Rose of Nevada
Dir. Mark Jenkin, U.K., 1-2 Special

Blown-out celluloid; blooms of varicolored rust and fungi; the creak and crackle of derelict machines; spectral shimmers of forgotten history—the cinema of Mark Jenkin revels in states of decay. More than just a trendy fetish for outworn textures, the Cornish filmmaker’s longstanding commitment to analogue forms is thematically essential to his latest, Rose of Nevada, which both dramatizes and aestheticizes the insidious, nostalgic pull of bygone eras. The film’s title is first seen stenciled on the bow of a deserted fishing boat, drifting back to harbor after 30 years lost at sea. The eponymous ghost ship will soon collapse the past and present for doomed deckhands Nick (George MacKay) and Liam (Callum Turner), who emerge from this temporal twilight zone to find themselves inhabiting the lives of Luke and Alan—the crewmen that vanished from their village with the vessel in the early ’90s.

Pitched with the cryptic tone of a fireside chiller, Rose of Nevada is a delicate, fine-tuned thing. As with his 2019 debut Bait, also set in Cornwall’s working-class coastal milieu, and his 2022 folk horror film Enys Men, Jenkin shot Rose himself on a 16mm Bolex with no live sound, opting to mix, record, and compose all of the film’s aural elements in postproduction. The uncanny effects of this approach lend his tactile imagery a subtle layer of distortion, the story seemingly echoed from a distant point in time, its characters hemmed in by italicized anachronisms.

Jenkin patiently unspools the paranormalities lurking in the crevices of this village that time forgot, situating the viewer with a kitchen-sink realism that seamlessly gives way to formalist abstraction. Shivering, seasick camera movements are punctuated by hypnotic slo-mo and stasis; resounding ticks from nearby clocks are cut short mid-scene; old advertisements foretell a commercial future that never comes; and the town begins to resemble a faded postcard, a dispatch from stabler times that are better left in the past tense.

Rose of Nevada’s meticulous craft offers a bevy of immediate sensory pleasures, but it’s best displayed in the construction of the characters, and their place in a community that surrounds and eventually imprisons them. The stark difference between the village’s bustling past and unpeopled present puts the stakes of the Rose’s expedition into context for both the protagonists and a local economy dependent on the fruits of their physical labor. We first see Nick exiting a food bank, hastening home to his beloved wife and daughter. A water-logged roof leaks steadily into their kitchen, which the devoted family man tries and fails to patch himself—when he falls through the ceiling, their domestic space is punctured as a result of an immediate financial lack, forewarning the more profound familial and temporal ruptures that await upon his return from work.

Liam drifts into the desolate, destitute town from nowhere in particular. He stumbles upon the Rose’s open position and quickly heads to the local bar—monikered “the Ship”—where he tries to get a drink on credit. He meets a beautiful young woman, also rebuffed by the bartender for having run up too high a tab. Their flirtations are interrupted by the arrival of her mother, Tina (Rosalind Eleazar), widow of the long-lost Alan. As she leaves the bar, the young woman kisses Liam and places her father’s red baseball cap on his head. “Now you have to come back,” she says. Neither one is aware that Liam will soon return as the hat’s original owner. This queasy oedipal grace note, struck again when the cap is returned to her as a little girl (a moment seen through a watching surveillance camera), weaves a strain of unarticulated peril into the act of playing house.

Nick will lose a wife and daughter, while Liam will gain them. Nick rejects his change of scenery wholeheartedly, to anyone who will listen, while Liam grows into the comfy confines of domesticity. Nick looks the part of the struggling breadwinner, but Liam assumes the role of a provider with the ease and affability of an impostor. Jenkin’s attention to his characters’ footwear (an admitted sartorial fetish) is significant from moment one: Nick wears workman’s boots, Liam wears sneakers. The film’s symbolism frequently teeters on the edge of opacity, but Jenkin’s knack for staging his ideas through behavior and gesture carry the film through its wobbliest passages. In one scene, the ship’s trap door leading to the upper deck becomes a figurative threshold, deliberately crossed by a counterfeit father figure, leaving his homesick crewmate below with the heaps of gutted fish—a spatial confirmation of two men irreversibly trading places.

MacKay’s favored facial tics are well-suited to a character who wears his harried and horrified heart on his sleeve, and Turner brings a taciturn suavity to Liam that veils a deeper mystery; while the latter performance is arguably the film’s enigmatic tour-de-force, saucer-eyed Nick is our primary point of identification. That said, we’re rarely limited to his point of view—Jenkin’s camera serves as a sinister, omniscient tour guide through this maritime supernature, flitting between the shifting perspectives of the townsfolk: Tina and the Rose’s owner (Edward Roe) enlist these desperate men seemingly aware of the time-warping outcome, a historical revision that will economically benefit the floundering community; skipper Murgey (Francis Magee) tutors Nick and Liam, playing into type like someone who’s lost all sight and memory of who he is outside of his work; Luke’s parents (Nick’s neighbors in the present, played by Adrian Rawlins and Jenkin regular Mary Woodvine) struggle to understand Nick’s insistence that he isn’t their son, while past-Tina squares her suspicions that Liam isn’t the man she married with her undeniable need for somebody to lean on.

Rose of Nevada’s communal portraiture fleshes out its protagonist’s inverted parallel purgatories, lending them relational depth and situational urgency. Jenkin deftly folds his characters’ fraying psychologies into a larger view of the measures a neglected town will go to in order to preserve its place on the map; in the final stretch, Nick and Liam gradually come into focus as laborers exploited by a flailing industry, one that entices workers with the promise of community and stability only to render them interchangeable cogs milked for profit. The film’s stirring and startling final shot finds the two men in an identical pose of departure to the last known photo of their historical counterparts; as the Rose tugs them out to sea, and out of frame, the men’s faces are blank, suspended in stoic submission to their newfound positions as ghosts in the machine.

Maddie’s Secret
Dir. John Early, U.S, Magnolia Pictures

“I call it scarf and barf,” the girl on the screen grins, saucer-eyed at her own admission. The classroom broke into a giggle. It was 2015, and thus objectively funny that our Southern Ontario health class was still adhering to its ’90s curriculum. By this point, we had already watched a handful of schmaltzy after-school specials about teens with eating disorders: For the Love of Nancy (1994), When Friendship Kills (1996), and, now, “The Secret Life of Mary-Margaret: Portrait of a Bulimic,” the pilot episode of HBO’s Lifestories: Families in Crisis (1992), about a popular girl who vomits into mason jars and stuffs them in her closet. (I thought this was what bulimia was, even after developing an eating disorder shortly thereafter.) One couldn’t suture a strand of relatability into these “lessons,” which taught us significantly more about melodramatic film form than about binge eating. My adult appetite for parody and kitsch might be easily traced back to the erratic sensation of watching these films, which registered as both asinine and grotesquely appealing to my gummy 15-year-old psyche.

Maddie Ralph, the Nancy or Mary-Margaret of American comedian John Early’s directorial debut Maddie’s Secret, is that familiar blend of blonde, mousy, and ingratiatingly pure. Working as a dishwasher for GourMaybe, a culinary studio behind trendy test kitchen-style videos à la Bon Appétit, Maddie boasts the brand of clumsy innocence which typified after school specials of yore and millennial identity formation in the Buzzfeed era. She’s also played by Early in drag, a queer quiver in the subgenre’s formulae that evades gimmickry through a totally embodied (and impressively measured) performance. Attuned to the body as a projection of our competing desires, Early’s Maddie feels so meticulously constructed that she becomes more sincere with each added layer of artifice. She scurries around the studio kitchen with her feral lesbian coworker Deena (Kate Berlant), who makes her fratty romantic feelings known in spite of Maddie’s doting husband (Eric Rahill). Maddie’s first secret is that she aspires to become a recipe developer (a “vegetarian Nigella”) in the upper crust of GourMaybe’s content creation. When her recipe vlog of a Tortang talong–inspired smash burger goes precipitously viral, Maddie is thrust by her douchebag boss (Conner O’Malley) into a distending limelight where public sentiment triggers a relapse into bulimia.

It’s a pristine present-day parable: a food influencer capsizes from the impossible constraints of internet diet culture. To activate the low tragedy of Maddie’s situation, Early pushes beyond parody and contemporary critique (though the inclusion of “The Boar,” a prestige kitchen dramedy shopping for their food stylist at GourMaybe, feels overstated).There’s inevitably a campy gloss to the queer overtones—a gay man in suburban millennial drag, a predatory lesbian who slinks in and out of frame—but Early’s clarity of vision makes for something more akin to Sirkian melodrama or body horror than to sketch comedy. Pink donuts, wet with spit, are shot in distorting extreme close-up. The controlled whirl of a stand mixer harmonizes with Michael Hesslein’s ’80s-inflected score. Following each of Maddie’s episodes (Early avoids any depictions of retching), she is seen bloodshot, clammy, and in a stupor, like James Mason in Bigger Than Life (1956).

The film does not interrogate disordered eating any more than its wealth of straight-to-DVD influences do, but instead beholds the very logic of consumption in the digital era as an outcrop of our messier desires. Consuming content about consumption is a bit of a “scarf and barf” unto itself; in the perpetual scroll of lifestyle media that judges the digital body for its real-life appetite, eating becomes a performative gesture. Is the aioli sliding down your chin a turn-off? Was the chili crisp on your shelf ethically sourced? Deena’s fixation on Maddie—scaffolded from the stereotype of the excitable best friend in love with the clueless lead—balloons simultaneously with Maddie’s relapse and online ascension. So too does the bubbling envy of another GourMaybe recipe developer, and Maddie’s husband’s detachment. Everything spins off the very same axis of want.

