Reviews

Ash (2025)

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It is a truth non-universally acknowledged that all art is political, but Ash, from director Steven Ellison (better known under his musical moniker Flying Lotus), may be the first film I’ve ever seen that has no identifiable thesis and thus appears to be completely apolitical. This isn’t a criticism so much as an observation of the fact that this movie, despite how much I enjoyed it, seems to be all but completely theme-less. Riya (Eiza González) wakes up, amnesiac, inside of what appears to be crew quarters, surrounded by dead bodies, all of which demonstrate extreme violence done against them. She experiences horrifying flashes of such violence: a head bashed in by a rock, a face melting away as it decomposes, smiles turning from friendly and warm to malevolent and menacing. She walks outside and discovers that she was inside of some kind of station or base on an alien world, as something snowlike drifts down from a sky that is dominated by a radial design that resembles the iris of a great eye, pulsing and pulsating. She sees something vaguely humanoid at a distance, obscured by the harsh atmosphere, although it remains unclear if there is someone or something out there, or if it is perhaps a mirror image of herself (as it mimics her movements) or even a mirage or hallucination. She manages to make it back inside before the atmosphere suffocates her, only to hear a knock at the door. It’s Brion (Aaron Paul), the sixth member of their expedition team, who has left his post in orbit in response to a distress call from the surface, saying that Riya himself had told him that Clarke (Kate Elliott), the only person not accounted for between the two of them and the corpses, had undergone some kind of psychotic break and attacked the others. Riya attempts to recover her memories and advocates for finding and rescuing Clarke, but their time is limited; they have to return to the main spaceship the next time that it completes its orbit in just a few hours, as damage to the base means that they have insufficient atmosphere to wait for it to come around again. 

In writing about Lotus’s previous film, Kuso, Brandon noted that the gross out comedy (with heavy focus on the “gross out” part) was of a kind with Adult-Swim-to-feature pipeline films that “tend[ed] to push attention spans to the limit at full length.” I can confirm that this was an issue for one of my viewing companion, who admitted in the car ride on the way home that some of the gaps in his understanding of the film could be attributed to dozing off a couple of times, but this is also a film with an intentionally dense plot that lends itself to few easy answers. The amnesiac protagonist character is not necessarily a new one, but the film initially sets itself up as a bit of a science fiction mystery with an anachronic order: Who killed everyone? Can Brion be trusted? Can Riya, for that matter? As characterization and events are doled out in flashes of recovered memory as well as exploration footage that Riya manages to recover from a drone, we learn more about what happened, and it becomes apparent that this movie is little more than a remix of other films from this genre — an excellently photographed, perfectly soundtracked, and gorgeously colored, to be sure, but a remix nonetheless. That does not detract from the film, but that all of these elements come with a bit of a pacing issue does. 

In the opening minutes, as Riya makes her way outside of the base and sees a figure in the distance mimicking her movement, one thinks of the finale of Annihilation. The quick cross-cutting of horrific images in Riya’s mind—be they memories, hallucinations, nightmares, or some combination thereof—calls to mind Event Horizon, which famously tucked all of the visuals that pushed the film into the NC-17 rating into mere blips on screen in order to secure an R, so that the viewer isn’t sure what they’re seeing but are nonetheless disturbed. As Riya watches the video captured by one of the mission’s drones and we intercut between the footage itself and the memories that it awakens within her, one is reminded of the crew of the Nostromo as they approach the downed ship on LV-426 in Alien (that the planet “Ash,” from which the film takes its title, also has a very similar designation is but one of the smallest of many allusions to that franchise). Their discovery of an alien artifact of their own and the realization that this is the first domino that falls before the tragedy we entered in media res at the start of the film is likewise very Alien-like, and then the film pushes further and becomes a bit like Prometheus in the study of organic matter taken from it, which becomes an orifice-invading life form that is ultimately responsible for everything. There’s even a little The Thing in there, as this is an isolated place in a desolate environment where no one can be trusted, as well as a really great Rob Bottin/Stanley Winston style mutant human at the end. 

One Alien film it doesn’t borrow from is Alien3, but it does crib from another of director David Fincher’s films, but to say more on that would stray too far into spoiler territory, and I think this is a film that should be gone into with as little foreknowledge as possible. I certainly did; it just happened to be $5 Tuesday (well, $5.75 now) and a friend finally had some time off after having to work an extended stretch of days during and around SXSW. The arthouse was doing repertory screenings of things I had already seen, and Brandon had written about Black Bag and the new Looney Tunes picture, so with nothing more to go on than the tiny icon of the film’s poster in the MoviePass app, I went to the film with a couple of friends. As soon as the characteristic “heartbeat” sound and logo card that accompanies the opening of the Shudder app and precedes the films it distributes, I realized that I had accidentally duped myself into paying for a movie that I could watch at home. That having been said, when the film’s opening fifteen minutes or so felt very much like the beginning of a Syfy Channel original (albeit an extremely elevated and gory one), I was glad that I was watching this in a theater instead of at home, where the film’s pacing would have been a greater challenge on my attention span. This is a film that is introspective, but temporally, not tonally. There’s a lovely dream sequence in the middle that I rather liked, but the purposeful use of long scenes in which very little is happening and we are left to merely contemplate the tableau is something that I can see turning off certain audiences (my two viewing companions, for example, had polar opposite reactions).

Even if you, like me, are more tolerant of those contemplative moments, you may still find that what’s most critically missing here is a lack of theme. Alien is positively (and often literally) dripping with concepts of motherhood, gestation, and birth; The Thing captures a quiet paranoia and isolation that’s universally emotionally applicable; Event Horizon is a parable about madness through the consequences of what happens when science pierces the veil of reality. All of these are existential horrors in what are normally considered environments of speculative fiction, and all of them feature terrifying results of encounters with beings so unlike us that moral concepts of “good” and “evil” don’t really apply. So is Ash. But as to what Ash is about … I’m not really sure that I could tell you. The overall societal decline in attention span has resulted in a lot of discourse about whether a certain scene has a “purpose” or a “point,” meaning to what end does it serve the god of plot and the god of plot alone. Those people are not going to have a good time screening Ash. But the fact that I liked this one so much despite its real lack of theme or thesis tells me that this is a movie with no small amount of things to enjoy and even praise. Its “purpose” is to be an Alien movie unapologetically shot like Knife+Heart; its “point” is to synthesize all of those elements together and then create the best sci-fi synth soundtrack since Blade Runner. It won’t be for everyone, but if you have the inclination after this review to see it, I’d see it on the big screen if you can.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Possible Films: Short Works by Hal Hartley 1994-2004

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I was unfortunately out of town or otherwise indisposed when my local arthouse theater recently hosted a showcase of Hal Hartley films. I’m not terribly familiar with the director’s work, but the promotional videos that were cut together for the screenings were very enticing. Unfortunately, the films that were shown have proven difficult to locate elsewhere, even despite the presence of my local, resurrected, independent video store. What they did have readily available was a collection of his shorts, a 2004 DVD release titled Possible Films: Short Works by Hal Hartley 1994-2004, which included eight titles that added up to be a bit of a mixed bag. 

First up is Opera No. 1, described by one online review as the most accessible of the shorts, which has born itself out to be relatively true. It’s a condensation of an operatic story about love and loss starring Parker Posey and James Urbaniak alongside the late Adrienne Shelly, who was a frequent collaborator with Hartley. Shelly and Posey play roller-skating angels among other characters within a narrative that Urbaniak is simultaneously both composing and living (I think). Twelfth Night is alluded to through an apparent gender swap for one of Shelly’s characters (again—I think), but the narrative isn’t really what’s important here so much as the image and, if you’ll forgive me, the vibe. Urbaniak’s placement on a precarious-looking scaffold as he writes out scenes then balls the paper in his fist evokes a sense of what it is to create: to endanger oneself through exposure of your innermost thoughts stage and the frustration that comes when one tries to contort the world into something more beautiful and manageable but failing to capture the same. Posey and Shelly are ethereal as angels, skating about in an empty theatre behind and between rows of empty seats, but the transcendent is also made human in that they also seem to love smoking. 

Opera No. 1 is followed immediately by The Other Also. Apparently, this second short began life as an art gallery installation, and I can neither improve upon nor dispute a contemporary A.V. Club review from Keith Phipps which stated this was “arguably the only place where a single out-of-focus shot of two actresses circling each other in slow motion to the accompaniment of an ambient score and a haltingly repeated Bible passage would be welcome.” It was at this point in my initial viewing that I stopped the DVD and decided to engage with the shorts individually, with some distance between them. 

The third short, the dialogue-free The New Math(s), is a return to something a little more “formful,” a film that is truly experimental in the sense that one feels Hartley trying out different techniques to see if they work. In an abandoned warehouse, two people sit at desks in a makeshift classroom. One, a man whose suspenders and short pants code him as youthful (David Neumann), contemplates an apple, while the other, a woman (Miho Nikaido, Hartley’s wife) works diligently on the math equation set before the two of them. A third character, their apparent teacher (D.J. Mendel) gets on and off of a freight elevator elsewhere in the building. When the woman appears to complete the equation, a non-violent kung-fu style battle seems to break out as each party pursues one another through the empty building, parts of which are likewise etched with other elaborate mathematical equations. The woman pulls a lever, machines elsewhere begin to move, and then their apparent activation seems to no longer be tied to the lever but to the woman herself, with the possible interpretation that the equation somehow delineates or even affects the passage of time. There’s something almost distinctly “public broadcasting” about it, from the grainy film quality to the overuse of the swoop and swoosh noises that come from parodying kung-fu sequences to the very Square One use of math(s) as a narrative device. I feel like I can see Hartley in the editing bay, working out how to convey the starting and stopping of time through the use of heavy machinery footage that may have been free to license, or him pushing the limits of his ability to capture fighting on screen and whether he had a knack for it. As with Opera No. 1, there’s little to say about the narrative or plot, but there is something interesting about the energy and the fun of getting to watch a filmmaker try out some new things. 

The fourth short, entitled NYC 3/94, follows four characters. The first is a man portrayed by Dwight Ewell (most recognizable to me from his long-ago Kevin Smith collaborations, most notably as Hooper the Black, gay comic book writer in Chasing Amy) who finds himself standing at the edge of a roof. The shot cuts away and we find him on the ground, apparently unharmed, where he meets a woman (Lianna Pai) who helps him to his feet. All around them, the sounds of war rage. Elsewhere, another man (Urbaniak again) reads out a jeremiad for the present day, narrating the inevitable collapse that we see taking place on the street. The final character, a man in a suit (Paul Schulze, whom I couldn’t place until I looked him up; he’s Father Intintola from The Sopranos), asks to be let into a place where Ewell and Pai’s characters have taken shelter and apparently dies in the street, but who is later seen escaping with the other two characters. Apparently, the audio was taken from “the war from the former Yugoslavia” (according to the aforementioned Phipps review), and the supposed mundanity of a civilization in collapse is effectively captured via the fact that the short is shot guerrilla style. As our three characters duck and cover from violence that only exists in the audio track and thus is only inferred through the magic of filmmaking in the images, people in the background mill about and go about their daily lives, “oblivious” to the “war” around them. It’s a neat little piece. 

The Sisters of Mercy is the fifth short and consists of seventeen minutes of outtakes between Posey and Sabrina Lloyd (from Sliders!) as they rehearse for Hartley’s short film Iris (not included on the disc), which is set to the song of the same name by The Breeders. It’s interesting from a technical point of view and mostly in conversation with the avante garde music video that for which it is, for all intents and purposes, supplementary material. Iris clocks in at under four minutes long, and Sisters of Mercy works to show how much work actually goes into a much shorter completed piece of art. As an individual piece, there’s little more to say about it, as it feels like an orphaned DVD extra. I did seek out and find Iris on the Criterion streaming collection, though, and it’s pretty good! 

I have to admit that I messed up a little here. Seeing Sisters of Mercy, Iris, and Regarding Soon on the Criterion Channel, I decided not to rush through the remainder of the shorts and instead return the DVD to my local video store, only to discover that the next short, Kimono, was not only not on Criterion, but all but impossible to find online. I would have to rent it all over again, I assumed, until I accidentally misspelled the director’s last name as “Hartly” in one of my Googlings, and discovered the 27-minute short in its entirety … on a porn site. I don’t know that I would call it pornographic, but there should be no mistaking the fact that this is an erotic film. A woman (Nikaido again) is a woman in a wedding dress who is ejected from a New Beetle (this was released in 1999, after all) in a deserted area. She wanders through woods and fields, slowly shedding parts of her wedding dress until she’s down to her lacy undergarments, all the time pursued by two woman that the IMDb page identifies as wood nymphs (Valerie Celis and Yun Shen). Once she’s shed every part of the bridal attire, she redresses herself in a kimono that she finds in a rundown house in the woods. She appears to fall asleep, whereupon a ghost whispers something to her while the observing nymphs cover their ears. Intermittently, poetic phrases float up on screen (ex.: “In this world / love has no color / and who knows how / my body is marked by yours”). They appear in broken lines, and it’s unfortunate that the effect is something like you would see in a contemporary film trailer for a suspense thriller (you know the effect I’m talking about, even if you can’t pinpoint the last time you saw it). It lends the whole experience the effect that it’s an advertisement for something else, and with a runtime of nearly thirty minutes, that’s a negative. On the other hand, this is a beautifully photographed piece, and one which shows that, even before the term “wife guy” was coined, Hartley was pioneering what that meant when it came to making a piece of art about how much he loves his hot wife.

Regarding Regarding Soon, this ten-minute film features Hartley talking about the creation of his stage play Soon, which was inspired by the Branch Davidian massacre and revolves around millennialist end-times Christianity in America. In his review of the DVD, Robert Spuhler noted that Sisters of Mercy was “probably [his] favorite as an actor” because of its insight into the creative process. Regarding Soon turned out to be one of my favorites probably because of my (well documented) interest in American eschatology. The play largely consists of arguments between seven characters about scriptural interpretation and interpolation, and the concept of “creative religiosity,” most notably the way that both religion and art are attempts we mere mortals make at attempting to understand the nature of existence. There doesn’t seem to be a performance of the play online in any format that I can find, but there must have been a publication of the script at some point since it has a presence on GoodReads, and we do get some images of the performance on this DVD, which is nice. I recently saw part of Hartley’s 1989 film The Unbelievable Truth and was struck by the pointedness and efficiency of its dream-like dialogue, how it presaged the kind of quick-witted linguistic playfulness and melodramatic delivery that would go on (sometimes for better, sometimes for worse) to be a characteristic of works like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gregg Araki’s Nowhere, and Gilmore Girls. It seems like this was the mode for Soon as well, and I hope I get to see a production of it or get the chance to read the script at some point in the future. For something that’s essentially a supplementary text for a larger work, this one held my attention quite well, and it was fascinating to hear Hartley talk about his creative process and confirm some of the things that I had already assumed about him from the previous entries in this anthology. He describes himself as minimalist by nature and how he enjoys working within a “restricted palette,” and I think that came through in all of these in one way or another. 

Ultimately, this collection wasn’t what I expected. Probably a must-view only for Hartley completionists, a few films feel like they are included here just because they had to be stored somewhere in order to be cited in his feature works, or feel like diary entries from production, which has a limited audience. I think that most others would get just as much out of watching the ones that sound interesting to them on the Criterion Channel (or whatever porn site you can find Kimono on).

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond 

Eephus (2025)

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I am not sure how, but my grandfather watched a baseball game for the entire span of my childhood. No matter when we stopped by his house, that one Atlanta Braves game was playing on the television, with no beginning or end. No one ever won or lost. Nothing especially interesting ever happened on the field. It was just plain, old baseball for all of eternity. I never understood the appeal until I attended a game in-person as an adult. With a couple beers and an Italian sausage in the stands, the endless stasis of plain, old baseball became pleasant instead of confounding. It was a calm background texture, an occasional distraction from the casual conversation & junk food consumption I would be indulging in anyway. Baseball is, essentially, the hangout movie of sports.

The new gloomy hangout comedy Eephus understands the spirit of that sport more deeply than any other baseball movie I can name. It’s a slow-paced, aimless picture that feels like watching a sub-professional baseball game played in real time. None of the players are especially athletic, much less talented. They’re playing a game so pointless that they can opt to get drunk & nap in the outfield with no direct effect on the final score. And yet, the dead-space background texture of the sport leaves a lot of room for what really matters in movies: detailed observations of human behavior, character quirks, and the poetic graces of life. Every single dialogue exchange & character detail of Eephus is deeply charming, riotously funny, or both, making for an exceptionally pleasant day at the park.

The occasion of this specific baseball game is the closing of Soldiers Field in Nowhere, Massachusetts. Before the site is demolished to make room for a school, two recreational-league teams of middle-aged men gather for one final game. They complain about the cruel absurdity of building a school on such hallowed ground, as if their field were being replaced with a strip mall or prison. The next-nearest field is only a 30-minute drive away, which they consider an insurmountable distance, deciding instead to retire from the sport forever. As the sun sets on their final game, the field lights never kick on, so they play in the dark, unable to see the ball or accurately call a play. They can barely haul their sagging dad-bods around the bases, joking “They should put me down” as if they’ve fully outlived their usefulness. There’s no real momentum or purpose to the game beyond going through the motions to give the field a proper send-off. When they celebrate with fireworks after the final play, we don’t even watch the display. There’s no sense of ceremony here, just lives being lived.

Eephus lingers somewhere in the vast liminal space between Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets & Field of Dreams, but its moment-to-moment charms are more kinetic than that description indicates. There are seemingly no repeated camera set-ups as cinematographer-turned-director Carson Lund (Ham on Rye, Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point) finds infinite angles from which to shoot a generally unimpressive recreational field. Standalone shots of an empty dugout, a good cloud, or the moon peeking out in daylight register with a quiet, warm beauty, but Lund never allows the tempo to drift from hangout movie to slow-cinema abstraction. He mostly finds the humor & humanity in the minor, unimportant behaviors of his small cast of minor, unimportant men. Meanwhile a series of local Halloween-themed radio commercials and an opening news broadcast voiced by Frederick Wiseman keep the energy up with loud, frantic background chatter. As an end-of-an-era movie about people who’ve outlived their purpose, it’s unavoidably melancholy, but it moves quick, looks great, and delivers constant laughs as it waits out the final hours of the day.

-Brandon Ledet

Mickey 17 (2025)

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When we recently did our podcast episode about The Big Sleep, Brandon mentioned that he had already seen Mickey 17 and briefly shared his thoughts about it. One of the things that he noted was that when Bong Joon Ho makes a movie that is primarily for a Western audience, he foregoes a lot of the subtlety that is maintained in the films that he makes with his homeland in mind. Which is to say that I think he thinks we’re all a little stupid over here (and he’s not wrong). Memories of Murder and Parasite are films with lots of subtext and subtlety (although the latter doesn’t hold back with its themes), while Snowpiercer and Okja are—and I mean this in the most affectionate and respectful way possible—a little obvious. When I think about Bong’s body of work, the scene that comes to my mind most often and the one that stands out most clearly is the sequence from Snowpiercer in which Tilda Swinton’s androgynous Minister Mason delivers a speech to disruptive back-of-train passengers. “A hat belongs on the head,” they say, “And the shoe belongs on the foot. I am a hat; you are a shoe.” Mason’s voice drips with disdain and hatred. Theirs is a demonstration of not just their slavish, religious devotion to class distinction, but just how furiously angry power can be when it reinforces itself, how the veil of civility (barely) conceals a snarling dog. 

So when you hear mixed things about Mickey 17, and people talking about how the film is obvious, well, they’re not lying to you. Mickey 17 is an obvious movie. It lacks subtlety, and I can see how people may feel that they’re being talked down to, or how the film’s lack of nuance in its themes could make it feel like a Disney Channel Original version of Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, if you’re feeling extremely uncharitable. I would never go that far, but I will say that my expectations were not exceeded. 

Three decades from now, dimwitted Mickey (Robert Pattinson) has run into some trouble with a mafia-connected loan shark, alongside his friend Timo (Steven Yeun). The two decide the best solution to their problem would be to escape the dying planet aboard a corporate ship bound for worlds that humans seek to colonize. Timo is able to talk himself into a pilot position immediately, while Mickey signs up to be an “expendable,” a person whose primary role is to take on dangerous jobs during the long spaceflight. Sometime between the present and the not-too-distant future, scientists figured out how to 3-D print cloned human bodies and how to transfer memories between them, allowing for people to essentially create backup versions of themselves in case of death. When the technology was virtually immediately used for criminal (and homicidal) purposes, its use was banned on earth, but due to the dangerous nature of starfaring, one “expendable” is allowed per starship. Aboard, Mickey meets and falls into immediately reciprocated love with Nasha (Naomi Ackie), a security officer. The ship on which they are travelling is commanded not by a seasoned space veteran but by manchild former (read: failed) politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a character who exists to be an amalgamation of celebrities cum “leaders” but whose details make him a very (read: not at all) thinly veiled parody of the current U.S. president. Along for the ride is his wife Ylfa (Toni Collette), whose rather thin characterization—she’s obsessed with sauce—goes largely unnoticed as Collette gives another fantastically over the top performance. 

Over the course of their journey, Mickey isn’t just given dangerous jobs to do, he becomes the subject of outright inhumane laboratory tests. His brain gets backed up onto a hard drive every week and then he gets printed out again when he dies. He’s put outside in a spacesuit in order to be exposed to cosmic radiation; he’s used to collect spores from the new planet’s atmosphere so that a vaccination to the diseases present on the planet can be created; he’s exposed to an ongoing series of nerve gas exposures in order to develop new biological weapons. One would also have to assume that, as his rations keep being halved over and over again, one of the Mickeys must have starved to death. It’s not a charmed life, but Mickey is so in love with Nasha that he doesn’t mind dying over and over again as long as they are together. Things go sideways, however, when he’s left to die after falling into a crevasse. He’s rescued by the tardigrade-like aliens that are native to the planet and brought back to the surface, and when he manages to get back aboard the ship, he learns that his replacement, Mickey 18, has already been printed. If anyone learns that there are two of them, they’ll both be killed and the brain backup deleted in accordance with law, and Sen. and Mrs. Marshal are all too happy to kill both Mickey and the tardigrade aliens (whom they dub “Creepers”) despite the indigenous life form’s apparent sentience. 

It’s a small detail, but one of the things that I liked at the beginning was that we see Mickey and Timo wearing the shirts for their failed macaron business, which features the slogan “macarons are not a sin.” It’s an unusual slogan but one that makes some modicum of sense since desserts and sweets are often considered an indulgence. However, we later learn in the film that “multiples are not a sin” was a rallying cry for a certain perspective on the question of the legality of the human backup-and-restore program. This all leads us to see how short-sighted Mickey is, as he clearly would have to know enough about the cloning process to see this as a reasonable macaron peddling tagline, but he also isn’t paying enough attention to know what he’s signing up for when he first enlists as an Expendable. Further, his taking inspiration (or willingness to go along with Timo’s inspiration) from a complicated legal and social issue for a myopic macaron business is more insight into Mickey’s doofiness. There is a charm in that, though, and the way that Nasha is instantly smitten with this dumb, lost puppy is endearing, as is her ongoing devotion to him despite the personality changes—some almost imperceptible, some quite obvious—that come with each rebirth. 

Shortly after Mickey 17 returns to the ship and discovers that Mickey 18 is already up and about, Mickey 18 takes it upon himself to assassinate Marshall. 17 is able to stop him in time, but this action reveals their existence as multiples and also ends in the death of one of two baby Creepers who came aboard the ship inside of a rock sample. There’s some slapstick, Ruffalo bellows as Marshall, the little cat-sized alien beings run around, then one of them is gunned to pieces. My viewing companion leaned over to me and said “I hated that,” the moment that the sequence ended. I didn’t agree, but I also understand that Mickey 17 isn’t going to win over as many people as Bong’s previous works have; it’s a familiar theme of his in a new environment and with different sci-fi trappings, but for some, it just doesn’t have that same “wow” factor. Unfortunately, I find myself completely sympathizing with the underwhelmed.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Urban Legend (1998)

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The 1998 college-campus horror Urban Legend resides at the crossroads of two major 1990s cultural projects, both involving the legacy of Wes Craven. First & foremost, it’s a post-Scream third wave slasher, coasting on a deluge of self-aware meta horrors starring young, hot teen actors who are conscious they are in a horror movie and provide live commentary on the tropes of the genre as they’re systematically killed. In this case, the famous-at-the-time teenyboppers in question (Alicia Witt, Jared Leto, Tara Reid, Joshua Jackson, etc.) attempt to guess the next patterned kill of a serial murderer who’s recreating long-debunked urban legends rather than recreating famous movie scenes—like in Scream—but the effect is the same. The secondary project of Urban Legend was part of a larger 1990s effort to reclaim the public reputation of Robert Englund as more than just the creep who played Freddy Kreuger, presenting him instead as a kind of effete academic. His late-80s turn as the Phantom of the Opera transported his Freddy Kreuger persona to the more refined cultural space of a period-piece opera house.  He later turned up as himself in Craven’s proto-Scream meta slasher A New Nightmare, appearing out of Kreuger drag as a thoughtful, classically trained actor haunted by the grotesqueries he was typecast as post-Elm Street fame. In Urban Legend, Englund’s past professional triumphs as Freddy Kreuger still linger in the audience’s mind as his character is floated as the most obvious suspect in the serial-killer investigations, but he’s quickly cleared of guilt and presented as something much more respectable: a bespectacled, leather-patched college professor and the leading expert in his field, which conveniently happens to be urban legends.

Of course, the only reason to return to Urban Legend all these decades past its expiration date is to pinpoint what, exactly, is the most 1990s-specific detail about it. There are plenty of late-90s time capsule contributions competing for that honor: frustrations with dial-up internet connections tying up a shared phone line, Joshua Jackson’s frosted-tips Peroxide hairdo, a meta joke at the expense of Jackson’s Dawson’s Creek fame, “Goth 4 Goth” campus hookup message boards, needle drops from Stabbing Westward and Cherry Poppin’ Daddies. When I saw the film was screening on a Monday evening down the street from my house, I didn’t attend in hopes that it would hold up as a wrongly dismissed 90s classic, à la The Rage, The Craft, or Cherry Falls. I attended out of nostalgia for the film’s value as a retro Blockbuster Video rental, watched alone on my bedroom VCR when I was old enough to crave teenage transgressions but too young to experience them first-hand. It was a pleasant time to return to, if not only to reminisce about a moment when teen slashers were slickly produced, hot commodities. Every exterior scene involves a completely unnecessary crane shot, and every nighttime slashing sequence is set during a music video-style thunderstorm for atmospheric effect, flaunting money most modern slashers couldn’t afford to scrape together. The only embarrassing thing about the movie, really, is watching the adults in the room have to play archetypes for mouthbreathing teens’ entertainment: Brad Dourif as a creepy gas station attendant, Loretta Devine as a Coffy-obsessed campus cop and, of course, Robert Englund as a learned professor of the macabre.

As for the urban-legends-obsessed serial killer conceit, even the teenage victims point out that the premise is “a bit of a stretch.” There are a few obvious go-to urban legends that map well to the teen slasher format. There’s the classic “The call’s coming from inside the house” story of the babysitter being killed by a home invader, restaged here in a frat house much like how the foundational 70s slasher Black Christmas restaged it in a sorority house. The first kill involves an axe murderer hiding in the backseat of a woman’s car, played for ironic humor as she sings along to the “Turn around” refrain of Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” painfully off-key. The killer’s motivation being a disastrous prank version of the “flashing headlights gang initiation” legend is similarly effective. Three or four clever kills are not enough to fill the 100-minute runtime, though, which inspires the movie to reach for urban legends that don’t fully map to the genre. In the most egregious example, one character is force-fed a combo of Pop Rocks & Drano in a violent escalation of the schoolyard myth that combining Pop Rocks & soda will explode your stomach. Otherwise, things get exceedingly silly when the legends are updated with modern twists, like switching phone calls for online chatrooms or creating new teen slang in which victims-to-be each share their “favorite U.L.” at the campus coffee shop. With the gnarly exception of a microwaved dog, the violence of the film is never especially gruesome, but it does find plenty of novelty in its post-Scream meta slasher premise. It’s a wonder there were any legends left for its two less-remembered sequels; it seems like this one ran through all the standards.

If you want a smart, level-headed version of this movie, you’re much better off revisiting the 1992 classic Candyman, which starts with a grad student recording a broad range of urban legends before settling on one specific, hyperlocal one that destroys her life. The modern folklore academia of Urban Legend is much broader, and it only serves two cynical purposes: cashing in on the popularity of Scream and making Robert Englund appear intellectual. A couple decades later, the only cultural significance the movie has gained is as a reminder that Jared Leto was once passable as a normal, functional human being, albeit a strikingly pretty one. Everything else is pure late-90s nostalgia, the cinematic equivalent of binging Stabbing Westward & Cherry Poppin’ Daddies music videos on YouTube.

-Brandon Ledet

Fade to Black (1980)

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“Why don’t you live in the real world with the rest of us?”
“No thanks.”

During the opening credits of the early-80s horror curio Fade to Black, our serial killer anti-hero Eric Binfold (Dennis Christopher) is mumbling to himself about Bogart & books, likely in reference to the Howard Hawks noir The Big Sleep. He’s then revealed to be lounging in his underwear, studying local TV broadcast & repertory theatre listings in the newspaper to plan out his week. His bedroom is wallpapered with movie posters for violent genre films like Don’t Bother to Knock, Frenzy, and White Heat. His first kill, halfway into the film, is pushing his wheelchair-using adoptive aunt down their apartment stairs, inspired by an infamously vicious murder in Kiss of Death. He is later depicted masturbating to a Marilyn Monroe poster while wearing a Nosferatu t-shirt. He changes his name from Eric Binfold to Cody Jarrett in honor of James Cagney’s performance in White Heat, reflecting the way he deals with his mommy issues by violently lashing out against the world. Eric Binfold is living my exact life and watching the exact same movies I am, except that he’s a sociopathic murderer, and it scares me.

Fade to Black is an uncomfortably prescient film about how anyone with a Letterboxd account is an antisocial degenerate. It makes visual allusions to early slashers like Psycho & Halloween to help guide the audience with genre-template guardrails, but the horror classic it most closely resembles is Willard. All Eric Binfold wants to do is be left alone to watch his movies, but he keeps being hassled by family, coworkers, and bullies who interrupt his hobby. Like how Willard eventually exacts revenge on the world by weaponizing his own hobby of training rats, Eric snaps and goes on a killing spree using The Movies as his weapon of choice. He dresses as vampires, cowboys, and classic-noir gangsters, hunting anyone who belittles his favorite pastime of sitting alone in the dark, watching a glowing screen. Dennis Christopher gives an intensely nervous performance in the role, calling into question why Willard got the Crispin Glover remake treatment instead of this one. He’s also, of course, a prototypical incel – not committing his first murder until he’s stood up by an Australian flirt who happens to vaguely resemble Marilyn Monroe. What a dweeb; I hate that he’s so relatable.

The real horror here is the isolation & frustration of dedicating every waking thought to the antisocial pursuit of Watching Movies. It’s an unhealthy lifestyle, but given the choice between “escapist trash” and the cruel mundanity of the real world, it’s a relatively attractive one. The trick when “going to the movies a lot” is “your thing” is to remember how to talk & relate to other people in the hours you inevitably have to spend outside the theater. You can’t just fire off movie trivia at normal, functional human beings and consider the exchange Polite Conversation. Universal’s Famous Monsters aren’t famous to everyone; you have to recognize that you are the town freak, not the local genius, and adjust your behavior accordingly. When Eric’s killing spree spirals fully out of control and he takes the Marilyn impersonator hostage at gunpoint, the taboo he can’t wait to break is touching a movie theater screen with his hands, something that wouldn’t register as a blasphemous transgression to most. He’s an avatar for Cinephile Brain Rot at its most rotten, another reminder to periodically step outside the cinema and touch some grass.

-Brandon Ledet

Juliet of the Spirits (1965)

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The standout sequence in Juliet of the Spirits that dropped my jaw lowest in the theater was its ugliest & most mundane. The 2015 restoration of the 1960s Fellini classic is, for the most part, a gorgeous swirl of vibrant color. It’s a dark fantasy movie in which the Italian master invents the cinematic language for later texts as disparate & monumental as Lynch’s dream sequences, Jodorowsky’s circuses, and Friedkin’s exorcisms, all rendered in sinfully lurid Technicolor. That was all expected, though. What really caught me off guard is when Fellini pauses his gaudy reverie to also invent the cinematic language for the television program Cheaters. It happens in the sequence where his real-life wife & muse Giuletta Masina visits the private detective agency that’s been trailing her husband, and they play back to her a full week of documented adulterous behavior. The way the head dick in charge narrates the sepia-tone surveillance footage with time stamps and sneering innuendo is so specific to the Joey Greco era of Cheaters that I now understand that reality TV show to be a loving homage to the film’s legacy. Such is the power of Fellini.

Much like an episode of Cheaters, watching Juliet of the Spirits feels like intruding on a private domestic dispute that’s really none of our business. Our director is working through his real-life conflicts with his wife by illustrating his own adulterous behavior onscreen, through the avatar of actor Mario Pisu. Giuletta Masina stars as Giuletta Boldrini, a wealthy but lonely housewife who’s increasingly isolated by the extramarital indulgences of her husband Giorgio, played by Pisu. As Giorgio spends increasingly long stretches away with his latest fling, Giuletta seeks spiritual advice from the dark arts, meeting with a series of psychics & mystics in search of a calmer, wiser perspective on her broken marriage. This pursuit opens her mind to a loud circus of perverted spirits & ghosts that constantly parade through her head, pulling her out of her Catholic comfort zone towards a larger religious truth: pleasure is the true religion, and she should be cheating too. The whole thing plays like a plea from Fellini to his wife to start cheating on him to help balance things out and to take her mind off the marital injustice he initiated.

Unlearning Catholic guilt is easier said than done. The proto-Exorcist imagery results from a childhood memory in which Giuletta starred as a martyred saint in a church play, burned alive for the transgression of accepting Christ in her heart. Anytime the adult Giuletta considers indulging in an extramarital affair (with a handsome ghost, demon, or otherwise), her mind flashes back to this scarring memory, which has taught her to associate Earthly pleasure with guilt & pain. Everyone around her is fully enjoying what being alive has to offer—especially in the pleasures of the flesh—and yet Giuletta continues to fret, unable to let go and enjoy herself as much as her wandering husband. Buried somewhere in the film’s increasingly dreamlike imagery, there’s eventually a healing moment in which she frees her flaming inner child from her Catholic shackles and comforts her with a motherly embrace, but it’s still not enough to fully make up for what Giorgio has done to their marriage. Maybe Fellini’s admitting personal guilt there more than he’s attempting to shake his wife loose from her own self-limiting Catholic guilt. Again, it’s not really any of our business.

For all of its messy offscreen domestic drama and the deep psychological pain caused by religious repression, Juliet of the Spirits is often a light confection. Snazzy jazz scores the backyard wanderings of a mystic housecat and the Italo-fashion beachwear modeling of Giulietta’s fabulously amoral neighbor with no attempt to underline the dark-fantasy elements of the plot with any palpable menace. Fellini feels just as preoccupied with injecting eye-searing beauty into every frame of his first in-color picture as he is with working out his domestic issues with his wife. Even the candlesticks in the couple’s home are tinted lavender instead of the typical white, just to squeeze more color into the frame. It is, without question, the most gorgeous, surreal episode of Cheaters in the history of the show; and yes I am including the one where Joey Greco got stabbed on a boat.

-Brandon Ledet

Universal Language (2025)

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Matthew Rankin makes great movies, but I’m not yet fully sure what makes a Matthew Rankin movie specific to Matthew Rankin. His first film The Twentieth Century is one of the best debut features of this decade, and yet the most accurate way to recommend it to the uninitiated is as the best Guy Maddin movie not directed by Guy Maddin. I found myself reaching for similar hypotheticals while watching Rankin’s latest picture, the low-key absurdist comedy Universal Language. What if Wes Anderson directed My Winnipeg? What if Roy Andersson directed True Stories? What if Quentin Dupieux directed Where is the Friend’s House? Thankfully, Matthew Rankin is quickly becoming a distinct enough directorial voice that I won’t have to come up with these lazy rhetorical scenarios for much longer, but there just isn’t enough material out there to fully pinpoint what makes his work unique, at least not yet. For now, its greatness is still familiar to its most glaring reference points.

Set in a parallel-universe version of Winnipeg that’s just as influenced by Iranian culture as Canadian, Universal Language casually slips between Persian & French dialogue & text as a mirror reflection of its characters’ liminal cultural identities. We start at a French immersion school, with Persian students anxious to break away from their eccentric teacher’s disciplinary shouting so they can have wholesome adventures in the Canadian snow. Outside, their small-scale schemes intertwine with the daily toils of a Winnipeg tour guide and a stranger (Matthew Rankin, essentially playing himself) who’s returning to town to visit his ill mother after years of estrangement. In stage-comedy tradition, their stories converge in a single apartment at the story’s climax, but much of the film leaves them traveling & plotting in isolated vignettes. The tour guide is the most solid narrative anchor in that respect, providing the audience a sense of place as he shows off the many uninspiring wonders of Winnipeg’s cultural monuments: an endless tangle of grey interstate highways, a Beige District of nondescript brick buildings, a briefcase that was abandoned on a park bench in the 1970s and left undisturbed due to general Canadian politeness, etc.

Universal Language lounges in a calm, unrushed mood, warming its frozen hands with a hot glass of tea in avoidance of the harsh winter outside. It’s quietly hilarious, though, with an excess of absurdist gags about turkey beauty pageants, sentient Christmas trees, local TV-commercial celebrities, and schoolboy Groucho Marx impersonators that each land with a warm chuckle rather than a full-bellied laugh. Its visual trickery is similarly subdued, especially in comparison with the German Expressionist fantasia of The Twentieth Century. There are two scenes in which a shot-reverse-shot sequence triggers a harshly mundane psychedelia: one that maps out the cubicle-walled limbo of a government bureaucrat’s office and one that swaps two characters’ personae mid-film, recalling Lynch’s Lost Highway. Another isolated sequence of low-key surrealism makes the audience dizzy with double-exposure images of a figure skater dressed in silver like a spinning disco ball. It’s all purposefully underplayed deadpan, so its merits as Great Cinema are much less obvious than they were in Rankin’s previous picture. It’s also much sweeter & more communal, though, suggesting that Rankin is investing more heart into his characters than his production design as he hones his directorial voice. Although many immediate comparisons come to mind while describing what he’s achieved so far, I still can’t fully predict where his mind is going next. He’s an exciting Artist To Watch as a result, even as someone who’s not yet making fully distinct art.

-Brandon Ledet

Working Girl (1988)

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I’ve been thinking a lot about Harrison Ford lately, mostly by happenstance. He’s in TV commercials promoting a new Captain America film as a tomato-red variation of The Hulk transformed by the magic of CGI. He’s lurking in the background of Awards Season ceremonies, disrupting live broadcasts with his signature geriatric-stoner aloofness. When I last went to the theater, he unexpectedly appeared against-type as a young, stone-faced villain in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. Harrison Ford is everywhere, as long as you happen to be making the exact programming choices I am. So, when I was flipping through my stack of unwatched DVD purchases, I had to follow the pattern and watch the first movie that featured Ford’s handsome face on the cover: Mike Nichols’s late-80s romcom Working Girl, where Harrison Ford plays the lead romantic interest for star Melanie Griffith. Despite Ford’s lengthy screentime and central importance to the plot, it turned out to not be an especially great watch if you’re looking for pure Harrison Ford content. He’s mostly used as a sex-symbol prop, an object to be ogled. Like in my recent everyday life, he’s just kind of . . . there.

Besides the film being a star-vehicle for Melanie Griffith, the reason Harrison Ford doesn’t make much of a strong impression in Working Girl is that the cast is overflowing with a surplus of supporting players, of which he just happens to play the primary hunk. Alec Baldwin plays Hunk #2, a perfectly cast meathead himbo. Sigourney Weaver gives a hilariously broad performance as Griffith’s boss & romantic rival. Joan Cusack plays her even more eccentric bestie. Oliver Platt appears as her workplace enemy, a Wall Street slimeball. Kevin Spacey plays an even slimier Wall Street slimeball. David Duchovny shows up as a background player at her surprise birthday party. Working Girl has the kind of stacked cast of character actors that has you shouting “Holy shit, look who it is!” all the way until the final minute. The last one that got me was Suzanne “Big Ethel” Shepherd from A Dirty Shame delivering exactly one line as an unnamed receptionist in the final few minutes, one of two single-scene appearances from John Waters players, including an earlier appearance from Ricki Lake. Casting director Juliet Taylor was a real over-achiever, as evidenced by roping in someone as classically charismatic as Harrison Ford to just stand around and look handsome.

Working Girl is essentially a fish-out-of-water comedy about a Staten Island party girl (Griffith) who struggles to be taken seriously in the Big Business world of Manhattan across the bay. She rides the ferry to work every morning in her stockings & tennis shoes, switches to the sensible heels stored under her desk, and struggles to keep her hairspray-sculpted lioness mane vertical while battling sexist stereotypes in the lion’s den of stock trading. Her big break arrives in the form of a broken leg, when her much more refined Manhattanite boss (Weaver) injures herself skiing and is briefly taken out of the picture. Our titular working girl makes a power move by taking over her boss’s life & wardrobe, Single White Female-style, and attempting to broker a major corporate-buyout deal with a hotshot fuckboy broker (Ford) before she’s discovered to be a fraud. After the movie comes dangerously close to kicking things off with a date-rape meet cute, they genuinely fall in love and a series of silly deceits & misunderstandings ensue. The entire two-hour runtime is dedicated to the contract negotiations of their singular business deal together, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is Griffith’s self-described persona of having “a head for business and a body for sin,” a line so perfectly written it belonged on the poster instead of in the dialogue.

Griffith’s sinful body is frequently put on display here, as lacy, overly complicated lingerie appears to be just as much of her Big Business uniform as her pencil skirt; she even vacuums in it. Harrison Ford is tasked to strip too, for a sense of balance, at one point taking a whore’s bath during a phone call in his glass-walled office while his female coworkers gawk & applaud. As a Reaganite cultural clash between the small-town vulgarity of Staten Island and the big-city sophistication of Manhattan, Working Girl is a little conceptually vague. As a collection of always-welcome faces, however, it’s exceedingly charming from start to end (Spacey excluded). You can tell it’s charming just by clocking that there are two overlapping cast members from Moonstruck featured here (Cher’s mom & Cher’s hairdresser), which is the undisputable masterpiece of this 80s NYC romcom subgenre. Harrison Ford is just one handsome face among many. He hadn’t yet learned how to be a dazed, scene-stealing agent of chaos, but thankfully there were plenty of other over-the-top performers around to pick up the slack (with Weaver & Cusack doing most of the heavy lifting in that respect).

-Brandon Ledet

No Other Land (2025)

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I saw No Other Land about a week before its Oscar win for Best Documentary Feature. I’ve been sitting on it and digesting it in the time since, thinking about what (or even if) I should write about it. As a document, it speaks for itself. 

Basel Adra opens the film with a voiceover, narrating footage taken of him at the tender age of nine. It is the first (but certainly not the last) time that Basel and his family are captured on film being forced to leave their home in Palestine under invading colonial forces. He tells us about how his father’s activism inspired his own. Through no fault of his own, his entire existence has been one spent on the edge of the knife and in the intersection between two barrels: the gun that seeks to push him out and the camera lens which documents his and others’ lives under apartheid. Masafer Yatta is the place in question, a region in the occupied West Bank, which has been declared (by the Israeli high court) to be annexed for use as a military training ground. Throughout the footage, taken over years, people are forced out of their homes by men and women in uniform who have only one refrain: “It is the law,” they say. “It is the law; it is the law.” And with each time they repeat it one can’t help but hear what they are actually saying, in the present as it was said in the past: “We are only following orders.” It is no defense. 

In many ways, No Other Land documents much less outright violence than one would expect. We’ve all spent an unbelievable length of time bearing witness to much more depraved acts of violence against the people of Palestine than are recorded here, although this film is not without horror, of course. During one protest we see Israeli soldiers open fire on a group of civilians, paralyzing one of them. The same man later dies after his home (a tent) is destroyed and the inhabitants of Masafer Yatta are forced to scatter to a series of caves for refuge; he succumbs to infection there. It is this man’s mother who gives the film its title, speaking of the fact that there is nowhere else to go. We also see Basel’s father shot at another point later in the film, and Basel is forced to give up on his activism for a time so that he can operate the area’s only gasoline dispensary, his father’s business, as its operation is vital for the area, at least until further settler invasion forces the forfeiture of all vehicles as the vice grip of their organized terrorism continues to tighten around the peoples of Palestine. 

The other primary lens through which we see the activities other than Basel’s is that of Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, who is able to come and go freely from the ravaged area, and although he develops a deep and abiding friendship with Basel, the privilege of movement that he enjoys remains a sharp dividing line between the men. Yuval also comes face to face with people who appreciate his mission but doubt his ability to make any real changes, and when Yuval’s missives fail to reach larger audiences, he loses hope quickly while Basel and his people understand that this is an effort that could (and likely will) consume their lives and their lifetimes. 

One thing that particularly struck me was how this documentary works in conversation with Ernest Cole: Lost and Found. In particular, when watching Basel’s friend be shot and become quadriplegic, I remembered the segment of Lost and Found wherein the voiceover explained the monetary compensation that the apartheid regime enforced on the native South Africans. A specific dollar amount was assigned for the loss of a limb, or for total loss of one’s ability to work in the mines. Even under what we now recognize unilaterally as a genocidal and evil colonial practice, there were more protections (measly and inhumane ones, to be sure) for the people who were crushed under the heel of colonization. Lost and Found also featured many photographs of Cole and his community’s homes being demolished as well as images of the cookie cutter housing put up on their former land to be occupied by settlers. No Other Land features almost the exact same imagery, except that instead of photographs, it’s video of tractors and bulldozers demolishing the homes of the disenfranchised. Together, the two films tell a story about generational evil, the methods of control that are enacted across decades through violence and intimidation, and the way that world leaders are largely indifferent to suffering. What that conversation between them does positively is give me hope. Ernest Cole, like Moses, was exiled and never allowed to see the Promised Land, as he died within weeks of Mandela’s release, but South African apartheid did end, even if he never got to enjoy the fruits of his activism. If South Africa could be freed, then so too can Palestine.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond