reviews

Day of the Dead (1985)

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One of the more exhausting tendencies of zombie outbreak stories is how they all inevitably devolve into large-scale militarism. Even the more modern deviations on vintage zombie tropes in 28 Days Later, Overlord, and The Girl With All the Gifts are largely military stories, as if there is no way to depict a worldwide zombie outbreak without filling the frame with tanks & helicopters. All zombie roads lead directly to the military, and they all trail back to George Romero’s original Living Dead trilogy. Following the suburban invasion of 1968’s Night of the Living Dead and 1978’s trapped-in-a-shopping mall satire Dawn of the Dead, 1985’s Day of the Dead is a pure brains-vs.-brawn showdown in an underground military bunker just below the surface of an ongoing zombie apocalypse. If violent, crowd-controlling military action is essential to zombie outbreak storytelling, then movies might as well make the conflict between that military and the citizens it supposedly protects a central part of the text. Being more of an Idea Guy who was always eager to dig into the moral & philosophical implications of his films’ supernatural events than someone who could convincingly stage propulsive action or heartfelt drama, Romero was perfectly suited to explore that conflict at length, locking the audience into the bunker with him until he could sort it all out.

Lori Cardille stars as a scientist willing to dedicate the rest of her life to researching a cure for zombie blood infection. Unfortunately, she’s the only woman in the underground military bunker that’s been retrofitted into her research lab, and the heavily armed meatheads who provide her rations are getting tired of her work showing no discernible progress. The only thing stopping them from stripping her of her lab equipment (and more) is the parallel research of Dr. Matthew Logan, a mad scientist whose colleagues mockingly refer to as “Frankenstein”. Having long given up on finding a cure, Frankenstein has instead shifted his research to training zombie captives from the mines outside the military base on how to behave. He rigs their undead, semi-disassembled bodies to machines, stimulating them with electricity to see how their flesh might be controlled by the living’s command. He’s also taken one specific zombie as a pet, a specimen who he’s nicknamed “Bub” in loving, disdainful memory of his own father. Thanks to the power of positive reinforcement, Bub can vocalize simple phrases, operate a Walkman, salute the military officers in the room, and (most recklessly on Frankenstein’s end) fire a handgun. He can also apparently hold a grudge, since he eventually escapes containment to hunt down the bunker’s most fascistic militant in retribution for the crime of being an asshole.

There are three clear MVPs at work here, Tom Savini the most obvious among them. The all-out zombie mayhem of the final minutes (when the military base is inevitably invaded by the horde outside) gives Savini and his make-up team dozens of chances to stage and restage the classic Romero gag where a victim is overwhelmed & disemboweled by hungry zombies’ reaching hands. Before that climactic payoff, the frequent visits to Frankenstein’s lab allow Savini more freedom to construct individual animatronic monstrosities that show the mad doctor’s abandoned experiments in various stages of failure & disrepair, and the results rank among the gore wizard’s most unforgettable creations. The unlikely comic duo of Frankenstein (Richard Liberty) & Bub (Sherman Howard) are also obvious MVPs, delivering most of the film’s memorable character moments. The way Frankenstein wanders into meetings with military officials smeared from face to boot in infected zombie blood while explaining why they should pet-train the cannibal ghouls instead of shooting them dead makes for consistently rewarding comic relief. Meanwhile, his star pupil Bub is initially amusing as a slack-jawed walking corpse who can only vaguely mime human behavior while chained to the laboratory wall, but he ends up carrying most of the film’s effective pathos once he breaks free – just like the original Dr. Frankenstein’s pet creature.

Like with most Romero classics, I found the scene-to-scene drama in Day of the Dead to be frustratingly inert but was greatly impressed by its thoughtfulness in theme and tactility in violence. Maybe the main scientist’s heart-to-hearts with her infected boyfriend or the renegade helicopter pilot who could eventually fly her to safety ran a little dry, but the larger dramatic concerns about military muscle overpowering scientific experts after the breakdown of societal decorum felt true and continually relevant. On the film’s 30th Anniversary, it isn’t especially difficult to find contemporary meaning in a story about scientists working towards a solution for an infectious illness that could wipe out the entire planet’s population but having their research derailed by a few gun-toting fascists who don’t care to understand the value of the work. The most Romero stands out as a visual stylist here (outside the opportunities he gives Savini’s crew to run wild in the lab) are during a brief zombie hunt sequence in an underground cave, where he brings back the same extreme red & blue crosslighting he experimented with in 1982’s Creepshow. Otherwise, his artistry is most deeply felt in the philosophical nature of his writing, which finds a way to interrogate the inherent militarism of zombie narratives instead of casually accepting it as a matter of course.

-Brandon Ledet

The Lovers on the Bridge (1991)

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What could be more thrillingly romantic than young, destitute artists falling in love while starving and drinking themselves to death on the streets of Paris? Try those young lovers beating up cops and lifting businessmen’s wallets together against a backdrop of fireworks & gunfire. Leos Carax’s 1991 stunner The Lovers on the Bridge depicts the kind of ferocious, burn-it-all-down love affair that scares everyone outside the mutually destructive pair at the center, whose romantic gestures include acts of betrayal, theft, murder, and institutionalization. It approaches Parisian homelessness with the same unsentimental, semi-documentary eye as Varda’s Vagabond, and yet it largely plays as a love letter to impulsive, erratic behavior instead of a dire warning against it. It’s a love story rotting in illness, addiction, and retributive violence, which greatly helps undercut the schmaltz when it frames the Eiffel Tower through the rotating spokes of a Ferris wheel. Countless movies gesture towards the all-consuming, obsessive passion of young love without ever fully capturing it; The Lovers on the Bridge is the real deal.

The English translation of the original French title is a deliberate simplification. The French title Les Amants du Pont-Neuf makes reference to a specific bridge, the oldest bridge in Paris (despite the name “Pont Neuf” paradoxically translating to “New Bridge”). It’s a historic site that has been cited as the location where the first human figure was ever captured in a photograph, an early daguerreotype experiment by the eponymous Louis Daguerre. It was also temporarily closed to the public for restoration from 1989 to 1991, when the film was set & produced. Juliette Binoche & Denis Lavant play young homeless artists who squat on that closed historic bridge, unsure how much they can trust one another despite their obvious mutual obsession. Our two lovers first encounter each other while their partner is unconscious. Binoche finds Lavant’s unresponsive, blackout drunk body in the street and sketches his corpse-like visage from memory. Once recovered, Lavant later finds Binoche sleeping in his personal alcove on the bridge, discovering the charcoal sketches of his own undead face and studying her with the same intense fascination in return. Once both awake, they start guzzling gallons of trash wine together and committing escalating crimes in the streets on either side of the Pont Neuf, coinciding with the citywide bicentennial celebration of The French Revolution. A painter and a street-performing firebreather, respectively, the homeless couple become unlikely, reckless avatars for the city’s long history of art, sex, violence, and sensual romance, breathing new life into Parisian clichés that have otherwise become as stale as an old baguette.