The film is unofficially cleaved into two parts: before and after Maddie seeks (or, rather, is forced to accept) help from an inpatient program at an eating disorder clinic. The sterile test kitchen gives way to a shared hospital room where patients are strictly regimented, and the film’s rolling playfulness decelerates into a more somber feel. After-school specials orbited around the restitution of the nuclear family (generally, mother figures were shown fighting for the lives of their daughters), but Maddie’s Secret upsets this trope with the ominous inclusion of an unsupportive mother (Kristen Johnston) goading Maddie further into her disorder. Maddie’s mother looms over the plot with genuine cruelty—why would a parent send their vegetarian child boxes of steak?—until a confrontation scene disgorges their toxic dynamic.

“I love movies because of women,” Early recently told Time. “All the people I fell in love with as a child were women.” This lovesick attraction to women and the specificity of their struggles might have felt mocking in the image of a lesser comedian, but Early—whose body becomes the film’s membrane between performativity and self-inflicted violence—seems, genuinely, to love women and the movies.

Disclosure Day
Dir. Steven Spielberg, U.S., Universal

“Well, I guess you’ve noticed something a little strange with Dad,” says Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) through tears to his frightened family in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). After experiencing brief contact with a UFO that leaves a burn on his face, Roy exhibits increasingly erratic behavior, compulsively crafting models of a mountainous shape that has invaded his subconscious. His mania emotionally terrorizes his wife Ronnie (Teri Garr) and three children, who eventually abandon him once his prolonged breakdown compels him to dig up their garden in a bathrobe. Roy undergoes something akin to a spiritual awakening that to most cognizant observers resembles a complete mental collapse.

The closest analog to Roy in Spielberg’s new science-fiction film Disclosure Day (2026) is Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a TV meteorologist whose life becomes upended after coming into contact with an alien before she goes to work one morning. Upon staring into the eyes of a red cardinal that flew into her apartment, Margaret can suddenly speak multiple languages and read people’s minds, a talent she uses to offer advice to people in various degrees of emotional distress. When she goes live on air to deliver the weather, she begins speaking in gibberish before collapsing. Her sudden change in behavior disturbs her coworkers and her doofus boyfriend (Wyatt Russell), who, not unlike Ronnie, just wants everything to go back to normal.

The only person who understands what Margaret says on the broadcast is Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a former employee of the clandestine extra-governmental organization Wardex who has stolen their troves of data proving the existence of alien life. Margaret’s newfound intuition drives her to search for Daniel, whom she senses has also been touched by the same otherworldly presence. Together, they venture towards a group of Wardex defectors, led by the dulcet-voiced Hugo (Colman Domingo), who wish to publicly disclose the truth about extraterrestrials to the entire world. Meanwhile, Wardex head Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) and his cronies are on their tail so as to conceal that information believing it will only further destabilize a globe on the brink of an extinction-level war.

Despite its galactic stakes, Disclosure Day forgoes loud spectacle for more subdued drama. The action setpieces (e.g., a car chase on train tracks), the use of fantastical alien technology (psychic control, bilocation, invisibility), and even John Williams’s score take on a muted, contemplative quality. If anything, Spielberg’s latest resembles an existential chase film, like if The Sugarland Express (1974) had a therapeutic streak. The focus lies largely within the heads of Margaret and Daniel, who, much like Roy and his fellow experiencer Jillian (Melinda Dillon) in Close Encounters, are compelled towards each other in search of answers to larger questions about their place in the universe. How are they connected? Why do they feel so misunderstood by those around them? Did someone, possibly from above, briefly enter their lives and profoundly change them?

Across Spielberg’s films, aliens have frequently been a vehicle to explore religiosity from a secular perspective. Institutions and dogma are elided in favor of dramatizing the ecstatic feeling of believing in something far beyond one’s station, and having that faith rewarded. His wayward protagonists search for meaning in the cosmos to clarify the senseless world below. Spielberg invokes the divine when the childlike aliens emerge from the spacecraft in Close Encounters as well as when the eponymous extraterrestrial from E.T. (1982) makes his first appearance. The hyper-advanced androids at the end of A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) with the power to grant emotionally devastating wishes resemble celestial beings. Even the vaporizing aliens in War of the Worlds (2005) inspire awe, just not the good kind, befitting its post-9/11 Bush-era cultural context.

In more ways than not, Spielberg’s foundational blasphemy lies in his belief that evidence of aliens trumps everything from domestic stability to the confirmation of God’s existence. (Even the crystal skull in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull [2008] isn’t a connection to the civilization of Akator but rather proof of interdimensional beings.) In Disclosure Day, the near-octogenarian director partially interrogates this perspective through the character of Daniel’s girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson), a former novitiate who believes that disclosing documentation of aliens would only undermine the faith-based community amidst international strife. How would theology survive if we could actually lay eyes on “supreme beings”? Spielberg provides a brusque response when Margaret, after realizing she’s a vessel for alien communication, tells a deaf, wonderstruck former Wardex employee that she refuses to be anyone’s religion.

Ironically, Jane’s creed not only puts her in league with the likes of Wardex, whose interests are tied up in national defense and corporate propriety, but also makes her a target for exploitation. In a particularly nasty scene, Noah uses an interplanetary device to prey on Jane’s piety and manipulate her into betraying Daniel; she tries squeezing a cross so tightly she bleeds to ward off his advances, but ultimately fails. Even after Jane escapes Noah’s mental clutches, she later asks for guidance from her mentor Sister Maura (Elizabeth Marvel), who gently informs her that the Bible never precludes the possibility of otherworldly life. It’s as if Spielberg himself is asking for absolution for the most resonant motif of his career.

**

Disclosure Day fascinates as an auteur object. Margaret, Daniel, and Jane’s tour (or, escape) through the Midwest features many signifiers of Americana in which Spielberg has previously trafficked: farmhouses, diners, highways, hospitals, etc. A misguided authority figure with vague governmental backing serves yet again as a primary antagonist. Attentive viewers will spot not-so-subtle nods to his previous works. The tactile technology in Wardex’s corporate headquarters and Noah’s clairvoyance both recall Minority Report (2002). Spielberg attempts his version of the trainwreck sequence from The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) that baptized himself and his fictional stand-in in The Fabelmans (2022) in cinematic destruction. The film’s final act, a dramatization of a live breaking-news broadcast, evokes the (inter)national urgency embedded in The Post (2017).

Spielberg often imbues his characters with a sense of bewilderment as a means of audience identification. Neither the viewer nor the characters in the film is prepared to believe, say, sharks are feasting on unsuspecting children, or what the Ark of the Covenant actually contains, or that dinosaurs can walk amongst us. Spielberg foregrounds this emotion in Disclosure Day whenever Margaret showcases her psychic abilities for compassionate ends, like encouraging a cop who pulls her over for speeding to forgive his tired wife or urging a harried coworker to leave an abusive relationship. Multiple people, including Margaret, repeat variations of “I don’t know what’s happening” in a mixture of fear and reverence as they process the unbelievable in real time.

That same perplexed, quasi-religious feeling ideally would reflect the viewer experience, even as Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kamiński work in tandem to deliver their patented blend of hyper-backlit, spatially precise drama. But while Disclosure Day provides a lot to ponder and admire, especially for devotees of Spielberg’s oeuvre such as myself, it doesn’t inspire the type of astonishment that characterizes his strongest work. Its diffuse, breakneck narrative, courtesy of screenwriter David Koepp, isn’t nearly as involving as it should be, mostly because the eventual triangulation of Margaret, Daniel, and the former and current Wardex workers is so telegraphed from the jump that too much of Disclosure Day feels like marking time. Admittedly, Blunt’s possessed performance—one of, if not the best of her career—does its damndest to infuse Disclosure Day’s weakest moments with an appreciably off-kilter energy.

Moreover, Disclosure Day’s storytelling inadequacies aren’t appropriately compensated by its emotional gambles. A late scene featuring Hugo gently leading Margaret and Daniel to remember the details of their shared alien abduction from childhood—framed by Spielberg in a deliberately unreal fairy tale context, positioning both kids as a version of Hansel and Gretel—should feel cathartic. Spielberg even ties it to the revelation that Hugo and his team have spent much of the film reconstructing Margaret’s childhood home on a soundstage to trigger the release of her repressed memories. An act of communion, fostered by a community invested in the care of relative strangers, underlined by the inherent tragedy that no one can ever return home again—this is where Spielberg excels. Yet, the entire sequence feels oddly impersonal and flat, with certain touches, like a young Margaret holding a young Daniel’s hand to soothe his fears, coming across as distant instead of intimate.

On paper, a heady remix of ideas and themes first introduced in Close Encounters modified for the present moment should burrow under the skin. (Plus, Disclosure Day hardly suffers in comparison to Spielberg’s 1977 masterpiece since it’s operating in different modes towards comparable yet ultimately dissimilar ends.) Spielberg’s fundamental optimism about the unknown still holds considerable sway to me, especially as the nation regresses further into xenophobia. The landmark image from Close Encounters of the young Barry looking out his front door at a UFO’s blazing orange light might suggest danger, but crucially, the child isn’t afraid. In fact, he beckons the unseen beings to come inside. In Disclosure Day, this message takes on a literal dimension through Margaret’s initial unintelligible broadcast, which we learn translates to, “Don’t be afraid of what you don’t know.”

This unfortunately prosaic dimension of Disclosure Day becomes difficult to ignore as it veers towards the concluding sequence its title promises where Spielberg and Koepp’s political limitations are on full display. While their updated ’70s-era governmental distrust is on point—Spielberg even revamps Close Encounters’ corrupting image of the Piggly Wiggly truck containing military equipment into a meat processing plant housing malicious Wardex employees—their belief in the primacy of images to sway minds, let alone suspend an indistinct international conflict, feels too naïve to swallow. It’s a noble fantasy I would like to believe in, but it simply fails to translate, even as Spielberg’s direction of the titular disclosure impresses, complete with an archival tour of major UFO conspiracies dating back to 1947, and the accuracy of such a phenomena being mediated through a sea of smart phones.

