reviews

La Bola Negra (2026)

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La bola negra (trans. “the black ball”) is an unfinished play by Spanish writer Federico García Lorca. Only four pages exist, which tell the story of a young man whose application to a prestigious casino in Granada is rejected, and who tells his father that his rejection was due to allegations of homosexual conduct. This year’s film of the same title imagines that the play is not unfinished, but merely partially lost, and weaves together three narratives across nearly a century of time in order to tell the rest of that story.

In 1932, Carlos (Milo Quifes) is rejected by the casino, literally blackballed as they use a system of voting using white and onyx spheres. In 1937, Sebastián (Guitarricadelafuente) is a young trumpeter whose village is ready to welcome the Fascist forces of Mussolini (who is supporting the Nationalist rebels against the Republican forces), only for the Italian planes to open fire and kill most of the villagers. He escapes and is enlisted in the Spanish Nationalist forces, where he is tasked with guarding a prisoner of war, a Republican lieutenant colonel named Rafael Rodríguez Rapún (Miguel Bernardeau). Sebastián becomes enamored of the man, whom he learns was a footballer and actor in his younger days. Finally, in 2017, Alberto (Carlos González), a lapsed playwright who has become a historian, is searching for musical recordings that predate the Spanish Civil War in the hopes of recovering a buried and forgotten queer history. When he is contacted by the estate of a grandfather he has presumed long dead, his mother Teresa (Lola Dueñas), a troubled addict, tells him not to collect his inheritance. Albert  chooses to go, and comes into possession of a manuscript that has been presumed lost for decades.

La bola negra is a majestic, sweeping, beautiful film. Carlos’s story is one that is haunted by gorgeous, surreal imagery that’s counterposed against the reality of closeted living in 1930s Granada, in both its dangers and its beauties. Carlos’s dreams are for him alone and are packed with beauty while his waking life is lived for others and is filled with monsters ready to leap out of cruisy alleyways to waylay him and call him back to heteronormativity. When the grandeur of his dreams breaks through into reality, he has a choice, and we learn only in the very end which one he makes, and whether it was the right one or not. Sebastián’s narrative is much more straightforward, and even more sorrowful; his mother dies, everyone he knows dies, he’s conscripted into an army fighting an ideological war that he wishes to have no stake in, and he falls in love with a prisoner that he knows he may one day be forced to execute. There’s beauty in the little moments that he can sneak, but it’s fleeting. The carnage of the war called to mind several sequences from On the Silver Globe (there’s one tracking shot that is composed almost identically, although I can’t be certain that this was a direct inspiration or simply a matter of great minds thinking alike) as well as Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace, and it’s breathtaking.

Alberto’s story is smaller, more personal, and has the least bombast, but it would have to, as it is the one that is closest to us and thus most familiar. His attempts to make space in his life for his mother despite her abusive, erratic behavior are balanced by his supporting relationship with his partner Juan Pablo (Julio Torres). That ability to openly love and be loved is one of the defining differences between Alberto and the protagonists of the 1930s narratives. We get to see everyone’s mothers; Carlos’s is fretful but loving, minimally present in comparison to her daughter, whose struggles against the social restrictions of her gender mirror Carlos’s own inability to fully actualize; Sebastián’s mother is killed before we can learn anything about her, but her affection for her son is real; Alberto gets the benefit of being open, but he does not get to feel a mother’s unconditional love. The way that these narratives interweave with one another and serve as thematic and narrative bridges is something that I don’t want to reveal this early in the film’s run, as that pleasant feeling of everything falling into place is one that I enjoy and would like to preserve for others. It’s a satisfying reveal, and one that ultimately elevates the whole. You won’t want to miss it.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

I Am Frankelda (2026)

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It’s really important to catch Laika movies in theaters — not so much to experience their innovative stop-motion artistry on the big screen or to financially support the brand, but because the trailers always remind you of how much less obnoxious they are than most other children’s movies on the market. The loud, sugar-addled trailers for upcoming Disney, Dreamworks, and Illumination titles that played before my local AMC screening of Wildwood were deeply depressing, a stark reminder of just how dire most kid-friendly corporate content is. In contrast, the dark mood, complex emotions, and visual majesty of the feature presentation was even more impressive, making it clear just how vital Travis Knight’s Nike-funded vanity project is on the modern animation landscape. Still, there were moments of Wildwood where the studio’s animation technique was so smoothly, competently achieved that it was near-indistinguishable from what its CG-animated competitors are peddling. As the modern stop-motion heavyweights, Laika & Aardman have both perfected the artform to the point where imperfections have to be artificially reinserted into the work to give it the handmade feel of stop-motion’s past. It’s wonderful that a modern movie studio is still making aesthetically beautiful animation for young audiences, but is it possible that it’s become too beautiful?

That’s at least a question I asked myself while watching the rougher-edged, lower-budget monster mash I Am Frankelda at home the same day I watched Wildwood in theaters. The straight-to-Netflix indie production has been advertised as Mexico’s first fully stop-motion animated feature film, one that’s been quietly received in the US but was popular enough elsewhere to serve as the prequel for a Cartoon Network Latin America TV series. Fraternal directors Arturo & Roy Ambriz seemingly deployed the same 3D printing technique that make Laika & Aardman productions so machine-perfect, but they’re working with a much smaller, scrappier crew than those two towering studios’, and it shows in the stilted, misshapen details of the work. And yet, the constant onscreen reminders that I Am Frankelda was made by human hands imbues it with a genuine, poetic magic that’s somewhat lost in larger productions like Wildwood. A lot of stop-motion’s charm is in the ordinariness & tactility of its creation, and the Ambriz bothers’ indie studio Cinema Fantasma is still intimate & hands-on enough to carry that charm from figurines to screen. It’s possible that the tie-in TV series Frankelda’s Book of Spooks will gradually become so popular that their production scale will eventually escalate to match Laika’s, and that tactile charm will be lost to time, but for now they’re operating in a perfect artistic sweet spot.

