reviews

Paris, Texas (1984)

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There are some major film-world names attached to the 1984 road trip drama Paris, Texas. If nothing else, it is the Harry Dean Stanton movie, the most memorable example of the notoriously unfussy character actor stepping into the leading-man spotlight. Even so, German model-turned-actress Nastassja Kinski threatens to steal the whole movie from under him in a just a couple scenes buried late in the third act; Kinski radiates enough It Girl beauty & cool that the film’s most iconic stills are of her modeling a pink sweater dress, not of Stanton wandering the American sands. German director Wim Wenders obviously looms large over the production as well, gawking at the dust & concrete vastness of the American landscape with the amazement of an astronaut exploring an alien planet. Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller puts in career-defining work here too, dwelling in the ombre gradients between the natural light of dusk and the neon glow of roadside motels. This is the kind of movie that’s so stacked with big, important names that even its credited Assistant Director, French auteur Claire Denis, is an art cinema icon in her own right. And yet, the name that was most on my mind while watching the film for the first time this week was American painter Edward Hopper, whose work’s melancholic sparseness is echoed in each of Wenders & Müller’s carefully distanced compositions, to great effect.

Of course, it turns out my association of this 40-year-old movie with one of this nation’s most accomplished fine artists was not an original thought. After the screening concluded, I immediately found an article titled “How Edward Hopper Inspired Wim Wenders, David Lynch, and More” that detailed Hopper’s artistic influence on Wenders in clear, direct language. Most importantly, it includes direct quotes from Wenders himself, who explained in his 2015 book, The Pixels of Paul Cézanne: and Reflections on Other Artists, “‘All the paintings of Edward Hopper could be taken from one long movie about America, each one the beginning of a new scene […] Each picture digs deep into the American Dream and investigates that very American dilemma of appearance versus reality […] [He] continually reinvented the story of lonely people in empty rooms, or couples who live separate lives together without speaking […] In the background are the impenetrable façades of a hostile town or an equally unapproachable landscape. And always windows! Outside and inside are the same inhospitable and unreal living spaces, radiating a similar sense of strangeness.’” I could have written the exact same thing about Paris, Texas that Wenders says about Hopper in those quotes. I just would have worded it in clumsier, less articulate phrasing.

Paris, Texas is a solemn 1980s road trip through Edward Hopper’s America, conveniently relocated to the great state of Texas via interstate highway. Harry Dean Stanton stars as a weary, severely dehydrated traveler. He seems to be operating under a magic spell that compels him to walk through the Mojave Desert until he forgets everything about himself and where he came from. When his estranged brother (sci-fi convention regular Dean Stockwell) rescues him from that aimless mission to wander his identity into oblivion, it takes days for him to rebuild his persona from the ground up. He has to relearn how to talk, how to dress, how to act around relatives, and so on — recovering one personality trait at a time until he can recall who he was before he fucked off into the desert for a four-year eternity. As soon as he remembers, he immediately wishes he could forget again. It turns out he chose to obliterate his former self, because that man was an abusive, alcoholic prick. It’s an epiphany that inspires one last road trip, as he attempts to make right by reuniting his young, abandoned son with the young, abandoned wife he used to physically abuse (Kinksi). The effort is bittersweet. It disrupts all of the healing that’s accumulated in the years of his absence just so he can seek some personal absolution, but his heart is at least in the right place, seemingly for the first time in his life.

Like many great movies, Paris, Texas is very slow, very sad, and very beautiful, with many humorous little grace notes throughout. As cute as it is to watch Stanton mimic Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp while bonding with his sweetheart son, the full weight of his past sins sits heavy on that memory by the final scene, when he abandons the boy a second time. Those sins also create an impenetrable barrier between him and Kinki’s mother figure. The former lovers can only communicate via phone on opposite sides of the peep show booth where she now works, barely able to stomach the sight of each other. Müller’s Hopper-inspired landscape photography underlines that isolation in every exterior. While these European filmmakers seem wryly amused with the fast food, billboard ads, and novelty roadside attractions that define American kitsch, they also emphasize the sparseness of the country’s sprawling landscape to portray the characters within as isolated, lonely, broken people. The Edward Hopper of it all is a studied observation of physical distance, where people are only connected to each other through long-reaching shadows, interstate concrete, and telephone wire. Even the wandering Stanton’s Norman Rockwell daydream of his reunited family is framed within a vast, vacant lot in the titular Texan town, where nothing awaits him but dust.

Paris, Texas screened at The Broad in New Orleans this week, presented as a new 4k restoration by Janus Films. It was the final screening in this year’s Gap Tooth Cinema program, which is now on break until the first week of January. The screening sold out early, then was moved to the cinema’s largest theater, then sold out again. Like most of my experiences with Gap Tooth’s programming, it was wonderful to see such a gorgeous picture for the first time so big & loud with such an engaged, respectful crowd. I recently put together a Letterboxd list of my favorite new-to-me film discoveries from this year, and Paris, Texas was just one of many titles I got to see theatrically thanks to Gap Tooth: namely, Black Narcissus, Nashville, High Heels, Juliet of the Spirits, The Lovers on the Bridge, and the ephemeral America: Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of. They’re doing great work, and if you live in New Orleans you should be making time for their screenings in your weekly schedule. Just, you know, please wait until I can purchase my ticket first.

-Brandon Ledet

Rabbit Trap (2025)

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“Listen,” speak-sings Daphne Davenport (Rosy McEwen) into her microphone over ambient nature sounds that she and her husband Darcy (Dev Patel) have been recording. “Noise … the oldest of gods. Before language, before flesh, before name, she was here.” It’s 1976, and the two of them have moved from London to the Welsh countryside with reel to reel recorders and state of the art microphones, which they traipse around the forest with, capturing the sounds of squelching marshes, nightbirds chirping as they move through the air in bloblike flocks, skittering feet of bugs across leaves, and the distant song of unseen fauna, or at least one hopes it’s something so natural. Later, the couple meets a mysterious androgynous child (actress Jade Croot, although The Child is only ever referred to as “he”), and when the boy asks if he can sing Daphne a lullaby that his mother used to sing him as a child, she records him as well. Listening back to it later, Darcy says it “sounds like a spell.” Rabbit Trap traffics in this idea, of sound as song, noise as god, voice as spellcraft, in a beautiful little folk horror from director Bryn Chainey, who has heretofore mostly worked in short film. 

There are points of comparison that it would be easy to go to when describing the film’s atmosphere. The sudden presence of a creepy child who brings with him portents of folkloric truth calls The Killing of a Sacred Deer to mind, and although this is set in Wales rather than on the Cornish coast, the atmosphere of isolation, hallucination, and lost time invokes Enys Men. There’s a sequence in which The Child leads Daphne to a series of tunnels and trenches that seem neither manmade nor natural and lures her through them by whistling a tune that she whistles back to him, and for a moment I felt I was watching Jessie Buckley harmonize with her own echo in Men. Despite these intentional homages or simple similarities, Rabbit Trap feels fresh despite being familiar. Even the way that this film goes to horror media’s most frequently visited well of late (grief and trauma are the real monsters) doesn’t feel like the cliché that it is. For one thing, the film never feels the need to dwell on what’s causing Darcy’s sleep paralysis. We see him experiencing strange dreams of the windows of the house being covered in goop and a spectral figure that may represent his father, with Daphne being quick to record his sleeptalking in the hopes that it might help him remember something when he wakes. Later, those dreams recur after he has broken a fairy circle, and in the end of the film, we find him standing in a beautiful vista recording his truth so that he can play it for Daphne later, since it’s too hard for him to say to her face. We can really only speculate what it is that’s caused Darcy to see himself as the source of an emotional “rot,” because it’s important only in its implications, not in its specifics. 

The plot kicks off when Darcy accidentally wanders into a ring of mushrooms, which folklore calls a “fairy ring,” and to break one invites the wrath of the Tylwyth Teg, fae from another world. Shortly thereafter, The Child appears outside of their cabin. Playing off Darcy’s concerns that he might be a burglar, he instead calls himself a hunter, taking Darcy to see the traps that he lays out for rabbits, taking special care to note that the bait has to be offered with honest and meaningful intention in order for the trap to work. The Child grows closer to both of them, taking an active interest in Daphne’s previous musical work (he asks if she’s famous, to which Darcy replies “You can’t really be famous with her kind of music. She’s more… influential”) and enjoying his and Darcy’s excursions into the marshes to record nature noise. As he becomes more and more of a surrogate child to the couple, his affection for Daphne grows to the point that he asks her to pretend to be his mother, as he claims his died long ago. Darcy, with his unspoken and only vaguely defined issues surrounding fatherhood, starts to get a little creeped out by this, and The Child’s behavior becomes more invasive and presumptuous. What little we do know about Darcy’s past is revealed to us not explicitly but in the way that he talks about sound—that god, that ghost, calling it a “Vibration of an event, an energy shadow, memory carved into the air, a scared lost creature desperate for somewhere to hide before it fades away. When you hear a sound,” he says, “you become its home, and your body is the house it haunts.” Darcy’s body is keeping an unknown score, and The Child has come to find a new family, one way or another. 

Much is left up to interpretation here. My personal reading is that the story The Child tells early in the story, about a baby brother that wandered into the Tylwyth Teg circle and disappeared, is actually about him, and that he grew up parentless in the fae realm, or that he was otherwise a kind of inverse changeling. Now that the ring has been disturbed again, he has the opportunity to go back out into our world and try to reestablish some kind of family, which would explain his quiet (and later loud) desperation on this front. This would also make his introduction of himself as a “hunter,” rather than the more accurate descriptor of “trapper,” a bit of foreshadowing despite the metaphorical, psychedelic rabbit trap that Daphne and Darcy must pass through at the end. Of course, this is a film that leaves a great deal up to your imagination, one that is more a visual and sonic experience than it is a narrative one. Its brisk runtime, coming in at under 90 minutes, means that this tone over text ethos never wears out its welcome. It’s unlikely that, at this late date, many people are still considering new entries onto their end of the year lists, and although this one was stellar, it’s one that will be waiting for you when you’re ready for it, but it’s an inexpensive rental if you’re still doing your 2025 end of the year cramming. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Marty Supreme (2025)

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Timothée Chalamet is an annoying twerp. That’s just a fact. Or, it’s at least been a fact for the past ten or so months of self-aggrandizing PR stunts, as he’s brought a style of hype & bravado to the film marketing business that’s usually only heard from rappers & athletes. During a SAG Awards speech earlier this year—where he won a statue for headlining a cookie-cutter Bob Dylan biopic—he declared that he is currently “in pursuit of greatness” as an actor, citing Michaels Jordan & Phelps among his professional inspirations alongside more relevant luminaries like Daniel Day-Lewis & Marlon Brando. His announced ambitions are the loud, brash ramblings of a twentysomething bro who hasn’t yet been slapped back down to Earth by the limitations of his talents & life, an inevitability eagerly anticipated by all of the pasty movie-nerd cynics watching from home. While annoying, however, there is an undeniable charm to the little twerp, who can worm his way into your heart with the slightest “Ain’t I a stinker?” smirk. Has his year-long campaign to dominate The Movie Business the same way Michael Jordan dominated the basketball court been a sarcastic bit, or is he totally sincere in his rejection of actors’ usual put-on airs of professional humility? I can’t say for sure, but if it’s all been a long-form viral marketing campaign for his new starring role in Marty Supreme, then he might be on the most genius self-promotion run in the history of the artform.

The titular Marty is a twentysomething ping-pong player who honed his craft by hustling tables in 1950s New York City, based loosely on real-life table tennis showboat Marty Reisman. Marty is a scrawny twerp possessed with the self-driven mission to prove that he is the greatest ping-pong player in the entire world. All signs point to it being time to put that dream aside and settle down, get a real job, and build a home life with the woman he just got pregnant behind her husband’s back (Odessa A’zion, the only supporting player who manages to keep up with Chalamet’s manic energy). Unfortunately, none of those practicalities will penetrate his thick skull until he can prove his dominance in the sport, despite the fact that ping-pong is not especially popular, profitable, or respectable outside a few niche international circles that he cannot afford to reach by plane. So, he acts like a petulant child until he gets his way, getting both literally and figuratively spanked for his brattish misbehavior as the Bad Wittle Boy of Table Tennis until he achieves a self-determined marker of victory. Then, his ambitions lift like a curse and he can start to see other people in his small orbit as human beings, not just boardgame pieces to move around in his “pursuit of greatness.” It’s an incredibly disgusting, energizing performance from Chalamet, who nails every beat in building up Marty “Supreme” Mauser as one of cinema’s greatest attractive-repulsive antiheroes. For his sake, I hope he wins an Oscar for it, freeing him from his own curse of professional ambitions so he can calm the fuck down and we can all catch a breath.