The opening shot of Disclosure Day features a wrestler’s foot stamping on Kaminski’s camera. Spielberg detractors will have a field day connecting the image to George Orwell’s famous Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) quote, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.” The Hollywood titan’s cultural supremacy, and his longtail impact on the film industry, will probably always feel somewhat authoritarian to his critics, with his preternatural ability to pull the masses’ heartstrings serving as a cheap distraction from his cinematic hegemony.

Debates over Spielberg’s influence on American cinema aside, his sentimental streak—still perceived by some as a deficit, no matter how complicated it appears on screen—has actually accumulated potency as society’s atomization continues unabated. His enduring faith in flawed people (as opposed to benevolent, beatific extraterrestrials) to still be invested in our collective survival, in the face of overwhelming odds and irrefutable evidence, feels more humane than we frankly deserve. In Close Encounters, Spielberg goes to some lengths to underline that Roy Neary isn’t the only person undergoing a concerning, spiritually induced crisis; in fact, he's one of many searchers desperate to discover why the night skies have affected them so deeply. For all of Disclosure Day’s shortcomings, Spielberg makes a very similar case with Margaret’s saintly counsel: she touches people by telling them what they already know but are afraid to confront, demonstrating that we’re all connected by the wounds we carry. Spielberg’s insistence that “we are not alone” was never meant as a threat but a form of reassurance.

Body Double screens at Museum of the Moving Image on June 12, 2026, as opening night of De Palma: Summer of Suspense.

“It’s a good script. It’s not gonna save the world. I mean, it doesn’t have eighty-five messages pasted on it. But it shows a side of Los Angeles, and it’s gonna be entertaining.”

As indicated by that not particularly overwhelmed evaluation from Joe Napolitano, Brian De Palma’s’s first AD from Blow Out to The Untouchables, deeming Body Double (1984) one of his peaks is largely a retroactive estimation. That quote opens Susan Dworkin’s book-length making-of chronicle from the time, Double De Palma: A Film Study with Brian De Palma, which captures in granular detail both the workings of a mid-size studio ’80s crew and how De Palma made use of it. As she documents, his penchant for improvisation and incorporating suggestions made for a more flexible vision than suggested by his aesthetically airtight camera drifts, meticulous storyboarding, and rigorous formalism.

Blow Out’s box office failure had taught De Palma a lesson: “I have a certain corrosive vision of society, which seems to not be very commercial,” he told Dworkin. “I try to not let my vision corrode the movies to the extent that they become so dark that nobody wants to see them. I did that in Blow Out, and nobody really cared.” Thus, Body Double marked a “lateral move” (his words) into the realm of technical self-refinement while revisiting the genre that brought De Palma the commercial success of Dressed to Kill. The film had another, equally pragmatic motivation: after going over budget on Carrie, Blow Out, and Scarface, both De Palma and his agent Marty Bauer felt, in the latter's words, that "it would be advisable that for his next picture, he should make a movie that did not have a substantial possibility of” doing so again. One way of getting there was to not cast any stars; per Columbia exec Craig Baumgarten, “We agreed that there would not be three more people to come and see this movie if it had a big star. Brian De Palma is the star of this movie.”

Like Body Double’s reputation, its star emerged retroactively—Melanie Griffith, given free rein to riff—but Baumgarten’s evaluation was ultimately correct: Body Double is defined by De Palma’s patented, hypnotically narcotized camera motion. The film’s controversies were almost predetermined by its central driller-killer murder scene, which doubles down on Scarface’s X-rating-courting violence, and rumors that the movie would feature actual penetration. Griffith’s character was heavily informed by input from Annette Haven, an adult performer who vehemently rejected the label “porn” and who auditioned for the part, but there’s no credence to those rumors, which Columbia swiftly investigated to make sure they weren’t paying for actual pornography.

Body Double began as a 13-page treatment that De Palma intended to produce, only taking on the role of director after his twice-as-expensive project Fire—with John Travolta as a self-destructive rock star modeled on Jim Morrison—fell apart. In the meantime, the treatment had been expanded by screenwriter Robert J. Avrech and then went back through De Palma, who continued revising throughout the shoot. The fundamentally simple premise—an actor, Jake Scully (Craig Wasson), plunges into his own personal Vertigo—was shaped by elements from both De Palma’s cinephilia and life: Scully’s separation from his fiancée echoed the director’s recent divorce, and he used a trauma from his past for an early anecdote explaining Jack’s claustrophobia, rooted in the experience of when, as a child, he was trapped behind a refrigerator while playing with his brothers.

Jack tells this story in an acting class while being broken down by an impatient teacher (likewise rooted in experiences De Palma had), and is then seemingly befriended by fellow struggling actor Sam Bouchard (Gregg Henry). Learning that freshly single Jack is in need of a sublet, Sam offers to hook him up with a Hollywood Hills plant-sitting gig. The UFO-looking hyper-modernist pad comes with a long-lens telescope that, at Sam’s prodding, Jake uses to voyeuristically spy on the nightly dance-and-masturbation routine of Gloria Revelle (Deborah Shelton) across the canyon. That telescope echoes the film camera Robert De Niro uses to spy on his neighbors in De Palma’s 1970 film Hi, Mom!, which was itself based in De Palma’s childhood experience of (correctly) suspecting his father of infidelity, following him with a camera and catching him in the act.

Gloria is murdered, and her Vertigo double turns out to be porn star Holly Body (Melanie Griffith) as Hollywood Hills glamour cedes to home-video sleaze; anxiety about the rise of VHS and its potentially devastating effects for theatrical revenue percolates underneath the plot. Body Double’s other metatextual elements include a not-so-subtle indictment of baked-in entertainment industry racism: when Jake witnesses Gloria being murdered by a flagrantly made-up stranger, it’s easier for him to believe in a rogue Indian running around Hollywood than any slightly more plausible explanation. This subtext is given unintended support by the (unsavory pun) Red herring’s savage white dog, cast after De Palma saw him in the Sam Fuller movie of the same name. (It’s actually two dogs—one for snarling and barking, the other for jumping. Which one was the Fuller alum is unknown.)

De Palma’s films are punctuated by unexpected lurches into comedy, and Dworkin’s book clarifies how that comes about; there are multiple descriptions of Wasson and co-star Melanie Griffith cracking each other up with their riffs. In another section, De Palma acts the other end of a telephone conversation with Shelton, but his “gravelly deadpan cues” don’t produce the required anguish, so Wasson takes over:

“Remember how when we first got together, every time it was boom boom boom, and now it’s every third time or every fourth time? Well, I’ve met somebody new and it’s boom boom boom every time again.”

Brian laughed hysterically, turning crimson. Deborah rolled her enormous blue eyes toward the sea. “I’m trying to get the anguish and he’s laughing.”

A modest production whose budget adjusted for inflation would now come in around $30 million, Body Double nonetheless benefitted from the kind of large crew that could jump into action to accommodate last-minute requests. The original ending took place in a graveyard, but how it worked didn’t satisfy De Palma, who signaled his intent to come up with a new one. When location scout Eric Schwab passed an aqueduct, De Palma decided on that new setting four days before shooting. Relocating the ending there required shooting both outside (with a cost for diverting the water for five hours of $18,000) and doubling the aqueduct inside, including making a hole on the stage that would later be repaired at a cost of $22,000. For Napolitano, this wasn’t an existential change on the scale of De Palma figuring out the ending of Blow Out at the last second—necessitating, among other things, procuring fireworks and 60 extras—but it’s nonetheless startling to learn that such a highly controlled ending was literally constructed in four days.

Prior to Body Double’s release, De Palma had been hype-baiting the press for months: “The media’s gonna go nuts. I’m gonna do all the things they’ve been critiquing me for!” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Rick Lyman. To Lynn Hirschberg in Esquire: “If they want an X, they'll get a real X!” The press repaid the favor: Body Double was denounced seven months before it was released, in the Los Angeles Times by then-regular contributor Joyce Sunila Holt, who wrote, “De Palma can’t wait to show us the depths of his contempt for women … De Palma will pose and strut for reporters, winking his superiority to his material and dragging poor Alfred Hitchcock in as an accomplice.” Body Double was the last erotic thriller he’d make until Femme Fatale (2002) and its tepid critical reception and financial failure were among the factors that convinced him not to take on Fatal Attraction, saying in 1987, “I don’t think you can make movies any longer where you put women in peril that way”—and so, he didn’t. The film inevitably looks tamer than it did upon first release, which only helps its oneiric drift sink in. Camera motion in and of itself is the project beyond all else; per De Palma’s explanation for the 360-swirls around Wasson and Shelton when they kiss, “Every revolution is a revelation.”

Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon will receive a Moving Image Award for their body of work from Museum of the Moving Image at its 2026 Spring Gala on June 10, 2026.

Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon have more than 250 screen acting credits combined. Bacon’s career has spanned almost five decades, with numerous high-profile roles including the beloved classic Footloose, box-office juggernaut Apollo 13, idiosyncratic horror-comedy Tremors, and more recently niche TV favorites like City on a Hill and I Love Dick. The eternally boyish, deeply serious actor is an indelible part of the American movie landscape, so much so that he can be connected to any other screen performer in just six quick steps, allegedly. Sedgwick, who started acting in her teens in the 1980s, captured the Gen-X spirit in Singles, added potent emotionality to Born on the Fourth of July, gave a real kick to Something to Talk About, and spent eight seasons bringing Brenda Leigh Johnson to life on The Closer, which earned her an Emmy.

Separately, they’re screen stars of the highest order—unmistakable faces and familiar presences—and together, one of Hollywood’s most beloved and long-lasting couples. Both actors have done time in the director’s chair, as well, often involving the other in their projects. Most recently, the pair has taken on co-directing with Family Movie, a horror comedy they star in alongside their kids.

