For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the New Orleans-set Clint Eastwood thriller Tightrope (1984).
00:00 Welcome
01:15 Columbo (1971 – 2003)
03:45 The Not-So-New 52
07:22 American Fiction (2023)
13:20 Stalker (1979)
24:45 Party Girl (1958)
29:55 White Heat (1949)
35:45 Tightrope (1984)
You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.
– The Podcast Crew
Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.
After the personal disappointment that was Superman/Batman: Public Enemies, I was pleasantly surprised to see that not only was the next movie on the docket one that I had seen before, but that it was one that I unabashedly love: Crisis on Two Earths. This one and the film that follows, Under the Red Hood (which I love so much it was the Movie of the Month for May 2018), are back-to-back great films, and the perfect way to wash out the lingering bad taste of Wonder Woman and Public Enemies. An interesting bit of trivia is that this narrative was originally supposed to be produced years earlier as a film that would bridge the gap between Justice League and its follow-up/continuation Justice League Unlimited, both of which I’m fond of. At the end of the former, longtime teammate Hawkgirl was revealed to be a mole for an invasion of Earth by her people, the Thanagarians, before she ultimately chooses to side with the people she was sent to spy upon, and the final arc saw the destruction of the JL’s “Watchtower” headquarters. At the beginning of the latter, the titular team of titans have a newly expanded roster (hence the “unlimited” moniker) and a new Watchtower base, the design of which is the same as the one that appears under construction at the end of this film. From this and other details, it’s easy to see where this would slot in between those TV seasons, but there’s enough that’s different that the viewer is still in for some surprises.
Our film opens with two men we know as villains, Lex Luthor and the Joker (here known as The Jester) breaking into a facility and stealing a small piece of equipment, pursued by two shadowy figures. The Jester sacrifices himself to give Luthor time to escape, giving himself up to two silhouetted figures who appear to be Hawkgirl and Martian Manhunter, but who are revealed as twisted versions of the same. Luthor then transports himself to “our” world, where he immediately turns himself over to the police and demands to speak to Superman. We quickly learn that this version of Luthor comes from a world where the characters we know as heroes are instead replaced by villainous versions: in place of Superman (Mark Harmon), Ultraman (Brian Bloom) runs the Crime Syndicate, an organized crime outfit that he leads with Owlman (James Woods) as his lieutenant instead of Batman (William Baldwin) alongside Superwoman (Gina Torres) rather than Wonder Woman (Vanessa Marshall), Johnny Quick (James Patrick Stuart) in place of the Flash (Josh Keaton), and Power Ring instead of Green Lantern (both Nolan North). Luthor (Chris Noth) has come to beg for the help of the Justice League in order to defeat their evil counterparts and save his world. When they do join him in his crusade, they find themselves in conflict with that world’s U.S. president, a non-evil version of Wade “Deathstroke” Wilson (Bruce Davison), and Martian Manhunter (Jonathan Adams) finds himself falling in love with the president’s daughter, Rose (Freddi Rogers).
This one is a lot of fun, and one of my top favorites of this franchise, even before beginning this watch project. One of the most compelling elements is the relationship between Owlman and Superwoman, who is not a version of Wonder Woman in this world but is instead a twisted mirror of longtime character Mary Marvel, as evidenced by the fact that her crew of “made men” consists of other Shazam-related characters. James Woods may be a name we only speak in soft whispers now in order to avoid catching his attention like the Eye of Sauron now that he’s gone completely fascist, but he gives a great vocal performance as a soft-spoken nihilist in comparison to the normal gruff brusqueness that we have come to expect from the Caped Crusader, and he becomes the true villain of this piece when his philosophy leads to him attempting to wipe out all Earths in every dimension. Convinced that all decisions are meaningless due to the fact that every choice made everywhere creates a new parallel dimension, leading to an exponentially large number of worlds, the number of which is so vast it is indistinguishable from infinity, he decides that the only “true” decision anyone can make is to destroy all of them. For her part, Superwoman, who is at first motivated solely by the desire to conquer and accumulate wealth, is completely on board with this idea once he explains it to her, and Gina Torres sells her ruthless fanaticism beautifully. The fact that she is, in reality, a teenage girl who has simply chosen to live as her adult superhero alter ego at all times makes the whole thing that much creepier and more fun to watch.
The action scenes in this one are very exciting too, in a way that hasn’t been as memorable for me in several of these movies. The level of destruction wrought in Superman: Doomsday was impressive, but it was ultimately a lot of punching back and forth. Wonder Woman had the action as one of its high points, between the monsters vs. Amazons fight at the beginning and the rematch at the end (which included the raising of the dead and forcing the Amazons to fight the corpses of their own reanimated sisters), but this one is chock full, and some of the moments are fascinating in just how small they actually are. Batman, who initially stays behind when the rest of the League goes to the Crime Syndicate dimension as he thinks it falls outside of their purview and that they need to get their own house in order first, ends up facing off against the evil Marvel family on his own, and it’s just our luck as viewers that they appear on the Watchtower at a time when he’s in an Aliens-esque power loader, which makes the fight dynamic more interesting. Once it’s down to just him and Superwoman, he attempts to throw a punch while she has him pinned down, and she calmly tells him that this move will cost him a rib, and she casually breaks one of his by simply applying a tiny bit of pressure with her thumb. It’s deeply unsettling, and I love it.
If there is one plot element that I’m not fully sold on, it’s the relationship between Martian Manhunter and Rose Wilson. There’s something to be said for Rose’s character’s refusal to lie down and roll over for the Crime Syndicate the same way that her father has, at the threat of great danger to her life. That Martian Manhunter conceals himself among her secret service detail and is forced to reveal himself in order to prevent her from assassination at the hands of that world’s evil version of Green Arrow is a fine narrative choice, but the romance that blossoms between them feels a bit tacked-on, even if its presence is supposed to serve as a reflection of what a love based on mutual admiration and fondness looks like, in contrast to the “love” between Owlman and Superwoman. I don’t love that Martian Manhunter mind melds with her after a single kiss (she tells him that this is how they show affection on Earth, and he demonstrates that on Mars they do the same through telepathic contact) and they share all of their thoughts with one another. It’s not merely that he doesn’t really explain this to her before doing so — and, in so doing, gives her a lifetime of his memories and gets all of hers, which makes it feel … less than consensual, especially since she now has firsthand memories of the genocide of the Martians from the point of view of their last survivor. It’s also that his memories include the death of what appears to be his wife and child, which makes the age gap between them feel weirder. I’m not really interested in weighing in on the current obsession with age gap discourse (other than to say that anyone who doesn’t see that the malicious adoption of this discussion by bad faith actors is a ploy to eventually move from “Eighteen-year-old women’s brains are still developing!” to “A woman can’t make rational decisions until she’s 25!” with the ultimate goal of getting to “Women shouldn’t be allowed to make their own decisions!” is a fool, and the insufficiently critical young leftists who are participating in this campaign are doing damage that will take decades to undo), but it does feel a little gross, given that we never really know how old Rose is supposed to be.
I really want to call out Lauren Montgomery here, who shares directing credit with Sam Liu. Montgomery helmed Doomsday, Wonder Woman, and Green Lantern: First Flight, and she’s doing excellent work here as well. Liu’s previous work in this particular franchise was on Public Enemies, which also was nothing to scoff at, especially since I don’t blame him for that film’s egregious art style, any more than I blame Montgomery for the sexist elements of 2009’s Wonder Woman. This one is the best looking of all of them, with the tightest storytelling and the most interesting premise, which manages to feel fully realized despite this film having the same 75-ish minute runtime as all of the other movies so far. In some cases, that’s been the sole positive selling point for these movies, that with their minimal time investment, there’s no reason not to give it a shot. This one feels complete and unrushed in that time while still telling a full and compelling story, and I love that about it. This one gets the biggest recommendation from me yet.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.
The creators of Justice League Unlimited had a real stroke of genius in casting CCH Pounder as Amanda Waller in that animated series. Since then, she’s reprised that role five more times: thrice for the Arkham video games, once for an adaptation thereof, and once, here, in Superman/Batman: Public Enemies. She’s not the only returning player, either, as Kevin Conroy returns to once again voice Batman, Tim Daly is back as Superman (having voiced him in the self-titled Superman animated series but not the Justice League shows), and the inimitable Clancy Brown once again gives voice to supervillain Lex Luthor. One could almost mistake this as a continuation of that franchise, given the high amount of character crossover, but there are certain elements that make that impossible (most notably the presence of Power Girl, here voiced by Smallville alum and cult leader Allison Mack, when the equivalent in JLU was a Supergirl clone named Galatea), although no one can stop you if that’s what you want to believe.
This animated film, which is the first of the movies in this project that was a first time watch for me, loosely follows the plot of the 2003 comic arc of the same name. In the comics, that arc began the end of an ongoing DC comics story, namely the ascendancy of Lex Luthor to the presidency (starting in Action Comics #773 in November 2000) and the resultant fallout. This movie wisely skips over his election and inauguration and skips through a montage of unrest that gives way to order as Luthor enacts his agenda. One facet of said plan was to deputize several superpowered people to act as his national response squad, while other heroes with good reason not to trust him refuse to join up with his enforcers, notably the two named in the movie’s title. They’re still out there doing what they do, of course, simply without the spotlight. This becomes more complicated when astronomers observe an inbound city-sized meteor made of Kryptonite on a collision course with Earth. Lex makes a show of extending an olive branch to Superman, only to use their meeting as a trap to force an altercation between Supes and Metallo, here imagined as a Terminator with a Kryptonite heart. Outmatched, Superman is rescued by Bats and they escape into the sewers, but Luthor uses doctored footage of his meeting with the Man of Steel to make it look like Superman attacked the president, with Lex not only framing him but blaming the inbound meteor’s effects as the cause for Superman’s sudden change in morality and putting out a bounty on the hero, driving him and Batman completely underground, where they must try to figure out a solution to prevent the apocalypse raining down on them should Lex fail.
With that stacked cast and a fairly decent plot outline, this one had a lot of potential, but unfortunately, it’s ugly as shit. No offense to anyone who worked on this movie; I know that this is a corporate product that required strict adherence to the approved character design (and in this case I do mean design, singular – the current page image for the TV Tropes page for “Heroic Build” is a still from this movie, in which three men have essentially identical bodies to one another, which are also identical to those of every other man on screen), but it looks awful. One thing you could never say about the other movies before this one was that they never looked or felt cheap, but this one more than any of the others I’ve seen, before or after this one in production, looks like such garbage. There appears to be an insistence on maintaining consistent lighting/shadow on certain characters’ faces in order to make their faces dynamic (this is particularly evident on Luthor; I think they’re trying to create the impression of cheekbones, but I can’t be sure), but those light/shade spots remain the same no matter how the angle or lighting changes within the scene. The giant faces, combined with exaggerated musculature on a body that’s not quite proportionate as a result of said exaggeration, makes this look like it took design inspiration from The Super Hero Squad Show – a series aimed at preschoolers based upon a toy line of the same name, wherein Marvel heroes had deformed bodies that were easy to grab with little dexterity and difficult to choke on (think Fisher-Price Little People). It’s not the aesthetic that you really want your audience to think about when you’re trying to get adults on board with your little direct-to-video for-a-more-mature-audience mandate. In the film’s defense, this is pretty similar to the comic from which it takes inspiration, but this is proof positive that what works on the page won’t necessarily translate to the screen.
If you can get past that (or just get used to it), there’s a decent enough story here, although the throughline with Power Girl transition from working for Lex’s government squad to working with Superman and Batman is the weakest element. Mack was riding high at the time of release; Smallville was still on the air, and Chloe Sullivan was the show’s breakout character (at least until Justin Hartley’s Green Arrow came along), and the comic had enough time to devote to showing her questioning her allegiances that it didn’t feel rushed. Here, the decision to keep this unsure loyalty as an element of the narrative while sprinting towards getting her on the side of our heroes makes the whole thing feel rushed and cheap, just like the rest of the plot. Amanda Waller is a welcome presence, but she’s given almost nothing to do, other than to try and convince Luthor to come up with a backup plan in case his plan to detonate the Kryptonite meteor with nukes fails (it does). The most interesting thing about his movie ends up being the relationship between its two leads, who genuinely feel like friends—very different people, obviously, but with a casual easiness between them that speaks to years of caring about each other deep down—in a way that’s usually absent from most adaptations, and most comics, if we’re being honest. Their banter, which at times is so familiar that it borders on loving, is rather fun, and will be the only positive thing that I remember about this movie when all of the chaff of its failures is burned away.
The “Lex loses his mind because he’s juicing himself with Kryptonite steroids” angle is goofy, but once he’s ‘roided out and in that green and purple mech suit, he’s still pretty scary. I will say that this movie has been largely forgotten (as have a lot of these earlier animated flicks from Warner Premiere), but unlike the others we’ve discussed, its tangential connection to real world politics means that this one does still generate some interest and friction in certain corners of the internet. Lex’s ascension to the U.S presidency predated the 2016 election by over a decade and a half, but there are people online who can’t help but bring up the “evil businessman becomes President” connection even when the comparison is vapid and facile. It’s not that there’s not a long history of Luthor/Trump correlations that goes back to even before I was born; Luthor’s reimagination as a businessman instead of his traditional “mad scientist” persona came about in 1986 as a response to real life anxiety about corporate power, with Trump as the model.
For most of these movies, edits of the pages relating to them on the aforementioned TV Tropes are all but ancient; for instance, the “Your Mileage May Vary” tab for First Flight was last edited in May of 2022 for grammar reasons. In comparison, the same tab on the article for this film was last edited eleven days ago as of this writing, which is bananas for a fourteen-year-old movie with such little public awareness, but there are still ongoing editing wars about whether or not this movie is “Harsher in Hindsight” because a supervillain did become our president for a while. Comparing Trump to this Luthor is a mistake, though, as this one only descends into madness after introducing a period of relative pax Romana, improving the economy and, in the words of one of the characters, he “put that formidable intellect to work doing such a good job [that] no one will have a choice but to respect him.” Although that statement is immediately followed up with “It’s all about ego now,” which is true about the former president, one would be hard pressed to identify him with the first statement. The comparison here does a disservice to Lex Luthor and paints a real person who struggles to rise to the level of “competence” as some kind of talented mogul.
Compare this to the presentation of Luthor in the series Young Justice, where the Lex of the first two seasons (which aired in 2010 and 2012) is a formidable enemy because he’s always several steps ahead of the protagonists, to seasons three and four (which aired 2019-2022), where he becomes much less of a threat at the same time that he starts paraphrasing and/or quoting Trump, including soundbites about “fake news” and “good people on both sides” and tweeting “SAD!” I didn’t like that plot development there at all, not because I have any sympathy for the orange bastard, but because it turned a well-developed character into an SNL parody. For what it’s worth, the currently running Harley Quinn series’ choice to play Lex as more of a parody of Elon Musk—a businessman whose “inventions” are just ideas he purchased from others and whose self-proclaimed supergenius is a facade that only fools morons—is a much funnier bit. That having been said, the Lex of Public Enemies does turn into a madman at the end, more interested in allowing the extinction level event to occur so that he can rule over the ashes than preventing the meteor from hitting the Earth, which is something that I can see 45 doing, so there’s that.
That’s enough discourse for one day. This one has a pretty good narrative, but if you’re following these movies for frenetic action and dynamic animation, you can skip it. You’ll spare yourself some trouble.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
We’ve said it before around these parts, but it bears repeating: Tubi really is the people’s streaming service. While recently browsing through the “leaving soon” section of the app after rewatching the underrated Earth Girls Are Easy, some friends and I stumbled across a movie none of us had ever heard of entitled Prince of Pennsylvania. As the service auto-played a scene from the movie, we did a quick review of its credentials: a staggeringly low 14% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and a caustic Roger Ebert review of not just the movie but the trend in which the movie is a participant and society as a whole (he’s just like me!). We gave it a shot, partially because my best friend loves to needle her boyfriend about the acting talents of one Keanu Reeves (a trend that started after we all watched Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula a little while back) and partially because, well, it’s been an arctic vortex, and what else can you do?
The film follows Rupert Marshetta (Reeves), a recent high school dropout in the coal town of Mars, PA. His mother Pam (Bonnie Bedelia) has had only one wish for him and his brother their entire lives, which is that neither of them would end up working the mines like their father, Gary (Fred Ward). For the time being, Rupert is living in his parents’ garage, which is filled with various gizmos that the boy has built, and working at the local ice cream shoppe owned and operated by disillusioned hippie Carla (Amy Madigan), on whom he has a crush despite her on-again, off-again relationship with “Trooper” Joe (Jay O. Sanders). As the film opens, the philosophy-quoting Rupert goes to a junkyard and happens upon some bikers, and a biker girl close to his own age gives him a (very stupid looking) punk haircut, just before he is supposed to attend the christening of the most recent addition to the neighboring Sike family, which enrages his father. Things in Rupert’s life get turned even more upside down when several major life events happen in succession: he follows his mother to a run-down trailer that belonged to Gary’s father and discovers her in a secret tryst with new father Jack Sike; he and Carla sleep together after her most recent split from Trooper Joe; his father reveals that he has gotten an offer for his father’s old land that will change the life of the family immeasurably; and, finally, a fire in the mine traps Gary and Jack below ground where the latter, believing that they are about to die, confesses his affair with the former’s wife.
In his review, that lovable curmudgeon Ebert laments that this movie represents a then-contemporary movie trend that “forces realistic characters into an absurd plot, and expects us to accept the plot because we believe in the characters.” And he’s not wrong about that; the film does have a bit of a tone problem. You see, the complicating action is that Rupert hatches a plan to get himself and his mother out from under their father’s thumb by kidnapping his father, under the assumption that this would somehow allow his mother to convince the courts to let her sell Gary’s valuable land in order to pay the ransom, which Rupert would collect and then split with her. He doesn’t loop her into this plan until after he and Carla have already gone through with the kidnapping; once Pam is informed, she attempts to go along with it, only to learn that Gary already sold the land and took payment in cash, which complicates the plan.
It’s an utterly absurd premise that is completely at odds with the extremely grounded nature of the relationships at play and the characterizations of the people we’ve met. We learn a lot about each of them, and what motivates them. All Gary wanted was to give his own children a better opportunity than he had growing up in his father’s little trailer, and although they are better off, his inability to connect with (or even understand) his eldest son pushes him to a breaking point, and the revelation that his wife has been infidelious enrages him further, as if the two of them are in some kind of conspiracy together to make him angry when it’s his inability to let go of his fantasy of how things “ought” to be that has driven both of them away. (It’s worth noting here that his speech about this is where he mentions that he thought of himself and Pam as the “king and queen of Pennsylvania” with Rupert as their prince who would inherit everything one day, and it’s one of the worst, most belabored title justifications that I have ever encountered, made only worse when it is called back to in the film’s final moments.) Carla’s life is no picnic either; she and Trooper Joe used to live in another state where they had an affair that resulted in the birth of a little girl, whom Carla turned over to Joe and his wife to raise. The couple moved out of state and by the time that Carla was able to save enough to move closer to them to be nearer to her daughter, they had already divorced and Joe didn’t fight his ex-wife for custody of his and Carla’s child.
The film is excellent at creating rich, full backstories for its characters, and I’m not surprised that Ebert found the tonal dissonance between this and the goofy kidnapping plot to be an insurmountable problem when trying to enjoy the story. “Give me a great big break,” he wrote. “A movie about any of these people might have had a chance, if the filmmakers had retained a shred of sanity.” I don’t have that same problem, however, because (whenever we aren’t getting backstory about Carla’s baby and Gary isn’t smacking his wife around after finding out about her adulter) this movie is one of the most genuinely funny comedies that I have ever seen. Reeves is adorable in his role as a hapless, gifted-but-aimless layabout teenager whose lack of ambition is only matched by his lack of opportunities. From the moment that he shows up with his (very, very stupid) punk haircut, it’s impossible not to enjoy his antics, whether he’s futzing about with the light-up ice cream cone on top of Carla’s shoppe, running from a burly man in a towel after knocking the guy’s coffee out of his hand as a distraction while Carla impersonates Gary for the sake of the kidnapping plan, or playing at espionage, he’s utterly magnetic and a total joy to watch.
There are two scenes here that will stick with me forever. The first is an amazing setpiece; following his interruption of the altercation between his parents that results in a physical fight with his father, Rupert goes to the ice cream parlor and sees Trooper Joe’s car, enraging him, and then he is baited by some kids on the way to their homecoming dance. Angered, Rupert goes to the bikers from the opening scene and invites them to come raise hell at the dance, which is themed “Nights of Dallas” (“You can’t come in here unless you’re dressed from Dallas or Dynasty,” says the ticket-taking girl who wonders where he’s been all year). It’s all very hilarious and tacky and Texan, with the band performing in front of a giant Texas state flag while wearing cowboy hats, a punch bowl shaped like an oil derrick, a papier-mâché armadillo the size of a VW bug, and a model drilling platform that’s got to be over two stories tall. The whole scene is a delight even before Rupert is chased offscreen while trying to make a quick getaway. But what really made me fall out of my seat laughing was a scene in which Carla, wearing a trench coat and a Freddy Krueger mask to disguise herself while taking care of the kidnapped Gary, attempts to keep the man calm with written messages that have a very distinct and recognizable style from her restaurant. It’s comic gold, and I’m still laughing about it days later.
By the time that you read this, The Prince of Pennsylvania will likely be long gone from Tubi, but it seems like exactly the kind of cheap, easily licensed movie that will end up on another streaming service sooner than later. Adjust your expectations before going into it, and you’ll have a good time. Or just fast forward to the homecoming and kidnapping scenes; I’m not your dad.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the Canuxploitation bank heist thriller The Silent Partner (1978), written by Curtis Hanson and starring Elliott Gould.
00:00 Welcome
01:38 Swampflix’s Top 10 Films of 2023
16:16 Total Recall (1990)
19:01 Minority Report (2002)
23;20 The Not-So-New 52
24:07 Earth Girls are Easy (1988)
28:00 The Prince of Pennsylvania (1988)
31:38 Soy Cuba (1964)
34:04 The Cranes are Flying (1957)
37:57 The Book of Clarence (2024)
42:11 Robot Dreams (2024)
45:09 Destroy All Neighbors (2024)
49:00 The Beekeeper (2024)
55:38 The Silent Partner (1978)
You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.
– The Podcast Crew
Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.
Rewatching these DC animated movies has been a strange ride so far. I remembered enjoying Superman: Doomsday as decent but not noteworthy, New Frontier as an unassailable masterpiece, Gotham Knight as forgettable, corporate-driven trash, and Wonder Woman as being quite good. It’s strange to come to such different conclusions now, with Doomsday as a memorable story of grief on the part of Lois Lane despite the film’s off-putting and occasionally ugly stylistic choices, Frontier as fun and novel but hampered but its sudden and overt jingoism, Knight as stylish and fascinating, and Wonder Woman in particular as being much grosser and more sexist than I remembered. The change in my perspective on this one, however, is perhaps the most extreme to date. Green Lantern: First Flight is truly adult in a way that the preceding films have attempted but not achieved. And it’s not simply about going grim and dark through violence (although that is present here, and it’s spectacular), but through a more nuanced approach to the narrative and a few genuine surprises.
Hal Jordan is a modern-day test pilot for Ferris Aircraft whose simulation pod is forcibly drawn to the dying corpse of extraterrestrial humanoid Abin Sur, who explains that he is a member of an extraterrestrial police organization called the Green Lantern Corps, and that he has chosen Hal as his successor. Within a fairly short time, several other members of the Corps show up to take Hal back to Oa, the planet from which the Corps operates under the supervision of the Guardians, little floating blue guys with red robes and giant heads. These beings were the first intelligent life in the universe, and they created the giant lantern-shaped battery from which the many members of the Corps draw their power. As the rest of the galaxy considers Earth to be a backwards planet of smelly, greedy, crude brutes, the Guardians are resistant to the idea of letting a human join the ranks of the Green Lanterns, but highly decorated and trusted veteran Sinestro requests the opportunity to train Hal and, in so doing, test his worthiness. Their first order of business is tracking down the man who dealt Abin Sur his mortal blow, and use him to locate his employer, the warlord Kanjar Ro, who is rumored to be building his own powerful battery to rival that of the Guardians.
If you thought Wonder Woman speedran through that character’s origin (it handles in 20 minutes what took an hour or so in the 70s pilot movie), this one really puts the pedal to the metal, with Hal getting the ring before the 5 minute mark and him en route to Oa within three minutes of that scene (not counting the credits). That’s not a bad thing; New Frontier had already covered much of the same territory (albeit in a different era) and the ill-fated Ryan Reynolds Green Lantern was in production already at this time and would cover the origin story yet again, so it was wise to breeze through all of that and get to the meat of the story so that it could spend more time developing the plot rather than the exposition. That may be why this feels the most like a proper movie of these first five, since it hits the ground running and gets to the point with enough time to explore the characters better. By fifteen minutes into the film, Hal is already on a mission with Sinestro that plays out like a scene from Training Day, wherein Sinestro tracks down the mistress of their suspect and, using an orb that produces a narcotic-like euphoric effect, tortures her to the point of nearly overdosing until Hal intervenes (a little too late for us to find him “heroic,” to be honest, but the narrative requires that Sinestro pushes the envelope, so I’ll allow it).