Besides their shared stop-motion medium, Frankelda & Wildwood are also linked as dark children’s fantasy stories about scary bird-people. In I Am Frankelda‘s case, those talking bird-creatures live underground, which feels somewhat counterintuitive as a limitation to their flight. To be specific, they are winged demons, connected to the humans aboveground in 19th Century Mexico through the power of literature. They are the monsters under our beds, an underground class of magical creatures who inspire humanity’s fears that we, in turn, translate into art. The titular Frankelda is the one artist who manages to physically access their demonic underworld, at first translating the fears the demons inspire into a storybook but eventually joining them in a supernatural hostage crisis she can’t fully escape. The resulting movie-musical struggle between human & monsterkind is the kind of mall-goth fantasia that Tim Burton & Guillermo del Toro dream about when they close their eyes at night, populated with a wide range of beautifully hideous monster puppets slathered in glow-in-the-dark paint. Like Wildwood, it’s a children’s adventure into a dark fantasy world, but its dream-logic rules of how fiction is “more real than reality” allows its imagination to stray as far into that demonic wilderness as the Ambriz brothers’ 3D printer can possibly go.

Another way that Frankelda resembles Wildwood is that it is overlong by a third. The TV series it sets up, Frankelda’s Book of Spooks, follows a Tales from the Crypt-style anthology format, in which Frankelda introduces 15-minute horror stories about misbehaved or cowardly children who need to be scared by monsters to learn a life lesson. Most episodes open & close with Frankelda playing Crypt Keeper, but in the finale her own childhood story of how she came to be trapped in the demonic underworld is told in fifteen concise minutes. This prequel film retells that exact story, recycling some of the exact imagery from the episode, at a 100-minute sprawl, which allows its internal lore a little too much space to get tangled up in its own convolutions. We learn very quickly that Frankelda is being held hostage specifically because the demons below are running out of good ideas for inspiring nightmares in the increasingly jaded youth of “today” (give or take a century or two), and so she’s stuck in their nightmare realm as an unpaid staff writer for all of eternity, or at least until Cinema Fantasma can’t earn any more outside funding. Without the anthology vignettes to break up that origin story at regular intervals, the movie version of Frankelda’s own morbid tale gets a little exhausting by its final stretch, especially once you’ve already met all the multi-eyed demons in her supporting cast of freaks.

It’s unclear what Frankelda‘s future will be. The first & only season of the show aired five years ago, and this subsequent prequel movie made such a quiet splash on Netflix that it’s unlikely to justify international distribution for another follow-up. The anthology format of the series means that the Ambriz brothers can continue telling Frankelda stories forever if they can find an outlet for it, though, and it’s got an Over the Garden Wall quality to it that makes it perfect Halloween Season ritual viewing in its brevity & rewatchability. My hope is that, like Over the Garden Wall, it’ll eventually earn enough of a cult following to make Cinema Fantasma as much of an animation-nerd household name as Laika & Aardman—if not only as their weirdo goth-kid little brother—and Frankelda’s demonic hostage crisis will continue on for all of eternity, alongside other stop-motion tales of the macabre.

-Brandon Ledet

Bouchra (2026)

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Usually, whenever I’m confronted by an image that could be categorized as “furry art”, I immediately scroll past it and move on with my day, since it’s clearly not for me. Most furry art is seemingly designed to appeal to one of two audiences: adults who find anthropomorphized animals intensely erotic or, counterintuitively, young children — whose cartoon adventure comedies are often animated by adults who find anthropomorphized animals intensely erotic. Furry art is a closed loop. Even when it leaks out into mainstream productions like Zootopia, Bad Guys, and Forgotten Island, its talking anthro-animals always find their way back to horndog internet subdungeons like DeviantArt, returning to their primary audience’s busy hands. The computer-animated memoir Bouchra deviates from that closed-loop system to appeal to anyone who might be interested in broader-appeal artforms like personal essays, queer familial dramas, or independent filmmaking, regardless of whether they’re turned on by fursona character designs. It’s refreshing to finally be confronted with furry art that aims to make its audience feel other emotions besides Horny.

Obviously, Bouchra occasionally aims to make its audience feel Horny too; that’s unavoidable. It’s a low-key indie drama about struggling artists living in New York City, and just like any other movie in that category, those hip, young characters occasionally have sex onscreen. It’s just unusual for the sex to be performed between predator & prey-type fursonas animated through the video game engine Blender. As a personal memoir about a documentarian’s difficulties adjusting to queer city life while maintaining a healthy relationship with her conservative parents back home, there’s nothing especially flashy or novel about Bouchra‘s scene-to-scene drama. However, that lesbian filmmaker being represented onscreen as a CGI jackal who occasionally strips down to lick the scruff & thighs of the cows & other prey in her life does add some specificity to the project that distinguishes it from other confessional debut features of the same ilk. The CG animation itself can be outright beautiful too, with more attention paid to blocking and light sources than most modern animation bothers with while appealing to sugar-addled children. The smoke trailing from a character’s post-coital cigarette in a stream of liquid CG glitter is so beautiful that it’s easy to forget you’re watching a talking animal inhale it. These are real, fully fleshed out characters who love, fight, fret, and fuck just like anyone else . . . give or take some major anatomical details.

The drama is convincingly personal & heartfelt too. Our main jackal, Bouchra, finds herself unexpectedly homesick for Morocco while struggling to root herself in her new life as a up-and-coming NYC filmmaker. Her relationship with her mother remains close and openly communicative despite the geographical distance, with the devastating exception that her mother refuses to acknowledge her lesbian identity. Bouchra is working on an autofictional memoir as a way of dealing with that fractured family dynamic, which she uses as an excuse to interview her mother by phone about her decade-old coming out letter that otherwise remains undiscussed by the two jackal-women. Reality & fiction intertwine as their relationship and the fictional movie about their relationship play out simultaneously, alternating between NYC & Casablanca in a purposefully disorienting continuity. First-time filmmaker Meriem Bennani also deliberately confuses the details of her personal life with this autofictional narrative, voicing Bouchra herself as an invitation to read that character as her very own fursona avatar. In doing so, she’s found a way to express the broad queer-culture theme of frustration with family’s refusal to engage with the details of your romantic life in a way that feels both specific to her own life’s circumstances and convincingly translated into honest artistic expression.

