reviews

The Age of Innocence (1993)

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The period-piece romance The Age of Innocence is never the first title that comes to mind in discussions of Martin Scorsese’s work, nor even the tenth. After a long career defined by stories of Catholic faith, brutal violence, and the mafia, the name Scorsese usually conjures crime-thriller titles like GoodFellas, Casino, The Departed, and The Irishman, not his adaptation of a Gilded Age romance novel by Edith Wharton. The Age of Innocence is not all that extreme of an outlier within his larger catalog, though, at least not in terms of theme. Despite first appearances, it is a quintessential Martin Scorsese picture, in that it’s a distinctly New York story about violent passion & conspiracy. It’s also immediately recognizable as one of his very best, calling into question whether his career would’ve been improved if he were diverted into only directing the American equivalent of Merchant-Ivory costume dramas instead of sticking to his typical crisis-of-faith & organized-crime stories.

The plot is centered on a love-triangle scandal in 19th Century NYC, in which a young, ambitious lawyer (Daniel Day-Lewis) is distracted from his impending marriage to a naive socialite (Winona Ryder) by the arrival of her disgraced, free-spirited cousin (Michelle Pfeiffer), to whom he is a better-suited romantic match. While helping the cousin break free from an abusive marriage to a European nobleman without stumbling into the public scandal of divorce, the lawyer falls into obsessive, feverish love with her without even noticing his transgression. Everyone around the forbidden couple notices, however, even if the organized gossip network of NYC society would never speak such sin aloud in mixed company. The result is a competition between two simultaneous conspiracies: one in which the potentially adulterous lovers believe they are discreetly indulging in their shared passion without notice, and a larger one in which their city-wide social circle closes ranks to shut their emotional affair down for good before it has a chance to become physical. The shock of the story is in learning just how active the younger, performatively dim fiancée is within the conspiracy to nip the affair in the bud, which is the kind of last-minute reveal that makes you want to immediately rewatch from the beginning through a new lens — the highest compliment that can be paid to any movie.

All of the passion, yearning, and unspoken political maneuvering of the story is inherited from its literary source material, with Scorsese going as far as to preserve the beauty of Wharton’s prose in a constant narration track from Joanne Woodward. He makes his presence known in the visual language, though, pulling influence from infamously showy, experimental directors in his mental cinematic encyclopedia. He employed Saul Bass for the opening credits sequence—time-elapsed flowers blooming in double exposure over vintage lace—sharing a core collaborator with Alfred Hitchcock. Full-screen flashes of white, yellow, and red express the violent passion of his characters in direct allusion to François Truffaut. Stuttered montage of opera-house audiences recalls the crude, tactile animation of Stan Brakhage. The opera theatre itself—the grandest temple of New York social life—is shot with the erratic, swooping verve of Argento’s Opera. Longtime Scorsese collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker is equally aggressive in the editing room, overwhelming the audience with insert shots of extravagant meals & tobacco-smoking instruments in fetishistic detail. The director even physically inserts himself into the picture in a single-scene cameo as a portrait photographer, again recalling the legend & legacy of Hitchcock. He is respectful of Wharton’s source text, but he’s not delicate with it.

Even without Scorsese’s technical bravado intensifying the breathy dialogue exchanges, The Age of Innocence would still register as a cut above most of the literary dramas that rack up easy Best Costume Design Oscars year to year. The central cast is phenomenal, with Winona Ryder weaponizing her appearance of naivety to devastating effect, Michelle Pfeiffer causing havoc as the only member of New York Society who dares to speak & live honestly, and Daniel Day-Lewis showing a softer, more vulnerable side of himself before his wayward yearning transforms him into one of the violently passionate freaks he usually plays. His own naivety is neither cultivated nor performative, as he believes he is keeping his sinful desires hidden from the public while comparing the idea of his would-be lover returning to her marriage as a sentence worse than death & Hell in Byronic hyperbole. He never allows himself to fully consummate his lust, but the small ways he indulges it is somehow more sexual than actual sex — sneaking kisses to her wrists, her slippers, and her parasol as if those sneaky micro-transgressions could go possibly go unnoticed. The other two corners of the central love triangle are equally strong, but all of the passion, pain, and betrayal of the story is clearly visible in his dark, burning eyes, a reminder that he used to be one of the best actors in the world before he became an unlikely fashionista.

One of Wharton’s most clever lines preserved here is Pfeiffer’s observation that “all of the blind obeying of traditions, somebody else’s traditions” in New York society is self-defeating, since “it seems stupid to have discovered America only it make it a copy of another country.” All of the rules about virtue, propriety, fashion, and divorce that keep the central trio locked in a social prison of their own design are leftover from the social values of upper-class Europe. An entirely new world is being actively built around them, while they insist in living by the rules of an old one. Scorsese appears to be operating in a temporal limbo between old & new worlds here as well, gazing slack-jawed at the gorgeous oil-painting galleries & soaring architecture of the story’s Gilded Age setting while also brazenly distorting the visual aesthetics of the era through his own distinctly 1990s style. Both the romance of the picture and the auteur behind it are torn in two by the conflicting interests of tradition & passion. In that way, the seemingly incongruous marriage of filmmaker & genre is exactly what makes The Age of Innocence so remarkably great. It’s almost enough to make you wonder what would happen if Julian Fellows were making a hyperviolent organized-crime saga instead of coasting on Downton Abbey fumes with The Gilded Age.

-Brandon Ledet

Lagniappe Podcast: M3GAN v Superman – Dusk of Justice

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss two superhero movies currently in wide theatrical release: M3GAN 2.0 (2025) & Superman (2025).

00:00 Welcome

04:17 I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)
15:10 The Age of Innocence (1993)
21:57 Misericordia (2025)
28:50 Looney Tunes – The Day the Earth Blew Up (2025)
34:24 Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985)

38:24 Megan 2.0 (2025) vs. Superman (2025)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

The Leather Boys (1965)

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To my surprise, the film I’m most looking forward to from this year’s Cannes slate is not the new Lynne Ramsay, the new Ari Aster, the new Julia Ducournau, nor any other new release from an established-name auteur. The Un Certain Regard selection Pillion was the title that most caught my attention in the trades, teased with a premise in which “A timid man is swept off his feet when an enigmatic, impossibly handsome biker takes him on as his submissive.” Given their recent freakshow outings in Please Baby Please & Infinity Pool, respectively, the casting of Harry Melling & Alexander Skarsgård as that unlikely couple is certainly part of the attraction, despite debut writer-director Harry Lighton being an unproven no-namer at the time of this posting. Honestly, though, it’s just an alluring logline premise on its own no matter the talent involved, even if it’s more or less been done before: recently in Jeff Nichols’s excessively hetero biker-culture melodrama The Bikeriders and a half-century ago in the kitchen-sink drama The Leather Boys.