Structurally, Marty Supreme is not especially surprising for anyone who’s seen Josh Safdie’s previous directorial efforts. Like Adam Sandler & Robert Pattinson’s pieces-of-shit protagonists in Uncut Gems & Good Time, Chalamet spends the entire film hustling every single person he runs into in desperate bids to fund his own selfish gambles. The only difference here is a matter of genre, leaving the audience more satisfied with the built-in payoffs of a sports drama than the grim, end-of-the-line letdowns of Safdie’s previous works. Bona-fide celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow, Fran Drescher, and Shark Tank‘s Kevin O’Leary mix with first-time no-namers who appear to have been cast at the corner bodega, overloading the screen with a surplus of vintage New Yawk accents & faces to scowl at our incorrigible antihero — another Safdie trademark. Third-time collaborator Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) returns to deliver another dizzying synth soundtrack, this time mixed in with a coke-fueled 1980s mixtape that disorients the audience within the 1950s setting. There’s an escalation of surrealism here in momentary tangents involving falling bathtubs, licked honey, vampires, The Harlem Globetrotters, and a seminal opening credits sequence borrowed wholesale from Amy Heckerling. Overall, though, Safdie mostly sticks to the formula that’s been earning him bigger acclaim every picture (as opposed to his brother Benny, who went out on a limb with his own sports drama this year, to lesser success). So, all of the novelty and spectacle on this outing belong to Chalamet and Chalamet alone, as he seeks to dominate this movie in every scene and, by extension, all movies for all of time. I wish him all the best, meaning I hope he eventually gives it a rest.

-Brandon Ledet

The Headless Woman (2008)

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2008’s The Headless Woman is the kind of thoroughly inscrutable arthouse film that poses even the meaning of its title as a riddle. Is Maria Onetto’s protagonist-in-crisis “headless” in the “Where’s your head at?” sense? The film is a week-in-the-life portrait of a wealthy Argentine woman who we never truly get to know, because by the time we meet her she’s not quite acting like herself; she goes through the motions of her usual daily schedule, but her mind is elsewhere. Is her titular headlessness a reference to director Lucrecia Martel’s tendency to push her characters to the furthest edges of the frame? We often see Onetto’s figure literally headless, as she is cropped & contorted so that her face is obscured from our eyes. My favorite, most baseless theory is that the title is a slight mistranslation from a Spanish-language idiom meaning The Concussed Woman, as that is our POV character’s least questionable condition. She has a head; she just smacks it really hard in a car accident, leaving her dazed for days on end as she stubbornly refuses medical diagnoses from both doctors in the film and the audience in the theater.

Besides the figurative opaqueness of its title, another common arthouse complaint that The Headless Woman invites is that “Nothing happens.” That would ring especially true for anyone who arrives late to the theater, since exactly one thing happens in the first few minutes, and if you miss it you’re fucked. The film opens with indigenous children playing in the canals off a service road, followed by a sequence of a white Argentine aristocrat (Onetto) driving recklessly down the same dusty path. She hits something with her car while reaching for her cellphone, but instead of stepping out to investigate what it was, she momentarily pauses then drives away — concussed and afraid. The next week of her life is a test of just how little effort she has to put into her daily routine to maintain her bourgie lifestyle. Annoyed family members, indigenous servants, and professional underlings guide her way as she sleepwalks through her schedule, distracted both by the guilt of possibly having killed a child with her car and by the physiological effects of a head injury. Eventually, she snaps out of it, repairs her car, dyes her hair, and moves on with her life. Nothing happens, and that’s entirely the point.

The Headless Woman is often billed as a psychological thriller, which I suppose is abstractly true. Although there’s not much action or momentum in the fallout of the opening car accident, Onetto’s concussed protagonist is often in danger of hurting more victims because of her temporarily headless state. Whenever she drives a car or shows up to work at her dentistry practice, there’s tension in what damage she might cause while her mind is adrift. Imagine if your next dental surgery was performed by Dougie Jones of Twin Peaks; it’s a nightmare scenario. Ultimately, though, it’s the stasis & rot of her inaction that causes the most damage, as she takes several days to admit to herself that she very probably killed a child. When she manages to voice that confession to loved ones, they immediately shut her down and reassure her that it was likely just a dog, encouraging her to continue to do nothing until the details are muddled and the transgression is forgotten. The constant attention paid to her interactions with the servant class indicate that it would be an entirely different story if she had struck a white child instead of an indigenous one, but that’s a story told through observation, not confrontation. The thrill is in puzzling through the intent behind every image & interaction Martel offers, leaning more psychological than thriller.

I’ve now puzzled my way through three of Martel’s works, and they all are determined to rot in a similar kind of immoral inaction. In her name-maker debut, La Ciénaga, the wealth class of Argentina drink their days away poolside while their estates are gradually reclaimed by nature and their indigenous servants continually refill their cocktails. In her most recent budget-escalator, Zama, an 18th Century Spanish officer is assigned to lord over the indigenous people of Argentina, with no specific orders except to await more specific orders. There’s a gradual madness built by the lack of action or momentum in all three works, and they all point to a cruel, culture-wide pointlessness in the nation’s colonization. Likewise, our figuratively headless protagonist is maddening in her lack of momentum or direction, a psychic wound that does not heal just because she eventually snaps out of it. That immoral stasis & mindless occupation doesn’t make for especially thrilling stories beat to beat, but it leaves a lot of room for the audience to think about the meaning behind each of Martel’s images, which are uncanny in their sinister ordinariness: a room temperature coffee pot, a staticky wedding video, a limp body seen only through the dusty veil of a rearview window.

-Brandon Ledet

The Suspect (1944)

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After finally seeing The Spiral Staircase earlier this year, I’ve been working on watching as many other films from director Robert Siodmak as I can get my hands on, having since also seen and quite enjoyed both The Dark Mirror and Phantom Lady. The calendar year 1944 was a big one for Siodmak releases, as Phantom Lady premiered in late January before being followed by adventure film Cobra Woman in May, Christmas Holiday at (bizarrely) the end of July, and closing out the year with the West Coast premiere of The Suspect on December 22. It’s unclear to me why Universal would release a picture with “Christmas” in the title in the dog days of summer, but The Suspect does fit nicely into the winter holiday season, as the inciting death that occurs in the film happens on Christmas Eve. If you’re looking for a little noir with your eggnog, this one is a breezy, memorable watch that also happens to include the kindly image of Charles Laughton decorating a Christmas tree. 

The film opens with on-screen text announcing the film’s time and place as London in 1902. After a long day as manager of Frazer & Nicholson, a tobacconist’s shop that proudly announces on their windowfront that they are the supplier of tobacco to the British royal family, Philip Marshall (Laughton) returns home to find his wife Cora (Rosalind Ivan) in a tizzy. It seems that Cora has finally gone too far with her continuous torment of their only child, son John (Dean Harens), nagging him to fix the kitchen sink and, when he failed to do so because he was doing overtime work in hopes of a promotion, threw a week’s worth of his calculations into the fire. With John out of the house, Philip announces his intention to move into the boy’s vacated room, telling Cora that there’s no longer a need to keep up their pretense of marital satisfaction now that their captive audience has departed. Cora is incensed, but powerless. 

Thus enters the lovely young Mary Gray (Ella Raines) into Philip’s life. Although he rejects her application to work as a stenographer for Frazer & Nicholson as they are fully staffed, she is nonetheless charmed by his firm-but-gentle remonstrations of the shop’s errand boy, Merridew, for his pilfering of pennies for sweets and to give to the organ grinder’s monkey. When Philip finds her crying on a park bench later, he takes her out for dinner to cheer her up. After a montage of the two of them growing closer over learning to use chopsticks, attending circuses and plays, and generally getting along pleasantly, we learn that he has helped her find a job. Their non-physical love affair must come to an end, however, as Cora refuses to give him a divorce despite their mutual unhappiness, and she extorts him into remaining with her by promising to ruin him socially if he does, and he breaks things off with Mary before going home and putting up a Christmas tree. His hopes that they might be able to find some peace during the holidays even if they have come to hate each other are dashed when Cora announces that she’s discovered Mary’s identity and plans to tell Philip’s employers and friends of his (dubious) infidelity, and that he’ll destroy Mary and leave her penniless and ruined as well. After she heads to bed, we see Philip lift his walking cane from its place beside the entry door, feeling the heft of it in his hands, and we fade to black. 

Ivan’s Cora is admirably loathsome, a truly horrid person with no redeeming qualities. This is made clear in no uncertain terms the moment that she first appears on screen, as her husband can barely make it inside before she starts to hassle him about his work hours and his light-handed treatment of their son, just before we learn about her jeopardization of the boy’s career over a minor household chore. She’s cruel, miserly, and brings nothing but misery to everyone around her, a sociopathically bitter person who manipulates every kind word and attempt at compromise and twists them into something that she can take offense to and escalate through overreaction to perceived slights. It’s frankly a relief when she dies, and virtually everyone is better off for her absence. Her sudden departure from the narrative necessitates the introduction of additional antagonists, who take the form of Scotland Yard Inspector Huxley (Stanley Ridges), who is investigating Cora’s death despite the coroner’s rule that her fatal tumble down the stairs was an accident, and the Marshalls’ slimy neighbor Gilbert (Henry Daniell). Gilbert is established in his first appearances as a perpetually inebriated snob, scion to a formerly wealthy British family of no current notability, who looks down upon his middle class neighbors with great disdain; further, he mistreats his wife from the start and we later even see her bruised from his abuse. It’s based on the activities of the first, Huxley, that the latter, Gilbert, decides to threaten to make up a story about having heard Philip and Cora fighting the night of her death, announcing his attention to blackmail Philip and to go on extorting him for more money in the future. With Philip once again in an untenable position, what can he do? 

With the Hays Code at the front of my mind, I was distracted as the film started to wind down, as The Suspect seemed to fly in the face of its strictures in both spirit and text. According to IMDb, the film was passed by the National Board of Review (certificate #10564, although I have no way of verifying that), but the poster on the film’s Wikipedia page has a “not suitable for general exhibition” notation, so it was definitely reviewed and released. The film was headed for what seemed like a happy ending with scant few minutes left to pull the old Code-accommodating switcheroo that sees our criminal protagonist find himself clapped in irons and sent off to pay for his misdeeds (or dead). John gets that promotion despite his mother’s petulant sabotage and is being sent to the Canadian office, and Philip proposes to Mary (by this time his wife) that they join him, and he makes it all the way onboard their departing ship and even has a final conversation with Huxley that absolves him of all of his (legal) guilt. Of course, it doesn’t absolve him of his (moral) guilt, as he learns that Gilbert’s widow is to be tried for her husband’s apparent murder. Alas, despite being a killer, Philip would never let his kind neighbor go to the gallows for a crime that she didn’t commit, but we still never see him delivered into police custody; he disembarks the ship as Huxley watches, confirming his suspicions. “He’s getting away,” Huxley’s partner says, to which he replies:

“No, he isn’t. He thinks he’s done a pretty big thing. Let’s leave him alone; he’ll come to us when he’s ready. Just keep an eye on him in the meantime.” 

And there we leave Philip, standing in the fog, still a free man. This flew in the face of conventional wisdom, or at least what I thought I know, about the Hays Code. Didn’t it require the death or arrest of the killer, no matter how sympathetic he or she was, in order to be approved for screening? Is that not why James Cagney gets gunned down at the end of The Roaring Twenties? Is that not why Carolyn Jones kills Mickey Rooney at the end of Baby Face Nelson, and why Jean Simmons drives herself and Robert Mitchum over a cliff in Angel Face? Isn’t that why Rebecca’s dramatic reveal is different in Hitchcock’s film from the du Maurier novel? If Hitch couldn’t skirt it when adapting a literary text, then how did Siodmak get away with leaving this film so ambiguous? So I went and re-read the code, for probably the first time in over a decade, and there’s nothing explicit in its guidelines that says a film must show the guilty face consequences. Instead, it states under “Principles of Plot” that “no plot theme should definitively side with evil against good” or “throw the sympathy of the audience with sin, crime, wrong-doing, or evil,” and that “the question of right or wrong [should never be] in doubt or fogged.” 

As such, The Suspect doesn’t break any of the rules by letting Philip walk away to (presumably eventually) turn himself over to Scotland Yard, but it is rather successful in subverting the spirit of the Hays Code. Specifically, when it comes to the treatment of murder, the code states that “technique[s] of murder must be presented in a way that will not inspire imitation” and that criminals must not seem justified. As to the first case, we don’t see Philip kill Cora. In fact, that the act is not depicted is enough to inject reasonable doubt on the part of the audience, and although we get a pretty good idea of how he did it since Huxley acts out, in detail, what he believes Philip did that night, it skirts the “inspire imitation” language by presenting it this way. Regarding whether or not the killing of Cora is justified, that’s left to the determination of the audience, but we’re certainly never treated to a drop of humanity in her that might make us consider the sanctity of her life. Overall, however, the impression that the code gives is one of complete and utter moral absolutism; the law can never be seen as unjust, adultery can never be justified, obscenity of word or gesture is forbidden, the law is good and everything else is evil. The Suspect makes its moral relativism clear in the scene in which we find Gilbert and Philip at odds with one another, as we find ourselves, like Philip, repulsed by the man who “merely” abuses his wife, while we empathize with Philip, who murdered his (probably). It’s not a very flashy picture, but its subtle undermining of blanket moralizing of the time seems almost radical in retrospect. 

I’ve already cited Ivan’s performance as Cora as a standout, but I was also rather taken with Molly Lamont as Gilbert’s unfortunate wife. She brings a lot of warmth and light into a role that could easily be underserved in another feature. Ella Raines, who had been the protagonist of Phantom Lady earlier that year, is lovely here, even if she’s not given much to do other than fawn over Philip; her chemistry with both Laughton and Harens makes up for the relative lack of development. Laughton is himself in quite fine form here, playing a kind, gentle man pushed to the edge and forced to take matters into his own hands. His deftness is shown in the early scene with the errand boy to establish that his interest in cheering up Mary, aside from one slightly leering glance that comes later, is on the up-and-up. By the film’s end, we’re excited for him to start his new life in Canada, far away from all of his bad memories, but his conscience stops him from finding that freedom. It’s poignant, the perfect film to add to your Christmas watchlist if you like your holiday season a little bittersweet. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Hamnet (2025)

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All of the advertising for and critical response to Chloé Zhao’s prestige-season adaptation of Hamnet will lead you to expect a much shallower film than what it actually is. Having not read the novel myself, I’ve so far only understood Hamnet to be the weepie version of Shakespeare in Love: an Oscar-bait Hollywood drama about the death of William Shakespeare’s young child, Hamnet, the tragedy that inspired him to write the near-eponymous play. The loudest critical responses to the film adaptation have either been in praise of or in resistance to the ways that actors Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley perform that parental grief as Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes Hathaway, respectively. I’m enough of a sucker for period-piece melodramas that I would’ve been onboard for that relatively small story about one historically famous couple’s version of art therapy, but the film turned out to be much grander & fuller in scope than that. It hits on much broader themes about how we’ve all lost a genuine, Pagan relationship with the natural world and how making art can be a form of witchcraft that brings us back to it. And it only manages to do so by primarily functioning as Agnes’s story, not William’s.

We meet Agnes & William as young no-namers who are violently in love but haven’t yet fully established their place in the world. As much as they adore each other, their individual natures pull them in separate directions. William’s theatrical ambitions draw him to a busy life in The Big City, while Agnes thrives in the country woods as far away from London as she can get. The central conflict is not so much the grief that couple suffers when they suddenly lose their child to illness, but the dissonance in how they personally process that grief after the fact. A falconer & herbalist who’s viciously rumored to be “the daughter of a forest witch,” Agnes is in tune with the natural flow of life & death, but that flow is frequently disrupted by civilized townsfolk who drag her out of the woods and into the unnatural rituals of Christian society. She’s neither allowed to give birth in the way that feels natural to her (alone, standing in the woods) nor grieve familial loss in her own way (directly, without averting her eyes). When her young son dies and her husband fucks off to the city to continue his work in the theatre, she perceives the abandonment as his own close-hearted rejection of life & nature, lumping him in with the phonies who won’t let her simply be herself in the woods because it’s not Proper Behavior. It isn’t until she sees the resulting play William names after their son that she understands that he can only grieve through his art, and that his act of creation on the stage is its own form of witchcraft — however foreign to hers.

The final act of Hamnet—when Agnes is reunited with and says goodbye to her dead son’s spirit through her husband’s art—is powerful stuff. It cuts right through the knee-jerk cynicism that usually prompts me to dismiss the Oscar-hopeful studio dramas that flood the release calendar this time of year. In particular, I was moved by a shot of Agnes looking up to the stage at her son’s dramatic ghost that mirrors earlier sequences of her looking up to the flying spirit of a deceased pet hawk, illustrating in a small gesture the separate but parallel magics she & her husband practice. It’s that tension between the old & modern ways that makes Zhao such a strong fit for the material. Her docudrama filmmaking style is incongruous with the costume drama genre, but her security-camera modernity clashes with the Old World natural setting in a way that echoes the spiritual divide between Agnes & William’s respective worldviews. The only times the movie loses its way, really, are the brief moments when Zhao strays from Agnes’s POV to catch up with how William is getting along in the city. There’s an especially corny reading of the “To be or not to be” soliloquy that temporarily breaks the movie’s spell as William works out his feelings on his own, but that’s less the fault of Paul Mescal’s performance than it is a misstep in intellectual rigor behind the camera. Hamnet is only truly about Hamlet in the final minutes when Agnes engages with that work from the audience pit, armed with Jessie Buckley’s trademark combative smirk. When it sticks with her, it soars. Thankfully, that accounts for most of the runtime.

-Brandon Ledet

America: Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of (1973)

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Tony Ganz & Rhody Streeter only made films together over a couple of years in the early 1970s. A few of their documentary shorts aired on the syndicated PBS series The Great American Dream Machine, which was simpatico with their collaborations’ wryly humorous portrait of the nation. Otherwise, their catalog of shorts remained unseen by a wide public audience until their recent exhibitions in New York City, now collected under the anthology title America: Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of. Because of that spotty history of distribution & scholarship, there wasn’t much context for what Gap Tooth‘s weekly repertory audience would be seeing when the collection premiered in New Orleans last week, besides the films being rare. It was a packed room anyway. The ten Ganz & Streeter shorts that make up America: Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of were met with shocks of laughter and stretches of stunned silence, depending on the mood of the moment. The individual films weren’t produced with a unifying theme or intent in mind, but since they were made with such a small, consistent crew in such a short period of time, they end up forming a singular mosaic picture of 1970s America — especially the white parts, the very white parts.

America: Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of is at its strongest when its shorts are hitting on a common theme, illustrating a postcard advertisement for The American Dream as a prepackaged plastic commodity. The opening short “The Best of Your Life (a.k.a. Sun City)” plays like an early prototype for the recent surreal retirement community doc Some Kind of Heaven, inviting the audience into a 3D brochure to gawk at all the uncanny weirdos who reside within. The other standout shorts in the set also work as ironic advertisements for the kitschiest corners of American monoculture: a novelty sex resort in “Honeymoon Hotel,” a Christian Nationalist death cult in “Risen Indeed (a.k.a. Campus Crusade for Christ)”, an elevator music studio in “A Better Day in Every Way (a.k.a. Muzak)”, a finishing school for adults in “Woman Unlimited”, and a billboard advertisement painters’ studio in “Sign Painters (a.k.a. Signs)”. It’s in these ironic snapshots of microwave-dinner America that Ganz & Streeter land their biggest laughs, likening retirees’ synchronized workout routines to soldiers Sieg Heiling their Fuhrer and infiltrating anti-hippie Christian activist circles who believe Communists to be Satanists engaged in a literal holy war. At the same time, they find a way to mock institutions instead of laughing at individual interview subjects. Later documentaries like Grey Gardens & Gates of Heaven would soon take on a similar project to much wider attention & acclaim: recording sweetly humanist interviews with ordinary, everyday weirdos like you & me, who happened to have gotten wrapped up in fascinatingly unreal scenarios.

Any one of those on-topic shorts could land as someone’s personal favorite in the collection. Personally, I laughed the hardest at the robotic corporate speak of the “Muzak” and “Sign Painters” docs, as straightlaced business suits passionlessly explained how they’ve turned once artistic mediums into uniform, sellable products. The candy-colored splendor of the “Sun City” retirement home tour and the women’s-mag “Honeymoon Hotel” ad is also undeniably enticing, making for the most visually striking and spatially disorienting selections in the bunch. It’s the other, “off-topic” shorts in the collection that really make those works stand out, though. You don’t get a full sense of just how uncanny & inhuman the collection’s portrait of American culture is until they cut away from the Norman Rockwell postcards to black & white snapshots of real people struggling with real problems in real environments. In “Help-Line” & “Y.E.S.,” desperately lonely people on the verge of making life-ending decisions re-establish tenuous human connections via phone call. In “Bowery Men’s Shelter,” New York City alcoholics and discharged mental patients find a temporary place to sleep between psychotic episodes & binges, barely limping along to the next day. The furthest-afield inclusion is “Hoi: Village Life in Tonga,” which leaves America entirely for a quiet anthropological study of indigenous Tongan social life. It was the very first film that Ganz & Streeter shot together and, while it doesn’t fit in tonally or thematically with the other shorts in the collection, it does help contextualize their countercultural-outsider approach to American anthropology in the more idiosyncratic shorts. Not for nothing, but “Hoi” & “Bowery Men’s Shelter” are also the only films in the collection in which non-white subjects are interviewed, making for some politically productive tension in their contrast with other subjects, like the prayer-warrior fascists of “Campus Crusade for Christ”.

If there’s anything especially remarkable that Ganz & Streeter achieved with these short-form American anthropologies (besides conveying a clever editorial eye for selecting environments & industries worth documenting in the first place), it’s in their avoidance of outright condescension. The uncanny, hyper-American scenarios they captured on film range from conceptually funny to outright evil, but the people who are trapped within them are consistently charming regardless of their participation. The nation’s cultureless rituals have made fools of us all, and so we can only feel warm comradery with our fellow fools who’ve fallen into its strangest crevices. That warm humanism is especially apparent in the closing short, “A Trip Through the Brooks Home,” which expands on an interview with a married couple who live in the Sun City retirement community profiled in “The Best of Your Life.” It’s very simply a guided home tour, but there’s a pervasively sweet awkwardness to the husband & wife at the center of it, recalling the Mitch & Micky folk singer duo of Christopher Guest’s A Mighty Wind. It’s that generosity towards its subjects that makes America: Everything You’ve Ever Dreamed Of such great theatrical programming, as you can hear individual members of the audience being delighted by one isolated character quirk at a time. Hopefully, it’ll be more widely available soon, both in theaters and at home, since it’s both a useful historical document of vintage American kitsch (especially when juxtaposed with genuine American suffering) and a godsend for cult cinema freaks who’ve already rewatched similar human-interest docs like American Movie, Vernon, Florida, and Heavy Metal Parking Lot too many times to count.

-Brandon Ledet

Angel’s Egg (1985)

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Angel’s Egg, a 1985 film from director Mamoru Oshii of Ghost in the Shell fame, is currently screening in limited runs with a 4K remaster, and I was lucky enough to catch it at my local arthouse. It’s stunning. A beautifully rendered monochrome world with only two living beings within it, the film is one that resists most attempts to interpret its metaphors, with Oshii himself admitting that there are parts of it that he does not understand. As such, it feels like a long, strange dream, full of images that feel pregnant with symbolism but too ephemeral to achieve any truly coherent exegesis. 

In a waterlogged and abandoned city, an unnamed girl protects a large egg, while she forages for canned food and collects jugs of water. A giant machine rolls through the town, and an unnamed man bearing a cross-shaped weapon clambers down from it. They resemble one another, both being porcelain pale with platinum hair, but the girl flees from the man initially, and when he asks her for her name, it’s unclear if she fears him, can’t remember her name, or if she perhaps never even had one in the first place. The man briefly steals the egg and then returns it to her, retelling the story of Noah’s Ark but changing the ending so that the dove never returned, and that everyone on the ark simply forgot about their pasts. This leads the girl to take the man to a sort of sanctuary where she has been bringing her collected jugs of water, numbering in the thousands, and placed them all around the fossilized skeleton of an angel. The man, who has said that the only way to know what is inside of an egg is to break it, does so one night while the girl sleeps, and her screams the following morning when she discovers the bits of shell are heartbreaking. She runs and falls into the churning sea, where she drowns. 

That’s a very rough sketch of what barely constitutes the “plot” of the film. This isn’t a story so much as it is a series of surreal images strung together as flimsily as the sluggish narrative of a dream in which you’re exploring a seemingly endless, empty city beneath a gray sky. (These are positive qualities that the film possesses despite “flimsy” and “sluggish” having derogatory connotations.) None of it really seems to mean much of anything. My favorite images from the film are completely tertiary to the above synopsis. The city seems to be filled with statues of fishermen, which the girl is startled by and avoids the presence of. Later, the city suddenly becomes filled with shadows of giant fish, silhouettes cast upon the streets and the sides of buildings, and the fishermen spring into action in an attempt to catch them, firing harpoons into the road and through streetlamps and into windows and empty houses. When I was still trying to understand the film and not simply experience it, I thought of them as automatons from the derelict city’s ancient past, left running in order to catch fish which had been hunted to death. That didn’t at all explain where the shadows came from, and now I see the sequence as two different kinds of ghosts, memories of two extinct parties that are both now long gone, physical husks that hunt long-dead prey, and the shadows of the flesh long since transcended. Is that accurate? Does any of it mean anything? I’m not sure, but it definitely doesn’t really matter. 