A major reason I’m comfortable classifying Bouchra as furry art (beyond defining it by the “I know it when I see it” pornographic metric) that when we watch the jackal-documentarian storyboard her own life’s story on index cards, they’re sketched out in an unmistakably furry art style — complete with prurient yiffing detail. If we’re meant to see Bouchra as Bennani’s avatar, that inclusion is an essential insight into her creative process (alongside co-director Orian Barki, who voices her talking-lizard bestie). Those storyboard index cards, as highlighted in slideshow montage, contextualize Bouchra as an authentic art piece from a filmmaker who primarily sees the world through predator-prey fursona dynamics, having been raised in an Internet subculture with its own closed-loop logic & visual language. I haven’t personally engaged with enough furry art to claim that it’s the first major artistic work achieved within that closed loop, but it does feel like the first major title to fully escape containment and stand out on its own artistic, dramatic merits beyond its occasional erotic appeal.

-Brandon Ledet

Clayface (2026)

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As we were walking to the car after our viewing of Clayface last night, my viewing companions and I were discussing the movie, and I mentioned how much it reminded me of Sam Raimi’s Darkman. As I described the 1990 film—a scientist experimenting with generating synthetic skin for burn victims is brutalized and left for dead by some mobsters, then enacts his revenge by using his experimental discoveries to get close to his victims by disguising himself as other people—my companion said, “Oh, so it’s the exact same.” And yeah, kind of. Clayface doesn’t have the same dark sense of humor, the lead character’s descent into madness is neither as successful or excitingly depicted, and it’s also a distractingly ugly movie. Darkman doesn’t have a poorly considered element of the protagonist being falsely accused of sexual assault, and the love interest in Clayface is the scientist this time around while the disfigured antivillain is an actor, but otherwise the changes are, if you’ll forgive the term, mostly cosmetic.

Matt Hagen (Thom Rhys Harries) is an actor on the rise, having come from humble beginnings in the Gotham City neighborhood known as The Narrows and risen to Hollywood stardom. On the day that he learns that he’s been nominated for an Oscar, he goes out clubbing with childhood friend Corey (Joshua James), who tries to warn him that he’s dancing with a mobster’s girlfriend. Matt ignores this and spends the night with the woman, only to wake up and get his face sliced to pieces by Markos Szabo (David Dencik)’s goons. Several costly and ineffective reconstruction surgeries later, not only has Szabo’s untouchable made man status and smear campaign (including having his moll claim that Matt drugged her) resulted in Gotham failing to prosecute criminally but also ensured Matt’s civil case is likewise dismissed. Bled dry by some bad investments on the part of his business manager Frank (Eddie Marsan), to whom Matt gave power of attorney, Matt crawls back to the roach-infested hole from which he thought he had escaped. Hope comes in the form of Dr. Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie), whose research into nanotechnology may hold the key to fixing Matt’s facial scarring and help him get his life back. All the while, her fiancé John Borelli (Max Minghella), the one good cop in all of Gotham City, continues to investigate Matt’s disfigurement.

There are moments in Clayface that sing. The sequence near the end in which Matt manages to get inside of Szabo’s club and then proceeds to wipe the floor with his men because of his shapeshifting abilities is genuinely fun and exciting. It’s not a big CGI extravaganza where he overcomes with brute strength but is in a seemingly real environment full of actors and extras, and the shapeshifting cost-saving measure of having Matt transform as some object passes between him and the camera gives the whole thing a Twilight Zone flair that’s rather effective. This has been touted as a body horror film, and there’s enough of that to go around as well. The actual attack on Matt is harrowing, the goopification of his face is successful even when it’s computer generated, and the ways that he murders the recipients of his vengeance through various different applications of his newfound abilities is sufficiently gross and never gets boring. When prosthetics are in use, they’re also quite good; the scene of Matt having to cut through his own flesh during a bumpy plane ride to prevent his eyes from sealing shut has been in every preview, but it’s still effective in the final cut. It’s quite reminiscent of the Fringe episode “Ability,” which makes me wonder if screenwriter Mike Flanagan is as big a fan of that show as he is of Battlestar Galactica, as his recent casting of several BSG alums on Carrie demonstrated. There’s also a bizarre and erotically charged scene in which Caitlyn is studying Matt while he sleeps, only for him to partially morph into her and touch himself-as-her with his still-masculine hands. If nothing else, this one is at least a little “for the freaks.”

There are also moments that fall flat. The narrative choice to have Mia (Joana Ribeiro) accuse Matt of drugging and assaulting her is a strange one; the only excuse for it is that, once Matt’s face seems to have healed, he’s welcomed back onto the red carpet with nary a moment’s hesitation, which may have been intended as a commentary on how quick the media machine is to forgive men who are credibly accused (or convicted) of abuse. If that was the intent, it’s barely legible. The narrative journey of Matt’s supposed best friend Corey reads as an attempt at deepening the sense of betrayal that Matt feels when he realizes just how few people could actually rely upon and drive him further into an obsessive dependency upon Caitlyn to be friend, physician, confidante, and more. Unfortunately, the overall flat characterization of Corey and his glossed-over unlikely path to success in the wake of Matt’s fall means that everything having to do with this character feels forced and unnatural.

Having highlighted the good and the questionable, all that’s left to us is what doesn’t work, and there is, unfortunately, quite a bit of that. First and foremost, this is an ugly movie. I don’t want to keep comparing Clayface to Darkman, but there’s a quality to the grime and the gritty noir feeling in Raimi’s film that is not even attempted in James Watkins’s vision for Clayface. The interior sets range from decent (Matt’s awful Narrows apartment) to great (Szabo’s club), but every single outdoor shot looks like hot garbage. The presumably CGI backdrops look like something straight out of an early 2010s Syfy Channel show, and even if you try to ignore that your attention is constantly being drawn back to them by an overabundance of lens flare activity that makes JJ Abrams seem restrained. I rewatched the trailer for Darkman and although it has its fair share of special effect failure, you can tell that some thought and planning went into, for instance, the helicopter crash sequence. In night shots, Gotham City looks like Megalopolis, and it’s just awful. The romance here is also nothing to really write home about; Caitlyn’s fiancé is less a character and more of an afterthought. I did appreciate that the film had her be very resistant to Matt’s charms, but given where the narrative goes, it ends up having no real stakes.

I was not impressed with director Watkins’ Eden Lake, albeit for different reasons than my ultimately lukewarm feelings about Clayface, and I was subjected to the trailer for Speak No Evil for so many months that I refused to see it on principle. This is both a better and worse film than Eden Lake; that was an extended exercise in misery that was very much a product of its time: reactionary paranoia-mongering about dangerous youths as an excuse for extended misery with nothing substantive to say. This film is different; it’s at least trying to break out of the “low-budget movie about a B-list comic book villain” box by showcasing gross body horror and giving us no one to really root for. But the next time I feel a hankering for something like this, I’ll probably just watch Darkman instead.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Tuner (2026)

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FYC screener season is well under way, as critics and guild members are starting to draft ballots for their respective Best of 2026 awards rituals as part of the year-long movie-marketing cycle that never truly ends. Depending on what titles you afford your thinly-stretched attention, that can mean spending the last few months of 2026 watching overlong, overly dour festival-circuit dramas in a desperate effort to catch up with the year’s pre-ordained Important Movies, which are typically held back until the last minute before votes are due. A more relaxed approach could be to just coast through FYC season watching middlebrow crowdpleasers starring always-welcome celebrities you already know & love, playing dress-up & make-believe for easy layup accolades. This year, for instance, has seen prominent awards-seeking runs for John Malkovich in Wild Horse Nine, playing a too-old-for-this-shit wisecracking criminal in a 70s throwback acting vehicle, and John Turturro doing the exact same in The Only Living Pickpocket in New York. I’d also like to offer, for your consideration, the unassuming crowd pleaser Tuner, featuring a prominent supporting role for Dustin Hoffman as a too-old-for-this-shit wisecracker in yet another 70s throwback crime-drama acting showcase. Tuner was released back in May to strong critical marks and relatively quiet fanfare among wide audiences, and it’s now resurfacing to seek potential placements on Best of 2026 ballots in the season where it truly belongs: the time of year when we endlessly discuss & promote movies people otherwise only engage with on the backs of airplane headrests.

If anything, Tuner acts as a symbolic passing of the torch from one generation’s always-welcome celebrity actor to the next. Dustin Hoffman’s role as an overly chatty piano tuner with a vaguely shady past and a heart of tarnished gold only accounts for a few minutes’ screentime, which he mostly spends in a hospital bed cheering on his young costar from the sidelines. The fresh-faced Leo Woodall is the Tuner of the title, a talented pianist whose career in music has been sidelined by a hearing disability that makes him overly sensitive to loud noises, relegating his perfect-pitch ear to the more humble craft of tuning dust-gathering pianos for the wealthy, jaded citizens of New York City. By happenstance, he also learns that his overly sensitive hearing also makes him perfectly skilled for cracking safes, which gets him in quick trouble as he scrambles to pay for his aging mentor’s out-of-control medical bills. Woodall mostly plays the titular safecracking piano tuner as a kind of gentle giant, a sensitive soul who’s constantly mumbling “Sorry” as he bumps into things despite his jockish, muscular physique. However, as the pressures of his duty to Hoffman’s mentor figure, his gradual integration into an underground crime world, and his burgeoning romance with a career-hungry composer (Havana Rose Liu) bring him to an uncontrolled boil, he becomes genuinely dangerous in his volatility. If he’s not capable of physical violence, he’s at least at risk of committing emotional violence against his precious few loved ones, especially as the constant, blaring sounds of NYC rattle his practiced sense of laidback cool.

Why does this safecracking piano tuner continue to live in New York City anyway? When explaining his extreme hearing sensitivity to his new girlfriend, he says, “You’d be surprised how loud the world is.” That’s doubly true for New Yorkers, though, especially the ones unlucky enough to drive a work van down city streets from job to job to make ends meet. Tuner is not nearly as interested in plausibility as it is in recreating a vintage 70s crime thriller vibe in its jazzy score, its character-actor quirks, and its whip-pan camera maneuvers. Director Daniel Roher is fighting an uphill battle on that front, since he’s shooting this big-city crime story on modern digital cameras instead of relying on the throwback celluloid grain of a Safdies-style production to sell its retro cool to the audience. As Woodall learns how to crack safes via YouTube tutorials, finds himself walking through security camera footage, and has to beg his fellow boneheaded criminals to turn down the volume on their video games & TikToks, the movie does gradually justify its flat digital patina, but if any modern thriller was begging for the shot-on-film treatment, it’s this one. Still, it establishes a relatively cool, laidback heist thriller vibe with some surprising visual choices in how to represent its routine safecracking sequences so they never become stale: fetishistic close-up details of the inner locks clicking into place, fish-eye views of the thieves from the safe dial’s POV, rapid-fire clicks & edits as the piano tuner hops from one rich prick’s safe to the next. It’s fun, it’s freewheeling, and when our handsome lead gets into legitimate trouble, it’s effectively thrilling in its brutality.

If there’s anything inadvisable about Dustin Hoffman’s deployment as Tuner’s celebrity mascot, it’s that his presence does recall the once celebrated, now disgraced autism drama Rain Man, especially in sequences where Woodall is tasked to recognize complex musical notes & patterns with near-supernatural accuracy. Otherwise, Hoffman’s perfectly suited for the task of affording the film some vintage New Hollywood authenticity as a 70s-era throwback and, more importantly, making sure it lingers in the discourse past its theatrical run, as his name inevitably will find its way onto a few Best Supporting Acting ballots in the next couple months. This is the one time of year that Dad Movies, Airplane Movies, and other solidly entertaining Middlebrow Crowdpleasers are treated as Important Cinema before they’re shuffled off to basic-cable rotation or forgotten to time entirely. It’s Hoffman’s performance that sneaks Tuner into that conversation, and it’s Woodall’s preposterous journey as history’s most musically talented safecracker that makes it worthy of the extra attention. Its FYC season victory lap is well earned.