Like all great romances, The Lovers on the Bridge is propelled by tragedy. The film opens with Lavant’s unresponsive body being scraped off the pavement where he’s been run over in traffic. He’s washed & patched up by a city-run homeless shelter and then re-released back on the streets, where he immediately falls back into the self-destructive cycle that got him banged up in the first place — guzzling alcohol as intentional self-harm. Meanwhile, Binoche’s struggling artist is suffering a more medically diagnosable malady. Her eyesight is failing her due to a rare form of ocular degeneration that will soon leave her blind and unable to continue working. She’s relatively new to street life, while her drunkard firebreather lover appears to know how to thieve, grift, and glean with the best of ’em. After a short crime spree ties up some loose ends in Binoche’s former life as a semi-wealthy suburbanite, the pair quickly bond by getting wasted on cooking wine and laughing maniacally. Part of what makes their volatile dynamic so romantic is that either or both lovers could die at any moment, and they’re both selfish enough to die by the other’s hand in a desperate crime of passion. It almost plays a prank on the audience that the movie eventually ends on a moment of quiet sweetness, with Carax restaging the bus ride epilogue from The Graduate as an epiphanic embrace of the central romance instead of a reality-check rejection of it.

Contemporary movie nerds familiar with Leos Carax from the more recent, extravagant productions Holy Motors & Annette would know to expect an ecstatic, expressionistic visual style here that breaks away from the movie’s semi-documentary opening. Once Binoche & Lavant lock onto each other’s romantically nihilistic wavelength, the visual language soars — sometimes literally, mixing images of swarming birds and helicopters in a single, seemingly impossible shot. Their lives are small, tethered to a single stone bridge, but nothing about their depiction is simple. The painter cannot simply take her daily birth control pill; her lover must feed it to her via open-mouthed kiss. It’s not enough for the doomed pair to peer into the social lives of more fortunate & fashionable Parisians from the streets outside; the windows into nightclub are lowered to the pavement, so all that’s visible is the wealthy’s dancing feet & flashing lights. When laughing like children while high on bargain-bin wine, Carax uses a shift-tilt lens and oversized set decoration to physically shrink his performers in the frame. This expressionistic visual approach reaches its fever pitch during a grand bicentennial fireworks display, which is used as a backdrop for a Sinners-style musical sequence that mixes orchestral chamber music, Iggy Pop, Public Enemy, and Bal-musette accordion waltzes into one delirious post-modern cacophony. Improbably, it lands as one of the most romantic sequences of cinematic spectacle I can recall instead going full cornball. It’s also immediately followed by the lovers bonking a beat cop on the head and hijacking his boat for a joy ride, somehow escalating the visual spectacle even further through a brief detour into vaudevillian slapstick.

The Lovers on the Bridge was recently restored in a new 4k scan by Janus Films, and it’s currently bouncing around American arthouses. I recently caught it at The Broad’s weekly Gap Tooth Cinema rep series in New Orleans, weeks after Boomer reported it was playing alongside Carax’s Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais Sang at the Austin Film Society one state over. That loose thematic trilogy surprisingly makes up half of Carax’s total catalog of features, which means he’s not an especially intimidating auteur to catch up with in terms of prolificacy. There’s more out there than just Holy Motors, but not much more. The Lovers on the Bridge is as good of a place to start as any, since it’s so utterly romantic, so utterly violent, and so utterly, utterly French.

-Brandon Ledet

The Idiots (1998)

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It is with great disgust and disappointment I must observe that “the R-word” has somehow slid back into the American lexicon. Yes, basic human decency has died another casual death in the public discourse, as a term recently considered to be a cruel slur against mentally disabled people has once again become something young C.H.U.D.s playfully throw around as a jocular insult among friends. It’s an unfathomable moral backsliding for someone in my age range, who remembers that particular slur being an unspeakable taboo way back in the 1990s, when “wokeism” (i.e., empathy) was still called “P.C. Culture.” Mocking mentally disabled people for hack schoolyard-bully comedy was such a taboo, in fact, that tireless provocateur Lars von Trier built an entire feature film about the social discomfort of the act. His 1998 feature The Idiots is an abrasive black comedy about a small clique of wealthy suburbanite edgelords who squat in an empty Copenhagen estate, pretending to be mentally disabled as a grand social experiment. In private, the experiment is purported to be a way to access the supposedly sublime aloofness of someone with limited mental functions, freeing members of the idiot cult from the petty bourgeois concerns of modern living. In public, it allows them to prankishly disrupt the daily lives of other bourgeois squares without fear of repercussion, since they are posing as innocent psychiatric patients on field trip excursions. Like with most of von Trier’s provocations, the exercise mostly proves to be bleakly nihilistic, acting as a precursor to Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers that’s more philosophical about its trash and more pornographically literal about its humping.

Before von Trier has time to dig into the philosophical peculiarities of this idiot prankster cult, the audience has to adjust to the crass commercial quality of his camcorder footage. The Idiots was produced as a contribution to the Dogme 95 experiment that von Trier cooked up with Thomas Vinterberg, an exercise in formal restraint that was meant to strip cinema down to its barest essentials. The rules laid out in the Dogme 95 Manifesto included stipulations that the camera must be handheld, that all shooting must be done on-location with no outside props or special effects, and that all included music must be incidental & diegetic. As a result, The Idiots plays more like a backyard movie than the work of a festival-circuit auteur, especially since the manifesto also stipulated that Dogme 95 films must not credit their directors. Von Trier makes no effort to crop out any boom mics or camera operators that wander into the frame. He frequently interrupts the narrative flow of his story with documentary interviews with the fictional cult members, reflecting on their time as “idiots” in a reality-TV confessional format. The Idiots recently played at The Broad as part of the weekly repertory Gap Tooth series, and I could practically count the individual grains on the screen; its image quality was just as aggressively off-putting as its characters’ behavior, which I suppose I mean as a compliment. I could also count the individual laughs in that room, since every response to every provocation felt like personal litmus test for basic decency. Von Trier finds great comedic timing in his editing that got some big laughs out of me, especially when cutting to outsiders’ responses to the idiot cult’s behavior. Sometimes, though, when members of my own audience laughed at that exact same behavior, I found myself getting offended by their response. I suppose that’s a good sign that the movie is genuinely provocative instead of merely gesturing at provocation.

If there’s anything von Trier is doing here that’s worthy of respect, it’s in his thoroughness. He examines the cult’s meditative search for their “inner idiot” from every possible angle, at first gleefully indulging in the social chaos of their field-trip pranks around Copenhagen, then digging into the selfish & therapeutic motivations individual members had for joining in the first place. When the idiots stage a food fight, it’s initially played as an Exterminating Angel-style breakdown of bourgeois social norms until all that’s left is primal animal response. Then, members snap out of it mid-fight to realize how disgusting it is to be smearing themselves with expensive caviar while elsewhere homeless people are starving to death. When the idiots have sex, it’s initially played as orgiastic hedonism with the same pointless for-its-own-sake chaos of the food fight. Then, a pair of true lovers break off to show how tender & heartfelt blank-minded, present-in-the-moment sex can be. These upheavals of the group dynamic occur most often when their conclave is outnumbered by outsiders. Whenever they are confronted with scrutiny from family members, coworkers, bikers and, most uncomfortable of all, real-life people with Down syndrome, the bit suddenly isn’t funny anymore, and their inner cowards quickly overtake their inner idiots. Von Trier constantly goads the audience into getting upset by the movie’s basic premise, which could very easily play as the cinematic equivalent of throwing around “the R-word” as a goof. In practice, however, The Idiots proves to be much more introspective & socially critical than what is initially conveyed. You wouldn’t know that if you had encountered the film’s advertising during its original theatrical run in the Anti-PC days of the late 1990s, though, since the trailers sell it as a prankish boner comedy along the lines of a Jackass movie or an American Pie — an act of false advertising so egregious it almost feels criminally liable.

-Brandon Ledet

Naked Ambition (2025)

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One of cinema’s greatest virtues is how it functions as a populist access point to art. Not only is the medium itself a collaboration between artists of many talents—photographers, writers, actors, costumers, sculptors, set designers, musicians, make-up artists, etc.—but its documentary branch can also document and distribute fine-art images to the widest audience possible, making fine art objects readily accessible to virtually everyone. While it could be prohibitively expensive to travel the world seeing the great works in person or to collect high-end art books that present them in the best 2D renderings available, it doesn’t cost all that much to watch a movie. With enough patience & a library card, you can even access most documentaries about fine artists for free. There’s obviously something lost in not seeing a large-scale oil painting in person or hearing a world-class musician perform from across the room, but fine-art photography is especially apt for the documentary treatment, since montages of still photographs largely function the same way as catching a photographer’s career-retrospective slideshow in a physical art gallery. Thanks to the movies, I’ve seen hundreds of photographs from the likes of Nan Goldin, Lauren Greenfield, Ernest Cole, and George Dureau that would have cost exorbitant sums of money & time to track down in other venues. Formally, documentaries about photographers don’t need to try very hard to be worthwhile. A feature-length slideshow narrated by talking heads who know the artist personally is already well worth any art-enthusiast’s time, especially if you don’t live the kind of life that allows you to travel to Paris, London, and New York City between shifts at your soul-crushing 9 to 5.

It might seem a little flippant to praise a documentary for providing wide public access to vintage nudie pics as if they were the cultural equal to Guernica or the Mona Lisa, but vintage cheesecake photographer Bunny Yeager has well earned that art-realm prestige. The new documentary Naked Ambition argues that Yeager should be recognized for her artistic & political merit as a skilled portraitist, pushing back against her superficial reputation as the pornographer who made Bettie Page the world’s most famous pin-up model. However, that work has already been done by fine art curators in recent years, who have staged retrospectives of Yeager’s work in legitimizing gallery spaces instead of the nudie mags where her photos were more traditionally exhibited. Even if Bunny Yeager were “just” a pornographer, her contributions to the visual lexicon of American pop art would still be worthy of a career-retrospective gallery show or documentary. Her iconic collaborations with Page and her aesthetic-defining contributions to Playboy‘s early, semi-literary days helped define an entire genre of vintage American smut that has been gradually disseminated & recontextualized enough that her artistic influence is now immeasurable. She also has a great print-the-legend story as “the world’s prettiest photographer,” having started as a pin-up model herself before learning how to operate a camera. As profiled here, Bunny Yeager was just as highly fashionable as she was highly ambitious. Her career as a public spectacle affords the movie more than enough vintage talk show clips, nudie cutie excerpts, and celebrity name-dropping anecdotes to fill its 73-minute runtime, but the real treasure is the access it gives the public to high-quality scans of her photographs. Like Bunny herself, they consistently look fantastic and convey a timeless cool.

If there’s any value to Naked Ambition outside of its function as a Bunny Yeager slideshow, it’s in its peripheral portrait of Miami, Florida sleaze from the 1950s through the 1970s. Alongside young feminist talking heads who link Yeager’s work to modern phenomena like burlesque revues, Insta selfies, and OnlyFans modeling, the doc also drags out a few surviving old-timers from Yeager’s heyday to attest to the grease & sleaze of vintage Miami living. The late, erratic news anchor Larry King is a surprise MVP in that respect, telling wild stories about how easy it was to get laid in his radio broadcast days that have no direct relevance to Yeager’s work except to establish the mise-en-scène in which it was created. There are also brief glimpses into the private lives of Sammy Davis, Jr. and the surprisingly gravel-voiced Bettie Page that happen to appear in anecdotes, but for the most part Yeager’s social life appeared to be more domestic than glamorous. As much as Yeager’s skill & fashionability elevated her work to fine-art quality, it was still produced as commercial material meant to financially provide for her family. Her surviving daughters are in an ongoing dispute about whether to treat the work she’s left behind as archive-worthy art or disposable smut, but they at least appear to agree that they were raised in a loving home with emotionally present parents. If you read between the lines during their opposing interviews, there is some juicy drama to be found here in how Bunny Yeager is being remembered by the people who loved her most, but that domestic conflict isn’t really any of Naked Ambition‘s business. The movie cares most about the work itself, which is presented in constant art-gallery slideshow. Assuming the public display of nude breasts can no longer shock a modern audience, there is nothing especially surprising or daring about that cinematic presentation, but there is something greatly virtuous about its ease of access.

