Unfaithful Mutations

February 20, 2026February 20, 2026 / swampflix / Leave a comment

Wuthering Heights is one of my all-time favorite works of art. Emily Brontë’s 19th Century novel is a shockingly horrific read for anyone who’s ever been assigned it in a high school or college-level literature course, expecting it to be a melodramatic romance (matched only in its homework-assignment shock value by her sister’s novel Jane Eyre). Wuthering Heights is not a traditionally tragic love affair; it imagines romantic attraction as a form of life-destroying doom that compels all involved to viciously tear each other apart out of the insatiable hunger of yearning, never to be satisfied through physical touch. It should be no surprise, then, that the latest, loudest adaptation of that novel would receive equally loud criticism for the ways it reduces its source text to a more familiar, better-behaved romance, as if it were a dime store paperback instead of a great work of Gothic lit. Personally, I can’t conjure the energy to care. To my knowledge, no movie version of Wuthering Heights to date has approached anything near faithful adaptation. They tend to leave the business of adapting the novel’s second half—in which a second generation of interfamilial combatants continue the first half’s vicious games of yearning & revenge—to be retold only via BBC miniseries, which are too tonally genteel to convey the full, feral nature of the source text. So far, what we’ve seen is a story dutifully half-told, with no real personal imposition on the text by the filmmakers behind the camera (besides maybe Andrea Arnold’s race-conscious adaptation from the 2010s, which gets specific in conveying the novel’s themes of “otherness,” usually left more vaguely defined). They tend to be more transcriptive than interpretive. So, I find myself in the embarrassing position of being impressed by the crassly unfaithful adaptation of one my favorite novels for at least engaging with the material in a transformative way, even if it’s more deimagined than reimagined. “Death of the author” means allowing our sacred texts to become entirely new beasts in afterlife.

Despite all the prepackaged backlash, “Wuthering Heights” proved to be another erratically entertaining piece of lurid pop art from Emerald Fennell, whose previous works Saltburn & Promising Young Woman were also loudly scrutinized in their own time for their thematic carelessness. Fennell appears eager to get ahead of the criticism in this case, adding the titular scare quotes in an effort to defuse any expectations that she might be sincerely adapting Brontë’s novel. Every image is prefaced with a wink, signaling to the audience that it’s okay to have fun this time instead of getting too hung up on Heathcliff & Catherine’s recursively lethal, semi-incestuous attraction to each other. It’s not so much an adaptation of Wuthering Heights as it is an adaptation of the horned-up dreams a teenager might have while reading Wuthering Heights — often illustrated in fancam-style montages that insert bodice-ripping sex scenes into a story that used to be about the destructive nature of unconsummated lust. Jacob Elordi & Margot Robbie are cast more for their paperback-romance cover art appeal than their appropriateness for the source material. Charli XCX is employed to soundtrack the music video rhythms of the edit to rush the story along before the discomfort of any one cruel moment has time to fully sink in. Even when destroying other women’s lives in order to get Catherine’s attention, Heathcliff seeks enthusiastic consent, turning what used to be domestic abuse into a kind of elaborate BDSM game. It’s all in good fun (give or take the obligatory tragic ending), staged entirely for the purpose of hiring movie stars to play dress-up and dry hump, supplementing the wet sounds of actual sex with bizarrely chosen surrogates like fish heads, snail slime, egg yolks, and raw dough. As goofy & half-considered as it is, it’s also Emerald Fennell’s best work to date. She continues to improve as a populist entertainer with every picture, but she has also suffered the great misfortune of being immediately successful, so everything she does is met with obnoxiously loud scrutiny. Hopefully all of her generational wealth serves as a small comfort in this difficult time.

The same week that Wuthering Heights topped the US box office (proving yet again that online backlash has no tangible effect outside your Twitter feed), I saw another domestic release of an unfaithful literary mutation. The new anime film Scarlet restages Hamlet as a sword-and-sorcery fantasy epic in a Hell-adjacent afterlife, seemingly combining the characters of Hamlet & Ophelia into one newly imagined, feminist action hero. I’m no Shakespeare scholar but, like Wuthering Heights, Hamlet does fall into the category of great literary works I was assigned to read multiple times throughout high school & college, and I don’t remember the bard describing the young Dane being groped by countless hands of the undead under a sky of black ocean waves in his stage directions. By the time Scarlet interjects a title card that drags the story back to 16th Century Denmark, I couldn’t help but treat it as a visual gag. I laughed, but I was the only one laughing in that theater, because I was the only one in the theater at all. Director Mamoru Hosoda is relatively well known among anime nerds for earlier works like Summer Wars, Wolf Children, and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, but recently he’s been on a kick where he reinterprets literary classics as high-fantasy adventure films featuring heroic warrior princesses. With Belle, he relocated characters from Beauty and the Beast to a Virtual Reality other-realm where violence & power is wielded through pop songstress supremacy and it online follower counts. With Scarlet, he reinterprets Hamlet as a warrior princess saga about the value of forgiving yourself instead of seeking revenge, set in a timeless afterlife where the souls of 16th Century nobility can fall in love with 21st Century hunks who have working-class jobs but angelically noble hearts. Unlike with “Wuthering Heights”, no one appears to be especially angry about these far-out reinterpretations of their source texts, likely for two very obvious reasons: 1. Hamlet & La Belle et La Bête have already enjoyed multiple faithful movie adaptations while Brontë’s novel hasn’t and, more importantly, 2. Way fewer people are watching them.

As of this posting, roughly 9,000 people have logged Hosoda’s unfaithful Hamlet mutation on Letterboxd, compared to the 570,000 who have logged Fennell’s unfaithful mutation of Wuthering Heights. That’s an imperfect metric when measuring these two films’ audience reach (not least of all because “Wuthering Heights” has been review-bombed by angry social media addicts who haven’t yet seen the film themselves), but those two numbers are extremely disparate enough to mean something. Some people are mad at Emerald Fennell for not adhering to one specific interpretation of Brontë’s book as if it is the only objectively correct one (i.e., the Arnold-friendly interpretation in which Heathcliff’s otherness is based more in race than class). Others are mad at her for having no interpretation at all, using a half-remembered impression of what the book is kinda-sorta like as an excuse to stage a series of images that make her horny. I find both criticisms to be misguided. No movie owes fealty to it literary source text; all that matters is the distinctness of the vision that literature inspired. For all of her consistently reckless flippancy, Fennell’s vision gets increasingly distinct every picture. We’re also getting a clearer picture of what she personally finds erotic, which I’d argue is one of the best uses of the cinematic artform any director can pursue. Forget using the art of moviemaking as a machine that generates empathy; it’s much more useful as a window into the unresolved psychosexual issues of artists who don’t know how to effectively express themselves through any other medium. In Fennell’s case, that window appears to be attached to a candy-coated dollhouse with an immature brat trapped inside, which she expresses here by re-working Catherine into an indecisive woman-child who suffers through attempts to have her cake and eat it too. She even employed the official mascot of Brat culture to sing on the soundtrack, continuously underlining the point. While prettier to look at and grander in scale, I don’t know that Hosoda’s films are useful as a window into anything especially personal about his hang-ups or worldview. The images are more pleasant and the ideas are more carefully thought out, but to what end? Maybe the other obvious reason that fewer people are talking about them is because there’s just not as much to say.

-Brandon Ledet

Krewe Divine 2026

February 18, 2026 / swampflix / Leave a comment

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.

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 2026 excursion, our seventh outing as Swampflix’s official Mardi Gras krewe:

Eat Shit!

❤ Krewe Divine ❤

Adpocalypse Now

February 14, 2026February 14, 2026 / swampflix / 1 Comment

It feels trite to say this right now, given that America is currently squirming under the boot of an openly fascist presidential regime, but the escalating omnipresence of corporate advertising in every aspect of daily life is starting to feel outright apocalyptic. It was already demoralizing enough when corporations convinced us to advertise brand names on our clothes, so that we’re paying to display billboard space on our own bodies, but once they caught up with the fact that we spend most of our time looking at each other through screens instead of in person, things have only gotten worse. Yes, the internet is a convenient access point to a wider world of art and social interaction, but it’s also an easy access point to funnel nonstop advertisement into our eyeballs. Every streaming service is just a variation of the Tubi model now, inserting commercial breaks into shows & movies we’re already paying to watch. Those old-guard artforms are also gradually being replaced with social-media microcelebrities, who skip the middleman and deliver shameless sponcon as the main source of entertainment instead of an occasional annoyance. Credit card companies control what we can do & see online via what kinds of content they allow to be monetized, stepping in as the internet equivalent of the MPAA to determine what does and does not qualify as pornography, and what forms of pornography are “allowed”. I could go on, but you have a phone, so you’re already well aware of mainstream culture’s slow-motion landslide into a corporate-sponsored Hell pit. It’s a pervasive menace that darkens & distorts every aspect of modern human life, and it’s willing to choke what’s left of that life out of us as long as it can also squeeze out our last few pennies with it, as indicated by the current advertising push for the resource-draining evils of generative A.I. So, I was pleased to discover two new movies in theaters right now that treat the exponential relentlessness of corporate advertising as the existential threat that it truly is — both of which were packaged with trailers advertising other new movies to check out while they’re in theaters, of course.

In her self-satirizing mockumentary The Moment, pop singer Charli XCX treats corporate advertising as an existential threat to art. Set during her Big Moment following the blow-up of her album Brat last summer, The Moment imagines what would happen if Charli made the same corporate business deals that took other pop stars like Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, and Justin Bieber to “the next level” during their own respective Big Moments. Her in-film record label scores two major (fictional) deals on her behalf: a credit card marketed exclusively to queer clientele and a production of a Disney+ style concert film documenting the Brat world tour. The Brat credit card deal makes for an easy, funny punchline mocking the crass commodification of identity politics and is deployed in the film as a form of recurring prop comedy. The production of the Brat concert film is a more nuanced debacle, with Alexander Skarsgård stepping in as a corporate-stooge movie director determined to sand off all of Charli’s roughest edges so she can be marketable to a more Family Friendly audience. Instead of sticking around to fight the good fight with her longtime creative director Celeste (Hailey Benton Gates), Charli folds under the pressure and allows Skarsgård to take over, turning the coked-out club classics nightlife vibe of the Brat album into a cigarette-themed version of The Eras Tour. It’s an oddly vulnerable PR move, in that it can be read as Charli satirizing herself as indecisive to the point of having no artistic convictions at all, portraying her as being personally incapable of maintaining a clear creative ethos once corporations step in to promote her art to a wider audience. The more generous reading, of course, is that she’s saying that no one can stand up to that kind of corporate pressure, and that’s why all corporate-sponsored art sucks. Whether she’s the butt of her own joke or she’s throwing punches at peers, it’s at least clear that the real villains are the credit card companies and the assembly-line hack directors who are willing to sacrifice art to the almighty altar of Advertising.

In the new sci-fi comedy Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, director Gore Verbinski (along with screenwriter Matthew Robsinson) treats corporate advertising as an existential threat to human dignity. Sam Rockwell stars as a time-traveler from a near-future dystopia that has been overrun by A.I. In order to stop his grim timeline from coming to pass, he must quickly recruit random customers from a Los Angeles diner to put a stop to that A.I.’s creation over one long, zany night before it’s too late. This A-plot premise is broadly generic in both its LOL So Random style of humor (think “hotdog fingers” and you get the gist) and in its observations on smartphone addiction, in which all teenagers are portrayed as George Romero zombies who aimlessly wander through the city while staring at their screens. There is some biting satire scattered throughout the film’s Black Mirror-inspired vignettes, however, once the focus shifts away from Rockwell’s all-in-one-night mission to profile the daily lives of the diners he takes hostage. Juno Temple’s screentime as a single mom who loses her teenage son to a school shooting is especially fruitful, both in how it portrays America’s treatment of those shootings as being as unavoidable of a natural occurrence as bad weather, and in how the tragedy invites advertising into her family home. After her son is killed, the grieving mother is sold on purchasing a cloned version of him, but she can’t afford the luxury model, so her subscription comes with ads. A corporation has smoothed out all of the details of her son’s personality until he is a generic non-entity, and they’ve doubled that indignity by making him a mouthpiece for IRL sponcon, spouted as if it were casual conversation. Likewise, the Romero zombie teens elsewhere in the film speak entirely in ad placements when not staring blankly at their screens, satirizing the ways in which modern online discourse has turned us all into uncompensated employees of marketing companies. With or without an inevitable A.I. takeover, we are already doomed.

Unfortunately, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die far exceeds its LOL So Random allowance by the end, and it’s ultimately just not very good. Gore Verbinski has made exactly one fully satisfying film to date (Mouse Hunt, duh), and ever since then he can only manage to stage extravagant disappointments that almost kinda-sorta work if you squint at them from the right angle, among which Good Luck is no exception. He has a very Baz Luhrmann-coded career in that way (Strictly Ballroom, duh). Charli XCX’s movie is much less ambitious and, thus, has a much easier path to success. One of The Moment‘s more reliably successful gags is the way luxury brands, hotel chains, and sponsorship deals are announced in the strobe-lit block text that has accompanied all of Charli’s recent concert performances, very directly using her art to advertise corporate products. Most of the film is shot in the grainy, low-lighting texture of modern fly-on-the-wall documentaries, and most of the humor registers as similarly low-key. That makes for a much less ambitious source of comedy than the anything-can-happen-at-any-moment zaniness of Good Luck, which works up an excess of flop sweat while scrambling across Los Angeles in search of the next randomized Mad Libs punchline. For all of the ways Verbinksi’s latest might disappoint as a comedy, however, it’s easy enough to get behind its resentful messaging about how our culture-wide smartphone addiction has “robbed us all of our dignity and turned us into children.” Despite all of its cutesy visual gags, dirt-cheap guitar riffs, and Deadpool-level ultra sarcasm, it’s at least pointing its finger at the right cultural boogeyman. Corporate advertising is going to kill us all, and we’re inviting more of it into our brains every second we spend looking at our phones. Now excuse me while I check every local cinema’s website to plan what showtimes I will purchase tickets for next.

-Brandon Ledet

Boomer’s Best-of-the-Year Oversights, Part One (2015-2019)

February 8, 2026February 8, 2026 / swampflix / Leave a comment

In one of our end-of-the-year podcast episodes last year that was partially inspired by my having finally been convinced to watch The Twentieth Century based on my delight in director Matt Rankin’s follow-up feature Universal Language (it was my favorite movie of last year!), Brandon read off a list of film titles that he asked me to identify as a kind of makeshift quiz. Those titles were all films that had been on the Swampflix Top Ten list for their eligible year, and which I had not seen at the time of the relevant list’s publication. I’m not a completionist, but with an upcoming collaborative project, I took that list as homework and got to work filling out these blind spots to determine if the listed films would have made my own end-of-the-year list if I had seen them in time. Come along with me for part one: 2015-2019.

2015: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

Crimson Peak – Watched February 1, 2026

Upon review: Crimson Peak has all of the strengths of Guillermo del Toro’s recent Frankenstein adaptation with none of its weaknesses . . . although it admittedly has other weaknesses of its own, mostly in regards to casting. A gorgeous period film with beautiful costumes and sets that all act in service of a Victorian gothic romance that also happens to be a ghost story, this is del Toro at his best and also his most unabashed. As his main character, an aspiring novelist, says of her own work, “It’s not a ghost story; it’s a love story. The ghosts are metaphors for the past.” The film is almost cringe-inducing in the nakedness with which it comments upon itself, but that same open and unabashed sincerity is what makes it so meaningful and worthwhile. The casting of 2010s Tumblr’s favorite “woobie” it-boy Tom Hiddleston is a miss, and although there’s nothing wrong with Jessica Chastain’s performance, doesn’t it just feel like Eva Green should be playing Lucille? 4.5 stars.

Would it have made my list? Yes.

Tangerine – Watched January 22, 2026

Upon review: I wouldn’t consider myself an Anora hater per se, but I certainly wasn’t enamored of it in the same way that others were. The overwhelmingly positive critical response to a film that I considered solid but not necessarily remarkable made me somewhat hesitant to revisit director Sean Baker’s earlier work, as I felt fairly certain that I would fail to connect with it in the same way that I had with Anora. I was pleasantly shocked by this one, a film that I remember mostly as part of the discourse for the fact that it was shot entirely on smartphones, a brand-new trick at the time. This story of two trans sex workers, Sin-Dee Rella (who recently completed a prison stay on behalf of her pimp/boyfriend Chester) and her best friend Alexandra is an absolutely hilarious, heartbreaking, and overwhelmingly humane piece of narrative cinema. A true slice of life in the day of two women struggling, not to “have it all,” but just to have some little thing, whether it be a sad Christmas Eve singalong that’s barely a step up from a private karaoke room or the pathetic human specimen of Chester (R.I.P., James Ransone). Anora may have had the budget, the big release, and the acclaim, but this earlier outing blows it out of the water. 5 stars.

Would it have made my list? Yes.

2016: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

Kubo And The Two Strings – Watched February 6, 2026

Upon review: I was a latecomer to appreciating the animation studio Laika, as I didn’t get around to seeing Coraline, arguably their most famous film, until 2021. I also remember the discourse that surrounded Kubo when it first came out, mostly in the form of criticism of the film’s casting of mostly white voice actors for a story set in and inspired by feudal Japan. While that’s definitely worthy of discussion, I also found Kubo to be an unexpected delight, a gorgeously animated stop-motion film about a boy with magical, musical powers who finds himself thrust into a conflict with his mother’s family following her apparent death, after years of raising the boy in secret. The quest Kubo finds himself upon isn’t the most novel one, but the film takes an interesting twist at the end by having the protagonist forsake the items acquired during his journey and find a more humane way to deal with his evil grandfather. Dark but not too dark, this is one that I would recommend for any child or adult. 4.5 stars.

Would it have made my list? Yes.

Tale Of Tales – Watched January 25, 2026

Upon review: A fantastic fantasy film! When Brandon and I discussed this one while recording our Beast Pageant episode, he mentioned that it had one of the highest hit rates for a horror anthology, and I can’t help but agree. I’ll always think of this one first and foremost as a fantasy/fairy tale picture (it is an adaptation of multiple stories by Italian fairy tale collector Giambattista Basile) before I think of it as a horror film, but don’t be fooled by the Italian poster that makes it look like a collection of episodes of Jim Henson’s The Storyteller; there’s plenty here that aligns more with horror as a genre. A queen (Salma Hayek) eats the massive heart of a giant sea dragon, a dye-maker finds a man who will flay her alive in the misguided belief that it will make her appear younger, a young princess is given to an ogre as a wife and is brutalized by him, and when the last of these escapes, the ogre hunts her down and kills her companions with the ferocity of a slasher. Good stuff. 4 stars.

Would it have made my list? Yes.

2017: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

The Lure – Watched January 13, 2026

Upon review: I loved this movie. A bizarre horror musical fantasia, The Lure follows two sirens who are lured onto land by the songs of an eighties Polish pop band called Figs & Dates, then become part of the band’s act before turning into stars of their own. Their eel-like mermaid tales, which only appear when they get wet (Splash or, depending on your generation, H20: Just Add Water rules), don’t prove to be much of an imposition, but when one of the girls starts to fall in love with the Evan Peters-esque moptop bassist of F&D, her more worldly-wise sister tries to get her to break it off. If she doesn’t, she’s in for a Little Mermaid ending, of the Hans Christian Anderson variety, not the Disney one. Running the gamut from club music to pop to thrash, the soundtrack is excellent, and the moments of horror are genuinely chilling. Not to be missed. 5 stars.

Would it have made my list? Yes.

2018: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

Cam – Watched some time in 2019.

Upon review: I have to admit that I don’t remember this one too well, although I do recall that I enjoyed it. It’s not possible to legally watch this film anywhere anymore, as it was a direct-to-Netflix feature that the platform no longer hosts and it never got a physical media release, so I don’t have the option to go back and review it again to get a fuller, clearer picture than the one in my head. I remember not caring for actress Madeline Brewer very much at the time, mostly based on her performance on Hemlock Grove; since then, I’ve come around on her, especially when I came to like her quite a bit as the protagonist of the final season of You. This was one that hit with a lot of the Swampflix group based on the predisposition toward internet-based horror, and it went over fairly well in my house with me and my roommate of the time. Too bad I can’t confirm that anymore. 4 stars.

Would it have made my list? 2018 had some clear leaders of the pack with Hereditary, Annihilation, and Black Panther, but the lower rankings on the list aren’t as solidly defensible. Verdict: Possibly, lean toward yes.

Mandy – Watched January 29, 2026

Upon review: Back when we watched Beyond the Black Rainbow as a Movie of the Month years back, I remember reading that as a child director Panos Cosmatos would walk down the horror aisle at the video store and imagine what a movie would be based on the poster alone. Looking back on that, I do wonder if the abyss didn’t gaze back a little, since he has a tendency to make movies that sometimes linger on a single image for extended periods of time, as if the film is the poster. That bothered me much less in Mandy than it did in Rainbow, possibly because it’s driven by yet another in a long history of butterfly fearless performances from Nicolas Cage, or because this one’s nostalgia for VHS-era horror is more textual than referential. The evil gang of demonic bikers who help a cult subdue and torment the titular Mandy are almost exactly what one might imagine from sneaking a peak at the horror aisle at age eight and seeing the cover of Hellbound: Hellraiser II while an overhead TV played Psychomania. The psychedelia and too-familiar narrative structure are unlikely to please plot essentialists, but as a chainsaw duel enthusiast and a King Crimson fan, I liked this despite the soporific nature of its back half. 4.5 stars.

Would it have made my list? I think that I would have overlooked this one or taken it for granted during the year of its release, especially given my cool reception to Black Rainbow. So no, it would not have made my list, but that would have been an error on my part.

Eighth Grade – Watched February 6, 2026

Upon Review: Most online sources would say that this is a coming-of-age dramedy, but that would be incorrect; this is a horror film. Our young protagonist Kayla (Elsie Fisher) is growing up during a time in which social media use is essentially compulsory, while she’s also trying to navigate a world that, to the adult viewer, is largely alien, all while her hormones surge amidst a peer group whose treatment of her ranges from cruel to apathetic. That strangeness of the world in which children reside “now” (given that the film itself is nearly a decade old at this point) is made manifest in a scene during which Kayla spends some time with an older girl and her high school friend group, all of whom seem infinitely older and wiser to Kayla than herself despite the fact that they themselves are still children (and not that their youth stops one of them from being a predator). These older teens marvel at the idea that Kayla had SnapChat, a messaging app that their contemporaries use almost solely for exchanging nudes, when she was in fifth grade, and it blows their minds in the same way that I often marvel that there are entire generations now that have grown up on YouTube, a site that launched the summer after I graduated from high school. Kayla’s entire life is inscribed by the age-old pubescent need to be seen and acknowledged, filtered through a world in which validation is a currency that exists entirely within one’s phone. Good stuff. 4 stars.

Would it have made my list? Yes.

In Fabric – Watched April 4, 2025

Upon Review: An absolute marvel of a movie, I just happened to miss this one when it appeared, despite the affection I already held for Peter Strickland’s earlier giallo-adjacent psychological thriller Berberian Sound Studio. Featuring an excellent turn from Marianne Jean-Baptiste, one of our greatest living performers, this spooky feature about a red dress that torments its owners is an absolute delight. Briefly discussed at the time of viewing in our Buddha’s Palm episode at about the seventy-two minute mark. 4.5 stars.

Would it have made my list? Absolutely.

The Wild Boys – Watched December 21 and 22, 2025

Upon Review: I was not looking forward to disappointing Brandon when I watched this one and did not care for it. So much so, in fact, that I watched it again the following day to see if there was something that I could connect with and care for. Unfortunately, this proved not to be the case. A mostly monochrome fantasia about boys becoming women on an island full of erotic flora, I felt in my bones how strongly this would connect to Brandon, but it just didn’t with me. The moments I loved most were when the film would suddenly turn almost Technicolor, bright and vibrant, and then would be disappointed when we went back to black and white. There must have been a reason for not shooting the whole thing in glorious color, but I couldn’t pin down exactly what the reasons were despite two viewings. It is, as Brandon wrote in his review, “decidedly not-for-everyone-but-definitely-for-someone.” 2.5 stars.

Would it have made my list? Alas, no.

2019: Boomer’s List vs. Swampflix’s List

The Lighthouse – Watched January 11, 2026

Upon Review: I was a big fan of The VVitch, so much so that it was my number one movie of 2016. Despite that, I let both of director Robert Eggers’s following films, The Lighthouse and The Northman, slip past me in the stream. Perhaps it was simply a matter of not being up to grappling with the film and its presaging of the madness of isolation when the film came to home viewing in the early days of lockdown. Having now seen The Lighthouse, this was a huge miss on my part. An utterly captivating story about two men on an island together tasked with maintaining an apparatus that captivates them like it were an unknowable elder god, the film is as rich with symbolism as it is dense with the old-timey dialogue for which Eggers continues to demonstrate his uncanny ear. An unpleasant delight. 4.5 stars.

Would it have made my list? Absolutely; it would have hit the top 10.

The Beach Bum – Watched January 20, 2026

Upon Review: Matthew McConaughey plays the worst person in the world, a very famous (Florida specific) poet named “Moondog,” who floats through life on little more than military grade marijuana, beer that’s barely fit for swine, and a garden of sun-dried poontang. This life of luxury is not sustained by his poetry, but by the fortune of his wife Minnie, who loves no man but Moondog but has taken to shacking up with R&B artist Lingerie (Snoop Dogg) in the “civilization” of Miami during Moondog’s long hiatus in the Keys. When Minnie tragically dies, the plot, such as it is, kicks in, as Moondog must now finish his current writing project in order to get the inheritance that will continue to fund his degenerate hedonism. Along the way, McConaughey as Moondog gets to spout the occasional fragment of genuinely decent poetry broken up with narcissistic phallocentric drivel that believably charms whatever constitutes the literati of Jacksonville and, less convincingly, the Pulitzer board. It’s all good fun with great editing, delirious neon, and a practiced eye for composition, but I could see this turning into a red flag favorite long term in the same genus as Fight Club or Scarface. 4 stars.

Would it have made my list? Not this time.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Podcast #257: Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers (1972) & Pre-Giuliani NYC

February 3, 2026 / swampflix / Leave a comment

Welcome to Episode #257 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of movies made on the grimy streets of pre-Giuliani New York City, starting with the queer musical comedy Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers (1972).

00:00 Krewe du Goo
03:53 While We’re Young (2014)
10:00 Lost in America (1985)
14:20 Another Woman’s Husband (2000)
21:03 Sudden Fury (1993)
25:23 Broken (1993)

36:00 Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers (1972)
1:02:00 Klute (1971)
1:21:00 The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974)
1:36:00 The Exterminator (1980)

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

– The Podcast Crew

The Swampflix Oscars Guide 2026

January 23, 2026January 23, 2026 / swampflix / Leave a comment

There are 35 feature films nominated for the 2026 Academy Awards ceremony. We here at Swampflix have only reviewed half of the films nominated (so far!), which isn’t nearly a high enough ratio to comment on the quality of the selection with any authority. We’re still happy to see movies we enjoyed listed among the nominees, though, including 40% of our own Top 10 Films of 2025 list. The fact that most top prizes are likely to go to one of two titles in that overlap (Sinners or One Battle After Another, both scoring high numbers of nominations) is also an encouraging sign of improving tastes within The Academy, validating this year’s list of nominees as a decent sample of what 2025 cinema had to offer.

Listed below are the 18 Oscar-Nominated films from 2025 that we’ve covered on the site, loosely ranked based on our star ratings and internal voting. Each entry is accompanied by a blurb, a link to our corresponding review, and the listed awards the films were nominated for.

Sinners

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Michael B. Jordan), Best Supporting Actress (Wunmi Mosaku), Best Supporting Actor (Delroy Lindo), Best Original Screenplay, Best Casting, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, Best Makeup & Hairstyling, Best Visual Effects, Best Sound, Best Original Score, and Best Original Song (“I Lied to You”)

“A truly American horror story: a beer & blues-fueled gangsters vs ghouls battle set against endless fields of cotton and all the commodified evil they represent. This is the movie that brought non-movie people out to the movies last year. There’s usually at least one, but they rarely become such a full-blown cultural phenomenon.”

Marty Supreme

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Timothée Chalamet), Best Original Screenplay, Best Casting, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Production Design, and Best Costume Design

“Josh Safdie’s ping-pong hustling saga is remarkably deranged for a sports drama, overloaded with an even more remarkable collection of vintage New Yawk accents & faces to scowl at our incorrigible antihero. The audience scowls too, while we struggle with our simultaneous desires to see Marty succeed and to watch him fail, miserably.”

One Battle After Another

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Leonardo DiCaprio), Best Supporting Actress (Teyana Taylor), Best Supporting Actor (Benicio del Toro), Best Supporting Actor (Sean Penn), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Casting, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Production Design, Best Sound, and Best Original Score

“2023’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline presented a rudimentary prototype for a kind of politically daring Hollywood blockbuster that a major studio would never actually touch, and then one of the last few standing put some real money behind making the real thing (before promptly being chopped up and sold for parts). After so many years of Hollywood studio action spectacle getting lost in the CG/IP wilderness, it’s encouraging to know the medium can still be thrilling & meaningful when the funding flows to the right people.”

The Ugly Stepsister

Nominated for Best Makeup & Hairstyling

“A gnarly body-horror revision of the Cinderella story, now about the madness induced by the never-ending scam of self-improvement through cosmetics. It’s one of many recent revisionist fairy tales that rehabilitate a famous ‘villain’ who isn’t really a villain but a victim of circumstance. This particular one’s a cautionary tale about how ‘changing your outside to match your insides’ isn’t always the best idea, not if you’re willing to allow your insides to become monstrous in the process (and, by extension, about the dangers of tapeworm-based weight loss).”

Weapons

Nominated for Best Supporting Actress (Amy Madigan)

“Semi-functional alcoholism, conspiracy theory paranoia, Ring camera surveillance, cops harassing the homeless, mob justice vigilantism, institutional scapegoats for abuses at home … Oh yeah, we’re rockin’ the suburbs.”

Sirāt

Nominated for Best Sound and Best International Feature

“When it’s time to party*, we will always party hard.

*distract ourselves from impending apocalypse and the ever-present desire to cry until we puke”

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

Nominated for Best Actress (Rose Byrne)

“A portrait of parenthood as being cursed with an imaginary friend that demands your constant attention 24/7.”

Bugonia

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress (Emma Stone), Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Score

“Our corporate-speak overlords are literal demons on Earth and all we can do about it is conspire & seethe online. No action, just endless talk talk talk until the biggest lunatic among us ineffectively lashes out. Weirdly, if this inspires any been-there-seen-that jadedness, it’s coming from Kinds of Kindness, not Save the Green Planet!; would’ve fit right in as another vignette in the anthology, if condensed.”

KPop Demon Hunters

Nominated for Best Original Song (“Golden”) and Best Animated Feature

“The people yearn for the return of the music video.”

The Secret Agent

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor (Wagner Moura), Best Casting, and Best International Feature

“I witnessed two verifiable miracles that night: the scale & period detail afforded by this movie’s budget, and an earthly visit from an angel (Udo Kier).”

Hamnet

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Casting, Best Production Design, Best Costume Design, and Best Original Score

“I expected this to exclusively be about one historically famous couple’s version of art therapy, but it hits on much broader themes about how we’ve all lost a genuine, Pagan relationship with the natural world and how making art can be a form of witchcraft that brings us back to it. It’s powerful stuff; cut right through my knee-jerk cynicism (except during one disastrously phony reading of ‘To be or not to be’ that temporarily broke the spell).”

It Was Just an Accident

Nominated for Best Original Screenplay and Best International Feature

“A surprisingly straightforward thriller, considering what’s usually publicized about Panahi’s recent work. The urgency of its politics hangs heavy on each plot beat & morbid punchline, though, which makes for interesting comparison points as a contemporary of One Battle After Another.”

The Perfect Neighbor

Nominated for Best Documentary Feature

“A nightmare dispatch from the suburban US surveillance state. Probably amoral of me to say this about a documentary of a real-life tragedy, but this would be a helpful answer for anyone who was asking what Weapons is ‘about’. This country is terminally ill.”

Arco

Nominated for Best Animated Feature

“Between this, Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds, and Mars Express, it feels like there’s nice little new wave of sci-fi/fantasy films forming in French animation studios right now. Mars Express is a little more Blade Runner than Arco & Sirocco, which skew a little more Ghibli (making them less distinct in the process) but they’re all pleasant & enchanting enough in their own way.”

Sentimental Value

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (Renate Reinsve), Best Supporting Actresses (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas & Elle Fanning), Best Supporting Actor (Stelan Skarsgard), Best Original Screenplay, Best Editing, and Best International Feature

“At times, a nice movie about a nice house; at other times, a sad movie about making a sad movie.”

Frankenstein

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Jacob Elordi), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Production Design, Best Makeup & Hairstyling, Best Sound, and Best Original Score

“A more refined, accomplished version of what Kenneth Branagh failed to fully give life. I’m excited to get to the point where Jack Pierce’s creature design is in the public domain so that every new version of this story isn’t so fussy & literary, but this still feels like an exceptional specimen of its ilk.”

The Smashing Machine

Nominated for Best Makeup & Hairstyling

“The Rock has been famous for longer than he’s been an actor, so it was impressive to see him disappear into a role for the first time this deep into his career. I don’t know that there’s much else to the movie besides giving him the opportunity to flex his recently atrophied acting muscles, but he puts the spotlight to good use.”

Train Dreams

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Original Song (“Train Dreams”)

“More of an illustrated audiobook than a movie. Specifically, it’s illustrated with the visual language of a macho, all-American TV commercial for a whiskey brand (which at least makes it interesting for how vocally pro-worker & anti-ICE it is in its politics).

I would be curious to know how many people dug this but didn’t vibe with Hamnet, which hits on a lot of the same themes (re: Old World Nature, familial grief) but actually makes an effort to adapt its source material instead of just reciting it. Personally, I found Hamnet powerful and this one hokey, but I’m sure that’s exactly flipped for a lot of people.”

-The Swampflix Crew

Podcast #256: Landscape Suicide (1987) & Elevated True Crime

January 20, 2026January 20, 2026 / swampflix / 1 Comment

Welcome to Episode #256 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of high-concept true crime documentaries, starting with 1987’s Landscape Suicide.

0:00 Welcome
02:50 Swampflix’s Top 10 Films of 2025
04:17 F.A.R.T. The Movie (1991)
07:52 Amish Stud – The Eli Weaver Story (2023)
11:13 Project X (2012)
15:02 January horror
18:45 Atom Egoyan
30:20 The Roottrees are Dead

33:37 Landscape Suicide (1987)
1:01:38 Zodiac Killer Project (2025)
1:26:00 Casting JonBenet (2017)
1:45:00 Voyeur (2017)

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

– The Podcast Crew

Swampflix’s Top 10 Films of 2025

January 19, 2026January 19, 2026 / swampflix / 3 Comments

1. Sinners — A truly American horror story: a beer & blues-fueled gangsters vs ghouls battle set against endless fields of cotton and all the commodified evil they represent. This is the movie that brought non-movie people out to the movies last year. There’s usually at least one, but they rarely become such a full-blown cultural phenomenon.

2. Marty Supreme — Josh Safdie’s ping-pong hustling saga is remarkably deranged for a sports drama, overloaded with an even more remarkable collection of vintage New Yawk accents & faces to scowl at our incorrigible antihero. The audience scowls too, while we struggle with our simultaneous desires to see Marty succeed and to watch him fail, miserably.

3. The Phoenician Scheme — Its violence is Looney Tunes, its business negotiations are Three Stooges, its religious visions are Ingmar Bergman, and yet you could not mistake a single frame of The Phoenician Scheme for any other director’s work. It’s another superb outing from Wes Anderson, who’s been sinking three-pointers at an incredible rhythm lately.

4. Eephus — A slow-paced, aimless movie that feels like watching a sub-professional baseball game in real time … except that every single dialogue exchange & character detail is either deeply charming, riotously funny, or both. The film takes its title from a type of curveball that supposedly floats through the air in a way that makes it seem as if time is standing still. The game it stages also plays out over an impossibly long time, an eephus hovering in the air while everyone hopes it will never end.

5. One Battle After Another — 2023’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline presented a rudimentary prototype for a kind of politically daring Hollywood blockbuster that a major studio would never actually touch, and then one of the last few standing put some real money behind making the real thing (before promptly being chopped up and sold for parts). After so many years of Hollywood studio action spectacle getting lost in the CG/IP wilderness, it’s encouraging to know the medium can still be thrilling & meaningful when the funding flows to the right people.

6. The Ugly Stepsister— A gnarly body-horror revision of the Cinderella story, now about the madness induced by the never-ending scam of self-improvement through cosmetics. It’s one of many recent revisionist fairy tales that rehabilitate a famous “villain” who isn’t really a villain but a victim of circumstance. This particular one’s a cautionary tale about how “changing your outside to match your insides” isn’t always the best idea, not if you’re willing to allow your insides to become monstrous in the process (and, by extension, about the dangers of tapeworm-based weight loss).

7. The Plague — A coming-of-age nightmare drama about hazing rituals at a children’s water polo summer camp. It might not fully qualify as Horror proper, but it comfortably belongs in a social-anxiety horror canon among titles like Eighth Grade, The Fits, and Raw. Possibly the most painfully poignant film about boyhood bullying we’ve ever seen.

8. No Other Choice — Park Chan-Wook returns with another spectacular revenge thriller, except this time the antihero lead can’t actually fight the thing that’s wronged him. You can’t push capitalism off a cliff, you can’t lure layoffs into a torture dungeon, and you can’t force commercialism to cut out its tongue. So, he convinces himself that he has no other choice but to kill his fellow workers while competing for jobs, losing sight of the real enemy. Our relentlessly mundane & degrading corporate hellscape knows no borders nor mercy. Someone ought to do something about it … just preferably someone smarter & nobler than this guy.

9. Boys Go to Jupiter— Cozy slacker art that plays like a D.I.Y. video game set in Steven Universe‘s Beach City, illustrating the listless ennui of unoccupied time between childhood school sessions and the grueling machinery of gig-economy desperation. Overflowing with killer music, adorable animation, and quietly hilarious characters, its Floridian otherworld is politically grim, but hanging out there feels like getting a foot massage while digesting an edible.

10. Rats! — A pop-punk breakfast cereal commercial molding in rotten milk. Rats! follows in a long tradition of no-budget Texan slacker art, but it’s doubtful any other post-Linklater buttscratchers have ever been this exceedingly gross or this truly anarchic. It’s a singular vision, if not only because none of its peers would think to extrude poop directly onto the lens.

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

-The Swampflix Crew

Britnee’s Top 15 Films of 2025

January 16, 2026January 16, 2026 / swampflix / 1 Comment

1. When Fall Is Coming – The one and only François Ozon blew me away yet again. Moral dilemmas wrapped in a melodrama following two elderly women in the French countryside feels tailor-made for me to devour. The dark secrets and mysteries in these women’s lives set against a cozy autumn backdrop completely won me over.

2. The Ugly Stepsister – A brilliant dark take on Cinderella that focuses on the “villain” who really isn’t a villain but a victim of circumstance. Complex characters and violent body horror born from unrealistic beauty standards and body image pressures come together to create nothing short of a masterpiece.

3. Misericordia – Very French, very horny, very gay, and very funny. Claude Chabrol would have loved this one. The village priest is delightfully unhinged, and I just can’t get him out of my head.

4. Marty Supreme – So many unlikeable characters who are endlessly entertaining. I simultaneously wanted Marty to fail and succeed at all of his insane schemes. Totally warped my brain.

5. KPop Demon Hunters – My most re-watched film of the year. I adored the story, the energy, the vibrant animation, and the soundtrack packed with bangers. Everyone’s talking about it, and the hype is completely deserved.

6. The Plague – A coming-of-age nightmare that instantly proves that Charlie Polinger is a brilliant filmmaker and needs to keep making movies. Possibly the most painfully poignant film about bullying in boyhood that I’ve ever seen.

7. Frankenstein – Another botched literary adaptation that I vibed with hard. I love a tall, brooding man and when it’s Jacob Elordi as The Creature, roaming along in search of human connection, I’m 100% on board.

8. Boys Go to Jupiter – This feels like getting a foot massage while taking an edible. Killer music, cute animation, and genuinely hilarious characters. This one feels like medicine for depression.

9. Bugonia – A thought-provoking, sometimes silly, very violent achievement for Yorgos Lanthimos. It takes aim at a lot of things I personally despise, which makes it an absolute delight.

10. Sinners – The movie that made non-movie people go to the movies. There’s usually at least one each year, but Sinners became a full-blown cultural phenomenon. It’s an unbelievably cool vampire movie packed with stellar character-building.

11. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You – This made me feel physically suffocated to the point of sweating. Navigating the complexities of being a sick child’s caregiver with no help from a significant other in a judgemental world just seems like hell, and Rose Byrne’s performance made me feel that pure terror.

12. Weapons – The way the narrative structure revisits the same moments through multiple perspectives added so much depth to those small moments that usually go by unnoticed. I’m also forever grateful for the birth of the pop culture icon that is Aunt Gladys.

13. Hedda – I absolutely adored Hedda, inaccuracies and all. It may stray from Henrik Ibsen’s original play, but I would happily watch a chaotic, bisexual Tessa Thompson wreak havoc in a decadent mansion anytime.

14. Companion – A romcom sci-fi slasher with a feminist soul that is essentially this generation’s version of The Stepford Wives. I had a ton of fun watching this one.

15. Bring Her Back – I love a horror film that makes me cry and evokes an uncomfortable sense of empathy, because that emotional discomfort only deepens the disturbance. Hereditary has done that for me better than any other film, but Bring Her Back almost takes it to that same level.

-Britnee Lombas