This year, Museum of the Moving Image will recognize both actors with its highest honor at the 40th annual Moving Image Awards. In the lead-up to the award, the duo sat down with frequent Reverse Shot contributors—fittingly, a pair of married film critics—to discuss acting, directing, and how their relationship has been reflected in their collaborations.

Sarah Fensom: Congrats on your Moving Image Award. How does it feel to be honored by Museum of the Moving Image?

Kevin Bacon: I was really touched by the award for a few reasons. First off, movies and making movies is so incredibly important to us—it’s how we’ve both spent our lives. I started on stage, and Kyra and I go back every once in a while, but we are fundamentally screen actors. It’s also lined up so nicely with having decided over the last few years to do more work with each other. We’ve always overlapped in different ways, but now basically we acted in two things together and co-directed back-to-back—we’ve never delved quite this deeply into working together. So it just seems like great timing, plus we’re New Yorkers, so that’s a cool part, too.

Kyra Sedgwick: Any place that celebrates film is so important, especially with everything [in the industry] feeling so precarious. So much of my blood, sweat, tears, brain power, heart, and soul have gone into making movies and television and telling human stories.

SF: Let’s start from the beginning. When you two met on Lemon Sky, were you already familiar with each other’s work? Kevin, you had already done successful films—especially Footloose, and Kyra, you had been on Another World.

KS: Did you watch Another World, Kevin? (Laughs). I knew him from theater in New York. My mother is an avid theatergoer. She would come home and say “Oh, I just saw that Kevin Bacon. He’s so good. He’s so talented.” When he did Album at the Cherry Lane Theater in 1977, my mother gave me tickets to go see it. I was like, this is the guy everyone’s talking about and, god, he’s so good. We ran into him at the deli across the street in between shows, and my brother said, “Tell him how much you like him!”

I came out to L.A. at 18 or 19, and auditioned and got called back for a few films that he was in, but I didn’t get any of them. And then I saw him at an aerobics class and told him I was an actor and had auditioned for some of his movies. And that was it. Then when Lemon Sky happened we both got cast. At one point they said he might not be able to do it, but I had a feeling he would, and in the end he did, and the rest is history.

SF: Kevin, do you remember any of these interactions Kyra is describing?

KB: The first time I don’t remember at all, but the exercise class I do remember because she was an absolute knockout.

KS: And you were in the class, too.

KB: Yeah, I was in the leg warmers and the cut-off sleeves. I was smitten with her. With Lemon Sky, it was a Lanford Wilson play, and this was the Second Stage production and a filmmaker from Boston, Jan Egleson, wanted to film it for public television. A half-play, half-movie type thing. He approached the cast that was doing the play, and in that cast was Jeff Daniels and Cynthia Nixon. Neither Jeff nor Cynthia was available, so we have them to thank for our relationship.

Chris Shields: We’re both fans of the film Pyrates you starred in together.

SF: Which I had on VHS when Chris and I met, and we watched it together.

KS: Pyrates was really fun. They wanted me to do it. I convinced Kevin to do it because they needed a guy. We had a great time. And he probably didn’t want me rolling around in bed with anyone else anyway.

KB: You know who shot that fucking movie? Janusz Kaminski. It was his first American movie, and he was so great. I thought it was a good weirdo movie.

SF: And can you talk about another collaboration, Murder in the First, Kevin?

KB: It was sort of the opposite. I had that part, and Marc Rocco, the director, came to me and asked if Kyra would play this one scene as the prostitute. I thought, sure, it’s not really much of a part, but it was one of those situations where she probably wouldn’t have done it if I wasn’t involved. But she was great— it was a really emotional scene.

CS: And what about The Woodsman?

KB: The Woodsman—weird story. It was handed to me on a beach. First off, I wasn’t looking for an indie. I was like, “I’ve done enough indies. They never work for me.” I’m never in sex, lies, and videotape. Mine were all straight-to-video.” I wanted to do mainstream stuff. And I read this script, and one of the cardinal rules is if you want to sustain a successful career as an actor, do not play a child molester. It’s the kiss of death. But I said, “Honey, that dude that handed me the script on the beach, I read it and I think it’s kind of great.” She read it and said, “Oh my god, you have to do it.” When I reached out to the producer, Kyra was their first choice for the female lead. I said, “Awesome, we can do this together.” I knew Kyra had the kind of vulnerability needed for the part, but she was hesitant because she didn’t want to take people out of the movie. I told her “Look, we’re good enough, people will accept it if we do our work the right way.”

CS: You’ve both worked with a who’s who of directors, including one of our favorites: Oliver Stone.

KS: I’ll start because I was first. I went in for a meeting with him [for Born on the Fourth of July] when I was like 23—I didn’t audition. He just kind of made fun of me, and I gave it right back to him because I grew up with brothers and I don’t take shit. And he was like “Oh,” and I really think that’s why I got cast. He had a bad reputation with women, and I believe he thought, “Okay, this is a person I don’t have to worry about.” Then I met with Tom [Cruise] and we read through some scenes. That was a huge break for me. I was pregnant when I did the movie—the first trimester. Some of it was scary—the protest scenes, because I was pregnant and the cop actors were pretty rough. But I loved working with Oliver, he was very specific, and working with Tom. I felt like he was at his best. And now, Kevin….

KB: We were on our honeymoon when Kyra got called back [for Born on the Fourth of July], so it got shrunk. When I heard the cop actors were roughing her up in the protest scenes, I think my head was going to fucking explode. But for me, JFK was great. I don’t look at jobs being career changing but that definitely was. I was spinning my wheels and hadn’t accepted the fact that I’m a character actor more than a leading man and that movie definitely gave me that opportunity.

Oliver sat me down and said, “Can you be transformational?” And I said “Yep.” He did fuck with me a little bit. He initially did some manipulative things to make sure I brought a certain fire, which is not really my preference in terms of being directed, but it worked. I felt I really had to deliver. One of the first scenes I shot was the one with [Kevin] Costner. After the first take there were no more questions. We were completely in the trenches together, me and Oliver. It really changed the trajectory of my career.

CS: I really see that. There’s a lot of dark, idiosyncratic characters after that. You’re also in so many iconic horror films, like Tremors, Flatliners, and Stir of Echoes. And now with Family Movie, it takes place on the set of a horror movie.

KB: I love horror, because the stakes are so high, it’s a good challenge as an actor. But also you have to remember, when I started out, horror was not a place a serious actor wanted to be. I never really felt that way, so I have gone back. With Friday the 13th, that was a gig. I didn’t have two nickels to rub together. I was working off Broadway for like $125 a week and waiting tables. But you look at Friday the 13th structurally, in terms of the way it was set up, I think it was made for under a million dollars. It was thrown together. Scrappy sort of stuff. And then it had this incredible success. And that’s the sweet spot for what horror can be: a version of a very independent film that can reach a wide audience.

SF: Shifting to a very different type of film, Kyra you played Ruth in James Ivory’s Mr. and Mrs. Bridge. I’m a huge fan of the novels and the adaptation.

CS: Sarah had me read the novels when we first got together!

SF: It’s true, I had to make sure he could hang. But you’re in the film alongside another super-famous movie couple. What was your experience like on that one, and what was it like working with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward? Do you ever reflect on seeing their relationship as actors behind the scenes.

KS: To me that movie, those novels, were about the repression that’s inherent in the world, and the pain and damage it can do. And I think it’s still so powerful. It was really Joanne’s love for those books that got the movie off the ground. I was so grateful for that [role] because I knew I was breathing rarified air. I’d seen so many of their movies separately and together. And, of course. I admired their relationship. There’s a scene where I’m doing Romeo and Juliet with Paul, and it was extraordinary. I was an absolute sponge taking in everything, and I can still remember very specific things Paul said to me. And working with James Ivory was incredible.

I was enamored with how Paul and Joanne worked together, how they laughed together, and hosted together. They would invite us over for dinner, and he would be cooking on the grill, and I remember him asking if I wanted a glass of wine. I said, “I don’t know, I’m breastfeeding—the brain cells.” And he goes, “You got a lot of brain cells.” It was so funny.

CS: That leads well into our next question. For your forthcoming project, Family Movie, you co-direct and act in along with your daughter and son. What does co-directing look like for you two? And directing and acting with your family?

KB: For us with co-directing, we didn’t go, “Oh, you take this and I’ll take that.” We worked on everything together. And to me that wasn’t a hard adjustment because when I’ve directed in the past, it really has been a collaboration with everyone on set. With this project specifically, we started talking about it years ago. We shot it last summer. But basically, during the pandemic, we decided we wanted to do this movie with the kids. So, we worked on it constantly. We planned stunts in the living room. I could show you this collection of miniature people and mock sets that we built to lay out blocking. After years of planning, it was a dream come true to make it happen together.

KS: We collaborate in life, being married as long as we have been. But also, we’ve always shared our thoughts about character or like, “I’m thinking of shooting this scene this way.” We’re not “leave your work at the job” kind of people. Especially loving what we do so much. Honestly, [directing] is not something I want to do with anybody else. I like being the last word, making the decisions and not being questioned about them. But I certainly don’t mind investigating questions and decisions. With Family Movie it worked out great because there wasn’t a huge budget or a lot of time—I guess there’s never enough money or time. I would always take longer in the makeup chair. He took 15 minutes, and I took at least an hour and a half, so in terms of the economy of time, it was helpful to have him there. But I also think we’re a really good team. I always say separately we’re great, but together we’re unstoppable.

CS: What you’re describing resonates with us because we’re married and we write together a lot. People are often surprised that we love working together, but we’re surprised that they’re surprised—we’re looking for any excuse to spend time together.

KB: Yeah, Kyra started producing when she was about 23, and the first thing she produced, I directed. So, we’ve overlapped a lot. She’s directed me, I’ve directed her.