-Brandon Ledet

The Oldest Person in the World (2026)

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The festival-circuit documentary The Oldest Person in the World is an intentionally incomplete project, in that it could theoretically be expanded upon into infinity . . . or at least for as long as humanity is still viable and still making movies. As such, it’s a project without a clear goal beyond marking the passage of time, one that director Sam Green has taken on as a personal mission within the scope of his own family life but could, theoretically, stray into any direction the next filmmaker in his lineage wants to take it. The logline premise is simple. Green has spent the past decade interviewing the world’s currently oldest living person, as determined by Guinness World Records, one reigning champion at a time. He hopes to continue this project for as long as he continues working & living as a filmmaker, with an open-ended invitation for it to carry on beyond him in another documentarian’s hands — preferably his young son’s. The idea is that, every ten years, a new edition of The Oldest Person in the World would be issued with a new batch of interviews as the title changes hands, inviting the audience to reflect on the passage of time at the furthest edges of a human lifespan. That project only takes up so much of the movie’s runtime, however, as Green allows himself space for his own self-reflections on the passage of time within his immediate family, getting sentimental about his growing son, his aging mother, his deceased brother, and his own prematurely failing health. The world’s oldest living people only have the strength and the self-awareness to say so much about what it means to live an extraordinarily long life, so Green fills the void with his own ups, downs, and neuroses. It’s unclear what place, exactly, that perspective would have in a future edition of this project once Green passes the baton, which is probably why the Guinness Book of World Records isn’t typically written in first-person.

It likely goes without saying that Green’s interview subjects are of far greater interest than his personal video diary entries that fill the gaps between them. It also likely goes without saying that the oldest person in the world is almost always asleep or grumpy, which makes them terrible interviewees — delightfully so. The MVP subject of this initial batch is the 118-year-old French nun Lucile Randon, who attributes her longevity to the mystery of God’s will, which she treats as a kind of supernatural hostage situation she wishes to be over as soon as He’s ready to relent. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the kindly 117-year-old Jamaican woman Violet Brown sees her continued life as more of a gift than an extended prison sentence, stressing to Green how important it is to hold onto the memories that matter most for as long as you can, lest they slip away to time. Green also does some extracurricular research between interviews into the history of the Oldest Living Person title, uncovering bar-trivia tidbits like how all-time champion Jeanne Calment was not only the world’s oldest living person ever at 122 years of age, but also became the world’s oldest rapper on a novelty record to promote her achievement in delaying the inevitable. These women (and they’re seemingly always women) are endlessly fascinating subjects in their own right, so it can’t help but feel a little disappointing that Green relies so heavily on his own cutesy narration to sell their shared story’s poignancy. The resulting film is frequently poignant, though, and funny too, so the indulgence is forgivable. It’s just always a relief when he finds himself at a loss for words (if not only because he doesn’t always speak his interviewee’s language) and sits with his subjects in a shared silence, allowing the passage of time to naturally imbue the moment with meaning.

Conceptually, the idea of The Oldest Person in the World continuing on as a collaborative project is a little flawed, given how much of himself Green has inserted into the initial work. The way he proposes it, the movie would not be followed up by sequels every decade like the Seven Up! series, so much as it would be continually expanded upon in new, fluctuating edits. A new edit from a new contributor would have to transform the work radically to be at all worthwhile, though, as Bresson’s axiom goes that, “A film is born three times: first in the writing of the script, once again in the shooting, and finally in the editing.” What happens if Green’s son grows up to be an avant-garde experimental filmmaker in the Godardian tradition? Would he be allowed to remix footage from this first edition into a multimedia collage of abstract, incongruent imagery, or would Green’s more Varda-inspired approach to documentary filmmaking play out in full before abruptly switching modes as the next contributor takes over? Furthermore, who’s to say that anyone besides Green would be interested in continuing this project at all, including his own son, given how personal the initial outing is to his own familial sentimentality? The imperfection of the proposed project does not delegitimize its existence, though, no more than the imperfection of Guinness World Records’ tracking of the world’s oldest living person makes that pursuit meaningless. Guinness sometimes struggles to fully verify the birth records of the reigning champion, so that there are stretches of time where there technically is no official oldest living person until the next legitimate one can be crowned. Time marches on, though, and things are inevitably taken out of our hands as we’re decommissioned and replaced by the next batch of human beings behind us. All we can really do in the meantime is observe & document the process.

-Brandon Ledet

Cujo (1983)

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Sipping a late-night beer while flipping through trash TV channels in an overly air-conditioned hotel room is one of the great luxuries of modern living. It doesn’t matter the quality of the hotel, the beer, or what’s on the TV; it always feels indulgent in the exact right way. I recently found myself enjoying this modern luxury while vacationing in Hot Springs, Arkansas, during a time when basic-cable TV channels were deep in their Halloween season programming. Every night, I would flip between the available movie channels to catch brief, out-of-context glimpses of crowd-favorite horror titles between commercial breaks, hopping from one movie to the next the second an ad would interrupt the spook show. From night to night, it seemed the same movies were playing in rotation while also hopping from channel to channel, establishing a moment-in-time canon of horror classics that are both famous enough to draw ad sales and currently cheap enough to license: Aliens, Beetlejuice, Bride of Chucky, Seed of Chucky, Stephen King’s IT, Jaws II, Halloween II, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, Lake Placid, The Mummy Returns, and several other titles I’ve already seen plenty of times before. Somewhere in that mix, I also caught glimpses of the 1983 Stephen King adaptation Cujo, which I was surprised to discover I hadn’t seen all the way through before, despite its obvious cultural familiarity. It seems to me that if a horror movie was famous enough to be included in that rotation of well-worn classics, I should probably make time to properly watch it, which I dutifully followed through on as soon as we returned home. Vacation is over, and I am no longer watching movies in out-of-context snippets; this blog is serious business.

Cujo stars Dee Wallace as the mother of a young child, caught between her duties as a housewife and her desires as a lonely, frustrated woman. Her husband (Daniel Hugh-Kelly) is a total drip whose high-pressure advertising job has him ceaselessly babbling on the phone about breakfast cereal commercials, so she instead seeks sexual release with their rough-handed handyman (Christopher Stone), who’s too much of a brute for the tryst to last long-term. While this peak-divorce-era adultery drama plays out in the suburbs, a junkyard St. Bernard named Cujo is suffering his own personal crisis on the rural outskirts of town, where the family employs an off-the-books mechanic. Cujo is usually a very sweet, good boy, but he sticks his snout where it doesn’t belong and gets bitten on the face by a rabid bat, transforming him from loving family dog to giant, froth-mouthed monster. When the jilted husband leaves for a work trip after discovering his wife’s infidelity, mother & son bring the family car to Cujo’s junkyard for repair, where they find that the dog has already started a vicious murder spree, and they’re next on the menu. The film becomes intensely claustrophobic from there, with Wallace’s distraught & dehydrated mother fighting to keep her son alive in a broken car that Cujo guards like a prison warden, viciously attacking the duo any time they attempt escape. Through the struggle, she proves her worth to herself as a familial protector who’ll do anything to keep her son alive and her family intact, whereas she starts the film listlessly detached. She also gets in a paw-to-paw fight with a gigantic, rabid dog, whose supernatural relentlessness is comparable to a Freddy, a Jason, a Michael, or a Chucky.

At its start, Cujo doesn’t appear to be in much of a rush to terrorize its audience. The first half of the film is pure domestic drama, with its horror elements only hinted at in the young child Tad’s insistence that there is a monster under his bed that will eat him as soon as the lights are switched off. His otherwise absent father gets all the glory as the family protector in those scenes, scaring the make-believe monster away while his mother does the less glamorous work of actually raising him at home from day to day. That is, until the rabid dog attacks start halfway through, when she has to go to battle with the very real monster lurking under the family car instead of the fake one hiding under the bed. Once mother & son are isolated in that automotive prison, Cujo is legitimately terrifying. It’s the most I’ve been unnerved by a scary movie since I first saw the home-invasion thriller The Strangers a few years ago, likely because—like senseless home break-ins—an angry, barking dog covered in blood is a more probable threat in my life than ghosts or ghouls or goblins or the other go-to monsters I usually seek out in classic horror movies. Even so, Cujo does transform from a common dog to a supernatural monster somewhere in the process of his mental decline. Early in the movie, Tad makes a jokey reference to the movie Jaws at the family dinner table, which places this firmly in the canon of cross-species Jaws knockoffs from its era: Jaws, except it’s an octopus in Orca; Jaws, except it’s a bear in Grizzly; Jaws, except it’s a boar in Razorback; and so on. Appropriately enough, the director of Cujo made one of the finest specimens of that subgenre in the 1980 Jaws, except it’s an alligator banger Alligator.

It’s easy to see how Alligator landed Lewis Teague the job of adapting King’s novel — big creature, big chompers, etc. Along with frequent Verhoeven cinematographer Jan De Bont, Teague finds infinite angles on the car-imprisonment scenario of the second half to exploit for effective scares. The camera spins on a 360º swivel inside the car, searching for an unseen Cujo. The rabid dog’s own POV is shown in first-person Cujo Cam during his more slasher-inspired attacks. In the smartest production move, the dog is often portrayed by a man in a costume during his attacks, allowing him to get physical with his costars in a way more traditional animal-attack creature features can’t achieve. It’s a convincingly tactile tactic that helped clarify why I found Primate to be one of this year’s most satisfying horror titles, despite its muted reputations among more high-concept hits like Backrooms, Obsession, and Camp Miasma. It turns out that a freaked-out actor wrestling with a rabid, enraged animal is enough of a hook to carry an otherwise middling family drama, as long as you can sell the viciousness & physicality of that interspecies clash. I doubt that Cujo was ranked near the top of many critics’ Best of the Year lists back in 1983 either, but the scariness of its back half has proven to be enough to solidify it as a lasting horror classic . . . if the metric of continual basic-cable broadcast means anything in establishing that canon. It’s unlikely that Primate will experience the same long-term vindication over the decades, considering the current absence of a legitimate monoculture, but I would be just as happy to see out-of-context clips of it while surfing channels in a hotel room over a beer in the 2060s, God willing.

-Brandon Ledet

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)

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People like to say that the best biopics focus on a small window of time in their subjects’ lives instead of scrambling to cover everything from birth to death. The traditional cradle-to-grave biopic format (as so perfectly parodied in Walk Hard: The Lend of Dewey Cox) has long gone out of favor, with the current preference being for slice-of-life portraits of famous people in their quieter, private moments. The 1986 true-crime biopic Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer was ahead of the curve on that trend, choosing to focus on a small snippet of real-life serial killer Henry Lee Lucas’s infamous crime spree instead of creating a full profile of his life from childhood to arrest. Only, the movie eventually proved to be a warning about choosing the wrong slice-of-life moment in your subject’s biography, since it happened to focus on a small window of time in Lucas’s life that he very likely made up and did not happen at all, thank God. Lucas became famous for confessing to hundreds of murders during police interrogation after arrest in Texas, with his former cellmate Ottis Toole bragging that he was an accomplice in the headline-grabbing crime spree. The problem is that Lucas was just telling the cops what they wanted to hear, allowing them to close as many unsolved murder cases as they wanted to pin on him as long as it made the jailtime for his actual crimes easier to bear. Of the 600 murders he confessed to, it’s difficult to fully decipher which ones he was actually guilty of, and so Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer has eventually transformed into a print-the-legend endeavor, operating more as a composite portrait of a serial killer rather than a detailed portrait of this serial killer.

A young Michael Rooker stars as the cold, unfeeling Henry, portraying his brief time in Chicago as the roommate of former prison buddy Ottis Toole (Tom Towles). Ottis invites his semi-estranged sister Becky (Tracy Arnold) to crash on the couch for a while, and the trio momentarily form a fucked-up family unit that repeats the abuses they each suffered as children. Ottis & Becky both reveal to Henry that they were raised by a physically abusive father, and Henry subconsciously takes over that role in their new family home — keeping them both in line with weaponized sexual tension and threats of physical violence. Things get even more unseemly as he takes Ottis under his wing as a night-owl serial killer, strangling, stabbing, and shooting the citizens of Chicago at random as a form of stress relief. It’s unclear what Henry’s own abusive backstory might be, as nailing down the details of how and why he killed his own mother is just as difficult for these fictionalized characters as nailing down the details of his actual crime spree was for real-life journalists. Rooker mostly portrays him as a blank slate with nothing going on behind his empty, black eyes besides an unexplained compulsion to kill. He’s equally soft-spoken and vicious, without much internal life to be accessed past his hardened surface. Likewise, his crimes are depicted from an alienating distance, focused more on the stillness of his victims’ bodies in the aftermath than on the passionate thrill of his murders in real time. As a result, Henry’s only truly knowable in how he interacts with his abuse-victim roommates, making this more of a family portrait than the portrait of a single man.

Speaking of family portraits, the movie Henry most reminded me of was the 2003 horror anthology Family Portraits: A Trilogy of America, which also found infinite cruelty behind the closed doors of American family homes. That insidious tone is also echoed in James Benning’s experimental true-crime documentary Landscape Suicide, where the setting and the aftermath of vicious crimes are similarly preserved in cold tableaux. It’s a discomforting approach to crime-story filmmaking, no matter how true the crimes being depicted are to real life, which likely helps explain why Henry was stuck in distribution limbo for four years after its festival premiere despite the wide accessibility of the era’s more fantastical body-count slashers. Most of the real-time violence depicted onscreen is mediated through the remove of VHS camcorder recordings that Henry & Ottis film to review later at home over beers, once again chilling the audience at an unfeeling distance instead of submerging us in the heat of the moment. No matter what distribution issues it may have initially suffered for its unforgiving iciness, the movie’s long-term legacy has endured to hold cult-horror audiences’ fasciation as a kind of sleepover-dare endurance test. I happened to catch it in a new, cleaned-up 4k restoration at this year’s ScreamFest NOLA, where I got to experience the browns & greys of its abject squalor in fine HD detail. It no longer matters, really, whether any of the crimes Henry depicts actually happened, since the movie itself has been traumatizing enough on its own merits for thrill-seeking audiences looking to be chilled to the bone.

-Brandon Ledet

A Talent for Murder (2026)

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What do Alain Delon, Dennis Hopper, Andrew Scott, Matt Damon, John Malkovich, and now Alden Ehrenreich share in common? As of 2026, all of them have played some version of novelist Patricia Highsmith’s most well-known character, Tom Ripley. Of course, Ehrenreich isn’t really playing Ripley, is he?

A Talent for Murder (not to be confused with the Angela Lansbury telefilm A Talent for Killing) stars Ehrenreich as Edward Ridgeway, who travels to Switzerland in 1995 on behalf of his New York publishing house in order to convince Highsmith (Helen Mirren) to sign a contract for a sixth novel in her “Ripliad.” En route, he meets a young American woman named Clementine (Olivia Cooke) who is visiting her well-to-do European relatives. Aboard the train, she notices that he’s reading The Talented Mr. Ripley, while she falls asleep reading Camus. The cab driver who takes Ridgeway to Highsmith’s remote home notes that she has more local notoriety for having killed a neighbor’s annoying dog than for any of her literary accomplishments, which does nothing to assuage Ridgeway’s concerns over the fact that the last agent sent by his company called home to say he felt unsafe with Highsmith and was never heard from again. Upon arrival, Highsmith greets him with hostility, immediately declaring that she will never return to New York, tipping her hand to reveal some old school racism in the process (she explicitly names Jewish, Korean, and Black people as the reason she left). Ehrenreich nevertheless presents her with the peace offerings she previously expressed interest in: some American notebooks, six cans of Campbell soup, some shirts from Brooks Brothers, and a fancy knife, which she adds to the collection on her wall, Deathtrap style.

After getting some jollies from giving the young man a hard time, like sending him to fetch a beer from a fridge in her pantry, which is filled with various poisons, and feeding him a breakfast to which she may or may not have added arsenic, the two brainstorm a potential new adventure for Tom Ripley. This is envisioned with Ridgeway in the Ripley role, where he reimagines his first encounter with Clementine, this time casting himself as unapproachable and seductive. Using details from their discussion aboard the train, he paints the rest of Clementine’s life as background for Tom’s next project: the loving grandfather who controls the first set of purse strings, the sophisticated aunt who is the second to stand in the way of inheritance, and eventually Clementine herself, whom Tom will ultimately have to kill in order to get her money — or, rather, the beautiful art and travel that her inheritance will allow him to go on enjoying. After they plan out the killing of (fictional) Clementine’s grandfather, Highsmith issues a challenge: if Ridgeway can come up with a “sufficiently Highsmith” method of murder for the aunt, she’ll sign his contract.

Mirren is quite good as Highsmith, although this isn’t a very demanding role. For the most part, she’s cranky and irascible, without too much else required. There’s a moment early on when Ridgeway awakes in the night with an unexplained cut on his neck, and when he checks to see if Highsmith is in bed, he finds her supposedly asleep, only for her to turn on her desk lamp and cackle at him. Although the play on which the film is based is a decade old, there are moments here that make this feel like Camp Miasma for those whose hyperfixation is literature rather than slashers, as this also features a super fan (Ridgeway can recognize a passage from a lesser known work, The Heroine, in only a couple of lines) visiting a reclusive artist to convince her to take one more ride on the gravy train, only for the visitor to find themselves lost in the blurred lines between reality and fiction. Mirren gets less to play with than Gillian Anderson did in Miasma, as she spends most of her onscreen time sitting in a chair, smoking, and making cryptic statements about Ridgeway’s sexuality and comparing him to the hermaphroditic snails that she keeps as pets. She might smirk from time to time, but there’s nothing to challenge her as a performer. Much of the insight that we get into her as a character comes from her home: the remote location; a withering, nasty letter from her mother which she keeps framed in her guest room; a French literary award to which she has added “and Tom Ripley” next to her name, as she says that he is always with her, like a longtime companion. She’s oddly defensive of her character, rebutting Ridgeway when he calls Tom “evil,” as she says that every person has a killer inside.

Ehrenreich has more to do, balancing between Ripley’s suave, practiced manipulator and Ridgeway’s stammering nerdiness. He fills both roles well, with the difference between them illustrated when Ridgeway coincidentally runs into Clementine in the nearby town and is invited to a party at her real aunt’s home; he’s noticeably out of step with the elite, while Ripley immediately endears himself to the fictional avatars of Clementine’s family. They’re more alike than initially meets the eye, however, as Ridgeway’s journey, being sent to Europe from New York to retrieve someone, echoes Tom Ripley’s being sent to find Dickie Greenleaf in The Talented Mr. Ripley, and has to blend in with Clementine’s aunt by pretending to have gone to school with Clementine in New York, which was also Tom and Dickie’s connection. Ridgeway discovers the previous literary agent’s clothing in a closet and wears it to meet Clementine’s family, just as Ripley stole Dickie’s clothes after killing him, and the lines between fact and fiction start to blur. Is Ridgeway actually Highsmith’s creation somehow manifested in the real world, come round at last to visit his maker, or is Ridgeway simply losing his grip on reality?

I reread The Talented Mr. Ripley earlier this year, and as I write this, I’ve got a library copy of Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train (the Hitchcock adaptation gets a shout-out when Clementine and Ridgeway first meet) sitting about ten feet from me, waiting to be read during some upcoming travel. In the past couple of years, we’ve covered Purple Noon as a podcast episode, I watched the Andrew Scott Netflix Ripley series, and I was pretty disappointed by The American Friend. This is a movie that was virtually tailor-made for me, and perhaps that set my expectations a little too high. I have a feeling that it will only improve in the rewatch, when I’m already familiar with its overall structure and I can interact with the text directly rather than being distracted by what I was expecting. It’s a fun ride, if a little messy.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Wildwood (2026)

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It’s been ten years since Laika Studios released Travis Knight’s first film under their banner as director, the excellent Kubo and the Two Strings. In the interim, they’ve released the mostly forgotten Missing Link while Knight has directed two big intellectually driven properties, the positively received Bumblebee and, earlier this year, the critical and commercial failure Masters of the Universe. The last five years have been spent on the production of another instant masterpiece, a dark fairy tale that cribs from Rapunzel, The Birds, Labyrinth, and other dark children’s fantasies of yesteryear, ultimately crafting one of the best films of 2026 in Wildwood.

Prue McKeel (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) is the too-mature-for-her-age, espresso drinking teenage daughter of two Portland hipsters. Despite being forbidden from taking her baby brother Mac out of the house while their parents attend a craft festival, she takes the boy on a tour of the city, getting Voodoo Doughnuts and dealing with unicycling bagpipers. She even bikes past the Legionnaire’s Lament bookstore, a nod to the source novel written by Colin Meloy of The Decemberists, who contributed some songs to the film’s soundtrack. Unable to ditch a more juvenile and naive schoolmate, Curtis (Jacob Tremblay), Prue takes Mac to a playground, where the baby is abducted by a countless number of crows who fly the baby directly into the same impassable forest that her father has warned her about for her entire life. The kids follow, finding themselves in a magical world where they encounter coyote soldiers in service of a “dowager governess” and are forced to split up. Curtis is taken to the governess (Carey Mulligan), who enlists him in her service because when she looks at him, all she can see is her deceased son, Aleksi. Prue, elsewhere, eventually finds her way to the community of South Wood, where she runs afoul of the current governor and his sniveling assistant before being rescued by the leader of the Avian Principality, Owl Rex (Richard E. Grant), and his general (Angela Bassett).

The narrative here is quite dense. The film clocks in at over two hours and is half an hour longer than Kubo, which was already pretty complex. Although the inciting incident bears more than a passing resemblance to Labyrinth, given that it’s a “girl goes into a bizarre fantasy world to save her infant brother” plot, that’s ultimately only a small part of this sprawling story. There are many, many ideas from the wider fairy tale canon: the mechanical recreation of life, a Robin Hood figure, a fertility deal made with a witch, a world covered in magical, possibly malicious kudzu. It also whips out new ideas all of its own, but what really makes this one sing is just how much of a technical marvel the film is. The magical origami creations in Kubo were already masterful, but in Wildwood we witness fusing ivy vines growing like mystical beanstalks, hundreds of birds in flight at once, and dozens of other images that are sheer magic in their scale and imagination before one even considers the intensive labor that went into bringing them to stop-motion life.

Wildwood is already struggling in theaters, which is unfortunate. Laika, one hopes, will continue to provide funding for works like this even if the return on investment continues to fall in the red. In a film year where most of the animation slate is taken up with intellectual property in various stages of descent into slop (Toy Story 5, Minions and Monsters, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, Angry Birds 3, PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie, Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender, and more, if you can believe it), this film’s PG-13 rating is probably hurting its chances with a younger audience. Of course, it’s also not for those audiences, despite what the child-friendly trailers that played before it (for The Cat in the Hat and Cocomelon: The Movie, among others) might have you believe. I attended a midday Sunday screening and I only noticed one kid in the audience of what is already one of my multiplex’s smaller screening rooms, and to be quite frank, I found myself worrying about what that stranger’s child might be experiencing. I always have been and forever shall be a proponent of films for children that are frightening; I’ve seen the kind of adults that kids who never experience fear in a safe, manageable environment grow up to be, and their lives are not enviable. Maybe today’s youth are being exposed to worse things online generally, but without the safety net of “it was all a story” that Are You Afraid of the Dark? had or the overall goofiness of Goosebumps to undermine any long-term trauma, they’re not getting the chance to experience terror and then see how it’s not really that scary after all. Make no mistake: Wildwood is decidedly too dark for a child under the age of eleven or so, and its rating is well deserved. The problem, then, becomes the fact that its more reasonable demographic of teenagers will dismiss it because it’s animated and gets looped in with the Cocomelons and the PAW Patrols. That makes for something that’s hard to market.

As such, the film is already being pulled from some markets, and that’s a shame. This is a sprawling, expansive, beautiful movie, and one that you truly should treat yourself to seeing in a theater. It won’t be the end of the world if you see this once it comes to home video and/or streaming, but it won’t be the same. See this one on the big screen if you can, while you can.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond