drama

Camille 2000 (1969)

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Radley Metzger’s late-60s romance Camille 2000 slips through the cracks of most marketable genre definitions. Its title suggests a Swingin’ 60s sci-fi futurism, but its story is set in contemporary Rome; the only thing futuristic about it is its see-through inflatable furniture. Its fashionable Italian production design and scene-to-scene dramatic sensibilities recall the post-Hitchcock stylings of a giallo, but there’s no murder nor mystery to be found in its plot. Its director’s reputation as an unusually stylish hardcore pornographer sets the mood for lewd on-screen sex, but its historical timing as pre-Deep Throat erotica means it can only deliver softcore posing of nude bodies, with no genital contact nor thrusting. So, what exactly is a sci-fi title without science fiction, a giallo without murder, a porno without penetration? Like with many artsy Euro dramas, it’s all just a vibe. In this case, the vibe happens to be a Pierre Cardin magazine layout inspired by Valley of the Dolls. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

The titular Camille is a wealthy Roman socialite who’s living a dangerously fast life of pure, high-fashion hedonism. She spends her careless days drunk & stoned, shopping for dresses, and party-hopping from orgy to opera to orgy. The only thing she needs to do to sustain this fabulous lifestyle is to marry rich, an obligation that stresses her out as she half-heartedly attempts to placate an aging sugar-daddy fiancée while continually humping the more age-appropriate fuckboys whom she actually desires. She warns the latest fuckboy not to fall in love with her, since that life-dependent need to marry rich will certainly break his heart in the long run, but the young Frenchman can’t help but fall for her anyway. He swears that even if he sleeps with 2,000 other women, he still won’t be able to get over her (thus the futuristic-sounding title). He copes by draining his modest bank account trying to keep her clothed and happy until she can’t help but move on and officially marry, securing her place in life. She copes by popping pills in-between her nonstop parade of orgiastic cocktail parties, too numb to feel the full brunt of her burgeoning love for the dolt. Their toxic dynamic inevitably leaves him drunk and her dead. It takes 131 long minutes to arrive at that predetermined destination, like a train that takes lengthy breaks at every station.

Camille 2000 is not a movie you watch for its drama or its action; you watch it for its production design. Its social conflicts and stoney-baloney fuck sessions are frustratingly inert, but they’re at least staged inside an Italo fashion magazine layout, where it’s appropriate to wear see-through swimsuits to an afternoon cocktail party and no bedroom is complete without at least a dozen strategically angled mirrors. It’s less actual pornography than it is lifestyle pornography, inviting the audience to hang out with emptyheaded European socialites whose only immediate concern in life is finding the chicest place to smoke their dope and get their rocks off. Metzger can’t go full-hardcore here the way he does in later, more famous pictures like The Opening of Misty Beethoven, but he has plenty of opportunity to leer & drool over his actors’ carefully arranged nude bodies. In the most stylish scene, Camille is being eaten out by her favorite Frenchman in the background while a vase of camelias is framed close-up in the foreground, with Metzger’s lens alternating focus between the two displays to the rhythm of her orgasmic breaths. Like everything else in the picture, it’s gorgeous, it’s indulgent, and it lasts for several more minutes than you expect it to, so it’s best not to be in a rush to get off and get over to the next swanky locale.

Roger Ebert wrote a 1-star review of Camille 2000 for the Chicago Sun-Times, frustrated by the excess of mirrored nude modeling and the total lack of actual phonographic thrusting. That review was published in October of 1969, and I am dying to know if that was before or after Ebert wrote the screenplay for Russ Meyers’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls that same year. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls resembles Camille 2000 in its garish look and its erotic sensibilities far more closely than it recalls the original Valley of the Dolls it was supposedly a sequel to, almost to the point where it feels like a direct parody of Metzger’s film. Camille even has a gay fashionista bestie that stands in as the film’s very own Z-Man, whom I fully expected to transform into Superwoman during the film’s climactic, prison-themed S&M orgy. I must admit that a large part of my enjoyment of Camille 2000 is in its resemblance to Russ Meyer’s much crasser, much more exciting follow-up, since it was a joy to spend more time luxuriating in mise-en-scène that so closely recalled one of my all-time favorite films. Meanwhile, Ebert would’ve been confronted with it as a routine work assignment that tested his patience & forgiveness as its drama refused to progress and its nude models refused to hump. All I can say is that all movies become more interesting with time, which tends to flatten their differences and accentuate their shared value as cultural snapshots of a bygone era.

-Brandon Ledet

Time of the Gypsies (1988)

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In its opening act, the 1988 coming-of-age drama Time of the Gypsies appears to be an “Eat your vegetables” proposition, the kind of middlebrow Euro arthouse fare that immerses international audiences in the daily toils of a cloistered ethnic community, learning a little empathy along the way. Our teenage Romani protagonist, Perhan (Davor Dujmović), is having a tough go of it. His grandmother can barely house him with the money she makes as the village faith healer; his young sister needs serious medical intervention the family cannot access; and his shit-heel uncle constantly threatens to destroy their modest home with his drunken gambling. Worse yet, Perhan doesn’t have enough money to charm the mother of the girl he wants to marry, leaving his best chance for romance on the backburner until he can get his life together. Most VHS-era international dramas would’ve kept their stories close to home, tracking Perhan’s uneasy maturation into a young man as he navigated the big, eccentric personalities of his village. Instead, director Emir Kusturica finds inspiration in Romani nomadism and takes his story on the road, where Time of the Gypsies quickly shifts gears and becomes a Scorsesean rise-to-power, fall-from grace crime story. It’s like a Romani prototype for Goodfellas, except that Henry Hill got in trouble by trafficking cocaine instead of trafficking human beings.

Notably, Henry Hill also did not have telekinetic superpowers and, to public knowledge, was never visited by the ghost of his pet turkey. Time of the Gypsies deviates from the genre expectations of the Euro coming-of-age drama and the organized crime picture by dabbling in some light magical surrealism. Beasts of the Southern Wild director Benh Zeitlan introduced the film as a major source of inspiration during a recent screening at Gap Tooth, and it’s easy to spot the influence. This is a story about a young, naive person on an adventure to bring their family back together, getting in over their heads in the wider world of magical wonder & poverty-driven crime. Unlike in Beasts of the Southern Wild, however, Perhan is an active participant in both of those larger forces; he can move small objects (like kitchen utensils) with his mind, and he quickly works his way up the ranks of a crime organization that traffics children to cities like Rome & Milan to work as petty street hustlers. If you’ll excuse yet another Western cultural reference for this Yugoslavian artifact, there’s a Max Fischer impishness to Perhan’s personality that makes it easy to overlook his flaws, but the behavior he learns from the men in his immediate circle unavoidably influences him to grow up into a criminal lowlife himself. If you’ve ever seen a crime story before, you know what fate awaits him at the end, but rarely will you have such a magical time getting to that predetermined destination.

Okay, let me toss off one more Western reference, just for kicks. Time of the Gypsies could’ve just as easily been titled Three Weddings and a Funeral, given how much of the runtime is spent celebrating various Romani marriages, every last one of them doomed because of the drunken brutes acting as grooms. My Western-brained movie references are at least somewhat supported by the text, which features onscreen references to Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin and, most improbably, Richard Gere. Emir Kusturica conveys a true cinephilia here, not only in the crime-story genre shift at the top of the second act, but also in his obvious love for “movie magic,” both literal & figurative. In addition to the aforementioned telekinesis & turkey-spirit visits, Kusturica is constantly playing with real-world logic of various scenes merely by moving his camera in unexpected ways. Characters will appear at two opposite ends of a single pan shot, impossibly occupying two places at once. Perhan enters a village festival from the sky, clutching his beloved turkey while being gently lowered to the ground via camera crane. A home is lifted into the sky by another crane while a family cowers below, their entire lives hanging over their heads. It’s often impossible to know whether we’re watching a dream sequence or an actual occurrence until its effect plays out in a subsequent sequence. Meanwhile, constant Eastern European folk music scores each transition from the magical world to the real one, suggesting a fluid, meaningless barrier between them.

In some ways, the communal story told by Time of the Gypsies will always be distorted through translation for me. In a very direct way, its recent Gap Tooth screening was distorted through the translation of shoddy subtitles, which were so half-considered that they refer to Perhan’s young girlfriend interchangeably as “Sorry” and “Excuse Me,” as both a frustratingly literal translation of the name “Azra” and, seemingly, as an open apology. The movie fully immerses its audience in a Romani world at the outset, though, overwhelming us with a nonstop soundtrack of accordion tunes, crying babies, gobbling turkeys, thunder, and top-volume drunken arguments. Once we’re fully rooted in that world, Kusturica shifts into more West-accommodating genre tropes, staging the Romani version of The Godfather across multiple years & countries. It’s a much more thrilling, lyrical journey than you might expect in the first few minutes, where it seems we’re settling in for a broad family dramedy about Old World village life.

-Brandon Ledet

Il Posto (1961)

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It goes without saying that a critic’s personal biases can have a major effect on how they rate a film. So, it’s probably best to be honest about those biases up front, rather than pretending that you’re reviewing films from a purely objective perspective. Personally, the bias I find the most difficult to get past is an embarrassingly simple one: setting. No matter when a movie is set throughout history, I find it’s far easier to lose myself in a story set in a city, rather than the great rural outdoors. No matter whether it’s in the blazing heat of the dusty Old West or on the icy crags of a European mountaintop, I always have to work a little harder to care about stories set outside The City, where my simple urbanite mind longs to be. At least, that’s what was on my simple mind while watching films by Italian neorealist Ermanno Olmi, whose two most famous titles are rooted in the Italian countryside. Olmi’s 1977 Palme d’Or winner The Tree of Wooden Clogs profiles the daily lives and toils of sharecroppers in rural Italy at the turn of the 20th century, forever held down by predatory landlords. It’s a remarkably thoughtful, righteously political work, but I’d be lying if I said spending so much time in the mud & muck of daily farm life didn’t test the endurance of my half-open eyelids. In his 1961 breakout film Il Posto, however, a young man who lives in the Italian countryside actively seeks employment in nearby Milan, hoping to break away from his parents’ small-town control over his daily life by exploring some newfound urbanite freedom. Now, that’s a story I can easily relate to, especially by the time all of his hopeful, youthful momentum crashes into the brick wall of a bureaucratic desk job, where all youth & hope goes to die.

The remarkable thing about urban living is that—unlike farm work—it never really changes all that much. Il Posto is set a half-century and an entire continent away from where I’m living & working today, and I recognized so much of my daily joys & indignities reflected back at me from the screen. Our scrawny desk-jockey hero Domenico (Sandro Panseri) timidly learns his way around a public transit system, a busy coffee counter, an awkward office party, and an endless labyrinth of path-blocking street construction in his early days as a shy, soft-spoken urbanite in the exact ways that I remember them in New Orleans. Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before: He goes looking for a job, and then he finds a job; heaven knows, you know the rest. In Il Posto‘s most surprising sequence, we briefly leave Domenico’s POV to catch a glimpse of the quiet home lives, petty workplace grievances, and go-nowhere artistic projects of his older, more established coworkers, who’ve long ago settled into the exact daily routine that’s soon to take over his entire life. From there, the film mostly amounts to a catalog of small character quirks & warmly human interactions found in a cold bureaucratic environment, determined to discourage such comradery through staggered lunch breaks and other interdepartmental barriers. Our little country boy’s big city dreams are adorable at first, as he smirks his ways through all the little indignities of modern urban living with the charming boyishness of an Italian Timothée Chalamet. When an older coworker who’s deluded himself into thinking he can live a full life by sneaking in some writing sessions on the clock between work assignments suddenly dies, however, it’s clear the paper-pushing desks Domenico is working towards are just one-man prison cells, each carrying a life sentence. At least, that’s what’s resonating with this humble office worker who’s currently sneaking in a writing session on the clock between work assignments.

