There’s a sequence in Megadoc that features Shia LaBeouf talking about the great respect that he has for Jon Voight as an actor, despite their extreme disconnect on politics. I didn’t realize it at that time just how far back their connection went, as I had not yet seen the 2003 film adaptation of Louis Sachar’s novel Holes, which featured a then-teenaged LaBeouf in the title role of Stanley Yelnats IV, a wrongfully imprisoned child laborer whose adult enemies include overseer Mr. Sir, played by Voight. My blind spot on this topic came up in conversation at a recent post-New Year’s hangout, and I had to admit that although I had grown up reading Sachar’s work (my Scholastic book fair copy of Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger was so well loved it eventually fell apart), I had never read or seen Holes. Not only did I not realize that the film was chock full of movie stars, but that the text itself was notably complex, textually intertwined, and much more thoughtful than most fare made for children.
Generations ago in the old country, Stanley Yelnats IV’s great, great-grandfather Elya brought down a curse on his bloodline by failing to deliver on his promised payment to Madame Zeroni (Eartha Kitt) that he carry her up a hill to drink from a spring. At the end of the nineteenth century in fertile Green Lake, Texas, the son of the town’s wealthiest man, Trout Walker, is spurned by kind-hearted schoolteacher Katherine Barlow (Patricia Arquette). When he later discovers that she is in love with Black onion farmer Sam (Dulé Hill), he leads a mob that burns down the school and results in Sam’s death while he is rowing across the lake from his onion farm. Sam’s death seems to curse the town, as it never rains again and the lake dries up. Heartbroken, the former schoolmarm rechristens herself “Kissin’ Kate Barlow” and avenges Sam’s death by becoming an outlaw, eventually robbing a stagecoach occupied by Elya’s son, the first Stanley Yelnats. Stanley survives, but his stories of “taking refuge on God’s thumb” make little sense to his descendants. Kissin’ Kate buries all of her loot somewhere in the salt flats that were once Green Lake and allows herself to die from the bite of a yellow spotted lizard rather than allow Trout Walker to try and torture the location out of her.
A century later, Stanley Yelnats III (Henry Winkler) is trying to create a perfect recipe for foot odor, and his son is overjoyed when a pair of cleats belonging to a major baseball star seem to fall from the sky, but he’s caught with them and the shoes turn out to have been stolen from a charity auction, with young Stanley taking the offer from the judge to go to Camp Green Lake instead of juvenile detention. Once there, he meets his bunk’s “counselor,” “Doctor” Pendanski (Tim Blake Nelson) as well as the aforementioned Mr. Sir, whose role at the “camp” is unclear other than to be a brute and a bully. He’s also introduced to his fellow inmates and their typical kiddie novel prison nicknames: “Armpit,” “Zig-Zag,” “X-Ray” (Brenden Jefferson), “Magnet,” “Squid,” and most importantly, “Zero” (Khleo Thomas). Each day, the boys are driven a distance from the “camp” to dig a hole, five feet in diameter and just as deep, to “build character,” with the tantalizing promise that if they find anything interesting, they might get the rest of the day off. Despite being the smallest of the inmates by quite a bit, Zero is the fastest digger, and he offers to help Stanley with his hole every day in exchange for teaching Zero to read. When Stanley finds a small metal tube engraved with the initials “K.B.,” he’s bullied into letting X-Ray take the credit, which finally gets Camp Green Lake’s heretofore unseen warden (Sigourney Weaver) out of her house to lead a thorough excavation of everywhere around X-Ray’s hole, indicating that they’re not just digging holes for carceral punishment, but because she’s looking for something out there.
The construction of this little narrative is surprisingly elegant for something made by Disney in the twenty-first century. Most of that intricacy comes as a result of having the novel’s author write the screenplay, which ensured that all of the rich subtext that characterized the Newbery Medal-winning book made it to the screen. All of that plot synopsis above is doled out in beautifully concise increments, with all of the planting of future payoffs feeling completely organic and real. The story of Elya Yelnats is related as if it were no more than a typical family story that playfully scapegoats an ancestor for the clan’s current financial predicaments, and the reveal that Zero’s real name is Hector Zeroni, sharing the last name of the woman whom Elya failed to close the loop with before heading to America, comes late enough in the film that the primarily young audience has probably completely forgotten about her by then. Although the film doesn’t show Trout Walker calling Sam any racist epithets, it doesn’t shy away from demonstrating the dangers to a star-crossed mixed race couple in the 1880s, or the fatal outcome of racist mobbery; the only concession it makes (other than sanitizing its language) is filming Sam’s death at a distance, as Kate stands on the shores of the lake trying to warn him before the peal of a gunshot and Sam’s distant figure collapsing in his rowboat. It’s dark stuff, and the kind of thing it’s hard to imagine a major studio adapting a book with such serious subject matter at such a huge scale in these more mealy-mouthed, faux-progressive times. There’s a mature sincerity about the whole thing that really makes Holes stand out.
I was quite taken with the way that all of the different narratives were eventually braided together into one larger, grander story. Eventually, after one piece of abuse from Dr. Pendanski too many, Zero hits his oppressor in the face with a shovel and runs off into the barren wasteland around Camp Green Lake, prompting the warden to tell her men to get rid of his files since, as a ward of the state, no one will be looking for him after her disappears. After a few days, Stanley takes off after him into the desert, eventually finding him camping out beneath onion man Sam’s overturned boat, where the younger boy has been managing to survive on jars of Kate’s spiced peaches, still preserved there after all this time. It’s from this vantage that Stanley spots a mountain peak that resembles a thumbs up and, recognizing it as “God’s thumb” from his great-grandfather’s survival story, the two of them make their way toward it. Zero almost doesn’t make it, but Stanley carries him the rest of the way to the top, where they discover one of Sam’s onion patches, still thriving, and regain their strength. Just as importantly, Stanley’s rescue of Zero has at last fulfilled the Yelnats family’s responsibility to the Zeronis, lifting their curse. Stanley teaching Zero to read likewise ensures that the latter is able to read the former’s name (or rather, Stanley I’s name) on the trunk that they unearth and keep it from falling into the warden’s hands. With her dying breath, Kate had told Trout that he and his children could dig for a hundred years and never find her treasure, and with the warden’s arrest upon the arrival of the Yelnats’s new lawyer and a couple of Texas Rangers (as it turns out, having a child prisoner with no record of him—Zero’s files were destroyed to cover up his presumed death—is bad news), Trout and his descendants wasted their lives on a treasure they never got to possess. At last, for the first time since Sam’s death, rain comes to Green Lake.
This is an impressive film cinematically as well. The fades between the verdant Green Lake of the past and the dusty plain of the present that is featureless other than its thousands of holes are concise and effective visual storytelling. Zero and Stanley’s ascent of God’s Thumb is very convincing, full of very expensive looking helicopter shots, and it looks fantastic. The locations are, overall, gorgeously photographed, so that even the desolate area around the camp/prison looks beautiful. Never having seen the movie before, I always assumed based on the presence of LaBeouf, who was a Disney Channel sitcom performer at the time, that Holes would be on par with their direct-to-cable original movies, functional and utilitarian rather than thoughtfully arranged and aesthetically interesting. It has some weaknesses of that genre, notably in the film’s soundtrack, which is full of inspirationally titled tracks (“Keepin it Real,” “I’m Gonna Be a Wheel Someday,” “Don’t Give Up,” etc.) that sometimes literally describe what we’re seeing on the screen, which feels like an over-explanatory narrative crutch for a film that otherwise trusts in its audience’s ability to pick up on nuance and subtlety. This extends to having the young actors perform a mixed hip-hop/pop track that plays over the film’s credits and is, respectfully, embarrassing. I probably saw the music video for it on television at the time of release, and that colored my perception of what I thought the movie was for a couple of decades, so I chalked up the frequent recommendations of it as little more than my peers’ nostalgia. I’m pleased to discover I was wrong.
There’s a section in Megadoc wherein director Mike Figgis interviews Star Wars creator George Lucas about his early career partnership with Francis Ford Coppola, and he discusses Coppola having served as producer on Lucas’s first film, THX-1138. My viewing companion and I realized we had both never seen it, so with the weather in flux and nothing to do in the dwindling days of the holiday season, we checked it out. To our delight, we found that it was actually a fantastic film … mostly. The only readily available version at this time is Lucas’s 2004 director’s cut, and if you saw the director’s name next to the year and panicked, you probably know what I’m about to say. Other than rare VHS and Laserdisc releases that might be floating around at a flea market out there, there’s never been a release of this film that didn’t feature Lucas’s late nineties/early aughts CGI meddling. It’s as intrusive as it is unnecessary, which is particularly frustrating when the restoration of Lucas’s actual seventies footage looks fantastic.
THX-1138 (Robert Duvall) is a worker on an android assembly line, putting small, volatile pieces into place via remote control from behind a radiation shield. Of late, he’s started to lose focus, and the consequences are dire, as there have been over 150 deaths at the plant that year alone. His is a dystopian world where the police have been replaced by chrome faced robots that are just as likely to dole out unnecessary violence as their flesh forebears, and other than the robed priests of state-enforced religious figure OHM-0000, everyone is dressed in identical white clothing and have their head shaved or buzzed to the scalp. OHM’s automated confessional booths are, of course, linked directly to the center of the city’s Orwellian panopticon, so all confessions are recorded and monitored to ensure that no citizens are engaged in criminal drug evasion, as the populace is completely controlled in every facet of their lives, down to being assigned roommates for companionship despite strict provisions against sex. THX’s recent disaffection is the result of his withdrawal from one of the state’s main mind control drugs, as his mate LUH-3417 (Maggie McOmie) has secretly been removing them from his provided supplements.
Although he loves the physical intimacy that the two can suddenly share since she’s removed the veil from his eyes as it has been removed from hers, their changes are observed by SEN-5241 (Donald Pleasence), who has figured out how to make small changes of his own using the computer access that his position allows. He attempts to use this to blackmail THX into becoming his roommate as LUH has already been taken away upon discovery that she’s pregnant, but this backfires when THX reports him for his activity. After an industrial accident caused by an ill-timed application of a “mind lock” by the authorities while THX is in the middle of a delicate moment at work, he’s tried for being an “erotic” and put into a white void of a prison, where SEN is already imprisoned himself. After there’s a lot of puttering around in this space, THX sets out to walk to the edge and get out so that he can find LUH, with SEN following him. The two manage to get to the outside world with relative ease after meeting another escapee named SRT-5752 (Don Pedro Colley), but the not altogether lucid SEN is found fairly quickly. THX eventually manages to escape to the “outer shell” after a car chase with the police in a nifty jet car based on the Lola T70 as the cost of pursuing him eventually becomes higher than the cash value he adds to society, crawling out into the sunlight at the end after learning that LUH’s designation has been “recycled” and applied to her fetus, implying her death.
It’s a dark ending, and this is a surprisingly bleak film for a filmmaker whose career has never really been marked by (and I mean this with kindness in my heart) much in the way of depth. THX-1138 is surprisingly experimental and surreal. It’s cribbing from a long list of dystopian sources for its narrative and thematic inspiration, notably the aspects of Big Brother’s state-enforced belief systems of 1984 and the drugged populace and sexual taboos of Brave New World. Interestingly, the presence of an automated recording of a confessor in the form of OHM (who is represented visually by a backlit poster of Hans Memling’s 1478 painting Christ Giving His Blessing) presages the current “race for an AI Jesus,” which is so inherently heretical in concept alone that I expect its completion to be heralded by a pillar of fire of a type unseen since the melting of the golden calf at the foot of Mt. Sinai. Visually, the film incorporates a lot of shots of computer monitors and readouts that are shot with such extreme closeup that their meaning is lost, while recordings of THX and LUH are played over and over again in command centers while being illustrated on an oscilloscope. The film’s climactic car chase scene takes place in the BART underground system, which was still under construction at the time, and it looks fantastic. That is to say, it looks fantastic once it gets there.
Beforehand, in the available edition, there’s a poorly rendered sequence of THX’s stolen jet car zooming around on the streets. Everything about it looks cheap and tawdry, like a low-effort Speed Racer sequence thrown in because that was what Lucas imagined thirty years prior and couldn’t pull off, but now he “can,” so he will have his way come hell or high water. Every time some stupid updated special effect appeared on screen, it looked dated and awful, genuinely worse than the gorgeously shot film surrounding it. It’s as if Lucas was so focused on communicating the literal vision that he had (or remembered having after decades of having time to dwell on it) that he lost sight of the fact that he had a good movie already, and he did the revisionist equivalent of smearing feces on it. There is an upload of the Laserdisc edition online—it’s not hard to find—and I went back and watched the sequences where I remembered the CGI standing out, and it’s all completely unnecessary. Bad CGI is used to transition through several floors of workers milling about before descending to the lower level where SEN confronts THX in the director’s cut, whereas the original version just starts the scene there, and it’s infinitely better for not having garbage digital effects added in for no narrative purpose. There’s a scene where THX has almost made it to the outer shell and his potential freedom where he must fend off a “shell dweller,” a kind of simian monkey we had seen a previous specimen of in the white void prison. If you watch Lucas’s preferred version, they’re represented by what are basically hairy Gungans with no believable screen presence; in the original, we see what could perhaps be described as children in Planet of the Apes Halloween costumes, and yet that still looks better and would be preferable to the updated edition.
There’s nothing narratively groundbreaking about THX-1138, but as a piece of filmmaking, it’s a bold outing for a first time director whose reputation would diminish as his career went on. This may be the equal of Star Wars in just how good it is, minus Lucas’s ill-advised fudging of his early career work. It won’t have the same broad appeal, and it definitely sags a bit in the middle as we dwell a little too long on SEN’s meaningless babbling during imprisonment, but as a cerebral, artistic oddity, it’s worth checking out. At the same time, it’s also worth waiting to see if we ever get a restored version without the extraneous and distracting VFX.
There’s a moment early in Megadoc in which Francis Ford Coppola is giving a speech to his assembled Megalopolis actors on the first day of rehearsals, and it feels very much like the first day of a high school theatre course. He quotes Dante’s Inferno, specifically the quote “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” which is posted at Hell’s gates, but then says that he has his own version, which is “Abandon worry, all ye who enter here,” which he notes should be on a sign in there in the large rehearsal space. “I have a sign and you’ll see it,” he says; “It’s supposed to be up,” revealing that, even in these early moments, things are already off schedule despite all the decades spent preparing for the film. “In this space,” he adds, “during this time, nobody can be bad, nobody can get in trouble.” Here, filmmaker Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas) zooms his camera in on Shia LaBeouf, and I don’t know if that was a live decision or one that came up in the edit, but it’s prescient nonetheless.
Figgis was invited by Coppola to document the creation of Megalopolis, a movie that I ranted about at length starting about 29 minutes into our podcast episode about Destroy All Monsters. I won’t recount the whole thing, but I summed it up at the time thus: “Bloated, hollow, ugly, infantile, pompous, stupid, pretentious, hubristic, insipid, hideous, homophobic, talent-wasting, facile, nepotistic, provocative (derogatory), neoliberal, lifeless, inconsistently performed, self-fellating, tiresome, shallow garbage.” In its own way, Megadoc is a perfect metatext for the film around which it revolves, namely in that just as Coppola couldn’t help but write a flawless avatar for himself in the form of Cesar Catilinia, he of the riches of the Emersonian mind. Inserting himself into the narrative obtrusively, Figgis is also far too much a presence in this “documentary;” it is, at best, an elevated behind the scenes featurette, albeit quite a long one. Initially, all the subjects present seem put off by his camera’s presence, other than Aubrey Plaza, who was not only the only person in Megalopolis who knew what kind of movie she was in but also the only person in Megadoc who knew what kind of movie they were in. She moves in quickly and adopts Figgis’s viewpoint as if it were the omnipresent camera of her character Wow Platinum. She’s an early delight in the finished Megadoc as the first person to be willing to do candid interviews, although it’s unclear exactly where Plaza ends and Platinum begins here, all to the film’s enrichment.
After that first day playing warm-up theatre games, things get more serious. Megalopolis takes on a conceptual art designer who is initially over the moon about getting to work with Coppola, and her office is adorned with concept images of the various applications of Megalon. By the midpoint of the film, Coppola gets into an argument with the on-set art director where it seems like the director just isn’t understanding that it would be a good idea to put a blue screen at the rear of a shot. He mocks the man, saying “This gets back into why I like live effects, because although, in your opinion, they’re not as extraordinary and wonderful as the other kinds, I don’t agree with you.” The way he puts a little edge in on the words “extraordinary” and “wonderful,” you can tell that he’s just trying to needle the guy to make a point, and after he’s fired the team and brought on the kind of lean art department to which he was more accustomed, he sneers while saying “The last film they did was Guardians of the Galaxy.” We cut back to that concept artist in her office, and all the images have been taken down from the wall behind her, and you can tell that she’s drawing on a lifetime of practicing speaking very deliberately and politically about the egos she’s encountered as she says, “I’ve wondered if we missed the signs earlier on that he wanted to approach the movie differently. I do wonder if he didn’t communicate it as clearly.”
This firing of the art department and hiring of a new one is only one of many woes that contributes to Megalopolis’s budget problems. Although I didn’t care for Figgis’s insertion of some of his own on-set video diaries, one cannot say that he doesn’t have a good head for comedic timing, as he’ll often pair footage of Coppola making spur-of-the-moment creative changes and decisions that have major financial consequences with on-screen text revealing just how much money was spent on inconsequential fluff. There are several minutes of rehearsal and test footage from Coppola’s failed attempt at getting Megalopolis off the ground in 2001, and they’re some of the most interesting things on display here, as we get to see Virginia Madsen perform a scene as Wow Platinum and a sequence of Ryan Gosling as LaBeouf’s character Clodio, with (I think) Scott Bairstow as his flunkie Huey. There’s a table read attended by Uma Thurman at which Billy Crudup learns that he’s been cast as Cesar rather than as Clodio as he believed. This shows us that, at that point in his career, Coppola was actually doing screen tests and taking other necessary steps in the filmmaking process that seem to have been completely absent from the production of the Megalopolis that made it to screen. Coppola is old and grumpy by his own admission, sometimes directing from his trailer so as not to explode at cast and crew, but he’s also gathered a huge crew at his own great expense to stand about while he and his son Roman fart around with trying to make an in-camera effect happen, when that’s the kind of detail that should absolutely be figured out and locked down by the time you get actors into costumes and make-up. It’s the kind of colossal waste of capital that one would expect when spending a studio’s limitless funds, not one’s own money obtained by selling off vineyards.
The film spends time on the conflict between Coppola and LaBeouf, and it is legitimately fascinating. Although I don’t think he’s a very good person and that his history doesn’t give him any excuses regarding his behavior, I also have sympathy for most former child stars who have a hard time maturing. It was once a VH1 reality show cottage industry to point and laugh at aged child actors of the seventies like Danny Bonduce and Peter Knight as they struggled with their demons (and frequently lost), which was gross then and remains so today. What we can learn from them is that although there are successes like the Fanning sisters and Scarlett Johansson, they are the exceptions to the rule that early life stardom is a machine that creates mental illnesses down the line. LaBeouf has a few moments of raw human vulnerability here about how this is his first chance to work with a director from the old guard rather than just taking a job because he was a “starving kid,” (I’m no Crystal Skull fan, but on behalf of Spielberg, ouch), but then he also spends a lot of his screen time arguing with Coppola, trying to perhaps stretch his acting muscles while the exasperated octogenarian is clearly just trying to get things done, either because he’s elderly and tired or because every second of this is hemorrhaging his wallet. Late in Megadoc, LaBeouf recounts the fact that Coppola told him he was the worst actor he had ever worked with; “He says, ‘You know, I have one regret on this show.’ I said, ‘Okay, what’s the one regret?’ He goes, ‘You. You have been the biggest pain in my fucking ass,’—the only time he cursed—‘You’ve been the biggest pain in my fucking ass of any actor I’ve ever worked with.’ I said, ‘Really? Really? Any actor? Did I show up fucking 700 pounds overweight in the jungle? Really, any actor? Did I quit ten days before we wrap? Really, any actor?” It’s relatively good stuff and the only thing that really elevates it above the kind of thing you would have seen in a DVD special features section fifteen years ago.
In his review of Megalopolis, Brandon noted that one of the modern ills that Coppola attacked via his fictional proxy was “journalists framing great men for fabricated sex crimes,” which relates to why this film barely counts as a documentary, if at all. Figgis and Coppola are, if not friends, at least amicable colleagues, and Megadoc does not address the allegations against Coppola, which first came to public attention roughly around the time of the film’s release. Although there’s been no resolution to the legal ramifications at the time of this writing, it’s telling that Megadoc ends its insight into the film’s creation not with the wide release to the public in September 2024, but at the Cannes premiere in May of 2024, with no additional dialogue or insight over what amounts to little more than cable red carpet coverage. It’s perhaps because Megadoc revealed moments before that Coppola’s wife Eleanor died in April of that year, right after footage of their sixtieth anniversary party on the set of Megalopolis. It verges on the disrespectful in its pre-emptive use of Coppola’s grief to end on a poignant note instead of addressing what is ultimately the most controversial thing about Megalopolis’s production. Tsk.
The most magnetic person on screen, however, remains Plaza. Even in her Zoom audition, she’s funny and fantastic, and it reminds you that she truly is one of the great comedic minds of her generation. There’s a quietly disturbing scene in which we get to see the result of her petitioning to improv a scene with Dustin Hoffman, which jumps immediately to the two of them arm wrestling and Hoffman is flirting with her, and although he might be doing it “in character,” it makes one’s skin crawl regardless. It’s the only thing that seems like it’s not completely tempered by a need to skirt around the edges of anyone’s ego, but it’s not enough to save it. As a documentary, it’s functionally informative but not very insightful, but that’s not to say that it doesn’t have decent entertainment value, which is more than I would say about Megalopolis.
I had always heard Dressed to Kill discussed in conversation about transphobia in horror cinema of the past, alongside Psychoand Silence of the Lambs in that they contained some manner of attempts at empathy for their crossdressing psychosexual killers. Psycho ends with a psychological explanation for why Norman Bates did what he did, and Lambs includes a scene that explains that Buffalo Bill is not really trans; “Dr. Lecter,” Clarice says, “there’s no correlation in the literature between transsexualism and violence. Transsexuals are very passive.” As society has already started walking back the hard-won rights of trans people (of which they already had so very few, you pricks) in recent years, Dressed to Kill feels like an artifact of a different time, wherein Brian De Palma, as Jonathan Demme would a decade later with Lambs, takes the time to explain that being trans doesn’t make someone crazy or evil, but also can’t help imitating Psycho in a way that feels transphobic through a modern lens. Of course, this is of a kind with De Palma’s eighties Hitchcockian thrillers; Dressed to Kill is to Psycho as Body Double is to Vertigo, after all.
In typical Psycho format, we spend most of the beginning of the film with a woman we don’t initially realize is doomed: Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson), a dissatisfied housewife whose husband fails to fulfill her sexual desires and whose young son Peter (Keith Gordon) bails on their plans to spend the afternoon at a museum together in order to work on one of his inventions. After a short check-in with her therapist, Dr. Elliott (Michael Caine), Kate goes to the museum herself, where she and a handsome man flirt throughout the various exhibits before they grab a cab together and get up to some hanky-panky, which continues all the way up to his apartment. She leaves in a frightened state after realizing that her hook-up has syphilis and gonorrhea when she finds his notice from the state health department while looking for a memo pad to leave him a note and almost makes it out of the building before remembering that she left her wedding ring on his bedside table. When she goes to retrieve it, however, a person in a black overcoat and hat, shades, and sporting blonde hair enters the elevator with her and slashes her with a razor, quite graphically and viciously. When the elevator stops at another floor, high class call girl Liz Blake (Nancy Allen) sees the body and screams; she reaches out to Kate as the doors start to close, catching a glimpse of the killer in the convex mirror.
Liz ends up hauled in for questioning by scummy Detective Marino (a perfectly cast, despicable Dennis Franz), as is Dr. Elliott, who lies to Marino that he doesn’t have any clues, despite the fact that he came straight from receiving messages from both Marino and a patient named “Bobbi” on his answering machine, confessing to having stolen Elliott’s razor from his shaving kit and done something awful with it. At the police station, young Peter uses some of his audio surveillance equipment to eavesdrop on the various investigations. As Liz begins to see a woman stalking her all over the city, she eventually runs into Peter, who has been surreptitiously surveilling Elliott’s office to try and find out if one of his other patients was his mother’s killer. Can this unlikely duo stay one step ahead of the killer and figure out who they really are before the police pin it on Liz to close the case?
We’ve already established that the film apes Psycho in its structure, starting out with a decoy protagonist who ends up killed halfway through, only to pass off the leading role to another woman. It also features multiple shower scenes in reference to Psycho’s most famous sequence, complete with showerhead closeups and murders (even if only in a dream). Kate reaches out her hand in death the same way Marion Crane did two decades prior, and when Liz picks up the murder weapon, the string section of the orchestra goes wild in a familiar way. Finally, and most notably, the killer is a man with a split personality, with “Bobbi” taking over their shared body in the same way that “Norma Bates” took over Norman’s. Where it differs is in its typical De Palma sleaziness (although recent viewings of latter day Hitchcocks like Topaz and Frenzy, which were unpleasant in a similar way, have made me question whether Hitch would have been as depraved as De Palma if he had been active in the same, morally loosened era). Kate Miller literally drops her panties in the cab ride following her cruising of the museum, and there are several sequences that spend a lot of time on loving close-ups of areolas and blonde pubic hair; this is an erotic thriller after all.
Perhaps it’s that which makes its gender and sexual ethics feel so weird to the modern eye. The film is unusually sympathetic to sex work for its day, showing Liz as a smart woman who happens to be a prostitute; she invests in art and is even on a first name basis with her stockbroker, with whom she communicates about insider tips that her clients let slip. The film also takes the time to include a segment from The Phil Donahue Show in which the host interviews an MTF transgender person (then-contemporary term “transsexual” is used universally throughout) to establish that trans folks are just like you and me. But that all of this is present in a film that also spends so much of its runtime being sexually titillating makes the film feel tawdry in a way that trivializes its presumably sincere attempts to pre-emptively defend itself against accusations of bigotry. On the whole, it feels more old-fashioned than offensive, which is fine, because it works rather well as a suspense thriller outside of all of these elements.
The film also feels very much like it’s in conversation with the 80s slasher boom, even if it couldn’t have been intended as such. Psycho is often cited as the prototype for the slasher genre, and with good reason, and this film was released less than twenty months after Halloween, the generally agreed upon catalyst of the next decade’s horror subgenre dominance. One of the ways that the film manages to subvert audience expectations is by having a summation sequence following the climax in which Dr. Levy (David Margulies) explains the irrational rationale of what caused “Bobbi” to split off from her main, male personality and how their shared body’s sexual arousal prompted “Bobbi” to emerge and try to destroy the objects of that desire. It’s textually very similar to the scene in which a psychiatrist explains Norman Bates’s “possession” to the survivors of Hitchcock’s film, but instead of ending in that moment, Dressed to Kill still has 10 minutes left. We get to see “Bobbi” in a hellish mental institution, where she kills a nurse and escapes to stalk Peter and Liz; Liz has another shower scene to bookend the one at the start, only to emerge and realize that Bobbi is in the room with her, then gets killed, only to awake screaming. I have no doubt that the asylum scene here was a visual influence on a similar sequence in A Nightmare on Elm Street: Dream Warriors, and that double fakeout ending of “the villain escapes for one last kill” followed by “the final girl dies but it’s only a dream” is familiar in retrospect but was probably novel in 1980.
As another Brian De Palma visual spectacle, this one is top notch. The split personality narrative is echoed in the use of countless split diopter shots that look fantastic and are perfectly suited for when they appear; a sequence in which it’s used for a close-up of Peter listening in on Det. Marino’s conversation with Elliott so that we can pick up on the details that Elliott is lying while also watching Peter’s face fall is particularly excellent. There’s also a great scene in which Elliott comes home and starts watching TV while Liz calls her stockbroker, splitting the screen between them. As we get to see both what Elliott is watching (the aforementioned Donahue interview) and his face as he does so, Liz calls her madame from a second landline in her apartment so she can negotiate for a specific amount for the night while telling her broker when to expect her with the money the next day. The screen and the soundtrack are suddenly very busy, and it feels like it’s building to a frenzy, but despite all of the overlapping dialogue and crosscutting, one never really loses track of what’s happening. It’s masterful.
Iris (Molly Gordon, who also has a “story by” co-credit) and Isaac (Logan Lerman) are on their first romantic weekend away together after seeing each other for four months. The two abscond to a rented farmhouse in High Falls, NY, where things seem to be going really well. They have great sexual and conversational chemistry, and they end the first lovely day together with a scallop and pesto pasta meal that Isaac prepares before they head to the bedroom, where they use the bondage gear that they discovered in a locked closet to cuff Isaac’s wrists and ankles to the bed. Afterward, when Iris starts to talk about their relationship, Isaac tells her that he never assumed that they were exclusive, and the conversation they previously had about their status was interpreted differently on both ends; she thought that they were dating dating, and he assumed that she simply didn’t want him to have unprotected sex with other people. Hurt (and more than a little drunk), Iris leaves Isaac chained up while she spends the rest of the night frantically googling ways to make him realize that she’s the one. The next morning, she tells him that she’ll uncuff him after twelve hours but that she intends to spend that time convincing him that they are meant to be together. After this time elapses, however, Isaac still isn’t won over, so she refuses to release him and calls her best friend, Max (Geraldine Viswanathan) for help, not realizing that she also brought her own boyfriend, Kenny (John Reynolds), whose Law & Order expertise means he knows that what Iris has done is a felony, and she’s now made Max and Kenny accessories.
Molly Gordon is a lot of fun here as the deranged Iris, whose actions are unjustifiable but also ultimately sympathetic. If you had Logan Lerman chained to a bed, would you ever let him go? I didn’t think so. At one point, Max explains to Iris that Isaac is a “soft boy,” a variation on the fuck boy archetype who uses apparent emotional vulnerability and openness as a manipulation tactic to make women fawn over them, and she’s not wrong. Although we get a hint that Isaac is a bit of a dick in the film’s opening scene, wherein he flirts with a roadside strawberry stand worker with little to no regard for Iris’s feelings as she watches the whole thing go down, his actions once they get to the farmhouse are openly romantic and sweet, playing the part of the perfect boyfriend through and through. The cracks show once he’s been chained to a bed for over half a day, but one can hardly hold it against him that he resents the position that he’s been put in, even if what’s happening to him is not totally undeserved. Iris is doing something that we all have fantasized about doing at one point or another in our lives: forcing the object of our yearning and affection to spend enough time with us that they realize that it’s foolish not to give things a real chance. Although my daydreams about getting a heartbreaker to settle down have never involved a bound Logan Lerman (that’s filed under a completely different section of my fantasy catalog), one can’t help but appreciate the feelings that Iris has, even if we can’t justify her actions.
Max and Kenny arrive at the midpoint of the film, and they’re delightful as well. Max is all-in on helping Iris get her man, even after she realizes that her U.S. visa is endangered by her presence at the scene of the crime, and Kenny’s devotion to her is admirable and charming to watch. John Reynolds calls to mind his characters from Horse Girl and Save Yourselves! here, and it’s an archetype he’s quite good in (so much so that he’s able to leverage it into something more sinister, as he did in the second season of Yellowjackets); he feels settled. After having to play second fiddle to Margaret Qualley in Drive-Away Dolls last year, Viswanathan gets to roll out the comedic chops that she demonstrated on Miracle Workers, and even though she’s billed lower this time around, it’s great to see her having so much fun. Her absolute insistence that her witch cousin’s spell to make Isaac forget the last two days will work is a delight to watch, especially as it spells out just how desperate the situation has become and Viswanathan’s conviction sells the scene. It doesn’t work, of course, but a playing-along Isaac does have a dream about Iris that indicates although Iris’s attempts to make him hers aren’t likely to be successful, Isaac’s faux self-reflection may be replaced by actual inspection of the issues he has that lead him to treat relationships as casual and disposable. Lerman isn’t called upon to do too much heavy lifting, acting-wise, but his underplaying of the scene in which he plays along to finally escape and his heartfelt conversation with Iris once she helps rescue him in the woods after he injures himself demonstrate that he’s more than just a toned chest and a pretty face.
A nice, easy, fun romcom for anyone in the mood for it, Oh, Hi! is currently available on Netflix.