-Brandon Ledet

Boys Go to Jupiter (2025)

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It’s been three decades since Toy Story diverted the animation industry towards computer animation instead of traditional hand-drawn & stop-motion techniques, and the world is mostly worse off for it. The CG animation era has largely been dispiriting, typified more by soulless corporate dreck like Bee Movie, Shrek, and The Secret Lives of Pets than more relatively artful corporate products like Across the Spider-Verse. It feels like the entire battlefield has been surrendered to lazy IP cash-ins so celebrities like Chris Pratt can collect easy voice-acting paychecks. I haven’t seen much genuine, personal art in the medium outside a few short films in festival showcases. The new debut feature from outsider 3D animator Julian Glander is a welcome glimpse of how that might change as the tools of the trade become more widely accessible outside the corporate offices of Disney & Pixar. Admittedly, Boys Go to Jupiter indulges in the same lazy celebrity voice-acting traditions of lesser, more expensive CG animated films, but this time the voice cast happens to be overpopulated with hip, talented people: Jeaneane Garofalo, Julio Torres, Cole Escola, Elsie Fisher, Joe Pera, Chris Fleming, Demi Adejuyigbe, Sarah Squirm, and the list goes on. It’s also got a distinct visual style, an understated tone, righteous politics, and an authentic sense of genuine humanity — all things that are difficult to find in the average computer-animated feature. It’s a vision of a better world, even if it’s one that satirizes the corporate hell world we currently live in.

In essence, Boys Go to Jupiter is cozy slacker art. It follows the daily toils of food-delivery-app worker Billy 5000 as he spends every waking minute scheming to earn the $5,000 fortune of his namesake. He scoots around his bumhole Florida town on a Segway, cramming in as many deliveries a day as he can to exploit a financial loophole in his delivery app before the bigwigs at Grubster catch onto the grift. Most of his interactions with fellow disaffected Floridians are exceedingly low-key, as he casually bumps into acquaintances like his dirtbag friends, his religious nut neighbor, an overly dedicated hotdog salesman, and his fellow Grubster drones while scooting from doorstep to doorstep. His coming-of-age Bummer Summer lifestyle is only effectively interrupted by the intrusion of two supernatural forces: an E.T.-type alien creature invading from beneath the Earth’s surface and a potential love interest who works at her mother’s science lab developing impossible varieties of semi-magical fruits. It turns out that even these fantastical players are weighed down by the daily mundanities of labor, however, as the older girl he crushes on struggles to accept her fate as her mother’s successor and the underground E.T. creature is revealed to belong to a family of social media food bloggers who have to transmit Grubster take-out reviews to their followers back home to justify their vacation on the surface. Many pointless hangouts and improvised junk food jingles ensue, with all of Billy 5000’s many trivialities revolving around one simple truth: having a job sucks.

The rounded edges, overemphasized light-sources, and blown-out haze of Glander’s visual style belong to the kind of 3D art renderings you’d only expect to see in indie comics and homemade videogames. Specifically, it plays like a D.I.Y. videogame set in Steven Universe‘s Beach City, so much so that I’m amazed it’s screening in neighborhood arthouses like Zeitgeist and not personal Steam Deck consoles. Whether Glander effectively applies that softly psychedelic visual aesthetic to anything especially unique or useful is up for debate. I didn’t find it had anything new to observe about gig-economy exploitation that wasn’t more successfully satirized in fellow low-budget sci-fi whatsit Lapsis, but it’s relatable & satisfying enough as a slacker comedy that its political effectiveness is a moot point. All I know is that I liked the way it looked, its laidback novelty songs soothed my addled brain, and I laughed every time Billy 5000 concluded a Grubster delivery with the fictional company’s signature slogan, “Have a Grubby day!” I know a lot of people had their faith in computer-animated outsider art restored by last year’s feline adventure flick Flow, but I couldn’t feel that future promise of the medium myself until I “went to Jupiter” (i.e. ate some junk food and sang silly songs on the beach) with the boys.

-Brandon Ledet

One, Two, Three (1961)

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The morning after I saw The Roses in theaters, I texted Brandon to let him know that I had seen one of the least funny comedies of all time, but that I had followed that up with a screening of one of the most hilarious pieces of filmic art that I had ever been privileged to witness. Billy Wilder’s 1961 ruckus is entitled One, Two, Three, and by the end of it I was hoarse from laughter. Oddly enough, both this and The Roses contained a performance of the novelty song “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” a coincidence that made me feel a little bit like I was going crazy. 

“Mac” MacNamara (James Cagney) is an American abroad, a Coca-Cola executive living in West Berlin and trying to further the cause of democracy by working to get the beverage behind the Iron Curtain, or rather, he’s trying to leverage that major success into becoming the head of the London office. He gets a call from the home office in Atlanta and is told that he’s going to be responsible for his boss’s teenaged daughter for a few weeks while she’s traveling. Scarlett Hazeltine (Pamela Tiffin) arrives drawling, dim, and charming, and her short time turns into two months, to the slight chagrin of Mrs. Phyllis MacNamara (Arlene Francis). Just as her parents are about to set out for Europe, Scarlett reveals that she’s spent the past six weeks sneaking over to East Berlin and meeting in secret with Otto Ludwig Piffl (Horst Buchholz), a handsome young communist. Worse—they’ve gotten married. It falls to Mac to figure out how to split them up, which he does by getting the boy arrested by framing him for anti-Soviet leanings. Then, when it turns out that Scarlett is pregnant, he has to figure out how to not only spring the kid from an East German prison but also to make him a socially acceptable husband for the genteel Hazeltines before their plane lands. 

The comedy comes at a breakneck pace. Cagney is absolutely fantastic here, delivering some very witty dialogue like he’s got only minutes to live, and at other times bellowing orders at a successive list of underlings, Soviets, and haberdashers like he’s running the navy. The rest of the supporting cast is also a delight, with particularly great performances from Hanns Lothar as Mac’s assistant Schlemmer and Liselotte Pulver as his secretary Fräulein Ingeborg. The fräulein is great fun, as it’s clear from very early on that she and Mac are having an affair of some kind, and when he stops appearing for their “German lessons” (with “special attention to the umlaut”), she threatens to quit, and he must subtly rehire her by asking her to draft up an advertisement that includes “fringe benefits” that she immediately accepts. One of said benefits is an outfit that she saw earlier in the day, and when we see her join him in his misadventures in East Berlin to liberate Otto from the German police, she’s wearing exactly the dress and hat described; still later, when he gives his Soviet “allies” the slip to return Otto to West Germany, he leaves Schlemmer behind in her clothing as a decoy. Schlemmer himself has a habit of clicking his heels together, revealing his former involvement in his nation’s activities in the previous war (he first claims to have been part of the “underground” before it is later clarified that he worked on the literal subterranean trains). 

