Reviews

After Hours (1985)

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The time of another adaptation of The Odyssey is upon us, which means that it’s time for the underemployed to crack their knuckles and start making Letterboxd lists of films that are spiritually similar. One that’s been popping up more often recently is the Martin Scorsese film After Hours, one of the director’s more underdiscussed pictures. The 1985 dark comedy, set in the wee hours of the morning in New York City, follows word processor Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) on, well, an odyssey across the city as he faces various challenges in trying to get back home from Soho. In a diner one night, he’s reading a Henry Miller novel when the lovely Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) strikes up a conversation with him. They flirt, and she tells him that she’s staying with a sculptress friend, Kiki (Linda Fiorentino), whose work includes making plaster bagels with cream cheese. Intrigued, he calls Kiki’s loft later that night and Marcy invites him over, but he ends up losing the only cash he has on him, a $20 bill, when it’s blown out of a cab window. 

This is only the beginning of Paul’s troubles for the night. As it turns out, not only is Marcy already married (albeit separated from her husband, whose fetishization of The Wizard of Oz has made him incapable of orgasming without screaming “Surrender Dorothy”), she’s also already got a boyfriend, with whom she quarreled earlier in the night, prompting her flirtation with Paul in the first place. She behaves erratically, tells harrowing stories about her past that may or may not be true, has a book of images of horrific burns, and is constantly leaving the room to giggle and whisper conspiratorially with Kiki; she is, in short, a manic pixie nightmare woman. Paul sneaks out of the apartment but is unable to make his way home as he’s short the fare for the subway, as there was a price change that went into effect at midnight, and he makes his way to a late night bar, where he befriends bartender Tom (John Heard) and finds himself the object of desire for dissatisfied, forty-something cocktail waitress Julie (Teri Garr). Tom takes pity on Paul and offers to give him the dollar that he needs to get home but is unable to open the register. Paul leaves his own apartment keys as collateral in order to take Tom’s keyring and collect the spare register key from Tom’s place. On his way out, he’s spotted by some of Tom’s neighbors, who accuse him of being the neighborhood burglar who has been hard at work in the area in recent weeks, but he manages to convince them otherwise. 

Returning to the bar, he comes upon the real prowlers (Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong) loading Kiki’s life size papier-mâché sculpture of a screaming man into their van, and he scares them off. Returning the sculpture to Kiki’s apartment, he finds her in the middle of a BDSM session with a hulking man named Horst, who scolds him for running off on Marcy. Paul attempts to apologize to Marcy but finds that she has overdosed on barbiturates. When he goes to Kiki and Horst for help, he finds that they’ve left a note saying they’ve gone to a club. Paul calls the police to report Marcy’s death and returns to the bar to return Tom’s keys. Tom has closed the bar for half an hour, but Julie, who lives across the street, invites him in from the rain. Her apartment matches her beehive hairdo, which shows that she’s stuck in the 1960s; it’s pink, decorated with the occasional rainbow, and stocked with an entire shelf of Aqua Net. After a few more contrived coincidences and turns of the vice that’s gripping Paul, he ultimately finds himself at the mercy of a mob that’s out for the blood of the neighborhood burglar, led by an irate ice cream truck driver named Gail (Catherine O’Hara). Will this be the end of Rico? 

After Hours is a very funny movie, and it’s a shame that it’s not considered one of the essentials in the director’s oeuvre. Paul’s initial situation is a familiar one, in which one finds themself in the home of someone that they barely know but slowly comes to the realization that instability can present as cute quirkiness on first impression, and has to extricate oneself with as much finesse as possible. From there, the continuous downward tumble and increasingly hostile interactions with the bizarre characters who haunt Soho’s streets during the darkest hours of the night make for a hilarious, anxiety-inducing social nightmare. It reads like an early version of Beau is Afraid, in which an ill-equipped everyman must grapple with an increasingly bizarre reality. Here, it’s because everyone involved is connected (Tom is, of course, the boyfriend with whom Marcy had a fight earlier in the night) and are caricatures of normal people with their neuroses turned all the way up. This makes for some very funny characters who are still well-observed. One of the bits that I enjoyed the most was when Julie invites Paul up to her apartment out of the rain while he waits for Tom to reopen the bar, and she puts on a Monkees record. When she realizes that Paul is in a somber state after finding a dead body, she soundtracks the new mood by playing Joni Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morning,” seamlessly changing the records. From the punks who try to forcibly shave Paul’s hair into a Mohawk at Club Berlin to the woman who lives beneath the club in a cluttered museum of antiques to a neighborhood that’s as trigger-happy for mob justice as Springfield, everyone is a portrait of a weirdo, and I loved After Hours for that. 

Three years after After Hours, screenwriter Joseph Minion would pen Vampire’s Kiss, known to the general public as the image source of an infamous Nicolas Cage meme, but which has a similar sense of humor to this one. This came right on the heels of another Scorsese comedy, The King of Comedy, which found a balance between being a funny comedy and a genuine thriller, and King continued the Scorsese tradition from Taxi Driver of having the source of danger be the character that we spend the film with. This one not only breaks that tradition by making Paul more of a Hitchcockian falsely-accused-man-on-the-run archetype who’s mostly the victim of circumstance (and a few poorly considered lies), but also in tone from King, having more of Minion’s fingerprints on it than Scorsese’s. There are no long tracking shots that are a hallmark of the director’s filmography, no fancy camera movement, just workmanlike competency, but this allows more room for the comedy to breathe, to the film’s benefit.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Odyssey (2026)

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For the first hour of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, I found myself somewhat bored. As I sat in the theater, staring up at the screen, I felt a sense of dread creeping over me as I wondered whether the whole film would play out as that first third did, like a well-produced but ultimately faithful-to-a-fault PBS adaptation of Homer’s poem. As a filmmaker, one of the things that makes Nolan’s work so widely accessible is his ear for expository dialogue. If it weren’t for all the spectacle that accompanies his films, most people would find them overly explanatory in a way that feels like educational media. I have gone on record as being unimpressed with one of this year’s most acclaimed and discussed films, Obsession, and admitted that my dislike for it was that I really thought it would be something new, fresh, and exciting, but found myself bored and frustrated with what, to me, was a conceptually stale piece of art. For sixty minutes of The Odyssey, I found myself asking the same questions that I did during Obsession: Why are we here? What’s the point of creating a film if it can’t bring something novel and noteworthy to an idea that I’ve seen dozens, perhaps hundreds of times before? Who is this even for? (In the case of Obsession, it turns out that the answer is “everyone but me, apparently,” but I digress.) Even the film’s first major effects sequence, which recounts the encounter that Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his men have with the cyclops Polyphemus, was both well-executed and a bit of a yawn. Was this really going to be all that The Odyssey would be? A very expensive, well-made adaptation of a very familiar story? Then, at around the hour mark, Circe (Samantha Morton) enters the film, and everything shifts. By the end, I was pleased with the journey, even if it was one that I had taken many times before, because Nolan had successfully managed to make the narrative resonant in a new way, even if every plot beat was familiar. 

You probably know this story. If you didn’t read it in college or high school, then you probably saw the nineties miniseries in one of its endless repeats on the Syfy (at the time the Sci-Fi) Channel, or you saw O Brother, Where Art Thou?, or you saw Odysseus played by a Jack Russell Terrier on Wishbone (my first exposure was an episode of DuckTales). After years of unsuccessfully sieging the walled city of Troy under the command of Greek king Agamemnon (Bennie Safdie), the clever hero Odysseus lights upon the idea of concealing a contingent of men within a hollowed out wooden horse to be presented to the Trojans as a gift and taken within its walls. Once inside, Odysseus and his men open the gates of Troy to Agamemnon and his waiting army, who storm Troy and pillage the city. Eight years later, Odysseus has yet to return home; his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) has spent the last few of these years being forced by the divine laws of hospitality to entertain a number of suitors who wish to marry her and take the throne of Ithaca. Chief among these is the boorish Antinous (Robert Pattinson), who loves to falsely recount his desire to join the Trojan campaign, claiming that Odysseus personally asked him to watch over his family instead. In reality, Antinous was drafted via lottery and traded places with a shepherd’s boy, Sinon (Elliot Page), who died in the sand of Troy’s shores. Penelope’s only real allies are Eumaeus (John Leguizamo), a blind herder of pigs who remains devoted to Odysseus even in his long absence, and Odysseus and Penelope’s son Telemachus (Tom Holland), who hadn’t even been weaned when Agamemnon summoned his vassals. 

Odysseus’s attempt to return to Ithaca alongside Eurylochus (Himesh Patel) and bring the men under his command home is long and arduous, as he follows the stations of the canon that most of us already know: the Cyclops shepherd, Circe turning the Ithacans into pigs, losing ships to the Laestrygonians (here reimagined as 10-foot men in otherworldly armor), wax in the ears to drown out siren song, the consultation with Tiresias’s spirit in the afterlife, navigating between Scylla and Charybdis, Odysseus’s men eating Apollo’s sacred cattle; it’s all here. As with a lot of modern “realistic” retellings of classics that were composed in an era when the contemporary audience believed that their deities walked among them, Nolan excises all of the gods and goddesses from this version, reassigning their roles in the events to others. The sole exception is Athena (Zendaya), who appears only to Odysseus and is mostly an externalization of his guilt over his role in the downfall of Troy and, by extension, the collapse of the myth of civilization. 

This extends into other realms, of course, as the overall “gritty” look of the film requires the excision of the more fantastic parts of the setting as well, like making Circe a woman in a roughhewn stone cottage wearing coarse, muted clothing rather than a daughter of the sun with all of the magnificence thereof. There are also concessions made for time and pacing, like removing the isle of lotus eaters entirely and moving the memory-clouding flower to Calypso (Charlize Theron)’s story and allowing the framing device of Odysseus recounting his journey to Nausicaa to be converted to his memory coming back as the effect of the lotus wears off. Telemachus’s travels are simplified to a single outing to visit Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) and Helen (Lupita Nyong’o) to learn about the fate of his father. Even this condensation of plot elements to make the narrative tighter is nothing new. This is a foundational narrative that’s nearly three thousand years old, and it’s changed and had more permutations than could ever realistically be traced. 

So what’s Nolan doing with it here? He blends in sources from The Iliad and even extra-Homeric texts (Sinon appears in neither The Iliad or The Odyssey, and his role here as the deceiver of the Trojans is taken from Virgil’s Aeneid) to weld together a cohesive story, but also leaves out certain factors that some readers would consider integral to the narrative. The one that I find most revealing about Nolan’s motivation is that he’s made Odysseus’s guilt the central focus of his character motivation, but only his guilt about the sacking of Troy, not about his role in the instigation of the Trojan War itself, which is entirely left out. Odysseus’s love for Penelope led him to introduce the pact that allowed Agamemnon to call his vassals to war in the first place, but Odysseus doesn’t blame himself for the war in Illium because his era is one in which such scrabbling is part of the natural order. His world is one that is utterly alien to us in the modern era, one of gods and monsters and “apparent magic,” but which is nonetheless undergirded by its own sense of morals and ethics, just as our society is. 

Chief among these divinely demanded statutes is xenia, herein referred to as one of “Zeus’s Laws,” which was an ancient nigh-universally observed mandate from on high that travellers and beggars be treated with hospitality. Odysseus’s decision to falsely enter Troy by pretending to offer up a tribute to a goddess worshipped by both parties is the equivalent to a war crime. It’s so unthinkable that it effectively destroys the fabric of society itself, exposing an existential truth that the world of observed communal social order is a thin membrane on which we all float above a roiling abyssal ocean of darkness and mayhem, reinforced only by our shared belief in it and our commitment to upholding it. For as slimy as he is, Antinous only ever bends the rules of xenia, or takes advantage of them for his own benefit, but even he never conceives of the entire system being upended. Odysseus bears the weight of understanding that his “brilliant” war tactic has plunged the world entire into a darkness that he created and cannot escape, represented by many characters voicing their fears about the fabled “men from the sea” who terrorize the coasts and don’t follow Zeus’s laws. Even before he realizes that these rumors are about him and his men, he seems keenly aware that he has brought an end to civilization as he knows it. As a new take on this text, it justifies its existence.

That having been said, this film still falls victim to the pitfalls of Nolan’s work and mainstream filmmaking in general. This month, I watched all four parts of the Soviet-produced War and Peace adaptation from the 1960s, and I was continuously struck by the raw, miserable, hellish conditions of war that Sergei Bondarchuk captured with his lens. It left me thinking a lot about the criticism that Western cinema can never be truly anti-war because of the nature of our filmic language and the way that our cultural narratives justifying mass slaughter trickle down into everything that we create. The Odyssey has this problem. I’m fairly confident in my reading of Nolan’s authorial intent regarding Odysseus’s motivations in this telling, so I have little doubt that he intended to make the scenes of the sack of Troy harrowing, but the heavy stylization and action movie editing undermines any anti-war sentiment that the film might be trying to capture. I think Nolan probably believed that he was making something with that thesis, but he just can’t help himself when he’s got his hands on an IMAX camera. 

I’ve long been critical of The Dark Knight Rises, a film that I think is best consigned to being forgotten as a piece of reactionary propaganda. Defenders of the film cite that the infiltration of the Occupy Gotham movement by Bane and his terrorist cronies is a statement about the ease with which progressive movements can be co-opted by fascists. I can’t abide this reading, since the film that I watched was one that was narratively patronizing to progressives as sheep who can be easily misled, a film in which everything goes to pot when the police are disempowered in a city that can only be saved by getting the police back on the streets, a story in which a character living in a hellish Gotham under fascist control proudly says “Look around, this is what we wanted!” That film may not seem like it came out all that long ago, but it hasn’t even been 15 years. The state of our society has just fallen so far since then that it feels like an artifact of a time that’s almost as alien as Homer’s. 

I don’t think that Nolan himself is a reactionary the way that many of his detractors do (I mostly lay my issues with TDKR at the feet of David S. Goyer), but his Odyssey feels like an attempt to grapple with the reality of a dissolved social order. The sack of Troy is predicated on the breaking of a sacred trust, one that results in the dissolution of the social order and the end of an era of certainty built on universally accepted norms. It is the January 6th of antiquity, the act that unmakes civilization not because of its inherent violence but because it exposes how fragile our “reality” is, the end of normalcy before a dark age. For all of the discourse online from those whose moral compasses are broken, who racistly criticize the casting of Nyong’o or insist on misgendering Page, they’re all utterly missing the point that their effigy of “woke” Christopher Nolan overlooks the direct rebuke of reactionaries and right-wingers. He’s doing so by invoking traditional moderate values—implicit acceptance of institutionalized, lineage-based rulership, great man theory of history, and even the disruption of social order as chaotic and inherently negative—but their frothing madness at the perceived slights of a non-white Athena and Helen means that they’ll never even see the real way that Nolan is criticizing them. It may be one of his more visually impressive works, but it’s not the most thematically consistent, perhaps for reasons that Nolan is unable to see from within the horizon of his own self-understanding. It’s worth seeing as an insight into the director’s soul, and if it gets more people to read pre-modern literature, I’m all for it.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

War and Peace, Part IV: Pierre Bezukhov (1967)

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At the end of this final installment of the War and Peace tetraptych, my viewing companion and I sat in stunned silence. After a few minutes, I said “That was a stupendous thing.” I tried to think of something else to say, then simply repeated, “That was a stupendous thing.” Although what these films have managed to accomplish thus far was already breathtaking, the final film, subtitled Part IV: Pierre Bezukhov, pushes into something even more astonishing. After three films in which war is a metaphorical hell, an endlessly churning pit of misery, pain, despair, and death, this film opens with Field Marshal Kutuzov, who has mismanaged every battle he has overseen so far, surrounded by a small war council. Kutukov refuses to answer Napoleon’s demands for surrender, citing that in so doing his legacy would be forever tarnished as a coward with no honor; he instead has the Russian army retreat and leave Moscow behind. One of the other attendees cites that “the game” is not over, harkening back to Prince Andrei Bolkonsky (Vyacheslav Tikhonov)’s soliloquy in Part III that conceptualizing war as a game is a monstrous thing. Moscow is evacuated; Count Pierre Bezukhov (Sergei Bondarchuk, who also directs once again) demands that his servants find him peasant’s clothing and a pistol so that he can stay behind, with the intention of assassinating Napoleon. This leads him to part ways with the Rostov family, including young Natasha (Ludmila Savelyeva), as they flee the city. The Rostovs allow their carts and carriages to be used to assist in the evacuation of injured soldiers. Although they are initially unaware, they find themselves spiriting away none other than Andrei himself, who is dying after the Battle of Borodino. 

What follows is one of the most harrowing things that I have ever seen. Part IV takes the metaphorical hell of war and makes it as literal as possible, as the historic Russian tactic of setting Moscow ablaze in retreat to prevent pillaging by the French army turns Moscow into Perdition itself. After his tearful goodbye to Natasha and her family, including young Petya, who demanded to be allowed to join the army at the beginning of Part III, Pierre wanders a city engulfed in flames. Cyclones of large pieces of ash fill the air like swarms of birds as fire consumes everything; the air is filled with wailing, crying, and screaming. French soldiers loot the city, tearing down religious icons and pilfering precious metals, running about with mad glee like the minions of the devil himself. The evacuees from Moscow can see the entire city burning on the horizon, turning the night sky a disconcerting red. I will be haunted by it. Pierre manages to befriend a French captain by preventing him from being murdered by a drunken Moscovian, then rescues a child from a burning building, but when he attempts to stop a French soldier from assaulting a beautiful woman, a brawl with several soldiers breaks out. Pierre manages to put up an impressive fight but is eventually arrested. He is declared a Russian spy by a French general and incarcerated, where he befriends a man who, despite his many injuries, still sees beauty in life, and even shares his meager rations with a dog that has followed the death march that Pierre now finds himself part of. In the midst of this, he is forced to watch as several of his fellow prisoners are tied to posts and killed via firing squad, including a teenage boy, and he observes as several of the young soldiers who hold the rifles weep openly as they are ordered to shoot. 

When Andrei is recognized, the Rostov family takes him back to his estate, where he is reunited with his young son and his sister, Princess Maria, who, alongside Natasha, nurses him in his final days. When Natasha first goes to him, his failing vision captures her in her white nightgown as a blurry figure somewhere between bride and angel, and she begs his forgiveness in his final hours, which he grants (although I’m still not entirely certain that she really did anything wrong, at least not to my modern eye). It’s then that the film transitions into one of the entire seven hour experience’s most astonishing sequences: the death of Prince Andrei. After a tear-filled conversation with Natasha (Bondarchuk does something really masterful here by composing the screen as if they are looking into each other’s eyes, but Natasha is ever so slightly further from the camera, so that they are each looking directly ahead but not making eye contact, as if they are already no longer on the same “plane”), Andrei has a series of dying visions that are surreal in a way that nothing prior to this has been. He sees a mass of people walking toward him, the din of their voices incomprehensible, appearing as phantom projections on a wall and then disappearing, with the collapse of Andrei’s vision conveyed via a first person point of view shot that shudders and falls. Andrei, suddenly clean shaven and whole again in his mind’s eye, wearing his crisp white dress uniform, becomes translucent and crosses the room in which he’s dying in order to try and hold a door closed against his inevitable end, only to fail and then see himself, tiny and distant, a minute white figure in a great and dark expanse. It’s confusing and frightening while also being comforting, which is quite a feat to pull off in any medium. 

Death is described in Pierre’s inner monologue almost immediately thereafter. As the occupying French troops retreat from Moscow before winter comes and either freezes or starves them to death, their prisoners are forced to march with them, and any stragglers who fall behind are shot without hesitation. This happens to Karataev, the man whom Pierre befriended, and Pierre has his own psychedelic experience as he grapples with the meaning of all of this horror. “He had flowed forth and disappeared,” Pierre says, “it’s all so simple and clear. How was it that I had not known before? Life is everything.” He sees the world as a globe, which becomes an out of focus image that may be a dandelion, and as he has a breakdown when the prisoners and their guards make camp for the night, he looks up at the stars and, as if drawing the lines in a connect-the-dots puzzle, perceives the connection between all men, between all life. “Who is doing this to me?” he asks himself at one point in the film, and sees the faces of his enemies. Pierre realizes that he is both the imprisoned and the imprisoner, that he and every one of the people around him and beyond are the same, not individual souls but all facets and fragments of a singular humanity coming into conflict with itself, confronting and fighting, loving and dying, meaningful and meaningless. 

In the final half hour, the French spirit is broken, although not before the last battle of the war costs the life of one more innocent, Natasha’s younger brother Petya. He falls on the field of battle after spending the previous evening playing about the camp and imagining the war to come, before his innately sweet nature causes him to prompt the camp’s leader to allow a captured French drummer boy to dine with them. His death feels as if it’s supposed to have some meaning, but I’m also not entirely certain that I ever fully discerned what the thesis of this massive epic was supposed to be. I’ve written before that I’ve interpreted the many scenes in which the generation that preceded Andre and Pierre’s was one afflicted with an intentional blindness to reality, and there are scenes here that seem to continue that idea, most notably the denial and disbelief that Countess Rostova experiences when she learns of Petya’s death. In the end, however, the literally half blind Field Marshal Kutuzov gives a rousing speech that is positioned as a counterpoint to one delivered in voice over (via letter) by Napoleon, in which he praises the Grande Armée for their spectacular victories in the European theater of war. It is self-aggrandizing (“It is my wish that you should see your emperor clothed in grandeur and glory worthy of the sovereign of the first nation of the world,” and so on), and as he speaks, the camera glides past a seemingly endless line of dejected French soldiers marching homeward in the snow, the ground around them littered with the fallen, frost-bitten, frozen bodies of their comrades in arms. When Kutuzov’s men are reunited with the freed prisoners, including Pierre, the marshal tells his men that although they could not spare themselves in time of war, they can show mercy to their enemy, before laughing and saying, “No one invited them anyway.” I half-expected him to have the French POWs slaughtered in that moment, but instead he rides off on his white horse in triumph, which I found baffling as a goodbye to a character I was theretofore certain we were supposed to despise. 

In the final minutes, Pierre returns to a Moscow that is being rebuilt. The narration reveals that Pierre has realized “with his whole being and life” that “man is created for happiness,” “joyfully” contemplating “the ever-changing, great, incomprehensible, infinite life.” As he is reunited with Natasha, our view becomes that of God flying over the countryside, as the narrator closes the film by saying that “all thoughts that have tremendous consequences are simple.” 

There is very little more to say about War and Peace other than “That was a stupendous thing.” Try as I might, I cannot fully comprehend the effort that putting on a production of this scope and magnitude required. It is one of the finest pieces of art with which I have had the good fortune to commune, and perhaps the most harrowing depiction of the hell that men make for one another on this earth. The enormity of it alone would make it one of the greatest films ever made, but at no point does the scale of the work supersede its beauty, or its invoked ugliness. That this magnificent film is available to anyone in the world with an internet connection via MosFilms’ YouTube channel is a blessing, one that should be taken advantage of at the reader’s earliest advantage. Staggering, harrowing, beautiful, and timeless.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Irony, Sincerity, Hilarity, Clarity

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Does a comedy owe its audience even an ounce of heartfelt sincerity, or is it enough to just tell jokes? Is ironic detachment an open excuse for artistic laziness, or can it be a useful tool that cuts deeper than straightforward sentimentality when wielded with intent? I recently took in a double feature of new-release comedies that challenged my relationship with ironic, bad-on-purpose humor, which I used to enjoy without reservation half a lifetime ago. In my early 20s, I would’ve been over the moon for David Wain’s latest ironic joke-fest Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, which is so relentlessly, purposelessly stupid it’s almost indistinguishable from a hack studio comedy from a lesser mind. Instead, I swooned for the equally ironic but much more purposeful Maddie’s Secret, a new John Early vehicle that parodies hack TV movies & afterschool specials of a bygone era while also honoring their ability to make an audience cry.  Both were funny on their own terms, but only one made me genuinely feel something, which is an effect I didn’t know I needed in a comedy until I saw it was possible.

To paraphrase the great Robert Bresson, Gail Daughtry offers neither beautiful images nor necessary ones. The film starts in Everywhere, Suburbia, mimicking the imagistic sensibilities of a studio comedy from at least two decades ago. When our titular plucky hairstylist (Zoey Deutch) leaves the safety of the suburbs behind for a life-changing adventure in Los Angeles, the images shift to mimic the B-roll stock footage of an Entertainment Tonight segment showcasing the glitz & glam of Hollywood living . . . also from at least two decades ago. Everything you see in Gail Daughtry is intentionally, hideously stale, and much of its humor relies on its jokes being punishingly unfunny, all for the sake of above-it-all ironic detachment. If there’s any emotional investment in its low-effort mockery of pre-existing entertainment, it’s in the film’s broad parody of the Old Hollywood classic The Wizard of Oz. Gail Daughtry’s name is a mirrored slant-rhyme of Dorothy Gale’s. The wizard she hopes to meet in the emerald city of Los Angeles is Jon Hamm (playing himself), whom she’s desperate to sleep with after her fiancée improbably acts on his own “celebrity sex pass,” to even the score. Along the way, she gathers a ragtag group of daffy bozos: a brainless management-agency desk clerk (Ben Wang), a heartless paparazzo (Ken Marino), and the cowardly John Slattery (again, himself). Along for the entire ride is her pet gay bestie Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), another anagrammatic reference to Toto. The Wizard of Oz homages are genuinely cute & heartwarming throughout, acting as the one shining beacon of effort & sincerity in a comedy that would otherwise rather not bother.

Maddie’s Secret is a different story. Ostensibly, the film is a winking, ironic parody of the made-for-TV “women’s issues” movie Kate’s Secret (1986), now set in the modern world of culinary “content creators.” Only, it’s not clear exactly how much of that parody is meant to be taken as a joke. John Early stars as the titular Maddie, reviving the same exaggerated drag mannerisms he brought to his 2021 “redux” parody of Showgirls. Early’s performance is a kind of post-ironic magic trick, one that can only be compared to Divine’s domestic melodrama performances in Hairspray & Polyester. You immediately forget that Maddie is a woman played by a male comedian; you just accept her as a person worthy of the world’s love, from the hairs on her stringy blonde wig to the everyday commonality of her sagging breasts (arguably, the MVP movie prop of the year) to the sensible shoes on her feet. Maddie’s in-movie audience loves her too, as she finds fast fame online making relatable cooking videos that outpace the view counts of her more pristinely put-together coworkers (most notably, Claudia O’Doherty as her test kitchen employer’s queen bitch). The fame gets to her, though, exacerbating her private struggles with bulimia so violently that she’s voluntarily institutionalized. From there, the movie takes a detour into Girl, Interrupted homage, introducing the audience to a clique of other women in crisis to fall in love with (including Vanessa Bayer as her ditzy roommate and Kate Berlant as her predatory lesbian sidekick). Everyone involved is technically putting in ironic, going-through-the-motions comedic performances, but the effect of the scene-to-scene drama is still deeply, painfully heartfelt. It’s a lot like watching an actual vintage made-for-TV melodrama on Lifetime, in that it can make you laugh and cry, often simultaneously.

Some of the disparity between Maddie’s Secret & Gail Daughtry‘s respective relationships with visual, effortful beauty is that the imagistic standards of all media have declined over time. Gail Daughtry may borrow its story structure from The Wizard of Oz, but its visual cues mock the pedestrian, smartphone-quality digital footage of modern filmmaking — intentionally deglamming & demystifying the Hollywood dream factory. Meanwhile, Maddie’s Secret is set in the world of digital content creation, but it pulls its visual cues from an era when even made-for-TV movies were expected to be relatively beautiful. The standards of basic craft were just higher in past decades, so that certain lighting & framing choices in a TV movie about bulimia could be mistaken for a Fassbinderian homage to Douglas Sirk. As such, I should probably cut Wain’s film some slack for being so aggressively ugly & mundane, since its lifeless visual aesthetic is itself a critical commentary on modern comedic media production. It’s just difficult to do so while there’s another comedy in theaters that proves ironic humor does not necessarily require a lack of effort, emotion, or purpose. Maddie’s Secret looks great, lands laughs, and earns tears while maintaining the same dedication to feature-length ironic parody. It can be done, and it is worth the effort.

-Brandon Ledet

War and Peace, Part III: The Year 1812 (1967)

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War and Peace: Part III: The Year 1812 opens with the same shot which ended Part II: Natasha Rostova, as Napoleon’s army of thousands enters the Russian theater of war. We then return to Russian high society, where the final lines of the previous film, regarding war as an event “beyond human nature, and human reason” are repeated over the image of another gala, but this one is quickly interrupted by the arrival of soldiers onto the ballroom floor, disrupting everything and turning the perfectly formed lines of group dances into chaos. The image contrasts Napoleon’s incoming army, so regimented and moving in perfect union, to the disruption of that same uniformity on the home front. There’s a strange air of casual indifference to the war among those far from the front lines, until it’s nearly knocking down their doors. The incompetence of Field Marshal Kutuzov, who eventually oversees (and utterly botches) the Battle of Bordino, is a matter of aristocratic gossip, to be pulled out, picked over, and joked about at fancy parties. 

Part III, thus, ends up being a story about the ignorance of an older generation. I’ve puzzled over what I perceive to be an ideological disconnection between the Soviet philosophy and these films’ romanticized depiction of the aristocracy of the era. Pierre Bezukhov (Sergei Bondarchuk) and Andre Bolkonsky (Vyacheslav Tikhonov)’s world is one of ornamented decadence; Natasha Rostova (Ludmila Savelyeva), who is once again reduced to little more than a background character for this outing, is both a product of that lifestyle and an object of desire within it. The Year 1812 is the shortest of the four films, at only eighty minutes, and it’s divided neatly in half at the midpoint by the beginning of the Bordino conflict, with that battle playing out over the last half of the runtime. The first half is itself divided in two, with the first quarter of the film focusing on what’s going on back in Moscow and St. Petersburg and the second quarter depicting the preparations for the war that will take up the back half. In the beginning, we meet a boy who can’t be more than ten years old, begging his family to allow him to join the army, despite, as his guardian says, his lips still being wet with his mother’s milk. We move from here to the Bolkonsky home, where the elder Prince Andrei is being tended to in his dying days by Princess Maria, the younger Prince Andrei’s sister, who is also overseeing the raising of Andrei’s son. 

Despite increasingly bad news about the Russian Army’s performance on the borders, including a letter from Andrei the younger saying that he fears the very camp he’s writing from will be taken by the French by the time it finds its way home, Andrei the elder doesn’t absorb any of this. It would appear at first to be dementia, but when he finally understands the peril in which Russia finds itself on his death bed, it’s an equally valid interpretation that he had simply rejected reality with a clear mind all along. This is mirrored in the more war-oriented parts of the film, where we see that the jokes that the upper class have been making about Field Marshal Kutuzov are apt; he’s unable to mount his horse, is winded at the slightest exercise, and, in a piece of on-the-nose characterization, blind in one eye. There is a boy in his camp that’s barely any older than the child we saw at the very beginning, and may even be the boy to whom that first child was referring when he said “Obolensky’s younger than I and he’s going.” There are other parallels, but the reading I take from the film is that this is a story that is made to address the inadequacies of the generation that preceded Pierre and Andre’s, one that is full of fools, truth-deniers, and incompetents who rose to power through nothing but birthright alone. The nineteenth century has come, and although the new generation sees things as they are, the trappings of the old ways and their attendant wealth are still with our characters (and still empower them). I must admit, however, that I haven’t quite parsed out what value the Soviets perceived in all the gilded filigree of the monied nobility, and how they were able to square what appears to be a celebration thereof with the anti-aristocratic political ideation of the government that funded and empowered the creation of this unbelievably massive undertaking.

In truth, I’m beginning to feel that I may not understand the actual overall thesis at all. Shortly before the Battle of Borodino, latrines are being dug and maimed soldiers are borne away from the lines of engagement in carts when Pierre, resplendent in expensive, clean white clothing (and a top hat to boot), appears to meet his friend Andrei and offer his services. Following the dual narratives in Part I, which saw Pierre and Andrei separately coming to the realization of just how precious and fragile life is, it feels redundant to have them seem to learn this lesson again. Maybe there’s something deeply Russian about revisiting this again, that the cyclic and reiterative structure is a literary device to which I’m unaccustomed or that it’s aiming for something that I’m failing to perceive. It’s also possible that it’s simply becoming more difficult to keep track of the intricacies of the narrative, or perhaps this is merely a reminder of their values when faced with another miserable war. Andrei’s only real notable moment of agency in this is that he rejects a staff position under Kutuzov and instead remains in a command position in actual combat, which underlines a soliloquy he has about how war is not a game and that the men above him in the chain of command are too far removed from the horror of it all. And it is grisly, and nightmarish, and through all of it, Kutuzov sits in a state of relaxation, enjoying tea and canapes while filtering out the reports of death and destruction that surround him. Like the elder Prince Andrei, he only hears what he wants to hear and turns his literal blind eye to the reality of the rapidly deteriorating battle around him. As a result of his ineptitude, Pierre even ends up getting splattered in the blood of the young attendant who might be Obolensky. 

It feels redundant, at this point, to go on praising the masterful filmmaking here, but it really is spectacular. War is once again hell, the screen filled with images from nightmares, smoke and blood and gunpowder and fear. Anatole, who almost eloped with Natasha last time, has his leg amputated, which is witnessed by Andrei (and the audience), and it’s nauseating. We go from a scene in which a grateful army descends on a small lake in the nude and en masse to bathe themselves, and they seem jovial, and it undercuts it even further when we see these same men gutted and killed in the fog of war. I’m still trying to fully grasp at every different thesis that War and Peace is laying before the audience; I can only hope that Part IV is capable of wrapping up all of those threads and braiding them into a tapestry that fills in the gaps in my interpretation. We’ll find out soon enough. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

War and Peace, Part II: Natasha Rostova (1965)

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The second part of Sergei Bondarchuk’s four-part adaptation of War and Peace contrasts and serves as companion to the previous film, which focused primarily on the “war” of the title, while Part II: Natasha Rostova, instead gives us a portrait of “peace,” as much as such a thing can exist in the heartland when war is at the borders. Natasha Rostova (Ludmila Savelyeva) played a fairly minor role in the first film, where she appeared as a young girl at a fête hosted in her family home in honor of her older brother Nikolai, before he went off to the war effort alongside Andrei Bolkonsky (Vyacheslav Tikhonov). There, her childhood innocence was a counterpoint to the war that we would soon see, and served as a reminder of what the war was meant to protect. Here, she is still naive, but is reaching adulthood. When she goes to her first ball, we hear her internal monologue as she panics that no one asks her to dance. Encouraged by Pierre (Bondarchuk), who is now officially Count Bezukhov, Andrei takes his “protege” for a spin around the parquet, and it only takes one waltz for sixteen year old Natasha to be utterly smitten with him. 

Andrei, who has been in a state of depression after recovering from his near death in the last film only to arrive home in time to watch his wife die in childbirth, ponders an apparent dead oak in early springtime, and compares himself to it, a hollowed shell that only seems alive. After meeting Natasha, he is reinvigorated, and passes the same tree, only to discover that it has put out new green leaves for the spring. He appears at the Rostova’s home and asks for Natasha’s hand, but states that they should not announce their engagement and instead delay marriage for a year, ostensibly so that Natasha can have some life experiences and decide if marriage to an older man is really what she wants for herself. (It’s worth noting here that I have no idea how old Andrei is supposed to be, but Tikhonov was almost forty.) He goes away to further convalesce abroad, and she goes nearly mad with missing him. Pierre has made some kind of peace with his wife Helene, and she attends the Moscow Opera with Natasha in tow, which leads to the girl meeting Helene’s brother Anatole (Vasily Lanovoy). Anatole was part of Pierre’s old drinking crowd with Dolokhov (Oleg Yefremov), the man Pierre wounded but did not kill in a duel in part one, and is an utter cad. At Dolokhov’s suggestion, he begins to pursue Natasha, despite already having married a foreign woman while serving abroad. When confronted about this by his sister, he declares that either the other marriage is irrelevant in Russia, in which case he gets what he wants, or he’ll be found to be a bigamist and driven out of polite society, in which case he will still get what he wants, which is Natasha’s innocence. Eventually, Natasha’s hostess learns of her plans to elope with Anatole and chastises her, and Natasha breaks down in tears; Anatole’s attempts to abscond with Natasha are repelled by Andrei’s watchmen. When Pierre sees Anatole’s eyes light up at the prospect of being bought off, he calls him a “vile, heartless brood.” 

Andrei is, ironically, no prince either. In the first film, he tries to convince Pierre to never marry, citing his unhappy union with the very pregnant Lise, whom he completely abandons in order to join the war effort despite there being no expectation of him to do so. Textually, it’s a good thing that he did, as he will prove invaluable to the war and a great leader later, but that’s immaterial to his motivations. He returned from the Battle of Austerlitz just in time to bear witness to Lise dying in childbirth and tell her that he loved her and regretted leaving her alone. This time around, he immediately falls in love with a child (the standards of the time notwithstanding), tells her he’ll marry her but not for a year, and then disappears again. (It appears that this delay was a demand by Andrei’s father in the source text, but no explicit reason is given in the film other than the one cited above, that she should be allowed to gather some life experiences before getting hitched to an older man.) When she does become excited at the prospect of marrying him, after spending weeks yearning for him to return to the Rostova family compound, we get to see him react in real time as his affection turns to disgust the moment that the marriage proposal is accepted. I’m not sure if this is an intentionally ugly portrait of Andrei, to show that he’s a man who immediately stops desiring something the moment that he actually has it, but whether this is a deviation from the source text or something that was not considered in the novel is irrelevant; it’s textual here. In the film’s closing minutes, Pierre reminds him of a conversation that the two had in St. Petersburg regarding morality and ethics. “I said that a fallen woman should be forgiven,” Andrei admits, “but I didn’t say that I could forgive her; I can’t” (emphasis added). As someone going into this adaptation with no real knowledge of Tolstoy’s novel, I had assumed that Pierre was one of its heroes, but I’m not so sure now. 

As Natasha breaks down, declaring her life to be over, Pierre cheers her up by telling her that if he were younger and single, he would beg for her hand, and this appears to break her out of her funk. Immediately after, Pierre is taking a sleigh ride when he sees Napoleon’s Comet overhead, and that narration informs us: “It seemed to Pierre that this falling star was a symbol of what was passing in his own softened and uplifted soul.” An image of the comet in the night sky is suddenly harshened by the crashing of a loud, dramatic scare chord, then some peasants crossing themselves, which was a delightful transition. The year “1812” rolls up onto the screen as ominous music plays, and the final image that we see is of Napoleon’s forces invading the western Russian frontier, promising more hideous war in the immediate future, “contrary to human reason, and human nature.” 

After the explosive, violent nature of Part I: Andrei Bolkonsky, Part II: Natasha Rostova is a bit of a breather, which makes the pacing of the whole thing feel slightly less thrilling in comparison. Despite being nearly an entire third shorter than Andrei, Natasha feels longer. The less dense narrative events are given some space to stretch out; it is, perhaps, too much breathing room. Internal monologue is a tricky thing to adapt to film as a medium, and one of the go-to failed examples that always comes to mind is David Lynch’s Dune, in which different characters’ thoughts are shared with the audience via whispery voice over. That’s not a novel idea in and of itself, but everything gets a bit muddied when the audience is bombarded with the thoughts of dozens of people. That tactic was also present in Andrei, but that film was cramming so many things into its long runtime that one didn’t have time to contemplate it. Here, we find the Rostova women preparing for a ball at around eight minutes into the film, and there’s an unfathomably complicated tracking shot as they all get ready, and then at about nine minutes in, they arrive to the gala, where we get another extremely impressive tracking shot that moves from the grand staircase in the entryway of a palace, goes up the stairs in order to watch Natasha and her cousin ascend, then enter the ballroom and wind through the various corridors, and it’s four minutes without a single cut. It’s beautiful and masterful, but we spend a lot of time at this party, to the point that one starts to have a little too much time without anything progressing. One becomes a bit tired of the pageantry and starts to wonder when we’re going to just get on with it, especially since there are still many hours left to go in this story. 

Where the film does see great success is in its style. One gets the feeling that Bondarchuk was delighted to get to play indoors after what must have been a miserable shoot on the first film. There are several sections in which the film becomes a split screen, divided between warm and cold colors, as characters have conversations that parallel one another. It makes for a beautiful tableau:


On the beauty of its images alone, this film safely rides into “excellent” territory, despite not living up to the standard set by Andrei. The ominous cliffhanger ending is a delight, and I’m looking forward to seeing how this plays out in the following segments. You can find Part II on Mosfilm’s YouTube channel here.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

War and Peace, Part I: Andrei Bolkonsky (1965)

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How do you adapt a novel like Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a tome so notoriously lengthy (587,287 words) that, for over a century, merely having read it was considered a badge of honor, a sign of elite literary prowess? If you’re Paramount Pictures in the 1950s, you cast Audrey Hepburn as the teenaged ingenue Natasha Rostova opposite fifty-year-old Henry Fonda and forty-year-old Mel Ferrer, and you try to cram as much of the novel as you can into 208 minutes (admittedly a runtime not to be scoffed at). Not to be outdone, however, the Soviets decided that a Western War and Peace simply could not be allowed to be the film adaptation that everyone would remember, so they set out on a half-decade journey to create and release four different films, each roughly adapting one of the novel’s volumes. Four Soviet War and Peace films were released between 1965 and 1967, totaling over seven hours of runtiy. Having already seen what masters some of the Soviet filmmakers were, and what stunning pieces of filmmaking they created with The Cranes are Flying and Soy Cuba, when a friend suggested we pursue this massive undertaking, we leapt in with both feet. 

The three primary characters about which the narrative circles are Pierre Bezukhov (Sergei Bondarchuk, who also directed all four films), Andrei Bolkonsky (Vyacheslav Tikhonov), and Natasha Rostova (Ludmila Savelyeva), although Natasha’s involvement with the narrative of Part 1 is minimal. Pierre, the bastard son of an unfathomably wealthy Russian count, has just returned to St. Petersburg after having been educated in France; both his illegitimacy and his more French way of thinking make him socially awkward, especially as Napoleon is leading France against Russia’s allies at the time of Pierre’s homecoming. At a ball, he reunites with his friend, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who is at the crux of an existential crisis after growing disillusioned with the life of the aristocracy of St. Petersburg and bored with his socialite wife. To that end, he plans to join the war effort as an aide-de-camp to a Russian general, leaving his very pregnant wife in the care of his eccentric father, the elder Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, and his religious sister, the Princess Maria.

Despite Andrei’s warnings that Pierre should avoid the company of drunken roustabouts Anatole Kuragin and Fedor Dolokhov, Pierre ends up involved in an embarrassing bit of public drunkenness in which the three of them strap a policeman to a bear and throw him in a river (we do not get to witness this on screen, but we do see them drinking with the bear at a party immediately prior), resulting in Anatole and Pierre being expelled from St. Petersburg and Dolokhov being demoted in rank in the Russian army. When Count Bezukhov dies and recognizes Pierre as his legal heir, the new count becomes a desired party guest (and potential husband for any number of voluptuous aristocrats) overnight, and he finds himself courted by Helene Kuragin, Anatole’s sister, and the two wed despite Andrei’s admonitions against marriage in general. 

Dolokhov, Andrei, and Nikolai Rostov (the older brother of Natasha, who, like his sister, is less important here but becomes more so down the line) are all present at the Battle of Austerlitz, where Andrei is presumed to have died in battle. On the home front, Pierre becomes obsessed with the rumors that Helene and Dolokhov are having an affair, challenging Dolokhov to a duel. Despite Dolokhov’s military training, Pierre manages to shoot him, albeit not fatally, and Dolokhov misses his return shot. Pierre is horrified by the fact that he very nearly took another man’s life, becoming introspective and philosophical. Andrei, for his part, has had similar revelations in the field of war, and is revealed to his family to be alive when he returns home, just in time to witness his wife die in childbirth, realizing too late that he did truly love her, or so he says. 

It may not seem that this outline, although fairly complex (and admittedly oversimplified), could fill nearly two and a half hours of screentime, but it does, and marvelously. I’m writing this review after having only watched the first two parts, and while Part Two is more about the “peace” part of the original text’s title, Andrei Bolkonsky is very much about the war. Weary generals arrive to tell their Russian counterparts about their complete defeat in other campaigns, the war and its justifications (and the narcissistic self-justifications of those who participate) are a constant topic among every rung of society that we witness, and we are treated to a very protracted depiction of the Battle of Austerlitz. It’s the last of these that’s most fascinating, as it’s long been a topic of film criticism that the depiction of warfare, especially in American and other Western films, often tries to articulate an argument against war but fails because it cannot help but depict war as glorious and honorable because of the very nature of filmic language. (If you’re too online, you may recognize a shadow of this in the now ever-present “depiction equals endorsement” fallacy that will be a product of discourse from now until we’re all dead.) Or, to paraphrase an old Lindsay Ellis video, a movie might make war look bad, but doesn’t it also make it look kind of badass? 

Counter-examples to this thesis are usually films of extreme misery, like Come and See or Threads, and although War and Peace is not interested in forcing the audience to suffer like those films, it makes for a very effective piece of anti-war art. It’s also a reminder that, for most of human history, warfare was a straightforward affair of armament, topography, and the sheer number of human bodies one army could throw at the enemy’s own masses. This was the most expensive film that the Soviets ever made, and every penny (or ruble, as the case may be) is on screen. Twelve thousand actors march toward each other on a series of hills, shrouded in fog and gun smoke, and when they meet, they fight to the death, brutally and without sentimentality. Soldiers break under the pressure and flee while others die in pursuit of their own glory, but all of them are men who have been led to believe that fighting and dying for Mother Russia is all adventure and excitement, only to realize too late that war is only ever death and despair. It’s technically impressive and gorgeously shot, capturing what feels like an endless field of battle, stretching as far as the eye can see, and what that eye beholds is hell on earth. Andrei’s revelation of the fact that he rejected a life of leisure at home with his loving wife because he believed in the fantasy of glorious war is paralleled in Pierre’s horror at himself and the fact that he nearly allowed something as petty as his own insecurities to drive him to kill. 

It’s all very good stuff, and the film is inarguably a masterpiece, an epic made with machine-like precision that unfolds like a series of blooms, one after another. There are elements of its visual style that I think become even more clear in the following film, and I’ll talk about them as they become more concrete. As of the time of this writing, Mosfilm has the entire series, remastered from 70mm just a few years ago, up on their YouTube for free; Part One is here. If you love movies, do yourself a favor, and watch it right now. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Family Portraits: A Trilogy of America (2003)

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One of the buzzier cultural events on the cinematic calendar in recent years has been the annual celebration of Bleak Week, a repertory block designed to celebrate the “cinema of despair.” What started as a cheeky attempt to create a Shark Week style marathon for arthouse cinema’s most notoriously dour, punishing missives in the cultural hubs of Los Angeles & New York City has since escalated to a global-scale film festival. In its fifth year, Bleak Week was celebrated by over a hundred theaters in over seventy international cities, each with their own unique lineups of hopeless, despairing classics. It’s proven to be a remarkably popular event, which means that it’s only going to expand even further in the coming years before cinematic masochists everywhere tap out and declare that we’ve already suffered enough. As a result, repertory programmers across the globe are soon going to run out of the more obvious Todd Solondz, Michael Haneke, and Lars von Trier titles that would conveniently pad out an annual Bleak Week schedule, and they’re going to have to venture further into the cinematic abyss for bleak deep cuts to avoid repeating themselves. To that end, I would humbly recommend that rep programmers consider screening Douglas Buck’s 2003 short film collection Family Portraits: A Trilogy of America in future Bleak Week celebrations. Not only does it match the general Bleak Week vibe in its early-aughts edgelord miserabilism, but its structure as a tryptic of shorts would fit right in with the typical rhythms of a festival program (especially as a reprieve from lengthier Bleak Week regulars like Bela Tarr’s 7-hour stunner Sátántangó).

The subtitle “A Trilogy of America” makes Family Portraits sound like it tackles a much broader topic than what it actually covers. Buck’s trademark short films specifically depict the failures of American fatherhood, not America as a whole. The fathers in all three of its vignettes are dead-eyed, emotionally unavailable brutes guilty of domestic violence and incest. The other descriptor Buck used to describe these shocking portraits of bad dads was “a Suburban Holocaust trilogy,” signaling the shorts’ penchant for inhuman cruelty and their anonymous setting in the suburbs of Everywhere, America. Just as depressing as the passionless acts of familial violence is the pervasive blandness of the mise-en-scène, as these fucked up domestic dramas are staged in loveless, artless homes with cheap appliances and no distinguishing character. In “Cutting Moments”, a lonely housewife mutilates herself in a desperate attempt to distract her abusive husband from a televised baseball game. In “Home”, a lonely housewife struggles to conform to the self-flagellating religious rituals of her Evangelist husband, who’d rather slaughter his family than pursue a healthier relationship with his sexuality. In the longest, concluding segment, “Prologue”, a lonely housewife discovers a cache of her husband’s crude artworks that confess his double life as a small-town serial killer. In all three shorts, the men profiled are serial rapists of children and terminate their loveless marriages in horrifically violent acts. They’re all variations on the same bleak idea: that the American family unit is rotten at its core, that most of the nation’s bleakest horrors play out quietly behind closed suburban doors.

“Cutting Moments” was Douglas Buck’s student film, and you can feel a youthful eagerness to resolve the tension of its suburban despair in the shocking violence of its conclusion (which features gore effects from horror legend Tom Savini). By the time Buck made “Prologue”, he was much more willing to sit in a rotten mood without offering his audience the violent catharsis of genre filmmaking (despite horror mainstay Larry Fessenden’s appearance in a small role). Not only is “Prologue” the longest & quietest segment, but it’s also the only one where all of the sensational violence has already occurred years before the story’s start, and all the audience can do is chill in the aftermath. Its ice-cold sparseness in mood & setting recalls the arthouse abstraction of James Benning’s Landscape Suicide more than any shock-value horror title, whereas “Home” & “Cutting Moments” wouldn’t feel out of place as standalone segments in the Masters of Horror miniseries. In a way, Buck’s Family Portraits are their own mini Bleak Week program, condensed down to 100 convenient, squirmy minutes. The genius of the anthology’s sequencing is in how it gets bleaker as it goes along, despite opening with its most attention-grabbing acts of onscreen brutality. Whether you live in a city that has yet to initiate its own Bleak Week celebrations (such as New Orleans, which has yet to participate in this relatively new tradition) or you already miss that cold, despairing feeling and can’t wait for next year’s program to come around, Family Portraits: A Trilogy of America is the perfect Bleak Week microdose to help you get through the sunnier days of summer blockbuster season, as ruled over by the tyranny of joyful entertainment.

-Brandon Ledet

The Invite (2026)

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After the much derided (but enjoyed by me) Don’t Worry Darling, Olivia Wilde was put in director jail for a while, only returning this year with the premier of The Invite, a comedy starring Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penélope Cruz, and Edward Norton. Wilde and Rogan portray Angela and Joe, a couple whose married life is circling the drain, with Norton and Cruz as their upstairs neighbors Hawk and Pína. Taking place over the course of a single, awkward, semi-disastrous, illuminating dinner party that Angela and Joe host, the film plays out as a less biting, more comedic version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

The strains on Angela and Joe’s married life are self-evident from the get-go. Angela is a consummate (and bad) liar who, when caught in her dishonesty, simply freaks out until something else comes up conversationally that distracts from her lies. She prepares an elaborate meal and charcuterie in her excitement over the dinner, which was only planned earlier that morning after a chance encounter with Pína, despite lying to Joe that she told him about it the night before, and that he simply didn’t listen to her. When Hawk compliments her on a designer rug, she claims to have found it at a flea market, despite the audience seeing her unpack it and lay it out during the film’s opening title sequence. It appears that she has chosen to fill her life with these falsehoods (and too many podcasts) to distract herself from its banality, despite that life being one that she chose, as she admits that she got her degree and never did anything with it. For his part, Joe is also dissatisfied, seeing himself as a failure due to the one hit wonder nature of his band, his employment as a music instructor at a third-rate, non-prestigious conservatory, and the fact that the couple and their daughter live in the apartment that he grew up in. From within the horizon of her own unhappiness, Angela can only see that they live in a beautiful home, have a daughter who adores her father, and that Joe has an ideal job, regardless of the lack of respect that his institution commands. 

Into this dynamic comes the duo of Pína and Hawk, whom Angela is desperate to impress and for whom Joe has nothing but contempt, as he finds Hawk’s casual small talk in the elevator annoying, not to mention that the upstairs couple’s sex life is both very active and extremely loud. The dinner itself is a disaster, Angela’s souffle is completely burnt, Pína is revealed to be a vegan (debatable, given that her contribution to the meal is a flan) and unable to eat anything other than the charcuterie olives, and Angela’s lack of planning means that their only option for wine is a bottle given to them by Joe’s late uncle to save for a future anniversary. The two break off into pairs, with Pína joining Joe for a joint in his office while Angela gives Hawk a tour of the house that ends with tequila shots. With everyone properly socially lubricated, Hawk and Pína apologize for the frequent ruckuses upstairs before Joe can address the subject more hostilely, and admit that they are swingers who are interested in their hosts. Angela is fascinated by the possibilities that this opens up, and Joe, initially resistant to the idea based on the assumption that he would be excluded, also warms to the idea. The results are moderately disastrous, but not in the way that one would expect. 

The Invite is an adaptation of the 2020 Spanish film The People Upstairs, with a screenplay from Rashida Jones and a co-credited Will McCormack, whose only feature writing credit prior to this was as a co-story writer on Toy Story 4. The script is a delight, capturing a great deal of insight into relationships and their idiosyncratic disconnections (or, as Leo Tolstoy might put it, each failing marriage is “unhappy in its own way”) while never losing sight of the fact that this is first and foremost a comedy. That doesn’t mean that the film treats every part of its subject matter with levity, with a particularly noteworthy scene in which Norton’s Hawk delivers a sobering monologue about his failures as a husband to his now-deceased wife, but even that is undercut by the fact that this is Hawk’s self-rationalization for his current sexual curiosity. Penélope Cruz struts around this film with the knowledge and understanding that she is one of the sexiest people on earth, and her calm, casual demeanor is as magnetic to the audience as it is to an enraptured Angela. I also found myself charmed by Seth Rogen here; much of his film career consisted of variations on the single central idea of “pothead gets into A Situation,” which has never been a brand of humor that resonates with me. In The Invite, Rogen is still the snarky stoner providing commentary on everything that passes before him, but he’s also a sad, trapped man, and he conveys that complexity in a commanding way. 

The real revelation here, as is the case with all of her projects, is Olivia Wilde. Booksmart was universally praised while the critical reception to Don’t Worry Darling was… harsh. It’s impossible to fully sift out every part of that backlash to the latter that had more to do with the casting and behind-the-scenes controversy than the actual quality, but criticisms of Darling included that it was a bit of a mish-mash, never fully committing to any of its myriad ideas enough to coalesce into a solid thesis. While that wasn’t a problem for me, The Invite is a film that’s so confident and singular in its vision that it feels like a direct answer to that critique. This film is the twenty-first century reinvention of Woody Allen’s 70s adultery comedies (the film is even dedicated in memoriam to Diane Keaton), but Wilde has so thoroughly committed to separating the art from the artist that she has taken on Allen’s role as both director of the film and neurotic lead, with great success. Wilde reveals herself here as a very talented physical comedian as well; one of the biggest of my many laughs in this film came during Angela’s argument with Joe about cancelling the dinner, where the camera shifts to a downward angle that positions the front of the oven on the left side of the screen. Wilde crouches into the frame, almost feral, gesticulating to the souffle within. It’s very confident, but also strangely vulnerable, and I loved it. 

A story like this has the potential to feel extremely heteronormative, especially as it revolves around two typical man/woman pairs, one of them sexually repressed and the other more permissive and exploratory. While it stretches belief that a modern day couple would be completely unfamiliar with swinging, if this were an American film of even a decade ago, the main couple would open things up a little, have an awkward interaction that proves that they really love one another, and resolve to recommit to heteronormative routines. The Invite doesn’t do that; in fact, it never gets to the “sex” part of the sex comedy, and instead has the encounter collapse before it ever really gets started. Angela and Joe’s relationship isn’t rattled by temptation in order to come out stronger on the other side; instead, the revelations that emerge from both the need for trust and the rejection of anger that open relationships demand highlights that each is miserable. The ending is deliberately ambiguous, as Pína tells them directly that, in her opinion as a psychotherapist, their relationship is over, but also that a new relationship can form between two people if they try. It’s sweet without being overly sentimental, and it works.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Doll (Vaxdockan, 1962)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before: A lanky loner who works late nights and has uneasy relationships with women lives alone in an upstairs attic with an empty rocking chair, muttering increasingly disconcerting, violent things to an imagined woman who isn’t really there. Psycho was on my mind during the entire runtime of Arne Mattsson’s The Doll, which was produced in Sweden just two years after Alfred Hitchcock’s genre-defining masterwork. And yet, none of the film’s prominent critical commentary mentions Hitchcock by name, instead likening The Doll to the more sophisticated national cinema of Ingmar Bergman. Personally, I can’t read The Doll as anything other than an attempt to class up Psycho for an international arthouse crowd. It’s less of a direct photocopy than it is a cross-cultural echo, altered enough through translation that it gradually becomes its own distinct art piece. If nothing else, in the process of swapping out Norman Bates’s maternal corpse for a sexy department store mannequin it pushes past Hitchcock knockoff territory to explore new psychosexual genre textures, accidentally inventing Peter Strickland’s fetish-horror cinema in the process.

Our troubled antihero is a self-pitying sad sack who moans & groans about the loneliness of everyday city life. He spends countless hours staring at the water stains on his apartment ceiling, daydreaming about his ideal romantic partner instead of actually, you know, talking & relating to the women around him. The incel loser then strikes gold while working a shift at his nightwatchman job, discovering a department store mannequin that looks exactly like the ideal woman he’s been picturing in his head: a near-featureless object with a blunt brunette bob. He steals her away from his post, blames her absence on a robbery, and relocates her to the squeaky mattress in his bachelor pad. There, he keeps the plastic woman as a kind of domestic prisoner, pouring his heart out to her as the first woman to ever fully understand his peculiar persona . . . since she’s an inanimate object he can control through his own imagination. The longer he spends time alone with the mannequin, however, the more of her own self-determined personality & autonomy starts to emerge, and her captor once again struggles to reckon with the idea that women are people with their own wants & needs, not possessions to dress up & neatly store like dolls.

Once The Doll finds its unlikely man & mannequin couple locked away in a single-room attic apartment, it becomes a kind of volatile stage play about gendered domestic squabbles. Although the incel nightwatchman does commit violent acts as these one-sided arguments escalate, it’s less a horror of action than it is a horror of the uncanny. As he starts to fully believe in the personhood of the mannequin, she subtly comes to life; she laughs, she cries, she dances, she writhes. At first, she lays still while Mattsson’s camera handles all the movement, indicating her emotional state through a sweeping pan around her prison bed. Then, her mannequin body is periodically replaced by the real-life flesh of actress Gio Petré, who’s outfitted with the same bob wig and feature-flattening makeup. The mannequin figure alternates seamlessly between Petre’s body and its artificial surrogate, so that many shots leave the audience questioning which is which. This dynamic gives actor Per Oscarsson a fellow onscreen player to bounce the protagonist’s misogynist ideology off of, so that he’s not entirely acting opposite a doll, but it also provides the majority of the film’s horror-cinema chills.

Despite its potential framing as a rushed-to-market Psycho knockoff, The Doll is a beautiful art object in its own right. Mattsson lights his players with the harsh low-angle flashlight spotlight of a crime scene, establishing an Old Dark House vibe in what’s otherwise a fairly mundane apartment building. He also frequently finds aesthetically beautiful ways to accentuate the uncanny nature of the titular doll’s body, such as the Buñuelian image of her severed hand resting on the apartment’s basement stairs, or a rose gently resting on that same upturned palm once it’s reattached to the mannequin’s arm. Petre consistently contorts her hands to match the mannequin’s pose in her scenes, and she finds a way to appear distant & glassy eyed even in her fiercest arguments with Oscarsson’s disturbed lead. For a sexually sordid horror picture with a creepy children’s theme song about “a grown man who plays with dolls,” it’s a remarkably classy affair, one that earns its Bergman comparisons in its lengthy, vicious war-of-the-sexes dialogue exchanges. If you want the trashier, campier version of this movie, check out Peter Strickland’s In Fabric or the German whatsit The Berlin Bride. This one’s for the artsy-fartsy horror crowd, the elite pervert aesthetes.

-Brandon Ledet