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Krewe Divine 2023

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For Carnival 2017, a few members of the Swampflix crew joined forces to pray at the altar of the almighty Divine. The greatest drag queen of all time, Divine was the frequent collaborator & long-time muse of our favorite filmmaker, John Waters. Her influence on the pop culture landscape extends far beyond the Pope of Trash’s Dreamlanders era, however, emanating to as far-reaching places as the San Franciscan performers The Cockettes, the punkification of disco, and Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Our intent was to honor the Queen of Filth in all her fabulously fucked-up glory by maintaining a new Mardi Gras tradition in Krewe Divine, a costuming krewe meant to masquerade in the French Quarter on every Fat Tuesday into perpetuity.

Our initial krewe was a small group of Swampflix contributors: site co-founders Brandon Ledet & Britnee Lombas, regular contributor CC Chapman, and repeat podcast guest Virginia Ruth. We were later joined by local drag performer Ce Ce V DeMenthe, who frequently pays tribute to Divine in her performances. There’s no telling how Krewe Divine will expand or evolve from here as we do our best to honor the Queen of Filth in the future, but for now, enjoy some pictures from our 2023 excursion, our fifth year in operation as Swampflix’s official Mardi Gras krewe (and our first year returning after the COVID-19 outbreak of 2020):

Eat Shit!

❤ Krewe Divine ❤

CC’s Top 10 Films of 2021

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1. The French Dispatch — A delightful, elaborate brunch of a film, offering a little taste of all your favorite flavors: something sweet, something savory, and a well-balanced cocktail to top it all off.  The anthology format affords Wes Anderson carte blanche to cram even more visual detail into the frame than usual, making for a texturally rich text.  Every chapter has a different approach to costume & set design, sifting through 1950s black & white crime pictures to colorful 1930s New Yorker cartoons to laidback 1960s talk shows.  Anderson’s previous films are beautifully decorated cakes; this one is a full banquet.

2. French Exit — Michelle Pfeiffer was my favorite part of mother!, and it’s great to see her playing a similar role in this gem.  I was surprised to see so many people turn their nose up at it.  I could watch Pfeiffer chew scenery for all eternity, and here she goes as far as chewing up her martini glass, tossing the olive aside.  I was also surprised to discover that it was adapted from a novel and not a stage play, although I’m not surprised that it started a literary text.  The dialogue is not at all naturalistic, but it is extremely satisfying, like a good Albee or Pinter play.  I’ve never experienced the life of the idle rich, but this movie allows you to indulge in their wicked, self-amused humor through a fictional remove.  At the very least, it’s comforting to know that they apparently despise cops as much as us commoners, which is something you can’t say about the wealth & property-obsessed capitalists among them.

3. Mandibles — The stupidest comedy of the year, and my favorite.  Sometimes I fear that I’m the least intelligent person alive and people are just flattering me by not calling me out on it.  It’s reassuring to see two actual idiots on the screen for comparison, then, especially in a comedy that doesn’t have to go overly scatological or sexual to land its jokes the way similar Farrelly Brothers movies would’ve in the 90s.  It’s somehow smarter and more imaginative than past examples of its genre like Dumb and Dumber or There’s Something About Mary—building its absurd story around a freakishly gigantic housefly—and yet it’s just as hopelessly stupid.

4. Lapsis — The most impressive sci-fi film of the year, especially in the skillful way it achieves wide-scale worldbuilding on a tiny budget.  Its setting is not exactly our current reality, but it does closely mirror what’s happening right now, particularly in modern labor exploitation.  It’s also smart about how it combats that exploitation, choosing to radicalize an unremarkable, politically mainstream worker instead of pretending a useful labor movement can be achieved with only leftist academics.  It’s rare to see labor movements depicted as they actually are: democratic and beneficial to the common worker. 

5. Zola — A “just vibes” movie that somehow has a plot.  The vibes are mostly bad, but its mirrorworld fantasy sequences where dancers try on different outfits & personae achieve a kind of high-art serenity you won’t find in many madcap road trip comedies.  It’s also an excellent adaptation of its online source material, capturing the breakneck pace of each new update steering its infamous Twitter thread into new, thrilling directions.  There aren’t any major examples of how to translate that modern storytelling style to the screen, so this feels like it’s exploring entirely new territory – to the point where the tweet notifications on its soundtrack were instantly iconic. 

6. Bo Burnham: Inside — I wanted to not like this for the very same reasons that Burnham mocks himself in it; his admissions that he’s a rich white guy with nothing substantial to contribute to society all ring true.  I enjoyed all the songs, though, and his self-criticism ultimately ended up being what won me over.  The more he focuses on his own shortcomings, the more this “comedy special” devolves into a relatable madness.  It perfectly captures the feeling of reality itself crumbling around us as we remain in isolation, unable to tell what’s real and what’s not in our increasingly fake modern world.

7. Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar — This was almost the stupidest comedy of the year, losing that prestigious contest to Mandibles.  It’s a type of mainstream comedy that you don’t often see anymore: something that’s incredibly idiotic but still has the grandeur of big musical numbers and expensive set pieces.  I especially love that its heroines are unremarkable middle-aged women, a demographic who don’t often get to be the heroines of anything – even goofy comedies.

8. Wojnarowicz — This documentary about artist and political activist David Wojnarovicz made me seethingly, white-hot angry.  I was angry at past injustices, but also the injustices of the present: the governmental cruelty that led to Wojnarovicz’s death and the fact that not a lot has changed since.  It made me want to ACT UP.

9. The World to Come — Most costume dramas about doomed lesbian romances contain their affairs to fleeting moments and wistful memories.  This one pushes the practical impacts of its romance much further, not shying away from the tragic, real-world consequences of expressing queer love in a brutal, patriarchal past.

10. Titane — I don’t feel as strongly about this film as the rest of the Swamplix crew seems to, but I can’t deny that it was one of the best-made films of the year.  I watched about fifty movies released in 2021, and this was easily among the most memorable.  It takes big swings at issues most movies don’t dare explore, especially in the way male socialization rituals that are often perceived as markers of toxic masculinity are actually important bonding experiences that connect people in a meaningful way, affording them a shared sense of humanity.

-CC Chapman

Swampflix’s Top 10 Films of 2020

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1. Deerskin – Quentin Dupieux’s absurdist thriller about a man’s obsession with a fringed deerskin jacket is consistently funny, but also incredibly vicious when it wants to be. Despite indulging in the ridiculous, high-concept genre of Killer Objects horror (think Death Bed, In Fabric, Christine, or the director’s own Rubber), it’s a surprisingly thoughtful film about the inadequacy that mediocre men face at middle age, and their psychotic efforts to overcome that deficiency. Jean Dujardin previously charmed American audiences in Best Picture-winner The Artist, but here he’s a sad, pathetic grifter who has to scam people just to hang out with him. It’s a hilarious joke at the expense of male vanity (including the vanity of making an entire movie about a deerskin jacket in the first place).

2. Color Out of Space – Richard Stanley returns to the director’s chair after decades of mysterious exile to adapt an H.P. Lovecraft short story about a meteor crash and a malignant color. Most criticism has fixated on Nic Cage’s over-the-top lead performance, but those antics aside this is a harrowing film about loss & cancer, fearing not just the disease but also its emotional erosion of familial relationships, interpreted through the powerful medium of cosmic horror.

3. The Invisible Man – A genuinely scary film that operates in a realm of traditional horror tropes. For a lot of its audience, it’s doubly scary because of its domestic violence aspect, capturing the feeling of the ground being pulled from under you when you realize your abusive relationship is not the loving one you initially pictured it to be. That realization happens before the film even opens, but we’re made to live through its terrifying aftermath.

4. The Twentieth Century – This pseudo-biography of a real-life Canadian politician is a gorgeous, absurdist fantasy piece that retells the history of Canadian governance as “one failed orgasm after another.” History says its events are set in Canada, but what’s onscreen is some nowhere nether-reality of dry ice and matte paintings, populated by caricatures rather than characters. It’s like Guy Maddin directing an especially kinky Kids in the Hall sketch, stumbling out into feature length in a dreamlike stupor.

5. The Wolf House – A nightmare experiment in stop-motion animation that filters atrocities committed by exiled-Nazi communes in Chile through a loose, haunting fairy tale narrative. It’s got all the trappings of a pre-Brothers Grimm folktale: the sour ending, the moralistic behavioral warnings, the magic that is both beautiful and cruel. It’s a relentlessly grotesque display, one that fully conveys the hideous evils of its allegory’s real-life parallels even if you aren’t familiar with that particular pocket of fascism history.

6. Possessor – This techno body horror from Brandon Cronenberg feels like the cursed love child between his father’s eXistenZ and his own Antiviral. It’s a compelling psychological battle between its characters to gain possession of the corporeal vessel they share (a battle powerfully performed by Christopher Abbott & Andrea Riseborough). A truly shocking film, both beautiful and disgusting.

7. Birds of Prey – A wonderfully stylized, deliriously hyperactive superhero movie that doesn’t drag or feel laboriously obligated to comic book backstory or pathos. It steps on other superheroes’ capes, soaring in its own unique, chaotic way (a power seemingly fueled by Vodka-Red Bulls).

8. Bacurau – A Brazilian film that mutates familiar details inspired by “The Most Dangerous Game” into a surreal sci-fi-horror-western genre meltdown. It uses familiar tropes & techniques to tell a story we’ve all heard before in a new style & context that achieves something freshly exciting with those antique building blocks. In other words, it’s genre filmmaking at its finest.

9. Swallow – An eerie, darkly humorous descendent of Todd Haynes’s Safe, in which a newly pregnant woman is compulsively drawn to swallowing inedible objects, much to the frustration of her overly-controlling family & doctors. It’s a subtle but highly stylized psychological horror about bodily autonomy, class warfare, and trauma, illustrating the complete lack of control you have over your own body & destiny if you’re born on the wrong end of class & gender dynamics.

10. His House – Reinvigorates haunted house genre tropes with the same tactics that titles like Blood Quantum, Zombi Child, and The Girl With All the Gifts used on the similarly overworked tropes of the zombie genre: by shifting the cultural POV and the purpose of the central metaphor. This bold debut feature from screenwriter and director Remi Weekes tackles topics of grief, disenfranchisement, loss, immigration, and cultural disconnection – all framed within the traditional scares of the haunted house horror film.

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

-The Swampflix Crew

CC’s Top 15 Films of 2020

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1. We Are Little Zombies – The meteoric rise and fall of a punk band formed by four disaffected, emotionally stunted Japanese orphans who run away together after meeting at their parents’ respective funerals. It captures both the exuberance of youth and the rage kids feel when the world is outside their control. As a directorial debut, it’s like the best bands’ freshman albums, with years of pent-up creative material exploding onto the screen. I just hope Makoto Nagahisa has enough ideas leftover for his next film, because I’d love to see more.

2. American Utopia – I saw an abbreviated version of this David Byrne concert at Jazz Fest a few years ago and was supposed to see the full show at the Saenger in 2019, but it was cancelled due to a scheduling conflict with a Disney Live! production. And then COVID-19 eliminated any chance of that show being rescheduled. So, it was a little bittersweet getting to see the movie version for my birthday this year, but it was still a powerful experience. The way Byrne questions who we are in the world as people and as citizens really spoke to me. It’s like an emotional, danceable TED Talk about our interdisciplinary connections, studying humanity as if it were a type of fungal mycelium. If anything, the show’s only become timelier & more relevant since the 2018 performance I attended. Police brutality has been a scourge forever, but last summer it came to a head in a really public way, and I was impressed to see a concert film directly deal with that injustice.

3. The Wolf House – An animated Chilean film that addresses a real-life religious cult that committed wartime atrocities and other crimes against humanity dating back to the 1960s by recounting them in an ugly fairy tale. It’s got all the trappings of a pre-Brothers Grimm folktale: the sour ending, the moralistic behavioral warnings, the magic that is both beautiful and cruel. Although it’s framed as a rediscovered propaganda film lost since the 60s, it’s constructed with some of the most astonishing modern animation techniques I’ve seen. It’s ostensibly stop-motion, but it’s achieved through a wildly imaginative multimedia approach. That innovation is more than just an all-style-no-substance gimmick, though; it’s an integral part of the storytelling. It’s evil, it’s sick, and it’s grimy.

4. Birds of Prey – A wonderfully stylized, deliriously hyperactive superhero movie that doesn’t drag or feel laboriously obligated to comic book backstory or pathos. It steps on other superheroes’ capes, soaring in its own unique, chaotic way (a power seemingly fueled by Vodka-Red Bulls).

5. Emma. – I love how sharp this Austen adaptation is, both in the physical choreography of its characters’ movements and in their cutting, carefully chosen words. The costumes & sets are also superb. Its biggest detractors criticize it for how mean Emma is, but that’s also just how she’s presented in the novel. Emma Woodhouse is not some sweet saint; she ruins lives for her own amusement and is too vain to admit how much pleasure she gets out of that transgression, which is just teenage girls for you. It’s nice that Anya Taylor-Joy has decided to stop aging so she can play these parts forever. Johnny Flynn also commands the same animal sexuality he got to display in Beast, except dressed up here in nicer clothes. The whole film feels like a dangerously sharp knife with an exquisitely crafted handle. It can draw blood, but it’s an object of pure beauty.

6. Portrait of a Lady on Fire – This period drama is very sumptuous & sensual in its cinematography, unlike the sharp angularity of Emma. It’s soft like the beautiful green fabric of the dress in the titular portrait. Still, I love the bleakness & the remoteness of its locale and its outlook on human relationships. It notes the rigid, absolute limitations placed on women, even women of a very privileged class. Despite the corseted parameters culture places on its characters, there’s a free-flowing wildness of femininity & womanhood that runs through it, best exemplified by the acapella folksong sung around the bonfire.

7. Dick Johnson is Dead – A documentary made in collaboration between Dick Johnson and his filmmaker daughter, Kirsten Johnson, working through their anxieties over his impending death by staging fictitious versions of that impending tragedy in increasingly imaginative ways. Its interspersed interviews with Dick and the people in his orbit examine the nature of relationships between children and their parents, our larger societal relationship with death, and indefatigability of the human spirit. It’s a happy film about a sad subject, ultimately feeling triumphant in the way it cheats death for Dick. Even though he will die, he will always feel alive to people who watch this document.

8. Possessor – This techno body horror from Brandon Cronenberg feels like the cursed love child between his father’s eXistenZ and his own Antiviral. The plot isn’t particularly important. What’s most compelling is the psychological battle between its characters to gain possession of the corporeal vessel they share (a testament to the powerful performances from actors Christopher Abbott & Andrea Riseborough). It’s a truly shocking film, alienating the audience with images no one should see. The visual effects are fascinating, both beautiful and disgusting.

9. Palm Springs – A Groundhog Day time-loop film, which is quickly becoming its own genre. This one’s timing felt very in-tune with the themes of the pandemic. It captures the anxieties we especially felt early in the stay-at-home lockdown orders but channels them into something fun & constructive. It’s a pleasing comedy that transforms the year’s shitty, never-ending nightmare into a solvable equation.

10. The Shock of the Future – A day in the life of a young composite character who’s an emerging artist in late-70s electronic music. Over the course of the film, she composes the very first electropop song, a tribute to several women pioneers of analog electronica who struggled to get recognized for their innovative artistry in a male-dominated industry. It’s impressive in the way it pushes against the myth of the individual artistic genius perpetuated by most biopics, instead stressing the importance of community & collaboration. It’s also fascinating to watch electro pioneers tinker with individual pieces of analog equipment to create new, exciting sounds. It made me want to play around on some vintage synths & drum machines myself.

11. Deerskin – Who doesn’t love a film about killer fashion? Between this & In Fabric, that may only be a subgenre of two (so far), but it’s a wonderful extension of the killer-objects horror of classics like Death Bed, Rubber, and Christine. Despite indulging in that ridiculous, high-concept genre, this is a surprisingly thoughtful film about the inadequacy that mediocre men face at middle age, and their psychotic efforts to overcome that deficiency. Jean Dujardin previously charmed American audiences in Best Picture-winner The Artist, but here he’s a sad, pathetic grifter who’s lost his job and his only meaningful relationship, now having to scam people just to hang out with him. It’s hilarious. Also, shoutout to Portrait of a Lady on Fire’s Adèle Haenel’s performance as his only accomplice; she’s a great audience surrogate in her amused fascination over the ongoing car wreck of his life.

12. Color Out of Space – I always love attempts to modernize Lovecraft, bringing his mythology (but not his personal politics) into modern media. This is only the second most successful visualization of the original short story’s central threat in its visual effects, trailing behind the 2010 German film that better captured the impossibility of its adaptation. It’s much more effective in metaphor, crafting yet another horror of male inadequacy that examines the lengths that men will go to maintain their power & privilege. Nic Cage plays an absurdly silly man who fears his family is starting to rupture due to illness & emotional alienation. His desperate efforts to draw his nuclear family back into order only place them directly in the path of cosmic horror even further outside his control. A lot of critical focus has been around his over-the-top performance, but those antics aside this is a harrowing film about loss & cancer, fearing not just the disease but its emotional erosion of familial relationships, interpreted through the powerful medium of cosmic horror.

13. The Invisible Man – Okay so it turns out the overriding theme of the year is the lengths that sad, pathetic men will go to maintain power & privilege. This one is a genuinely scary film that operates in a realm of traditional horror tropes. For a lot of its audience, it’s doubly scary because of its domestic violence aspect, capturing the feeling of the ground being pulled from under you when you realize your abusive relationship is not the loving one you initially pictured it to be. That realization happens before the film even opens, but we’re made to live through its terrifying aftermath.

14. The Twentieth Century – This pseudo-biography of a real-life Canadian politician is also a highly-stylized farce about, again, a pathetic man’s foibles in his quest for power. History says its events are set in Canada, but what’s onscreen is some nowhere nether-reality of dry ice and gorgeous matte paintings, populated by caricatures rather than characters. Guy Maddin & David Lynch are obvious influences on its imagery, but it’s all filtered through a more vintage George Méliès patina. It resurrects the early-cinema Méliès tradition of the féerie play: crafting an artificial fantasy plot & spectacular visuals but anchoring them to a melodramatic morality play about the weaknesses of privileged men.

15. Extra Ordinary – This goofy-not-scary Irish horror comedy shares a very particular sense of humor with titles like Housebound & What We Do in the Shadows, to the point that it’s shocking it’s not from New Zealand. A woman who is not yet middle aged but no longer young doesn’t know what to do with her life, mostly because she harbors unresolved guilt over her paranormal-expert father’s death. Luckily, she gets pulled into a zany adventure that saves her from her rut and resolves that leftover guilt. And surprise, the villain she faces is a sad, pathetic man desperate to hold onto his power & prestige – an aging rock star played by Will Forte with the same childish temper tantrums he threw in Last Man on Earth.

HM. Swallow – Although this was my #1 film last year, when I saw it at the New Orleans Film Festival, I would be remiss if I didn’t include it again this year when it was more widely available. It’s a subtle but highly stylized psychological horror about bodily autonomy, class warfare, and trauma, illustrating the complete lack of control you have over your own body & destiny if you’re born on the wrong end of class & gender dynamics.

-CC Chapman

Lagniappe Podcast: #NOFF2020

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For this lagniappe episode of the podcast, Brandon, Britnee, and CC review the few films they caught at the 31st annual New Orleans Film Festival, including films on killer mermaids, local drag artists, and New Orleans legend Valerie Sassyfras. Enjoy!

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Podcast Crew

Episode #106 of The Swampflix Podcast: Kenneth Anger’s Magick Lantern Cycle

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Welcome to Episode #106 of The Swampflix Podcast!  For this episode, CC & Brandon tackle Kenneth Anger’s decades-spanning short film series “The Magick Lantern Cycle” – from Fireworks (1947) to Lucifer Rising (1972).   Expect occultist rituals, leather bondage regalia, LSD freak-outs, and good old-fashioned homoeroticism. Enjoy!

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, YouTube, TuneIn, or by following the links below.

-CC Chapman & Brandon Ledet

Episode #104 of the Swampflix Podcast: Children of Paradise (1945) & New Orleans French Film Fest 2020

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Welcome to Episode #104 of The Swampflix Podcast! For this episode, the podcast crew discusses all eight features they caught at the 2020 New Orleans French Film Festival, with a particular focus on the 1945 epic melodrama Children of Paradise – which is often cited as “the greatest French film of all time”.  Enjoy!

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-James Cohn, Hanna Räsänen, CC Chapman, and Brandon Ledet

Krewe Divine 2020

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In 2017, a few members of the Swampflix crew decided to finally grow up and get serious about Mardi Gras. We collectively shed our annual personal crises about what themes to include in our Fat Tuesday costuming by pooling our resources to pray at the altar of a single cinematic deity: Divine. Arguably the greatest drag queen of all time, Divine was the frequent collaborator & long-time muse of one of our favorite filmmakers, John Waters. Her influence on the pop culture landscape extends far beyond the Pope of Trash’s Dreamlanders era, however, emanating to as far-reaching places as the San Franciscan performers The Cockettes, the punkification of disco, RuPaul’s Drag Race, and Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Our intent was to honor the Queen of Filth in all her fabulously fucked-up glory by maintaining a new Mardi Gras tradition in Krewe Divine, a costuming krewe meant to masquerade in the French Quarter on every Fat Tuesday into perpetuity.

Our initial krewe was a small group of Swampflix contributors: site co-founders Brandon Ledet & Britnee Lombas, regular contributor CC Chapman, and repeat podcast guest Virginia Ruth. We were later joined by local drag performer Ce Ce V DeMenthe, who frequently pays tribute to Divine in her performances. There’s no telling how Krewe Divine will expand or evolve from here as we do our best to honor the Queen of Filth in the future, but for now, enjoy some pictures from our 2020 excursion, our fourth year in operation as Swampflix’s official Mardi Gras krewe:

Eat shit!
❤ Krewe Divine ❤

Krewe Divine Prayer Cards

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Happy Mardi Gras, y’all!

Today marks the fourth outing of Krewe Divine, Swampflix’s official Mardi Gras krewe.  As part of our continued effort to pay tribute to the filthy divinity of John Waters’s own Dreamlanders crew with our annual costuming excursions, I made these “Catholic” prayer cards as this year’s throws.  Feel free to print & laminate them yourselves to pass around.  Spread the good word of Filth.  And, as always, eat shit!

Click through the images for full-size scans.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

-CC Chapman

CC’s Top 10 Films of 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-CC Chapman