The cast here is great, as it has been in all of these films. Christopher Meloni is an obvious choice to voice a cop, even one who operates across an entire sector of space rather than simply a unit for special victims. The real standout, however, is Victor Garber as Sinestro. You don’t even really have to be familiar with the comics or any of its adaptations to see his turn to the dark side coming—I mean, his name is Sinestro—but this is one of the more interesting versions of this character that we’ve seen. He’s the epitome of a cop: looking down on those he is supposed to serve and protect, an outsider in the communities that he is policing who thinks his badge ring gives him immunity to instigate and escalate violence with little regard for collateral. He’s trusted and respected by his superiors and peers, but he doesn’t hide this side of himself from Hal for long, immediately saying upon their arrival at the standard wretched hive of scum and villainy that he suggested that the place be destroyed via meteor shower, only for his leaders to laugh off his earnest suggestion. Sinestro is often a character that it is difficult to take seriously—again, his name is Sinestro—but Garber imbues his performance with such strong contempt that he sells the character’s malice completely. It’s really something to behold. Juliet Landau, probably best known either for being Martin Landau’s daughter or for portraying Drusilla in Buffy and Angel, gives a great performance as minor character Labella that sells the pathos of her position, but it’s another actress best known for her genre work, Tricia Helfer of Battlestar Galactica, who deserves a call out here. As fellow Green Lantern Boodikka (I know), Helfer makes Boodikka vulnerable and trustworthy in a way that—spoilers for a fifteen year old movie incoming—make her betrayal of Hal all the more agonizing, even if the fact that it’s Helfer in the role means we should have seen that twist coming.
When it comes to stakes and action/violence, this is the best of these films yet. Late in the film, Sinestro deactivates the lantern battery, preventing any Lanterns in the field from using their rings, so that any who were traveling through space or in a situation where they were protected by said ring are killed, with the rings then returning to Oa where they fall from the sky as thickly as rain in a raging storm. And that’s offscreen violence—characters die by falling into the walls of space transit tunnels and exploding into vapor, Sinestro temporarily reanimates the corpse of a fallen foe into a shambling semi-conscious undead thing in order to ask it some final questions, and one of Kanjar Ro’s men is sucked into space spine-first through a six-inch hole punched in the hull of a spaceship. It’s not simply darkness for the sake of being edgy, it’s often very inventive and integral to the plot. I’ve already given away too much, I fear, so I won’t spoil anything else, but I will say, this is the best one so far, and the most worthwhile one yet.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
Immediately after our viewing of Soy Cuba, my viewing companion started reading about the director, Mikhail Kalatozov, and discovered that he had also previously directed Letyat zhuravli (The Cranes are Flying), and that it had won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1958. We checked to see if it was on the Criterion streaming service and discovered that it was, and immediately made plans to watch it as soon as possible. Although it lacks some of the spectacular work that was present in Soy Cuba, the seeds for many of that film’s finest moments are on full display here, and this one is likewise worthy of revisiting for a modern audience.
Boris (Aleksey Batalov) is a young Soviet factory worker with lofty ideals, deeply in love with Veronika (Tatiana Samoilova), whom he has nicknamed “Squirrel,” and he plans to marry her as soon as he can. Boris lives in a multi room apartment with his family: his grandmother, his father Fyodor (Vasili Merkuryev), and his cousins Mark (Aleksandr Shvorin) and Irina (Svetlana Kharitonova). Fyodor is a doctor and Irina is in training to enter the same profession, while Mark is a composer and piano player who is himself obsessed with Veronika. Boris and Veronika’s meetings are often delayed by his duties at the factory, which gives Mark the opportunity to try and ingratiate himself with his cousin’s betrothed, but Veronika soundly rejects him at every advance. When the Soviet Union enters WWII, many of Boris’s colleagues worry that they will be drafted, and there is much discussion about the possibility of receiving exemptions, and Veronika worries incessantly that Boris will be conscripted, unaware that her naive, doe-eyed love has already volunteered, alongside his friend Stepan (Valentin Zubkov).
On the day before Veronika’s birthday, he is ordered to report for duty, and the two are unable to find each other in the crowd, prevented from saying a final goodbye. In his absence, things go from bad to worse for Veronika when her parents are killed in an air raid; she is taken in by Boris’s family, but this leaves her vulnerable to Mark’s machinations, and he forces himself upon her during another raid while the rest of the family is in hiding, then forces her to marry him. On the front, Boris is shot while saving a fellow soldier and declared missing. Veronika never gives up hope that he will return, however, even as she is trapped in a loveless marriage with Mark, evacuated to Siberia from Moscow as the enemy’s forces encroach, and made to endure the bitter lamentations of returning wounded who have more harsh words for the women who failed to wait for them than they do for the fascists that they fight.
This movie is stunning. Samoilova is doing unprecedented work here as Veronika, from the first time that she sees the cranes flying over Moscow with Boris at her side, to the film’s bittersweet final moments when she sees them again after learning that Boris will not be returning home to her. This isn’t a spoiler—the film treats his death as an inevitability from the moment that we learn he has volunteered, and although there are a few moments in which it seems that there may be reason to hope, it is a foregone conclusion that he will not be coming home. The film knows it, the characters know it, and we know it, even as Veronika keeps hope alive in her heart for a reunion that will never come.
This was, apparently, one of the first films within the USSR to treat the war as a tragedy and not a source of tremendous patriotic pride. Prior to this, all films that dealt with WWII did so in an overtly propagandistic way, with the films creating an image of a cheery populace without flaw, all working together in blissful harmony and without want or need. This was a lightning bolt of realism thrust into that industry, a film in which our heroes and our villains espouse the same political philosophies even if they enact very different systems of morality, showing both the mask that the USSR presented the west and the varied faces beneath it. Boris is lovable but he is also not only an obvious fool but dishonest, as evidenced not only by his immediately volunteering for the war effort but also when he lies straight to Veronika’s face about their plans for the immediate future, despite knowing he will not be able to fulfill any of it while he is out on the front lines. Mark is an utter cad, moving in on his cousin’s beloved even before he goes off to war and making every effort to take her for himself (up to and including an implied sexual assault) and resorting to bribery in order to receive a draft exemption—an action that also includes him using his respected uncle’s name without his knowledge and besmirching the man’s honor. Irina is likewise flawed. Her earliest scenes in the film show her belittling Boris for staying out late and sleeping in on his day off, despite the fact that he’s more exhausted from extended days of honest work than he is from catting around the city with Veronika; later, she treats Veronika like garbage for marrying Mark, even though it’s clear that she had little choice in the matter and Irina didn’t respect Boris in the first place. These are people, not propagandists.
There’s something beautiful about the sense of impending doom here, and the way that it plays out in the visuals and the performances. Of particular note here are Fyodor and his mother, both of whom I completely adore. Grandmother (as she is credited) is weary with wisdom; unlike her naive grandson, she has seen wars before and she knows how the play out, and the knowing look in her eye when she learns that Boris is going to serve and she gazes into his face with the certain knowledge that this intimacy between them is now finite and has an expiration date is heartbreaking. On the day that Boris is to report, two women are sent to the family home bearing gifts from the Communist Party, and as they begin to recite the exhortation of Boris’s bravery and patriotism that they were sent to deliver, Fyodor interrupts them and finishes the last half of the speech for them. He’s heard it before, and too many times, and although he himself will later serve the effort in his capacity as surgeon and head of a medical facility, he knows that war is an ugly, inglorious thing in which young men die, not a call to some greater glory or honor. This, too, was unusual at the time, as the process of De-Stalinization had only really become state policy some half a decade before the film was made, and creating art that professed such a view of war prior to this could very well have been considered insidious or even treasonous. As Boris departs for the assembly grounds, Grandmother first shuts the door behind him as voices retreat down the stairs, only to rush back out onto the landing and call down to him; Fyodor admonishes her for her emotion, perhaps feeling some shame at his own emotional outburst and transferring that embarrassment to his mother, only to join her in their pre-emptive (but correct) grieving when she tells him that she just wanted to see Boris “one last time” (emphasis added).
Visually, this is a masterpiece, even if it doesn’t reach the same heights that the director would later achieve in Soy Cuba. There’s nothing as breathtakingly awe-inspiring as that bus transition scene or the funeral march in the third segment of that narrative, but this is nonetheless a gorgeously shot film, and the abundance of epic tracking shots is already on full display, from the way that the camera follows Veronika through the throngs of people as she struggles to find Boris before he ships out, to the similar scene at the end when she searches for him amongst the returning soldiers at the train station in Moscow, to the way that the camera moves with perfect precision as it follows Boris on the front lines as he races for the safety of the tree line with his injured compatriot on his back. The most stunning may be the repeated images of characters climbing a mind-boggling amount of stairs—first, Boris climbs them because he cannot bear to leave Veronika’s building after they have spent the night walking the city together; later, he bounds up them in a surreally shot sequence wherein he returns home triumphantly and marries Veronika as he promised, a dream as he lays dying; still later, those stairs are all that remain of Veronika’s apartment building when she returns home from the subway shelter after an air raid as she ascends them rapidly, already knowing that her parents have been killed but needing to see for herself. And that’s not even getting into the other ways that this film uses visual language with such style and aplomb; the choice to have Mark pursue Veronika through the streets of the city in the same places and from the same angles as we earlier saw her walk with Boris is particularly inspired, as if he is taking even that from her and making it revolting.
There’s a real sense of modernity that Soy Cuba had that is missing here, it’s true. That film felt like it could have been made yesterday, while this one definitely feels more like a product of its decade, with many of the hallmarks thereof. Still, as someone who usually can’t stand war movies, this one is a beautiful film, and although I don’t really know what the other contenders were, I have no doubt that it deserved its Golden Palm win. If you were interested in watching both, I might suggest starting here and watching the later film afterward, but both are beautiful, noteworthy, and deserving of attention, either as a pair or in isolation. The Cranes are Flying is currently streaming on Criterion.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba) is one of the greatest movies ever made – possibly the greatest. I say that without hyperbole. At the end of watching this movie, even though there was only one other person in the room with me, I stood up as the credits rolled, unable to contain the puzzled look on my face and started to clap. This is the first and only film to ever get a standing ovation in my living room, and I’m absolutely desperate for everyone else to see it.
Soy Cuba initially came to my attention over a year ago, when one of the many film folks that I follow on social media talked about how a particular scene featuring a bus should be studied by student filmmakers before they ever even touch a camera. This sparked my interest, but after an exhaustive search for it online, I gave up on ever seeing it and put it in the back of my mind. The film became part of the discourse again recently, when Phil Lord (half of the “Lord & Miller” duo) responded to the announcement of the film’s upcoming Criterion physical release to criticize it as a “distorted Soviet propaganda piece”, saying that the film should be contextualized as such, citing later that he had largely seen Soy Cuba “generally presented as a romantic documentary,” which I think says more about his college than it does about the film. It is Soviet propaganda, to be sure, albeit one that the Soviets didn’t care for much at the time of release (due to its accidental framing of capitalist excess as “cool”) and buried it, leaving the film largely forgotten until it was rediscovered by Martin Scorsese and remastered. And bless that man and all his progeny, because this is a treasure.
The film unfolds in four separate narratives. In the first, a woman named Maria, who lives in a hovel in a slum, goes to a casino to prostitute herself; her john for the night, an American, insists on seeing where she lives rather than taking her back to his hotel room, essentially acting as a tourist in her poverty for the evening before buying her most beloved possession—a crucifix—and leaving her behind. In the second, a sugarcane farmer named Pedro is told by his landlord that he must vacate the property, on which he has just raised his best crop after decades of working the soil, as the landlord has sold the land to United Fruit. In the third, a student rebel named Enrique takes part in the symbolic torching of a drive-in movie theater screen that is showing propaganda about Fulgencio Batista, the dictator of Cuba prior to Castro’s uprising. After he rescues a local woman from marauding American sailors, he retires for the night, only to learn the next morning that one of his comrades has been murdered by the police and to find that Batista’s regime is spreading the lie that Castro has been killed as a way of suppressing hope among the rebelling proletariat. In the fourth and final story, another farmer named Mariano is eating his meager breakfast with his family when an exhausted rebel stumbles upon their meager shack and entreats Mariano to join the revolution. The farmer declines, but the trajectory of his destiny is forever altered when Batista’s air forces bomb the valley in which he lives, with deadly collateral damage.
There are things that the camera does in this movie that utterly boggle my mind. The movie is made up almost entirely of stunning standalone shots, which would be impressive on its own, but there are ways that the camera moves that seem impossible to me. Right from the outset, there’s a sequence at one of the casinos that starts on a rooftop where a band is playing, as the camera zooms in and out on various musicians in a way that organically blends with the music itself, before our audience POV goes over the edge of the building and glides down to the poolside below, even diving below the surface to show off all the shiny, happy people who are having a great time at the expense of the impoverished locals. Even more impressive is a later scene in the third segment, which starts on the left side of a bus as the vehicle is approached by a news-seller on a bicycle. He rides straight up to Enrique’s outstretched hand and puts the paper in it, as the camera strafes leftward to enter the bus and focus on Enrique’s reaction to the news he’s reading. We get a full shot of the rest of the bus that shows that this wasn’t done with some kind of cutaway, either; when the bus comes to a stop, Enrique departs, and the camera stays within the bus to watch him descend, cross the street, and then run up a long set of steps, all without batting an eye. When I was watching this, I turned to my viewing companion and asked “Did we just go through the bus?” before shaking my head and declaring “I can’t figure out how the hell they did that.” It’s a technical masterpiece, a breakthrough on par with breaking through to the technicolor world from drab Kansas in The Wizard of Oz. A later scene moves away from a massive funeral procession into a building and then climbs to the top of it before panning through a room full of laborers and then back out through their window to watch the march proceed into the distance, unstoppable. It’s stunning.
It’s not just that mastery of the craft that makes this so impressive, though; it’s the humanity. The story of Maria, from the moment that we first meet her, is one of such tragic hopelessness that it’s impossible not to have your heart break for her. We first meet her as herself, as she encounters a poor fruitseller who is in love with her and dreams of marrying her one day in the nearby chapel, excitedly dreaming about her beauty in her white dress. She is forced to go from here almost immediately to a casino, where three boorish American sex tourists that we have already seen harass her and a few other working girls into drinking with them. One of them, who earlier waved off two of Maria’s colleagues and was accused of being prudish by his buddies, spots her immediately, and he makes it clear what attracts him to her: her faith and innocence, as evidenced by her displayed crucifix. She is entreated to dance and initially hesitant, but ultimately gives in and begins to move with such frenetic energy that she almost loses shape on film, a dervish, as she metaphorically resists the attempts of these capitalist pigs to buy her—buy her body, buy her dignity, buy her innocence, buy her soul—before being forced to relent, and in so doing gives up control of herself. After the tourist spends the night with her, he tells her that he is a collector of crucifixes, and as he lays a couple of bills on the bed, he offers her another, then a second, then lays a third beside her before he takes the symbol of her faith (et al) from her. It’s five bills in total; he pays more for her innocence than for her body, and it’s clear that he’s done this many times and plans to continue to do it forever, pillaging and plundering the colonized world for its body and its soul. What it lacks in subtlety, it makes up for in its overt reminder that, yes, all colonization is predatory, now and for all time.
Not a day has gone by since my screening that I haven’t thought about this movie, and I don’t think I’ll ever stop thinking about it. Through the modern lens, it’s impossible not to look at the representation of the suffering of the people of Cuba under Batista and not see in their struggles and in their faces the embattlement and the countenance of all people, everywhere, who suffer under the oppression of colonialism and the evils of an economic system that can only exist by enforcing suffering on others. We are living in a time of great moral darkness, watching the systematic and unconscionable evil that is being forced upon the people of Palestine at the hands of the West and its collaborators, and although this movie is explicitly propagandistic, we can’t lose sight of the fact that this simple fact does not necessarily make its message incorrect or inapplicable. Across all spectrums, all marginalized people are struggling together, and our oppressor is always the same system. To fight that is the only fight that matters.
I’m not sure when the Criterion disc is expected to be released and I’m not sure that, when it is, it will also mean that the movie will be on their streaming service. You can watch it for free right now, however, as one of your four free monthly borrows with your library card, on Hoopla.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
Welcome to The Not-So-New 52, your digital Swampflix comic book (adaptation) newsstand! Starting in 2007, DC Comics and Warner Premiere entered the direct-to-home-video market with animated features, mostly in the form of adaptations of well-received event comics or notable arcs. This Swampflix feature takes its name from the 2011 DC relaunch event “The New 52,” and since there are (roughly) fifty-two of these animated features as of the start of 2024, Boomer is watching them in order from the beginning with weekly reviews of each. So, get out your longboxes and mylar sleeves and get ready for weekly doses of grousing, praise, befuddlement, recommendations, and occasional onomatopoeia as we get animated for over fifteen years of not-so-new comic cartoons.
It’s a testament to just how starved we were for Wonder Woman content in the aughts that this animated movie, which came out in 2009, was so well received. It’s not bad per se—in fact, in many places, it’s quite good—but this movie’s version of Steve Trevor is gross in a way that was probably apparent even at the time, but which has become even more apparent in contrast to the way that the character was portrayed by least problematic Christopher in Hollywood, Chris Pine, in the live-action 2017 film that was released just a scant eight years later.
The 2009 Wonder Woman film starts in the distant past: Amazon Queen Hippolyta (Virginia Madsen) is locked in battle with god of war Ares (Alfred Molina), her former lover. As her warriors die on the battlefield, locked in combat with an army of mythical monsters led by her and Ares’s son Thrax, she turns the tides by beheading her own offspring. Preparing to do the same to Ares, she is stopped by Zeus and Hera (Marg Helgenberger), who tell her that they cannot permit her to kill a god, but they will bind his powers and allow her to hold him as her prisoner in perpetuity, granting her and her people a new home on the paradise-like island of Themyscira, safe from the dangers of “man’s world.” After she and her people build their new home, Hippolyta is granted another boon as she crafts a child for herself from the island’s clay, which the Olympians bring to life: a daughter, Diana (Keri Russell). Decades later, Ares remains under lock and key under the guardianship of Persephone (Vicki Lewis), a warrior who lost an eye when she jumped into the line of fire and took a blow that was meant for bookworm Alexa (Tara Strong) in the war against Ares in the prologue; this lack of interest in battle on the part of Alexa makes her the target of mockery for supposed cowardice by her older sister Artemis (Rosario Dawson), Hippolyta’s right hand general. When modern USAF pilot Steve Trevor (Nathan Fillion) lands on Themyscira after an aerial dogfight, a contest is held to determine which of the Amazons should travel beyond their peaceful oasis to return him to his nation. Diana wins this competition, but her excitement is short lived, as Ares’s escape while the island’s inhabitants were distracted by the contest means that she will not need to seek him out and return him to his cell.
There’s a tonal issue at play here that drags this one down a bit. It’s got a PG-13 rating, and at the time of release, there was some outcry about the level of violence in this one. I think that’s reflective of a systemic issue, as this film is no more violent than Superman: Doomsday, which didn’t receive the same kind of criticism, and I think it’s owed solely to the fact that the combatants here are women. There is a decapitation (in shadow), but in the earlier film, Doomsday murdered an actual child (although the “camera” cut away), but because Amazonians (read: women) are doing the violence, this one received more criticism. It makes sense that this would get the MPAA rating that it did because of this, but the dialogue remains very PG. There’s a recurring bit that starts because Trevor says “crap” in front of the Amazons, then has to explain that it means excrement; each time after this that he uses the word, the Amazons take this as further evidence of the crassness and baseness of mankind, until Diana finally uses it herself at the end as a demonstration of her becoming more acclimatized to man’s world. That’s all well and good (if a bit pat and trite), but its failure to push the boundaries of the film’s rating demonstrates that the franchise is still trying to bridge a gap between appealing to (and being acceptable for) children while aiming to attract an older audience through a novel, more mature approach to storytelling.
Once upon a time, I owned this movie on DVD, having obtained it for a mere $5 from the CVS on Leon C. Simon, when I was a student at UNO. I have a very clear memory of watching the special features, which included several talking heads from the film’s voice cast, and Rosario Dawson using the word “warriess” several times, which I always found endearing. Dawson is giving a great performance here in general, with a couple of quite badass lines—my favorite of which is when someone teases her about her giant sword, and she replies that it “is but [her] dagger.” Very little in the film stuck out in my mind, however, other than the speedrun through the stations of the Diana of Themyscira canon: born of clay, paradise island, crashed air pilot, championship to determine the ambassador to man’s world, crusader for truth and justice. Once Diana comes to the modern world, there’s a distinct lack of charm in her fish out of water story that acts as a demonstration of why this narrative works better as a period piece; the Patty Jenkins Wonder Woman movie sets its events during WWI while the Lynda Carter TV classic was set in WWII (at least initially), as the earliest comics had been. This allows for there to be some natural chemistry between this isolated demigod princess and a man who can be a little regressive but still likable in that he was more aware than average for this time. Here, Steve Trevor is a total hound dog, in a way that would have been obnoxious even for a contemporary guy at the time of the film’s release.
All of the stuff with Wonder Woman herself is great (minus a comment that she makes about Etta Candy that is supposed to shame her for being a stereotype), but I’d really rather not have heard Steve Trevor tell Queen Hippolyta that “[her] daughter’s got a nice rack,” even if it’s supposed to be a moment played for comedy (he’s bound with the Lasso of Truth). Later still, he tries to get Diana drunk with the implication that he expects to have the opportunity to take advantage of her! It’s vile, frankly. The rest of the film, as wonderful as so much of it is—the fight between the Amazons and the reanimated dead is a particular standout, especially as it exists both as set piece and as vehicle for closure on the Alexa/Artemis relationship—doesn’t make up for the fact that its male lead is an attempted sexual assailant by any other name. Edit all of that out and you have a 4-star animated flick, but it is in this film, and that leaves us where we are.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
1. Barbie – Greta Gerwig’s hot-pink meta daydream combines the bubbly pop feminism of Legally Blonde with the movie-magic artifice of The Wizard of Oz to craft the modern ideal of wide-appeal Hollywood filmmaking. It’s fantastic, an instant classic.
2. Enys Men – In a year where the buzziest horror titles were slow-cinema abstractions (see: Skinamarink, The Outwaters), Mark Jenkins’s sophomore feature was our clear favorite. More like an imagistic poem about loneliness and isolation than a “movie,” Enys Men is the psychedelic meltdown of id at the bottom of a deep well of communal grief. It restructures the seaside ghost story of John Carpenter’s The Fog through the methodical unraveling of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, dredging up something that’s at once eerily familiar & wholly unique.
3. Poor Things – Yorgos Lanthimos has always poked at assumed social norms as if they were a corpse he found in the woods. That naive interrogation has never been as scientifically thorough nor as wickedly fun as it is here, though, to the point where he’s articulated the entire human experience through repurposed dead flesh. We love everything about this perverse Frankenstein story: every outrageous set & costume design, every grotesque CG creature that toddles in the background, every one of Mark Ruffalo’s man-baby tantrums and, of course, every moment of Emma Stone’s central performance as an unhinged goblin child.
4. Asteroid City – A new contender for one of Wes Anderson’s strongest works. In The French Dispatch, he self-assessed how his fussy live-action New Yorker cartoons function as populist entertainment. Here, that self-assessment peers inward, shifting to their function as emotional Trojan horses. It has more layers of reality upon fiction upon more fiction upon reality than The Matrix, with gorgeous set design and an incredible cast of actors giving career-best performances.
5. The Royal Hotel – Kitty Green’s service industry thriller plays like a slightly more grounded version of Alex Garland’s Men, except the men in question swarm their victims like George Romero zombie hordes. A great film about misogyny, social pressure, and alcoholic stupor.
6. Smoking Causes Coughing – An anthology horror comedy disguised as a Power Rangers parody, Smoking Causes Coughing is another bizarro knockout from Quentin Dupieux (director of Rubber, Mandibles, and previous Movie of the Year pick Deerskin). Apparently antsy about having to spend 70min on just one absurdist premise, Dupieux’s now chopping them up into bite-sized, 7-minute morsels, which is great, since every impulse he has is hilariously idiotic.
7. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem – Not only the best Ninja Turtles movie in thirty years, but also the best mutation of the Spider-Verse animation aesthetic to date and the most a Trent Reznor score has actually sounded like Trent Reznor’s band. We were particularly delighted that it leans into the “teen” portion of its title by making everything as gross as possible and by making the turtles’ ultimate goal Saving Prom.
8. M3GAN – Finally, a modern killer doll movie where the doll actually moves, a huge relief after spending so many years staring at the inanimate Annabelle. M3GAN loves to move; she does TikTok dances, she actively hunts her prey and, most importantly, she never turns down an opportunity to give Michelle Pfeiffer-level side-eye. It’s been a long time since this first hit theaters, but the increasing, insidious popularity of A.I. among tech bros kept it on our minds all year. What a doll.
9. Infinity Pool – There certainly hasn’t been a shortage of “Eat the Rich” satires recently, but Brandon Cronenberg’s entry in the genre still stands out in its extremity. Not only does it have Mia Goth’s most deranged performance to date (no small feat), but it’s also more willing than its competition to push its onscreen depravity past the point of good taste for darkly comic, cathartic release – careful to put every substance the human body can discharge on full, loving display. Plenty audiences were turned off by its disregard for subtlety & restraint, but that’s exactly what makes it great.
10. Priscilla – Sofia Coppola’s downers & cocktails antidote to Baz Luhrmann’s brain-poison uppers in last year’s Elvis. Technically, both directors are just playing the hits in their respective Graceland biopics, but only one of them successfully recaptures the magic of their 1990s masterworks. It’s one of Coppola’s best films about the boredom & isolation of feminine youth, which by default makes it one of her best overall.
Read Alli’s picks here.
Read Boomer’s picks here.
Read Brandon’s picks here.
Read Britnee’s picks here.
See Hanna’s picks here.
Hear James’s picks here.
-The Swampflix Crew