Lots of the best comedy bits revolve around the supposed lack of ingenuity and progress behind the Curtain, but they become timeless because the film doesn’t rely solely on them. For instance, when attempting to bribe Mac to give them Fräulein Ingeborg, one of the Soviets offers him a “brand new” car that he then admits is exactly the same as a 1937 Nash; later, when a car chase to the Brandenburg gate involves the Soviet crew in hot pursuit of Mac and company, Mac’s chauffeur is surprised to see them being followed by an obsolete car, saying “It looks like a ‘37 Nash!” Said vehicle completely falls apart long before Mac makes it to the border, losing fenders and tires and arriving at the Gate rolling on one of its exposed axles. They still almost catch up, however, as Mac is detained before crossing, only for it to be revealed that the guards want to return the (now empty) bottles of Coca-Cola he had brought as proof of his profession (i.e., a bribe), which calls back to the beginning of the film, where one Mac’s complaints wasn’t that the East Germans were buying Coca-Cola in West Berlin and taking it across the border, not because he doesn’t want to sell to them but because their failure to return/recycle the empties was driving up bottling costs. It’s all very perfectly constructed, which only makes it funnier. 

The film isn’t jingoistic in its devotion to finding comedy only in mocking the film’s communists, however. Some of the jokes, like Otto being tortured by being forced to listen to “Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” over and over again, cut both ways, but there are plenty of jabs made at American foolishness, especially in Scarlett’s extreme naivete. When Mac tells her that she might be found guilty of spreading anti-American propaganda due to her possession of signage that says “Yankees Go Home!”, she’s insistent that it’s not anti-U.S. but anti-Yankee, drawling that, where she’s from, “everybody hates the Yankees.” She’s also adamant that she’s going with Otto to the U.S.S.R. (“That stands for ‘Russia’!”) and that she loves washing his shirts while “he broadens [her] mind.” There are also some great digs in at European aristocrat culture in general, as part of Mac’s attempts to make Otto appealing to an American parent involves getting Count Waldemar von Droste-Schattenburg to adopt the young man, as his title will give him prestige despite the fact that the count himself is working as a bathroom attendant. It’s all very, very good. 

Wilder considered this to be one of his lesser films; I read an interview with him later in life in which he expressed that he didn’t think it was actually all that funny or that it worked, but it’s just as much an overlooked classic in his canon as Ace in the Hole. People may remember him best for Sunset Boulevard or Some Like it Hot, but every time I dig further into his backlog, I love everything that I find. Track this one down if you can.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Roses (2025)

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When we went to see Superman while I was in New Orleans in July, Brandon & I mentioned a couple of trailers that we were both sick of seeing and expressed our lack of interest in the films that they were promoting. One of them was Freakier Friday, which I ended up loving, and the other was The Roses. With apologies to my viewing companions who loved this, unlike with Freakier Friday, this one was just as awful as the trailer made it out to be. 

Theo (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Ivy Rose (Olivia Colman) are at an inflection point in their marriage. It’s been ten years since they first met, when Theo escaped into the kitchen of a restaurant to cool off when another person took credit for his designs at a work dinner, meeting chef Ivy. The two moved to the U.S., where Theo’s just landed a major contract to design and build a maritime museum, and he uses the advance from the project to open Ivy’s dream restaurant, called “We’ve Got Crabs.” Unfortunately, the museum collapses during a storm as a result of his poor handiwork, but the same storm ends up stranding a huge crowd of people at Ivy’s usually-empty restaurant, including a notable film critic. As Theo’s career essentially comes to an end (not helped by his filmed reaction to the collapsing building going viral), Ivy’s suddenly explodes, and the two decide to let her be the breadwinner for a time while he raises their two children, Hattie and Roy. A few years later, the kids have transformed from fun-loving little moppets who ate sugar until they threw up to preteen athletes obsessed with performance and fitness, while Ivy’s empire has expanded through franchising of her restaurant. Although Theo was mollified for a time by Ivy’s funding of his design and construction of their (read: his) dream house, now that he’s done with that and ready to re-enter the workforce, their resentments toward one another eventually bubble over and the two start the process of a divorce, as acrimoniously as possible. 

This film was directed by Jay Roach, whose early-career comedy success with the Austin Powers and Meet the Parents franchises eventually devolved into making things like the poorly received American remake of Le Dîner de Cons in 2010’s Dinner for Schmucks and the toothless political satire The Campaign starring Will Ferrell and Zach Galafianakis. Screenwriter Tony McNamara has a better reputation around these parts, having written Poor Things (and having a hand in writing The Favourite), but while this script is serviceable, it’s not up to par with either of those works. In McNamara’s defense, this feels like a film in which the attitude toward adlibbing was a bit too lenient, although given how clunkily some of the film’s supposed zingers thud to the ground it’s hard to believe that this was the best that this cast could come up with. Andy Samberg doesn’t pull out any of his trademark charm as he sleepwalks through his lines with an identical and static “Can you believe this?” smirking energy, but at least he’s not as out of place as Kate McKinnon’s portrayal of his wife, an oddball whose desire to get into Theo Rose’s pants is as obvious as it is offputting. She does deliver the film’s best line, however, when she admits that she’s thrown caution to the wind because she’s old, her face is melting, and she knows her body’s “working up a stage 4 something” so she might as well live a little. 

Both Samberg and McKinnon’s performances have the air of something that would have worked well if the film had been edited with a little more oomph. Their failure isn’t in the performance (at least not entirely) as much as it is in the pacing and the way that the camera lingers on them a little too long after they do a bit. The same cannot be said for Zoë Chao and Jamie Demetriou, who are bafflingly unfunny in ways that I didn’t imagine possible. If you don’t recognize Chao from her voice work on Creature Commandos or know Jamie Demetriou from Fleabag, you’ll know them from the trailer as the couple doing the “We love your witty banter” bit, which is even less funny in the film than it was in the marketing material. Ncuti Gatwa, who plays Ivy’s head waiter, has a couple of good lines, but he’s also playing his character a bit broad; as I’m currently catching up on Doctor Who after losing interest around 2019 and was just coming to the end of Jodie Whittaker’s run, I was a bit concerned that this would bode poorly for his turn as the title character (having since watched his premier in “The Giggle,” I can say that I’m very looking forward to his time as the Doctor). 

I’ve never seen the Danny DeVito-directed original adaptation of this under the same name as the novel, The War of the Roses, but I can’t imagine that this improves on that one. For one thing, that film features DeVito as both a character (he’s a divorce lawyer) and narrator, and it also seems like that one gets into the actual conflict between the couple a lot earlier in the narrative than this one does. I suppose the omission of “war” from the title was actually a declaration that this movie wasn’t terribly interested in that conflict and would instead be a longer portrait of what is, for the first two acts, a fairly ordinary marriage. By the time Ivy’s making deepfakes of her husband confessing to intentionally botching the maritime museum in order to put the final nail in the coffin and Theo’s bashing the actual stove that belonged to Julia Child to pieces, there’s barely any runtime left. The film’s final moment is the most interesting and novel element, but it’s far too little and comes far too late to save this. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Stigmata (1991)

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One of the easiest ways to evoke dread in a horror film is to fake a found-footage cassette tape, recoiling from the flat digital textures of modern cameras to instead seek shelter in the spooky analog media of old. Two of this year’s buzziest horror titles rely heavily on that aesthetic cheat-code to varying levels of success; both Together & Bring Her Back explain the practical step-by-step details of their respective supernatural rituals via vintage camcorder recordings made by the cults who practice them. It’s the kind of haunted-media aura that you’d assume was earned over time, the way that scratchy old records, faded celluloid, and dusty children’s toys become creepy as they degrade but were considered innocuous when fresh. Camcorder video is different, though. Like with Polaroids, homemade video tapes were immediately understood to have a creepy aura, since their production in private, unregulated spaces could document all kinds of unspeakable evils with relative impunity. You can especially feel it in the video-art experiments of No Wave filmmaker Beth B, whose early projects like “Belladonna,” “Hysteria,” and “Thanatopsis” layered eerie camcorder video footage over horrific text pulled from Sigmund Freud, Nazi scientists and, perhaps the most extreme of all, Lydia Lunch. The real shock among those video-art experiments is how much her mid-length 40min feature Stigmata uses the exact same editing tricks as recent horrors like Together & Bring Her Back, interrupting its central narrative with shocks of contextless camcorder footage, evoking evil without ever fully explaining it. That’s not a newly creepy aspect to camcorder footage that was earned over time, like the spooky toy telephone & Fleischer cartoon broadcasts of Skinamarink. It was integral to the medium from the very beginning.

The core of Stigmata is more PBS special than analog horror. Beth B interviews six recovering heroin addicts about their lifelong personal struggles in the same black-void studio space you’d expect to see on a talk show like Charlie Rose (or, more charitably, a Marlon Riggs video). “Brutal honesty” doesn’t begin to cover the candidness of these interviews, which detail the personal, familial, and medical circumstances that lure people into hard drug addiction. Subjects explain at length how shooting heroin can be an act of self-medication, an escape from the prison of everyday life, and a relatively healthy alternative to suicide. Their struggles with the drug are confrontationally foregrounded, so that the entire screen is filled with the pain on their faces as they each recall their respective rock bottoms. The only relief valve Beth B offers the audience is occasional cutaways to unexplained home video footage that I assume was shot on vacation in coastal Europe, most likely Italy. These interstitials’ relationship to the addict interviews might mean something personally significant to the director, but that connection is left open for the audience to ponder. The title “stigmata” evokes the near-religious ecstasy of heroin use, which Beth B emphasizes by superimposing the opening credits over what appears to be an Old-World basilican dome. The subsequent interviews drag that ecstasy down to the physical level of holes being punched into bodies, while other camcorder cutaways stir up more horror than transcendence or peace. Beth B is especially fixated on the image of a stone window leading out to a seaside village, accompanied by unexplained sirens in the distance. The more that image repeats, the more sinister it becomes, as if it were found footage recovered from a self-documented suicide. The camera and its unseen operator never leap from that window, but the tension of the image never relaxes, and its ambiguous juxtaposition with the interviews make the whole project feel like a cursed object.

Self-billed as “a film/tape by Beth B,” Stigmata is included on Kino Lorber’s collection of the director’s solo works, titled Sex, Power, and Money. Along with her early reality-TV experiment Visiting Desire and her sleazy dance-club music video for “The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight,” it registers as the one of the most substantial titles on the set. Other shorts included there play with the same juxtaposition of confessional dialogue and video-art menace in more naked terms. “Belladonna” mixes found texts from Sigmund Freud case histories and war crime reports from the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele with triple-exposed images of urban transportation in modern NYC. “Hysteria” similarly clashes outdated case reports from patriarchal gynecologists throughout history with confessional interviews in which modern women critique their own naked bodies, presented as headless reflections in an unseen mirror. “Thanatopsis” illustrates a Lydia Lunch spoken-word piece about macho violence with domestic images of the punk-scene performance artist lounging in her apartment. Those are exceedingly strict formal experiments compared to Stigmata, which is less academically declarative in its own methods. The relationship between the intimate confessions of addiction and the anonymous found-footage B-roll is much trickier to define, leaving it open to more poetic interpretation. There is a sinister energy that hums underneath all of Beth B’s solo video work (except in “The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight,” of course, which is purely a party), but Stigmata stands out as the one that fully understood the evil power of its medium. It interjects home-video camcorder footage into its main narrative in the exact way that modern horror films do, establishing the visual language of current mainstream genre cinema in art-gallery experimental spaces decades ago. Beth B may be better remembered for collaborations with fellow no-waver Scott B on narrative titles like Vortex, but her solo documentary work convincingly verges on something new & lasting in its own right.

-Brandon Ledet

Night of the Juggler (1980)

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I had somehow never seen a full episode of the criminal-justice procedural Law & Order before this year. Since the start of this summer, however, I’ve watched nearly 100 episodes of the series, as it quickly became my go-to nightly watch after I ran out of episodes of The Sopranos. As a result, nearly everything I watch these days is filtered through a Law & Order lens. It’s not just detective stories & courtroom dramas either. The show is so lousy with recognizable actors that I’ve already seen big-namers like Ann Dowd, Christine Baranski, Sam Rockwell, and Allison Janney repeat as multiple unrelated characters only four seasons into the show (among one-off stunt casting appearances from unexpected heavy-hitters like Elaine Stritch, Tony Todd, and James Earl Jones), like a local repertory-theatre troop with a globally famous cast. So, I like to think it’s somewhat justifiable that Law & Order was at the top of my mind during a local screening of the new Night of the Juggler restoration that’s currently making the theatrical rounds. Released a full decade before Law & Order premiered in 1990, Night of the Juggler is a grimy NYC detective story similar to the 1st-act investigations of my new vintage-television obsession. While it doesn’t share early Law & Order‘s more prestigious contributions from cinematographer Ernest Dickerson or mad-genius screen actor Michael Moriarty, it does overlap significantly with the below-the-line cast & crew, including Dan Hedeya playing a violently corrupt police sergeant in both titles. In total, there are 28 contributors who worked on both Night of the Juggler and Law & Order—mostly NYC-based character actors—which feels like a substantial number even if it doesn’t remotely compare with the 757 contributors who worked on both Law & Order and my previous nightly catch-up show, The Sopranos.

There is one major payoff Night of the Juggler offers that even peak-era Law & Order couldn’t afford: action. In most of the NYPD investigations on Law & Order, suspects who flee the scene are quickly apprehended by detectives Logan & Briscoe at the same shooting location where they’re spotted. The show is largely a crime-of-the-week soap opera that contains its scene-to-scene drama to a series of courtrooms, judges’ chambers, and holding cells. Night of the Juggler cannot be contained. It runs wild in the streets of New York City, staging multiple, lengthy chase scenes that hop from taxi to subway train to public park to porno theatre to underground cellar, leaving a trail of wrecked cars & hot dog carts in its wake. Its premise is typical to an early Law & Order episode, though, even if it’s one the show would likely save for a season-finale ratings spike. Cliff Gorman plays a run-of-the-mill maniac New Yorker who exacts revenge upon the millionaire real estate developers who gentrified his neighborhood by kidnapping one of the business pricks’ teenage daughter in Central Park. Only, he mistakenly kidnaps her doppelganger, the daughter of a tough-as-nails truck driver and former cop played by James Brolin. So, not only is there no way for the unscrupulous sleaze to cash the teen in for the demanded million-dollar ransom, but now he also has a crazed working-class brute on his tail who’s willing & able to punch him to death for the offense — as soon as he can catch up with him. Dressed more like a lumberjack than an ex-cop city boy, Brolin is a macho folk hero who takes a principled stand against the flagrant crime of late-70s NYC by chasing down the man who wronged him for vigilante justice while NYPD’s finest twiddle their thumbs (or, in the case of Dan Hedeya’s wild-eyed corrupt sergeant, attempt to take down the obvious victim instead of the obvious creep).

Night of the Juggler is the kind of low-budget, anything-goes filmmaking that’s most remarkable for the unpredictability of its minor details. Gorman’s unpredictability as the crazed kidnapper is especially thrilling. He’s introduced at a greasy-spoon diner, making a smiley face out of his bacon & eggs breakfast plate before dousing that culinary cartoon with excessive ketchup gore. He’s scary because his every move is impossible to anticipate, especially as he seemingly falls in love with his underage “Million Dollar Baby” kidnapping victim while making threatening phone calls to the wrong family about what he’ll do to her if they don’t pay up (including her sending her back home as “chunks of meat”). There is no shortage of NYC freaks on his level here. The city is overflowing with the criminally insane, making it near impossible for James Brolin to navigate his way back to his daughter before she’s torn apart by the horde. Despite drowning in that bottomless cesspool of cretins, both Brolin and his kidnapped kid continually express a deep, unbreakable love for the city and its people, which makes the movie oddly charming despite the frequent escalations of its violence. Sure, Brolin is on a similar vengeance mission as Charles Bronson is in the Death Wish series, but in this case the criminal he’s after is the racist lunatic, not the hero; Brolin generally loves the people of New York, chastising his ex-wife for abandoning the city for the safer, blander refuge of suburban Connecticut. When Mandy Patinkin appears as a vigilante cabbie, or Sharon Mitchell shows up to work the peep show booths on 42nd Street, or Richard Castellano stops his police investigation dead to instead inquire about how frozen yogurt is made, the Big Apple comes across as a great city spoiled only by its few bad apples, among which are the cops who care more about personal profit than the people they supposedly serve.

Night of the Juggler‘s recent return to theaters is a cause to celebrate among longtime fans who luckily caught it during its original run or during its subsequent late-night cable broadcasts, as it’s essentially become lost media in the four decades since. The new restoration is especially being heralded by genre-film junkies who watched the scuzzy, taped-off-the-TV scan of it that made its way to YouTube in recent years. That scuzziness isn’t totally inappropriate for a movie that mostly characterizes New York City as a collection of feral rats scurrying around underground jets of steam, but I imagine the pixelation of a low-quality YouTube upload would’ve made it borderline illegible during its multiple whirlwind street chases, so there’s never been a better time to catch up with it than now, really. Not for nothing, there’s also never been a better time to catch up with early seasons of Law & Order if you missed its original run, since it consistently aired out-of-sequence during its years of televised syndication. It also looks incredible streaming in HD as a relic from when major-network primetime dramas were shot on actual celluloid and featured contributions from world-class actors & cinematographers. Law & Order and Night of the Juggler: two great, greasy tastes that taste extra great & greasy together.

-Brandon Ledet

Young and Innocent (1937)

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After a recent viewing of Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright, I double checked to see if it had already been covered on the site (it had), since I had learned to do this recently after getting a couple of paragraphs into a review of the director’s Frenzy, which Brandon had also already covered. This made me wonder just how many of Hitch’s thriller features we had covered; these account for 40 of the roughly 45 films in his filmography (I say “roughly” since I’m not sure how we would count his earliest, lost films like Number 13 and The Mountain Eagle), and I texted Brandon that we had covered 13 so far, to which he noted that we had already hit 14 if one counts his discussion of Strangers on a Train here. I thought it would be fun to try and do all 40 sometime, and figured I would tackle the next one chronologically after The Lodger. Unfortunately, my local video store does not have a copy of Blackmail!, so I rented Murder!, only to find out that the LaserLight DVD they have in their possession is one of those quick and dirty late nineties/early 2000s releases of a very poor transfer (in fact, The Hitchcock Zone has a warning about this exact DVD). It was, in a word, unwatchable, and that’s coming from someone who buys every unlabelled estate sale VHS he sees just to see what’s on them. I was still in a Hitchcock mood, though, so I decided to see what he had available on the Criterion Collection and stumbled across Young and Innocent, one of his 1937 pictures. The description of the film gave fair warning that the movie did contain a sequence of Blackface, which made me a bit wary. The movie ended up being so much fun and so delightful (in fact, I started to wonder why it wasn’t more well known) that I had completely forgotten about this heads-up by the time that the last ten minutes rolled around, and boy did it negatively affect my perception of this feature overall. 

The film opens on an argument between Christine Clay, a British actress returned home after having success in Hollywood, and her ex-husband Guy, who accuses her of “bringing home boys and men” and refusing to accept that the marriage is over. The following morning, young Robert Tisdall (Derrick De Marney) is walking along a cliffside when he sees a body on the beach and climbs down, discovers Christine dead, and sprints away to get help. His speed is witnessed by two girls who had come down to the water to swim, and despite the fact that he did come back with the police, said coppers immediately decide to believe the teenagers’ interpretation that he was fleeing the scene and arrest him; it certainly doesn’t help that his raincoat was recently stolen and Christine was strangled with a raincoat belt, or that he and Christine knew each other from their stateside film work, where Robert was a writer. Their suspicions deepen when they learn that she has left him a substantial amount of money in her will, and he’s prepared for immediate arraignment. While detained at the station, he faints when he learns of this, and is revived by Erica Burgoyne (Nova Pilbeam), the daughter of the police commissioner, and is totally adorable with her Sealyham terrier named Towser and her beat-up, hand-cranked jalopy. When he’s given a clearly incompetent public defender, he flees the overcrowded courthouse and escapes by hiding in Erica’s car. When she runs out of gas, he pushes the car to the nearest petrol station and uses his last few coins to pay for more fuel before hiding out in an abandoned barn. When Erica returns home, she overhears that he can’t get far since he only has thirty pence, and she comes to believe that he must be innocent, as he claimed. When she returns to the barn to leave behind some food and coins for him, the two barely escape discovery by a couple of her father’s policemen, and she ends up agreeing to take him to the boarding house where a drifting vagrant who supposedly has possession of his raincoat may be able to prove his innocence. 

De Marney and Pilbeam are utterly charming in these roles. We know from the start that Robert is innocent, so even though Erica’s claims that he’s too sweet-looking to be a murderer are dubious at best, we also can’t help but agree when we see Robert’s boyishness, especially when we get to see the two together in all their on-screen chemistry. In a lot of these “innocent man pursued” pictures, Hitch’s leading men often get frustrated and agitated at their situation, and even though this is early in his career, it’s kind of refreshing to see a man who’s at least somewhat enjoying the ride that he’s on. That makes his flirtation with Erica and her eventual willingness to help him try and find the proof of his innocence a nice, charming romance, with two sweet leads who work quite well together. Once they do locate the homeless china-mender, Old Will (Edward Rigby) and enlist him in their mission, he adds even more charm to their little ensemble. Perhaps my favorite character, however, is Erica’s Aunt Margaret (Mary Clare), who appears when Erica and Robert are still heading to the boarding house where Old Will might be found, and she says that she’ll call her father so that he doesn’t get worried and start looking for her. Erica has forgotten that it’s her younger cousin’s birthday and she gets roped into attending her party. Aunt Margaret is a total busybody and a bit of a party bully, but she’s so arch and funny that she’s much more entertaining than she is frustrating. Her husband, Uncle Basil (Basil Radford, who would appear the following year in The Lady Vanishes), is less suspicious and can see that blossoming romance between Erica and Robert so clearly that he ends up helping them slip away. 

The general light-heartedness of this one also makes for a very fun comedic outing, but it’s also not without its fascinating set pieces, either. Besides the aforementioned child’s birthday party scene, Erica’s home life with her father and several younger brothers is also quite charming. It’s clear that her relationship with her family is a loving one, and all of the boys get enough characterization that it’s a delight to watch them all play off of each other. There’s a studious and up-tight one with glasses, the more jocular and athletic middle boy, and the precocious youngest who ends up bringing a rat to the dinner table at one point. This makes the later more serious scene in which her father shows her the resignation letter that he intends to deliver that day (rather than arrest his own daughter, whom he knows has abetted an escaped inmate) all the more impactful. For comedic set pieces, there’s a very good one at the restaurant called Tom’s Hat where Robert’s raincoat first went missing, when a couple of vagrants get into a brawl with some truckers that they feel are giving away a little too much information about Old Will, with Robert forcing his way inside in order to try and save Erica from the kerfuffle, only for her to have already made her way out of the building without any of his help. On the more dramatic side, the abandoned barn makes for a beautiful location, and there’s also a great setpiece where Robert, Old Will, and Erica (and Towser!) drive into an abandoned mine shaft to evade pursuing police, only for the shaft to give way beneath them and swallow the car as they desperately try to climb out of it before it falls. There’s also a great dance sequence at the end where Old Will, having been given an offscreen makeover that he despises, goes to a fancy hotel with Erica to see if he can identify Christine’s killer there, and it’s a sight to behold. 

Unfortunately, it’s this final scene in the hotel where the film gets a little too ugly to swallow. It wasn’t uncommon for live musical performances of the era to take advantage of the minstrel show aesthetic, and every single member of the ten-piece band performing at the hotel ballroom is in Blackface, and it’s quite awful. I know that I’m looking at this through a modern lens and the contemporary logic was that it would make sense for the killer to have a job where he’s in some kind of disguise, and being painted to look like a racist caricature made for an understandable method of hiding in plain sight during a time when that kind of entertainment was common. Still, I can’t help but be sickened by the final ten minutes, especially since this one was chugging along at such a nice pace up until that point. I was a little curious as to why the quality control on the subtitles for this film seemed to be barely up to snuff, as the caption “[inaudible]” appears more here than in any other film I’ve ever seen, over a dozen times. Sometimes it’s character names that perhaps the captioner didn’t feel confident in providing or slang of the time that a younger staffer at Criterion might simply be unfamiliar with (in the very opening scene, Guy tells Christine that he won’t accept her “Reno divorce,” which the subtitles render as “[inaudible] divorce”), but at other times it’s just fast child-speech that a trained ear should be able to hear or it’s totally clear dialogue. It made it feel like this was done haphazardly and lazily, and I was keeping track of what I heard in order to email Criterion to recommend an update, but by the end of the film, all of the wind in my sails had gone out after seeing the Blackface sequences, and I get the feeling that whoever was in charge of getting this up onto the Criterion Channel likely had the same deflation. I can’t say that I blame them. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond