“Nothing lasts, really. Neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long.”
All of the stills and promotional posters for David Lean’s 1945 adultery drama Brief Encounter had convinced me that it was going to be a noir, not a stately stage play adaptation. Having now seen the film in full, I’m not entirely sure I was wrong. Brief Encounter is a kind of classic noir where the inciting crime is an emotional affair instead of a heist or a murder. It has all of the stylistic markers of noir: the drastic camera angles, the haze of urban steam, a morally compromised lead recounting their crimes in a confessional narration track. The fact that there’s no actual crime to speak of does little to muddle that flirtation with the genre. When the potential adulterers develop their first inside joke it’s like watching them load a revolver. Each kiss is another bullet unloaded from its chamber. When they chain-smoke on empty city streets to calm their nerves, they act as if they’re on the lam, avoiding eye contact with city cops. The whole affair is just as thrillingly romantic as it is unavoidably doomed.
The opening shots of this lean, 86-minute stunner are of two commuter trains passing in opposite directions at a furious speed, their billows of steam settling into a wispy veil over the platform where our would-be lovers first meet. Later, the lovers are similarly veiled by the gauze of cigarette smoke under movie projector lights, in the cinema where they spend Thursday afternoons sitting in the tension of each other’s desire. Their entire affair carries the impermanence and impossibility of a dream, with both dreamers daring each other to make it real. Celia Johnson narrates their emotional crimes in flashback, looking for someone safe to confess to and eventually settling on an internal monologue to her doting but unexciting husband. In her months-long flirtation with Trevor Howard’s mysterious but gentlemanly doctor, she never gets a glimpse of his homelife with his wife, but we get the sense that it’s just as sweetly serene. Their entire relationship is based on the spark of excitement found in flirting with a stranger while waiting for their opposite-direction trains home, a romance that can only flourish in a liminal space. If they did leave their spouses for each other, they’d likely settle into the same warm but bland domestic routines; the spell would be broken.
Whether David Lean was knowingly playing with the tones & tropes of film noir here is unclear. Since the genre had not yet been fully codified or even named, it’s more likely that he simply framed an adulterous dalliance as if it were a legal crime instead of just a moral one, and the stylistic overtones of the era took care of the rest. Either way, it’s clear that Brief Encounter has endured as a major influence on modern filmmakers, from the moody high-style tension of Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love to the opening across-the-bar “What’s their deal?” speculation of Celine Song’s Past Lives. Because it’s such a dialogue heavy stage-to-screen production, a lot of its power is creditable to Johnson & Howard’s acting chops, especially in the physicality of their guilt-haunted faces. When Johnson reassures the audience, “I’m a happily married woman,” her body language tells a different story, and there’s similar complexity lurking behind every line delivery of her imagined confession. Still, Lean is a formidable third wheel, guiding this trainwreck romance from the director’s chair with such intensity that you can practically feel his hand tilting the frame. There’s no event or action I can point to that would help classify it as a thriller, but it is thrilling from start to end, with a final line of dialogue that’s more explosive than any stick of stolen dynamite.
The 1996 BBC Films production of Twelfth Night: Or What You Will is a mostly faithful staging of the classic Shakespeare comedy, directed by The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Trevor Nunn. It’s not the kind of MTV-era update to Shakespeare’s text that you’ll find in fellow 90s titles like 10 Things I Hate About You or My Own Private Idaho, which tried to Make the Bard Cool Again for a generation who mostly knew him through frustrating homework assignments. You wouldn’t know that from Twelfth Night‘s poster, though, which sold it as exactly that. Attempting to cash in on a recent string of mainstream gay comedies with themes of crossdressing & drag, 1996’s Twelfth Night was marketed with the tagline, “Before Priscilla crossed the desert, Wong Foo met Julie Newmar, and the Birdcage was unlocked, there was … Twelfth Night.” I assume most adults expecting a boundary-pushing gay farce based on that marketing would’ve found this film tame by comparison, as the queer sexual tension of the text isn’t updated or sensationalized for the 90s in any flashy, daring way. If nothing else, it’s somewhat surprising that Tromeo & Juliet is the 1996 Shakespeare update that includes a lesbian makeout session, given which one would’ve been supported by its source text.
I have to imagine, then, that this version of Twelfth Night was a little more subtle & subversive in its queer appeal. If the adult audience marketed to in that tagline were already well fed by the mainstream echoes of New Queer Cinema and the bratty teens of the time were looking for Shakespeare plays set in the halls of their high school (preferably starring Julia Styles), it’s the younger, more sheltered crowd who would’ve benefited most from the queer themes of Shakespeare’s play. It’s not hard to imagine a heavily policed gay preteen who wasn’t allowed to rent a copy of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert sneaking Twelfth Night past their parents as a cultured, educational video store selection. 1996’s Twelfth Night seems ideally suited as a queer-awakening VHS rental for younger audiences who grew up watching titles like Ever After, The Secret Garden, and The Secret of Roan Inish in regular slumber party rotation or on solo lazy afternoons. Romeo+Juliet was the Shakespeare update with true Gay 90s™ flair; this one lets the confused-lust genderfuckery of the original play stand on its own without any post-MTV stylistic embellishments. It’s very warmly pleasant & endearing for that, and maybe even quietly transgressive depending on the parental censorship of your childhood household.
I won’t dare recount the plot of such a faithful adaptation of the original play here, at least not until this blog starts generating income as a SparkNotes subsidiary. All you need to know is that twins who make do as traveling entertainers are separated by shipwreck, presuming each other dead. Putting their twin-magic cabaret act to good use, the sister goes into hiding in male drag and quickly gets entangled in a queer love triangle with a man & woman who use her as a romantic surrogate, to the sexual confusion of everyone involved. Then, her near-identical twin brother shows up wearing the same dumb little wispy mustache, leading to a chaotic reset to normalcy at a heterosexual wedding, in classic farcical tradition. Before order is restored, though, there’s plenty of intense dwelling on the same-gender attraction stoked by the hiding-in-drag sitcom premise. Characters often breathe heavy as they lean in for a near-kiss – an exchange that reads gay whether it’s Viola-as-Cesario nearly kissing her male employer or Viola-as-Cesario nearly kissing her employer’s female crush. Other highlights include tender bathtub flirtation between bros and an opening-credits montage where Viola first gets into Cesario drag, with major emphasis put on her stuffing the crotch of her pants for accuracy. It’s not hard to imagine a young audience discovering things about themselves watching all of this gender play & queer desire onscreen, and it’s all presented under the guise of traditional, sophisticated theatre.
Presuming that you are no longer a sheltered 90s child depending on Blockbuster Video rentals to smuggle Gay Content into your family home, the best reason to watch the 1996 Twelfth Night at this point is the cast. Imogen Stubbs does a decent enough job in the central Cesario drag king role, in which (through Viola) she mostly equates being a man to being a Bugs Bunny level smartass. Ben Kingsley, Richard E. Grant, and Nigel Hawthorne are all formidable fools in the goofball periphery of the central conflict as well, along with what I can only presume are veterans of The Royal Shakespeare Company and of multi-episode arcs of Downton Abbey. The real draw in the cast, though, is a young Helena Bonham Carter, especially if you have any nostalgia for the era when her time machine got stuck in centuries past and she made a name for herself playing love interests in costume dramas (including an early starring role in director Trevor Nunn’s Lady Jane). While the film’s younger video store audiences experienced a queer awakening at home, HBC was experiencing a kind of goth awakening onscreen as Olivia, who’s introduced in mourning for her own deceased brother, which is what attracts Viola to her. She takes to black lace like no one before or since; it’s a marriage built to last longer than any among the story’s main players, so it’s romantic to think that it all started here.
There can be something reassuring about watching a truly Bad movie. Comforting, even. The term “Bad Movies” has been applied to a growing canon of “so-bad-they’re-good” oddities with such wild abandon that a lot of so-good-they’re-great titles like Showgirls, Glen or Glenda, and Freddy Got Fingered have gotten swept up in the momentum, either because their intent is misunderstood or because they fail to meet arbitrary standards of objective, professional quality. The further I’ve immersed myself in the deep end of iconoclastic, outsider-art filmmaking the more difficult it is to find any value in a Good vs Bad dichotomy. If I had to come up with my own binary, I’d say movies are usually either Interesting or Boring. So, it’s helpful to have a reality check like the 1995 buddy-cop comedy Theodore Rex to remind me that, yes, movies can be objectively Bad. Everything about Whoopi Goldberg playing a future-cop who’s reluctantly partnered with a talking animatronic dinosaur sounds like the kind of nonsense novelty that gets me to overlook objective quality markers to instead find joy in the inane and the absurd. And yet, there is no joy to be found in Theodore Rex. It’s bad; it’s boring. It’s more chore than art.
I mean “chore” in the literal sense. Whoopi Goldberg was contracted to star in this 90s Dino Craze kids’ film though an oral agreement that she tried back out of once she smelled the stink on the project, then was forced to follow through on her promise via lawsuit. As a result, most of the blame for its dead-eyed energy has defaulted to criticism of her performance, which is indeed a legally obligated sleepwalk. The real shame, though, is that her T-Rex screen partner has no personality to speak of either. His human-scale dino suit is cute enough to appeal to kids, but George Newbern’s vocal work as Teddy Rex is embarrassingly whiny & unenthused. He spends the entire film mumbling to himself like a socially awkward nerd who just got dropped off for his first day at a party college (speaking from personal experience), draining all of the ferocious cool out of the T-Rex’s street cred and replacing it with generalized, unmedicated anxiety. Worse yet, these two lifeless drips are investigating the conspiratorial murder of another T-Rex, so kids not only have to hang out with the least exciting dinosaur alive, but they’re also confronted with the limp corpse of their favorite dino in multiple scenes. The whole thing plays like a cult deprogramming tape meant to convince children that dinosaurs are in no way interesting or cool.
If there are any signs of life in this dino-themed court summons, it’s in the production design. Theodore Rex was one of the most expensive direct-to-video productions of its time, as it was initially budgeted for theatrical release. That bloated scale mostly translates to big explosions, a thoughtful mix of animatronic puppetry & 90s computer graphics, and surprisingly engaged performances from recognizable names like Bud Cort, Carol Kane, and Richard “Shaft” Roundtree. The money also shows in its intensely artificial sets, which take the “Once upon a time in the future …” framing of its sci-fi noir premise to a cartoon extreme where all the world is a DZ Discovery Zone. However, you could just revisit the live-action Super Mario Bros movie or the TV-sitcom Dinosaurs for that exact effect without having to spend time with these dipshit dino cops. They suck all of the fun out of every room they enter, and as a result the movie just kinda sucks. There’s something especially painful about how every failed, flat punchline is punctuated with goofball sound effects to remind the audience that we’re supposed to be having fun! fun! fun!, so that our participation in this bullshit feels just as mandatory as Whoopi’s. When it ends on a sequel-teasing title card that reads “See Ya!”, it reads like a threat. Leave me out of it.
Welcome to Episode #208 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna celebrate March Madness by discussing a handful of basketball documentaries, starting with the Safdie Brothers’ 2013 profile of Lenny Cooke.
00:00 Welcome
07:23 How to Have Sex (2024) 13:52 The Double Life of Véronique (1991) 19:11 The Marsh King’s Daughter (2023) 24:11 Out of the Blue (1980)
30:23 Lenny Cooke (2013) 55:30 Hoop Dreams (1994) 1:19:46 AND1 Ball Access – The Mixtape Tour (2002) 1:40:01 Dennis Rodman’s Big Bang in Pyongyang (2015)
There’s been a lot of recent online conjecture & debate about the future of Tubi. Following the streamer’s rebrand with a uglier, bubblier logo, rumors spread that Tubi has been requesting that distributors upload censored versions of their films, with all graphic depictions of sex & violence obscured from public view. It’s unclear whether this is true for the entirety of Tubi’s streaming library—which is miles deeper than any of its fellow competitors’—or if it’s just true for the movies that play on its “Live TV” channels that simulate pre-streaming movie broadcasts. Or maybe it isn’t true at all. There’s more speculation than evidence out there so far, so the only thing that’s really resulted from this scrutiny over Tubi’s supposed swerve into puritanism has been the constant reminder of who owns the company: the same Murdoch family who owns Fox News. It’s not out of the question, then, that Tubi might go squeaky clean in the near future, which makes it my solemn duty as a film journalist to watch the most degenerate smut I can find on the platform just to keep an eye on the evolving facts of the situation.
You have to search for 1967’s Blood of the Virgins by its original Spanish-language title “Sangre de Virgenes” for it to populate on Tubi, but I can confirm that it has not yet been censored or removed. The dream is still alive; tits & gore are still welcome on The People’s Streaming Service. This apparently includes movies where tits & gore are the only thing on the filmmakers’ minds, as is the case with this sub-Jesús Franco vampire smut – a genre the poster specifies as “Erotomania”. Blood of the Virgins is an oddball novelty even within the context of dirt-cheap, horned-up vampire schlock. If nothing else, I’ve never seen a vampire movie try to pass off stock footage of seagulls as if they were its vampires’ bat form, aided only by a red color filter and some unconvincing squeaks on the soundtrack. I’ve also never seen a vampire movie produced in Argentina, an unusual cultural perspective that shows in the film’s vintage telenovela blocking & scoring and in its central location of a vampire-infested log cabin instead of a vampire-infested Gothic castle. Of course, these cultural & aesthetic details are all secondary to the film’s main goal: dousing beautiful naked bodies in artificial stage blood.
If you cannot tell from its listed 72-minute runtime, Blood of the Virgins was designed to pad out a double feature for drive-in make-out sessions, not to scare. It’s closer to softcore pornography than it is to horror, especially in its best, earliest stretch where it chronicles a Swinging 60s ski cabin trip taken by its doomed hippie victims, who eventually break into the wrong cabin to their own peril. After a period-piece vignette establishes the existence of vampires in centuries past, the audience is bombarded with an energetic Russ Meyer-style nudie cutie montage in which hippie freaks indulge in dive-bar go-go dancing between bouts of road trip heavy petting and wholesome downhill skiing. It’s an invigorating, titillating start to what’s ultimately a low-energy Hammer Horror knockoff. Once the vampires isolate & drain those hippies (who, I must note, are very much not virgins), the movie slows way down and loses both its momentum and its overall sense of purpose. By then, it has outlived its function as background noise for drive-in canoodling, and it’s really your fault if you’re still paying attention to see how the story plays out.
There are a lot of fun little touches to this Argentinian oddity for anyone familiar with this genre. Its hand-drawn credits, its soap opera zoom-ins, its seagull shaped “bats”, and its main vampire’s predilections as more of a titty sucker than a neck biter all make it an amusing novelty for anyone who can stay awake long enough to gawk at those details. Blood of the Virgins is just slightly off in its bargain-bin approximation of Jesús Franco vampire erotica, making it a fascinating outlier for anyone who knows how these things are supposed to play out. For instance, it’s weirdly sheepish about depicting lesbian acts between the hippies & vampires, but eager to gesture at male-hippie-on-female-vampire cunnilingus, which is a much rarer treat. The Russ Meyer-style hippie montage at the beginning is also remarkably energetic for a genre that’s usually so sluggish & unrushed, and this might have been a bonafide cult classic if had sustained that rhythm throughout. As is, it’s still great fun and great confirmation that you can still find boobies on Tubi despite recent reports otherwise.
Sometime during my bus trip from watching the 4-hour French culinary documentary Menus-Plaisirs at The Prytania to immediately follow it with the 3-hour Polish sci-fi epic On the Silver Globe at The Broad, it hit me. If I lived in a bigger city with a full, robust repertory scene, I would have a weekly meltdown. Thankfully, New Orleans is relatively laidback in its repertory programming, with most of the heavy lifting done by The Prytania’s Sunday-morning Classic Movies series and now Wildwood‘s Wednesday-night screenings at The Broad. There’s usually only one or two now-or-never selections in any given month here, which is much more manageable than the nonstop deluge of rare 35mm prints that flood cities like Chicago & NYC. Having a large portion of those screenings recently relocate to The Broad has made it even more manageable for me personally, since it’s the theater closest to my home. So, I’ve been spending a lot of time watching older releases at my neighborhood cinema, but not too much time. Except for the rare occasions when I have to choose between two once-in-a-lifetime screenings on opposite sides of town, I’m mostly unbothered, moisturized, happy, in my lane, focused, flourishing.
As a result, I’ve racked up a few short-form reviews of older movies I happened to catch at The Broad in recent weeks. All three movies happen to be about rebellious young women’s lives as social outcasts, which likely says less about the kinds of films being programmed around town than it says about the kinds of films that motivate me to leave the couch. Here they are in all their grimy, leather-jacketed glory (listed in the order that I watched them).
Vagabond (1985)
Second only to Alfred Hitchcock’s routine appearances in Prytania’s Classic Movies program, Agnès Varda has got to be the most frequently programmed director in town (or at least has been for as long as I’ve been paying attention to such things). Since 2018, I’ve seen Le Bonheur, Faces Places, The Gleaners & I, and Cléofrom 5 to 7 at local specialty screenings, and I even missed one of Jane B. It’s an incredible string of luck that’s made me reluctant to catch up with Varda’s most iconic titles at home, with the assumption that they’ll eventually play in a proper theater if I’m patient enough to wait. That spoiled brat entitlement recently paid off when Wildwood screened the 1985 drama Vagabond, one of Varda’s most celebrated post-Cléo triumphs. I immediately understood its reputation as one of her best, since it works equally well as a prequel to her dumpster-diving documentary The Gleaners & I (my personal favorite Varda) and as a crust-punk take on Citizen Kane (many serious critics’ personal favorite by anyone).
Sandrine Bonnaire stars as a transient young woman named Mona, hitchhiking her way across France with no particular purpose or destination. Mona loves smoking weed, listening to generic pop radio, and not being hassled to do much else. We’re introduced to her as a corpse, frozen in a ditch without anyone looking for her or even really knowing who she is. We get to know her through the posthumous testimonials of people whose lives she drifted through, her aimless story playing out in fractured flashback. Everyone projects their own dreams, regrets, uses, and prejudices onto her but she was never vulnerable enough with any stranger ever to fully reveal herself, making her just as impossible to pin down in testimonial as Charles Foster Kane. Only, Kane was defined by the crushing weight of his own ambition, while Mona is defined by her total lack of it. As she camps on isolated roadsides and squats in abandoned estates, the people around her attempt to parse out the romance of her wandering vs the self-destructive impulse of her “withering.” It’s essentially unacceptable for her to merely exist, and the world inevitably punishes her for it by abandoning her body in a ditch.
One of the reasons I put off watching this particular Varda film for so long is that its premise sounds so unrelentingly grim. In truth, Vagabond strikes the same real-life balance between joy & misery that most of Varda’s films achieve; it just starts with tragedy instead of saving it for a last-minute shock. Even Mona’s death has an absurdist humor to it in the end, as it results from the joyous carnival celebrations of a local community who isn’t aware how vulnerable she is to their drunken shenanigans. As doomed as she is from the start and as unknowable as she remains to everyone she meets, Mona is a loveable, recognizable kind of rebel. Varda might mock the people who project their own psychological hangups onto the character’s blank canvas, but she includes herself and her audience in that indictment. By the end you really feel like you know Mona, especially if you’ve ever smelled the particular sweet-yeast/old-mold stench crusties tend to cultivate in their unwashed denim. You don’t know her, though. No one possibly could.
Rebel Dykes (2021)
I don’t know that Patois Film Fest‘s screening of the 2021 documentary Rebel Dykes technically counts as repertory, since it might very well have been the film’s local premiere. I’ve been waiting to see this low-budget, D.I.Y. punk doc for years, but it seemingly never landed official distribution outside its initial festival run. It was a perfect fit for Patois programmers’ focus on political activism, though, since it’s specifically about the anti-assimilationist queer politics of post-punk lesbian leather bars in 1980s London. Ostracized both by internal debates over whether S&M & pornography were acceptable feminist practices and by external governmental oppression in Thatcher’s UK, the heavy-leather lesbians of the era formed a tight community initially mobilized by lust but eventually galvanized into political fury – mostly by necessity. A lot of them are still around to tell the tale, too (a rare luxury for 1980s urban queer communities), including producer Siobhan Fahey, who’s interviewed among her friends as a first-hand witness to the scene.
Rebel Dykes has all the hallmarks of a self-indulgent documentary in which talking heads wax nostalgic about the “You had to be there” glory days, but it’s thankfully working with a deep archive of vintage material from the era that helps illustrate the scene’s historical importance. That archive is especially helped by its subjects recalling a time when home video camcorders were first becoming affordable, giving a lot of the vintage footage the feel of grimy video art and, more practically, homemade pornography. The animated interstitials that stitch those clips together are a lot less visually impressive, but there is a kind of homemade charm to them as well, as if a bored teenage punk made their own Flash Animation versions of Love & Rockets comic book covers. Mostly, though, Rebel Dykes‘s nostalgia is sidestepped through its usefulness as a modern political motivator. It was a perfect selection for the activism angle of the Patois program, as it got a rowdy crowd amped up to either throw some bricks through some government windows or to throw some BDSM sex parties with their friends – whichever is more politically expedient.
Out of the Blue (1980)
Appropriately enough, Wildwood also recently screened Dennis Hopper’s teen-punk precursor to Vagabond—1980’s Out of the Blue—which likewise features an aimless, denim & leather-clad rebel whose most prized possession is her portable radio. Linda Manz stars as an Elvis & punk obsessed brat who rebels against her eternal car-crash homelife by running away from home and mimicking the destructive, hedonistic behaviors of the drug-addict grownups around her. Meanwhile, Hopper rebels with equal gusto against every studio exec who ever gave him a chance, combining the ecstatic antisocial freedoms of Easy Rider with the ecstatic career-torching incoherence of The Last Movie to deliver the least commercial project of his notoriously chaotic stint as a New Hollywood auteur. Belligerent, sloppy, brilliant – Out of the Blue had me laughing and holding back tears throughout, often simultaneously.
Almost all of the credit for the movie’s power belongs to Manz, of course, whose lead performance anchors Hopper’s messy narrative style in the exact way her voiceover narration anchored Malick’s in Days of Heaven. Her thick New Yawka felt out of place in that Americana period piece, but it’s perfectly suited to her character here, since she’s essentially auditioning to become the fifth Ramone. Manz’s dialogue mostly consists of provocative catchphrases like “Elvis!”, “Punk rock!”, “Kill hippies!”, “Subvert normality!” and “I hate men!”, all of which she either delivers in confrontational shouts at the dysfunctional adults around her or in mumbled private reassurances to herself. She’s a teenage thumbsucker who loves her teddy bear, but she’s eager to break out of her addiction-rotted home to live the full Fabulous Stains punk rock fantasy on the road, a volatile combo of innocence & bravado. The result of that combination is inevitably bleak, but she’s explosively entertaining & surprisingly funny on her journey to self-destruction.
Out of the Blue is the total Rebel Girl package. It’s got the oddly joyful nihilism of Vagabond, the take-no-shit toughness of Rebel Dykes, and a special one-of-a-kind teen rebel quality that’s only ever been credibly brought to the screen by Linda Manz (give or take a Natasha Lyonne, who is partially credited for fostering the film’s recent digital restoration). It’s also got one of hell of a theme song in that titular Neil Young track, which helps add instant emotional impact to Hopper’s aggressively abject, abrasive imagery.
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the erotic Greek sci-fi thriller Blind Date (1984).
00:00 Oscars
04:45 Hundreds of Beavers (2024) 08:10 Eye of the Cat (1969) 11:42 Mamma Roma (1962) 16:16 Raising Arizona (1987) 19:20 Drive-Away Dolls (2024) 24:40 Dick (1999) 27:53 The Ritz (1976) 33:30 Gasoline Rainbow (2024) 39:03 Sleater-Kinney 41:05 Rebel Dykes (2021) 46:25 How to Have Sex (2024) 51:43 Blood of the Virgins (1967)
In the somber Brits-on-holiday drama How to Have Sex, a trio of teen besties spend a week getting wasted drunk at a Greek resort built to house teens getting wasted drunk. If they were teen boys in the early aughts, this would be a boneheaded boner comedy about virginal losers’ bumbling attempts to get laid for the first time among the Girls Gone Wild college crowd. Since they’re teen girls in a modern drama, that same mission to ditch their virginal status before the return flight home plays like a horror film. How to Have Sex dredged up some deeply unpleasant memories of my first couple years on my own at a binge-drinking “party college”, as well as more recent memories of being dragged out of the house by friends for a nightmarish stroll down Bourbon Street. It’s just as terrifying onscreen as it is in person, especially the longer you sit with how realistic it is to a lot of people’s first sexual experiences inside those neon-lit Hell pits. This is not just a film about the way alcohol violently fuels the flames of social pressure; it’s also a film about rape, even though everyone shows up eager to get each other in bed.
Mia McKenna-Bruce stars as our POV character, Taz, who travels to a MTV Spring Break-style hedonist resort with the sole intention of getting drunk and shedding her virginity. The resort comes with its own pre-planned parties & mating rituals designed to make that dream come true, mostly by getting the already horny hordes of kids so blotto on grain alcohol that they can’t remember whether or not they’ve actually, finally done it. There’s no room for authentic connection or intimate interaction within the cacophony of that DJ dance party dystopia, in which all the world’s a 24-hour nightclub. It would be easy, then, to script a physically violent rape between strangers there, but first time writer-director Molly Manning Walker instead scripts a more common, less sensational kind of sexual trauma. This is a story about the gradual erosion of consent by someone Taz knows. She vulnerably puts herself out there for consensual sex but is rejected; then she is isolated, pressured to consent to acts she’s uncomfortable with, and then physically overpowered by her abuser once her will is fully worn down. It’s tough to watch, mostly because it’s true to life.
In terms of recent erosion-of-consent stories about the gender politics of sexual assault, How to Have Sex is not nearly as feverishly overcharged as the service-industry thriller The Royal Hotel, nor as politically didactic as the porno-industry exposé Pleasure. It deliberately avoids glamorizing the allure of the nonstop nightclub atmosphere, sticking to the grating, real-world details of teens sloppily gobbling cheese fries & screeching karaoke instead of depicting the fantasy of the fabulous night they’re having in their heads. It might reframe the debaucherous mise-en-scène of a vintage Skins episode through clear-eyed sobriety of docu-fiction, but what it lacks in ecstatic cinematic style it more than makes up for in depth of character. Taz is a real person to us, not just a symbolic victim or a political mechanism. After her assault, she continues to think, feel, act, and react in ways that are authentic to real-life human behavior, which only amplifies the sinister inauthenticity of the world around her. McKenna-Bruce plays the part with heartbreaking sweetness & insecurity, while Walker surrounds her with just enough sense-memory detail to put the audience right back in her ankle-breaking heels. It’s a scarily vulnerable feeling.
There are 38 feature films nominated for the 2024 Academy Awards ceremony. We here at Swampflix have reviewed exactly half of the films nominated (so far!), which isn’t nearly a high enough ratio to comment on the quality of the overall selection with any authority. We’re still happy to see movies we enjoyed listed among the nominees, though, including two major titles from our own Top 10 Films of 2023 list. The Academy rarely gets these things right when actually choosing the winners, but from what we’ve seen this year’s list is a decent sample of what 2023 cinema had to offer.
Listed below are the 18 Oscar-Nominated films from 2023 that we covered for the site, ranked from best to . . . least-best, based on our star ratings and internal voting. Each entry is accompanied by a blurb, a link to our corresponding review, and a mention of the awards the films were nominated for.
Barbie, nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Ryan Gosling), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (America Ferrera), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Costume Design, Best Production Design, Best Original Song (“What Was I Made For?”), and Best Original Song (“I’m Just Ken”)
“Greta Gerwig’s hot-pink meta daydream combines the bubbly pop feminism of Legally Blonde with the movie-magic artifice of The Wizard of Oz to craft the modern ideal of wide-appeal Hollywood filmmaking. It’s fantastic, an instant classic.”
Poor Things, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Yorgos Lanthimos), Best Actress in a Leading Role (Emma Stone), Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Mark Ruffalo), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Editing, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Production Design, and Best Original Score
“Yorgos Lanthimos has always poked at assumed social norms as if they were a corpse he found in the woods. That naive interrogation has never been as scientifically thorough nor as wickedly fun as it is here, though, to the point where he’s articulated the entire human experience through repurposed dead flesh. We love everything about this perverse Frankenstein story: every outrageous set & costume design, every grotesque CG creature that toddles in the background, every one of Mark Ruffalo’s man-baby tantrums and, of course, every moment of Emma Stone’s central performance as an unhinged goblin child.”
Past Lives, nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay
“Past Lives is truly a perfect title. Each time that the two meet, so much about themselves has changed, to the point that they don’t perceive themselves as the same people. This is textual; at one point, Nora draws a distinction between her adult self and the child Na Young that Hae Sung used to know. Hae Sung, however, still sees Na Young inside of Nora, and she does the same for him; they may not be literally reincarnated, but they are different people with something innate and unchanging inside that they recognize in one another. This cycle is reinforced in the way that Nora and Hae Sung see each other only every twelve years, like clockwork. Even the location choices reiterate the cyclical nature of the two’s relationship: on the day that they reunite in their thirties, the two are framed against Jane’s Carousel, and they later also take the ferry tour around the Statue of Liberty. Both are rides that ultimately end in the same place that they begin and then cycle again, in a lovely metaphor.”
Anatomy of a Fall, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Justine Triet), Best Actress in a Leading Role (Sandra Hüller), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Film Editing
“Sandra Hüller is captivating in Anatomie d’une chute (Anatomy of a Fall) as a woman who must stand trial for the murder of her husband, all while we in the audience never learn whether his death was an accident, suicide, or murder. That absence of information is a shadowy void in the center of this film, a known unknown whose invisibility means that, just as in life, all we have to go on are people’s imperfect memories, their self-serving rationalizations, and the presumption of honesty. One of the most mature movies for adults of recent years and the one with the most enduring appeal of 2023.”
The Holdovers, nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor in a Leading Roll (Paul Giamatti), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Editing
“Is there a way to describe something that’s almost the platonic ideal of an indie darling? Like, something that could accurately be said to be simply a rebundling of cliches but which is also somehow entirely new? That’s what Christmas sleeper hit The Holdovers is—to be honest, there may not be an entirely original idea anywhere in here, but that doesn’t make it any less affecting, emotional, or funny. Alexander Payne masterfully molds together a film that made me ache for every person on screen, a story I’d seen before but nonetheless brand new.”
“It was a great year for nostalgic throwbacks to vintage tokusatsu (see also: Shin Ultraman, Shin Kamen Rider, Smoking Causes Coughing), but this is the only title in that crop to hit the notes of deep communal hurt from the original 1954 Godzilla film that started it all. That sincerity is incredibly rewarding, if not only because it’s the only Godzilla movie I can remember making me cry.”
“A coming-of-age story that incorporates many of the best parts of children’s fantasy that came before it, from The Chronicles of Narnia to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and more, The Boy and the Heron sees these familiar narrative devices through the lens of a childhood haunted by grief and as imagined by the most talented living animation director, Hayao Miyazaki. A movie that can be frustrating to an audience that is unwilling to float along with its dream logic or to those viewers who are uncomfortable with ambiguity, it’s hard to imagine that something this stuffed with the fantastic could be said to leave a lot to the imagination, but it does. Most recommended movie of the year for bird people.”
“There were moments that made me think of Basket Case 2, of all things, which is a strange thing to say about a movie in this larger franchise, owned and operated by a monopolistic media empire.”
May December, nominated for Best Original Screenplay
“Netflix is kind of the perfect home for this, since it’s playing with TV Movie aesthetics anyway. Usually when great directors’ work gets sidelined there it’s disappointing; this time it’s darkly funny.”
“By some miracle nearly matches both the absurdly convoluted humanity-vs-AI combat of Mrs. Davis and the absurdly over-the-top espionage action spectacle of Pathaan, making it one of the most entertaining American blockbusters of the year by default. Unfortunately, like a lot of other American blockbusters this year, it’s also only half a movie.”
“A weird thing happens to me when I watch these movies where I’m not especially invested in the story but I still well up with emotion because of how beautiful everything is visually. The art of the moving image and such.”
The Zone of Interest, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Jonathan Glazer), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best International Feature (United Kingdom), Best Sound
“I don’t know that further into ice-cold Haneke cruelty was the direction I wanted Glazer’s career to go, but he at least makes the misery worthwhile. The rare war atrocity movie that doesn’t let you off the hook for not being as bad as a literal Nazi, but instead prompts you to dwell on the ways all modern life & labor parallels that specific moment in normalized Evil.”
Killers of the Flower Moon, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Martin Scorsese), Best Actress in a Leading Role (Lily Gladstone), Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Robert De Niro), Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, Best Production Design, Best Original Score, and Best Original Song (“Wahzhazhe – A Song for My People”)
“Feels more like Scorsese in Boardwalk Empire mode than Scorsese in Goodfellas mode (more dramatic than cinematic), save for a few stylistic jolts in the final hour. Still, it’s a quintessentially American story told by a quintessential American storyteller, and there are far less noble things he could be doing with $treaming $ervice money than turbocharging Lily Gladstone’s career.”
American Fiction, nominated forBest Picture, Best Actor in a Leading Role (Jeffrey Wright), Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Sterling K. Brown), Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Score
“A delightfully cynical skewering of NPR liberalism, even if it often feels like the call is coming from inside the house.”
“If there are any complaints, it’s that the film runs a little long. Every chase scene is, frankly, excellent, with the only real set-piece that felt like ‘too much’ being the swarm of eels that Indie must face while diving for a map on the floor of the Aegean Sea, and even that is, at the very least, visually distinctive from any other action sequence seen before in this franchise. It feels true to the spirit of the franchise and the character in a way that Crystal Skull barely attempts; one would expect there to be more fanservice-y elements present, but all the nostalgia factor was largely used up in the last movie, meaning that this one had to do some real lifting, and it does. The CGI on Ford’s face is apparent, but all of the other sequences feel real and practical (other than the horse chase through the subway, admittedly). The sins of Crystal Skull may never be fully painted over, but this one does a pretty good job, and even has a truly ludicrous final action sequence that strides up to the line of cartoonish but falls back at the perfect second, which is a lot of fun.”
“The jokes are more cute than hilarious. The animation is more tidy than expressive. It’s like reading the Sunday funnies on a week when the cartoonists are feeling especially sentimental.”
Oppenheimer, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Christopher Nolan), Best Actor in a Leading Role (Cillian Murphy), Best Actor in a Sup. Role (Robert Downey Jr.), Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Emily Blunt), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Production Design, Best Original Score, and Best Sound
“Strives to overcome its limitations as a legal testimony drama by drawing immense energy from a three-hour crosscutting montage and relentless repetition of its own title at a Gabbo! Gabbo! Gabbo! rhythm. It mostly succeeds, but at what cost??”
Flamin’ Hot, nominated for Best Original Song (“The Fire Inside”)
“Maybe the most egregious of the infinite PR movies in this Year of the Brands; corporate bullshit of the lowest order.”
Swampflix 