Angel’s Egg is filled with Biblical imagery, with occasional glimpses of what appears to be the (or an) actual ark, sitting on a cliff as rain falls. Noah’s Ark is thematically central, and the film’s final image implies that all of what we have seen transpire occurred on the upturned hull of a giant ark-style vessel. The man’s use of a weapon in the shape of a cross is likewise open to many interpretations, but I remain convinced that attempting to puzzle all of that out is utterly the wrong way to engage with the film. There’s a giant mechanical sun that’s also an eyeball, and it’s covered in statues. What does it mean? Who cares? Enjoy the ride.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

No Other Choice (2025)

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“No other choice,” the new, American corporate overlords of Solar Paper say to Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) when he attempts to confront them about their mass lay-offs at the company where he has worked for decades. “No other choice,” Goo Beom-mo (Lee Sung-min) says to his wife when she asks why he can’t get a job in another industry; “Paper has fed me for 25 years, honey. It’s how I’m meant to be.” “No other choice,” say Man Su’s interviewers at Moon Paper as they describe their company’s movement to more automation and the removal of all human labor from their process. “No other choice,” Man Su murmurs to himself over and over again, taking the mantra-repeating practice taught in his lay-off exit group counseling session and applying it not to positive affirmations but to reassurances that his increasingly violent actions are justifiable. It’s the refrain of the past as it overshadows the present, a soundbite of self-flagellation about the impossibility of changing the future while actively creating that future in the same moment. 

If you’ve seen the trailers for No Other Choice, then you probably think you know what the film will be about, and to an extent, you’re going to get some of what you’re expecting. That’s the Park Chan-Wook special! I’ve still never seen Oldboy, the film he’s probably best known for, but I have seen (and loved) The Handmaiden, Lady Vengeance, Decision to Leave, and Stoker, and No Other Choice can now be added to that list of Park’s great achievements. If you’ve seen any of those films, you’ll also likely remember that they all feature a major upheaval right around the middle of the runtime to the expectations regarding all the ways that the plot could branch and pivot, based on what you’ve become accustomed to from other films in the same genre. No Other Choice presents itself as a film about a man who loses his job and, desperate to cling to the status and lifestyle that his former position offered, turns to murderous ends to eliminate his competitors for a position with a paper company that has “cracked the Japanese market.” That’s true, but in classic Park style, the director manages to take unexpected but plausible turns, with that mid-film sharp turn taking things in entirely unexpected directions. 

In narratives of this type, the protagonist’s family is often left on the margins of the story, treated as merely branches upon which some extensions of the male lead’s drama can hang. Most often, the wife leaves, taking the kids with her, if there are any. Sometimes, she leaves with blackmail material so that her husband must keep his distance. Other films that have a superficially happy ending, as this one does, see the family shunted to the side until the final moments reunite them before the credits roll. Man Su, his wife, stepson, and daughter are all once again ensconced in their home again at the end of the film, but the victory feels temporary. For one, Man Su’s wife Miri (Son Ye-Jin) doesn’t know the width and breadth of her husband’s activities, but she knows enough to know that he’s killed, and she not only keeps this secret, but also lies to her son about her husband’s nocturnal adventures to cover for him, so as to prevent him from fearing Man Su. For the rest of her life (or at least the rest of her marriage), she will be forced to maintain a facade of normalcy while compartmentalizing her deception of her son and of her husband, from whom she keeps the knowledge that she had seen one of the bodies he buried. Miri and Man Su have also kept the fact that their boy is not his son, acknowledging between themselves that they promised to tell him once he was old enough to shave, but they decide to maintain that lie as well. For Man Su, it’s also clear to the audience that although he may have wormed his way back into the world of paper manufacturing, this position is even less solid than the one he had before, and it’s likely only a matter of time before he’s laid off again, and then this whole violent cycle may begin anew. 

If I had to treat this review like a middle school book report and identify its theme, I would highlight that this film is about the fickle nature of independence. Man Su and Miri’s daughter is a nonverbal cello prodigy who refuses to play for the family, and even when the characters forego a lot of their costlier possessions—selling both of the family’s luxury cars and consolidating to a singular utilitarian sedan, giving their beloved dogs to Miri’s parents to care for, cancelling their tennis lessons and Netflix subscriptions, and even slowly selling off their furniture and electronics—the one thing that they ensure continues to be paid for are her cello lessons. When she reaches a point when her tutor is no longer able to teach her anything and refers the family to a music professor, the parents replay a conversation that they had earlier in which they talked about how the most important thing that they could do for their daughter would be to ensure that she is able to be independent, which they only see being possible if she becomes a musician. Their son also attempts to attain his own minor financial independence, in a poorly thought out cell phone reselling scheme that almost ends in tragedy, but offers Man Su the opportunity to show off his new, tough attitude in front of Miri when facing off against the owner of the shop, whose son is their son’s best friend and co-conspirator. 

Independence is good for one but not the other, and it’s unclear where Miri lies in all of this. Strangely, almost all of the wives of the four men in competition with one another are unemployed women of leisure; Miri’s life consists of ferrying her children about between their academic and extracurricular activities between tennis bouts, Beom-mo’s wife is an actress who can’t seem to get a part and has so much free time she still manages to carry on an affair in a house with a laid-off husband, second victim Ko Si-jo (Cha Seung-won)’s wife is unmentioned, and his final victim Choi Seon-chul (Park Hee-soon) is recently divorced and seems to still be supporting his ex. All of them are literally dependent, and what independence they do achieve undermines their respective husbands’ masculinity, through adultery, the perception of infidelity, or something completely different. Man Su’s suspicions about his wife are unfounded, with his overall hypocrisy highlighted by the fact that what he’s done is much, much worse than being unfaithful. Every man here tells himself that he has no other choice, and they’re all wrong, to their respective downfalls. 

This is a beautifully shot film, with fantastic and imaginative use of color. That’s never been something that Park has been afraid of, but it makes this combination of his uniquely unforgiving style and a (new to me) almost slapstick sense of comedy synthesize into something unique, and the almost Technicolor landscape makes it all the more special. The film is also full of seeming mundanities that might be metaphors for us to puzzle out over multiple viewings. A great deal is made out of Man Su’s tooth pain, as he has a molar that’s rotting away but he can’t do anything about it, until he finally pries the thing out in a primal rage in the film’s final half hour. There’s also time spent on the backstory of the house, that it was the house he grew up in and it stood on the edge of his father’s pig farm, but the farm went bust when a couple hundred pigs had to be put down due to a disease and were buried in a mass grave that still exists under part of the property. It’s grim stuff, and I’m looking forward to reading other critics’ analyses and interpretations in the coming months just as much as I’m looking forward to a rewatch. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025)

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“His flock has not only begun to shrink, but to calcify,” Bishop Langstron (Jeffrey Wright) warns young Reverend Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) about his reassignment to serve under Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin) at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude in upstate New York. Jud has just faced a committee of three upper-level members of the church for punching a fellow priest in the face, and he recounts the story of his turn to Christ, one of redemption not achieved but ongoing. Jud was a boxer in his youth before he found salvation, and for large parts of the film, the driving conflict is between Jud’s willingness to sacrifice, his sincere desire to bring others closer to Christ, and his testament to Christ’s love, versus Wicks’s egotistical self-martyrdom, his drive to consolidate his power at the expense of eroding his flock’s faith, and his heretical performance of his own prejudices as if they were God’s words. If Glass Onion could be (rightly) criticized for being a little too on-the-nose with its depiction of an Elon Musk-like richer-than-sin weenie loser villain, Wake Up Dead Man instead goes for a less specific target with the same ostentation by taking on all of the sins of modern right wing nationalism that cloak their evil under a banner of faith, and those who put darkness for light. Like me, director Rian Johnson had a profoundly religious upbringing, and although we both have left the churches in which we were raised, this film demonstrates a deep and abiding admiration for and fondness of true believers who practice God’s love, and I both respect and was moved by the approach. Johnson may have, intentionally or unintentionally, created one of the best pieces of Christian propaganda since Chronicles of Narnia or “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and he did it showing the apotheosis of contemporary American Christian Nationalism tending to a church that was literally without Christ. 

When I was young, one of the oft-repeated sermons that I witnessed (through countless Thursday chapel sessions at the fundamentalist Christian school that I attended, Sunday School sermons, Children’s Church ministries, and Wednesday Youth Pastor recitations) was one about the Christ-shaped hole in everyone’s being. Sometimes the hole was in your soul, and sometimes it was in your heart; if it was in your latter, they would occasionally use a piece of wood cut into a heart, with a lower-case-t-shaped void in the middle, into which a conveniently sized cross could slot as a visual representation. (Presumably, the more ambiguous nature of the soul prevented it from being carved out of scrap wood for these performances). I get the feeling that Johnson likely sat through some of these same services, and he transposes that metaphor in this film to a literal void in the shape of a crucifix on the walls of Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude. We learn the reason for this in a story related by Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close), who witnessed the destruction of the temple as a child; the monsignor’s grandfather Prentice was a widower with a daughter, Grace, when he became the shepherd of the town’s flock, and the daughter was a girl of “loose morals” who ended up a pregnant teen. Prentice promised her his fortune if she remained under his roof and didn’t embarrass him by going into the town, and she honored her end of the bargain until his dying day, watching as Prentice poisoned her own son against her and groomed him into becoming the next in a line of men who disguise their hatred behind their vestments. She found his bank accounts empty, and destroyed much of the church, supposedly out of rage, before dying while pounding on the outside of his “Lazarus tomb,” which can only be opened from the outside by construction equipment but which can be opened from within with only a light push. Ever since, Grace has been characterized as “The Harlot Whore,” and has become a key figure in Monsignor Jefferson’s fiery sermons.

It’s to this lost flock, not only shrinking but calcifying, that Jud arrives. That sounds like a coldly analytical way to describe it, but it’s with that same clinicality that Jud diagnoses the rot at the heart of Perpetual Fortitude, metaphorically calling it a cancer that must be cut out. This raises suspicions, of course, when Jefferson Wicks dies, seemingly impossibly. He entered a small cubby near the pulpit with no apparent exit, in full view of all witnesses, and collapsed before a knife was found in his back. Those in attendance that day other than Jud were a select few extremely devoted followers, who form our cast of suspects and witnesses. Martha was there, as was her husband Samson (Thomas Haden Church), the church groundskeeper who has found the strength to maintain his own sobriety because of his respect for the Monsignor’s own dubious overcoming of his addictions. Town doctor Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner), whose wife recently left him for someone she met on a Phish message board and took the kids with him, is present, as is concert cellist Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny), who is currently funneling all of her savings into Perpetual Fortitude in the hopes that the Monsignor will be able to cure her of her painful, disabling neuropathy. The town has also become home to Lee Ross (Andrew Scott), a former pulp sci-fi novelist of some (niche) renown whose pivot into libertarianism has made him an outcast in the elite literary circles he envies and left him with only a small but devoted fandom of survivalists who, in his words, “all look like John Goodman in The Big Lebowski.” Ross hopes to make his way back into polite society by publishing a book of Wicks’s sermons and his own accompanying essays and commentary, and as such is one of the Monsignor’s sycophants. Rounding out the group is Vera Draven (Kerry Washington), who is carrying on the family tradition of acting as the Wicks family’s lawyer, following in her father’s footsteps, as well as Cy (Daryl McCormack), the son her father forced her to adopt when she was still a student and the boy was already old enough to be in school. Cy has returned to Perpetual Fortitude, tail between his legs, after a failed attempt at breaking into politics. 

Most of the film’s political satire revolves around Cy. I mentioned before that the satire in this one is less about mocking a specific individual than about painting a broader picture, but Cy seems like a deliberate invocation of Christian Walker, at least if I’m reading Cy as being as closeted (which I am). When Cy complains to Jud that he failed to make his political ambitions come true, it was in spite of the fact that he hit every single right-wing talking point, listing them one by one in a screed that lasts for over a minute of the film’s runtime. He describes his playbook as, to paraphrase, “making people think about something that they hate and then make them afraid it will take away something that they love,” which is an encapsulation of the go-to method of reactionary appeals to perceived attacks on normalcy. Wicks is clearly not a technically adept person, a member of an older generation, but Cy’s incessant need to constantly curate his existence for his online following means that Wicks’s ideas work their way out to Cy’s followers, a genealogy of intolerance. It works thematically while also justifying why there’s footage of a very important meeting that reveals every participant’s motivation. 

We’ve gotten pretty far into this without ever mentioning Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), the gentleman detective who is ostensibly the star of this series. He enters the film fairly late as well, but it’s a damned good entrance, as he finds himself inside Perpetual Fortitude and face to face with Jud, who has provided the narration to this point, and finds it difficult to find something nice to say about the church and can only bring himself to compliment the architecture. Blanc has been brought in by the local sheriff (Mila Kunis), and he’s fascinated by the opportunity to solve what is, despite the lack of a door, a locked-room mystery. It turns out that the church reading group has all read multiple examples of the genre, including The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and The Hollow Man, which means that any one of them could have drawn inspiration from them. It was here that I first suspected that we were being led to the inevitable conclusion that Jud had committed the crime and was merely an unreliable narrator, as is the case in Roger Ackroyd (um, spoiler alert for a book that turns one hundred next year, I suppose); after all, his name sounds like someone trying to say the word “duplicity” after too many drinks. As it turns out, the presence of Roger Ackroyd is a clue, but not the one that I thought. 

Blanc, despite a slightly smaller presence here, is nonetheless excellent when he’s on screen. As with the previous two installments in this series, there’s much to laugh at and be puzzled by here, and the audience for my screening had a delightful time. You will too. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond