It’s that time of year again! This is the tenth time I’ve made one of these and I finally got started at a reasonable time.
I’m not including documentaries in the main list of best films of the year this year, since I’m not even sure how one would compartmentalize ranking some of this year’s most serious topics in a countdown alongside something like The Naked Gun, so I won’t try. The best documentaries that I saw this year, in no particular order:
Secret Mall Apartment – A surprisingly moving story about a cadre of art students whose statement about the need for gentrifying forces to occupy all public space turned into something more. Finding a void in the facade of a shopping mall, these young RISD co-eds and their mentor install an almost functional apartment within it, documenting the entire process on 2000s era video tech. It’s about ephemerality in art and in life, and works surprisingly well. Read my review here.
Ernest Cole: Lost and Found – This film is many things: an international mystery, an epistolary elegy, a warning that the past and the present are always the same. Last but not least, it is a portrait. From my review: “This documentary is deeply felt, wonderfully composed, and unfortunately timely. The portrait of Cole that is created is a warm but not overly sentimental one. The narrative choice to use only Cole’s words is one that means that the voiceover informs but does not contextualize and, thus, requires you to build the story yourself from the juxtaposition and editing rather than having your hand held about what you should be thinking or how you should feel.”
No Other Land – You already know why. Read my review here.
Although Hereditary was my number one in 2018, Midsommar my number nine in 2019, and Beau is Afraid my number four in 2023, Eddington, despite being another stellar entry from him, didn’t crack the top twenty (hell, it didn’t crack the top twenty-five). Read my review here.
It feels like it’s been ages since Companion was being advertised based on its connection to Zach Cregger (via his production credit), given that the rest of the year was dominated by Weapons, his follow up to Barbarianfrom a few years ago. This film finds Sophie Thatcher’s Iris in what seems at first to be the enviable position of Josh (Jack Quaid)’s girlfriend, but we learn fairly quickly that this is not a place anyone would want to be. The two of them join his friends at a remote lakehouse, and when she kills the host in self-defense after he attempts to force himself on her, she learns that there’s more to herself and to her situation than meets the eye. If you managed to avoid the marketing for this film that spoiled the first act twist, just trust me on this one and go in with as little foreknowledge as possible. If you’ve already seen it or already been spoiled, read my review here.
19. Sister Midnight
A not-quite-vampire story about a woman in an arranged marriage who slowly loses her sanity and seems to take on a curse when she kills an insect at a wedding. Is she mad? Is she a goddess reborn? Is she both? Listen to Brandon and I discuss Sister Midnighthere.
18. 28 Years Later
The long awaited sequel to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s iconoclastic early aughts zombie film, 28 Years Later follows the life of a young boy named Spike coming of age in a small community that is insulated from the effects of the Rage virus and those contaminated by it due to its inaccessibility other than a land bridge that emerges at low time and is easily defensible. He accompanies his father to the larger islands on a foraging expedition and faces off against the Rage mutants living there; he returns changed and is further disillusioned about adults and their lies, enough so that he secrets his mother across the land bridge in the middle of the night in the hopes of finding her medical assistance from a supposed doctor on the “mainland.” A breakout performance for young actor Alfie Williams and a stellar turn from Killing Eve star Jodie Comer, who plays his mother. Read my review here.
17. The Long Walk
Fifty boys, one from each state, participate in a televised competition in which they must maintain a speed of three miles per hour or die, with the understanding that there will only be one victor, who gets whatever they want. Based on a Stephen King novel inspired by nightly newscasts about the Vietnam War, The Long Walk as a text both preceded (and possibly inspired) many dystopian YA franchises and pre-emptively deconstructed them, showing the real, brutal effects of the regime without ever making our protagonists feel heroically defiant in the face of all odds. Not fun, but quite good. Read my review here.
16. Rabbit Trap
In the future, I may chalk this one up to little more than recency bias, but I’ve meditated on this one every day since I first saw it. A movie that evokes an otherworld through electronic distortion of natural sounds, Rabbit Trap is more about evoking a sonic, psychedelic experience than delivering a narrative that ties up all of its loose ends, and is all the better for it. Read my review here.
15. Boys Go to Jupiter
A very cute, very fun movie that captures both the listless ennui of unoccupied time between school sessions and the grueling machinery of gig-economy desperation. Read Brandon’s review here.
14. Lurker
“What’s the difference between love and obsession?” Oliver sings in one of the film’s breathy, whispery, but catchy (I’ll admit it) tracks. “I don’t know but I know I want you.” It’s a pretty explicit recitation of the question that drives the film. Oliver is a pop musician, Matthew is an obsessed fan. Or he might just be in love with Oliver. Or is he in love with the idea of Oliver? Perhaps he’s obsessed with the idea of what attaching himself to Oliver’s rising star can do for him, and love’s not even part of the equation, with Oliver himself only a means to an end. Lurker never comes right out and says which, if any, of these things are true; my interpretation is that Matthew is in love with Oliver, and his obsession builds from his overinvestment in Oliver’s casual intimacy and the fear of “losing” him, with all of his contributions to Oliver’s career merely the means by which he secures a place for himself in Oliver’s life. To me, Lurker is a love story, albeit one that’s also a cautionary tale for both the yearner and the object of adoration, while also being a story about what it’s like when the person who knows you best is the one you hate the most. Read my review here.
13. Wake Up Dead Man
Rian Johnson once again delivers a pitch-perfect presentation of our favorite gentleman detective, Benoit Blanc, even if he takes the back seat more here than in either of his previous two outings. The man we spend the most time with is young Reverend Jud, a former boxer who found an ongoing path to redemption in faith after killing a man in the ring, and whose quasi-punishment for an altercation in his home parish is reassignment to a church that is literally, metaphorically, and in every meaningful way without Christ. Alongside my number five, this is one of the only pieces of Christian propaganda (even if only accidentally) to feel genuine and alive in recent (and even not-so-recent) memory. Read my review here.
12. No Other Choice
Park Chan-Wook returns with another genre-bending spectacle about someone driven too far. Park is a director who knows how to navigate a revenge story, whether it be Oldboy, Lady Vengeance, and even Decision to Leave, but unlike the mysterious but ultimately human characters upon whom Park’s protagonists (and sometimes antagonists) enact their vengeance, lead character Man Su of No Other Choice can’t fight the thing that has wronged him. You can’t take your revenge on a system; you can’t push capitalism off a cliff, you can’t lure lay-offs out to an abandoned school to be tortured, and you can’t force commercialism to cut out its tongue. Bereft of a valid vessel into which he can pour all of his failures and furies, Man Su finds a man who convinces himself that he has no other choice than to kill his fellow applicants, who are not really his enemies. In the weeks since I wrote my review, I’ve been thinking a lot about the metaphorical relevance of Man Su’s tooth, an ailment that he ultimately remedies by pulling out the damned thing, taking the healthy parts of the tooth out with the rot, and how that relates to his “removal” of his obstacles, both innocent and not. Good stuff; read my review here.
11. Eephus
In his review, Brandon told what felt like a universally familiar story about a grandfather whose frequent (or even constant) viewership of televised broadcasts of America’s pastime makes it feel like one long baseball game playing out over decades. Eephus effectively captures that feeling, but my connection to baseball is a little different, as the first thing that comes to mind are the multiple summers in which I, miserable, was forced to play little league. Baseball is a forgiving sport, by which I mean that it’s not terribly fast paced, making it an acceptable sport for me, a boy with asthma, to play. What this also means is that it’s also a very boring sport, and every Saturday of my childhood and adolescence that I didn’t have to get up early and do yard labor, I was being dragged out of bed to go stand in an outfield in a BREC park somewhere, all of which in the mid-nineties looked like the field in which the entirety of this film takes place. Here, that slowness is the point; the film takes its title from a curveball that supposedly floats through the air in a way that makes it seem as if it’s standing still. The game that we see played out takes an impossibly long time, nine innings stretched out from the dewy dawn hours until so late in the night that the players have to pull their cars onto the field and use their headlamps to play, the eephus hovering in the air as no one really wants this last game to end. Truly special stuff, and funny as hell.
10. Twinless
Director/writer/star James Sweeney’s sophomore feature, a film about two very different men with distinct backgrounds, incompatible sexualities, and contrasting personalities who meet in a support group because of the one thing that they share: the loss of a twin. Dylan O’Brien is fantastic as both Roman and Rocky in one of the best performances of the year, and Sweeney is effectively sympathetic even as his behavior becomes unjustifiable and his secrets reveal a deeply unwell man. Read my review here.
9. Bugonia
Perhaps the greatest and most worthwhile example of a Western remake of an Asian film. The differences from the South Korean original range from significant to almost imperceptible, but the film more than justifies its existence, and features another stellar turn from director Yorgos Lanthimos at the helm. Superb. Read my review here.
8. The Naked Gun
This is the funniest movie I’ve seen all year, and one that I’ve revisited (as well as its inspiration) in the months since, despite my annual personal Q4 goal of cramming in as many unwatched new releases as I can gorge myself on. Liam Neeson is the perfect person to take on the role of Frank Derbin, Jr., and pairing him with nineties heartthrob Pamela Anderson feels almost like a no-brainer. Featuring more sight gags than all the comedies I saw in 2024 combined and a scene in which Anderson scats for her life, by far the funniest film sequence of the entire year was Frank and his new girlfriend going on a wintry romantic vacation that involves bringing a snowman to life (and then ending that life when their creation becomes unmanageable). It’s no surprise that I love this one, given that it was directed by Akiva Schaffer, and I’ve long been a vocal defender of Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, and co-written by Dan Gregor, who did fine work on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. To whomever decided to make the villain’s defeat just like Jonathan’s in the sixth season of Buffy and deliberately stated earlier in the film that knowledge of the slayer and her pals was important to get all the references, my great thanks. Read Brandon’s review here.
7. Reflection in a Dead Diamond
I’ve been remiss in not checking out previous films from the married writing/directing duo of Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, other than a screening of Amer that I attended years ago that was filled with distractions that kept me from fully engaging with the experience. Reflection in a Dead Diamond is one of the best films I’ve seen in years, a phantasmagorical journey into the psyche of elderly John Diman (Fabio Testi). The film finds Diman staying at a coastal hotel in an area that he visited years before, although it’s unclear if he did so as a James Bond-esque superspy or merely as an actor who played one. The film opens on a scene that virtually recreates the end of For Your Eyes Only, and we’re given no reason to believe that Diman’s recollections of his days in espionage are meant to be anything other than his memories, but ambiguity enters the picture around the midpoint. Diman’s enemies include a group of opposing agents with themed names: Atomik (who glows), Amphibik (whose gag is scuba diving), and of course the sexy love interest Serpentik, who mostly does Catwoman-esque violence but has a ring that she can use to poison her foes like a cobra. One of these is Hypnotik, whose schtick is that he can make you believe that you’re in a film; in his present day, Diman is repeatedly given clues that his recollected misadventures are nothing more than a misrememberance of a role he once played, but it’s unclear if this is the degradation of a man’s mind in old age or all part of Hypnotik’s suggestion. Stylized, beautifully shot, frequently quite violent, and unforgiving, Reflection in a Dead Diamond is the best Bond film of the twenty-first century. Read Brandon’s review here.
6. Sinners
What else is there to say about Sinners? The initial advertising for the film left me cold, but Brandon texted me and let me know that this would be very much up my alley. And he was right! The film has been covered to hell and back by much more interesting and well-read writers than I am, but if you’re looking for something interesting to fill your time, I highly recommend this YouTuber’s video essay about the relationship between Irish folk and Black American music; it’s good stuff. Hear the primary podcast crew discuss the film here.
5. The Colors Within
Ever since I caught this one so that we could engage with it in conversation with the director’s earlier film Liz and the Blue Bird for one of our recent podcasts, I haven’t been able to stop singing its praises, recommending it to everyone that I’ve talked to about my favorite films of the year. Maybe there’s some recency bias there, but there’s also a recurring theme this year that a lot of my favorite movies; this one, my number one, Eephus, Sister Midnight, and Boys Go to Jupiter are films that have no real antagonist. Even within those, however, there is an external force that has created the situation in which our characters find themselves, respectively inconvenient construction, arranged marriages, and capitalism-inscribed gig economy woes. The Colors Within doesn’t even have those kinds of systemic threats at play; it’s just the story of a lonely girl with such pronounced synesthesia that she can see music and perceive people’s auras, who then makes friends with a cool upperclassman who plays guitar and forms a band with another lonely kid. Brandon sold this one to me as being similar to Linda Linda Linda, a film that I loved, and while there’s no doubt in my mind that the earlier live action film was an influence on this one, Linda featured our main characters under a time crunch to learn and play three songs by the end of the week for their school festival. In Colors, the kids in this band are just kind of puttering around and getting to know each other for most of the runtime; by the time one of the nuns at the girls’ school recommends that their band play the Valentine’s festival, you’re ready to simply accept that as where the story was always going, and it’s nice that the film gives the audience and the characters so much room to breathe and let the characters do the work rather than have them driven toward a goal from the start. An animated film that justifies its medium with its psychedelic sequences, this is a (soft, quiet, cozy) blast. Read Brandon’s review here.
4. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
This year, while visiting with family in the Carolinas, one of my relatives mentioned that it wouldn’t be long before my maternal grandmother passed away, and that they would be going back to Louisiana when this happened. At present, my father and I are not on speaking terms, and I don’t expect that to change in this lifetime, and I knew this conversation would come up because I don’t intend to return to the homestead for the rest of my life, and I had a discussion with my therapist about it prior to my travels. I told her that I had spent my entire miserable, abusive childhood crying for help into a void, and that there was no laying bare of the scars on my body, mind, heart, or soul that had ever given anyone in my family pause. I asked her how much worse it would have had to be for any of them to care, to even listen, to stop repeating useless platitudes about forgiveness and the harm that holding onto hatred causes and think about just how monstrous things must have been for a child of eight years old to start having suicidal ideation. I asked her if it would have even made a difference if he had molested me, if that would have been evil enough for them to understand just how deep the damage goes … and she said “No.” In fact, she said, most of the time when that does happen, the family just covers it up and blames the victim for rocking the boat; and as soon as she said it, I knew she was right. I had heard this before from many victims, but never has it been so visceral, so infuriating, so frustrating, as it was when depicted on screen in Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. In the film’s opening moments, we see Shula (Susan Chardy) observe the dead body of her uncle in the road, and as she turns, we see a young Shula likewise stare impassively at his corpse. Thus begin the rites of the dead and the rituals of mourning, both of which attempt to sanitize the life of Uncle Fred, a lifelong and unrepentant pedophile, whose family has kept his danger a secret for so long that the trauma he has caused is intergenerational. Even in death, his sisters, who have a seven-year-old nephew via Fred’s currently still teenaged wife (she’s such a child that her smartphone case has sequined Mickey Mouse ears), blame the girl for failing to keep Fred fed and happy. “No family wants to admit that it’s dysfunctional,” my therapist told me months ago. “And more often than not they turn on the victim for complaining and protect the abuser. We don’t know why.” Every elder in Shula’s family has maintained a lie about Fred’s faith, fidelity, and goodness for so long that he never had to pay for his sins or his crimes in life, and even in death his victims aren’t free. A very, very strong showing that left me burning with righteous fury. Read Brandon’s review here.
3. Bring Her Back
My overall apathetic reaction to Danny and Michael Philippou’s freshman feature Talk to Me (which I mentioned at the top of my review for Bring Her Back) meant that I was interested but not overly invested in their sophomore outing. I wasn’t prepared for the emotional ride that this film took me on, with such palpable and almost unwatchable violence (it’s got the worst tooth/mouth gore I’ve seen all year, topping even the borderline nauseating tooth removal in No Other Choice). Sally Hawkins gives a star turn as a monstrously abusive foster mother hiding a secret agenda, one that we can empathize with even as we are stricken ill by the lengths that she will go to in order to try and bring back the daughter that she has lost. Not to be missed.
2. The Phoenician Scheme
To allay any confusion, let it be known that although we are very pro-Wes Anderson around here, we are not shills. I still haven’t gotten around to seeing Isle of Dogs, and I was lukewarm at best about The French Dispatch (Brandon responded quite well to it). I was all in on Asteroid City, though, and I find myself once again delighted by Mr. Anderson’s most recent release. Read my review here.
1. Universal Language
I was a latecomer to Universal Language, only managing to see it within the last month of the year, but it skyrocketed to being my top film of the year within just a few minutes. In trying to come up with a comparison point, I found myself reaching for some of the same touchstones that Brandon did in his review, including some of the visual stylings of Wes Anderson, the playful specialness of True Stories, and the sense of humor and historical revisionism (as well as the utter Candadianity) of Guy Maddin. Because of the various ways that the interconnected narratives wove together and then separated before colliding with another character’s storyline, I would best describe this as Maddin’s Magnolia. Just like P.T. Anderson’s film, it stays within the realm of the plausible (if quirky) until it goes for broke in its final moments; for Magnolia, that meant a one-off musical number and a rain of frogs, but for Universal Language, there’s a full-on personality crisis (get it while it’s hot!) and identity confusion, which makes for a somber and provocative ending to a movie that I couldn’t stop laughing with for most of its run time. Fantastic.
1. The Phoenician Scheme — The violence is Looney Tunes, the business negotiations are Three Stooges, the religious visions are Ingmar Bergman, and yet you could not mistake a single frame of this for any other director’s work. Another superb outing from Wes Anderson, who’s been sinking three-pointers at an incredible rhythm lately.
2. 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.
3. The Plague — The scariest movie I watched all October was a coming-of-age drama about hazing rituals at a water polo summer camp. I don’t know if it qualifies as Horror proper, but it comfortably belongs in a social-anxiety horror canon with titles like Eighth Grade, The Fits, and Raw. Kids are monsters, man; be thankful you never have to be one again.
4. Weapons — 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.
5. One Battle After Another— 2023’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline felt like 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 being chopped up and sold for parts). I don’t personally care too much about Hollywood studio action spectacle at this point in my life, but it’s encouraging to know the genre can still be thrilling & meaningful when the funding flows to the right people.
6. 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. It’s funny & sexy too, improbably.
7.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. He may be an annoying twerp, but lil Timmy Chalmette really is going places.
8. The Ugly Stepsister — A gnarly body-horror revision of the Cinderella story, now about the madness induced by the neverending scam of self-improvement through cosmetics. Sometimes “changing your outside to match your insides” isn’t the best idea, not if you’re willing to allow your insides to become monstrous in the process.
9. The Shrouds — Grief has been the major theme in horror for the past decade, while Conspiracy has been the major theme of mainstream political thought. Only David Cronenberg could find a way to eroticize both in a single picture. The king of the perverts continues his reign, despite his reluctance to wear the crown.
10. Dead Lover— Grace Glowicki follows up her freak-show stoner comedy Tito with a flippantly surreal Hammer Horror throwback, filtering the Frankenstein myth through the Tim & Eric meme machine. Dead Lover pairs some of the most gorgeous, perverted images of the year with the kind of juvenile prankster humor that punctuates each punchline with ADR’d fart noises.
11. Fucktoys — A low-budget, high-concept horror comedy about a sex worker struggling to earn the cash needed for a ceremony to lift the mysterious curse that’s constantly derailing her life. The fantastical Trashtown setting will likely earn this a lot of comparisons to the Mortville trash world of John Waters’s oeuvre, but in practice it hits a lot closer to Gregg Araki’s work: sincerely sexy & sensual while still remaining outrageously, garishly bratty.
12. Rats!— A pop-punk breakfast cereal commercial molding in rotten milk. Rats! follows in a long tradition of no-budget Texan slacker art, but I don’t know that 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.
13. The Surfer — An Ozploitation throwback in which a workaholic yuppie drives himself mad trying to prove his manliness to a beachful of toxic, brainwashed bullies. As the Aussie sun wears him down, it gradually transforms into Nicolas Cage’s version of The Swimmer, retracing Burt Lancaster’s surreal heat-stroke journey into his own macho psyche and hating everything he sees.
14. Sirāt — 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
15. Sister Midnight— A Mumbai-set horror story about what happens when a live firecracker gets married off to a dud, quickly going insane with the boredoms & frustrations of isolation as a housewife. It would make a great pairing with Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love in that respect, although I dare say it’s got a cooler look and its story takes more surprising turns.
16. The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man— A microbudget, based-on-a-true-story comedy about a fecal terrorist who dumped buckets of piss & shit on his fellow Torontonians in 2019, seemingly at random. The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man is surprisingly sincere about the severe mental illness that would inspire someone to attack strangers like that. What’s even more surprising is that it’s not necessarily the piss & shit itself that earns all the biggest laughs; it’s the custom-made parody songs about piss & shit, all of them comedy gold.
17. The Naked Gun— There was something infectiously sweet about Liam Neeson & Pam Anderson’s tabloid romance that made this goof-a-second spoof feel more substantial & relevant than it possibly could otherwise. It was already a generous enough gift that the PR power couple gave me an opportunity to laugh all the way through an 85min comedy with my friends, but it was also fun to get worked by their kayfabe love affair in the headlines outside the theater. They made me their snowman.
18. Grand Theft Hamlet — Starts as a document of an absurd, highly specific art project (staging a community-theatre production of Hamlet entirely inside GTA Online), then quickly becomes a broader story about how hard it is to complete any collaborative art project. The circumstances are always stacked against your success, in this case literalized by people firing bullets & rockets in your direction while you’re just trying to rehearse.
19. Boys Go to Jupiter — Cozy slacker art that plays like a D.I.Y. video game set in Steven Universe‘s Beach City. I’m still amazed that it screened in neighborhood art houses instead of premiering on Steam Deck consoles.
20. The Colors Within— Exceptionally quiet for a story about the formation of a rock ‘n’ roll synth pop band, and exceptionally pale for an animated movie about the divine beauty of color. When all that restraint melts away during the final performance, though, it feels good enough to make you cry.
HM. Mr. Melvin — A new edit of Toxic Avengers II &III, (both initially released in 1989), now Frankensteined together into one unholy monstrosity. Objectively, the best Toxic Avenger film is likely either the bad-taste original from 1984 or Macon Blair’s punching-up revision that was also released this year, but I can’t help but admire this one as a completionist’s timesaver. It’s all the best parts of the official Toxie sequels (the Japanese travelogue from II, the Toxie-goes-yuppie satire of III, not a single frame from IV) with at least 70 minutes of time-wasting junk erased from the public record. Mathematically speaking, it’s the most efficiently entertaining Toxic Avenger film to date, which technically qualifies it as public service — something to be considered by Lloyd Kaufman’s parole board.
Welcome to Episode #254 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon is joined by Pete Moran of the We Love to Watch podcast to investigate the paranormal British tradition of broadcasting ghost stories on Christmas, courtesy of the BBC.
00:00 Merry Spooky Christmas 23:49 Ghost Stories for Christmas (1971-1978) 1:04:54 Other BBC ghost stories (2005-2025)
Swampflix’s official selection of the best films of 2025 won’t post until January 2026, but list-making season is already in full-swing elsewhere. General consensus on the best films of the year is starting to take shape as regional film critic associations are publishing their collective Best of the Year Lists, and I’m proud to say I was once again able to take a small part in that annual ritual. I voted in the Southeastern Film Critics Association poll for the best films of 2025, representing a consensus opinion among 99 critics across nine states in the American South. Winners were announced this morning, and it’s a commendable list. At the very least, it’s cool to see the last three significant Warner Bros. releases (One Battle After Another, Sinners, Weapons) take a deserved victory lap before the historic movie studio is chopped up and sold for parts. While recent years’ SEFCA picks have typically been dominated by a single critical juggernaut (Anora in 2024, Oppenheimer in 2023, Everything Everywhere in 2022), this year we were able to spread the wealth among those three major Warner Bros. players: mostly split between Paul Thomas Anderson & Ryan Coogler’s respective accomplishments in One Battle & Sinners, while throwing some love Amy Madigan’s way for her Best Supporting Actress role as the instantly iconic villain of Weapons.
Speaking of that surprise Weapons win, the other major story of this year’s SEFCA list is the critical ascent of horror. To quote SEFCA Vice President Jim Farmer in today’s press release, “It was really satisfying to see a genre film like Sinners performing so well with critics across the country while also being a sensation at the box office […] I’ve always been a big supporter of horror films, and three of our Top 10 films fall into that genre.” Besides the aforementioned Sinners & Weapons, the third horror title that earned a spot in this year’s Top 10 is Guillermo del Toro’s gothic melodrama Frankenstein, a decades-long passion project for the notoriously cinephilic director. At this point, it’s unclear whether that critical boost for Weapons or Frankenstein will earn them Oscars attention as well, but Sinners ranks so highly among this year’s winners that it’s very likely going to be a major contender the way previous SEFCA winners have been in the recent past. Even if you don’t personally care about The Oscars as an institution, that does mean it’ll be easier for the next wave of high-concept passion project horrors to be made, as Awards Season attention often helps steer the flow of production funds. The collapse of Warner Bros. is a grim omen, but I’m still looking forward to our spooky future at the cineplex.
Last year, Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows made it to number 24 on Swampflix’s Top 100 films, so naturally I spent the evening of last Christmas Eve closing that blind spot. If you’re a weirdo like I/we am/are (and if you’re on this site, that’s probably the case), you’ll likely find yourself recognizing the plot from its contours, because what Star Wars is to Spaceballs, this movie is to John Waters’s Polyester. Since Brandon had already written a review years earlier, I repurposed the review I couldn’t stop myself from writing to save for this year as an earnest recommendation to spend some part of your Christmas season with Sirk too, on the 70th anniversary of Heaven’s release.
Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) is a well-off widow in New England. Her life is quiet, with visits from her two college-aged children Kay (Gloria Talbott) and Ned (William Reynolds) growing fewer and further between. Her best friend, Sara Warren (Agnes Moorhead), takes her out socially; attempts to get her to pair off with older widowers in their social circle are unsuccessful, as she feels no spark with any of them. One day, she realizes that some new hunk is tending to her landscaping, and he introduces himself as Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson), the son of the late Mr. Kirby who was previously engaged as the Scott family’s arborist. When she visits him at his home, she learns that he sleeps on a cot in a room attached to the greenhouse, and when he mentions planning to tear down the old mill on the property, she cajoles him into giving her a tour of the long-abandoned building, and she encourages him to convert it into a livable home instead. As their romance burgeons, their love is represented in ongoing changes to the mill house, which comes to resemble a livable home more and more. Ron takes Cary to meet some of his friends, a couple who have given up on the lifestyle of trying to keep up with the Joneses in New York and now instead tend a tree farm. As the night goes on, a party erupts, and the couple introduces Cary to their bohemian friends: birdwatchers, beekeepers/artists, cornbread masters, and lobster-catchers.
Cary has a wonderful, uninhibited time, but there’s trouble around the corner; her high society friends are rather snooty about her relationship, as are her children. When she mentions selling the house and moving in with Ron (post nuptials, of course), Ned becomes quite upset about his mother selling his childhood home and tells her that the “scandal” she’s bringing upon the family by dating someone who’s merely (upper) middle class could jeopardize his career options. The local gossip hound starts a rumor that Cary and Ron had been an item since before her husband died, which deeply upsets Kay, as she begs her mother to break things off with Ron. Everyone also seems to be utterly scandalized by their dramatically different ages. (Hudson was 30 and Wyman 38 at the time, and those are the ages that they appear to be to me, but the film may be trying to imply a greater disparity.) She acquiesces to the demands of her fairweather socialite friends and her ungrateful children, only to learn some months later that her sacrifice was in vain. Both of her children delay their Christmastime return to their hometown, and when they arrive, they reveal their own new life plans; Kay will be getting married to her beau in February when he graduates, and Ned will be leaving straight from his own graduation to take a position in Europe that will last, at minimum, a year. They present her with a Christmas gift that she doesn’t want (more on that in a minute), and Ned even suggests that they sell the house, since the kids won’t be needing it as their “home” any longer. Via a simple misunderstanding, Cary comes to believe that Ron is getting married to another woman, and the melodrama only unfolds further from there.
Sirk is a Technicolor artist, and this is a gorgeous movie, and a very funny one at that. One of the things that I really loved about this cast was the opportunity to see Agnes Moorhead play a kinder, more sympathetic role. Just a couple days after watching this one I caught her name in the opening credits of Dark Passage and thought to myself, aloud, “That woman was working.” And, wouldn’t you know it, I tuned into the New Year’s Twilight Zone marathon on H&I just in time to catch her episode of that:
Moorhead’s Sara Warren is the only real friend that Cary has, as she’s the one who encourages her to get back together with Ron when she sees just how heartbroken her friend is. We learn this in a scene that’s perfectly framed and is one of many pointed social critiques that the film makes. We cut to a shot of a housekeeper vacuuming a carpet, as the camera dollies backward through the doorway to the room in which Sara and Cary are talking, and Sara closes the door to shut out the noise so that the two women can converse. It’s a neat gag, but it plays into the overall social critique of the movie, in which even the most sympathetic member of the bourgeoisie is still an aristocrat shutting out her social inferiors, despite her softening her heart towards her friend’s desire to date a blue collar business owner. There’s also a great contrast between the country club cocktail party that Cary attends near the film’s opening scene and the lobsterfest that happens at Ron’s friends’ house, where the upper class is presented undesirably. A married man makes a pass at Cary, kissing her; a potential romantic interest tells her that there’s little need for passion at their age, to which she (rightfully) takes some offense; the town gossip queen is there to do her thing. Ron’s group’s party is a lively place, where he plays the piano and sings boisterously, and people dance with great fervor. It’s never commented upon, but it is present throughout.
Another fun little tidbit about this one is its distaste for television. Early on in the film, Sara suggests that Cary get a television to keep her company now that the house is empty, which Cary finds to be a contemptible suggestion. When a television salesman sent by Sara calls upon the Scott household, Cary shoos him away in a huff. In the final insult, however, Cary receives a television set as a gift from her children for Christmas. Ned even reiterates that Cary will be lonely and unfulfilled without her children and should have something in the house to distract her from her pitiful solitude, as if he and his sister hadn’t done everything in their power to sabotage her relationship with Ron. After the children have gone off to do their own things, their mother is left alone in the house, lit only by the lights of the Christmas tree and a duplicate fire: one in the hearth and its mirror in the flat TV screen — the giver of warmth and its cold reflected image. It’s striking and memorable, and the relatively tiny window that the TV might give of the world is visually contrasted with the vivid Technicolor world just on the other side of the panoramic windows that Ron has installed into the home he built to share with Cary. It’s good stuff.
The film doesn’t demand a winter or Christmas time frame to be viewed, but I think it works best in that context. I’m getting the word out now so you can put it on the calendar before we all get Christmas brained. And, while you’re at it, when was the last time you watched Polyester?
Welcome to Episode #253 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon & Boomer catch up with older movies from some of this year’s best directors, starting with Park Chan-wook’s infamous gross-out revenge thriller Oldboy(2003).
Is cinema dying? I don’t think so. Between local festivals, streaming premieres, awards screeners, and routine trips to my neighborhood theater, I watch about a hundred or so new releases every year, and there’s always plenty of daring, imaginative art out there worthy of being championed. Of course, there’s far more disposable garbage than there is buried treasure, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth digging. The allure of watching nothing but already-canonized classics from decades in the past and dismissing the cinema of the moment is that the digging has already been done for you. It’s easy to flippantly say that cinema is dead or complain that they don’t make ’em like they used to while sticking to long-beloved titles from the past, ignoring the blander, shittier movies from earlier eras that have been forgotten to time. The ratio of good-to-bad art has remained fairly consistent. Sure, comparing the dishwater-dull screengrabs from Wicked: For Good against the Technicolor fantasia of the classic MGM Wizard of Oz is dispiriting, but there are hundreds of forgotten Westerns, melodramas, and gorilla-suited monster movies from 1930s Hollywood that are just as artistically bankrupt as Jon Chu’s recent CG babysitters. Meanwhile, there’s ecstatically great work being made & distributed right now, seen only by those curious enough to go looking for it outside the Wicked-overrun multiplexes. So, I found myself feeling a little conflicted while watching a recent double feature of art films about the slow, ongoing death of art films. Both Bi Gan’s Resurrection and Radu Jude’s Dracula grimly declare cinema to be dead, looking in the temporal rearview for signs of life & art in a supposedly decaying medium (starting with parodies of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu in both cases, weirdly enough). The argument is somewhat self-defeating, though, since both films present newly mutated cinematic forms & iterations by poking at the century-old artform’s still-bleeding corpse. They offer an arthouse equivalent of the rapidly alternating “It’s so over”/”We’re so back” cycles of social media commentary on cinema’s constant death & rebirth in a single self-conflicting message, prompting me to switch between nodding along and shaking my head until I felt dizzy.
If either of these sprawling cinematic eulogies express any hope for the future of the artform, it’s Bi Gan’s film. An abstract sci-fi fantasy parable, Resurrection personifies dream-logic Cinema so it can watch it evolve over a century of increasingly narrowed formal refinements & constraints. It’s set in a loosely defined future where humanity has discovered that the key to avoiding death is to stop dreaming, creating an underground class of dissidents called Deliriants who continue to dream despite the new norm. The Deliriant of this particular story is the shared, personified dream of Cinema: a Nosferatu-styled monster whose beating heart is a film projector. He starts his journey in a German Expressionist dollhouse, peering out of warped Dr. Caligari windows in an early-20th Century opium den before his corporeal form expires in the vibrant poppy fields outside of Oz. His spirit lives on in other Deliriant forms throughout the decades, though, re-emerging in an amnesiac noir realm, a Buddhist temple ghost story, a card-trick conman hustling saga, and a vampiric Y2K gangster picture (each life representing one of the five senses, for reasons I cannot confidently explain). Unfortunately, charting the gradual mutations of the artform in this way means what starts as total lucid-dreaming freedom in the Silent Cinema era gradually becomes grounded & rigid in its thinking, with Bi Gan’s declared aesthetic influences abruptly stopping in the late 1990s; even the noir segment feels closer to Alex Proyas’s Dark City than anything recognizable from the 1940s (give or take an homage to the hall-of-mirrors shootout in The Lady from Shanghai). The most overt acknowledgement Bi Gan makes to the cinema of the now is in the gangster-vampire segment’s extensive long-take “oner,” a digital-era stylistic flex he became synonymous with in his 2018 breakout A Long Day’s Journey into Night. According to Resurrection, cinema started as freeform poetry that was slowly pinned down and strangled to death by the restrictions of real-world logic. By the end, Bi Gan is begging the world to start dreaming in the old ways again, so the medium can find new life in a better future. That might be a little dismissive to the cinema of the now, but it’s at least willing to believe the corpse can be revived.
Radu Jude is not so hopeful. The Romanian prankster’s death-of-cinema comedy Dracula only arrives at the scene of cinema’s death to playfully piss on the corpse, like a Calvin & Hobbs bumper sticker. Jude reportedly pitched his take on Dracula as an off-hand joke while struggling to secure funding for projects he actually cared about, and the resulting 3-hour sketch comedy revue largely plays as a punishment for everyone who encouraged him to paint himself into that corner. His onscreen avatar is a huckster with tireless Roberto Benigni energy (Adonis Tanta) who has been hired to direct a modern interpretation of Dracula but has no ideas on what to shoot. Having just barely put in an effort to change out of his pajamas, he fires off several prompts to a generative A.I. program that helpfully “writes” different Dracula scenarios for him, which are individually acted out in commercial grade digi-cam vignettes. The actual scripts for those varying skits were obviously written by Jude, not A.I., as he takes wild potshots at previous Dracula adaptations from the likes of F.W. Murnau, Francis Ford Coppola and, most recently, Robert Eggers. The vignettes are frequently interrupted and derailed by generative A.I. animation in order to supplement their budget, however, assaulting the audience with digital slop we usually only see by accident when clicking down the wrong Facebook rabbit hole. Jude conveys some muted respect for Dracula cinema of the past here, but he mostly demonstrates a combative relationship with the subject. The film opens with repeated A.I. line readings of the phrase, “I am Vlad the Impaler Dracula, and you can all suck my cock,” which are later rebutted by modern-day Romanians shouting their own expletives in return, like “Lick my pussy, Dracula!” and “Suck Popeye the Sailor’s dick.” Beneath all of the crass humor, there’s some genuine political anger at the heart of the project, just as there was in the Andrew Tate-spoofing segments of Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. He takes the time to illustrate how Vlad the Impaler, Dracula exploited & terrorized the Romanian people, how Romanian people are still being exploited & terrorized by the political powers of today, and how their exploitation & terror has now been commodified by an entire century’s worth of post-Nosferatu Dracula cinema. He’s not only declaring cinema dead, stomped into the dirt by generative A.I.; he’s also saying good riddance to bad rubbish.
If either of these films are actively aware of & engaged with current cinema, it’s Dracula. Radu Jude’s hijacking of Bram Stoker’s cinematic legacy is not so much the movie of the year as it is the movie of the moment: an AI-generated shitpost dispatched from the still-settling rubble of pop culture proper. It just sees nothing inventive or exciting about the modern art of the moving image except maybe in the exterior shots of Roku City or in pop up ads for boner pills. In contrast, Resurrection‘s reverence for the cinema of the distant past is less dismissive of the current moment as hopelessly dead than it is instructive on how it can be rejuvenated. I was in total awe for the first couple segments of the interlocking anthology film as it integrated the visual trickery of cinema’s early days among the likes of Murnau, Méliès, and Lang with a more modern approach to the craft. That spell was broken as its stylistic markers drifted closer to the current moment, though, especially by the time I realized it was going to declare cinema’s time of death as occurring just before the 21st Century began. Again, I feel compelled to contend that there are still daring, worthwhile works being made to this day, and that the artform is still very much alive. Cases in point: Bi Gan’s Resurrection & Radu Jude’s Dracula, no matter what they’d tell you themselves.
Every FYC awards screener mailed to critics this time of year includes severe legal verbiage about how they are to be viewed, warning against obvious transgressions like online piracy and more grey-area faux pas like watching soon-to-be-distributed titles in the presence of family & friends. Given that these screeners tend to flood critics’ inboxes in the holiday stretch between Thanksgiving & Christmas, it’s safe to assume that second warning is widely ignored. Critics, film journalists, and awards pundits often travel home with armfuls of FYC DVDs and e-mail inboxes overflowing with screener links that they’re supposed to review at the exact moment that they’re also supposed to be spending time with family. There’s going to be some unavoidable bleedover there. While more harrowing titles like Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You & Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love might be saved for a late-night laptop watch once the house has gone quiet, it’s inevitable that softer, more amiable fare like Mike Flanagan’s Life of Chuck or Celine Song’s Materialists will make its way to the living room TV at one point or another while the family is enjoying being cozy in each other’s presence. I do wonder how that home-with-the-family programming narrows down what critics & awards voters make time for during the annual holiday-season screener push. It’s gotta be easier, for instance, to sneak in a viewing of the latest Rian Johnson murder mystery, Wake Up Dead Man, in a shared living space than, say, Radu Jude’s 3-hour, semi-pornographic A.I. shitpost Dracula. Cozy living room viewing isn’t necessarily the enemy of art, though, and there are plenty of worthwhile new releases that won’t alienate or horrify onlooking relatives who are just trying to enjoy some Thanksgiving leftovers without being psychologically scarred. I even found myself drifting toward the cozier end of the screener pile over this past holiday week, saving the freakier, more esoteric stuff for when my family was napping in the other room.
Without question, the coziest option from this year’s holiday screener deluge was Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale — a movie so pleasant & unchallenging that it’s functionally an episode of television. Workman costume drama director Simon Curtis goes overboard mimicking crane shots with drone cameras in every exterior scene to convince the audience that we’re watching a real movie and not a TV special, but anyone who’s still keeping up with this series knows why we’re here. The only reason to watch The Grand Finale is to catch up with old friends from Downton Abbey‘s heyday, checking in on beloved characters like kitchen-comrade Daisy, surprise power-player Edith, and village moron Mr. Moseley for what the title promises will be the final time. Showrunner & screenwriter Julian Fellowes is shamelessly working on autopilot here, borrowing the A-plot conflict (in which longtime Downton queenpin Lady Mary struggles to maintain her social status after the public shame of becoming a divorcee) from the second season of his more current project, The Gilded Age. Both that A-plot conflict and the B-plot villain (an obvious confidence man who is emptying the pockets of the Granthams’ American cousin, played by an overqualified Paul Giamatti) are brushed aside with about 40 minutes of runtime left to go, so that the movie can get down to its real business: saying goodbye . . . for now. I have a hard time believing The Grand Finale will prove to be all that final in the years to come, as it’s likely Fellowes & company will find other ways to squeeze a few more dollars out of the Downton Abbey brand now that its theatrical-film cycle has officially run its course. To my discredit, I’ll also keep watching these addendum episodes to the show for as long as he keeps making them, since I’ve spent enough time with these characters by now that they’re starting to feel like actual family, especially now that they’re no longer in danger of anything permanently damaging ever happening to them again. All the big shocks & deaths are behind us; the future is looking purely, unashamedly cozy.
Besides low-stakes costume dramas, the epitome of cozy movie programming is Studio Ghibli animation: My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, Kiki’s Delivery Service, the classics. There weren’t any cozy anime titles left on my to-watch pile this year (although I will continue to sing the praises of Naoko Yamada’s rock ‘n’ roll sleeper The Colors Within to anyone who’ll listen), but thankfully French animators came through with a close-enough equivalent in the children’s sci-fi fantasy adventure Arco. Hayao Miyazaki’s career-long fascination with pastoral nature and the miraculous mechanics of flight are echoed in this story of a future society that supplements their cloud-city farm work with time travel technology that requires them to fly in rainbow arcs. The youngest member of that family, Arco, gets stranded alone in the past, where he meets a girl his age who’s living a similarly restricted, overparented domestic life. They go on their first truly independent adventure together, ultimately at the expense of losing time with their family. The animation is consistently cute, and the dual-timeline sci-fi worldbuilding opens the otherwise small story up to moments of grand-scale wonder. Between this, Sirocco and the Kingdom of the Winds, and Mars Express, it’s starting to feel like there’s a 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 or 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. The semi-retired Miyazaki can’t issue a new Boy and the Heron dispatch from the back of his chain-smoking brain every year, so we’re going to have to settle for his closest equivalents if we don’t want to end up rewatching Kiki’s Delivery Service every time we get cozy under a blanket. Arco ably does its job in that respect, helping keep traditional animation alive in our own CG Disney dystopia.
It’s possible that Arco might earn an Oscars nomination for Best Animated Feature and the latest Downton Abbey episode might score a stray Best Costume Design nod elsewhere, but it’s difficult to imagine that either awards campaign will result in any statues. To find a genuine awards contender in the FYC screener pile, you do have to go a little dark & serious, which can be challenging if you’re trying to keep things cozy around your family. Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value was already automatically going to be in awards consideration after the previous attention earned by his breakout hit The Worst Person in the World, but it’s got an especially good chance given how eager it is to please instead of alienate. At times, Sentimental Value is very simply a nice movie about a nice house. At other times, it is simply a sad movie about making a sad movie. It’s the perfect programming selection for the holiday season if you’ve got a few adult members of the family who need a break from the kids’ incessant rewatches of KPop Demon Hunters & Minecraft Movie, especially if they have the luxury of time to visit an actual brick-and-mortar theater outside of the house. Reinate “Worst Person” Reinsve returns as Trier’s muse, playing another thirtysomething who can’t quite get her shit together. This time, she’s a Norwegian stage actress on the verge whose touchy relationship with her estranged film-director father (Stellan Skarsgård) comes to a head when he writes a screenplay for her to star in. When she firmly declines, an in-over-her-head American movie star (Elle Fanning) takes the part instead, inadvertently stirring up decades’ worth of familial tragedies & betrayals. The movie is largely told from the POV of the family home, where the autofictional meta drama is going to be filmed, which opens the story up to a larger family history than the simple father-daughter conflict that I’m describing. It’s all very warm, solemn, and sophisticated in the exact way you expect an awards-season drama to be, and I’m sure its demonstrative good tastes & behavior will be rewarded in the months to come.
Being cozy isn’t everything; it’s not going to earn Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale any statues. It might help Sentimental Value‘s awards-season chances, though, especially when its closest new-release equivalent on the scene right now is a gut-wrenching drama about grieving the death of William Shakespeare’s young child. You’re a lot less likely to put your family through Hamnet than taking them to see a movie about a modern-day father & daughter repairing their relationship through some light art therapy, which helps attract awards-voter eyes to the screen.
Excluding the AMC multiplexes out in the suburbs, the Zeitgeist outpost in Arabi, and the backroom microcinemas in-between, there are exactly two regularly operational cinema hubs in Orleans Parish: The Prytania and The Broad. Both of these cultural epicenters work hard to make full use of their relatively limited screen space, finding the right balance between the arthouse titles that keep their die-hard regulars hooked and the big-ticket Disney products that actually keep the lights on. The most noble service The Prytania and The Broad provide is making room for regular, weekly repertory programming in the schedule gaps between new releases. Not too long ago, the Sunday morning Classic Movies slot at The Prytania Uptown was the only reliable spot to catch older titles in a proper theater around here, but the New Orleans repertory scene has gradually bulked up in recent years. The Broad has a classic horror movie slot every Monday night through ScreamFest NOLA (who’ve recently screened classics like Ginger Snaps, Frankenhooker, and Day of the Dead), an arthouse repertory slot every Wednesday night via Gap Tooth Cinema (who’ve recently screened once-in-a-lifetime obscurities like The Idiots, Supervixens, and Adua and Her Friends), and frequent specialty screenings at their neighboring outdoor venue The Broadside. Meanwhile, Rene Brunet’s Classic Movie Series is still going strong at The Prytania (recent standout titles: The Conversation, Dial ‘M’ for Murder, and 13 Ghosts in Illusion-O), and they’ve recently collaborated with the folks at Overlook Film Fest to program classic horror titles as well (Frankenstein, The Exorcist, and Interview with the Vampire, among others, during this year’s in-house “Kill-O-Rama” festival). Between these two businesses’ four locations, you can also routinely find specialty one-off screenings & re-releases on the weekly schedules (recently, Battle Royale & Linda Linda Linda at The Prytania’s Canal Place theaters and Night of the Juggler & Leila and the Wolves at The Broad).
All in all, our local rep scene is still too small to compete with larger cities like Los Angeles, New York, Austin, Chicago, Toronto, and San Francisco, where audiences seemingly get to see an older “new-to-you” title projected on the big screen every day of the week. New Orleans rep screenings are out there, though, and they are easily accessible if you know where to look. As evidence that this scene exists, here are a few quick short-form reviews of the repertory screenings I happened to catch around the city over the past couple weeks, along with notes on where I found them. I’ve also recently started a Letterboxd list to track what classic titles we’ve been able to cover on Swampflix over the years thanks to this growing scene, which seems to have only gotten more robust since I last filed one of these reports in 2023.
The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
The original Uptown location of The Prytania is still the most consistent local venue for seeing repertory titles on the big screen, as it has been for as long as I can remember. The only catch is that their Classic Movies program is almost entirely restricted to Hollywood productions, the kinds of titles you expect to see on TCM’s weekly broadcast schedule. As limited in range as that may sound, it’s an excellent resource for catching up with the works of luminary greats like Kubrick, Welles, and Hitchcock that you might’ve missed (especially Hitchcock, their house-favorite auteur), big & loud in an environment where you’re unlikely to get distracted by your phone. To that end, I recently saw John Huston’s foundational diamond-heist thriller The Asphalt Jungle for the first time as part of that series, after having previously seen Huston’s foundational noir The Maltese Falcon there several years earlier. Within the heist-thriller genre, there’s nothing especially surprising about The Asphalt Jungle‘s scene-to-scene plot beats, as it is an immeasurably influential work that helped establish that genre’s basic story structure in the first place. Where it does manage to surprise is in the little details of the character quirks, as it gradually becomes a story about the unlikely friendship between the elderly mastermind and the young hooligan muscle at opposite ends of the criminal hierarchy, both of whom are equally doomed. The framing compositions are also top-notch; that John Huston kid is a name to watch, I tell you what.
It would be disingenuous to call The Asphalt Jungle a hangout film, as there is plenty of urgent thriller tension in its textbook bank heist plot. The four factions vying for victory are clearly defined: the heist crew hastily assembled by a recently-paroled criminal mastermind (Sam Jaffe), the crooked lawyer who intends to steal away that crew’s loot for himself (Louis Calhern), the corrupt cop who pretends to be on their case while taking bribes beneath the table (Barry Kelley), and the by-the-books police commissioner who still believes in the nobility of obeying the law (John McIntire). The cops’ involvement in the diamond-heist fallout is mostly present as a background inevitability, something that makes the crooked lawyer sweat as he schemes to rip off his own accomplices. The real heart of the story is in the way the bank robbers pass their time between the heist and getting caught, recalling the crime-thriller hangouts of Quentin Tarantino’s oeuvre. There’s something sweet in the simple, pleasure-seeking worldviews of the mastermind and the hothead muscle (Sterling Hayden) in particular — one of whom meets his end while taking the time to watch a teen girl dance to a roadside diner jukebox and the other meeting his own end while indulging in homesick nostalgia, feebly returning to his family farm while he slowly bleeds to death from a gunshot wound. A baby-faced Marilyn Monroe also makes a huge impression in the couple scenes afforded to her as the crooked lawyer’s age-gap mistress, exclaiming “Yipe!” whenever she gets excited, and referring to her much older lover by pet names like “Uncle” and “Banana Head.” The editing rhythms of The Asphalt Jungle are not especially hurried or thrilling, but Huston arranges his performers in the Academy-ratio frame with consistently adept blocking, and he constantly feeds them all-timer lines of dialogue like, “Experience has taught me never to trust a policeman. Just when you think one’s all right, he turns legit.” It’s a great mood to sit in, especially once its noir-archetype characters start making unlikely friends & foes in the hours after the plot-catalyst heist.
Black Narcissus (1947)
Curiously, my most recent dip into the Gap Tooth Cinema program at The Broad was also a classic title you could expect to catch in TCM’s broadcast line-up, whereas the series is generally more unique for its “Where else would you ever see this?” selections (On the Silver Globe,Entertaining Mr. Sloane,Coonskin, etc.). 1947’s Black Narcissus is as core of a text to nuns-in-crisis cinema as The Asphalt Jungle is to bank heist thrillers. If it’s not the most often seen & referenced convent drama, that’s only because The Sound of Music has a more iconic sing-a-long soundtrack, whereas most of the sound design in Black Narcissus is overpowered by howling, ominous winds. It was hearing those winds in immersive theatrical surround sound that made this first-time watch so memorably intense for me, though, whereas Powell & Pressburger’s follow-up ballet industry melodrama The Red Shoes is more striking for its three-strip Technicolor fantasia. While there are flashes of Technicolor brilliance throughout Black Narcissus, the combination of its doomed nuns’ white habits & skin is so uniformly pale the film often registers as monochrome. It’s the constant roar of the cold winds that gradually break those nuns’ minds along with the audience’s, eventually triggering the passionate, color-saturated violence of the third act. I know it’s gauche to describe anything as “Lynchian” these days, but those howling winds are maddening in a distinctly Lynchian way, and it turns out the production was filmed the same year Lynch himself was born. Coincidence? I think not.
The sinful evil those winds summon is mostly the seduction of nostalgia & memory. Deborah Kerr stars as a remarkably young Mother Superior who’s assigned to start a new convent in a former cliffside harem in the Himalayas, offering medicine and education to the Indian locals who don’t need or want the nuns’ presence. The isolation of the newly repurposed “house of women” on that mountaintop weighs on the sisters who are assigned there, as the ominous winds and dizzying altitude invite their minds to drift to memories from before they took their holy vows. Since it’s a British studio picture made in the 1940s, the nuns never express the transgression directly, but they specifically start to doubt their commitment to Christ because they’ve become desperately horny & lonely, to the point of madness. The burly presence of a blowhard macho handyman onsite is especially tempting for the women, and their repressed desire for him explodes into expressionistically violent acts that can only lead to death, never actual sex. It’s in those climactic violent acts that Black Narcissus most directly recalls the dark fantasy gestures of The Red Shoes, especially in the sisters’ extreme, wild-eyed close-ups. The winds that push them towards the matte-painting cliffsides outside the convent are much more consistently surreal throughout, however, recalling much later, freer works like David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return or Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes.
Mr. Melvin (1989, 2025)
While The Prytania’s Classic Movies and The Broad’s Gap Tooth series are dependable workhorse repertory programs, you have to walk next door from The Broad to their outdoor sister venue The Broadside to catch the more extravagant specialty screenings. For instance, it’s where I caught Lamberto Bava’s classic Italo meta-horror Demons with a live score from Goblin’s Claudio Simonetti and, more recently, it’s where I caught the new remix of The Toxic Avenger Parts II & III (1989), now Frankensteined together and retitled as Mr. Melvin (2025). That Mr. Melvin screening was supposed to be accompanied with a Lloyd Kaufman meet & greet, but the recently injured Kaufman couldn’t travel so he appeared only via video message, sending Troma regular Lisa Gaye to act as his brand ambassador instead. The movie was also accompanied with an opening punk rock set from The Pallbearers, making for a much rowdier setting than is typical for movie-nerd rep screenings around the city. The general party atmosphere at The Broadside can be distracting if you’ve never seen the film they’re screening before (I remember being especially distracted by the circus-act antics of Gap Tooth’s showing of Carny there), but it’s perfect for celebrating a VHS-era classic that you’re used to watching alone at home. The timing of this Mr. Melvin cut was personally serendipitous for me, then, as I had just watched every Toxic Avenger film for a podcast episode the previous month.
Since I had already exorcised all my demonic opinions about Toxie’s big-screen journey so recently on the podcast, I don’t have much new to say about Mr. Melvin except in pinpointing where it ranks among other titles in the series. Objectively, the best Toxic Avenger film is likely either the bad-taste original from 1984 or Macon Blair’s punching-up revision that was also released this year, and yet I can’t help but admire Mr. Melvin as a completionist’s timesaver. It’s all the best parts of the official Toxie sequels (the Japanese travelogue from Toxic Avenger II, the Toxie-goes-yuppie satire of Toxic Avenger III, not a single frame from Toxic Avenger IV) with at least 70 minutes of time-wasting junk erased from the public record. Mathematically speaking, it’s the most efficiently entertaining Toxic Avenger film to date, which technically qualifies it as public service — something to be considered by Lloyd Kaufman’s parole board. And since the original, in-tact sequels were rotting so close to the forefront of my mind, I was able to step away during the screening to grab another beer without missing anything, which is essential to appreciating any Troma release. You go to The Prytania to watch Old Hollywood classics in a historic setting, sipping morning coffee to the vintage Looney Tunes shorts that precede the feature. You go to Gap Tooth screenings at The Broad to challenge yourself with some daringly curated arthouse obscurities, chatting with friends afterwards to parse through complex feelings & ideas. In contrast, the repertory programming next door at The Broadside is for pounding beers and whooping along to a personal fav you’ve already seen a couple dozen times with likeminded freaks. Plan your repertory outings accordingly.
Swampflix 