Welcome to Episode #228 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon is joined by Pete Moran of the We Love to Watch podcast to discuss the retro horror comedy Frankie Freako (2024) and the late-80s wave of Gremlins knockoffs that inspired it.
There are currently 8,867 films on my Letterboxd watchlist, and roughly 8,000 of them will remain unwatched for all eternity. Every time a movie looks interesting to me, I toss it into the bottomless watchpit, with no concrete plans to dig it up at any particular time. Either it’ll tumble out of the Shuffle button at the exact right moment or it will rot there forever, and I think that’s beautiful. What I’m much more dutiful about it is my physical media watchpile, which fits neatly into one humble box besides my television that I’m not “allowed” to let overfill before bringing home more discs. Having a physical Blu-ray or DVD in my home is a guarantee that a movie will be watched—soon!—if not only because it then enables me to buy more Blu-rays & DVDs. The watchbox has been getting a little tight lately, though, so it’s time to clear out a few lingering titles with some short-form reviews.
I’ve been having especially good luck finding used martial-arts DVDs at local thrift stores this year, so that feels like as good of a category to start this KonMari process with as any. Listed & reviewed below are four kung fu action flicks I purchased on used DVDs at two local Goodwill stores in 2024 (the one on Tulane Ave in MidCity and the new outlet “bins” location in New Orleans East, in case you’re on the hunt). They all roughly follow the same story template in which a young fighter is violently wronged, trains for violent revenge, and then takes that revenge against his oppressors in violent spectacle. Their individual emphases on the wronging, the training, and the avenging vary from film to film, though, as does their entertainment value as vintage martial-arts relics.
The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978)
By far, the best of this batch is the Shaw Brothers classic The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, which mostly focuses on the training aspect of the kung-fu story template. While most kung-fu revengers include a martial-arts training montage in which a young fighter is taught fighting skills & Buddhist philosophy in a temple of violence, The 36th Chamber expands that 2nd-act rebirth to stretch over the majority of its runtime. Gordon Liu plays a young student whose schoolmates & teacher are slaughtered by a fascistic government who sees them as a rebellious threat. He retreats to a Shaolin temple to learn how to fight back against those government brutes and is reluctantly trained by the monks who live there to be a world-class combatant. Most of the film features Liu solving physically challenging puzzles while older monks nod in silent approval, and he grows frustrated to be learning discipline rather than vengeance. His impatience eventually fades as he matures into becoming a deadly weapon of great wisdom, which is a gift he then vows to spread to the common man outside the temple so they can fight their oppressors in great numbers instead of as individual rebels.
I watched The 36th Chamber of Shaolin in its ideal format: a thrifted Dragon Dynasty-label DVD with a 10min RZA interview reminiscing about marathoning Golden Age martial-arts & porno schlock as a kid in late-70s NYC. The film would be considered a classic of Hong Kong action cinema without RZA’s help, but his grindhouse cinephilia helped sew its name into the fabric of American culture, so that every time you hear the words “36th Chamber”, “Shaolin” or “Master Killer” (the film’s alternate American title), a Wu-Tang Clan beat automatically plays in your head. It’s a little silly to include a 2min “Wu-Tang concert video” as an additional special feature, but there’s still some thematic overlap there in how the dozen people performing on stage at once have found strength in numbers that they wouldn’t wield as individual rappers. In his interview, RZA attempts to contextualize why Hong Kong martial-arts films might have resonated so deeply with him as a young Black youth in America, citing “the underdog thing,” “the brotherhood thing,” and “the escapism” as resonant themes. The truth is he more likely cited this classic so often in Wu-Tang lyrics simply because it looked & sounded cool. Either way, he’s right.
The Iron Monkey (1977)
The title & thrills of the 1977 martial-arts revenger The Iron Monkey are so much more generic & forgettable than 36th Chamber‘s that it’s usually only brought up as a footnote to a much more popular 1993 film of the same name, to which it has no narrative relation. Chen Kuan-tai directs and stars as a frivolous, drunken gambler with a rebel father who is—you guessed it—assassinated by a fascist government. He cleans up his act at a Shaolin temple and trains for revenge, which he eventually gets hands-on against the General that killed his father at the movie’s climax. Given the stark-white backdrop of its pop-art opening credits and its genre-dutiful training sequences you might suspect that it was a cheap knockoff of The 36th Chamber . . . until you realize that it was released an entire year earlier.
The Iron Monkey is a standard-issue kung-fu revenger with nothing especially noteworthy about it except that the violence occasionally goes way overboard, especially in the opening sequence where an actual monkey & eagle are forced to fight as symbols of the “Monkey Fist” vs. “Eagle Claw” combat choreography of its central hero & villain. There’s also a scene where the bad guys show they mean business by choking a child to death, which makes for two pretty alarming choices on when to color outside the lines. My used DVD copy was a digital scan of a dubbed & scratched film print, which feels indicative of its significance in the larger kung-fu landscape. I couldn’t tell if the off-screen impact sounds of punches & kicks that are heard but not seen were added by an American distributor hoping to keep the audience’s pulse up or were included in the original mix as a cost-cutting ploy, but the choice was something I had never encountered in a movie before. I’d rather indulge in that kind of novelty than watching a stressed-out monkey fight an eagle for my entertainment.
Return of the Tiger (1977)
Just because a martial arts film is cheap doesn’t mean it’s worthless. I was much more enthused by the Brucesploitation novelty Return of Tiger, which starred “Bruce Li” as yet another wronged son avenging the murder of his father. Supposedly a sequel to a film called Exit the Dragon, Enter the Tiger (which starred Li as an entirely different character), Return of the Tiger skips the hero’s training montage to instead detail the training of his enemies. Bruce Li and “special guest star” Angela Mao show up ready to do battle, but their Enemy No. 1 (Paul L. Smith, Altman’s Bluto) is continuously training a kung-fu army of underlings to protect his empire. As a result, the film has incredibly athletic martial arts sequences, but most of them are confined to the relatively drab setting of an Olympic training gym — including Li’s intro in the music video style opening credits. Mao’s intro is also literally gymnastic, in that she initially fights off the gang leader’s nameless goons while jumping on a trampoline and launching herself off a balance beam. As her special credit suggests, she steals the show.
While Return of the Tiger follows a familiar wronging-training-avenging story template, it does distinguish itself from the other films on this list in its contemporary setting. The main Bad Guy in the film is not some empirical warlord of the 18th Century; he’s a heroin dealer who runs a shipyard. My English-dub DVD copy (“digitally mastered” by the fine folks at Reel Entertainment in Digital, which cannot be a real company) not only overdubs the dialogue but also replaces the soundtrack with incredibly baffling song choices, including a nightclub scene set to Wild Cherry’s “Play that Funky Music” while a lounge singer mouths lyrics to an entirely different song. It’s a nice change of setting for the genre, and the fights staged there are accomplished in their precision & brutality.
The One-Armed Swordsman (1967)
The first-act wronging of The One-Armed Swordsman is two-fold, which doubles the amount of training sequences the film gets to indulge in. First, a young child watches his father get slaughtered (go figure), then is raised by a kung-fu master to become the formidable Hong Kong action hero Jimmy Wang. Only, the fellow students at his temple are jealous of his skills and spiteful of having to be equals with the son of a (dead) servant, so in an overboard schoolyard bullying incident they cut off his sword-carrying arm. Wang survives, improbably, and then trains again to re-learn how to fight with just one arm before local bandits get out of hand and harm untrained villagers who need protection. Despite this doubling down on its training-for-revenge sequences, much of the runtime involves debates between our titular hero and his wife about whether he should relearn his fighting skills at all, since it’s a like he’s inviting violence into the family home — like how gun owners are statistically more likely to be killed by guns. The title & premise make it sound like a gimmicky wuxia novelty, but in practice it’s a surprisingly classy drama set inside of a series of illustrated postcards . . . with some occasional swordfight gore.
What I mostly learned from this loose group of titles is that the Dragon Dynasty-label DVDs of classic Shaw Brother titles are a sign of quality & class, and they’re worth picking up any time you stumble across one at a Goodwill. The best special feature included on this particular disc was a short career-retrospective documentary on its director, Chang Cheh, which added at least a dozen titles to my ever-expanding Letterboxd watchlist. I’ll likely never get to them all unless they fall into my lap as used media, where tangibility means accountability and quality varies wildly.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the Belgian-French animated fantasy adventure Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds (2024).
Keeping up with Quentin Dupieux is hard work, even as a fan. The prankster Frenchman’s filmography is as prolific as it is silly, as he’s only surpassed in his routine creative output by Matt “The Madman” Farley. Every time I review “the new Dupieux” for this site, he’s already released at least two more recent films on the Euro festival circuit, which will inevitably be followed by yet another new Dupieux before those achieve US distro. So, while I am here to write about the two “new” Quentin Dupieux movies that arrived in America this year, I also have to acknowledge that his actual-latest film, The Second Act, has already premiered at Cannes and is still pending US release. That’s three new features total since I reviewed Smoking Causes Coughing at last year’s Overlook Film Fest (and three more films than most aspiring directors will get to release in their lifetime). The man is a machine that produces silly comedies at an alarming rate, like that haywire conveyor belt of chocolate treats that tormented Lucille Ball. This must be how more serious critics feel about Hong Sang-soo.
The best of this year’s silly treats was the semi-biographical comedy Daaaaaalí!, in which Dupieux pays flippant homage to master surrealist Salvador Dalí. The absurdly elongated title is in reference to how the multiple actors who portray Daaaaaalí pronounce their own name, often while bragging in third-person. Dupieux is unafraid to poke fun at his artist-subject’s ludicrous ego and public misbehavior, likely because his own creative debt and reverence for Dalí is obvious to the point of not needing to be stated aloud. The matter-of-fact surrealism of Dupieux’s humor already amounts to a career-long tribute to Dalí in its own way, so much so that the director finds it difficult to complete a film about the much more famous artist without feeling like a failure. Daaaaaalí! is a loopy, prankish comedy about the impossibility of making a worthy, satisfying movie about Salvador Dalí. Dupieux’s onscreen avatar is a young journalist who repeatedly attempts to film a full-length interview with Dalí but can never quite pull the fluff-piece documentary together, mostly due to whimsical sabotage from her subject. Instead, Dupieux sends her down a labyrinth of circular-logic dreams, time-jumps, and actor swaps that make no linear narrative sense, attempting to match the audience-trolling humor of Dalí’s work at large while staging living-tableau recreations of specific Dalí paintings. That way, Dupieux can’t disappoint himself in his homage to a personal, professional hero, since he openly admits defeat before the project starts in earnest. With Daaaaaalí!, Dupieux combines the professional self-parody of Deerskin and the anything-goes-at-any-moment sketch comedy of Smoking Causes Coughing into a single, silly picture – finding a delightfully uneasy middle ground between his two career-best titles to date (assuming he hasn’t released an even better one since I started typing this paragraph).
Something I’ve noticed about Dupieux’s recent output is that his increasingly silly ideas for movies are outpacing his already hectic production schedule, so that recent works like Daaaaaalí! and Smoking Causes Coughing play more like sketch comedy revues than single-concept feature films. That’s not the case with his recent title Yannick, though, which is an unusually focused & abrasive effort from the goofball auteur. An all-in-one-night black comedy about a low-rent theatrical production that’s threatened at gunpoint by an audience member who doesn’t appreciate the show, Yannick finds Dupiuex holding his audience hostage and heckling us about our own grossest impulses in a single-location limbo. The most interesting angle on it is trying to figure out if Dupieux considers himself one of us or one of the suffering artists who find it impossible to please us, mocking dissenters in his audience for making their personal criticisms loudly, publicly known to the detriment of fellow theatregoers who are quietly enjoying themselves. There is some formal playfulness in how he shoots the players from the audience and the audience from the stage like two warring sides of a never-ending conflict, pontificating on how even a successful stage play is already a kind of hostage situation in reverse. It’s just unclear whether his portrayal of the play’s titular heckler as a braying jackass is an insult to the audience’s intelligence or if he’s supposed to be a common-denominator mouthpiece voicing populist derision against needlessly pretentious, fussy art, which is something Dupieux might identify with as a man who’s dedicated his life’s work to being as silly as possible at all times.
If you’ve gotten used to Dupieux’s rapid-fire delivery of absurdly silly ideas in movies like Daaaaaalí!, the feature-length, single-idea fixation of Yannick can be a little tiresome, even at a mere 67 minutes of runtime. It’s still interesting to decipher within the larger context of Dupieux’s career as a public figure, which is always what happens when you watch too many movies from a single director. Out of context, Daaaaaalí! is likely still entertaining as a remarkably silly movie about a remarkably silly art-world icon, but the larger project of Dupieux’s career leads us to wonder where the director sees himself in the onscreen relationship between portraitist and subject. That goes doubly for Yannick, where the most interesting piece of the puzzle is deciphering what our auteur du jour is attempting to communicate about the relationship between artist and audience. It’s the same way that fellow Quentin’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is about Tarantino’s relationship with his industry, or the same way that every Matt Farley movie is now about the greater Matt Farley project, most recently exemplified in the self-parodic Local Legends: Bloodbath. To be a Quentin Dupiuex fan is to be someone who routinely watches two or three of the silliest movies released all year in a single sitting and puzzling through what they’re saying about Art and The Artist. Dupieux used to make movies like the killer-car-tire horror comedy Rubber about how nothing in life has any meaning or reason behind it; now he makes movies about what believing & embodying that ethos has done to his art and to the artist behind it. I’m assuming he doesn’t have a solid answer to that personal quandary yet, since he he’s been making a lot of them.
Swampflix’s official coverage of the best films of 2024 won’t start until January 2025, but list-making season is already in full swing elsewhere. General consensus on the best films of the year is starting to take shape as regional film critic associations are publishing their collective Best of the Year lists, and I’m proud to say I was once again able to take a small part in that annual ritual. I voted in the Southeastern Film Critics Association poll for the best films of 2024, representing a consensus opinion among 89 critics across nine states in the American South. Winners were announced this morning, and it’s a pretty solid list. At the very least, it’s cool to see Sean Baker recognized for his latest in a long line of high-energy, high-empathy sex industry dramas, Anora, and to see the objectively best score of the year win its respective category: Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross’s music for Luca Guadagnino’s erotic tennis thriller Challengers. I’m also proud to have helped a movie as absurdly grotesque as Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance get rightfully highlighted as one of the year’s major works.
The biggest story of last year’s SEFCA list was the total dominance of Christopher Nolan’s historical drama Oppenheimer, which then went on to sweep The Oscars as well, with seven wins out of thirteen nominations. This year, there’s no clear dominant winner, as the majority of the prizes are evenly split among Anora, Conclave, and The Brutalist. That sounds like a robust crop of movies to me. To quote SEFCA President Scott Phillips in today’s press release, “Every year we hear from the naysaying sectors of the industry that it wasn’t a very good year for film. This slate of winners easily disproves that statement for 2024. Between theatrical distribution and streaming, releases can be a bit scattered and hard to find, but if you take the time to find the better films of 2024, they form a potent lineup. We hope that film fans out there can use our Top 10 list to catch up on some of the best that 2024 had to offer.”
It has been heartbreaking to watch Barry Jenkins succumb to the Disney filmmaking machine, pouring years of his life & art into the lifeless, artless product of the studio’s “live-action” CG prequel to The Lion King. Regardless of whether Jenkins’s Mufasa is any good, it’s undeniably a waste of the talented filmmaker’s time when compared to his previous critical hits Moonlight & If Beale Street Could Talk: two gorgeous, somber portraits of Black American life, as opposed to a pale, sickly sing-along starring computer-animated lions. Anyone who’s mourning that loss and feeling nostalgic for The Old Jenkins is likely to find refuge in RaMel Ross’s Awards Season sweetheart Nickel Boys, which offers a more formally extreme version of Jenkins’s earlier triumphs. As already evidenced in his own earlier, artsier documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, Ross is a more challenging, experimental filmmaker than Jenkins, but the two directors share a fearless, formalist approach to Black portraiture and work well in tandem. Nickel Boys softens a little of Hale County‘s narrative looseness in its distraction with other tools of filmmaking language, but it’s still a potentially alienating work with uncompromising politics. Let’s just hope that its Oscars buzz doesn’t lead to Ross directing Moana 3 or Black Panther 4 over the next few years; the financial paycheck is never worth the artistic payoff.
The formal experiment in this case is in adapting a novel written from a 3rd-person POV into a 1st-person narrative film, putting the audience in the alternating minds & bodies of its two main characters. Instead of taking a straight historical look at the recent abusive, racist past of boys’ reformatory schools in the American South, Ross walks you through the first-hand experience of being imprisoned there as a young, innocent victim of the system. It’s like playing a 1st-person shooter video game except instead of committing acts of violence you walk into the wrong place at the wrong time, and your fate is locked into a one-way track you have no opportunity to break away from, which accounts for the experience of many young Black men in America. The result is a clear, direct argument that the institution of American slavery continued well after the Civil War; it’s just now carried out through schoolyard & prison labor under the guise of punitive justice. To his credit, Ross breaks away from the linear one-way-track structure of that political argument with intrusions of memory and glimpses of his protagonists’ future—which fully take over in the final, fragmentary montage that pulls the full scope of his story together—but the central conceit is having to suffer inside the two boys’ bodies & minds as if they were your own, fearful that you might not make it to the end credits without getting dumped into one of the school’s unmarked graves.
If you end up watching Nickel Boys at home instead of the theater, I recommend using headphones. A lot of attention has been paid to the 1st-person perspective of its imagery, but its sound design is just as intensely, complexly immersive. I wish I had more to say about what it’s doing dramatically rather than formally, but the technical achievement of that sensory immersion can’t be dismissed. If it has any narrative grace to it, it’s in the smaller, observational details that distract from his larger historical & political bullet points: focusing on the thread of a garment while news reports of a landmark Civil Rights event echo in the background, using the recurring image of a freshly picked orange to anchor the audience to the Floridian setting, throwing in a couple alligator jump scares to heighten the already tense experience of being a sensitive boy raised in a macho, militarized environment, etc. I can’t say the dramatic exchanges between actors ever overpowered the visual & aural devices that Ross spent so much of his energy tinkering with; it plays more like a VR experience than a traditional narrative film. Still, that’s more of an exciting, daring technical achievement than figuring out how to get a CG lion to mouth the words to a Lin Manuel-Miranda song or whatever Jenkins has been up to in his Disney Vault prison cell.
One of the more diabolical trends in recent film promotion & distribution has been the decrease in access to premiere screenings for professional critics in favor of inviting online influencers instead. The thought is that the younger, less journalistic influencer crowd is more likely review a new movie favorably than a traditional critic—especially when buttered up with parties, booze, and merch—so studios can effectively purchase cheap advertising by elbowing the old-world press out of the way to make room for the brats. Being neither a paid critic nor a young upstart with a substantial online following myself, I’ve never experienced that kind of blatant buttering-up first-hand, but I did get a small taste of it at last weekend’s local premiere of the microbudget documentary Holding Back the Tide at The Broadside. The ticket price for the screening included a Happy Hour icebreaker where local shuckers supplied unlimited raw oysters for the crowd to slurp down in excess, supposedly as a live demonstration of the shell-recycling program helmed by The Coalition to Restore Costal Louisiana, which has been repurposing shells from local bars & restaurants to rebuild the state’s eroding coastline. No matter how many helpful CRCL representatives were around to answer questions via personal interaction or post-film panel discussion about the recycling program, I could clearly see the truth; those oysters were a bribe – a bribe far more valuable than any Los Angeles red carpet meet-and-greet with the voice cast of Mufasa. They put the audience in a euphoric mood that was impossible to break.
In all seriousness, Holding Back the Tide does pair extraordinarily well with pre-screening oysters, since half of the movie’s credibility relies on a shared understanding that oysters are an exquisitely delicious treat. Once you agree to that premise, all the movie has to do is explain that they are also an admirable political tool & role model, as exemplified locally by CRCL’s Oyster Shell Recycling Program. This is not a talking-heads advocacy doc so much as it’s an invitation to mediate on the nature of the oyster as a divine organism for 77 breezy minutes, best enjoyed with the mollusks’ briny taste still lingering on your tongue. It walks a thin line between poetry and incoherence, but it also makes a convincing enough argument that oysters deserve that awestruck aspiration. By the time this seafood industry documentary ends on a heartfelt dedication “to The Queer Future,” it earns a hearty “Right on,” from its audience. At that point, we’ve touched on the oyster’s relationships with and answers to political subjects as wide-ranging as Climate Change, gender identity, communal solidarity, racial justice, and capitalistic overconsumption – each with seemingly enough contextual history worthy of their own standalone doc. Oyster farmers, vendors, shuckers, and scientists pontificate about their collective fav in fragmentary interviews, focusing mostly on the oyster’s significance to the life & history of New York City. This hands-on academia is counterbalanced by a more metaphorical appreciation of the oyster’s tendency to change genders mid-life to maintain social balance, as voiced & modeled by trans performers who personify the little wonders.
Holding Back the Tide is resistant to linear explanations of the oyster’s significance to NYC culture, choosing instead to mimic the circular, repetitive structure of human breath or crashing waves. Its imagery can be abstract to the point of counterproductivity, such as its gorgeous underwater photography of subway cars being used to restore coastal reefs along with humanmade, recycled oyster beds – which are seen but not verbally explained. When a seemingly cis-het couple orally exchange an oyster back & forth Tampopo-style, then emerge from the experience as a different pair of lesbian actors, their literalized transformation into The Queer Future is just as confused as it is corny. However, the living-tableau recreation of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus in an oversized oyster shell, reworked as a portrait of modern transgender beauty, is one genius image among many, with clear thematic intent. It’s especially easy to get on board with the movie’s religious exaltation of the oyster as a Louisianian familiar with its pleasures as a seasonal delicacy and its uses in coastal hurricane protection, maybe even more so than for the average New Yorkers in the target audience. Love for the oyster is something you feel more than it is something you can articulate, like the stupefying awe for rocks expressed in Deborah Stratman’s recent film Last Things. Holding Back the Tide is less abrasive & challenging than Stratman’s film, calling back to the more playful 90s NYC indie filmmaking of a Fresh Kill than anything so academically experimental. Its love for the oyster is raw & heartfelt, and it wants to be shared to its audience so badly it sometimes comes with a real-life oyster bar to help supplement the experience.
I attended my first live ballet performance this October, when the New Orleans Ballet Company staged its modern-dance interpretation of Dracula. It was an easy entry point into the medium, not only because it fit in so well with all of the horror movies I was binge-watching at the time anyway, but also because the Dracula story in particular is something I’ve seen repeated onscreen dozens of times before. From the more faithful early adaptations of Bram Stoker’s novel by Browning & Murnau to its weirdo outlier mutations in titles like Shadow of the Vampire & Dracula 3D, the Dracula story is well familiar to anyone who’s seen a horror movie or two. It’s even been staged onscreen as a ballet before in Guy Madden’s Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary. So, when the New Orleans Ballet Company had to cut some narrative & financial corners in depicting Jonathan Harker’s cross-sea travels to score a real estate deal with Count Dracula in Transylvania or in depicting the infamous vampire’s subsequent travels back to Harker’s home turf to seduce & destroy everything he holds dear, I never felt lost in the progression of the story – no matter how abstractly represented. That trust in the audience’s familiarity with the source material plays no part in Dracula‘s most recent big-screen adaptation, since director Robert Eggers is more of a history-obsessed purist than a Guy Madden-style prankster of poetic license. Eggers is as faithful to the original story structure of Stoker’s novel as the F.W. Murnau film from which he borrows his title, which itself was faithful enough to nearly get sued out of existence for copyright infringement by the Stoker estate. Audiences can expect to see every progressive step of the Dracula story dramatized onscreen—including the all-important legal signing of real estate documents—with full reverence for the Murnau classic as a foundational cinematic text. What they might not have seen before, however, is the intensity of the violence & beauty in the Dracula story cranked up to their furthest extremes, which accounts for Eggers’s other directorial specialty besides his kink for historical research.
Ever since he jumped ship from A24 to the major studios, Eggers has softened the more alienating, unconventional touches of his first couple films so that he can stage his exquisite, traditionalist images on a larger studio-budget scale. As a result, his version of Nosferatu does not add much to the ongoing ritual of reinterpreting Dracula, except in its attention to the period details of its 19th Century Germany setting (and in accidentally making a contrast-and-compare argument that Coppola’s version is the best adaptation to date). He dutifully, earnestly goes through the motions of a traditional Dracula movie plot with what his Van Helsing stand-in (Willem Dafoe) would describe as a sense of “grotesque tediousness.” The film makes for a great Yuletide ghost-story moodsetter, offering a Christmas Carol alternative for bloodthirsty freaks, but you can clearly hear some thematic preoccupations with the source text screaming for him to break from that literary tradition to deliver something new. If there’s any new angle in Eggers’s version of this familiar story, it’s his interest in the internal struggles of his Mina figure (Lily-Rose Depp) as she finds herself undeniably drawn to the mysterious Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård, the copyright-infringing Dracula) despite her recent marriage to a doomed dupe of a real estate agent (Nicolas Hoult). There’s a dark, soul-deep lust in her attraction to Orlok that affords the film a genuine sense of Evil at its core, with Depp pleading to anyone who’ll listen to answer the one question that haunts her, “Does evil come from within us or from beyond?” Since she starts the film as a young girl possessed, years before she meets Orlok or his dopey real estate agent in the flesh, the answer is clear from the outset, but her personal journey to accepting that answer gives the movie a fresh, personalized take on the material. So, it’s a little disappointing to spend so much time retracing the standard Dracula movie plot beats outside that central struggle. Following Hoult on his journey to sign the legal documents that seal his life-ruining real estate deal is a little like watching Bruce Wayne’s mother’s pearls hit the pavement in yet another Batman origin story. We’ve seen it before; you can stray your focus elsewhere without losing us.
No matter where Eggers’s Nosferatu may be a little straightlaced as a literary adaptation, it’s still a gorgeous, heinous nightmare in pure visual terms, which obviously goes a long way. Anyone who was frustrated with the director’s looser, atmospheric approach to horror in The Lighthouse & The Witch will find much more traditional genre pleasures here, delivered through a series of jump scares and horny gasps. If Eggers had fully drilled down into Depp’s acceptance of the darkness within herself and never left her sweaty bedside, the movie would lose Orlok’s absurd introduction of his What We Do in the Shadows voice & domesticity and Dafoe’s maniacal prancing among the vampire’s army of plague-carrying rats, which together account for most of its deviant levity. When Eggers fully settles into the supernatural cuckoldry of the central trio in the third act, things get thematically exciting in a way that makes you wonder why he bothered depicting anything else, but Skarsgård’s Orlok is a spooky enough image in itself to keep the tension up until that payoff arrives. Eggers’s longtime cinematographer Jarin Blashke puts in typically astounding work as a visual stylist, finding a terrible beauty in natural on-set lighting and the immense darkness it barely keeps at bay. It’s a ghoulish ghost story told over candlelight on a blistering winter night, which keeps it from feeling like the most daring onscreen interpretation of Dracula to date but still manages to scare & chill despite its narrative familiarity. I would’ve loved to have seen what the gonzo Robert Eggers who made The Lighthouse would’ve done with the erotic Mina-Dracula tensions of this film at feature length, but the more restrained, traditionalist Robert Eggers who made The Northman is almost just as good. If it sounds like I’m complaining more than praising here, it’s only because I’m holding the director to the impossibly high standard that he set for himself early on. It’s a very good, traditionally satisfying horror picture by any other metric.
It took a while to arrive, but 2024 was finally Sebastian Stan’s year. Ever since the strikingly hunky actor found early fame in the wide-appeal franchises Gossip Girl and The MCU, he’s been attempting to pull off the Robert Pattinson trick of convincing cinephilic snobs that he’s more than just a handsome face. Stan has been deliberately eroding his pretty-boy persona by taking on increasingly odd, unlikeable roles in titles like I, Tonya, Fresh, and The Bronze, but audiences have yet to take him seriously by any other name than Bucky Barnes. It’s clear to me that 2024 was the critical breakthrough in that effort, with Stan earning many impassioned accolades for his two most recent film roles in The Apprentice and A Different Man. Weirdly, that career boost may have been indirectly assisted by the recent re-election of Donald Trump, whom Stan portrays as a young man in The Apprentice. Or it was at least assisted by his fellow actors’ cowardice on the subject of Trump, since Stan vented that he was invited to participate in Variety‘s annual “Actors on Actors” interview series, but nothing ever came of it because no actor (or at least no actor’s publicist) dared to discuss Trump or the election on the record. This news item led to a fresh new wave of critics praising Stan’s fully committed portrayal of the president-elect as a young ghoul in training, reinvigorating discussion of a film that had for the most part faded into the Awards Season background since it premiered at Cannes. It’s not all just empty political posturing, either; he deserves the praise.
In The Apprentice, Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi (Border, Holy Spider) attempts to diagnose the illness at the heart of contemporary American politics by pinpointing the exact moment when Donald Trump transformed from human being to monstrous caricature. Trump is already a shit-heel capitalist at the start of the film, when Sebastian Stan is introduced as a racist landlord collecting rent payments & shutting out Black tenants in 1970s New York City. The punk, disco, and street noise of the era appear to rattle young Donny just as much as his legal troubles and his father’s withheld affections. Then, the figure of Roy Cohn appears from across a crowded barroom, played like a beckoning Count Dracula by Succession star Jeremy Strong. In the first third of the film, Strong’s verbal & physical mannerisms are more closely aligned with the SNL-parody version of Trump we’re all used to, and the acting challenge of the piece is for Stan to gradually grow into the role as he learns from his vampiric mentor. His transformation from status-obsessed dork to the most powerful carnival conman in America is physically manifested in peculiar contortions of the mouth and verbal jabs of one-upmanship against his own previous sentences while bragging to the press, and he learned it all from watching Cohn do the same. What Abbasi & Stan most clearly understand about Trump is how unfortunate it is that he’s a funny guy in addition to being an evil one, so that The Apprentice ends up becoming a kind of It’s Always Sunny-style dirtbag sitcom featuring talented actors playing despicable ghouls. It’s not especially insightful as a political text, but it is impressive as an acting showcase, which is exactly what Sebastian Stan needed to break through into critical legitimacy.
The only hindrance to The Apprentice announcing Sebastian Stan’s arrival as a formidable actor is that he only gives the second best performance in his own movie, as he’s often outshone by Jeremy Strong’s scenes-stealing performance as Roy Cohn. Funnily enough, that actor-vs-actor tension is the exact conflict that torments Stan’s lead character in his actual-best performance of the year. In A Different Man, director Aaron Schimberg ventures further into the ethical & psychological labyrinth of rethinking onscreen disfigurement & disability representation that he first stepped into with Chained for Life, this time with less third-act abstraction. Sebastian Stan does incredible work building complex layers in the lead role as a failed actor with neurofibromatosis, which hides his face under a mountainous mask of noncancerous tumors. After an experimental drug chemically removes those tumors in a miraculous transformation that reveals Stan’s Hollywood Handsome face, he remains a failed actor, finding that his lack of confidence & charisma had little to do with his disfiguring medical condition. Then enters Adam Pearson (Chained for Life, Under the Skin) as the world’s most affable guy, who charms every room he walks into despite the fact that his own neurofibromatosis remains untreated. Pearson is hilarious as the carefree bloke who completely wrecks Stan’s entire life simply by being pleasant company, but it’s Stan’s performance that affords the movie most of its emotional complexity. It’s impressive to watch him intentionally play someone who is disastrously bad at acting in a movie where we can all clearly tell he’s a great actor, maybe even with potential to become one of our best.
A Different Man is a great, darkly funny comedy about the tensions between internal & external identity, teased out through the pronounced artifice of stage theatre. By the time Stan is wearing a 3D rendering of his former disfigurement as a mask while playing a fictionalized version of himself on-stage, it’s clear that Schimberg has created something incredibly complex here, and he found an actor who was up for the task. A Different Man is a much smaller, quieter film than The Apprentice, which made enough of a stir to be publicly threatened with lawsuits by its subject’s legal team the week of its premiere. That threat certainly contributed to the good will behind critics’ defense of Stan’s right to discuss his craft in portraying Trump onscreen, but A Different Man is still the title of the pair that’s more likely to land on hipper publications’ Best of the Year lists. The Apprentice is, at heart, a kind of phony drama that excels solely as an acting showcase for its two leads, who make great use of the opportunity; it’s Awards Season fluff. By contrast, A Different Man is the real deal; it’s cinema. In combination, they suggest that Sebastian Stan has finally achieved the creative success he’s been seeking as an actor ever since he first achieved financial success as a handsome face. Let’s hope all these critical accolades only embolden him to get weirder & more off-putting, since he’s such a joy to watch in that mode.
This is not my time of year. While every multiplex in town is overbooked with screenings of four-quadrant crowd-pleasers like Wicked: Part 1, Moana 2, and Gladiator 2, my e-mail inbox is overflowing with FYC screeners for the critical favs that premiered at festivals months ago but distributors have held back for optimal last-minute Oscar buzz. Neither option is especially appealing to me, personally, as most of my favorite new releases tend to be the high-style, low-profile genre titles that quietly trickle into local arthouse cinemas during the first half of the year, playing to mostly empty rooms. Still, I make an effort to catch up with what hipper, higher-minded critics single out as The Best Movies of the Year, mostly as an effort to stay informed but also somewhat as an effort to not waste my time & money on the corporate IP currently clogging up American marquees. It’s during this holiday-season FYC ritual that I’m most often confronted with my most hated & feared cinematic enemies: Subtlety, Nuance, and Restraint. It’s also when I watch the most capital-A Acting, since these tend to be projects greenlit & distributed with the intent of stirring up awards buzz for a particular performer on the poster. If there’s any one theme to the trio of FYC screeners I happened to watch over Thanksgiving break, it’s that they were all easy-to-watch dramas about difficult-to-handle people, each highlighting the acting talents of their headlining performers by allowing them to get socially & emotionally messy onscreen without other cinematic distractions getting the way – petty details like dynamic, daring cinematography and editing, the art of the moving image.