By the time he started playing the title role in the 1951 season of The Adventures of Kit Carson, actor Bill Williams was thirty-six and had a respectably rugged face. A mere five years earlier, when playing dim-witted himbo sailor-on-leave Alex Winkley in Deadline at Dawn, he was so baby-faced I wouldn’t have believed he could transform so much in such a short time. This is a pretty important part of the plot, as the boy has to be so guileless that hardened city gal June Goffe (Susan Hayward) believes his innocence in the death of Edna Bartelli (Lola Lane), even when he’s not too certain himself. We in the audience, of course, know that Edna was alive enough to trade barbs with her blind, pianist ex-husband Sleepy Parsons (Marvin Miller) after she realized “the sailor” had taken her wad of cash and skittered off into the night, much to Sleepy’s annoyance. Deadline is another film in The Criterion Channel’s recently curated “Blackout Noir” collection, and the blackout experienced in this one is Winkley’s; he comes to his senses at a NYC corner newsvendor’s stall with way too much money in his pocket on a blisteringly hot night, and all he remembers is going up to Edna’s to fix her radio after being plied with alcohol. Alex Winkley stumbles into a dance hall and meets June and confesses that he stole money from a woman for no reason that he can recall, and she accompanies him back to the place so that he can return it, only for them to find her dead. To ensure that Alex doesn’t get clapped for the murder, they have to figure out who really did it before he has to catch his bus back to his naval base at dawn.
Deadline at Dawn was the only film directed by Harold Clurman, a name I didn’t recognize. He was a stage director primarily, directing over forty plays for Broadway, and entered into an artistic partnership with playwright Clifford Odets early in his career, directing Awake and Sing! in 1935 for the Group Theatre, which Clurman had co-founded. Odets was a name I did recognize, if only from theatre department shelves; it is the nature of theatre that its writers’ legacies are longer and have more reach than its directors do. It makes sense that this film was penned by a playwright, in that it has a tighter ear for dialogue than it does for narrative coherence and consistency. Early in their overnight investigation, June and Alex meet a kindly cabbie named Gus Hoffman (Paul Lukas), who has a bit of a verbal tic that causes him to preface his observations with “statistics say” and derivations thereof. Better still, when June and Alex buy a cup of orangeade on the street but don’t drink any of it, the cashier bids them to come see him again by saying “Don’t drink our grapeade next time.” The film is peppered with all kinds of fun New Yawker types whose brief appearances tell a whole story about their offstage life: the irascible superintendent who doesn’t get paid enough, the lonesome man seeking to make a wife out of a dance hall girl, a frantic man with an injured cat, the boarding house matron who doesn’t want to rent to a woman because “Girls want kitchen privileges and they wash their things in the sink.” That’s the good stuff.
The noir stuff, on the other hand, leaves something to be desired. The death of Edna Bartelli ends up having too many red herrings. The late Edna turns out to have been a blackmailer whose extortions eventually took her down. Our unlikely trio track down a woman who was seen leaving Edna’s building and confront her, but she was only there to confront Edna for blackmailing her husband and couldn’t have committed the crime. But did her husband? Did Sleepy Parsons? Could the killer be Edna’s lover Babe Dooley, a washed-up baseball player who periodically calls up to her window from the street like a drunken dog? Over the course of the film, the characters make far too many of what could charitably be called “Bat-deductions,” so named for the way that Adam West’s Batman could often parse together incomprehensible and unrelated “clues” into accurate conclusions despite no logical connection between the things. There’s a sequence in which Alex and June walk down to the corner from Edna’s place “because the killer might have done something like that,” then get drinks that they don’t finish, saying “Hey, maybe the killer would have bought a drink and then failed to drink it too!” It’s nonsensical, but how well the film plays for you will depend on what you want out of it. As a conveyance for delivering quippy dialogue and to show off Lukas and Hayward’s respective talents, it’s effective and fun. As a mystery film with a satisfying series of clues and payoffs, it’s less so. Perhaps the big reason for this is that the killer is someone we’ve come to like and trust over the course of the film, which means that the investigation, such as it is, was being guided by the guilty party for decent portions of it. It’s an emotionally convincing ending, even when it’s not necessarily a narratively convincing one. Enjoyable, but not a must-watch.
After another stellar outing for Benoit Blanc in Wake Up Dead Man, I found myself realizing that there were still parts of Rian Johnson’s filmography that, despite our coverage of Brick (and Poker Face), The Last Jedi, Knives Out, and Glass Onion, were still untapped. I didn’t see Looper when it first came out, but I remember its production well, as it was shot in New Orleans (one of the best places to go to capture images of dystopian poverty in the immediate and long-term aftermath of Katrina) while I was in grad school there. In fact, my roommate at the time of filming was an extra; he was the piercer at the tattoo parlor that we lived in the back rooms of, and there was a casting call for “weird looking people” for a group scene. Having now seen the film and having scoured the big party scenes that I would have assumed he would have been in, I’m sorry to say that I couldn’t find him, alas. That’s not the kind of close watching that this film necessarily relies upon, but as with all of Johnson’s films, you better be paying attention if you want to get the maximum amount of satisfaction.
Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a hitman living in Slumsville, USA in 2044. Addicted to an unnamed drug administered via eye dropper, Joe funds his habit as a “looper,” a specialized killer working for a crime syndicate that’s three decades in his future, where surveillance technology alerts law enforcement anytime someone dies. The mobsters of the 2070s skirt this by sending their victims into the past (the police apparently not being alerted if someone simply disappears), where Joe and the other loopers kill the doomed future victims and dispose of their bodies in exchange for silver. The loopers are themselves damned as well; all of them know that, sooner or later, they will have to “close their own loop,” meaning killing their own future selves (and getting one last big payday) and retiring, with the knowledge that they have only thirty years to live. When Joe’s buddy Seth (Paul Dano) fails to close his loop and allows his older self to escape, we get to see the lengths that temporally local crime boss Abe (Jeff Daniels) to make sure that Seth stays just alive enough not to destabilize the loop while also ensuring maximum suffering.
When one of Joe’s victims does not appear on schedule, he’s sufficiently distracted that the man, who turns out to be his own older self (Bruce Willis) is able to escape. As it turns out, Old!Joe is on a mission to answer the age old question of “Would you be able to go back in time and kill baby Hitler?” with a resounding “Yes, and anyone else born that same day at that same hospital, just to be safe,” which turns out to be less morally straightforward than he expected. In the future, there’s an underworld figure toppling and absorbing various criminal enterprises into one evil force, the “Rainmaker,” and Old!Joe eventually fell in love with a woman who died at the hands of the Rainmaker’s goons. With Abe’s organization after both of them, Young!Joe and Old!Joe find that they can’t trust one another despite being one person. Meanwhile elsewhere, Sara (Emily Blunt) is raising her young telekinetic son on a farm; he’s not the only one, as about 10% of people have barroom card trick level telekinesis at this point, but he has potential to become much more.
The performances here are fantastic. This was probably Willis’s last great outing (and I say that as a Moonlighting fan, so you know I’m always rooting for him), and he brings a lot of gravitas to the screen. There’s a moment where Young!Joe demands to see the photo of Old!Joe’s wife, saying that he can avoid ever speaking to her and thus ensure that she’s safe from being killed by the Rainmaker’s gunmen in 2074, but Old!Joe refuses; it’s not enough that he keeps her safe, but he wants his life back, specifically, no matter what he has to do. There’s a moment where Old!Joe realizes this about himself, that his decision is much less selfless and much more self-serving than he had convinced himself, and Willis conveys every moment of it with conviction. Gordon-Levitt, despite acting through prosthetics that are intended to make him look more like a young Willis, is nuanced in his interpretation of Willis’s body language, intonations, and idiosyncrasies, without it ever feeling like he’s doing an impression. Despite his small role, Dano makes his usual meaty meal out of a cowardly sleazeball, and it’s always a delight to see. Particularly impressive is the amount of menace that playing-against-type Jeff Daniels is bringing to the table. Perhaps glaringly, the person I haven’t mentioned yet here is Blunt, which is in some part due to her relative lack of screen time, as she doesn’t really appear until the midpoint of the film. But it’s also that she’s not given as much to do, as she’s relegated to a role that’s not really all that demanding, although there’s a scene where her son starts to pull a Carrie that shows her pull out some fierce chops.
The sci-fi conceits of the plot are fun. The introduction of the idea that telekinesis has been discovered and is widespread but is limited to what amounts to little more than parlor tricks feels like a weird tangent given that it disappears from the plot for a while, but when it comes back, it’s relevant and feels like a piece falling into place. That’s always been one of Johnson’s strengths as a screenwriter, and one that feels very satisfying to me as a bit of a systems thinker myself. The film doesn’t spend any time faffing about with trying to justify its time travel conventions, as Old!Joe gestures to a bunch of drinking straws on the table between them and says that they could give themselves headaches making diagrams with them or just get on with things, and that’s what they (and the film) do. One gets the sense that Johnson was the kind of person who may have made just those kinds of diagrams in his younger days and knows exactly what complaints to expect and how to make them irrelevant.
I still have yet to see The Brothers Bloom, but I do know that it’s a bit of a departure from the serious noir-at-a-high-school vibes of Brick and the techno noir of Looper, which is a bit of a bummer. I don’t foresee myself growing tired of Benoit Blanc (or Poker Face, although its fate hangs in the balance as of this writing), but I wish there were more noir reinventions from Johnson to watch now. Since it’s been over a decade since Looper and he hasn’t gone back to that well, I don’t know if we’ll see him release another one soon, if ever. I’d like to see him try his hand at one of these again, as it’s always a pleasure to see.
In 2026, the Star Trek franchise will celebrate its sixtieth anniversary, and this upcoming summer will mark thirty years since the thirtieth anniversary marketing push coincided with my being babysat by a family of Trek fans who introduced me to what has become a lifelong obsession. That 1996 anniversary was marked by a huge jump in merchandising of toys, knick-knacks, and fan publications, and since the franchise had two shows airing at the time (Deep Space Nine and Voyager) and that November saw the first solo feature outing of the Next Generation crew in First Contact, it had significant cultural visibility. Ten years later, the fortieth anniversary in 2006 found the franchise dead, as the end of Enterprise in 2005 meant that ‘06 was the first year since 1985 that the franchise hadn’t produced either a film or a season of television. The first show to air post-Enterprise, prequel (at least at first) series Star Trek: Discovery, would miss the fifty-year anniversary by a year and premiere in 2017, where it proved … divisive. Nevertheless, Discovery ushered in a glut of Trek content, having now concluded its fifth and final season, Picard had a three-season run, animated sitcom Lower Decks aired five seasons, and kids’ cartoon Prodigy ran for two seasons. With all of these having concluded, that unwieldy number of series has come to an end. As of the sixtieth anniversary, Strange New Worlds is the only continuing series, with even that having already wrapped its final two (yet to be broadcast) seasons, with a new series, Starfleet Academy, launching in January.
Both of the then-running series produced episodes for the thirtieth anniversary. DS9 aired “Trials and Tribble-ations,” which used state-of-the-art compositing to insert characters from the series into one of the original show’s most memorable episodes; Voyager less successfully produced “Flashback,” which relayed the untold story of what Sulu was up to during the events of Undiscovered Country. One would think that, having missed doing anything special (other than releasing Beyond to very little fanfare) for the fiftieth anniversary, the franchise’s current helmers might have considered doing something special for the sixtieth, but instead, we got a surprise “feature film” dumped directly onto streaming a year early, sometime after it was first announced as another series in Paramount’s massive streaming library. To explain, I’ll have to build you a timeline because, just like this movie, this review has to dump a lot of exposition on you multiple times in order for any of this to make sense.
On October 6, 1967, Star Trek airs “Mirror, Mirror,” the first of what will be far too many trips to the so-called “mirror universe,” where the peaceful Federation is replaced by the brutal and totalitarian Terran Empire. In April of 1998, Deep Space Nine airs the first episode of the series to reference “Section 31,” a covert operations unit acting within Starfleet against its declared principles of egalitarianism, democracy, and peace. On the 24th of September 2017, Star Trek: Discovery, a new series starring Sonequa Martin-Green as Michael Burnham, debuts; Burnham is introduced as the first officer of Captain Philippa Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh), who dies during the two-part feature length premiere. Later in that same season, Discovery takes its own adventure into the mirror universe, where Yeoh returns as the evil version of Georgiou, the emperor, who returns to “our” timeline at the end of this galavant for a redemption arc that was, at best, misguided from its inception. Georgiou is eventually recruited into Section 31 as part of the second season’s story arc, and the news was released that Paramount was developing this as a spin-off to star Yeoh. This was put on hold due to COVID, and then in March of 2023, Yeoh won an Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once, meaning that she didn’t really have as much time for all this Star Trek nonsense as she had before. I assumed that the project had simply been cancelled, but it was suddenly re-announced as a one-off non-theatrical feature and hastily dumped into everyone’s home screens, where it managed to be hated by just about everyone. I kept this one in my back pocket for a while because I knew our well of Star Trek annual podcast discussion topics was starting to run a little low. After covering First Contact in 2023, we talked about the documentary Trekkies in 2024 and the even more tenuously Trek-related Please Stand By in 2025; I figured this one would do for our 2026 topic. In those malaise-filled days during the holidays, however, I decided to give this one a pre-screen watch, and I could not in good conscience subject Brandon to it.
After a pre-credits sequence that establishes Georgiou ascended to the throne after killing her own family before scarring and enslaving her last competitor (and lover) for control of the empire, we’re in the primary narrative dimension of the 23rd Century, where a ragtag group of mercenary specialists has converged at a space station outside of Federation territory to prevent the sale of an omnicidal weapon. Coincidentally, the sale is set to take place in a bar/hotel/space station operated by the fugitive Georgiou. She catches on rather quickly and the leader of this group, Alok (Omari Hardwick) explains the situation and introduces his team: shapeshifter Quasi (Sam Richardson), psionic “honeypot” Melle (Humberly González), exoskeleton-bound Zeph (Robert Kazinsky), and Starfleet liaison Rachel Garrett (Kacey Rohl), the only character here with a canon precedent. Also on the team is Fuzz (Sven Ruygrok), who appears to be Vulcan but is actually a microscopic life form operating a humanoid mech suit. Georgiou teases them about their ho-hum plan and then introduces a new, more exciting one that predictably goes awry, allowing for her to discover that the weapon is of her design from her previous life as Terran Empress before it’s taken by a masked man. A “now it’s up to these unlikely heroes to save the galaxy” plot ensues.
To this movie’s credit, it certainly looks expensive. That’s not the same thing as looking good, mind you, but it is worth noting. A hefty chunk of change was clearly invested in the Section 31 series, which is probably why this exists in the first place. This “film” is so clearly cobbled together from the ideas of an unproduced TV series that it’s actually divided into episodes, I mean “transmissions,” with individual titles. Even without them, the episodic narrative beats of cliffhanger and resolution at forty-minute intervals would telegraph this structure. This makes for narrative chaos, since instead of three distinct acts we’re dealing with a film divided into thirds which are then subdivided into their own rhythms of rising and falling action; it’s muddled, to say the least. The writing likewise leaves a great deal to be desired. Screenwriter Craig Sweeny’s background largely lies in mystery procedurals, as he was an executive producer on Elementary, of which he wrote sixteen episodes, and has since gone on to create and serve as exec producer for Watson. Section 31 tries to have some mysteries, but if there’s anyone who didn’t assume that the masked villain was Georgiou’s presumed dead lover/enemy from the moment they appeared on screen, then that person has probably never seen a movie before. The mole—there is, inevitably, a mole—likewise is the person you’d most suspect based on simply having seen any movie of this kind before.
This might have worked better if there had been some breathing room. If the audience had a week between the installment where we introduce the fact that Fuzz can fly out of his Vulcan mech suit and into other cybernetics to futz with them and the next episode where said mech suit seems to be operating on autopilot while Zeph’s exoskeleton is acting up, then maybe it would have felt like more of an “ah-ha” moment. As it is in the text itself, it feels like more of the script’s tendency to overexplain the new elements that it introduces while also showing the frayed edges where character arcs are whittled down. This is most obvious with Quasi, who was presumably so named because his shapeshifting would have been a metaphor for being unsure of himself in the version of this that went to series. The characterization for this is thin throughout before becoming unusually pivotal to the climax when he has to trust his instincts and push one of two buttons. It’s all very surface level and rote.
Worst of all, however, are the film’s shuddering attempts at comedy. Sam Richardson is primarily a comedic actor, but the lines he’s given to deliver here are all absolute duds. The joke about whether the galaxy-threatening MacGuffin is called “godsend” or “god’s end” must have lasted less than thirty seconds but felt like it went on forever. Fuzz’s constant leaps to anger over perceived microaggressions about his size or species are, as comedy, dead on arrival. This film forced Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh to use the phrase “mecha boom boom” as a reference to sex with a person with cybernetics. Overall, however, the person I felt the most sympathy for throughout was poor Kacey Rohl, a Vancouver-based actress who’s one of those performers who’s always giving a quietly powerful performance, whether as budding sociopath Abigail Hobbs on Hannibal or in (my favorite) her recurring role as tough-as-nails hedge witch Marina on The Magicians. Yeoh is capable of making every stupid line given to her in this work on at least some level, but Rohl is tasked with some lifting that made me embarrassed on her behalf, like when she has to give herself a pep talk about how she’s a science officer and “science is just controlled chaos” in a scene that sees her skedaddling out of frame repeating “chaos, chaos, chaos!” She’s also the one given the most jarring instances of modern slang, like “whatevs” and calling Georgiou a “bad bitch.” Not a single comedic moment lands, which means that if you’re not going to be surprised by any of the film’s twists, you’re not going to find satisfaction in good character arcs or the humor, meaning that there’s nothing of value here to make the investment of the studio’s money or the audience’s time worthwhile, a film truly for no one.
If we wanted to think of this one as something close to an anniversary special, it’s worth noting that virtually every member of this by-the-numbers ragtag group seems to be functioning as a reference to a previous Star Trek film. As mentioned above, Melle is a Deltan, an alien species introduced in The Motion Picture, and Alok is a genetically augmented human left over from the Eugenics Wars like Khan while the “godsend” device also functions very similarly to the Genesis Device from that film. Fuzz is introduced as a Vulcan who laughs uncharacteristically, as was Sybok in the cold open of Final Frontier, and Quasi is identified as a Chameloid, a species only ever heretofore mentioned in Undiscovered Country. The use of future Enterprise-C captain Rachel Garrett references the launch of the Enterprise-B in Generations, while Zeph’s cybernetic exoskeleton deliberately evokes the image of First Contact’s villainous Borg. These allusions are relatively subtle in comparison to the more overt bits of fanservice that Trek fans are presumably supposed to gawk at, which I won’t bother to get into. The truth of the matter is that Section 31 is not only a bad Star Trek movie, it’s also a bad film in general. Despite the film angling for a continuation in its final moments, I hope we never get another one.
00:00 SEFCA’s Top 10 Films of 2025 15:30 The Secret Agent (2025) 43:35 Best Actor 57:33 Best Actress 1:10:13 Best Supporting Actor 1:16:52 Best Supporting Actress 1:25:06 Best Ensemble 1:29:41 Best Director 1:35:54 Best Original Screenplay 1:42:27 Best Adapted Screenplay 1:50:26 Best Animated Film 1:56:53 Best Documentary 2:13:46 Best Foreign-Language Film 2:23:00 Best Cinematography 2:34:45 Best Score 2:39:52 Best Editing 2:45:07 Best Costuming 2:49:34 Best Young Performer
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.
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