SF: Kyra, can you describe directing Kevin in this or Space Oddity or Story of a Girl?

KS: It’s great. It’s not hard—well, I wouldn’t say that.

[Everyone laughs]

KS: The truth is, he really doesn’t like notes, and he’ll say that. Instead, you just give a little suggestion here and there, and it’s like an alley-oop, and it’s lovely. I always know that the other actor in the scene is going to be the best that they’ve been because they’re working with someone who’s totally there and present, who’s catching the ball and throwing it. In Story of a Girl, for instance, he did something really different and outside his wheelhouse, and it was a part he really hadn’t played before, in my opinion. His work was extraordinary.

CS: Kevin, what’s it like to direct Kyra?

KB: I think there’s a notion that the director is the person that comes up with a piece of critique after you do a take, and you’re better in the next one. The amount of times that has a) ever happened, and b) actually been successful for me out of all the movies I’ve done is very minuscule. For an actor with the level of talent my wife has, my approach is just to kind of create a situation where the actor feels like they’re ready to do their best work. I know she’s going to come with a very specific idea and be prepared and immediately available. She’s the best actor I know.

SF: Could you each describe the other’s process? And what’s their particular magic on screen?

KB: Kyra does a lot of homework. She spends a lot of time thinking and writing. But her magic on screen is she’s just hard to hate. It’s an elusive thing. You can be great, but to have people want to spend a lot of time with you, that’s big—The Closer is a great example. People spent hour after hour, year after year watching this woman play a character that, by the way, is nothing like her, maybe besides the chocolate. [Her character famously kept Hostess Ding Dongs in her desk drawer for emergencies.] But yeah, there’s shit you can learn, but that’s something you just can’t.

KS: Kevin is just so endlessly watchable. And surprising. He’s an experimenter, and he’ll try something new with every take. He takes really big swings.

CS: Were you supportive when your daughter, Sosie, expressed interest in acting?

KS: No, I hated it. We had this family rule that you can’t work professionally until you’re 18, unless it’s in mom’s film. So, we begged her to act in Loverboy, and she did that and said, “I think I’ve got the acting bug out of my system,” and she went off to college. As successful as we’ve been in this business, it’s incredibly hard and painful. They love you one minute and hate you the next. So, when she said, “I want to leave college and pursue acting,” we were like, “Oh, fuck.”

KB: We were shocked, like what happened to that whole “I don’t want to act” thing? Also, they had never seen any of our movies until like five years ago. They famously had never seen fucking Footloose!

SF: [laughs] No way!

CS: How is that even possible?

KB: They wear it like a badge of honor.

Jonas Mekas will be forever remembered as the man who transformed American cinema, introducing the world to a generation of avant-gardists through his creation of institutions like Anthology Film Archives and the Film-Makers’ Cooperative in New York. At the same time, Mekas’s own films stand as totems of a new cinematic language. Walden, also known as Diaries, Notes, and Sketches (1969), Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1971-72), and Lost, Lost, Lost (1976) were his first masterpieces. In 2000, Mekas made his greatest film, As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty. An assemblage of footage from his archive, As I Was Moving Ahead was Mekas’s unofficial goodbye to celluloid. He had begun making work on a digital video camera ten years earlier. Straightforward in title and content, A Walk (1990) was an hour-long, single-take excursion documented by Mekas on a rainy day in SoHo. He talks aloud to himself, to the camera, and the low-resolution, grey, and blue pixelated puddles. With the swap of his 16mm Bolex for a digital camcorder, Mekas gave himself new creative possibilities. Perhaps most significantly, unlike the Bolex, a video camera could record image and sound at the same time. In his previous films, Mekas had collided past and present through voiceovers recorded likely during the editing process or while Mekas was looking back at his footage. Now, Mekas could react in real time to what he was shooting.

In the early aughts, Mekas and his then-wife Hollis Melton divorced. For a long time, they had lived together in a loft apartment in SoHo with their children Oona and Sebastian. This loft could be seen in Mekas’s films—in fleeting frames of their cats basking in the sunlight or in footage of Oona’s first steps, scored to the Velvet Underground’s “Run Run Run.” But when Mekas and Melton divorced, it was time to give up the loft. This is where Mekas’s 2004 film A Letter from Greenpoint begins.

A turning point in the filmmaker’s life, brought on by separation, A Letter from Greenpoint is startlingly intimate. For an artist who pioneered the “diary film,” simultaneously living and recording and sharing his life for decades, there’s oddly not much written information out there from Mekas regarding his divorce and move to Brooklyn. In the 800-page second volume of Mekas’s New York diaries, there are only a few details about the time. Therefore, this Letter is a rare vantage point into a particular point in the artist’s life.

In part one, “Farewell to SoHo,” a fresh-faced Sebastian grins and clicks drumsticks together while singing along with his father. Friends sit around the long, wooden dinner table. In the next scene, Mekas stands at the entrance of his loft. More stuff has been cleared out. He walks from one end to the other, to the window. “It is snowing,” he says. Sebastian rides his bicycle through the room. In a brief interlude, Mekas sits in a nearby coffee shop. Then he cuts back to the loft. It is even emptier. It is not really his loft anymore. Now, it is just a room. He speaks aloud and walks across the room again. “With no personal objects in it, just space. Just a space. There must be a lot of little atoms of myself, Hollis, Sebastian, Oona, attached to it somewhere. Floating in the air. But they’re just atoms. Totally invisible.” Mekas lets out a loud, Santa-like chuckle. A barbaric yawp. “I guess we are still here. But slowly, slowly…everything will be changed by new and different atoms coming into this space.”

With his new camera, Mekas can record the steps across his old space in real time. Everything is immediate now. In a 2012 interview with actor Benn Northover, Mekas said, “It took me ten years to master my Bolex, and about the same to master the video camera, to make it an extension of myself…Much of my later videotaping is like anthropological vignettes.” He mentions the scene from Greenpoint of himself and Northover wrapping gifts for the artist Louise Bourgeois. “It happens millions of times, across the world, when somebody is preparing a gift for somebody one loves. But it’s something unique. There is an intensity, a concentration in that moment; it’s not theater, it’s not artificial, it’s real. That’s where my Bolex and my video cinema differ.” Given that Mekas historically championed celluloid-as-cinema, it’s remarkable that here he advocates so firmly for video.

Part two of Mekas’s film is set in his new neighborhood, the traditionally Polish enclave of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He pops into a church to film people leaving the cathedral and greeting the sunlight. In a way, Mekas has ended up right where he began filming, when he came to Brooklyn with his brother Adolfas as a Displaced Person in the ’50s. He is moving into his new apartment. He is engulfed in cardboard boxes. The digital camera, with its low fidelity, turns everything into a wash of beige. Mekas seems to lack a certainty of what to do now. The new bachelor spends a lot of time with people of a younger generation, in their thirties, and getting to know strangers in bars. For all the waxing poetic on existential loneliness he has put into his films over the many years, A Letter from Greenpoint is Jonas Mekas’s loneliest film. At 82, he is having his midlife crisis. He proposes marriage to his black cat Mitzi. “We have to wait until it becomes legal in New York State.” He sits at home and eats soup with Northover, who reads from Mekas’s diaries in a cringey, over-acted performance. On the radio, commentators stoke the flames of war in the Middle East. Later, at another bar, his young friends toast to “tomorrow” and then to “now.” Then Mekas says, revealingly, “All past is bloody. There is nothing much to learn from it. Blood is running down the hills of every country you put your boots on. That’s the past.”

Whereas Mekas’s 16mm work provided his past with a fidelity that allowed its images to be clear, even if his memories might not be, the video work he would go on to make lacked that visual clarity. These videos, A Letter from Greenpoint included, play in 240p resolution, 360p if you’re lucky. It’s fitting, really, that such a destabilizing event in Jonas Mekas’s life would be documented in poor resolution. Not only is there a loss in clarity in terms of image, but there is also a loss in clarity for Mekas in a more concrete, literal sense.

A Letter from Greenpoint proved to be quite a generative shift for Mekas. In 2007, several years after the film’s release, he began the 365 Day project, making a short video every day of the year. With this project, Mekas harnessed the capabilities of short-form, digital filmmaking and made early iterations of what we might now consider “vlogs.” Some of these can still be seen on his website, although because it ran on the now-defunct Adobe Flash Player, much of what used to be viewable has been lost to the ever-changing technological times. As Mekas pointed out in a 2013 interview, “Already it is difficult for me to see material I recorded just five years ago. Recording formats become obsolete, the machinery dies out, and vast quantities of recorded material turn invisible. They are only as permanent as the technologies that support them.” It is a gift, then, that we have what remains—dispatches from the life of a legend that only digital technology makes visible.

A. Rimbaud
Dir. Patrick Wang, U.S., self-distributed

“[R]eality was too prickly for my lavish personality.” So begins Arthur Rimbaud’s poem “Bottom” (exquisitely translated into English by poet John Ashbery). Aside from being a killer opening line, the quote encapsulates his solitude as an artist at odds with the world that remained indifferent to his poetic vision. Now a towering literary figure who has influenced countless cultural icons, from Samuel Beckett to René Magritte to Bob Dylan, Rimbaud did not enjoy much success until well after his premature retirement from literature at age 20. In an 1871 letter to Paul Demeny, who preserved the poet’s early works against his wishes, the then 16-year-old prodigy declares that a true poet is “the thief of fire.” For him, poetry was a civilizational project of a Promethean magnitude that could—and should—reshape humanity.

Patrick Wang’s A. Rimbaud (2026), an utterly original “one-man-film” biopic that traces the visionary writer’s life from his adolescent years to his untimely death at 37, underscores Rimbaud’s ambition at the outset. Its first image, through rack focusing, shows a small patch of what appears to be a cave wall engulfed in darkness, lit only with a sharp spotlight. We see more of the wall when another off-screen light source bathes the space in an amber glow just as the teenage Rimbaud (Blake Draper) emerges from the unlit foreground and occupies the center of the frame, as if he himself has brought the fire. He addresses the camera, asking, “Would you like to hear a story? It is by Horace.” By the time he moves away from the rock formation and gets seated in an empty black box, he has forgotten the story. Instead, he recites his own musings about how much he hated school as a little boy. Draper’s doe-eyed face and remarkably assured line delivery of Rimbaud’s precocious observations animate the blank spaces of the frame with ingenuous conviction and lust for life.

The majority of A. Rimbaud is confined to the black box theater, dressed with only what is essential to evoke a given setting and mood—a bold aesthetic choice that mirrors a poet’s economy of words. Wang’s masterful framing and lighting, aided by Draper’s spellbinding performance, transform the austere setup into a boundless realm where Rimbaud’s hallucinatory imagery can fully transmit its cosmic potency. Early in the film, we see the poet, still a teenager but now dressed in a military uniform, lying on the ground and surrounded by green chalk marks meant to represent grass. He recites “Sun and Flesh,” a lyric poem written in French alexandrine that reinvigorates Victor Hugo’s Romanticism and Horace’s Latin verse with blunt sexual innuendo. The camera slowly zooms out over the course of the reading, and by the time he gets to the second stanza, the chalk grass starts to move as if dancing to his spoken words. “How can you love Baudelaire and want to stand still?” asks Rimbaud later in the film. His grand endeavor to animate not just his reality but the entire world with poetry finds a perfect vehicle in Wang’s filmmaking imagination, which harkens back to D. W. Griffith’s lamentation: “What the modern movie lacks is [...] the beauty of the moving wind in the trees.” Wang seems to wonder, perhaps through Rimbaud’s vivacious arrangement of words, could we reclaim cinema’s embryonic enchantment as “motion picture”?

He is not the first to pose this question, of course. Most notably, Jean-Marie Straub’s and Danièle Huillet’s many “reading” films feel like A. Rimbaud’s immediate spiritual predecessors. In Antigone (1992), for instance, the duo tests whether Fordian framing can be upheld solely by Hölderlin’s radically literal German translation of the Sophocles tragedy. A decade later, they dispensed with traditional dramatization altogether, putting their faith wholly in the spoken word’s capacity to sustain the moving image in Workers, Peasants (2001), in which amateur actors take turns reciting passages from Elio Vittorini’s novella Women of Messina. The press kit for Workers, Peasants comes with a 1947 interview with Vittorini where he says: “There is in every historical period a certain sum of possible means, if you like [...] But the capitalist world is such that these means are practiced in an absurdity and an absolute hypocrisy. They are endless means, a chaos of means.” Vittorini’s remark feels even more pertinent in our present moment, each day further degraded by AI-generated imagery and sound. Why bother with the latest technological fads when we have yet to completely exhaust the possibilities lying dormant in the tools we have had at our disposal for centuries and even millennia? Beyond their shared preoccupation with the musicality of words, what unites Wang and Straub-Huillet is precisely their resistance to “a chaos of means,” opting instead to strip cinema down to its most quintessential elements in order to reinvent it.

Wang captures the feverish delirium and infernal imagery of Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell using only a handful of “humble” means. Back inside the black box theater, our poète maudit, tormented by the disastrous two-year romance with Paul Verlaine, who has wounded him with a gunshot, stands in front of a wooden table; on it are pieces of scrap paper spaced out at uniform intervals. The lighting is soft, and his demeanor is timid. When he picks up the first sheet, however, a different persona possesses his body, accompanied by a much harsher and bluish lighting scheme. Venomous words flow out of his mouth. The light switches back to the initial diffused glow once the narration concludes, and he moves horizontally along the table, which seems to extend perpetually, and reads out different fragments from what would become his masterpiece. Hell is the unfathomably long table situated in the middle of the abyss, and the snapshots of its frightening splendor reverberate throughout the black box theater each time Draper utters Rimbaud’s words.

It’s worth noting that the poems and passages from Rimbaud’s epistolary correspondence we hear are presented in Wang’s own English translation. This was in part due to his dissatisfaction with the available English rendition that preserves the alexandrines and rhyming schemes of Rimbaud’s early lyric pieces. For a film that treats poems exclusively as embodied articulations instead of written texts, the echoes from Rimbaud’s rhyming verses were of utmost importance—hence, Wang took it upon himself to create a new English translation suitable for the film. With A Season in Hell, one of the great monuments of French prose poetry, Wang’s translation serves a different purpose. His version subtly amplifies the immediacy of Rimbaud’s visceral self-portrait of his tortured psychology. Take, for instance, a passage from its prologue: “Le malheur a été mon dieu.” Whereas Wyatt Mason and Louise Varèse accurately translate this into “Misfortune was my God,” Wang changes the tense and gives us “Misfortune has been my God.” Unlike in the pre-existing translation, misfortune continues to hover over the narrator, suggesting that he—both Rimbaud and the speaker of the poem—is still in the thick of a calamitous affair.

Even more crucially, the iteration of “Bad Blood” performed in the scene deviates significantly from the published text, with “My race never rose up but to pillage” from the second subsection preceding a passage from the first. Could it be that what we are watching is not the recital of a finished work, but an act of creation? Rimbaud is toiling through an early draft, metabolizing every scornful letter he has poured onto the pages before reshuffling them into the version we are now familiar with. In addition to Wang’s superb command of cinematic apparatus, this scene demonstrates his literary mind, prodigious enough to produce a convincing “rough draft” of A Season in Hell.

Such acts of creation abound in A. Rimbaud. Throughout, Rimbaud alone speaks human languages, and every “line” from other characters, all off-screen, takes on the form of musical fragments played on various instruments: Verlaine as viola, his employer Alfred Bardey as French horn, his servant Djami Wadaï as erhu, etc. On the surface, this feels like a humorous way to accentuate the poet’s loneliness, reflected in asymmetrical verbal communications. However, the positioning of music on par with human languages also speaks to Rimbaud’s sharp ear, which restlessly searched for melody and rhythm hidden in the most mundane, whether it was a casual chatter at a bar or a tedious quarrel with his unsupportive mother. His “lavish personality” was always attentive to what the world had to offer and gave back through his Symbolist poems. During his London years, he picked up several English words and injected them right into his poetry: the most indelible example being “her heart of amber and spunk” (“son cœur ambre et spunck”) from “Devotions.” And Wang seems to believe that the poetic ear never left Rimbaud, even as he worked as a coffee merchant in Ethiopia and Yemen in the second half of his life. It’s possible that he continued to produce poems and never wrote them down. One may also wonder how Rimbaud might have described the tasting notes of the coffee beans he was trading; could he have liberated us from cookie-cutter adjectives such as “floral” and “nutty”?

Above all, A. Rimbaud is a film that grapples with the poetic form: not the kind that forces the viewer to extract a vague revelation from meandering nature shots, but one that emulates the succinct arrangement of words that give structure to life’s wonders. If we can call Wang’s vision “poetic,” it has everything to do with how it urges us to be more precise with our expressions. Vladimir Nabokov’s dictum that “in a work of art there is a kind of merging between [...] the precision of poetry and the excitement of pure science” applies to A. Rimbaud. The journey to Rimbaud’s delirium requires not chaos, but rigor, as evidenced by Wang’s fastidious mise-en-scène and prosodic undertaking. For even ineffable enchantment needs precise forms to appeal to our senses.

With Hasan in Gaza
Dir. Kamal Aljafari, Qatar/Germany/France, Cinema Guild

In 2001, the Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari set out to find a man he’d known while imprisoned in the late 1980s, when he was only 17. With only his memories, Aljafari embarked on a road trip through Gaza with a guide named Hasan in search of his friend. Together, they captured the realities of an occupied territory and its people on a MiniDV camcorder. Decades later, Aljafari, a celebrated filmmaker and artist whose work deals in the elusive grammar of memory, rediscovered the footage and compiled the material into a haunting historical testimony. With Hasan in Gaza functions as a travelogue of occupation and an archive of a people besieged by Israel’s version of Manifest Destiny. That the places Aljafari visited and the conditions he witnessed so eerily foreshadow the recent devastation of Gaza reflects the insanity of a history that rhymes.

While many viewers will know Aljafari for his feature debut The Roof (2006), With Hasan in Gaza is functionally the director’s first film. At the time of recording, Aljafari was 28 and living in Germany. He had left Palestine a few years before for film school and came back to make a movie about his experience in prison as a teenager. Not only does With Hasan in Gaza possess the energetic devotion of someone newly armed with and aware of the camera’s possibilities, there’s also a sense of fugitivity in the filmmaking. As Aljafari and Hasan drive around, they film carefully and with a keen eye for Israeli Defense Force soldiers who might mistake their camera for a weapon.

With Hasan in Gaza opens with a shot of a checkpoint, a physical manifestation of Palestinian confinement in Gaza. Aljafari and Hasan will continue to encounter these barricades and talk about them with the people they meet on the road. The director mostly shoots from the inside of a car, where he sits with Hasan, who fills him in on all that’s changed about his homeland. With these early moments, Aljafari establishes the haunting atmosphere of occupation, one defined by overwhelming surveillance and restriction.

Aljafari has returned to a region reeling from the Second Intifada. Despite announcements of a ceasefire and calls for peace, that chapter of the conflict lasted from 2000 to 2005. While they drive around, Hasan points out the new buildings erected by Israeli settlers and mentions the refugee camps that have become home to thousands of Palestinians. The pair make a trip to a market for breakfast and head to the beach, where they talk to a father who has spent the last eight years in prison. Standing by the water, as his children frolic, the man reflects on how long it’s been since he has seen the sea.

Disquieting testimonies like these punctuate the long stretches of exterior shots—buildings, people milling about, the landscape as seen from the side of the road—that make up most of With Hasan in Gaza. As Aljafari and Hasan travel through the city, they collect the stories of Palestinians who have lost their families and loved ones to Israel’s violence. One man takes the pair through an area of demolished homes, pointing out artifacts that reveal how little time the families had to evacuate. Aljafari uses wider shots in these moments to take in the breadth of destruction: buildings left half-standing, debris, crushed baby carriers, and other signs of a wrecked domestic life are everywhere. In another scene, Hasan points out how people repair their homes, repatching walls that have been shelled or putting pillows and sandbags in windows blown out by bombs. “You see how it is broken?” one woman asks while pointing to a part of the building just out of frame. “Last night, after they talked about a ceasefire.”

Part of what’s striking about With Hasan in Gaza is how this archive of 2001 mirrors the occasion of its release. Conversations about the toll of the occupation and the struggle of daily life that Aljafari has with the people parallel discussions in recent documentaries like No Other Land, the Oscar-winning film about the destruction of Masafer Yatta in the Occupied West Bank, and From Ground Zero, an anthology film produced by the Palestinian director Rashid Masharawi. There are moments in the doc that speak to current headlines, exposing patterns within the occupation: announced and subsequently broken ceasefires; soldiers deployed daily to roam the streets; bombs exploding in the distance at night, checkpoints and the insubstantial tours by the United Nations. When someone encourages the woman pointing out the broken windows to elaborate on her situation, to expound on her frustrations, she replies: “What should I say? We’re tired of speaking.”

And yet, as with all oppressed people, they still have stories to tell. Hidden in this makeshift travelogue is a narrative touched by the resistance that figures in Aljafari’s later works. Since The Roof, the filmmaker has used his experimental projects to construct counternarratives, ones in which he centers the rich history of Palestinian people and their land. In Port of Memory (2010), a narrative drama about a family in Jaffa on the verge of displacement, Aljafari focuses on rituals that anchor the characters. Six years later, in Recollection, he removes Israelis from the footage to tell a different story of Jaffa, which both comments on and combats the historical erasure of Palestinians. In With Hasan in Gaza, a rebellious nature lives on in the children, who gleefully ask Aljafari and Hasan to film them or to take a picture. At the early moment on the beach, the kids dance around, hold up the fish they caught and smile as widely as they can for the camera. Their enthusiasm in the face of persistent struggle is a damning reminder of how Israel and its co-conspirators have justified the murder of children for decades, but it’s also evidence of endurance. There’s a moment in the middle of the film when a curious little boy looks at the camera and asks: “Who is he filming this for?” I like to think the answer is—for you.

Forastera
Dir. Lucia Aleñar Iglesias, Spain/Italy/Sweden, Grasshopper Film

There’s an uncanniness to the experience of grieving in a beautiful place—like the iridescence that trails from the tide, gone the second you look at it. It’s as though the heart can’t process the lost thing in the midst of too much sunlight. Forastera, Spanish filmmaker Lucia Aleñar Iglesias’s refulgent directorial debut, explores this process from the vantage of Cata (Zoe Stein), a pensive teen from Madrid spending the summer in Mallorca with her grandparents. Bicycling in a bikini with her sister Eva (Martina Garcia), canoodling with a Swedish dude in a rocky cove, Cata breezes through the activities common to summer vacation movies. But rather than experience some sexual awakening, heartbreak, or lesson on the limits of libertinism, Cata comes to realize just how little she knows her own family—and, more so, her distinct place within it.

An atmospheric film in which the dramatic Balearic backdrop abuts a white sand beach, Forastera privileges crystalline shot composition and soundscape over expository dialogue. Over a dark blank screen, the placid crash of waves segues into a close-up of the heroine peacefully sun-bathing, the shadow-puppet of her sister’s hand playfully grazing the brim of her nose.

Catalina (Marta Angelat), Cata’s beloved padrina, reluctantly tolerates her husband’s chauvinism. Whether beckoning his wife to refresh his friends’ drinks on the new terraza he constructed or massaging his wife’s shoulders as he gloats of the garden he will build next, Tomeu (Lluís Homar) is generally a benevolent tyrant. In turn, Catalina is hardly passive; she badgers Tomeu to teach Cata to drive, despite their mutual lack of interest, and smokes a leisurely cigarette after insisting on filing Eva’s nails.

Whether impersonating her namesake on the phone or fitting perfectly into her vintage clothes, Cata bears a tender likeness to her grandmother central to the film’s pathos. If anything, more time between the pair onscreen would have fueled the slow burn to follow. Instead, about 15 minutes in, Cata returns home to discover Catalina lifeless on the staircase outside the house, a trash bag in her moonlit hand. The rest of the film explores the gulf left between members of the family after her death—and the guilt endured by Tomeu, who heard nothing of his wife’s fall. “Was she still alive when you found her?” he begs Cata through tears. “No, she wasn’t,” she stoically replies.

Most of what we learn about the fallen matriarch is based on old photographs or recollections shared among friends and family. But lines like “Remember when she hid in the pantry to eat cookies?” between two sisters don’t reveal much aside from a secret sweet tooth, hardly revelatory. Learning more about Catalina would leave viewers all the more haunted by her absence. Her spirit lingers on in the flickering fluorescent kitchen light—the “ghost” joked about in an early scene—and in the sudden beauty mark Cata spots on her cheek after trying on her grandmother’s ’70s wrap dress. But, amidst the film’s other characters, Catalina the person feels a bit overlooked.

Self-conscious about her inability to express her sorrow, Cata doesn’t shed a tear the weeks after her grandmother dies, and her healing seems predicated on mediating between her squabbling mother and grandfather. If Cata is quietly perceptive of Tomeu’s grief, her mother Pepa (Núria Prims) is reactive and confrontational, finding her father's obstinate nature harder to swallow in Catalina's absence. Cata is more adept at handling Tomeu, revealing how capably a young woman can admire a flawed paternal figure while still recognizing his flaws. “Am I ridiculous?” he asks while she poses him for a series of photographs with an old manual film camera. “No, very handsome,” she assures. Sitting in her grandmother’s empty chair on the terrace, smoking her cigarettes, she serves as a living, breathing reminder of Catalina’s legacy; she also becomes a temporary companion for Tomeu, to whom she refuses to condescend.

The film’s tranquil pace and preponderance of teenagers languidly hanging out nicely evokes its Mallorcan setting, a place marked by siestas and village festivals. Yet Cata feels very contemporary, an outsider to Tomeu’s rule, and unafraid to challenge the implicitly sexist order of her family home. She stands up to her grandfather when he barks at her to “brake!” during a driving lesson. When he privately disparages her own mother as “disrespectful” in his house, she replies, “I don’t know what your issue is, but she doesn’t deserve that treatment.” In witnessing Tomeu’s hostility toward her mother, and experiencing similar harshness herself, Cata is able to empathize as she never could before. For her, growing up is less about superficial milestones than seeing how she is shaped by the forces that preceded her.

Forastera—the feminine word for “stranger” or “foreigner” in Spanish—is most invested in how families must reorient themselves when an elder suddenly passes on; authority isn’t necessarily handed off to the other elders, and intergenerational bonds can both strengthen and falter. The film further reflects on the liminal borders of selfhood—though stunned by her own sadness, Cata fills her grandmother’s shoes with confidence and grace. More subtly, the film confronts the ways in which gender roles can be flipped after a serious loss, and a grounded young woman can help her family see the light.

The Currents
Dir. Milagros Mumenthaler, Switzerland/Argentina, Kino Lorber

Argentinian writer-director Milagros Mumenthaler’s third feature opens with a woman staring out of a high-rise window, her expression partially obscured by the reflection of the wintry landscape before her. After receiving an award from an applauding crowd, she heads to the toilet, where after washing her hands, she glances at her glass trophy and casually pushes it into a garbage bin as a kind of afterthought. Wandering the cobblestone paths of the city, she strolls by a shop whose window display catches her eye. Now carrying a small package, she walks to the center of a bridge. And then, in a long shot that obscures her expression but clarifies her unhesitating movements, she jumps into the water. When we next see her, she is walking into a hotel lobby wrapped in a shiny emergency blanket.

With this enigmatic, elliptical, entirely wordless prologue, Mumenthaler makes it immediately apparent that her film will center squarely on the mystery of her protagonist, Lina (Isabel Aimé González Sola). When she returns to her home in Buenos Aires, after what we learn was a trip to Switzerland, we are gradually woven into the fabric of her everyday existence—her professional obligations as a fashion designer, as well as her domestic life with her husband, Pedro (Esteban Bigliardi), and young daughter, Sofia. But given what we have seen, the details of her routine take on far less importance than her attempts to reacclimate herself to it. Reeling from the vertigo of that destabilizing prologue, we search for clues that would explain her behavior, scanning every image for the source of her disaffection. Who is this woman? Why did she jump? And why has she chosen to return?

Across its runtime, The Currents refuses straightforward answers to these questions. In the aftermath of her icy plunge, which she conceals from her husband and daughter, Lina becomes physically repelled by the sound and touch of flowing water. A significant part of her readjustment thus involves negotiating the practical consequences of this new situation—such as her inability to care for her daughter as she bathes, and the complications this introduces into her marital sex life. These details, and others like it, might incline one to see Lina’s hydrophobia as a kind of metaphor—a body-horror stand-in for her alienation from her upper-crust existence. Yet Mumenthaler concretizes Lina’s dilemma in ways that push against such a neat reading. Turning away from her social circles, Lina seeks help from an old acquaintance, Amalia, with whom she shares an evidently significant, though largely unspecified history. A hairdresser by profession, Amalia helps Lina by putting her under with gas, washing her hair, and then cleaning her nude body—an act that registers like nothing so much as the preparation of a corpse. This is also to say that if Lina’s phobia is a metaphor, it is one whose significance is much less straightforward than it may at first seem.