The Bikeriders starred Austin Butler as a gorgeous greaser whose affection is fought over by his wife (Jodie Comer) and his gang leader (Tom Hardy) despite his one true love being the open road, breaking both their hearts. That bisexual love triangle goes more or less unspoken despite the homoeroticism inherent to depicting a group of men whose sole passion is to get filthy, roughhouse, and pound beers together while dressed in heavy leather. It’s so blatantly intrinsic to biker culture that a 1960s British studio film could get away with telling its own queer love triangle story without being censored out of existence. The Leather Boys is just as carefully chaste in depicting its unspoken bisexual tug-of-war as The Bikeriders, and yet it was saddled with an X rating because it did not similarly bury those themes in subtext. In contrast, Pillion promises to be explicit enough in its themes and its sexual imagery to have legitimately earned that X rating, at least according to early festival-circuit reviews. Still, it’s impressive that such a non-judgemetal portrayal of closeted, hush-hush homosexuality within 60s biker culture was made in its time at all.

Colin Campbell stars as the lead leather boy, Reggie, who’s still a hotheaded teenager when he marries his high school sweetheart Dot (Rita Tushingham). The working-class knuckleheads aren’t at all prepared for the day-to-day realities of marriage, and they struggle to settle into a healthy routine after the initial rush of lust cools. Every conversation quickly escalates into a top-volume shouting match, with Reggie frustrated that his wife isn’t motivated to cook or clean while he works at the local garage and Dot frustrated that her husband no longer wants to have sex. To blow off steam, Reggie starts spending more time around his leather-jacketed biker buddies at the local cafe, where he strikes up a fast, passionate friendship with a flamboyant jokester named Pete (Dudley Sutton). Pete & Reggie hit it off so well that they end up sharing a bed every night in a relative’s spare room while the naive teens’ marriage hangs in limbo. Only Pete seems to be aware of the romantic tensions of this “friendship”, while Reggie doesn’t have any self-awareness of his own feelings or desires whatsoever.

The Leather Boys is a sordid love triangle played as kitchen sink melodrama . . . with motorcycle races! While its source-material novel depicts two young leather-clad lovers on a wild sex & crime spree, the movie version is deliberately subtle & underplayed, avoiding all of the typical road-to-ruin trappings of similar teen thrillers of the 1950s. No one dies. Reggie & Pete sleep together, but they do not fuck. The early implications that Pete is gay start as a general disinterest in girls and an eagerness to perform the wifely duties Dot neglects, and his queerness is only confirmed by the delicate way he holds his “fags” while smoking in bed. Reggie’s own sexuality is even more subtly played, to the point where it’s never fully defined. He’s confused by Pete’s social flamboyance, confused by his own disinterest in bedding his wife, and generally just all-around confused by his feelings & life. The only thing he’s certain about is that he’s intensely uncomfortable when Pete introduces him to a larger queer community at the local gay bar, which breaks the spell of their brief tryst as best bros.

Through all of its rocker-culture ephemera and the hormonal confusion of its lost teen lead, The Leather Boys ultimately proves to be a more direct prototype for the coming-of-age rock opera Quadrophenia than for The Bikeriders or Pillion. Its kitchen-sink realism mostly manifests in its improvised slang, with the Cockney teens punctuating their every thought with phrases like, “You’re a right blighter,” “Get roffed!” and, of course, “Innit?” There’s also a kind of hidden-camera quality to the visual style, framing both the cramped interiors & wide exteriors of the location shoots through an extreme wide-angle lens, as if the entire film were shot in a motorcycle’s rearview mirror. It’s a cool, sensitive, surprisingly frank story of a young man with conflicted feelings, torn between his love for his wife and his attraction to his fellow leather boys. The only reason it was rated X was so that impressionable teenagers wouldn’t leave the theater to buy bikes & leather jackets of their own and flirt with a little confused gay romance for themselves.

-Brandon Ledet

Gwen and the Book of Sand (1985)

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Gwen et le livre de sable (Gwen and the Book of Sand) is a 1985 animated feature directed by Jean-François Laguionie, with its illustrations and animations done in gouache, giving the whole film a very watercolor texture. The plot concerns Gwen, a teenage girl who is adopted into a nomadic tribe who live in a post-apocalyptic desert. One member of the tribe, Roseline, is identified as a witch, and is said to be over 170 years old, and it is through her we get what little knowledge we have of this world and how it came to be. She tells us that the gods destroyed the civilizations of the past, and that now the world is stalked by an Eldritch abomination called Makou, which periodically roams the desert and spews out reproductions of various household objects from the sky, usually of a gigantic variety. Of course, Roseline also believes that the walled city she and her people avoid and from which the Makou seems to originate is the afterlife and that those within it are spirits, but when we learn more about them later, it becomes clear that Roseline’s wisdom is incomplete and thus many of her concepts of the universe’s function are inaccurate. In Gwen, Roseline sees a girl who has never known fear and respects this about her, but when Gwen and Roseline’s grandson Nokmoon sneak out one night to make love and fall asleep in a giant chest of drawers, Nokmoon ends up taken by the Makou. As the rest of the tribe moves on, Roseline and Nokmoon journey to the “afterlife” to try and rescue him. 

This film, like The Tragedy of Man, is currently available in a remastered edition from boutique home video retailer Deaf Crocodile. I got to see it on the big screen at my local arthouse, and it was absolutely gorgeous. Although the motion of the animation is limited at times, that minimal movement lends the whole thing a storybook quality, rendering Gwen as a post-apocalyptic fairytale. It’s a fairly short feature, clocking in at under 70 minutes, but it feels no less fully realized than a film that was twice its length. The desert features fantastical creatures that feel like revisitations of earlier French animation experiments in design; there’s nothing as strange here as what you might see in La Planète sauvage or Les Maîtres du temps, but they are of a kind. The desert nomads live solely off of a diet of feathers harvested from a mutant ostrich, and the only light that they have at night comes from a bioluminescent scorpion. Where the film gets its most surreal visual elements is in the “gifts” of the Makou, as giant watering cans reign from the sky and Gwen and Roseline navigate a labyrinth of doors or summit a mountain range of clocks. We eventually learn that these items are generated by the Makou is response to religious supplication from the people who dwell within the walled city, where religion has dissolved into a unified cargo cult centered around the titular book of sand, which is in actuality a home goods catalogue from before the collapse of civilization. Their hymns consist of recitations of product descriptions, which then prompt the Makou into creating them. The leaders of this “faith” are two twin brothers who observe the captive Nokmoon’s psychically projected dreams and hope that this can help them to prompt the Makou to create something “alive” rather than the inanimate objects that it normally produces. 

The mechanics of all of this are mostly irrelevant. The world-building exists solely to allow for the visuals, and that’s where the film shines. Gwen is able to rescue Nokmoon because this is that kind of fable, and it’s mostly an accident. The twin priests observe that a spiral image in Nokmoon’s dream resembles the product image of a particular firework, and prompt their faithful throng into singing it into existence via the Makou, which backfires when the people below are terrified by the suddenly bright, loud heavens. Gwen’s presence in the climax has no real bearing on the events there, except that she is able to bring Nokmoon home. She knows a bit more about the world now than Roseline does, but she lets the old woman continue to believe as she always has. Even if that story is a little confusing for the audience (and there are certainly some things left up to interpretation and conjecture, which is why I would recommend watching this one with a friend), it’s the sumptuous use of a non-standard artistic technique that makes this one worth finding and checking out. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Wolf (1994)

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Wolf is an oddity. I went on a little bit of a werewolf movie sidequest earlier this year viewing The Wolf of Snow Hollow and Wolfen, and when I borrowed the latter from the library, I thought Mike Nichols’s Wolf was what I was getting. I have very strong memories of the evocative movie poster for this one in at least one of the video stores of my youth, and I’ve always been curious about it. How can you not have some curiosity about a werewolf flick helmed by the director of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate, two years before he made The Birdcage? Starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Jack Nicholson, and James Spader, no less. Ultimately, this isn’t a bad movie, but it’s not a particularly noteworthy one either, which is likely why it gets mistaken for Wolfen. 

Will Randall (Nicholson) is the editor-in-chief of a major New York publishing house, although he’s a relatively mild-mannered man—at least as mild-mannered as any Nicholson character can be—for someone of such prestige. He has a loving relationship with his wife Charlotte (Kate Nelligan) and the respect of his peers and subordinates (David Hyde Pierce, Eileen Atkins), as well as a strong affection for his protege Stewart (James Spader). While driving down a Vermont road one evening, he hits a large dark mammal with his car, and when he gets out to check on it, the beast bites him. Despite his doctor’s insistence that wolves are extinct in New England, Will is convinced that this is what bit him. At a party hosted by the owner of the company, Raymond Alden (Christopher Plummer), Will is told that a new editor-in-chief has been appointed, and that Will can either transfer to an undesirable position manning the publisher’s office in Eastern Europe. Will immediately realizes that his “best friend” Stewart has stabbed him in the back, and he meets Alden’s daughter Laura (Pfeiffer) as he wanders the grounds, taking in the betrayal. Meanwhile, Will also starts to experience unusual physical changes, as the area around his wound sprouts long fur and his senses grow more enhanced, as he is able to smell tequila on the breath of a colleague, doesn’t even realize that he doesn’t need his glasses to read, and can hear conversations occurring in other parts of the office. Returning home one night, he smells something familiar on his wife’s clothing and confronts Stewart at the younger man’s front door before bounding up the stairs and animalistically and discovering his wife in Stewart’s bedroom, but not before snarling at (and perhaps biting) Stewart. 

It’s a pretty rote werewolf story, all things considered, and one that would have entered a market that was already saturated with American Werewolves, Teen Wolves, and Howlings. The script was co-written by Wesley Strick and, bizarrely, poet and essayist James Harrison. It is not based on Harrison’s novel Wolf: A False Memoir as one might suspect, and Harrison seems to have been involved initially simply because he and Nicholson were friends. This was Harrison’s second (and last) attempt at working in Hollywood, as he quit the film in exasperation over creative differences with Nichols. “I wanted Dionysian, but he wanted Apollonian,” he was quoted as saying (in literature, Dionysian attributes are those of intoxication and thus ecstasy, emotion, and disorder, while Appolonian attributes are logical, clear, and harmonious). That makes a certain amount of sense, but in the same interview, he then said, “[Nichols] took my wolf and made it into a Chihuahua,” which is less clear as a complaint. Strick, for his part, had risen to some prominence as the co-screenwriter of horror comedy Arachnophobia and had recently penned the script for the similarly messy 1991 Martin Scorsese picture Cape Fear as well as uncredited rewrites on Batman Returns. After 1997s underrated Val Kilmer vehicle The Saint, his credits take a steep nosedive, as his credits include the much-maligned 2005 video game adaptation Doom, the ill-fated and poorly conceived 2010 Nightmare on Elm Street remake, and the 2014 rotten erotic thriller The Loft. I want to say that some of the weakness was already present in the script here, but it’s really impossible to tell what parts came from him and which were from Harrison, and that’s not even getting into the fact that Elaine May was brought in for some uncredited punch-ups (although the fact that Wolf is two full hours long and meanders in the middle shows her fingerprints if nothing else). 

Pfeiffer is excellent here as she always is, and it is interesting to see Nicholson play a more subdued character than he is normally known for. Spader is effective as the smarmy sycophant who turns out to be aiming for Will’s job (and bed), and it’s no surprise when he turns up late in the film undergoing his own lycanthrope transformation, although I couldn’t help but think about how much I would have enjoyed this film a little bit more if it had been Christian Slater in the role. The film’s supporting cast is quite good. Although Pierce gets very little to do, Eileen Atkins does very solid work as Will’s secretary. Richard Jenkins appears as the detective investigating the sudden death of Will’s wife Charlotte, and he’s paired with veteran TV actor Brian Markinson. Perhaps one of the biggest standouts is Om Puri, who appears as Dr. Vijay Alezais, the folklore specialist that Will tracks down in order to get a handle on all the changes that his body is going through. Alezais tells him that it’s less a transformation than it is a kind of possession, and that the wolf that now lives inside him isn’t evil, but will only make him “more” of whatever he currently is. He even gives Will an amulet that will keep the beast inside, and it does seem to be working until the moment that Will must remove it in order to gain the wolf-strength needed to save Laura from Stewart. 

There’s simply nothing special about Wolf. If anything, it’s pretty rote. A perfectly serviceable mid-90s cable afternoon feature, but no staggeringly clever take on any of its component elements. Pfeiffer is serving looks in this one that are so 1994 Eddie Bauer coded that you’ll get something out of this if that’s of interest to you. There’s a lot of slow-motion werewolf leaping that gives the impression that Nichols has never seen a single episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, because all that’s missing is that bionic sound effect to complete the tableau, and I’m afraid that’s not complimentary. The film does make good use of the Bradbury Building, most notable for being the place where the climax of Blade Runner takes place but I also recently saw in D.O.A., and it’s always a comfort to the eye to see it in use. Still, it’s telling that I’m closing out this review of a werewolf review by praising the architecture. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Cape Fear (1991)

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As the final moments of Cape Fear came to a close with a zoom-in on Juliette Lewis’s eyes and a half-heartedly delivered epilogue about how she and her family never spoke about what happened with Max Cady with one another, I turned to my viewing companion and asked, “Wait, was this a bad movie?” to which he replied “I think it might have been.” But I’m getting ahead of myself. 

It came up months ago in a discussion about Goodfellas in the opening segment of our podcast episode about Nowhere, but I have a pretty big Martin Scorsese gap in my film knowledge. Until this year, I thought I had seen only one of his films, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (which was discussed in the opening segment of our podcast episode about Richard III), although further review of his filmography revealed that I had also seen two movies that I didn’t realize were his: the concert film The Last Waltz and Shutter Island, neither of which I initially connect to him because, in the case of the former, it’s not very much like his primary body of work, and in the case of the latter, it wasn’t a very good movie. Since then, I’ve also seen Casino (discussed in our Junk Head episode) and Taxi Driver (discussed in our Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie episode), and now we can add Cape Fear to the list, although I had kind of already seen it given that it forms the basis of the Simpsons episode “Cape Feare,” which I would conservatively estimate that I have seen one hundred times. 

A remake of the 1962 film directed by J. Lee Thompson starring Gregory Peck as a lawyer stalked and harassed by a recently released felon played by Robert Mitchum, Scorsese’s Cape Fear casts Nick Nolte as Sam Bowden, a former Atlanta public defender now living in North Carolina. His wife Leigh (Jessica Lange) is a graphic designer and their daughter Danielle (Lewis) is a high school student whom they have enrolled in summer school to punish her for smoking pot. Bowden is also carrying on an emotional (but not physical—yet) affair with a county clerk employee named Lori (Ileana Douglas). It isn’t his flirtation with infidelity that turns his life upside down, however, but the release of Max Cady (Robert De Niro), a man Sam dismissively refers to as a “Pentecostal hillbilly,” the scion of a family of snake-handling whom Sam unsuccessfully defended against a charge of aggravated rape of a sixteen-year-old girl. During the trial, Sam followed his personal ethics while simultaneously committing dereliction of his duty as Cady’s appointed advocate by burying evidence that Cady’s victim was characterized as “promiscuous,” which would have allowed Cady to argue down to a lesser sentence. Sam assumed that this would never come to light since Cady was illiterate, but in the fourteen years that he spent in prison, Cady has not only learned to read but has studied philosophy, theology, and the law. Using his new knowledge, Cady sets about tormenting the Bowden family while always remaining just within the allowance of legal statutes and using Sam’s defensiveness and hot temper against him by goading him into starting altercations. When Cady assaults Lori after taking her home from a bar because he knows that she, with her knowledge of how her sexual and personal history will be dragged out in front of a courtroom full of her co-workers, will refuse to press charges, things take a turn for the violent, and things get worse for the Bowdens and their allies from there. 

It’s impossible to talk about this film in 2025 without taking it into consideration with the indelible pop cultural impression that its Simpsons adaptation left on the greater consciousness. “Marge on the Lam” will never be more famous than Thelma & Louise; “Simpsoncalifragilisticexpiala(d’oh)cious” will never be better remembered than Mary Poppins; and “Rosebud” will never touch the widespread cultural importance of Citizen Kane. But Cape Fear? It may be less famous than “Cape Feare.” It doesn’t hurt that it’s widely considered one of the series’ best episodes, usually appearing in various top ten lists, and it’s a personal favorite of mine. When it comes to Sideshow Bob episodes, I think that I would give the edge to “Sideshow Bob Roberts” by just a hair because of that installment’s biting political edge, but “Cape Feare” is the funniest by a wide margin. Even if you’re someone who’s never seen the show, the omnipresence of memes that originate from it mean that it’s given us some of the longest lasting Simpsons jokes and images, like Homer’s extreme stupidity rendering him unable to respond to the name of his witness protection identity, Homer’s frightening offer of brownies and brandishing of a chainsaw on the “Thompson” family’s houseboat, and, of course, Bob and the rakes. It’s with this in mind that I offer the possibility that this movie was not intended to be as comedic as I found it, which contributed to a feeling of overall tonal whiplash and inconsistency that made it a strange text to interact with. That, combined with some experimental filmmaking choices that range from the interesting to the absurd, make for a film that is overall less than the sum of its parts. 

Despite the main conflict of the film happening between Nolte’s Sam and De Niro’s Cady, the most powerful scenes in this film are those that feature the film’s talented roster of actresses acting against one of them. Cady’s semi-seduction of Danielle by calling her the night before summer school starts to pose as her new drama teacher and direct her to the theatre in the film’s basement for “class” the next day, where he preys upon the fifteen-year-old’s desire to be treated more maturely, is skin-crawling, and Lewis plays Danielle perfectly in this scene —  disturbed but intrigued, flattered in spite of herself, and frighteningly naive. Lange gets two big scenes. While her big monologue in the finale, in which she attempts to redirect Cady’s imminent sexual violence against Danielle back onto herself by flattering him and lying about an emotional connection, is quite good, it’s the earlier scene in which she accuses Sam of sleeping with Lori after hearing him sounding overly concerned on the phone that is her powerhouse moment. She’s a tornado of fury, and it’s fantastic to witness. In Ileana Douglas’s penultimate scene, Sam comes to her in the hospital after Cady has beaten and sexually assaulted her, and we get our first glimpse of just how dangerous and vile a man Cady is; Lori has been brutalized. Douglas gives what may be a career-best performance delivering a harrowing monologue about what it’s like to be a woman who’s witnessed the justice system act as a secondary violating entity in the way that it forces the events to be revisited and picked over, examined and re-examined and cross-examined, and how often justice fails to be served in spite of all of it. 

It’s a gut-punch of a scene (genuinely the film’s greatest), one that’s immediately followed by one in which the furious Sam demands takes his anger out verbally upon sympathetic police lieutenant Elgart (Robert Mitchum, who previously portrayed Cady in 1962), who ends the scene with the uproariously funny line “Well, pardon me all over the place.” He’s not the only returning actor from the earlier film to appear in a scene that borders on camp in tone, either, as Peck portrays Lee Heller, an attorney that Cady engages to file a restraining order against Sam when Sam’s private investigator Kersek (Joe Don Baker) hires some goons to rough Cady up, in which Cady manages to get the upper hand. Heller appears in court wearing a suit that’s several sizes too big for him while Peck affects a Southern accent, to the effect that he feels like he’s a simple hyper chicken from a backwoods asteroid costumed by David Byrne. Cady himself is an interesting case, as De Niro plays him as a truly terrifying man, driven and determined and focused, with nothing but hatred and revenge in his heart. On the other hand, Cady is a clownish figure, dressing in garish clothing of various bold prints (notably, Cady also continues to wear bellbottoms in several scenes, which would have been the style at the time that he was sentenced in 1977), and his menace is undercut by some of De Niro’s choices to go a little “broad.” Or am I just too Simpsons-pilled? Do I read the scene in which a severely dirtied Cady detaches himself from the bottom of the Bowden’s Jeep Cherokee after they’ve driven out to Cape Fear as campy and funny because I’ve seen Sideshow Bob do it countless times? Am I not supposed to be laughing when Cady finally dies, being dragged beneath the surging waters of Cape Fear when he starts speaking in tongues before singing a hymn about the River Jordan? It feels like I shouldn’t be given that mere moments before this Leigh and Danielle were in harrowing sexual danger, but I also can’t imagine that the film could expect me to take Cady’s dying glossolalia seriously either. “Cape Feare” is in such a rhetorical conversation with Cape Fear that it’s essentially paratext, so I have to consider that I’m biased not to take the film’s drama seriously, but I also don’t think that the shadow of “Cape Feare” is entirely to blame for a Cape Fear’s tonal failings either. 

One of the things that is most praiseworthy in the film is the moral dilemma that it posits. Sam unequivocally betrayed his oath and broke the law by suppressing evidence that would have reduced Cady’s sentence; there’s no argument about that. But Cady had already bragged to him about beating two previous aggravated sexual assault charges and when Sam witnessed the extent of his brutality toward his teenaged victim, he made what is a reasonable moral and ethical choice to ensure that Cady could not continue his reign of terror. Justice failed, and justice was served. This is ultimately what Cady discovered and what set him off on his violent revenge campaign, and it turns out that Sam did it all in vain, anyway. Cady insists he would have served the seven years he would have gotten with his reduced charges and considered it just, but by the time he had spent that amount of time incarcerated, he had already murdered another inmate and made it look like an accident. This open secret meant that the parole board never even considered his early release. If Sam hadn’t hidden the “exonerating” evidence, Cady would still have served the same amount of time. Violence simply begets; that’s its nature. If the film had spent a little bit more time on this topic, I think it might have been able to pull these disparate threads together, but it never really comes to the forefront. As it is, this one is composed of some great elements, but they don’t work together. You can’t take it as seriously as it sometimes demands because it’s a little too campy in certain places, but you can’t take it as a fully straightforward campy thriller-comedy not because it’s often too frightening but because the omnipresent threat of sexual violence makes it too dark to comfortably enjoy on that level. Less worthy as a whole than the combined value of its individual parts.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)

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One of my most distinct moviegoing memories from my childhood was seeing the post-Scream teen slasher I Know What You Did Last Summer with my parents opening weekend. As an exclusive new track from my then-favorite band played over the end credits (“Proud,” by KoЯn), I was in 12-year-old nü-metal brat heaven, beaming in delight. That’s when my father leaned over and whispered in a firm, disappointed tone, “You never get to pick the movie again.” Three decades later, I’m older now than my father’s age was then, and I totally get it. This mildly violent teenage melodrama must be torturously tedious for any adult outside its very narrow target demographic (gloomy Millennials who were 12—and exactly 12—years old in 1997). In retrospect, I can’t believe that I dragged my parents to see it in a theater, regardless of how giddy it made me personally. Even more so, I can’t believe that some poor parent my age now is about to suffer the same fate via legacyquel. Must we forever be tormented by the sins of our mall-goth past? Can’t the world finally forgive & forget what we did that summer? Will there ever be peace in the suburbs?

All of your favorite late-90s teen stars are here: Sarah Michelle Gellar as a small-town beauty queen, Ryan Phillipe as her spoiled fuckboy sweetheart, Freddie Prinze Jr. as the townie interloper who’s desperate to earn his way into his friend group’s tax bracket, and Jennifer Love Hewitt as the only normal, well-adjusted youngster among them. The four bright young things get into trouble one night after partying on the beach outside their small fishing village, when they accidentally strike & kill a pedestrian crossing a dimly lit road and dump his body into a nearby bay to avoid hassle from the law. A year later, this act of semi-voluntary manslaughter haunts all four of the now-estranged kids involved, derailing their professional & educational ambitions as they quietly stew in the isolation of their own guilt & grief. The haunting becomes a lot more literal when a mysterious killer dressed in a fisherman slicker starts picking them off one by one via fish hook, seemingly avenging their hit-and-run victim from beyond the grave. If you’ve seen any formulaic teen slasher, you’ve seen it all before (doubly so if you’ve seen 1985’s The Mutilator); you just haven’t seen it performed by this era-specific cast.

I Know What You Did Last Summer splits the difference between an 80s teen slasher & a 50s road-to-ruin PSA about the perils of reckless driving, updated with a totally 90s cast & an astonishingly shitty 90s soundtrack (including, among other atrocities, covers of “Summer Breeze” by Type O Negative and “Hey Bulldog” by Toad the Wet Sprocket). It’s a little too squeamish about bloodshed to be an effective horror film, slaying most of its victims offscreen and keeping their corpses on ice like freshly caught fish so they don’t stink up the place. It is relatively compelling as an afterschool melodrama, however, with the two main girls’ increasingly grim home lives leading to a few memorable scenes that outperform the undead fisherman’s kills. Its lack of slasher-genre ingenuity is a little surprising given that the screenplay was written by Kevin Williamson one year after he penned the meta-horror hit Scream, which is much smarter about reshaping & reexamining the slasher formula from new angles. His trademark post-modernism enters the frame in an early scene where the teens in peril share campfire stories of the urban legend about a killer with a hook for a hand before suffering an updated version of it in real life, but the same idea was pushed much further in the next year’s Urban Legend, leaving this one effectively moot.

It’s easy to point out the ways in which I Know What You Did Last Summer falls short of 90s slasher greatness, but it’s by no means the worst of Kevin Williamson’s post-Scream teen horror scripts (that would be Teaching Mrs. Tingle). If nothing else, its coastal fishing village on the 4th of July setting affords it some occasional distinguishing novelty, not least of all in the multiple parade sequences featuring gigantic paper mâché fish on wheels. Thanks to Williamson’s previous commercial triumph, it was also made in a time when these teen bodycount movies were produced with robust Hollywood budgets behind them, so director Jim Gillespie (of Venom “fame”) gets to make frequent use of swooping crane shots to liven up the dialogue-heavy melodrama. Still, of all the 90s properties to continually get serialized & rebooted, it makes no sense that something this generic is still being kept alive as Horror Icon IP instead of, say, the more stylish & memorable Williamson-penned classic The Faculty. I pity the poor parents whose pre-teens are going to drag them to the theater for the latest legacyquel addition to the I Know What You Did franchise this summer because they have a crush on one of its famous-only-to-children stars. It’s a tradition that’s gone on for far too long, dragging on since the long-gone days of Soul Asylum, Our Lady Peace, and KoЯn.

-Brandon Ledet

The Dinner Game (1988)

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The English-language remake is enough of a modern anomaly that I can only name a few casualties in recent memory: Speak No Evil, Force Majeure, Let the Right One In – each softened & diluted from their European source material to appeal to mainstream audiences in the US. There surely have been meetings to put festival darlings like Anatomy of a Fall, Parasite, and Toni Erdmann through that dumbing-down process, but thankfully the practice of sparing American audiences from complex themes and the burden of reading subtitles has mostly dried up, so none of those projects got off the ground. I do not wish to participate in any nostalgia for the glory days of the English-language remake, but I will admit they’re not all bad. A recent screening of The Birdcage‘s source text La Cage aux Folles at New Orleans French Film Fest had me picking apart the ways that the American version tweaked the original’s template to greater comedic success, if not only through the strength of its performances. Likewise, I spent much of my time watching La Cage aux Folles screenwriter Francis Verber’s single-location farce The Dinner Game imagining how well it would have translated across cultural lines for multi-language remakes. It’s the first time in my life I can remember wanting to see an English-language remake of a European film instead of finding the concept repugnant. One Wikipedia search later, I discovered that not only had The Dinner Game already been remade in America, but I saw that remake when it came out, and it was predictably bland, like the majority of films given that treatment.

The titular dinner game is a cruel ritual in which a group of bourgeois assholes compete to see who can bring the biggest “idiot” to the table as an unsuspecting guest, a perverse hobby the business-prick sickos perform every Wednesday night. They target lonely men with esoteric hobbies like collecting boomerangs or antique ladles, while not recognizing that their own hobby of collecting “idiots” is equally dorky. In France, the film’s title Le Dîner de Cons translates literally to “Dinner for Idiots”. In America, it was remade as Dinner for Schmucks. There are two glaring reasons why I did not recognize the premise from my one-time viewing of Dinner for Schmucks over a decade ago: 1. Outside the opening credits sequence that details the titular schmuck’s mockable hobby (Steve Carell, taxidermist), there’s absolutely nothing memorable about it, and 2. It diluted & reshaped the French source material so much that their resemblance is effectively obliterated. The American version of The Dinner Game feels compelled to deliver on the promise of the premise, making sure that a significant chunk of the narrative action takes place during the dinner. In the original, however, dinner is never served, and the maddening ways in which the “World Champion Idiot” constantly derails the plot’s progression towards that dinner are almost Buñuelian in their absurdity (recalling, specifically, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise). It’s like a stage play where the audience is not allowed to escape Act 1, while the upper-class assholes are cosmically tortured for their crimes against the droll hobbyists of the world.

Jacques Villeret stars as a milquetoast tax auditor who staves off loneliness by making models of famous architecture using only matchsticks & glue. The square-jawed Thierry Lhermitte is excited to show off this breathtaking discovery of “idiocy” to his social circle of cads, but he never arrives to dinner with his World Champion Idiot in tow. Instead, Villeret unwittingly, systematically ruins Lermitte’s entire life one asset at a time – dissolving his marriage, driving his mistress to suicidal ideation, subjecting him to investigation for tax fraud, and effectively crippling him by tweaking his spasmatic back. None of these effects are the result of malicious intent, and most are achieved through mishandled phone calls made from Lermitte’s apartment. Alternating between the giddiness of a small child and the dead-eyed stare of a walking corpse, all the sweetheart imbecile Villeret can do is apologize by admitting, “I goofed,” after each social catastrophe. The audience is always on the pure-hearted idiot’s side, however, and any downfalls suffered by his straight-man victim register as just desserts for participating in the cruel ritual of the title. The fact that Villeret manages to make Lermitte’s plans backfire spectacularly before the game even starts is itself part of the cosmic torture. It’s a universally funny premise that translates well enough across cultural divides that every country could’ve staged its own Birdcage-style remake without deviating from the original script, each featuring its own National Champion Idiot: Roberto Benigni in Italy, Rowan Atkinson in the UK, Chris Farley in the US, etc. Instead, it got diluted & reshaped into Dinner for Schmucks, decades too late and mangled beyond recognition. Oh well. 

-Brandon Ledet

Buffalo ’66 (1998)

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There was a brief time a couple decades or so ago when Vincent Gallo was an exciting creative voice. I was recently reminded of this when visiting the independent theater Cine Tonalá in Mexico City, which prominently displays a framed poster of his directorial debut Buffalo ’66 in the lobby. It’s still a beautiful object that conveys a kind of in-the-know, independent-cinema cool, and it was worth framing to preserve the layer eye-catching glitter in its title text (which reads more as television static in the 2D version I’m more familiar with). The young, mysterious Vincent Gallo who made Buffalo ’66 and Brown Bunny is long-dead, though, having since been replaced by a grimy right-wing demon who lashes out at anyone who dares to question his all-knowing, all-powerful genius. Audiences no longer have to wonder how Gallo channeled such a putrid, self-centered asshole of a character as the lead of his own 1998 debut. The remaining wonder of the film is that Gallo does seem to be fully, demonstrably aware of how unpleasant he is to be around. He starts Buffalo ’66 being released from jail into the winter snow, with no loved ones meeting him at the gate. Unable to impress his parents with a genuine girlfriend, he kidnaps a teenager at gunpoint and forces her to play house to make himself appear loveable. He then spends the rest of the film working up the courage to settle a one-sided vendetta with a single act of violence he doesn’t have the stomach for. He’s deeply, thoroughly uncool – a total loser.

Vincent Gallo put a lot of himself into the depressive loserdom Buffalo ’66, which is something he’d go on to brag about to the press. Every chance he gets, he takes sole credit for everything about the picture that earns positive critical feedback, downplaying all contributions from his creative collaborators. The teenage Christina Ricci gives an incredibly bratty, disaffected performance as Gallo’s kidnap victim, modeling a babydoll grunge dress & tap shoes combo that affords the movie most of its late-90s cool. According to Gallo, she was more of a “puppet” than an actor, with him operating her every move on camera as the omnipotent puppet master. Similarly, he’s taken sole credit for all the creative work in the screenplay, describing his credited co-writer Alison Bagnall as a glorified “typist.” He doesn’t just take credit away from women, though. He’s also claimed ownership of every creative choice in the cinematography, firing industry legend Dick Pope early in the production and replacing him with Lance Acord, whom Gallo describes as a hired “button pusher.” That by no means covers the full scope of “difficulties” Gallo had with his cast & crew (his public feud with a nearly-unrecognizable Anjelica Huston, playing his mother, is even more storied), but it does cover the three factors that make the movie stand out as remarkably great, each apparently attributable to Vincent Gallo’s singular genius in a world full of lifeless automatons that he has to manage in order to see his vision through. Poor guy.

The first time I saw Buffalo ’66, I was around the age & temperament of Christina Ricci’s character in the movie, by which I mean I was a gloomy teenage grump. She’s the only character who fully falls for Gallo’s bullshit, fawning over him as “the sweetest guy in the world, and the most handsome” while his more jaded & faded friends & family resent his lingering presence as if he were a pestering ghost. I was similarly smitten with Gallo’s artistic vision at that age, finding Buffalo ’66‘s unpredictable camera angles and segmented picture-in-picture frames to be an exciting new spin on the lone-wolf crime genre. Revisiting the film a couple decades later, the relentless, exhausting rhythm of Gallo’s dialogue fits right in with the general overwritten machismo of the post-Tarantino cokehead 90s, and you have to squint a little harder to pick up on its one-of-a-kind novelty. Undoubtedly, the movie still looks cool, approximating the same Polaroid-in-motion aesthetic achieved in Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” music video. The dialogue purposefully undercuts that cool at every turn, though, with Gallo’s explosively violent reaction to every minor setback in his go-nowhere missions to impress his parents and settle an old football betting vendetta making him look like the squirmiest of little worms. When I was a teenager, I understood this to be a cool movie for cool people; now I understand it to be a slickly-produced character study of a terminally uncool dipshit.

As relentlessly gabby as Gallo’s antihero is in Buffalo ’66, his self-edited cut of the trailer features no dialogue or moving images. It’s just a series of stills conveying how cool the movie looks as a collection of working-class-fringe aesthetics while avoiding how grating of a personality Gallo himself plays at the center. It’s the same smartly observed marketing approached that inspired the glitter on the poster, promising a kind of indie-cinema glamour that willfully ignores the rotten core just beneath that layer of glimmer. At no point in the film does any of this petty-bully characterization feel at all unintentional. Gallo seems to know exactly how queasily pathetic he’s coming across on camera, which only makes it odder that he seems unaware of how that small-minded narcissism is coming across behind the camera. Maybe his dwindling opportunities to follow through on the promise of Buffalo ’66 & Brown Bunny have cleared that up over the years as he’s burned professional bridge after bridge (at one point even getting into vicious public feuds with his critics, most infamously Roger Ebert). I don’t know that letting him out of director’s jail would do any good at this point, though. His late-90s moment is long gone, and now he’s just a pestering indie-cinema ghost haunting vintage posters & Goodwill DVD shelves.

-Brandon Ledet

Materialists (2025)

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I’ve been seeing a lot of critical re-evaluation of Celine Song’s Past Lives in recent days, particularly as those who “saw through” its “mediocrity” from the beginning are feeling vindicated by the lukewarm reception of follow up feature Materialists. I couldn’t agree less about the quality of Past Lives, a movie I rated five stars and which was my third favorite film of 2023. On the other hand, that this movie is getting mixed to middling reviews isn’t a huge surprise to me, either. All the declarations that “the old-school romcom is back, baby!” that surrounded this film’s release may have been more of a threat than a promise. There’s also a tendency toward more drama than comedy, and there are moments where the slow burn that made Past Lives so powerful plays out here as more drawn out and tedious, but never so much that you’re ever truly bored. 

Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a professional matchmaker living in NYC for an organization called Adore. As the film opens, she is celebrating her ninth match that has resulted in a marriage, and she’ll be attending the wedding solo. At the wedding, she runs into her ex-boyfriend, aspiring actor John (Chris Evans), with whom she interacts warmly and fondly; she also meets brother of the groom Harry (Pedro Pascal), a handsome, wealthy socialite. Although she encourages Harry to join Adore as a client, citing that he’s a perfect package for their clientele and the proverbial “unicorn,” he seems most interested in pursuing her. In a flashback, we see that she and John broke up after an argument that was the result of his meager financial situation and both her frustration with his barely making ends meet and her own self-hatred over her materialistic nature. Meanwhile, in spite of her overall success in her field, Lucy is having trouble finding a good match for her client Sophie (Zoë Winters), a lawyer in her 30s, and when she thinks she’s finally made a good match, something tragic happens that shakes her faith in herself and her foundations. 

Materialists is about two things: the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves, and what gets lost when love is treated like capital – a measurable, tradable commodity. Early on, Lucy compares her work to that of a mortician or an insurance claims agent, in that she treats matchmaking as a mechanical enterprise. Boxes checked in Subject A’s columns match boxes checked in Subject B’s column, and we’ve got love. She gives the hard sell on Adore to several of the women at her client’s wedding, talking about love as an ineffable and beautiful thing, that matchmaking isn’t about finding someone to be with for the next ten years but a “nursing home partner” and a “grave buddy.” It’s hard to tell where the real Lucy is in all of this, how much of what we see is her putting on a show, but when we see her in a moment of vulnerability with her boss, Violet (Marin Ireland), she admits that she’s not interested in dating because she wants her next partner to be her husband, and that her ultimate goal at present is to marry a man who is wealthy enough to provide for her. At other times when it’s clear that the facade is slipping, she tells John that he shouldn’t want to be with her because she believes that, at her core, she’s a cold, unfeeling person who is only concerned with marrying rich. She wishes that she could be the kind of woman whose love for John would have kept them together despite his inability to take her to fancy restaurants instead of the corner Halal stand, but she isn’t, at least not until the story that she’s told herself about who she is professionally crumbles. When Sophie is assaulted by the man that Lucy matched her with, Lucy is confronted with the unfortunate truth that this is something that happens in their business because many terrible people are able to charm their way past attempts to gatekeep them. Lucy realizes that her narrative of being the girlboss of twenty-first century luxury courtship is both (a) not true, and (b) perhaps not that important, and that love is more than a series of compatibility tests. 

What’s fascinating about the way that people talk about love is how transactional it all is. When the bride from the beginning of the film has cold feet, Lucy is ushered in to see her; the woman asks why she’s even getting married in the first place, since her family doesn’t need a cow or to seal a political pact through ritual like previous generations. Lucy leads her to the truth, that the bride’s sister’s jealousy over how the groom was more handsome and taller than her own husband made the pride feel valuable, and that gets her up on her feet and down the aisle. We get a montage of several of Lucy’s clients, both men and women, and these segments lean a little bit more into the comedy than the mostly dramatic film. Although Sophie is the first one that Lucy interacts with on screen (over a phone call) and it makes her come across as shallow and unpleasable, but she pales in comparison to some of the people we meet later. There’s one client who clearly doesn’t know or doesn’t care how his requests come across, as he opens by talking about wanting to meet a woman who shares similar interests, who’s seen all the old classics and probably likes the same kind of music, but he also insists that his potential matches be in their twenties (he is forty-eight); when pressed, he says that even twenty-seven is “basically thirties.” Lucy has to put on a pleasant face with all of them, and it’s clear that she finds many of these people to be creepy and weird, but she also lives inside of their world insofar as she also treats love like, as she herself puts it, math, and the film is about her realization that there are some things that can’t be reduced to numbers and checklists. 

This one doesn’t have the same heart as Past Lives did, and I don’t think that it’s trying to. That film was much more introspective and thoughtful, and this one isn’t trying to recreate that tone so much as explore a different one. It’s also a more standard and formulaic one, but at least it’s been a while since there was such an earnest send-up of the canonical romantic comedy. It’s subversive in that there’s never a moment when the love triangle seems like it could ever possibly resolve with anything other than John and Lucy giving things another chance. Harry’s successful wining and dining of Lucy requires that we buy that our leading lady’s character arc will be accepting that she’s exactly as shallow and materialistic as she perceives (the persona she has created of) herself to be and she’ll be picking the rich guy? Be real. Within this paradigm of two love interests, one rich and one poor, for there to be a narrative at all requires that she not end up with the guy in whom she initially expresses a shallow interest. Where this breaks from the mould of the standard plot structure is that most of these films would have both love interests vying for Lucy at the same time, but the film is fairly well bifurcated right in the middle where she moves from one to the other, with the rejected partner disappearing from the plot after Lucy’s life is upended. 

A lot of whether this film will work for you depends on how you feel about Dakota Johnson and her acting style. Prior to her matchmaking career Lucy was, like John, attempting to make it as an actress, but she got a regular (well, sort of) job instead while he continued to pursue his artistic passions. This means that there is a conversation in which Lucy says things like “I decided acting wasn’t for me,” and “I was never a very good actor,” and I just know that the moment this movie hits video on demand, people are going to run wild with screenshots of these moments and attempt to use them to dunk on Dakota. In this house, we call those haters, and there’s not a hate campaign in this world strong enough to make me turn on my Madame Web. Before she was a director, Song was a playwright (and a matchmaker), and it’s in the scenes in which Lucy interacts with clients that the film feels the most like a stage play, with strong repartee, and it’s in these scenes that Johnson is the most believable. She’s as charming here to me as she was in Am I OK?, but while this film is much more well-made and richly photographed, it doesn’t connect with me on an emotional level. 

When I sat in the darkness staring up at Past Lives two years ago, it resonated with me deeply. Like Hae Sung, I had recently socially encountered an old … well, an old something let’s say, and the spark that still lingered there was such a powerful reminder of what that kind of interaction could feel like that I broke things off with someone I had been seeing casually for a couple of months because that electricity and chemistry wasn’t there. Circumstances with my old flame meant that, like Hae Sung and Nora, it could never be, no matter how much in-yun there may have been between us. There was a potency to the reality of it all that left an indelible imprint on me, and which simply is not a presence in Materialists. It may not be fair to judge this movie based on that criterion, especially since Materialists isn’t trying to be as deep as its author’s previous work, but it is nonetheless an area that it’s lacking. And before you jump to the conclusion that I may have overrated Past Lives as a result of my empathic rapport with its characters, you should know that I actually cried more during Materialists than I did Past Lives. The movie wasn’t connecting with me on the same emotional level as Hae Sung did, but the treatment of love as capital and the way that the film utilized that to find places in me that are still smarting from more recent misadventures and tribulations in the bottomless open sea that is contemporary love and dating … it did get to me. It didn’t get to me by resonance; it just happened to make me recall some misfires of late and then give me too much time to dwell on those before the film moved on to the next scene. When I watch Past Lives again, I will cry again. This one? Not so much. 

This is a cute movie. Serviceable, occasionally goofy, and mostly charming, I’m glad that it exists, even if I’m not sure it will have staying power. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond