossible, and that those who manage to somehow embody the mythological idea of social mobility must do so at the expense of others. It also commands a nightmare-logic looseness throughout that was only hinted at in Peele’s debut, leaning heavily into the horror of The Uncanny. It’s like getting an extra hour to poke around in The Sunken Place.

8. The Beach Bum – An abrasive stoner-bummer in which Matthew McConaughey plays a Florida-famous poet named Moondog. Harmony Korine always works best when he reins his indulgences in with a little guiding structure, and this one does so by riffing on 90s Major Studio Comedy tropes to hideous success. It’s basically Korine staging Billy Madison on the lower decks of a Jimmy Buffett pleasure cruise, a perfect continuation of the Floridian hellscape he previously sketched out in Spring Breakers.

9. Uncut Gems – Another Good Time-style panic attack from the Safdie Brothers, in which New York City is just as loud, chaotic, and crowded as it feels irl. Adam Sandler’s manic performance of gambling addiction & familial regret toys with audiences’ empathy, and its larger story of international jewelry trade emphasizes upsetting truths about the exploitation & suffering that’s behind all the world’s beautiful stones.

10. The Irishman – A late-career mafia epic from Martin Scorsese, the undisputed master of that genre. It’s a beautiful yet tragic story about obsoletion and the emptiness of a life spent mired in sensationalist violence, one with a metatextual significance in the life of its aging, self-reflective filmmaker.

Read Boomer’s picks here.
Read Brandon’s picks here.
Read Britnee’s picks here.
Read CC’s picks here.
See Hanna’s picks here.
Hear James’s picks here.

-The Swampflix Crew

The Future (2011)

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One thing I noticed while drafting a potential Best Films of the 2010s list in recent weeks is how little the twee aesthetic means to me at this point in time. As a budding film nerd (and pretentious college campus twerp) in the 2000s, twee was the exact modernized introduction to the capital-c Cinema sensibilities of the French New Wave that I needed in my life. I even still appreciate the aesthetic to this day (if not only for nostalgia’s sake), but it’s now something I can apparently live without. Twee heavy-hitters like Wes Anderson & Michel Gondry released excellent films in the 2010s that doubled down on the visual fussiness & whimsical melancholy that made them famous in the previous decade. Smaller pictures from new voices like Girl Asleep & I Lost My Body even strived to push the sensibility into fresh, exciting directions. Yet, I can’t find a place for the twee aesthetic on my list of my favorite films of the 2010s. There just wasn’t anything especially urgent or resonant about its presence on the pop culture landscape that decade. The closest any title comes to touching on that end of precious cinematic melancholy that I’d consider best-of-the-decade material is Miranda July’s sophomore feature, The Future. And even that film feels more like a post-twee cultural autopsy more than it does like a genuine twee specimen.

If the heart-on-sleeve earnestness, despondent whimsy, and pastel-tinted visual fussiness of July’s debut Me and You and Everyone We Know operates as a genuine entry in the twee canon, her follow-up feels like a breakthrough to a post-twee world. With nearly a decade’s worth of retrospect behind it, The Future now plays like the official, miserable onscreen death of Twee Whimsy. This time-obsessed breakup drama for a pair of listless thirty-somethings captures that post-youth stare in the mirror when you first realize you’re not special and that life is largely pointless & devoid of magic. It’s a painful but necessary rite of passage, one that directly mirrors my own experience with wonder & self-worth over the past ten years. Curiously, it’s also a breakthrough that seems to be lost on most viewers, who apparently see the move as more of the same held over from July’s debut. It’s fascinating to see on Letterboxd that a lot of people view The Future purely as self-absorbed hipster quirk, when that’s the exact subject the film coldly picks apart in a despondent autopsy. There’s something about July in particular that sets off more cynical audiences’ Bullshit Detectors before she’s even allowed to get her point across, which is a total shame, since she taps into private, internal triumphs & crises no one else thinks to put onscreen. In general, I don’t think the (loosely defined) twee genre ever got enough credit for how dark & melancholy it was just under its meticulously curated surface, and Miranda July is maybe the most undervalued dabbler in despair to be dismissed in that way.

The biggest roadblock that July’s skeptics struggle with in The Future is its choice of narrator: a cat. What could be cutesier than a talking housecat narrating the story of a young couple’s struggle with mid-30s ennui? Except, the execution isn’t cute at all. The cat is ill and lonely in captivity at a “kill shelter,” waiting for the couple (played by Hamish Linklater & July herself) to adopt it before it’s euthanization day arrives. That rescue mission never comes to fruition, though, as the couple becomes so absorbed in their own increasingly meaningless bullshit that they forget about the promise they made to that pitiful beast. Likewise, a magical realist interaction with The Moon where a character stops time to delay an imminent break-up argument and converses with the celestial body in that frozen moment sounds like saccharine whimsy in the abstract. In practice, it’s a devastating illustration of how a moment of heartbreak can leave you feeling as if you’re struck in time. There is no magic in this world, and as soon as the ruse of being able to pause time to prevent hurt is lifted, it’s revealed that weeks have gone by without you. The world has moved on; you are not its center. In the twee era of mildly magical romances like Amélie & The Science of Sleep, these characters’ love for each other might have broken through the restrictions of physics & time to save the proverbial cat. In The Future, magic is dead, and all hope is lost. All we can do is bide our time until we are old enough to die – preferably with company we can stomach.

If your mid-30s sounds like too early in a lifespan to give up & wait for death, don’t worry; the movie’s willing to make fun of that premature panic too. Faced with the responsibility of adopting an ill housecat, our central couple—a work-from-home tech support dweeb and an overqualified children’s dance instructor—trigger their shared mid-life crisis at least a decade too early. Their first-act freak-out that life is essentially over at 35 and everything to follow is “loose change” is eventually treated as a naïve oversimplification and, essentially, a bratty temper tantrum. As long as you live to old age instead of perishing prematurely, there’s plenty of time to live after your youth shrivels up. Too much, even. The realization they suffer here is more that their options & freedoms are becoming severely more limited as they settle into the grooves of adulthood. Feeling that they have been “gearing up to do something incredible for the last fifteen years,” they suddenly realize that nothing incredible is ever likely to happen. They’re doomed to be mundane, unspecial, and purposeless until they die (a very long time from now): the same curse that afflicts the overwhelming majority of humanity. Any attempts to shake off their limiting responsibilities as budding adults to instead pursue “Fulfilling Experiences” only alienate them further from the one comfort they have in this meaningless, increasingly isolating world: each other. Magical escapes from their mundane doom become less fulfilling with time, operating more as distractions than life-changing epiphanies. Few of us will ever amount to much or affect any large-scale change in the world, which is the exact tragic realization that gradually dawns on this couple on the verge of dissolution.

If the title of this film suggests that it’s attempting to predict the actual future, I’d say July was fairly successful. Its varied themes of Climate Change defeatism, post-Obama disillusionment, the pressure to turn self-gratifying art projects to public displays, and the isolating effect of social media obsession all feel accurate to how the 2010s played out in the long run – give or take a flip phone to smartphone upgrade. Extratextually, the film also felt like a prescient death knell for the twee sensibility’s importance on the pop culture landscape. The aesthetic’s ghost continued on in twee-as-fuck films to follow like Moonrise Kingdom, God Help The Girl, and even my beloved Paddington 2, but July had already given it a proper burial in The Future. It’s a film that will alienate many a cynical grump who stumbles across it by accident – if not as soon as its cat-narrated intro, then at least by the time July is doing an interpretive dance about vulnerability to a Beach House track. Still, for those more in tune with the heart-on-sleeve melancholy of the twee sensibility (or its equally ill-defined “mumblecore” aftershock), it really does feel like the end of an era in wide-eyed wonder & hope for what’s to come. It’s a shame that it’s taken July so long to follow up this soul-crushing bummer with a third feature, as I’m very curious to find out what adulthood milestone is going to break my heart next.

-Brandon Ledet

Movies to See in New Orleans this Week 1/23/20 – 1/29/20

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Here are the movies we’re most excited about that are playing in New Orleans this week, including a few major Oscar contenders.

Best Picture Oscar Nominees

Parasite – The latest from Bong Joon-ho (director of Okja and Swampflix’s favorite movie of 2014, Snowpiercer) is a twisty, crowd-pleasing thriller about class resentment that’s been selling out screenings & earning ecstatic critical praise for months as its distribution exponentially spreads. Don’t miss your chance to see one of 2019’s universally beloved genre gems big, loud, and with an enraptured crowd. Playing at AMC Elmwood and Zeitgeist Theatre & Lounge.

Little Women – Greta Gerwig’s directorial follow-up to Lady Bird is an ambitious literary adaptation that scrambles the timelines & narrative structure of its source material to break free from the expectations set by its cultural familiarity. Major bonus points: yet another featured role for 2019 MVP Florence Pugh, who had a legendary year between this, Midsommar, and Fighting with my Family. Playing at AMC Elmwood.

