reviews

The Puffy Chair (2005)

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I’m not fully sure where the current film culture consensus is on the Duplass Brothers. They’ve been quietly making low-budget indie dramedies for two decades now, and the larger cultural response to their work has remained at the same low, continual hum. Back when they started in the mumblecore days of the early 2000s, however, their performatively unpretentious filmmaking style made a relatively big splash in the industry, enough to convince established heavy hitters like Jonathan Demme to try their own hand at aggressively casual digicam dramas like Rachel Getting Married. I suppose I feel some personal affection for the Duplasses as Metairie-boys-made-good locals who’ve survived in an industry that’s since moved on after mumblecore’s brief moment in the Sundance sunshine, but I only occasionally dip into their work when it touches on genres I frequent, like the camcorder horror Creep or the sci-fi whatsit Biosphere. Given the wider cultural apathy for their indie cinema contributions (alongside an even harsher indifference to fellow mumblecore pioneer Joe Swanberg), I was surprised, then, that their breakout debut The Puffy Chair was given a 20th anniversary victory-lap release this month, celebrating two decades of quiet, low-budget crowd displeasers from our old pals Mark & Jay.

Mark Duplass stars in this go-nowhere road trip drama, co-written and co-directed with his brother Jay. It’s partially a movie about brothers, contrasting the frustratingly rigid, stubborn personality of Mark’s protagonist with the free-spirit openness of his fictional brother, a habitually jobless artist (Rhett Wilkins). More so, it’s a movie about bros, examining the quirks & kinks of the modern hetero male ego and finding the entire gender lacking in morality & merit. Our two brothers in crisis embark on a road trip to purchase the titular La-Z-Boy recliner as surprise gift for their father’s birthday, hoping to stage a family reunion with a familiar relic from their familial past in tow. They butt heads on the trip, as brothers do, but most of their personal issues arise from their relationships with women. The free spirit in the van falls in love just as quickly as he falls out of it, while our egotistical anti-hero drags out a doomed romance with a long-term girlfriend (Katie Aselton) whom he’d rather bicker with than commit to. The entire trip is shot on handheld, commercial grade digicams as if it were a documentary, and the only major splurge in the budget is the puffy La-Z-Boy, which goes through as much anguished hell as the characters who drag it down the highway. It’s all low-stakes, mildly funny malaise until late-night alcohol binges make the romantic arguments too vicious to bare, and the characters take their frustrations out on the chair instead of parting ways like they should.

The broey sensibilities of The Puffy Chair aren’t an accident; they’re deliberately evoked as a kind of self-skewering. Every detail about Mark Duplass’s self-assured asshole protagonist is seemingly designed to parody an early-aughts indie-scene bro archetype: his floppy hair cut, his American Apparel hoodie, his tighty-whities, his entrepreneurial pursuits as a failed musician turned band manager, his name being Josh. This very clearly a “depiction ≠ endorsement” situation, with the film’s main mission being a character study of the minute ways that Josh is a self-centered prick. Still, there is a kind of default-macho POV emanating from behind the camera that doesn’t feel entirely pointed or intentional, and that broey sensibility might help illuminate why the Duplasses have quietly drifted from the center of the indie filmmaking scene over the past couple decades. The same day that I watched The Puffy Chair in theaters, I had streamed Shudder’s feminist talking-heads documentary 1000 Women in Horror at home, in which women filmmakers are interviewed about their participation in & appreciate of the genre. In it, actor-turned-director Brea Grant relays an anecdote about her early days as a performer where she frequently had to ask male screenwriters what her character does for a living, since she could get no sense of who they were as a person outside their relationships to the male leads. That question echoed in my mind hours later watching The Puffy Chair. Does Josh’s girlfriend have a job? Does she have a life outside the world of Josh? It’s impossible to say.

It’s funny that this movie’s quiet re-release has coincided with a wider cultural celebration of the TV series Nirvanna the Band, which got its own theatrical victory lap earlier this year with Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. Both movies parodically skewer the same early-aughts indie scene bro archetype; Nirvanna the Band just has an easier time winning an audience over with overt humor while The Puffy Chair feels sadistically eager to dwell in discomfort. Between them, I feel like I’ve accidentally stumbled into a cursed time machine that only goes back to my worst college years. Their respective soundtracks are a major part of that temporal displacement, with Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie kicking off on a vintage Ben Folds track, while The Puffy Chair includes college-radio hits from Death Cab for Cutie, Spoon, and Of Montreal – all bands that have been collecting cultural dust since the dingiest days of the flip-phone aughts. While last year’s Secret Mall Apartment attempted to revive the new-sincerity hopefulness of the 2000s indie scene, The Puffy Chair & Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie brought me back to that decade as I actually remember it: grotesquely broey, depressed, poorly dressed, in standard definition. To their credit, The Duplasses appear to have been hyper aware of the era’s faults & foibles as they were happening, ready to be captured on MiniDV tapes for Sundance festival audiences’ squirmy mortification.

-Brandon Ledet

Thank God It’s Friday (1978)

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What’s the ultimate disco movie? Most people’s immediate thought would be Saturday Night Fever, but that’s because they’re picturing the few minutes of strutting & dancing that interrupt the other two hours of abject human misery that make up the rest of the runtime. Boogie Nights almost qualifies from a nostalgic throwback angle, but it’s more about disco partiers’ day jobs as pornographers than it is about their nighttime dance routines. Both the Village People vehicle Can’t Stop the Music and the Olivia Newton John musical Xanadu are strong contenders, but it’s hard to say that with a straight face without being laughed out of the room. That leaves 1978’s Thank God It’s Friday as the only legitimate pick for the ultimate disco flick, by which I mean it’s the one that you’d most readily show audiences who were too young or too square to be there and say, “This is how it was.” I assume that was the thinking behind the film’s recent screening at The Broad, anyway, which was programmed by the disco-themed Mardi Gras dance krewe Disco Amigos. Thank God It’s Friday may not be the best or most popular disco movie, but it is the most illustrative, like a cocaine-fueled time machine back to the most over-packed, overpriced nightclub of the 1970s.

This all-in-one-Friday-night ensemble cast comedy is set entirely inside and around the fictional LA disco club The Zoo. Much like the titular club in Xanadu (and, by extension, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”), The Zoo is an impossible fantasy space that offers multiple levels of amoral hedonism. There are multiple bars, an arcade, a makeout room, a crow’s nest DJ booth overlooking the dance floor, and multi-story bird statues seemingly themed after Baba Yaga’s home for reasons unknown. There isn’t a plot so much as there is an whole lot of chaotic busyness leading up to a climactic Commodores concert, which includes a much-anticipated dance contest for the audience. Thank God It’s Friday does a great job of keeping a fun party vibe going in the leadup to that payoff, despite its struggles as a comedy with an excess of whiny characters and no discernible jokes. Every single person who enters the club complains at top volume about how crowded, expensive, and awkward it is to be there, except in the few blissful sequences when they’re dancing too vigorously to talk. The only true standouts in the cast are a young Jeff Goldblum as the nightclub’s sleazebag owner, who spends that evening wooing an uptight married woman (Andrea Howard), and Donna Summer, who spends it trying to trick the DJ into allowing her to perform “Last Dance” as The Commodore’s unofficial opener. The DJ eventually relents (while the tempted housewife ultimately doesn’t), and “Last Dance” got enough of a main-stage spotlight to earn a much deserved Oscar for Best Original Song. Then, The Commodores perform “Too Hot ta Trot” to leave you on a strobelit high note, convincing you that this sweatily unfunny comedy was overall a pretty good time. In the movie’s own words, “Dancing! Everything else is bullshit.”

The best parts of Thank God It’s Friday‘s recent screening at The Broad were more a matter of presentation than of content. The showtime was scheduled during a pop-up poster sale run by Deadly Prey Gallery, who sell reproduced artwork inspired by hyper-violent horror & action flicks, hand-painted by artists in Ghana. When I arrived at the theater, the Disco Amigos were doing happy-faced disco routines in the sunshine, the exploitation genre freaks were gawking at art-gallery grotesqueries inside, and the city itself has rarely felt so beautiful. There was a second dance break during the film’s climactic rendition of “Too Hot ta Trot,” which the Disco Amigos performed quietly shuffling the dark, bravely pushing through the brief interjections of dialogue that lowered the song in the sound mix. They also handed out free kazoos at the door for a Rocky Horror-style call & response game that I still don’t fully understand, since I cannot recall a single kazoo appearing in the actual film. After Krewe da Bhan Gras’s recent screening of Mississippi Masala, that’s the second time I attended a Mardi Gras krewe’s promotional event at The Broad this year. In both instances, I felt like I was crashing someone else’s party, since both audiences were packed with krewe members and their immediate family, and in both instances I felt a warm welcome in the room anyway. I recommend keeping an eye out for future events from those krewes and other Mardi Gras contingents on The Broad’s monthly calendar more so than I recommend revisiting Thank God It’s Friday in particular. Like disco itself, it’s largely a “You had to be there” phenomenon, better experienced than described.

-Brandon Ledet

Mad Love (1935)

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This movie has everything. Bald-headed Peter Lorre hyperfixating on BDSM theater. Sad little orphans with weak spines. A condemned man praising the Hoover Dam. Evil hand transplants. Carnies being guillotined. One—and only one—Caligarian German Expressionist interior set. A wax Galatea. Drunken double vision cockatiels. Train derailments. It is a masterpiece. And not even seventy minutes long! 

Dr. Gogol (Lorre) is a masterful surgeon, a veritable miracle worker who spends his spare time occupying the same balcony seat for every performance at a “theatre” in which Yvonne Orlac (Frances Drake) is kinkily tortured, night after night, in a scene that perfunctorily depicts some historical event. When he learns that not only has Yvonne been married for the entire period of his distant infatuation but also that she’s leaving for England to be with her up and coming pianist/composer husband Stephen (Colin Clive), Gogol is bereft. As luck would have it, a train bearing both Stephen and a skilled knife-thrower being escorted to his execution gets into an accident; Stephen’s hands are crushed and require amputation, but a desperate Yvonne begs Gogol to save her husband’s hands, and he lights upon the idea of using the executed criminal’s appendages to save Stephen’s livelihood. Even after months of expensive physical therapy, Stephen finds himself unable to play like he used to, although he seems to have developed an acute ability to throw sharp objects, all while his temper seems to grow ever worse. 

I was looking for something to wash out the bad aftertaste of seeing Lorre in brownface in Secret Agent, and I could not have asked for a more perfect palate cleanser. Dr. Gogol is one of Lorre’s greatest characters, easily the equal of the impulsive, pathetic monster Hans in M or the perpetually sweating Abbott in The Man Who Knew Too Much, just an absolute freak whose gifted talent as a surgeon makes him a respectable member of a community that can never know just how much of a deviant pervert he is behind closed doors. Just when you think the film can’t get any more exciting, there he is in the distance putting a negligee on the wax figure of Yvonne he saved from being destroyed when her stage tenure came to an end. Then Gogol one-ups himself when a bid to frame Stephen for the murder of his own stepfather leads to a scene that features Yvonne coming face to face with this harrowing image, and all of us in the audience are close to crawling out of our skin. 

Of course, much of the film’s success depends on the masterful direction of Metropolis cinematographer and later The Mummy helmer Karl Freund. The film is hauntingly gothic in its imagery, even when the subject matter is lewd, manic, or quite funny. Even the opening credits get in on the action, as the film’s stars are listed on a pane of glass that’s shattered by an angry fist. The script is also a delight, with my biggest laugh coming in the moment that the condemned murderer, Rollo, asks for a moment to speak with a nearby reporter named Reagan who happens to be American; their discourse is brief but ends with Rollo’s underwhelming final words, “Oh well, so long.” I can’t even fully put into words how wonderful this one is; you’ll just have to see it for yourself. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Number Seventeen (1932)

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The last fifteen minutes of Number Seventeen are representative of Alfred Hitchcock at his finest: tense, thrilling, laden with spectacle, and very fun. It’s unfortunate that for a film with such a short runtime (under 65 minutes!), it spends its first three quarters treading water in a sloppy, lousy, mishmash of an Agatha Christie locked room mystery and an Oscar Wilde farce. 

The titular location is a seemingly abandoned house where a number of figures converge over the course of a dark and stormy night. There’s an awful lot of farting about during which the difficulty in telling all of the characters apart is made even more complicated by the fact that a lot of proper names are thrown around—Fordyce, Sheldrake, Brant, Barton, etc—among four of the five men, but the characters give false identities at different times and swap them about between each other. Two of the men even have matching hats and identical moustaches! The gist is that a very expensive diamond necklace has been stolen, some number of the men are criminals, one of them is probably a detective, a seemingly dead body is actually alive (twice!), and one of the criminals is accompanied by a woman named Nora (Anne Grey) who is pretending to be deaf and mute, for reasons that are never entirely clear. The only man who seems to be what he presents himself to be is a squatter named Ben (Leon St. Lion, who had previously appeared in the stage version), an alcoholic who has a much-abused sausage in his pocket. It’s all even less thrilling than it sounds. 

The plot gets going at last when the necklace turns up and it’s revealed that the house sits atop an access hatch that allows one to descend to a set of railroad tracks that eventually lead to a train ferry. A few of the criminals manage to board it with Nora in tow believing that the necklace is in their possession despite it having been picked from one of their pockets by Ben, while the man who introduced himself as Fordyce attempts to head off their getaway by commandeering a public bus. This is when things finally get interesting, as the thieves crawl around on the outside of the train to take out its various crew when they refuse to accommodate their demands, leaving a few petty burglars at the helm of a runaway locomotive that they don’t know how to stop. This is intercut with the rapid approach of the bus, as we watch the riders’ initial thrill of it all before they start to get tossed around a bit, and there are even brief moments when it appears that the bus and the train will collide, only for the engine to divert to an overpass while the bus passes through a tunnel that goes under the tracks. All the while, peacefully and inexorably, the ferry ship is coming into port. 

All of this is done with miniature work that most modern viewers would find laughable, but which I find utterly charming. That’s come to be one of my favorite things about revisiting his earlier films of late, from the impressive opening sequence of The Lady Vanishes to Young and Innocent’s delightful trainyard sequences. This was also a young director who just absolutely loved a train derailment, and Number Seventeen has one that involves smashing through a series of gates and crashing into a ship, with the train car bearing characters I presume we are supposed to care about are slowly sinking beneath the surface of the water like one of those convenient submarine air pockets that the photogenic leads on Baywatch were always finding themselves trapped in. It’s a delight, and it’s almost enough to save the film, but not quite. The final fifteen minutes alone in isolation are worth the ticket price, but if you can, just skip to that ending and don’t worry about the plot at all. Hitchcock didn’t. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

A Body to Live In (2026)

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Practically every adult I know socially has either a tattoo or a body piercing, if not both. Even I, a total square, have a few small tattoos myself, which you’ve only ever seen if we’ve hung out in an environment where it was appropriate to not wear socks. It’s increasingly common to see visible tattoos, nose rings, and other low-level body modifications in professional settings, since they’re now so common that they’re no longer transgressive or taboo. It wasn’t too long ago that this wasn’t the case. I remember tattoos & body piercings signaling a much edgier, fringe personality type growing up in the 1990s, whereas they’re now just as casual of a fashion choice as a quirky hat or what color shirt to wear. You can track the timeline of that body-mod culture shift in the new documentary A Body to Live In, which profiles the life, art, and spiritual practice of “modern primitivist” Fakir Musafar. From his early experiments with corset-binding fetish photography in the 1940s through his educational body-piercing and body suspension workshops in the 2010s, Musafar’s entire artistic, spiritual, and professional life was dedicated to the practice of body modification, and he saw that practice evolve from private kink play to public fashion display first-hand, seemingly involved with every major milestone of the journey. So, the documentary doubles as both a portrait of Fakir Musafar and as a broader overview history of body modification in the American mainstream.

I had never heard of Fakir Musafar before seeing this documentary, but he lived such a Forrest Gumpish life across so many various subcultures that I am familiar with that he continually crossed paths with faces that were already familiar to me: fellow self-promoting ritualist Anton LaVey, feminist pornographer Annie Sprinkle, professional Bob Flanagan flogger Sheree Rose, etc. Musafar’s body-mod journey was inspired by pure impulse (charged, at least partially, by unresolved gender dysphoria), and his early photographs were all produced in private, mostly consisting of corseting his body to simulate a female figure and then piercing that figure with needles and heavy ornaments. Once he found likeminded spirits across underground queer subcultures in 1970s California, the practice became much more social & less insular, and he was involved with a seemingly impossible range of extreme subcultures: heavy leather kinksters, Radical Faerie hippies, gallery-scene performance artists, and whoever else would show a sexual or spiritual interest in the ritualistic piercing & contorting of the human body. A lot of ground is covered very quickly as he drifts from subculture to subculture, always positing himself as a kind of mystic elder for the young & uninitiated to up to for guidance. We get to witness the evolution of professional body modification from the very first body-piercing shop opening in 1970s San Francisco to their modern omnipresence in every small town’s strip malls, but it’s always filtered through Musafar’s very particular, singular worldview.

For how impressively influential is subject was in a wide range of hip vintage subcultures, A Body to Live In is surprisingly smart about not devolving into hagiography. Musafar’s most glaring faults & criticisms are out there in the open, including control issues in his private relationships and larger accusations of cultural appropriation. In describing his early, private body-mod practices, Musafar explains that he was often inspired by ethnographic photographs in National Geographic magazines but would not read the accompanying captions, because he did not want the imagery spoiled by journalistic “interpretation.” Later, while promoting his “modern primitivism” philosophy on daytime talk shows, he struggles to articulate the authenticity of his body-mod rituals when confronted by Indigenous audiences who find his pick-and-choose appropriation of their cultures politically offensive. Even the term “primitive” is directly challenged for its political implications in the opening minutes, which might not be expected of a documentary exalting the movement for its positive influence across American subcultures. It’s very thoughtful, measured, and yet sincerely participatory in the body-mod spirituality depicted, making sure to include voices of dissent & discomfort with the practices’ cultural insensitivity while also showing the therapeutic & political good it can do in the right contexts.

Director Angelo Madsen does his best not to personally intrude on the material, except in a brief expression of regret for not asking Musafar a couple clarifying questions while he was alive to answer them. The most stylistic imposition on the material is found in the colorful psychedelia of the photograph development process, which helps transition from still photo to still photo without the clinical rigidness of an art-gallery slideshow. Madsen also arranges individual photos and slides on the screen to deliberately create a frame-within-a-frame distance from the original images, drawing attention to how Musafar’s curation of his photographs pushed his practice further into a fine art sphere than mere personal documentation of religious ritual & sexual kink. Musafar publicized his work through a wide range of artistic mediums, from the still photography he experimented with in his parents’ basement to documentary hosting in 1985’s Dances Sacred and Profane to confrontational performance art in the post-AIDS 1990s. It’s clear that his own body was the medium he was most interested in expressing himself through, though, as evidenced by his decades-long development of his nipples into cylindrical ornaments of great public interest. There’s a range of debate offered by the documentary’s talking heads about whether his primary motivation for that art was sexual, political, intellectual, gendered, or purely spiritual, and it’s to the film’s benefit that no one could definitively answer the question. They’re all partially true.

-Brandon Ledet

The Bride! (2026)

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There are many more direct sequels to James Whale’s Frankenstein than most people realize. Universal made eight Frankenstein movies in the famous monster’s original run across the 1930s & 40s, while most modern audiences’ experience with him stops at the second one: 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein, also directed by Whale. Whale was already in a “Okay, now let’s do a goofy one” mood by the time he made Bride, sacrificing some of the haunting beauty of his first Frankenstein film for screwball antics and intentional camp. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s new Frankenstein riff is largely going to be interpreted as a feminist reboot of that early Frankenstein sequel, since it directly references a couple of its more outlandish details: the living bell-jar specimens of the mad scientist’s lab and the fact that actress Elsa Lanchester plays both Mary Shelley (in the intro) and the titular monster bride (in the finale). Hot off her Oscar-winning performance as the violently grieving mother of Shakespeare’s children in Hamnet, Jessie Buckley is deployed to hit both of those goofball references in The Bride!, briefly appearing as a floating head in a bell jar and, more importantly, pulling double duty as both Mary Shelley’s ghost and the undead woman’s body she possesses. That decision to extend Mary Shelley’s screentime via body possession is part of what pushes The Bride! past its limitations as a Bride of Frankenstein modernization to instead reach the even more ridiculous heights of later Frankenstein sequels like The Ghost of Frankenstein or Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Gyllenhaal has effectively imagined an alternate timeline where Lanchester’s monster had continued to stumble through increasingly goofy Frankenstein sequels the way that Boris Karloff’s did in ours. Instead of spitballing, “Okay let’s put Chaney in the makeup this time, and now Lugosi’s Ygor plays a magical flute that controls him,” like Frankenstein producers of the past, she gets to riff, “Umm I don’t know, now she’s possessed by Mary Shelley’s ghost and we’ll dress up Fever Ray as The Joker or whatever. Let’s hit the road!” To be clear, this is why it rules.

Christian Bale co-stars alongside Buckley as the lit-famous Frankenstein, who assures the audience early on that it’s okay to call him that, since he took his scientist father’s name; for further convenience, he also goes by the nickname “Frank”. Having now roamed the Earth undead and lonely for over a century, he emerges from the shadows of 1930s Chicago to beg a mad-scientist woman in STEM (Anette Benning) to create a bride for him to love. True to the Frankensteins of old, he shows a surprising amount of tenderness & vulnerability for a monster, so the scientist eventually relents to what she initially sees as a piggish request. The corpse she revives as the titular monster bride is a recently murdered sex worker moll (Buckley), killed for her loudmouth blabbing about a local kingpin mobster’s evildoings after becoming possessed by the uninhibited spirit of Mary Shelley’s ghost (also Buckley). Once resurrected, she starts with a clean slate as a bratty agent of chaos who can’t remember much about who she is or why she exists, so she goes on a soul-searching road trip rampage with her newly assigned groom, acting like two giddy teenagers who just ran away from home . . . and who occasionally smash misogynist skulls along the way. They go to queer dance clubs soundtracked by a Jokerfied Fever Ray. They crash cocktail parties held by the wealthy elite, hiding in plain sight because no one would dare look directly at the help, no matter how grotesque. They kill any cops who try to stop their good times’ short, then feel immediate remorse for the transgression. Most importantly, they go to the movies. They go to the movies a lot, which is how they’re easily tracked down by an old-timey lady detective (Penelope Cruz) and her bumbling, good-for-nothing partner (Peter Sarsgaard). The Bride! is hyper aware of its temporal position in the long history of Frankenstein cinema, and it tracks the progression of the artform across a much longer timeline than what its 1930s setting should allow. Its character names are all inspired by Old Hollywood stars like Ida Lupino, Myrna Loy, Ginger Rogers and, of course, Elsa Lanchester. Jake Gyllenhaal frequently appears as the onscreen avatar for that era, performing Busby Berkeley dance routines that Frank imagines himself dancing along to in his fantasies. It also introduces the 3D craze to its onscreen cinemas decades before The Bwana Devil did so in real life, frequently dips into New Hollywood homage and, in its most blatant effort to modernize the material, has The Bride shout “Me too! Me too!” during her climactic fit of rage. Just like its tone, the timeline of The Bride!‘s vintage cinepehlia is all over the place, as Gyllenhaal seems to be following her own whims scene to scene without worrying too much about whether the audience is following along.

Besides killing cops and hanging out at the movies, another thing these monsters do is fuck. Given that the film includes tender, heartfelt monster fucking and concludes on a needle drop of the Halloween season novelty song “The Monster Mash,” it’s entirely possible that Gyllenhaal’s initial inspiration was cracking up to the recurring “Monster Fuck” bit from Comedy Bang Bang and wondering whether it could be adapted into a feature-length screenplay. Other stylistic influences seemingly include the bratty supervillain goof-around Birds of Prey and the sour-taste supervillain thriller Joker, the latter of which The Bride! shares a composer (Oscar-winner Hildur Guðnadóttir) & cinematographer (Lawrence Sher) with, among 100(!) other below-the-line crew members. As much as they delight me, personally, none of these references are especially revered as recent cultural touchstones, so it’s presumptuous for the film to prepackage a readymade Halloween costume in The Bride!‘s design (crafted by industry legend Sandy Powell) that spreads as a fashion trend among 1930s molls within the film itself. The Bride! has been immediately disregarded as a financial & critical flop, with no way of telling whether it will be reclaimed as a cult classic or forgotten to time in the long run. Any criticisms of it as a shallow work of pop-art feminism will miss the mark on what Gyllenhaal is accomplishing here. Its Feminism 101 political talking points are more than welcome in a cultural climate where teens are constantly bombarded with manosphere & trad-wife propaganda, and I find the dismissals of those themes just as misguided here as they were in the more cynical dismissals of Barbie. More importantly, Gyllenhaal puts too much of her own personal interests & obsessions on the screen for the movie to be seen as pure political allegory. It’s a family affair, with her husband & brother invited along to play silly onscreen. She also gives in to her cringiest Theatre Kid shenanigans, allowing Buckley to run wild with the multiple personalities fighting for dominance in her character’s undead body: the ghost, the monster, and the woman. She also frequently gets lost in the geeky love story shared by her two famous monsters, bringing their Old Hollywood cinephilia into the New Hollywood era via a feature-length homage to 1967’s Bonnie & Clyde. She is suffering from a severe case of Hollywood actor brain here, but the resulting spectacle is so chaotic and so specific to her personal interests that I can’t imagine any other response to it than admiration & delight. It’s like a version of The People’s Joker where Vera Drew had $100mil to play with and grew up obsessed with Frankenstein instead of Batman. Bless her corny heart.

-Brandon Ledet

Undertone (2026)

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Undertone apparently began life as a radio play when it was first conceived by writer/director Ian Tuason, and it shows. It was also born out of his experiences taking care of his parents, who were both diagnosed with cancer in 2020; this, too, is apparent in the final film. It is, in many ways, deeply personal in a fashion that makes me feel bad giving it such a rotten rating, but while I hope that crafting the film gave Tuason the opportunity to process some of his grief, in so doing he created a piece of art for the public that treads no new ground and ultimately failed to connect with me on an emotional level, or deliver on much in the way of fear beyond the sufficient spooky atmosphere. 

Evy (Nina Kiri) is the co-host of a podcast that she hosts with her friend Justin (an entirely offscreen Adam DiMarco), in which he plays Mulder to her Scully as they go through listener submissions of paranormal encounters. Having returned to her childhood home, Evy has spent a year caring for her terminally ill religious mother, with the 3 AM recording times of episodes of The Undertone serving as the only thing she has to look forward to, other than occasional visits to her non-helpful boyfriend, Darren. As Evy’s mother enters her final days, The Undertone receives ten audio files via email that begin with a man named Mike recording his pregnant wife Jessa’s sleeptalking, before those recordings escalate into aural terror. 

There’s probably a really, really good short film in here. David F. Sandberg produced a no-budget short entitled Lights Out in 2013, which opened up the door for him to eventually make a feature of the same name in 2016. Smile and Night Swim followed suit as features that expanded creepy shorts into theatrical releases that have a decently functional core premise but which doesn’t have enough real substance to warrant a feature length picture. I was positive that this would prove to be the case for Undertone, but once I got home and looked it up, not only was this not based on a short film with a premise that was perfect for a 20ish minute runtime and which had imperfectly inflated to fill 90 minutes, but it also wasn’t a COVID-era script that spent the last half decade circling the drain in production purgatory (my other hypothesis about the film’s origins). It’s just a movie that looks, feels, and exhausts like one. 

There’s plenty to praise here. Critics and audiences alike are agog at the sound design, which is admittedly exceptional. One would expect nothing less from a film about podcasting and which was originally planned as an audio narrative, but it’s praiseworthy nonetheless. Although the most recent Oscars ceremony has just passed, this is a strong early contender for a nomination in the sound category right out of the gate for next year. Kiri’s performance is likewise laudable, as she, like Rose Byrne in last year’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, is present in virtually every single frame in the film; other than her mother’s prone body, no other humans are ever visible on screen. While Legs spent most of its time in long close-ups of Byrne, Undertone balances that intimacy with long stretches in which the camera is distant from Kiri, isolating her at her desk in a third of the frame while the rest of the screen is filled with dark, empty space. That void invites the enlightened viewer, who knows about the subtle faces and figures in the edges of the frame in Hereditary and Longlegs, to lean in, searching for those subliminal demons here. The film foregoes the cliche of having something leap out of the darkness in a jump scare, which is also a strong point in its favor, instead opting for the audio equivalent by having Justin’s shattering of a glass play too loudly in Evy’s headset and other unexpected noises at unreasonable volumes. All of that’s good, and I again have to reiterate that this would likely make for a four star or higher short film, but as a feature, it just doesn’t work. 

Despite Kiri’s strong performance, there’s very little to Evy. We know that she has a boyfriend, that she loves her mother, and that she hosts a podcast. Other than that we know she feels guilty about her exhaustion from being her mother’s caretaker and that she feels disconnected from her mother’s devout Catholicism, there’s not much to contemplate about her inner life. Evy’s lapsed sobriety is given an offhanded comment that doesn’t amount to anything at all, a Chekov’s gun hanging over the mantle, frustratingly jammed. Maybe her skepticism about the apparent hoax nature of the recordings bleeds out slowly as she tips the bottle more frequently, so that the fever dream of an ending represents her descent; leaving the loop unclosed on this character choice means that her first drink, followed by lying to Justin about it, just takes up space in the screenplay, irrelevant and dangling. It’s one of the textbook tells that the film doesn’t have enough ideas to hit the minimum time to be considered for theatrical release, as does the podcasting duo’s decision to listen to only a few recordings at a time. Rather than get through them in a single session (or a maximum of two), the film artificially and illogically stretches the virtual listening party out to four different recording sessions. The film’s repetition of (a) spooky recordings listened to/played with in an audio compiler, (b) Evy talks to a doctor on the phone, (c) Evy administers to her unconscious mother’s needs, (d) Evy has a spooky dream, then back around to (a) is repeated so many times that, when my bladder was full, I knew I only had to wait a few minutes until the film would lull again and I could make a quick run for the theater restroom. 

Another thing that feels unsustainable about the premise is the inherent goofiness of following the narrative logic of “What if nursery rhymes contain secret evil messages?” to its conclusion. It’s not a secret that a great deal of folkloric melodies are based on schoolyard rhymes about historical events (or are retroactively diagnosed by later historians and critics as having been so) or that history is full of violence and ignorance, but the spooky, evil recording of “Baa Baa Black Sheep” really is a bridge too far into the absurd. Justin’s mind is frequently blown by reading the “origin and meaning” section of a Wikipedia page and acting as if he just got encrypted access to a declassified file, so when he downloads and sends the recording to Evy, he gets spooked by the coincidence that the version he found online is the same one that is playing in Jessa and Mike’s audio files. I don’t know, man, kinda seems like you and whoever is pulling this prank just landed on the same link on the first page of Google results for “spooky Baa Baa Black Sheep.” I know that I’m here to review the movie I saw and not rewrite it into the movie I wish it was, but when a film has this much potential only to squander it, I can’t seem to help myself. Imagine if Justin had masterminded this whole thing, that he had created Jessa and Mike’s recordings and sent Evy a version of an old song that he had deliberately backmasked in order to rattle her skepticism. From there, the story could delve into a more malicious reason for him to want to gaslight Evy (maybe her baby is actually his?), or keep it supernatural by having his audience-entertaining prank turn out to have actually summoned a demon. Instead, we get something that’s frustrating in just how much it’s held back by having too much imagination to dismiss as easy schlock and not quite enough to move the story in a less obvious, familiar direction. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Videoheaven (2026)

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The sprawling runtimes of amateur film-analysis videos on YouTube have seemingly inspired a new subgenre of documentary filmmaking among professional cinephilic directors: the durational essay doc. No longer restrained by what audiences would pay to sit through in a theater, essay films about niche cinematic topics are getting more unwieldy in length, aiming to be more exhaustive & definitive than they are concise. 2021’s Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched expanded what would normally be a 40min Blu-ray extra about the history of folk horror cinema to a three-hour flex, too gargantuan to be ignored. 2023’s We Kill for Love did the same for the history of the erotic thriller genre, exhaustively chronicling its straight-to-video period in a near-three-hour runtime (which I did thankfully get to experience in a theater, thanks to the fine freaks at Overlook Film Fest). That small canon has now expanded with Alex Ross Perry’s three-hour video essay Videoheaven, which has an official website advertising its availability for theatrical bookings but most audiences will watch streaming at home on The Criterion Channel. Videoheaven is arguably a more expansive project than We Kill for Love or Woodlands Dark, in that it doesn’t restrict itself to a single genre. It instead attempts to comprehensively catalog the onscreen depiction of video rental stores in all televised & cinematic genres, with all of its on-screen imagery pulled from vintage clips from movies, sitcoms, new broadcasts, commercials, and corporate training videos. It attempts to track the rise, reign, and decline of the American video store as a cultural institution by noting the ways it was characterized & documented over the past half-century of filmic media. It is, inarguably, more of an academic exercise than it is populist entertainment, but like other durational essay docs before it, its length & thoroughness transforms that exercise into an unignorable cinematic event.

Of course, these three-hour attention testers are only cinematic events for audiences who are already deeply nerdy about cinema as an artform. In the past, the durational documentary format was reserved for more socially or historically substantial subjects like Shoah‘s five-hour oral history of the Holocaust, Ken Burns’s eleven-hour recap of the American Civil War, or the unblinking institutional observations of any Frederick Wiseman film you can name. This new crop of post-YouTube essay movies about The Movies only offers a deviation from that tradition in the newfound frivolity of their subjects. It’s a newly achieved level of audience pandering, signaling to movie nerds that the micro-budget horror films and direct-to-video softcore schlock we waste our time with is Important, Actually. Within that new paradigm, Videoheaven already feels like the Final Boss of movie nerd pandering. It escalates the “Remember all these movies?” clip-show format from more routine pop docs to only include clips from movies that feature hundreds of posters for and references to even more movies. Not only are we revisiting televised & cinematic depictions of video rental stores, but we’re also leaning in to read the titles that populate the shelves of those stores. And since Perry is, himself, the same kind of movie nerd that he’s also pandering to, he shares his audience’s cinephilic interests to an almost uncanny degree. It’s not enough for him to include Matthew Lillard working a video store counter in John Waters’s Serial Mom; he makes sure to feature the scene where Lillard is watching William Castle’s Strait-Jacket on the store TV, doubling the reference. A wide shot of a video store exterior in Amazon Women of the Moon had me excitedly pointing to a poster for Russ Meyer’s Supervixens in the display window; Perry then immediately cuts to an image of Russ Meyer himself working that store counter, signaling that he shared in the same excitement. It was just as much of a pleasure to revisit longtime personal favorites like Muriel’s Wedding, Sugar & Spice, and The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert in clips as it was to spot VHS covers for more recent personal discoveries like 52 Pick-Up and I Heard the Mermaids Singing on the background shelves. One scene from an obscure McG-directed romcom called This Means War featured Reese Witherspoon & Chris Pine flirting in front of a video store display for DVD copies of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope in the exact edition I had just returned to my neighborhood public library mere hours before pressing play. I was indeed in video heaven: overly pandered, pampered, and validated.

The other tact Perry takes besides pandering to already-in-the-know cinephiles is claiming space on future university syllabi, functioning as a teaching tool for Gen Z & Gen Alpha students who might not have any direct personal experience in video rental stores. Gen Z gets their own form of audience pandering in the employment of Maya Hawke as the narrator, who appears onscreen in several clips as a video store clerk in the TV show Stranger Things (after opening the movie narrating her dad’s performance of an existential crisis inside a Blockbuster Video in 2000’s Hamlet, further justifying her involvement). She plays mouthpiece for Perry’s observations about the video store’s evolution in culture and on the screen, landing some fairly convincing observations about how the video store setting is a uniquely American filmmaking phenomenon, providing a space for the film & television industry to talk about itself and its audience. Where the script might slightly overplay its hand is in the claim that all modern depictions of the video store experience (such as on Stranger Things) are now commentaries about the past, as if any remnants of the industry are a form of retro-media nostalgia. I don’t know if that’s entirely true; not yet, anyway. Sure, most newly launched video stores (like Los Angeles’s trendy Vidiots or our local indie spot Future Shock) lean into kitschy 80s & 90s aesthetics, but there are also several major hangers on from the old days that are still operating as normal. Just a couple months ago, I watched a new indie drama called Two Sleepy People that features characters hanging out in the continually operational We Luv Video, and it didn’t play as a nostalgia trip to the past at all; it’s just a hallmark of living in Austin. Ross’s point will inevitably be proven right, though, and future generations of young people will need to have The Video Store Experience explained to them in order to fully grasp what’s happening in, say, Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman, in which the main character spirals into her own academic video essay project while working as a video store clerk. In the meantime, it feels as if Perry forgot the axiom that “You can never quarantine the past” (as posited in his previous documentary, Pavements) while mourning the recent loss of his own go-to video store, Kim’s Video in New York City. The real deal is still out there, even if it won’t last forever.

Although its subject may initially sound shallow to non-cinephiles, Videoheaven continually proves to be a rich text throughout its deliberately excessive runtime. It addresses the video store clerk as both a villainous know-it-all movie nerd archetype and as an aspirational archetype for those know-it-alls, hoping to become the next Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino by applying their cinephillic knowledge to the perfect indie screenplay. It pauses at length on the looming presence of the beaded “back room,” exploring mainstream America’s attraction-repulsion relationship with commercially available pornography (something younger generations will likely only experience in increasingly private spheres). Personally, I was most thrilled whenever the movie touched on subjects I’ve recently covered on this website—the trashier, the better—like the self-hating video store owner of Video Violence or the hostile video store takeover of Toxic Avenger III: Citizen Toxie, both of which are discussed at length as helpfully illustrative texts. It was reassuring to know that someone else out there finds this societally meaningless topic just as personally meaningful as I do, and I found a kindred spirit in Perry’s clip-to-clip interests at every turn. Academic exercises or not, the curation & duration of these exhaustive cinephila essay docs always end up revealing something personal about their respective directors’ obsessions & motivations. They’re achieving every video store clerk & customer’s dream: conveying good taste & cinephilic knowledgeability through media selection & consumption, establishing themselves as the intellectual champions of Watching Movies.

-Brandon Ledet

The Oscar (1966)

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This year’s Oscars statues were doled out earlier this week, and most of them found their way to deserving hands. There were a lot of great winners this year among a lot of great nominees, so there isn’t really anything major to complain about (depending on the fervor of your Stan Wars allegiance to Sinners or One Battle After Another). Personally, I enjoy the annual ritual of the ceremony, which provides one of the few remaining incentives for mainstream studios & audiences to pay attention to Real Movies for a few months before the marketing machine defaults back to Summer Blockbuster season. The secret to enjoying the ritual is to celebrate the instances where the awards happen to go to good movies, without fixating on the awards not going to your favorites. Getting hung up on Oscar snubs & losses is a quick path to madness, only advisable if your favorite pastime is getting mad, not watching movies. That said, I was amused by one particular Oscars “loss” this year, in the Best Lead Actor category. A couple months ago, the narrative was that Timothée Chalamet was a lock to win for his starring role in Marty Supreme, but the tide quickly shifted at the last minute to favor Michael B. Jordan instead, who ultimately won the statue for playing twin brothers in Sinners. It was a late-breaking upset widely celebrated for both its winner and its “loser,” since Chalamet had quickly become The Villain of this Oscars season, while Jordan is by all accounts a total mensch. Chalamet seemingly earned that 2026 Oscar Villain designation (despite having heavy competition in actual-villain Sean Penn) by allowing the youthful narcissistic brashness of his Marty Supreme character to bleed over into his real-life press circuit persona, turning off onlookers by playing a deviously ambitious brat for the cameras. None of this matters in any meaningful way, but it is funny how many of the jokes made during the ceremony were at Chalamet’s expense, and the crowd seemed ready to line up and take turns spanking his pasty behind with ping-pong paddles for the transgression of believing his own hype. It was even funnier watching him have to politely smile through it all, so we wouldn’t add “spoil sport” to his growing list of supposed offenses (alongside “ballet & opera hater” and “all-around fuckboy”).

All of this baseless speculation about Oscar narratives, Oscar villains, and dirty behind-the-scenes Oscar campaigns can feel like a decidedly modern phenomenon, specific to online discourse in a post-Weinstein movie industry. As evidenced by the 1966 industry melodrama The Oscar, however, those unseemly aspects of the Oscars season have been part of the ritual for over half a century now. Stephen Boyd stars as the dastardly Frankie Fane, a New York City gangster turned big-shot Hollywood actor, wholly made up for the source-material novel. The film starts at a 1960s Academy Awards ceremony where Frankie is expected to win for Best Lead Actor, despite being the obvious Villain of that season. We then flash back to his earlier years as a ruffian hustler on the opposite coast, making chump change as a carnival-barker promoter for his stripper girlfriend. In its first act, The Oscar operates mostly as a scumbag noir, characterizing Frankie as the kind of fast-talking tough guy sociopath James Cagney used to play several decades earlier. Then, it shifts into macho melodrama once Frankie is “discovered” by Hollywood types while threatening unsuspecting stage actors with a knife, seeing in him a sexy volatility that had made stars out of character actors like James Dean & Marlon Brando. Once Frankie goes to Hollywood, the movie becomes an All About Eve knockoff for meatheads, satisfying male audiences’ repressed desire for juicy gossip while distracting them with brutish delights like switchblades, bikini babes, strip shows, and fist fights. Frankie learns no lessons along the way. He burns every bridge he crosses, hustling his way to the very top in a series of professional backstabbing maneuvers, then works the press into crafting a pre-packaged Oscar narrative sure to win him the Best Lead Actor statue. In his own devious words, “I can’t rig the votes, but I can rig the emotions of the voters,” which still rings true to how most Oscars are “won” today. Only, Frankie has set himself up to be publicly humiliated by the end, since his fate lies in the hands of “a black-tied jury of his peers,” in an industry exclusively populated by people who hate his guts. He’s an asshole, everyone knows he’s an asshole, and it’s hard to pity an asshole.

It’s amusing to see a movie take the absurd pageantry of The Oscars so seriously, as if the stakes were life or death instead of the size of a nominated actor’s paycheck for their next role. The Oscar literally rolls out the red carpet to sell the prestige & grandeur of the event, going as far as to brag in its opening credits that it borrowed actual Oscar statues from The Academy instead of using props, treating them like celebrity guests. Legendary costume designer Edith Head also gets Celebrity Guest Star billing in the opening credits, appearing in a wordless cameo as herself in multiple scenes in the third act (alongside other infamous Hollywood Types like gossip columnist Hedda Hopper & 19-time Oscar host Bob Hope). Head, of course, also gets her more typical “Gowns by” credit, alongside a “Furs by” credit for famed furrier Frank Somper, which is how you know this is a classy affair. The recent Kino Lorber scan boasts some gorgeously garish color saturation, which again heightens the pageantry of this paperback novel adaptation miles above its station. The first half of the runtime is a go-nowhere crime story mostly consisting of sweaty men throwing punches to a swanky jazz soundtrack; the second half is a fish-out-of-water melodrama about a New York City street tough who can’t adjust his brash machismo to the more genteel schmoozing of the California cocktail set. Neither of those modes are especially compelling on their own, but they combine for an amusingly overwrought character study of The Oscar Villain as an archetype. Here we have a knuckle-dragging meathead with no sense of social tact, who can only get by on his movie-star handsome looks for so long before no one in his industry can stand to work with him any longer. By the time his rancid reputation catches up with him, he’s seething in his theatre chair on live TV while pretending to applaud a professional rival. He is a broken man at the rock-bottom end of an existential crisis, like Burt Lancaster at the end of The Swimmer, except the only tangible fallout of his humiliation is that he’ll have to pivot from movies to TV. I doubt that absurd scenario shares much resemblance to Timothée Chalamet’s brief, superficial arc as this year’s Oscars Villain, but it is funny to think about as the melodramatic extreme of that movie-industry cliché.

-Brandon Ledet

The Forbidden City (2026)

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Remember when 90s action movies like Hard Target & Rumble in the Bronx would import Hong Kong martial arts filmmaking sensibilities to American cities like New Orleans & NYC (or, at least, Toronto cosplaying as NYC)? The new Italo crime thriller The Forbidden City plays like a nostalgic throwback to that cross-cultural moment, except it’s set in Rome and takes its duties as a mafia melodrama just as seriously as its elaborate fight sequences. Stunt performer Yaxi Liu stuns in her first lead role, playing a Chinese martial artist on an international revenge mission to retrieve her lost sister, whom she suspects has been sold into sexual slavery in Roman brothels. Enrico Borello co-leads as a dopey local, whose Italian heritage is so important to his characterization that he literally makes pasta all day in a restaurant indebted to mobsters. The physical proximity of that restaurant to the Chinese brothel down the street proves to be important to the two leads’ shaky connection, as the chef’s father and the fighter’s sister were violently “disappeared” by the same violent thugs. They team up to get their dual revenge, combining their respective skills for bone-crunching violence and mouth-watering cuisine to take down the older, corrupt men who have broken up their families. And maybe, just maybe, they find love along the way.

The funny thing about this particular action-drama mashup is that its two genres mix like oil & water. Its dual modes as a Chinese martial arts revenger and an Italo family drama remain entirely separate, with their own beginning & ending. We start in China, detailing how the nation’s recent-history One Child Policy could make children invisible to the system and, thus, vulnerable to human trafficking. In that grimy storyline, every Roman backroom is a potential sex-traffic hotspot, including the upstairs portion of family restaurants where customers dine totally unaware of the crimes being committed above their heads. Yaxi Liu’s wronged woman makes quick work of punishing the ghouls who run those backroom brothels, relentlessly beating the life out of them with whatever makeshift weapons she can reach for on-site: knitting needles, Compact Discs, slabs of beef, dead fish, flowers, whatever. When she makes an uneasy connection the pasta chef down the street, she finds there are other skills that can be used to bring powerful men to their knees, such as Catholic guilt and a well-cooked meal. Both combatants find their own satisfaction in their dual revenge mission through two separate endings with their own respective Big Bads. Their stories only meaningfully intertwine in an unexpected romance plot, which feels semi-incestuous by the time you realize their missing relatives also indulged a romantic fling of their own, which is why they’re missing in the first place.

Director Gabriele Mainetti previously made a name for himself as an off-kilter genre masher in 2021’s Freaks vs. The Reich, which combined the superhero team-up picture with the vintage sideshow horrors of Todd Browning’s Freaks. Here, he hits all of the exact genre markers you’d want to see in both of his oil-and-water ingredients. The action set pieces feature some of the most elaborate & legible fight choreography around today, and the Old-World setting makes the whole thing feel surprisingly romantic despite its frequent bursts of violence. It’s impossible not to swoon at the gallery-style nocturnal lighting of ancient Roman architecture, so much so that you frequently forget just how sordid & absurd the details of the central romance are in context. If the doomed lovers’ clashing cultures are convincingly explored in any way, it’s through the assessment of a villainous gangster who muses that in Rome, “Nothing is important, and everything is permitted,” while in China the exact opposite is true: “Everything is important, and nothing is permitted.” Within that framework, emigration to Rome is both a liberating lifesaver and a soul-corrupting death sentence, which proves true in the fates of its characters’ families and fellow immigrant communities. The emotional impact of its interpersonal character drama never hits as hard as the sequences of Yaxi Liu throwing punches & kicks at Dutch angles, but Mainetti appears to be displaying his heart on his sleave throughout, and his dramatic sincerity is just as charming as it is quintessentially Italian.

-Brandon Ledet