If you’re ever in the mood to watch a movie that values acting over any other cinematic concern, you can always look to actors-turned-directors to scratch that itch. Jesse Eisenberg’s second directorial work, A Real Pain, is a two-hander acting showcase for himself and screen partner Kieran Culkin, who are both good enough in the movie that it’s been in The Awards Conversation for almost a full year since it first premiered at Sundance. Jesse Eisenberg stars as a Jesse Eisenberg type: a nervous New Yorker who can barely finish a conversational sentence without having a panic attack. Kieran Culkin is his socially volatile cousin: a bi-polar timebomb who breaks every unspoken social convention imaginable while still managing to charm every stranger he meets. Structurally, the film is a travel story about the cousins’ journey to Poland to reconnect with their Jewish heritage in the wake of their grandmother’s recent death, which leads to a lot of solemn sightseeing at major sites of The Holocaust. From scene to scene, however, it functions as a darkly, uncomfortably funny comedy about two men who love each other very much but have incompatible mental illnesses that make it impossible for them to share a room. No one wants to hear their Awards Season drama described as a breezy, 90min Sundance dramedy about The Holocaust, but that’s exactly the movie that Eisenberg made. A Real Pain‘s saving grace, then, is the strength of the performances the two central actors deliver as absurdly difficult people. Culkin’s social brashness and emotional volatility makes his difficulty more immediately apparent, but Eisenberg gives himself plenty of room to do his Nervous Fella schtick as much as possible. It’s an anxious archetype that Culkin’s character aptly describes as “an awesome guy stuck inside the body of someone who’s always running late.”
Marielle Heller is another actor-turned-director who has made empathy for difficult characters a core tenet of her artistry, most successfully in Can You Ever Forgive Me? and The Diary of a Teenage Girl. Her new adaptation of the Rachel Yoder novel Nightbitch doesn’t reach far beyond that search for empathetic cheerleading, though, and the movie is mostly a dud as a result. Amy Adams stars as a visual artist who has put her creative pursuits aside to raise a child while her husband travels for work. Spending weeks in isolation with only her young child for company, she loses her adult social skills and essentially goes feral, convincing herself that she is physically transforming into a dog. Suppressing her artist’s spirit to play housewife breaks her brain, causing her to hallucinate monstrous canine hair, tail, and nipple growth in the mirror and to act out wildly in public (barking, stealing food off strangers’ plates, dressing her son in a leash, etc.). Where her internal fantasy of motherhood bringing out her most animalistic traits ends and her external, real-life social misbehavior begins is intentionally kept vague, as Heller is more concerned with seeing the world through her protagonist’s color-blind eyes than with constructing genuine, heartfelt drama. Nightbitch is conceptually amusing as a body-horror metaphor for how motherhood physically & mentally transforms you, but it’s pretty lackluster in execution, especially as a page-to-screen adaptation. There are long stretches of narration in which Adams recites passages from Yoder’s book, as if Heller’s relationship with the material was more admiration than inspiration. She’s so concerned with landing its political jabs about gendered, invisible domestic labor that she forgot to make its characters feel like real people, so the whole thing ends up hollow & phony no matter how committed Adams’s performance is as the titular Nightbitch. It should’ve been an audiobook.
Mike Leigh did not start his career as an actor, but he does have a career-long history as a stage theatre director, which is a very actorly profession. That background heavily informs the sparse, minimalist approach to familial drama in his new film Hard Truths, which sits with its characters’ interpersonal conflicts rather than resolving them. As the most difficult person of all in this triple feature, Marianne Jean-Baptiste stars as a middle-aged grump who wages a one-woman war against the “smiling, cheerful people” of the world for 100 relentlessly sour minutes, including her own loving sister. Her performance is intensely funny and bitter, as she finds so much to complain about every second she is awake that she cannot even sit comfortably in her own home without obsessing over the activities of the pigeons, foxes, and bugs outside the window. There are multiple scenes that start with her gasping in horror at the sensation of waking up from a nap, and her nonstop tirades against the waking world’s many offenses leads to the highest incredulous-teeth-sucking-per-minute ratio I’ve ever seen in a movie as her audience is held hostage by her hostility. Meanwhile, a softly droning violin draws out the pathos of her pathological misery, especially in scenes where her much better adjusted sister gently attempts to diffuse her anger. Leigh pays careful attention to the social & economic circumstances of the sisters’ past that would’ve burdened one with awareness of the world’s wretchedness while leaving the other unscathed, but most of the thematic & emotional impact of the picture is achieved through the forcefulness of Jean-Baptiste’s performance, which is exactly how all of these movies work, even the lesser ones.
If any of these movies indulge in the Subtlety, Nuance, and Restraint that torment me during the Awards Season screener deluge every year, it’s Hard Truths, which is what makes it so unfortunate that it’s the best of this batch. If all of the cinematic value of a picture is going to be invested in the difficulty & thorniness of a central performance, that performance might as well reach for the extremity of Marianne Jeanne-Baptiste’s, which is a cinematic spectacle in and of itself. The problem with Amy Adams, Kieran Culkin, and Jesse Eisenberg’s performances—if there is one—is that you always get the sense that their respective directors need you to like their characters, so they’re careful not to push their difficult-person conflicts far enough to abandon the audience. Mike Leigh is fearless in that respect, even if he restrains himself elsewhere. Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s hopeless grump is somewhat lovable as a movie character, but you wouldn’t want to be in the same room as her for ten consecutive minutes, whereas you could easily imagine yourself splitting a bottle of wine with Adams, Culkin, or Eisenberg’s grumps to hear more of their side of things. If I’m going to watch a low-key movie about a high-maintenance individual, I’d prefer that character to be as high-maintenance as possible. Make them a real pain, a real bitch – a really, truly difficult person.
