reviews

All You Need is Kill (2026)

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The only manga I’ve ever read was an adaptation of the 2004 sci-fi novel All You Need Is Kill, and that’s because it was a gift. A family member who lives his life much deeper in the anime trenches bought it for me as a Christmas present after the novel was also adapted into the 2014 Tom Cruise vehicle Edge of Tomorrow (and famously retitled a second time under its tagline “Live, Die, Repeat” once it hit DVD). When I heard that there’s a new, Japanese adaptation of the same source text, then, my assumption was that someone had set out to illustrate a more faithful version of either the manga or the original semi-illustrated novel, undoing all of Hollywood’s work to center an action hero that Tom Cruise could credibly play instead of the novel’s heroine (sidelined as a supporting role in the live-action version, played by Emily Blunt). That’s not the case at all. The new version of All You Need is Kill doesn’t simply set the comic book illustrations of its source novel in motion; it redesigns them, introduces an overwhelming wealth of color to a world that was once entirely black & white, and once again makes major changes to the two main characters’ personae & dynamics. It’s less of a manga-faithful rebuke of Edge of Tomorrow than it is a fellow attempt at rogue reinterpretation, this time marketed to the cloistered nerds who actually read manga instead of the wider world of people who’ve heard of Tom Cruise.

That’s not to say that the new anime version of All You Need Is Kill is entirely novel in its reinterpretation. Edge of Tomorrow is not the only pre-existing work it evokes. It plays with the oil-slick color palette of Annihilation, echoes the YA mech-suit therapy sessions of Neon Genesis Evangelion, recalls the vintage sketchbook psychedelia of Mind Game, and touches on some parallel thinking with last year’s sci-fi adaptation Mickey 17. What I mean to say is that it pulls from so many varied sources that it eventually becomes its own thing, a stylish genre remix of its own unique flavor — however mild. For every inspired choice it makes (like redesigning its time-looping monster spawn to look like killer houseplants instead of meatballs with teeth), it also defaults to disappointingly basic choices elsewhere. It’s especially disappointing that the film ages down its two leads from near-future adult supersoldiers to near-future awkward teens. I don’t personally watch too much anime, but most of what I do see ends up being about shy teens who don’t know how to express their feelings to each other, which I suppose is a case of modern movie studios knowing their audience. There’s something absurd about shoehorning that shy-teen dynamic into this story about mech-suited futuresoldiers hunting alien beasts, but that choice does at least give it a different perspective than Tom Cruise’s action-hero-in-training role in the Hollywood version.

If I’m avoiding my plot recap duties here, it’s because talking about time-loop movies feels like its own kind of endless loop at this point. All You Need Is Kill‘s addition to the time-loop canon is that it’s set during a future space alien invasion, where the loop is started by infection with monster blood. The two infected soldiers stuck in this endless loop wake up every time they’re killed by the alien beasts, as if they discovered a video game cheat code for unlimited lives. In this version of the story, one of the characters even finds himself waking up to a video game prompt asking him if he wishes to continue playing, presumably having fallen asleep with a controller in hand. So, what you have is a militaristic sci-fi premise borrowed from an older text like Starship Troopers or The Forever War and made bizarrely existential through the recursive plot structure of Groundhog Day. If you regularly watch movies, you’ve seen more than a few variations of this story in recent titles like Palm Springs, Happy Death Day, Timecrimes, Triangle, Looper, Edge of Tomorrow (duh), and so on. So, all that’ll be new to you here is the visual splendor of its psychedelic animation style, which is very much worth the price of admission. And if you haven’t seen any of those movies before, I’m going to assume that you’re a teenager just getting into the medium, in which case the shy, nerdy leads of this version have something to offer you too: a mirror.

-Brandon Ledet

God’s Own Country (2017)

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Our fearless leader Brandon texted me several days ago with a screenshot of an upcoming February 2026 Criterion line-up entitled “Yearning,” advertised as featuring The Deep Blue Sea, Merchant-Ivory production Maurice, Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love, God’s Own Country, “and more” (which includes All That Heaven Allows). He jokingly asked if I had been moonlighting as the programmer for this series, given my love for The Age of Innocence (discussed here), Mood (as discussed here), and films about yearning in general. I am very much myself, as only the night before, I watched God’s Own Country for the first time, completely coincidentally. 

Johnny (Josh O’Connor) is a reluctant shepherd, living on an isolated farm and forced into growing responsibilities there by his hard father Martin’s recent stroke. Martin’s mother Deirdre also lives in the farmhouse and shares Martin’s low opinion of her grandson. For his part, the depressed Johnny fills his nights with raging alcoholism and finds no solace in the anonymous sexual encounters he has with other men when he manages to get off of the farm long enough to cruise. To help out for part of the calving season, Martin hires an itinerant laborer named Gheorghe (Alec Secăreanu), and he and Johnny immediately come into conflict, with Johnny using racial slurs to attack Gheorghe’s Romanian heritage. When the two are sent out to repair a fence on a distant part of the property, they begin to bond once Johnny witnesses Gheorghe’s more tender approach to farm work, although they eventually end up in a physical altercation that immediately turns into sexual release for both of them. Gheorghe’s influence on Johnny makes him a better person, but when Johnny starts to fantasize about a future together, Gheorghe’s reluctance prompts Johnny to engage in behavior that has the potential to sabotage their burgeoning love. Their situation is further complicated by Martin’s second stroke, which leaves him completely unable to manage the farm. 

I remember a fair amount of buzz around this one when it first arrived on the scene, although I don’t hear it discussed much anymore despite O’Connor’s rise to onscreen prominence in recent years. Perhaps it’s because he’s not a very likeable person in this film, and people might find him hard to relate to. We can identify with his resentment of his former peers for being able to move on with their lives and go to college while he’s stuck, seemingly permanently, doing manual labor that he’s not suited for. On the other hand, it’s hard to extend much empathy toward him when he’s hurling racial epithets or railing a random stranger in the pub bathroom while Gheorghe waits for him. That his journey is one of a white Briton whose harsh ways of viewing life are softened by the attentions of a loving “exotic stranger” makes the story a little iffy, and it seems like Gheorghe is way too good for Johnny from the outset. 

I did like the way that Gheorghe’s farm techniques are contrasted with Martin’s and how that carries over into their different relationships with Johnny and what those interactions cultivate within him. Martin insists that Johnny put down a calf that experienced breech birth rather than let his son take the animal to a veterinarian who might save it, and this hardness is apparent in the way that his son longs for his approval and the affection that a single, gentle touch would show. In contrast, Gheorghe saves the life of a seemingly stillborn sheep and then nurses it back to health; when they find another lamb that has died, Gheorghe skins it and places its hide on the runt so that the ewe will let it nurse. Johnny bears witness to this gentleness and, when it’s extended to him, it changes him for the better. About halfway through this film, you’ll start to wonder if this is going to be one of those queer films with a happy ending or a sad one. I won’t spoil that for you; this one is worth the journey to find out for yourself. It’s a quiet, slow, beautiful movie that’s perfect for a long, cold weekend sheltering against the latest winter weather threat.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Two Sleepy People (2026)

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Someone alert Ned Flanders; they’ve finally found a way for you to watch Woody Allen movies without Woody Allen in them. Last year, there were two prestige dramas that borrowed The Woody Allen Font to billboard their discussions of sexual assault within the university system: Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby and Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt. Those allusions to Allen’s past reign as the neurotic king of overly talky indie cinema were presumably semi-ironic—given Allen’s more recent association with sexual abuse outside of the cinema—but they’re at least honest about Allen’s continued influence on the Sundance drama as a medium. There are tons of recent options to check out if, like Ned Flanders, you like Woodsy Allen movies but don’t like that nervous fella that’s always in ’em: Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, James Sweeney’s Straight Up, Matt Farley’s Local Legends, and now Baron Ryan’s Two Sleepy People. There’s a whole new crop nervous fellas to choose from if you don’t care for the last one.

First-time writer/director Baron Ryan stars as a scrawny, neurotic office worker who’s trapped in an endless loop of pointless couple’s therapy with a wife he doesn’t love. His co-writer Caroline Grossman co-stars as a new coworker who catches his eye during awkward pitch meetings for a marketing campaign to sell melatonin pills. They both quickly latch onto melatonin’s natural occurrence in breast milk, inappropriately blurting out ad pitches focusing on “mommy milkers” during team meetings. Whatever Mommy Issues inspire those outbursts then echo in their melatonin-fueled dreams, which they start to inexplicably share as a married couple in a psychic common-space, vaguely remembering their nightly otherworld trysts the next day at work. It’s a clever way to literalize a workplace emotional affair by staging it in a psychic space separate from everyday reality, and it allows the two lonely souls to safely pair up & confront childhood traumas they’ve suppressed in artificial stage play environments. It’s also a clever way to interrogate big-picture concepts through limited cast & locations, revealing more about the writers’ hang-ups with the way they were raised as children than their fictional avatars’ phony struggles with intimacy.

Two Sleepy People starts with a consciously equal balance between the two leads’ leftover Mommy Issues and subsequent young-adult neuroses. We get to know them in their respective real-world living spaces where they’ve trapped themselves in prisons of their own design, with jailcell bars made of unpacked moving boxes or compulsively purchased houseplants depending on the apartment. Things are much more pleasant in their emotional-cheating dreamscape apartment, give or take the Lynchian theatre stage just outside the front door that forces them to relive memories of the mommies who failed them. While those memories also start off equally balanced between the two characters, Baron Ryan’s Woodsy Alleny protagonist eventually takes the literal spotlight, and the back half of the film largely becomes about his impending, unavoidable divorce. The film is most enjoyable in its first half, while it’s unsure how to define the rules of its Sleep Life/Real Life divide and the audience is still learning to love the characters and their worlds. Once their in-the-moment romantic issues have to actually mean something to move the plot along, it loses a lot of steam, and the nervous fella at the center of it all unfortunately outlives his welcome by at least a few overly chatty minutes of runtime.

The miracle of this microbudget indie project is that it’s ever funny or charming at all. Clicking around online, I gather that Baron Ryan is usually billed as a “creator” instead of a filmmaker, which means he already has a small following from making short-form videos on platforms like Instagram & TikTok. For the most part, his Very Online sense of humor translates relatively well to a feature film format, landing punchlines that work just fine out of context (such as a short story pitch about a fetus who is issued an eviction notice from its mother’s womb) and jokes that only make sense in this high-concept scenario (such as the double meaning of a coworker’s accusation that “Everyone knows you’re sleeping together”). There’s a timidity in just how emotionally or psychologically vulnerable he & Grossman are willing to get in their script, though, which especially shows in their fear of broaching the subject of sex. Their characters never physically cheat in their shared psychic space; when the subject of sexual needs or kinks comes up in conversation, they brush it aside to instead embarrass themselves with reenacted childhood memories and read-aloud diary entries. Compare that guardedness with the open-book neuroses of Joanna Arnow’s similarly themed & budgeted The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed, and you get a sense of just how careful Ryan & Grossman are to not fully Go There. To their credit, though, Woody Allen revealed way too much about himself in his own pioneering versions of this neurotic romcom subgenre, and we all now wish we knew way less. They may be sparing us in the long run.

-Brandon Ledet

Mississippi Masala (1991)

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The 1991 romantic dramedy Mississippi Masala is, to put it simply, a story about two incredibly hot people falling in love despite increasingly thorny circumstances. What Hollywood studios don’t want you to know is that every movie used to be like that, that life was once great. It turns out that all you need to make a lastingly beloved motion picture is to cast a couple nuclear-hot actors with nuclear-meltdown chemistry and then throw a few puny obstacles in the way of their union. It sounds like a simple formula, looking back, but from what I gather studio executives forgot to write it down, and it’s since been lost to time.

Sarita Choudhury & Denzel Washington star as the incredibly hot people in question: the daughter of motel workers in small-town Mississippi and a self-employed carpet cleaner who also does business at local motels, just outside of her periphery. The Indian immigrant & Black American communities they belong to are remarkably similar when compared in parallel, as the young couple angles for alone time between constant obligations to their aging parents. They’re also rigidly separate communities, to the point where it’s just as much of a transgression for them to date as it would be for a Montague to date a Capulet. Only, their worlds are separated by racial & xenophobic bigotry instead of interfamilial beef, which makes it even easier for the audience to root for their success.

The thorny circumstances that keep our incredibly hot would-be couple apart are given more political thought & attention than most by-the-numbers romances of the period. The story starts twenty years earlier in the Indian immigrant communities of 1970s Uganda, just as those communities are being forcibly ejected from the country by dictator Idi Amin. Roshan Seth plays a Ugandan-patriotic lawyer who’s heartbroken by his home country’s sudden rejection of his presence for not being “a real African,” which of course colors his opinions on mixed-race relationships twenty years later when his daughter dares to date a Mississippi local. Interracial bigotry is obviously not an uncommon source of conflict in romance dramas, but it is rare for a mainstream picture to dwell so thoughtfully on the historical, intersectional context of that conflict, let alone to tell a story with no white characters of consequence.

Director Mina Nair was very clear-headed in her mission to Trojan Horse political text into her traditionalist romance, doing on-the-ground research in Uganda while preparing the project. Nowadays, if you want to make a mainstream picture about geopolitical conflict, you have to sneak it into a $100mil superhero action spectacle; if you want to tell a story about small-town racial bigotry, you have to shroud it behind “elevated horror” metaphor. That is, if you want an audience to actually see your movie, as opposed to scrolling past its thumbnail on Netflix. In the 90s, the formula was much simpler. Side-by-side shots of Choudhury & Washington sharing a steamy phone call in their respective bedrooms was more than enough to justify the political substance of the larger text. I didn’t cry when that couple finally beats the odds, signing their romantic contract with a kiss at a highway gas station. I did, however, cry when Rashaan Seth finally returns to Uganda, fully reckoning with his lost home and his lost solidarity with fellow Africans. No one would finance a movie about the latter without indulging a little of the former, though, and Nair played the system perfectly to tell the story she wanted to tell to as many people as possible.

-Brandon Ledet

Dooba Dooba (2026)

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As often as it is reclaimed by the very people it others as monstrous villains, horror has always been a largely reactionary genre. You don’t have to scratch too hard at the surface of any classic horror title to find kneejerk fears of people with bodily, mental, gender, or sexual difference being expressed through metaphor. It’s a genre built on societal disgust with facial disfigurement, discomfort with ambiguous gender presentation, and paranoia over escaped mental patients, but it’s also one that’s routinely championed by the real-life targets of those societal phobias. Usually, it takes a couple decades for fans to reclaim blatantly homophobic films like A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 as Queer, Actually but, given enough time, every major horror title eventually gets its due as a transgressive, funhouse mirror version of Representation. What’s funny about the new found-footage horror Dooba Dooba is that it encourages that reclamation to happen in real time. Textually, the film very directly preys on people’s suspicions that modern teens diagnosed with severe anxiety and other social disorders are just faking it to torture the rest of us. Subtextually, its flippant construction leaves room for younger audiences to celebrate that torture. It functions as a kind of power fantasy for socially anxious Zoomers to get their revenge on the Millennials & Gen-Xers who doubt the severity of their mental disabilities. From either perspective, it’s an act of generational warfare — a perversely amusing one.

If Dooba Dooba openly participates in any other long-running horror traditions, it’s in its modern interpretation of the classic babysitter slasher. A 20something aspiring singer takes on a babysitting gig to make ends meet, and the extent of her desperation for rent money is immediately tested. The child is 16 years old but too anxious to stay by herself because she once witnessed the murder of her young brother in the family home. Her overly horny, socially awkward parents explain that to alleviate the teen’s anxieties, the babysitter must sleep in the same bedroom as her, must constantly repeat the nonsense phrase “dooba dooba” whenever making noise elsewhere in the house, and must remain under constant surveillance via closed-circuit security cameras, stationed in every room. Although the story is set in 2022, the cameras are much older & lower-quality than modern tech, giving the entire film the feeling of a crime scene documented via stationary camcorder. Whenever the edit switches to a tight-zoom-in, you can practically count the grains on the screen. You never forget that you’re watching a contemporary story, though, because the way the Zoomer teen in the babysitter’s care weaponizes her social anxieties as a form of low-level torture is distinctly of-the-now. For instance, she mocks the poor babysitter’s Soundcloud tracks as facile novelties, then passes off the faux pas as an inability to read social cues. Then, the torture gets more literal & physical, once her malevolence is clearly established as intentional.

Where the film steps away from othering & mocking teens who struggle with anxiety or Autistic social disfunction is in handing its young villain the keys to the editing room. We are not watching raw security-camera footage of this babysitter’s torment, but rather a PowerPoint-style presentation of the night’s events as interpreted through a prankster teen’s online-troll sensibilities. The horrors documented in this suburban home are flippantly narrated in the lower-case, goofy-font text of a teen fucking around in an AIM chatroom, mocking the victim instead of her tormentor. They’re also frequently interrupted by stock footage of and “fun” factoids about past American presidents (such as their history as slave owners), as if the film were half snuff tape, half high school term paper assignment. All suburban-set horror tends to function as a stand-in for the horrors of America at large, but Dooba Dooba is smart to make that thematic connection explicit, so it’s clear that it isn’t only punching down at awkward teens on the spectrum. Our socially maladjusted villain, her gig-economy victim, and her alcoholic swinger parents all come together to represent something insidious about what’s going on behind the locked doors of the modern American suburban home, protected by the red-white-and-blue flags that wave above. Of course, some public domain horror clips and documents of surgical gore are also included in the mix, just to keep the genre exercise clearly defined.

Overall, Dooba Dooba may not be as ambitious nor as accomplished as other recent “analog” horrors like We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, The Outwaters, or Skinamarink, but it’s got a real wicked streak to it, and it makes some impressively distinct visual & editing choices for something so obviously cheap. The cast is limited in both size and skill, but their awkwardness on camera only adds to the real-life social discomforts they’re supposed to evoke. The cathode-ray CCTV imagery is also limited in its texture & movement, but the sequencing of the edit maintains a perverse sense of humor & momentum throughout. Not for nothing, the film is also under 80 minutes long, making for a perfect January horror B-picture experience. Between Primate, The Bone Temple, and Dooba Dooba, the year’s off to a great trashy start. Just be careful not to play a drinking game with this particular one’s title, since it’s repeated often enough to send you to the hospital.

-Brandon Ledet

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026)

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In El abrazo de la serpiente (Embrace of the Serpent), there is a scene in which indigenous river guide Karamakate revisits a former Catholic mission/residential school on the banks of the Amazon River. He first visited the place decades earlier, where he tried to teach the boys held captive there about their traditions, saying “Don’t believe their crazy tales about eating the body of their gods.” When he returns, he finds them long after the priest has died and they have devolved into an outright cannibalistic cult that quotes half-remembered bits of Christian scripture to support their current state of being. I wrote about this years ago (and proofread poorly, it seems), but Serpiente is a story about an apocalypse that has already happened, the total destruction of a wide swath of cultures and peoples under the heel of European colonialism. I found myself thinking about it a lot during 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, a movie that one wouldn’t necessarily immediately think of as being in conversation with Serpiente, but which shares a common connection in that it spends a great deal of its runtime following a now-adult practitioner of extreme violence who was only a boy when the world as he knew it came to an end. They’re very different texts (with quite divergent intents), but I couldn’t help seeing something of the cannibalistic former wards of the church from Serpiente in Jack O’Connell’s here, and that enriched for me what was already a pretty great movie, especially for a January release. 

Our protagonist from 28 Years Later, Spike (Alfie Williams) takes more of a backseat role in this sequel. At the end of the last film, we last saw him leave the healthy infant who was born of a woman afflicted with the Rage virus before returning to the British mainland, where he was rescued from a pack of infected by a group of knife-wielding weirdos. As this film opens, we find him in the midst of being inducted into their ranks; “Sir” Jimmy Crystal (O’Connell) is the leader of their gang of seven “fingers,” all re-christened “Jimmy” in his honor. Sir Jimmy lords over the others, who have scarred the space between their eyes with an inverted cross like the one he wears, although we don’t see this forced on Spike when he manages to slay his assigned Jimmy despite his physical disadvantages. Elsewhere, Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) continues his work on his macabre memento mori memorial, the bone temple of the title, while also making the “alpha” infected a subject of study, trying to see if the Rage can be tempered even if it can’t be cured. He names the alpha “Samson” (Chi Lewis-Parry) and realizes that the seemingly mindless monster has become addicted to the drugs in his blow darts, so the two of them essentially start doing recreational morphine together and listening to Kelson’s record collection. When the Jimmies come upon some survivors, most of the fingers torture them slowly while Spike vomits and writhes in emotional agony and Sir Jimmy sends one of his deputies, Jimmy Ink (Erin Kellyman) scouting; she sees Kelson and Samson cavorting from afar and reports back to Sir Jimmy that she’s seen Old Nick, setting up a confrontation between the killers, Kelson, and his pet monster. 

I have one complaint. Williams was given a wide range of emotions to play in the previous film as Spike entered an adulthood that was as alien to him as it was to us. He was sheltered from a changing world and trained to survive, but isolated in a way that meant that his first exposures to the hypocrisies and dishonesty of the adult world made him reject it and instead attempt the impossible and bring his mother to Kelson for treatment. Here, Williams only has one mode: utter, pants-soiling terror at being forced into the service of Sir Jimmy and his psychotic acolytes. This makes total sense narratively within the story that this film is telling, but it also means that Spike has no real arc, which is bizarre since the last time we were all here, he was the main character. Here, he’s static and secondary, as this film features a much larger role for Fiennes and alternates entirely between his activities and those of Jimmy and his fingers. There’s a lot of great stuff to be mined here. Kelson’s treatment of Samson is procedural, sure, but it also allows for some excellent music choices. It’s fascinating to watch a man who’s been isolated among the bones of the dead for so long essentially adopt a zombie onto whom he seems to be projecting a lot of intent and intelligence for no other reason than that he’s been lonely a long time, only for the film to surprise us by having these actions not have been in vain. Sir Jimmy’s self-mythologizing has a lot of flair, and he’s effectively menacing and depraved that the film had me on edge for most of it. I didn’t think anything would top the electricity between him and Kelson in their first scene together, but there that’s followed up by a sequence set to Iron Maiden that I expect to be the most talked-about element of the picture. Overall, however, straying so far from Spike as our central focus necessitated a realignment of the stakes that left me less emotionally invested in this outing. 

Nia DaCosta is in the director’s chair this time around, and although I loved the way that Danny Boyle slipped back into this world effortlessly in 28YL, I had a higher opinion of 28 Weeks Later than the consensus, and that film was likewise helmed by a different creative team. Alex Garland still returned to pen this one, and although there’s a distinct stylistic difference between Boyle and DaCosta, I welcome her stamp on this overall enterprise. The zombies have never really been the point in this franchise, and (Samson excepted) the presence of the Rage-afflicted is the smallest here it has ever been, with the extreme gruesome violence on display here coming at the hands of survivors. The infected and the Jimmies have both lost their humanity, but the former did so because of the Rage, while the latter are monsters of Jimmy’s making. This has been the film series’ driving force for as long as it has existed, that man is always the real monster, going all the way back to Christopher Eccleston in the original 28 Days Later. As such, the film’s conflict is also ideological, with Jimmy and the mythology he has built around himself as Satan’s son and heir to dominion over his demons (the infected) inevitably coming to a head with Kelson’s rational atheism, within which he is able to provide some manner of salvation. That he manages to use Jimmy’s follower’s faith against them in the end is clever and satisfying, and I had a great time with the film overall. 

Where I remain most excited to see this franchise continue to go is in its exploration of the way that a disease-ravaged, isolated Britain has, in the absence of a larger social structure, devolved into a series of cults. Sir Jimmy and his crew are an obvious example, as is Kelson’s non-religious (but creepy) solo project of building his elegy of human bones. It didn’t come up in this film, but the island community from which Spike hails seems to have developed some of its own creepy rituals involving a mask, and I expect that the next film in this franchise will see that community return in some form since they are completely absent from this one. Most intriguingly, Samson’s trophy-like acquisition of human heads with attached spines and the way that he displayed them in the woods also seems like a worshipful action, although deciphering the motivation for this is complicated by revelations from Bone Temple, so we shall see. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Rachel Getting Married (2008)

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The #1 rule when attending someone else’s wedding is that you are not, under any circumstances, to make the day about yourself. It’s okay to be a little overly playful, helpful, sentimental, or even chaotic, as long as you avoid becoming the main character on someone else’s Big Special Day. I say that to explain why Jonathan Demme’s 2008 family drama Rachel Getting Married is excruciatingly stressful from start to end despite its setting at what appears to be an overall successfully fun, pleasant party. Anne Hathaway’s recovering-addict antiheroine breaks the #1 wedding rule even more frequently & thoroughly than Julia Roberts’s psychopathic pond-scum romcom lead in My Best Friend’s Wedding. The titular Rachel (Rosemary DeWitt) may be getting married, but her prodigal sister Kym (Hathaway) is pathologically incapable of ceding the spotlight to her for the occasion, since every day of their lives since Kym’s years as a teenage pillhead have been about Kym’s catastrophic, life-ruining fuckups, one after another. The trick of the movie, then, is in Demme’s humanist approach to characterization, leaving you with an equally loving feeling for both sisters, despite one of them obviously being in the deep end of the moral wrong. Every minute of the movie is hell, and yet you walk away feeling like you just met dozens of new friends at a fabulous party, wishing them all the best.

We meet Kym as she’s chainsmoking outside of rehab, hiding behind inch-thick mascara, shaking off the sugary aftertaste of earlier Hathaway breakouts like The Princess Diaries & The Devil Wears Prada. She returns to her family home under intense scrutiny, raising the hairs on every neck in every room she walks into. It isn’t until a periodic NA meeting halfway into the film that it’s fully explained why her presence has that chilling effect. It’s because when she was a pilled-out teenager, she crashed the family car with her younger brother inside, killing him by accident. Her sister (DeWitt) & father (Bill Irwin) still love her, of course, but every day of their lives since that accident has been a reaction to and recovery from the biggest mistake she ever made — the reckless killing of the family’s most vulnerable member. So, when Rachel begs for her wedding to finally be one day that’s about her and not her sister, it’s not the megalomaniacal ramblings of a Bridezilla gone mad; it’s a desperate plea from a caring family member who just needs a break. Kym can’t give her that one day, though, because she hasn’t fully healed yet, and so Rachel getting married has no effect on yet another family gathering becoming another 24/7 marathon episode of The Kym Show, all Kym all the time. Even the sisters’ long-suffering father can’t help but direct his attention to that wayward lamb, even though her mere presence breaks his heart by reminding him of what he’s already lost.

Jonathan Demme manages to stage all of that small, intimate familial melodrama within a large, sprawling party that spreads out for days across rehearsals, nuptials, and goodbyes. As many Hollywood Studio auteurs found themselves doing in the aughts, Demme challenged himself by stripping back the grand-scale production of his more typical work to instead rely on direct, handheld digi cinematography. Under a self-imposed adherence to the rules & principles of Dogme 95, he shot Rachel Getting Married more like a wedding video than a proper feature film. An insanely stacked cast of party guests like rapper Fab Five Freddy, Soft Boys singer Robyn Hitchcock, Dan Deacon collaborator Jimmy Joe Roche, and TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe (as the mostly silent groom) fill the event space, often sharing their various musical talents to entertain each other as the main cast works out their familial issues in the foreground. It’s such a crowded cast of talented people that Demme’s early mentor Roger Corman is listed in the opening credits, but you only catch a single glimpse of him working a digicam during the ceremonial vows. It’s as if Jonathan Demme took the Gene Siskel Test of “Is this movie more interesting than a documentary about the same actors having lunch?” as a kind of challenge by instead asking “Why can’t it be both?” There’s a very real, infectiously fun party going on during Rachel’s wedding that makes the manufactured melodrama that threatens to unravel it all the more stressful.

It’s no small miracle that amongst all that chaotic, freeform partying—effectively shot in real time—Demme still managed to leave space for moments of quiet intimacy. There are countless personalities bouncing around this family home threatening to distract from Kym’s many, many ongoing crises, and Demme carefully takes the time to listen to them with great interest — whether they’re sharing hardships during NA meetings, embarrassing themselves during rehearsal dinner toasts, or jamming out with the wedding band. The single most miraculous scene involves a competitive loading & unloading of the house’s dishwasher: a moment that starts as a small jest between Bill Irwin & Tunde Adebimpe as newly united family members, then escalates into a party-wide bloodsport, and inevitably crashes down into heartbreak once Kym inserts herself into the fray once again. It’s a scene so perfectly conceived that it acts as its own proof-of-concept short film that encapsulates everything about the family & party dynamics that an outsider would need to know, and it’s just as instantly iconic as anything Demme achieved in bigger-scale projects like Philadelphia, The Manchurian Candidate, or Silence of the Lambs. It also speaks well to him that he didn’t allow Kym to become just as much of an iconic villain as his version of Hannibal Lecter was, working with Hathaway to make sure that she’s another beloved member of that party even though she’s the sole source of all its teeth-grinding tension.

-Brandon Ledet

The Housemaid (2025)

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While my partner’s father was in town, we planned to go out and see Eternity, which still sufficiently piqued my interest despite Brandon’s (admittedly semi-positive) indifference to it, and it seemed like something that would be palatable for this kind of outing. Unfortunately, either I or someone responsible for updating the local chain theater’s showtimes made an error, so we arrived ninety minutes earlier than the next showtime, and instead opted to wait only half an hour to check out the most recent Sydney Sweeney vehicle, The Housemaid. I admit that the trailer had me intrigued, as it looked like the kind of trashy erotic thriller that we don’t see many of anymore, but I’ve also soured on Sweeney of late, so despite my lifetime adoration of co-lead Amanda Seyfried, I planned to sit this one out. Fate put me in that reclining seat of the Regal this past weekend, and I have to admit, I was entertained. I missed his name in the opening credits, but by the midpoint of this film, I knew that it was a Paul Feig production, so it was no surprise when his name appeared at the film’s conclusion. It’s strange to be able to pick up on that despite having only seen four of his twelve features (including this one), but there’s a certain inexplicable essence that’s unmistakably his; this has the same energy as A Simple Favor and an identical star rating, which is solid if unremarkable. Not that I’m judging him, really. I’m probably the last living person who ever thinks about Other Space, which I rather liked. 

Millie (Sweeney) is a recently paroled former inmate who was wrongfully convicted due to the friend whose assault she ended failing to corroborate her testimony. After serving ten years, she’s living in her car and can hardly believe her luck when her interview with Nina Winchester (Seyfried) to be the Winchester family’s live-in housemaid goes well and she’s hired. Although Nina’s eight-year-old daughter Cecilia is cold to Millie, Nina’s husband Andrew (Brandon Sklenar) begins with puzzled courtesy that predictably escalates to some hot and heavy adultery. Millie only falls into Andrew’s charms, however, because of a constant campaign of gaslighting on Nina’s part. She tersely demands that she pick up Cecilia from ballet the same night that she’s supposed to sleep over at a friend’s in order to embarrass Millie. Nina instructs Millie to purchase Broadway tickets and an overnight stay at a hotel for Nina and Andrew in the city and then berates her for doing so for the date requested, when Nina will be driving Cecilia to camp. Andrew ends up taking Millie on the date night, getting them separate rooms when they’ve had too many cocktails to go back to Long Island, but they ultimately give in to their lusts. When Andrew finally throws Nina out after yet another outburst, Millie quickly moves into Andrew’s bed, but it isn’t long before she starts to wonder if she put too much stock in the local gossip about Nina’s past psychological history and their petty sniping about how Andrew was too good for her. 

Since I didn’t expect I would be seeing this movie, I allowed myself to be spoiled by an early review for it. I’ll happily confirm that what one would probably expect based solely on the trailer for the film isn’t quite the narrative that you’re in for. It’s much like A Simple Favor in that it’s recognizably a narrative born of a mind that’s burdened with the knowledge of far too many Lifetime thrillers. Recurring tropes of that genre abound: the overbearing mother (Elisabeth Perkins plays Andrew’s with icy perfection despite very little actual screentime), the single mom easily entrapped by a wealthy man, the gaslighting employer, the new domestic servant’s room being an isolated place that may as well be a cell, the too-perfect husband, the backbiting PTA friends, the elaborate gambits that play out satisfactorily if not necessarily sensibly. You have until the end of this paragraph to jump ship if you want to go into the film with no foreknowledge. To his credit, Feig understands that the modern audience needs a wider array of eroticism. One of the things that I thought about while watching Dressed to Kill recently was that erotic thrillers of the bygone eras were designed to sexually stimulate only those who get a thrill out of watching a woman undress and shower. Feig is an equal opportunity titillator, as while the camera lovingly showcases Sweeney’s toned abs and voluptuous bosom, it spends just as much time ogling Sklenar’s chiseled abdomen and statuesque physique; we even linger on a shot that invites us to dwell on his sculpted derriere while he brushes his teeth, and let’s not even get into the muscle-hugging tank tops that leave very little of the actor’s areola to the imagination. While Sweeney sleepwalks through her lines, Seyfried is knocking it out of the park with a performance that vacillates between seemingly sincere remorse and seething, feral ferocity. She gives a performance that’s on par with Jennifer Lawrence’s in Die My Love, and it’s perhaps too good for the kind of movie that it is: elevated schlock from someone whose brain was warped by seeing Mother May I Sleep With Danger? one too many times after school. It’s nothing all that novel, but it’s twisty and entertaining enough, and if my packed screening is any indication, it’s effectively reaching its target market (BookTok teens). 

Spoilers ahoy. I can’t sufficiently divorce the film as I saw it from the plot outline I already knew to parse exactly how I would have felt if I had seen the film in a vacuum with no prior knowledge. It certainly felt to me that Nina’s treatment of Millie was within the realm of reality of what it must be like to be a contemporary housemaid for a privileged family, even if the narrative requires that Millie either stick it out or go back to prison in order to justify why she tolerates the escalating tensions. On the other hand, one doesn’t go into a thriller without expecting the other shoe to drop eventually, and I don’t think that anyone in the audience is going to make it to about the forty-five minute mark and think that Millie is going to live happily ever after with Andrew and Cecilia after Nina is banished from the Winchester estate. One might think that Nina might then return for revenge, perhaps with the assistance of her groundskeeper Enzo (Michele Morrone), or that Millie herself has been lying to us in her narration all along and she’s going to play black widow to Andrew now that Nina is out of the way. But to get to that conclusion, one has to ignore (what feels like) heavy-handed foreshadowing of Andrew’s hidden sociopathy. Sklenar pulls out the same charm that made him such a magnetic romantic lead in Drop, and its effectiveness is going to vary depending on whether or not he seems too perfect to be believed from the very beginning. Even knowing that going in, I didn’t have all of the details of how Millie would get the upper hand and how the power dynamics would further shift between the relevant trio. (It’s worth noting that the ending is changed from the source novel as well, meaning that even fans of the book are in for some surprises.) My desire for a twisty thriller was satiated. It’s not one that I would rush to see in a theater, but once it’s available for no-additional-cost streaming on one of the services you already have, you’ll have a better time than if you watch one of David DeCoteau’s twenty-eight (and counting) The Wrong… films. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Host (2006)

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When we discussed our conflicting feelings about Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, Brandon likened it to how Spanish critics have had to explain to English-speaking audiences that Pedro Almodóvar’s work in his native language has always been purposefully arch & overly theatrical. Specifically, the discourse revolved around allegations that English speakers perceive Almodóvar’s Spanish language works through a kind of veil of European exoticism while accurately identifying the more over-the-top and camp sensibilities in his recent films for audiences in the Western Hemisphere, which may also be the case with del Toro’s filmography. I’ve occasionally wondered about this in relation to last year’s Mickey 17, which was an overall disappointment to me as a Bong Joon-Ho fan, and which I dismissed as an example of his tendency to talk down to Western audiences that didn’t work for me this time, as it had in Snowpiercer. Was it possible that I was viewing Bong’s works in his native tongue through some kind of reverential veil and that Memories of Murder and Parasite were also over the top (outside of the moments of levity that were obvious across cultures) and I wasn’t picking up on it because I don’t speak Korean? Luckily, a viewing of Bong’s 2006 film The Host assuaged these doubts; when he’s going over the top, there’s no way to miss it. 

Half a decade after an American pathologist orders his Korean assistant to circumvent safety regulations about the disposal of toxic chemicals by directing him to pour (hundreds of bottles of) formaldehyde into a drain that eventually empties into the Han River, a mutant river beast emerges, killing dozens of people and abducting others. One of the abducted (and presumed deceased) is Park Hyun-seo (Go Ah-sung), the daughter of single father Gang-du (frequent Bong collaborator Song Kang-ho), a lazy manchild with bleached hair. Gang-du assists his father Hee-bong (Byun Hee-bong) in the operation of a riverside snack bar that they occupy as well, but his “assistance” is hampered by his apparent laziness and frequent napping, and his overall flaws are further communicated by his ill-advised choice to give his daughter a beer. The two of them are excited to watch Nam-joo (Bae Doona), Gang-du’s sister and Hyun-seo’s aunt, in the Olympic archery competition, but her primary character traits of being extremely proficient but hesitant and timid are telegraphed by her receipt of “only” the bronze medal as she allowed her time clock to run out. Hee-bong’s third child, Nam-il (Park Hae-il), is the only one to have gone to college, but his academic achievement has not netted him a job offer, and he’s taken refuge in the bottle. 

When the monster first emerges from the river, Gang-du manages to put up a pretty good effort, assisting a nearby American soldier who charges into the fray. He grabs Hyun-seo by the hand to flee and makes it some distance before falling, grabbing her again, and continuing to run, only to look down and see that he’s grabbed the wrong child in the fracas and is forced to watch helplessly as the monster brings her to the other side of the river and disappears. The Park family comes together in the wake of this tragedy, but during a mass memorial for the victims, a disease control team arrives in hazmat suits and advises that American scientists have theorized that some of the wounds left behind on survivors may indicate that the animal is a carrier for an unknown virus, and all present are shuttled off to a hospital for quarantine. Gang-du gets a call from Hyun-seo that indicates she’s still alive, and the Parks have to escape quarantine and work together to try and find the beast’s lair in the sewers before it’s too late. 

This is an unusual turn for Song Kang-ho as this is the first time I found it difficult to like him (at least in Bong’s filmography; he’s had a few effective villainous turns when working with Park Chan-Wook). It’s not his fault that his entire generation of the Park clan seems to be afflicted with narcolepsy, but his frequent sleepiness aside, he still does a lot of things that make him seem like a goofy old stoner in an American film about a guy who’s refused to grow up, even after having a child. That did not endear him to me as a character, especially when he later tries to explain to the authorities that he received a phone call from his presumed dead daughter and can’t hold it together long enough to explain this clearly. Instead he simply insists that “She’s deceased, but she’s not dead,” which doesn’t do him any favors, and not even the presence of his famous Olympian sister is enough to get anyone to listen to him. It’s in all of this that Bong is going very broad with the comedy, if it wasn’t already clear from the awkwardly long sequence in which Gang-du causes such a scene at the memorial that the rest of the Park family get involved in the bawl/brawl and security has to step in. It’s as campy as his movies for a Western audience, which comes through at the end when a forced lobotomy seems to suddenly make him hypercompetent. It’s not subtle, and now I can breathe a sigh of relief and rest assured I’m not simply elevating his Korean language films out of ignorance. 

There are other hallmarks of Bong’s work here, of course. It wouldn’t be a Bong Joon-Ho feature without some political commentary; it’s no surprise that American interference is the initial cause of the problem. On the cover of the DVD for the film is a pull-quote that says The Host “is on par with Jaws!” and while that’s a decent point of comparison, the film is much more like the original Godzilla in that it’s about an amphibious kaiju awakened (or in this case mutated) by American negligence, with tragic consequences for the respective coastal/island Asian nation states. Here, American interventionism continues throughout as a narrative thread, from the appearance of U.S. soldier Donald White at the first emergence of the beast from the river, to the American C.D.C. getting involved in quarantine and containment, eventually taking over the assault on the creature with a chemical weapon called Agent Yellow. That this deployment does virtually no long term damage to the creature (it’s up to Nam-il dousing it in gasoline, Nam-joo setting it ablaze with a burning arrow, and Gang-du stabbing it with a broken traffic post to bring it down) while harming if not killing the dozens of protestors who are opposed to the release of dangerous chemicals is, as always, a fun insight into Bong’s politics. Even when he’s doing a silly one, he’s still unmistakably at the helm. It’s worth noting as well that Gang-du’s aforementioned lobotomy was performed when he understood enough English to overhear a conversation in which an American scientist admits that there’s been no additional evidence of a virus and that they’re all in over their heads. 

In 2006 when the film was released, it was undoubtedly a bold new monster movie, but it lacks the timelessness of some of his other works; or perhaps what I mean to say is that if you already know Bong as an auteur after seeing some of his other films, this one may be a letdown, but if you approach it as a straight monster movie, you’re more likely to be satisfied. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Café Flesh (1982)

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The most infamous critical assessment of pornographic filmmaking was penned by a judge, not by a professional film critic. During a 1964 obscenity case, US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was forced to legally define the dividing line where sexually explicit art becomes hardcore pornography, and the best he could come up with was “I know it when I see it.” At the time, he was ruling on what kinds of material would be legally approved for public exhibition in the US, participating in a long tradition of governmental censorship of pornographic art, but it was such a rarely honest, human moment within that tradition that it’s continued to reverberate in the half-century since. That “I know it when I see it” ruling even continues to resonate in how modern film critics write about pornographic cinema, as the Porno Chic moment of the 1970s & 80s has once again become a fascination for film-nerd tastemakers. There’s an attraction among hip genre-film aesthetes to treat vintage hardcore pornography as the next taboo cult-cinema frontier to be conquered, now that every last slasher, giallo, erotic thriller, and noir pic of any interest has already been given the loving 4K Blu-Ray restoration treatment. How far does that renewed critical interest in hardcore porno go, though? If a vintage porno like Bijou or Blonde Ambition is worthy of critical re-appraisal through a modern lens, why aren’t more recent best-seller titles like Visiting My Anal In-Laws 2 or POV Juggfuckers 8 also afforded that same critical consideration? I’ve personally reviewed feature-length porno parodies of films as wide-ranging as Batman, West World, The Exorcist, and Repulsion on this very website, so why haven’t I also made the time for Pulp Friction, American Whore Story, or Back to the Cooter? Part of that decision making is that all movies become more interesting and culturally significant with time, so the better-funded, better plotted pornos made in the Golden Age of Porno Chic are going to be inherently more attractive for critical analysis than the straight-to-VOD porno of today. But where is the dividing line? Is there a definitive temporal or budgetary cutoff that cleanly divides the art from the schlock? The simple answer is no; I just know it when I see it.

Of course, this fussy self-analysis over what forms of hardcore pornography I consider worth covering on this sub-professional film blog doesn’t carry much big-picture significance. I’m no Supreme Court Justice. It was just on my mind after I looked up the 1982 dystopian sci-fi porno Café Flesh on the social media website Letterboxd: this generation’s online hub for cinematic discourse. I had just watched Café Flesh for the first time after purchasing a nice, newly restored scan of it on Blu-ray from the niche genre-cinema label Mondo Macabre. As if it wasn’t already embarrassing enough that I was curious what my fellow Letterboxd users had to say about the artistic merits of a 40-year-old porno, my search also dug up three titles in the Café Flesh series, not just the infamous one from director Stephen Sayadian. Apparently there was a Café Flesh 2 produced in 1997 and a Café Flesh 3 in 2003, long after the Porno Chic wave had crested. While the original film maintains a small, niche place in genre-filmmaking history (and on the boutique Blu-ray market), those two direct-to-video sequels are the kind of long-abandoned porno schlock you’ll only find on copyright-infringing streaming sites with names like SpankBang & TNAFlix. Based on their release dates, screengrabs, and slipcover art, I totally get it. They appear to be purely, crassly commercial products that conform to the respective industry standards of their times, produced entirely with the intent of arousing a few orgasms and, more importantly, selling a few video tapes. Meanwhile, Sayadian’s original Café Flesh is a bizarre cultural oddity: a hardcore porno that routinely, deliberately makes creative decisions that undermine its commercial, erotic potential. A post-apocalyptic sci-fi parable about a near-future dystopia where most nuclear-fallout survivors can’t stomach sexual contact without wanting to vomit, the film is stubbornly silly, depressing, and gross. Maybe that’s the dividing line between pornographic art and porno schlock: the willingness to undermine any possible titillation to be found in visual depictions of penetrative sex with so much extraneous bullshit that the audience can only walk away wondering, “Who was this for? Why was it made?”

Set in “a world destroyed, a mutant universe” left over after our impending nuclear holocaust, Café Flesh imagines a future society in which 99% of surviving humans become insurmountably nauseated when they attempt to have sexual intercourse. So, a fascistic government agency has been created to force the remaining 1% of sexually viable survivors to perform for the majority population’s entertainment, as a kind of addictive surrogate for sexual release. The titular “café” is a nightclub in which large groups of Sex Negatives gather to watch a small celebrity class of Sex Positives get it on in public, performing on a small stage as if they were singing karaoke. Think it of it as the de-evolution porno, a series of novelty sex acts staged through music video choreo in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where everyone’s horny but (almost) nobody fucks. Stephen Sayadian puts his personal stamp on the material as a name-brand reprobate auteur (under the porn-industry pseudonym Rinse Dream). Here, he develops a lot of the sound-stage surrealism imagery he would later push to ecstatic German Expressionist extremes in his career-high achievement Dr. Caligari, to much sillier results. In the opening sex number, a milkman in a humanoid rat mask fucks a bored housewife while her three overgrown man-babies watch from their high-chair perches in the background, dancing in place to the beat. Then, a giant sports-mascot pencil in a business suit fucks an office worker on his desk while his secretary types notes in rhythm, giving new meaning to the phrase “pencil dick.” Even when these cartoonish exhibitions are replaced with more traditional sex acts, Sayadian continues to undermine all potential for sincere arousal in his audience, such as in a lesbian orgy that is scored with maniacal male laughter and the droning bomb sirens of an oncoming air raid. These theatrical novelty acts are broken up by the recursive reaction shots and petty domestic squabbles of the Sex Negative audience watching from the floor, occasionally interrupted by a Steve Martin-impersonating MC who ads an air of state-sanctioned menace to the proceedings. The only genuine moments of eroticism are found in the taboo of crossing the threshold from observer to participant. When someone officially designated as Sex Negative is found out to be a Sex Positive in hiding and pressured into exhibitionism, the movie allows for genuine erotic tension to hang in the air; everything else is grotesque mockery of Reagan’s America and its inevitable toxic fallout.

While Dr. Caligari is Stephen Sayadian’s greater artistic achievement overall, Café Flesh holds its own cultural significance as the definitive 80s movie. It expresses all of the artistic & sexual neuroses of a generation rattled by Porno Chic, MTV, and nuclear bombing drills through a funhouse mirror reflection of the times. I’ve seen lowlier, crasser versions of this exact 80s-specific porno aesthetic in contemporary titles like New Wave Hookers, but I’ve yet to see it achieved with such an active disinterest in the erotic potential of the depicted sex. Even in making that distinction, I’m attempting to draw a line between the commercially minded pornographic filmmaking of Gregory Dark and the for-their-own-sake poetic indulgences of Stephen Sayadian, once again relying on a “I know it when I see it” system of assigning artistic merit to one version of pornography over another. Sometimes you just have to admit that there’s nothing new or novel left to say about film as a medium that wasn’t already better worded decades before you were born; it’s just that we’re more used to those short-hand critical wisdoms coming from a Roger Ebert or a Pauline Kael, not a judge on the Supreme Court.

-Brandon Ledet