Structurally, Il Posto follows the basic plot beats of an eternally popular urbanite genre: the romcom. Our adorably hopeful office worker quickly falls in love with the very first cute girl he meets in the city (Loredana Detto), then spends the rest of the picture trying to capitalize on that romantic spark while ignoring the thousands of other potential matches surrounding him in Milan. Their will-they-won’t-they relationship is undeniably cute, but it’s also undeniably naive, considering how many obstacles daily labor puts between their potential to socialize and how many other people are hanging around as unengaged romantic competition. Eventually, the film’s labor concerns overwhelm its romantic ones, crushing Domenico’s spirit at the very last minute with a kind of heartbreak he was too infatuated to see coming. So, what we effectively have here is a romcom setup to a bleak labor-politics punchline, ultimately making Il Posto just as much of a neorealist political screed as the rural, landlord-bashing Tree of Wooden Clogs. If I could write about film objectively, I might be lauding Wooden Clogs as the more technically impressive work over this scrappy tale of youthful disillusionment, or I might cite this duo as ideological equals in their shared themes of labor exploitation. Since I write subjectively, however, I have to say that the film that most drove home just how long I’ve been hopelessly crushed under the expectations of daily, dehumanizing labor is the one where the main character does the same kind of meaningless work that I do, arrives to his desk via the same city-owned vehicles that I do, and approaches his personal relationships with the same kind of dorky earnestness that I do — ignoring the vast social potential of modern urban living in favor of more immediate loyalty & intimacy. Such is the life of a city boy with a desk job.

-Brandon Ledet

Blue Heron (2026)

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Art really is all one big continuum. However lazy the practice may be, it’s always tempting to review movies by breaking them down into lists of other works they recall. For instance, I spent the entirety of David Lowery’s haunted-dress popstar fable Mother Mary making a mental list of other recent (and, frankly, superior) titles it visually & thematically resembles: Vox Lux, In Fabric, Suspiria (2018), etc. I could write an entire review of that film just by listing titles, suggesting that most genre filmmaking is just simple recombinations of preexisting material, à la collage art. Often, though, a movie can really surprise you with its combinations of preexisting pop art, bringing together disparate influences that no one else would ever think to combine. Sophy Romvari’s debut feature Blue Heron is very likely the only movie I’ll see in my lifetime that prompts me to think about Pearl Jam & Jeanne Dielman at the same time, for whatever that combination is worth. On the Jeanne Dielman end, Romvari tracks the daily, lonely domestic labor performed by a young mother, at one point sitting down to peel a pile of potatoes in direct homage to Chantal Akerman’s slow-cinema classic. The Pearl Jam connection is much more direct, and yet, possibly unintentional. The reason that overworked, underslept mother (Iringó Réti) is so close to her wit’s end is because she’s struggling to raise an unruly, maladjusted teen (Edik Beddoes) who she’s convinced is capable of committing an act of violence that threatens the family home, with no systemic help to prevent it. The fact that the story is set in the 1990s and the violent teen shares the name “Jeremy” with the eponymous school-shooting subject of Pearl Jam’s melodramatic 90s hit likely means nothing to Romvari, but it’s a connection I can’t help but make as a viewer. Some homages are intentional; others are uncontrollable happenstance.

As long as I’m playing the movie-connections game, Blue Heron‘s two most obvious points of comparison are other recent critical favorites in which first-time directors confront uneasy childhood truths from their own Millennial past: Annie Baker’s Janet Planet and Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun. When Romvari restages the potato-peeling scene from Jeanne Dielman, she adds a second character to the frame in a fictionalized version of her childhood self (Eylul Guven). In that way, the observation of her mother’s labor becomes the film’s subject instead of the labor itself. The same goes for that child’s observation of Jeremy’s teen-in-crisis behavior, later diagnosed by social workers as “Oppositional Defiance Disorder.” Romvari never fully divulges to the audience what childhood tragedy Jeremy is responsible for, even though this is her second film on the subject, after her self-documentary short “Still Processing.” All she can muster the strength to do is observe it from a distance, mediated through the camera gadgetry her emotionally-checked-out father (Ádám Tompa) documented his family with in the 1990s and again through her own autofictional documentation in the 2020s. She observes Jeremy twice here, both as his younger sister who only understands that he’s putting unbearable stress on her parents and as an adult who’s presumably been through years of post-trauma therapy, and yet still struggles to understand why he acted the way he did. For a slightly clearer idea of what real-world harm the fictionalized “Jeremy” caused in Romvari’s family, it helps to have seen “Still Processing” before watching Blue Heron, but both films are left as intentionally incomplete as the short’s title suggests. Like Wells & Baker, Romvari can only convey these mysterious adult-world crises through her own childlike observations as she remembers them, now even further distorted by the passage of time and the limitations of narrative filmmaking.

It’s not entirely fair to discuss Blue Heron through comparisons to preexisting works, at least not in its second half. After the familiar reexamination of her childhood confusion & trauma in the first half, Romvari then takes a much more direct approach with the project. She casts a second actor to play her current-day adult self (Amy Zimmer), who’s making her own movie about what went wrong with Jeremy and what, if anything, could’ve been done to prevent it. In the movie’s most excitingly original idea, Romvari literalizes her project by treating the past as a geographic place that can be traveled to and physically accessed, at least within cinema’s internal logic. Her adult avatar returns to her childhood home to directly interact with her family as they were in the 1990s (including her younger self), using the autofictional drama as a mundane form of time travel. All of the first half’s nostalgic immersion Windows ’95 user interface, Ron Popeil infomercials, and oversized cargo pants are ultimately just a method to distinguish the film’s two timelines, which impossibly crossover in the second half. While content to leave the audience unsure of exactly what tragedy Jeremy triggers in his family and how autobiographical that tragedy is to her real family’s story, Romvari appears to be clear-eyed in what she’s accomplishing here. She is confronting some half-remembered, semi-fictionalized version of her past through cinematic devices, so why not send her onscreen avatar directly to ground zero to assess the damage first-hand? I can’t say that I found that device to be as formally radical or as emotionally devastating as the film’s festival-circuit hype suggests, but I do at least appreciate its clarity in method & intent. I should’ve known going in that this wouldn’t hit especially hard with me, based on the similar public hype & personal response disparity of Janet Planet & Aftersun—two widely beloved films I also liked just fine—but I really do try to go into movies with no preconceived notions or comparisons clouding my view. I try, and I fail, because all of these things really are in conversation with each other, intentionally or not.

-Brandon Ledet

Erupcja (2026)

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The Year of Charli continues, uninterrupted. There’s seemingly a new movie featuring Charli XCX out in theaters every week this year, ranging from soundtrack work (Mother Mary, “Wuthering Heights”) to minor acting roles (Faces of Death, The Gallerist, I Want Your Sex) to a full-on feature length self-portrait (The Moment). During the recent Brat Summer hype cycle, the British pop singer proclaimed herself a cinephile, sharing her personal Letterboxd account for wide public scrutiny and flashing the names of buzzy auteurs (David Cronenberg, Ari Aster, Joachim Trier, etc.) at her Coachella audience in her trademark nightclub font. It wasn’t until this year’s Charli Movie deluge that the attention flowed the other direction, though. Cinephiles are now confronted with the pop star’s screen & soundtrack presence on a weekly basis, whether we’re actively seeking it or not. All of her various 2026 projects were planned & produced at different times, but they’ve collected at the dam of film distribution to release all at once in one mighty flood. So, if this Charli onslaught is going to continue (for as long as it takes for the new Gregg Araki & Cathy Yan movies to come out, anyway), it is comforting to know that there’s at least one title in that flood that’s both stylishly cool & dramatically compelling, suggesting that she has a longer movie career ahead of her once this wave of post-Brat cinephilia naturally crests.

Erupcja stars Charli XCX as a Londoner on holiday, dragging her milquetoast boyfriend (Will Madden) to Warsaw, Poland after suspecting that he was planning to propose to her in Paris, France. The reason she chose Warsaw in particular is because she has a semi-sordid history of partying there, thanks to a long term on-again-off-again toxic friendship with a local slacker (Lena Góra), who works the counter at an inherited flower shop. Ever since they were teens, the two directionless women have felt a thrillingly volatile connection with each other, seemingly confirmed by news reports of a major volcanic eruption coinciding with every time they meet. So, whenever Charli’s immature party girl pops back into Warsaw to check in on her favorite ambitionless florist, it’s because she’s feeling the urge to blow up her entire life again, leaving only ash & rubble behind. They drink, they dance, they ghost the baffled boyfriend until he gets the picture and abandons his proposal plans. Despite all of its allusions to grand-scale natural disasters, Erupcja is intimately tiny in scope, trailing behind a clique of unimpressive thirtysomethings as they party through a series of romantic meltdowns while playing tourist in Warsaw. The overall mood is ecstatic, though, evoking big feelings through small gestures. It’s also the first instance I’ve seen where Charli XCX shows genuine dramatic chops as an indie-scene movie starlet, rather than just using The Movies as a multimedia brand extender. Whenever she’s offscreen, the audience deeply misses her.

For all of my Charli XCX blabbering here, I was most interested in Erupcja due to the growing name recognition of writer-director Pete Ohs, whose career in low-budget indies has been a constant, pleasant hum in recent years. I was first impressed with Ohs’s editing work in the Gen-Z gun violence drama Beast Beast, and his name has continued to pop up in exciting works like the supernatural stalker thriller Jethica (as a writer-director) and the video game fantasy adventure OBEX (as co-writer, editor, and cinematographer). Ohs’s background in music video work shows in each of his projects’ ability to find high style in cheap scenery, in this case searching for glimpses of laidback urban cool on every Warsaw street corner. The narration echoes that Eastern European setting by mimicking the cadence of a vintage propaganda film, reporting on the thirtysomething hangabouts’ emotional states by dryly stating how they’re feeling and what they’re dreaming between their petty arguments. Ohs also directly illustrates his characters’ emotions in flashes of muted, chalky pastels that serve both as mood-ring insights and as easy scene transitions. Like his work in Beast Beast, there’s also some thoughtful acknowledgement of how much of these young people’s lives are anchored to their phone screens, often flashing back to memories of absentminded late-night scrolling as if it were just as dramatically significant as any offline, real-world event.

It speaks well to Charli’s interest in cinema as an artform that she’s been taking the time to collaborate with up-and-coming filmmakers like Pete Ohs & Daniel Goldhaber instead of leveraging her pop star notoriety to exclusively work with more established names like Gregg Araki & David Lowery. Despite the explosive energy suggested by its title, Erupcja will mostly register as a quiet rumbling on the cinematic Richter scale, while more aggressively advertised projects like “Wuthering Heights” & The Moment will guide most of the loudest Year of Charli discourse. There’s something quietly extraordinary about Erupcja, though, like watching a volcanic eruption through news reel footage on your smartphone. It’s such a small container for such a big personality, and that contrast makes her presence all the more compelling.

-Brandon Ledet

Agon (2026)

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During the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, I caught a couple live TV broadcasts of women’s fencing matches, expecting to watch some good old-fashioned swordfighting from world-class athletes. It turns out, modern fencing looks a lot more like retro sci-fi B-movies than the Old Hollywood swashbucklers I was picturing. I expected the competitors to be protected by masks & padding, sure; I just didn’t expect them to be plugged into electronic sensors, with each of their scores marked by lights & beeps when they completed a circuit with their foils, seemingly making the on-site referees just as vestigial as they are in the WWE. The new Italo arthouse headscratcher Agon presents the first cinematic instance I know of where modern, computerized fencing is represented at length onscreen, no longer relegated to bi-annual Olympic sports broadcasts. In fact, the sci-fi futurism of modern sports is just about the only thing on first-time writer-director Giulio Bertelli’s mind, as he spends Agon‘s entire runtime pondering & cataloging the various machines that have transformed the Olympic Games into an uncanny, inhuman abstraction rather than a straightforward demonstration of pure athletic prowess. It’s a surprisingly alienating, dissociative approach to the sports-movie formula, boldly announcing that the techno future of the sports drama is here, and it is terrifying.

In a semi-documentary style, we watch three women train & compete in various combat sports for a fictionalized version of the Olympics called The Ludoj Games. One is a fencer, who is physically plugged into the various computer sensors that have gradually transformed the sport into a live-action video game. Another is a sharpshooter, who is convinced that her own sport will become a literal video game in the near future, replacing traditional firearms with laser rifles. The third is a judo fighter, who you’d think would be safe from the encroachment of computer electronics in her sport, except that every aspect of her training and bodily maintenance requires high-grade, cutting-edge medical tech. Watching these women work at their craft is both chilling & beautiful, literalizing the ways that athletes’ bodies are precisely calibrated machines by surrounding them with endlessly bizarre, precisely calibrated machines. They hone their skills in abstract video game simulations. They measure their lung performance on treadmills by wearing Darth Vader-style breath masks. They reveal hidden injuries through X-rays & MRIs. They relieve stress between matches by streaming hentai on their smartphones. The entire film plays like a high-end version of those brain-rot video compilations of “satisfying factory machines,” minimizing the athletes’ bodies to an organic product of highly coordinated industrial processing.

Beyond its pronounced fetishism for the modern tech of sports medicine, Agon seems particularly interested in the exact tipping point where the simulated violence of combat sports turns into actual, physical harm. Very early on, our buff judo fighter suffers a painful knee injury, and we watch surgeons reconstruct her newly bionic body in intense documentary gore before she attempts to rehab her way back to the top of her field. Soon after, the sharpshooter lands in hot water with her financial sponsors over amoral hunting practices she’s engaged in outside the games, effectively transgressing by using her instrument for the exact purpose it was initially designed for – give or take her choice of target. It’s initially unclear what the fencer’s personal crisis with unstimulated violence could possibly be, and then it turns out she’s got it the worst out of the trio (especially once it’s revealed in the end credits that her own tragedy is inspired by a real-life freak event in the sport’s recent past). When the sharpshooter complains to an official representative of the games that she’s being professionally punished for her private behavior, the rep shoots back that, “There’s no room for violence here.” That’s a little rich, considering that the only sports profiled here are all simulations of violence, more military exercise than wholesome pastime.

When our psuedo-violent, semi-computerized athletes finally compete in The Ludoj Games, there is no live audience on hand to witness their technical achievements & failures. The games are staged in an abstracted black-box void, only to be witnessed by on-site officials, expensive camera rigs, and the all-important digital sensors. Obviously, this choice is at least partially driven by budgetary restraints, but Bertelli finds a way to make that limitation emphasize the cold post-humanism of modern Olympic sports. His interest in the subject appears to be somewhat personal, too, considering his advertised background in offshore sailing and, subsequently, the production of offshore sailing equipment. Not for nothing, but Bertelli also has familial ties to the fashion-industry royalty of Prada & Miu Miu, which is a dynasty he has attempted to professionally distance himself from but still shows in his filmmaking style. There’s a couture streetwear coolness in the way his three athletes model their sports’ various far-out gadgets, even as Bertelli dwells on the uglier, grotesque aspects of modern Olympic physicality. The movie is overall just as hip & fashionable as it is alienating & disorienting. Even the title “Agon” reads like the name of a fictional fashion brand, despite its intended academia as the Greek word for “conflict,” once used to describe the ancient, pre-computerized Olympics, BC.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: Love & Pop (1998)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Hideaki Anno’s live-action debut, the coming-of-age sugar babies drama Love & Pop (1998).

00:00 Welcome
01:55 Exit 8 (2026)
14:25 Project Hail Mary (2026)
22:45 Crash (1996)
26:05 Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (2026)
36:24 East of Eden (1955)
42:55 I Married a Vampire (1987)
48:35 Time of the Gypsies (1988)
52:55 The Taste of Things (2023)
56:30 ATX Short Film Showcase
59:36 Singles (1992)
1:06:26 The Bride Wore Black (1968)
1:09:33 Trekkies (1997)

1:10:55 Love & Pop (1998)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

The Drama (2026)

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In Kristoffer Borgli’s international breakout Sick of Myself, a woman becomes jealous of her boyfriend’s sudden art-world fame, so she fakes a disfiguring medical condition to one-up the attention he’s been getting online. In the funniest scene, she worries that her CT scan results at the hospital will expose this fraud, imagining an official medical diagnosis that she is “a liar” with “a bad personality,” which is legally punishable by death. Borgli’s first American film, Dream Scenario, follows the foibles of a schlubby college professor who becomes a living meme when he inexplicably starts appearing in people’s dreams across the world, a phenomenon that quickly sours once the novelty wears off and everyone’s sick of seeing his uninvited face. Borgli’s latest, The Drama, smartly continues the understated fantasy-sequence playfulness of those two previous pictures, often illustrating its characters’ intrusive thoughts as they occur in real time, then doubling back to show those characters as they actually are: unremarkable in their social anguish. Like Borgli’s previous films, The Drama also presents an absurd scenario that can easily be read as a moving think-piece on the nature of “cancel culture” but somehow never fully tips into reactionary apologia. His flippant engagement with hot-button topics in The Cancel Culture Era teeters dangerously close to a kind of online edgelord conservatism but, so far, he’s always landed somewhere on the safe side of good taste. His interest appears to be in exploring the ways that our internal thoughts—however momentary—might betray our external politics, and he finds an endless wealth of humor in that tension.

The Drama starts with a young couple’s fairy-tale love story, sprinting through the full romcom meet-cute, first-date, romantic-proposal cycle in rapid montage. Borgli very quickly maps out what a crowd-pleaser romance between stars Robert Pattinson & Zendaya might look like (if Hollywood was still interested in producing such a thing) before he announces the stakes of his latest prank. Days before the couple’s wedding, they engage in a dinner-party game where everyone at the table confesses the worst thing they’ve ever done. It’s an uneasy but revelatory ritual that pushes through some of the awkward shame of the “getting to know you” phase in a young romance, until Zendaya’s character gets her turn. Her confession crosses an invisible social boundary that she doesn’t realize exists until it’s too late, and everyone else present is so shocked that it threatens to derail the wedding they’re supposed to be celebrating. Notably, what she confesses is technically a thought crime, an ugly impulse that she did not ultimately act on but very seriously considered. It’s also something I won’t dare to spoil in this review, since it is the bait on the film’s proverbial hook, something that is meant to be discovered and digested in real time with the bride-to-be’s immediate social circle. All I can say, really, is that this first-act reveal positions The Drama as a throwback to a kind of classic water cooler romcom, however bleak, with certified movie stars on their worst behavior. You’re supposed to ask yourself how you would react to it while you watch Robert Pattinson go through the same hypothetical turmoil, and you’re supposed to find your own sense of morality lacking in the process.

There’s plenty of ammunition here for the offended to dismiss Borgli as a shock-value provocateur, but I don’t think that’s the case. Once it gets past the initial shock of its first-act confession, The Drama finds some genuinely productive provocation in asking how much modern outrage is personal, as opposed to communal. This is not a typical “How much can you truly know a person?” thought exercise. It instead asks whether modern moral outrage is driven less by the thought, “Am I okay with this?” than it is by the thought, “What would other people think of me if I were okay with this?” Very little of the central conflict is mediated through phone & computer screens like in Borgli’s previous pictures, but it still feels like it’s depicting a moral crisis specific to a post-social media world. Pattinson’s protagonist is not allowed time to internally process what he’s learned about his fiancée’s past; he’s pressured to immediately take a moral stance on it as a kind of performative social spectacle, causing great anxiety as he attempts to keep his shit together for the ultimate social spectacle: an expensive wedding. The pressure of publicly responding to this moral crisis makes for great comedic tension as the wedding deadline approaches, and it inspires anxious daydreams & nightmares that recall the low-level surrealism of Borgli’s previous works. It’s neither his meanest nor his most expressive film to date, but it does manage to throttle its audience with various social & moral crises while most of its imagery ultimately amounts to People Talking in Rooms — an increasingly rare feat at the American cineplex.

-Brandon Ledet

Chronologies of Trauma

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Kristen Stewart has great taste. You can tell that by how she’s capitalized on her Twilight notoriety in the past couple decades, leveraging her early teenybopper name recognition to work with directors like David Cronenberg, Pablo Larraín, Rose Glass, and Olivier Assayas in her cinematic adulthood. You can also tell by watching her own directorial debut The Chronology of Water, which features a flood of striking, well curated images that convey a deeper interest in the artform than you might expect from an actor-turned-director. Stewart smartly sidesteps a lot of the familiar pitfalls actors stumble into while transitioning to the opposite side of the camera. It’s typical for those projects to function largely as an acting showcase, allowing their performers an overly indulgent amount of onscreen real estate to run wild and chew scenery. She certainly gives her star, Imogen Poots, a lot to do as the film’s constantly flailing protagonist, but most of the meatier dramatic moments are chopped up & scattered throughout a purposefully chaotic edit, avoiding any potential backsliding into stage-play theatricality. However, that chaotic edit is where Stewart makes an entirely different kind of rookie mistake, the one most that young directors make when translating a novel that they love to the screen. Adapted from the eponymous Lidia Yuknavitch memoir, The Chronology of Water is a rushed, overlong onslaught that attempts to cram in every detail from its source text in direct illustration instead of re-interpreting that text for a new medium. The film covers author Yuknavitch’s life from traumatic childhood to literary notoriety, including long chapters of her story that mean more to her personally than they do to the filmgoing audience (such as her academic mentorship under Ken Kesey, portrayed onscreen by a haggard Jim Belushi). You can tell that Yuknavitch’s story meant a lot to Stewart on the page, and she wanted to bring it to the screen because of the vivid images it evoked, not because it was a convenient vehicle for hammy acting. She just never got a handle on the “kill your darlings” process of editing, choosing instead to stage every one of those images while Imogen Poots strings them together with a voiceover narration track pulled directly from the source text.

If there’s a textual justification for the way The Chronology of Water rushes through the details of Yuknavitch’s personal life, it’s that it takes a long while for the author to express what’s happened to her. We’re immediately aware that she grew up in an abusive household, cowering in fear of her monstrous father (Michael Epp), whose presence is a constant threat to her, her older sister (Thora Birch), and their alcoholic mother (Susannah Flood). At first, the only clear details of that abuse are the feelings of its effect, with the women of the house tiptoeing on eggshells to not draw the father’s attention, so that every sound in the mix thunderous & painful – like a snapping bone. As a high school & college-age Yuknavitch, Poots intentionally avoids processing those details for as long as she can, disappearing into drugs, alcohol, anonymous sex, and the adrenaline rush of competitive swimming instead of emotionally reckoning with what’s happened to her. It isn’t until she starts writing poetry and personal essays in the film’s back half that she can express the details of her childhood abuse in concrete terms, and the audience gets a much clearer, more horrific picture of what was done to her. Until that point, The Chronology of Water is constant rush of contextless snapshots from Yuknavitch’s life, but the connections between them and the memories that spark them start to make more sense by the time she’s learned to express herself instead of avoiding herself. It’s a conceptually interesting approach to telling Yuknavitch’s story, but the problem is that there’s so much crammed into the frame that the individual details leak through your fingers like water. Yuknavitch describes her semi-confessional approach to creative writing as “telling the truth in lies,” which is an axiom that Stewart finds inspirational but does not fully absorb herself. She’s too enamored with Yuknavitch’s writing to alter the details of her biography, attempting to preserve the truths from the page instead of re-interpreting them into a more coherent cinematic lie. Yes, drops of blood diluting into the water pooled on the shower floor makes for a gorgeous, evocative image, but that image is itself diluted by the excess of everything else Stewart throws at us in the 128min runtime.

I was thinking a lot about The Chronology of Water’s rushed, scatterbrained pacing while watching Catherine Breillat’s 2001 breakout Fat Girl, which screened at Gap Tooth the same week of its local release. Where Stewart rushes, Breillat cruelly dwells, forcing her audience to sit with the details of childhood sexual abuse as they’re happening in real time. Alternately titled under the dedication “For My Sister” in its original French, Fat Girl details the uneasy sisterhood shared by two French teenagers on a beachside vacation. The younger sister (Anaïs Reboux) is suffering the hellish awkwardness of puberty while the “older” one (Roxane Mesquida) believes herself to be a mature woman at the advanced age of 15. Her premature adulthood is challenged when she successfully attracts the romantic attentions of an Italian college boy who’s also vacationing nearby, and she finds herself inviting him over to the bedroom she shares with her less glamorous sister, who only halfway pretends to be asleep while the young couple fools around. A large portion of Fat Girl‘s runtime is dedicated to detailing the step-by-step process of coercive statutory rape, which is then downplayed & rationalized by two in-over-their-heads teenagers who are dabbling in sexual experiences they aren’t mature enough to fully interpret, much less consent to. Once this abusive tryst is inevitably discovered by the girls’ parents, the vacation understandably ends, and we travel back to their home in a tearful long-distance car ride menaced by big-rig trucks that threaten to physically crush the family with the slightest turn of a steering wheel. Then, Breillat physicalizes the constant threat of macho violence in a shocker ending so abrupt it practically plays like a punchline to a sick, sad joke. Even then, the teenage girl response to adult masculine violence is to play it off as no big deal, performing a kind of know-it-all maturity they couldn’t possibly have earned in their short time alive. In The Chronology of Water, the audience is just as distanced from the full brunt of that childhood trauma as the protagonist; in Fat Girl, we’re fully aware of what’s happening to the kids as it’s happening to them, even if they remain clueless until long after the end credits.

You don’t have to go all the way back into the early-aughts archives to find easy points of comparison for KStew’s directorial debut. If nothing else, it premiered at last year’s Cannes along with two fellow miserabilist coming-of-age dramas that tormented school-age swim teams: Julia Ducournau’s Alpha & Charlie Pollinger’s The Plague. Thanks to its seaside vacation setting, Breillat’s Fat Girl also offers a fair amount of swimming-pool escapism to its titular odd-girl-out protagonist, suggesting that there’s something about the sensory deprivation and bodily freedom of an underwater realm that’s a huge relief for teens going through pubescent hell (or for the audiences watching them go through it, anyway). The Chronology of Water and Fat Girl also share a thematic link in their depictions of sisterhood, in which a younger dead-eyed sibling suffers jealousy over the apparent grace & poise with which their older sister navigates the same childhood traumas. Truthfully, none of that was really why Breillat was on my mind while catching up with KStew’s debut. The reason The Chronology of Water had me thinking back to the abrasive, morally challenging feminism of the 2000s & 1990s was that Stewart was taking obvious delight in that era’s most transgressive provocations. Imogen Poots models the distinctly 1990s fashions of the source memoir’s setting, just as she models the social faux pas of a young affluent woman repeatedly using the word “cunt” in mixed company. Much like Breillat, Lidia Yuknavitch’s work is rooted in an era when it was more daring to talk about the supposedly shameful details of women’s bodies, and Stewart seems enthusiastic to bring every liquid she can from that text to the screen: blood, puke, spit, cum, shit, menstruate, the full flight. She makes a point to pause on a chapter when Yuknavitch finds that BDSM offers just as much bodily escapism as the swimming pool, depicting Poots being tied up & whipped by a professorial Kim Gordon. It’s a tangent so compelling that it could’ve inspired its own feature film, but Stewart has no time to dwell on it without sacrificing everything else that happens in Yuknavitch’s memoir, so she quickly moves on to the next unpleasant incident. Breillat offers you no such relief. Fat Girl is all one long, unpleasant incident, with child locks on the car doors to prevent your escape. Stewart may share Breillat’s furious enthusiasm for provocation, but she doesn’t yet fully match her talent for sadism, for (moral) better or for (artistic) worse.

-Brandon Ledet

Queen Margot (1994)

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Do Americans care about the César Awards? The annual film awards ceremony is colloquially known as “The French Oscars,” but it doesn’t get nearly as much Oscars-precursor press coverage as, say, “The British Oscars” (The BAFTAs), which Americans already only barely pretend to care about. I presume a large part of that cross-cultural indifference has to do with the fact that France already has a super prestigious awards ceremony at Cannes, which tends to suck up a lot of the oxygen in that industry. Last year, for instance, Jafar Panahi’s political revenge thriller It Was Just an Accident won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and went on to earn great international acclaim, while The Ties that Bind Us won Best Film at The César Awards and has been heard of by no one outside the borders of France. The year before, Emilia Pérez swept the César Awards before becoming an openly mocked punchline at The Oscars, and no one knew to make fun of their French colleagues for it because no one pays attention to the Césars. I say all this to note that I have no idea how big of a deal it is that the 1994 historical drama Queen Margot won five César Awards in its qualifying year (for cinematography, costume design, and nearly every acting category), since its single, subsequent nomination for Best Costume Design at the Oscars has at best left it as a pop culture footnote. No American is picking up a used DVD copy of Queen Margot at the thrift store because it was a major player at The French Oscars; we’re picking it up because it advertises a blood-soaked Isabelle Adjani on the cover, and she has an impeccable track record of being great in movies where her character is having a bad day.

If I closed my eyes and imagined what a stereotypical film that cleans up at an event called “The French Oscars” would look like, I would picture something a lot like Queen Margot. The lavish historical drama details the big-picture atrocities and petty personal betrayals of the French royal court during the 16th Century crusades, in which the Catholics in control of the nation were eager to “convert” (i.e, kill) all Protestants by sword or die trying. It’s a staggeringly extravagant production in its scale, its costuming and, because it’s French, its sex & violence. Star Isabelle Adjani’s glamour-shot lighting is extravagant as well, with more attention paid to her stoic beauty than to her trademark talent for simulating a total mental breakdown, as featured in earlier titles like Possession, The Story of Adele H, and Camile Claudel. Of course, Adjani continues to suffer here—as that is her specialty—but she does so quietly instead of thrashing her body against the proverbial tunnel wall. She starts the movie being forced into a sham royal wedding that is either meant to end the Catholic-Protestant conflict through cross-faith marriage or meant to bait her scheming family’s enemies to a single location for convenient slaughter, depending on who you ask. Regardless, the opening wedding celebrations quickly devolve into a Paris-wide bloodbath and Adjani’s queen-to-be has to spend the rest of the movie negotiating the continued survival of both her brothers and her lovers as the conflict plays out. She has very little success in that regard and often finds herself mourning one loved one after another, but she looks great doing so, never missing the spotlight for her closeups.

By American & British costume drama standards, Queen Margot is shocking in its scale and its extremity. Whether it’s staging a celebratory post-wedding orgy or a horrific battlefield massacre, there are bodies everywhere. Every wide shot is packed with extras in exquisitely detailed costumes, often for them to be removed or destroyed depending on the mood of the moment. Every candlelit interior is warmly intimate and carefully arranged – every frame a Renaissance painting. Meanwhile, the sex & bloodshed are deliberately ugly & messy. Slit throats spew geysers of blood, like a visual gag from Kill Bill Vol. 1. Whenever sexually frustrated, the titular royal LARPs as a streetwalker, enjoying anonymous alley sex with peasants as if a simple half-mask could obscure a face as striking as Adjani’s. People fuck; they kill; they hunt wild boars for sport and then fuck & kill during the excitement. It’s like an overlong, over-serious episode of The Great in that way, to the point where I’d be shocked to learn that this wasn’t a formative work for screenwriter Tony MacNamara. The very best sequences find a way to combine the sex & violence into a single lethal concoction, created in a mad-scientist lab by Margot’s mother’s perfumer, who also dabbles in poisons. He creates a poisoned glove, a poisoned book, and a poisoned batch of makeup that offer a much softer, more sensual murder method than the sword-wielding brutes outside the Louvre. Of course, those poisons can be gnarly too, causing their victims to bleed to death out of every pore in prolonged agony. The movie never misses its chance to show the audience some more blood.

Queen Margot opens with a long scroll of expository text that orients the audience in its historical setting, followed by forty or so minutes of character introductions before its melodrama starts in earnest. That relatively dry intro and the film’s lingering reputation as an awards-season period piece will lead you to expect something much statelier & more subdued than what’s ultimately delivered. Once the stage is set, though, it wastes no time indulging in the grotesque sex & violence of its 16th Century royal court, where it’s totally natural to hear lovers plead, “I want to see the image of my death in my pleasure” while fucking and combatants declare, “For each one you kill a sin will be forgiven!” while fighting. It’s a real actor’s showcase in that way, with plenty space in its near-three-hour runtime for every performer in the main cast to get in their own awards show clips. Notably, Adjani did win Best Actress at the 20th César Awards for her performance as the titular lead, but at Cannes that honor went to her co-star Virna Lisi, who plays her scheming mother (Catherine, the court’s #1 poison enthusiast). Adjani already had earned two Best Actress wins at past Cannes for Possession & Quartet, but it’s still a surprising footnote among the film’s official accolades, continuing the two women’s mutually destructive onscreen power struggle to the press circuit. They did both go on to win separate acting awards at The French Oscars, but I’m still not totally sure of those statues’ worth. Hell, the American Oscars awarded two statues to the aforementioned Emilia Pérez a couple years ago, so even the ceremonies we do pay attention to are effectively a joke.

-Brandon Ledet