Once Upon a Time . . . In Hollywood! – I enjoyed Tarantino’s latest overwritten provocation despite it communicating a sentiment I couldn’t agree with less. Do I wish the macho drunkards & Westerns of Old Hollywood kept clogging up LA with their mundane traditionalism forever and ever? Not at all, but it’s still amusing to watch an idiosyncratic filmmaker with niche interests passionately wax nostalgic about the gross bullshit only they care about. Playing at AMC Elmwood.

Other Movies

Paper Moon (1973) – Peter Bogdanovich’s classic roadtrip dramedy about a conman’s unlikely friendship with a young child (who may or may not be his daughter).  One of the true gems of the New Hollywood era. Screening Sunday 1/26 and Wednesday 1/29 as part of The Prytania’s regular Classic Movies series.

Gretel and Hansel– Oz Perkins warps the age-old fairy tale into one of those new-fangled “elevated,” Atmospheric Horrors everyone loves to rattle on about.  Given the director’s past work on The Blackcoat’s Daughter & I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House, it promises to be a total creep-out with detailed attention paid to eerie, immersive sound design. Playing wide.

The Turning – Another Atmospheric Horror literary adaptation, this one tackling Henry James’s 19th Century ghost story The Turn of the Screw.  Of particular interest to anyone who’s interested in following the career of the young Brooklynn Prince after her whirlwind debut in The Florida Project. Playing wide.

-Brandon Ledet

CC’s Top 10 Films of 2019

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1. Swallow – Although this will not get a wide release until later this year, I was so impressed with it at 2019’s New Orleans Film Fest that I feel like I need to gush about it now. It’s a horror film that perfectly captures the female experience, illustrating the complete lack of control you have over your own body & destiny if you’re born on the wrong end of class & gender dynamics.

2. Midsommar – Ever dated an absolute asshole? Ever dated someone you knew wanted to break up with you, but stuck around because you wanted to see how they’d end it, so you wait for them to do something as months & months go by? If so, this is the cathartic breakup horror you need in your life.

3. In Fabric – A bleak, surrealistic story about a murderous dress that fully indulges in the Theatre of the Absurd. It’s a fun watch, but it also makes both fashion photography and corporate employers legitimately menacing.

4. The Last Black Man in San Francisco – A powerful debut feature brimming with beautiful cinematography and compelling performances from distinctive non-professionals. Its broader themes touch on gentrification & race politics, but it also makes room to emphasize the power of storytelling & nostalgia. It’s a beautiful tale of an unlikely friendship, one that explores how the stories we tell about ourselves sustain us.

5. Parasite – It’s a genuine phenomenon that such a savage commentary on class politics became so universally popular, packing theaters for months on end. Usually when filmmakers tackle class so furiously (like Boots Riley with Sorry to Bother You), they earn strong critical attention but not such widespread popularity. It’s been amazing to see.

6. Knife + Heart – This is great smut, especially if you enjoy slashers. It really turns the usual male gaze & female victim empathy of that genre on its head in a fascinating way.

7. Come to Daddy – A darkly fun, weirdly plotted film that went in totally surprising directions I did not expect. It also doesn’t hurt that Elijah Wood is super cute.

8. Aniara – Based on a Swedish-language epic poem from the Golden Age of Science Fiction, Aniara explores the futility of being alive and trying to build anything in the face of the vast emptiness of space and time. It’s deeply sad, but also deeply relatable.

9. Little Women – Previous adaptations of Little Women (and even the novel itself) have been criticized for weighting their drama too heavily on the story’s opening childhood half, so that the adulthood drama of the second volume feels like a rushed afterthought. The remixed timelines of this adaptation allow director Greta Gerwig to draw beautiful parallels between both halves of the story and to highlight powerful moments & lines of dialogue that other adaptations tend to skip over. It’s the best version of the story to reach the screen yet.

10. Violence Voyager – I’ve never seen anything animated quite like this before. The way it uses such a cute, handmade, feminine animation style to tell such a nasty story makes for a haunting juxtaposition. It’s beautiful, unique, and original, but its artistry also makes for a discordant clash with its grotesque subject matter. That accomplishment deserves more attention than what it’s getting. At the very least we should be keeping an eye on the filmmaker, who genuinely seems like a potential danger.

-CC Chapman