Played with mesmerizing opacity by González Sola, Lina takes her place alongside the inscrutable heroines of such films as Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967), Jaime Humberto Hermosillo’s The Passion According to Berenice (1976), Todd Haynes’s Safe (1995), and, closer to home, Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman (2008)—all alienated from their environments, all troubled for reasons that they are unable to fully explain. Like those directors, Mumenthaler does not simply withhold the reasons Lina might have for behaving the way she does. Many basic narrative details, such as what her husband does for a living, are indeed elided. Nonetheless, by the end of the film, we are able to identify several plausible sources from which to trace the roots of her discontent—not just her anxieties about motherhood but also the sublimated class tensions between her and her husband’s family. What The Currents resists, then, is not the idea that there might be some cause of her present predicament, but that identifying this cause would really resolve anything. What Mumenthaler resists, in other words, is the assumption that Lina’s behavior could be accounted for by locating a past traumatic event.

Mumenthaler’s refusal of such explanations manifests clearly when Lina narrates the events of her Swiss trip to Amalia, and we flash back to the day of the jump, filling in the ellipses of the prologue. Here, one might expect some dramatic passkey—a plot revelation such as one might find in a classic Hollywood noir or a Hitchcockian thriller à la Spellbound, with their explicitly psychoanalytic frameworks of character action and behavior. Yet instead of some traumatic event, we see an unsensational scene of Lina buying a hand-stitched textile from a Swiss shop. The pattern on the cloth she buys depicts three women weaving, recalling the Greek Fates, traditionally seen as the personifications of destiny—a detail which might prompt one to trace the thread of Lina’s life still further into her past. And by the end of the film, we will indeed have seen Lina visit her troubled mother, and perhaps understood something more of her unease regarding her daughter. But over the course of the film, we are also led to question the sort of vulgar Freudianism which would simply identify a childhood trauma as the source from which one’s present neuroses spring.

Much of this questioning derives from the way The Currents conveys Lina’s discontent not through concrete dramatic situations but through reveries and ever more surprising digressions from her perspective. Stepping away from the set of a photo shoot, Lina wanders into the corridors of the building and happens upon a man playing the timpani drums—an incongruous, unremarked-upon event that recalls a similar scene in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria (2021), where Tilda Swinton’s heroine is momentarily waylaid from her search to observe a jazz session in full. Later, as Lina waits in the hallway of a client’s home, contemplating a sculpture at its center, the scene suddenly segues—in what may be a daydream, a flashback, or some amalgam of the two—to the sight of Lina’s client wandering an art museum, offering up images of Monets and Goyas entirely detached from the central narrative. Near the film’s climax, having momentarily lost sight of her daughter, Lina finds her perched on the lighthouse of their apartment building—at which point, Holst’s “Venus, the Bringer of Peace” swelling on the soundtrack, the camera ranges into the streets of Buenos Aires, following the lives of three women known to Lina, but venturing far beyond her limited acquaintance with them. In this rapturous passage, it’s as if Lina were attempting to escape her own life by projecting herself into the imagined identities of others, searching the cosmos for a way to break free from her world.

The Currents eventually builds to a moment where Lina feels that she must choose between her present life with her family on the one hand and the prospect of solitary reinvention on the other—in short, between staying still and moving forward. But without revealing just where the film ends up, suffice it to say that Mumenthaler ultimately rejects the terms of this opposition. In the film’s closing image of Lina laying down on her bed in a silk red nightgown, listening to the soft patter of rain outside, the filmmaker locates something beyond a simplistic equivalence of freedom and movement. After all, in a life lived after the flood, being swept away may be easier than staying in place.

The Nintendo NES’s ROB. The Dance Dance Revolution floor pad. The GameShark. The Guitar Hero and Rock Band instruments. Rumble packs. The myriad attachments for the Nintendo Wii’s remote controller, like the steering wheel or the gun. The Sony EyeToy. VR rigs. Various microphones, like those for the Gamecube or Dreamcast. From the beginning, there have been games that employed peripherals that break the traditional control paradigm of controllers, button consoles, and keyboards. Video games have a complex moment-to-moment relationship with their audience, and changing the fulcrum of that relationship can change the experience of a game in fascinating ways. In this multiplayer roundtable, Kambole Campbell, Holly Green, Esther Rosenfield, and Dan Schindel discuss examples (successful and not) of accessories and add-ons and what they do for their respective games.

Dan Schindel: To start with, what are your favorite and least favorite game peripherals? My favorite was always the Game Boy Camera, and by extension, the Game Boy Printer. It was a—now quite crude, but for the time revolutionary—swivel camera that captured low-pixel images. If I wanted to play psychologist, I might imagine it played a role in my interest in visual culture. People make genuinely beautiful images with the camera—there’s a whole virtual exhibition you can access through Itch. On the flip side, there was the e-Reader, a card-swiping attachment for the Game Boy Advance. Nintendo manufactured these cards with special barcodes that you could run through the reader to get extra levels, characters, or whatever. I mostly remember it being associated with Pokémon—for a time, every Pokémon trading card had an e-Reader barcode on the side, for synergy. I think I used my e-Reader to pretend I was in Digimon Tamers exactly once and then never used it again for anything else.

Kambole Campbell: That e-Reader looks like my knife sharpener. Anyway, when we say "peripherals," I wonder if we count regular controllers here, too. I thought the Joy-Cons for the Nintendo Switch look a little toyetic, like so many Nintendo products do, but also feel like they have a more ergonomic design than their previous controllers—like the Nintendo 64 and GameCube pads. But that more minimal look doesn't mean cutting back on functions: you can play it like a traditional NES controller, or you can use it like a more modern gamepad if you use the grips that come with the console. It's unique to have a modular console which acts as a hybrid of Nintendo Consoles to date, and miraculous that even the act of changing between these modes feels quite satisfying in hand.

If we were to narrow the definition of "peripherals" to mean accessories that aren't required to use the console, I think I would go for the GBA Wireless Link. Might be a boring choice, but the Game Boy Advance (and its follow-up, the SP) was the only console I owned until about 2006. So the social aspect it opened up for the Game Point Advance—mostly trading Pokémon—meant quite a lot in terms of making my own console more sociable compared to going to my friends for their PS1.

For least favorite: the Rock Band drum kit. It's gigantic, they sound horrible when you hit them.

Esther Rosenfield: The one that came to my mind immediately was the Wii steering wheel. To me, that is the most iconic peripheral ever. The key to the peripheral as a concept is to make the video game less abstract. The Wii wheel is a great example of a peripheral where the whole point is to collapse the distance between the actions you’re undertaking in the game and the actions you’re performing in real life. You are literally steering the Mario Kart. If you move to the right, the kart moves to the right. It felt so cool as a kid to feel less like I was figuratively driving. This feels like I'm physically holding the wheel of the kart. I still have very fond memories of that.

My least favorite is the GameCube microphone. There was a Mario Party game—Mario Party 6, maybe—that came with a little gray plastic microphone. It looked like an old '60s game show host microphone. There were various games that would require you to speak into the microphone or blow on it. My sisters and I had heard this rumor that if you said a number out loud while rolling dice, it would influence the dice to land on that number. It never worked.

DS: The Wii was big on this in general. Along with mobile games, it helped create what’s now called the “casual” demographic. At the time, a lot of “real” gamers made fun of waving the Wiimote around, but plenty of people thought it looked fun and simple.

Holly Green: Esther, I love that you brought up the steering wheel for Mario Kart, because I feel as though games are such a strong self-insertion fantasy. And when we improve upon or strengthen the bond in that self-insert, I think it leads to improved performance. When I was learning to drive, video games, even with just a regular controller, actually helped me learn things like remembering which direction to turn when I'm trying to back out of a parking spot. Peripherals are amazing in terms of sports psychology; there's a bond between visualizing an action and the success of that action.

And I believe that I'm absolutely a better Mario Kart player when I have the Nintendo Wii wheel. I have a bucket that my husband and I use as a graveyard of all my Wii peripherals. I was getting all the stuff as they were coming out, experiencing their novelty, and enjoying how much they improved my performance. I think my favorite, going way back, is the Nintendo Zapper. So many of those early peripherals, if you look at their history, are guns, which is unsurprising. It was such a fascinating early application of the technology. You got your NES, you got Super Mario Brothers, and you had your Duck Hunt. Duck Hunt made you feel so powerful, telling yourself you would be such a good shot if you had a real gun, because you could get these little flapping birds. It's sad because the Zapper probably could've had a lot more applications, but it didn’t really happen. And that would kind of be true of Nintendo for the next couple of decades, where you would see them try certain things and it wouldn't really happen at first, but then decades later, it would come back around in a much better way. And you can see the result of that evolution now with the Joy-Cons. Peripherals became a big part of their identity and were so well implemented and supported that they could become a part of their identity.

My least favorite peripheral is probably the Nintendo Labo. When that came out, my husband and I had been married about a year, I decided to get him Nintendo Labo, because we thought folding and putting them together would be a cute activity to do with my young son and niece. The concept is so smart. It's a system of build-it-yourself peripherals that support different mini-games. Family-friendly, much cheaper than buying a different peripheral for every game.

But those peripherals ended up taking up a lot of space. I wasn't able to store them very well either, especially because they're rather fragile and sensitive to moisture. Also, they actually didn't end up being as well supported as you might've thought, considering that particular era of Nintendo devices. When the Wii Remotes first came out, their success really depended on how much Nintendo supported the developers making stuff with them. Whereas the PlayStation Move was an optional device that wasn't well supported internally, PlayStation didn't have as much control over its developers as Nintendo did.
If Nintendo had made a second generation and brought that back in some way with better support, maybe it would still be a thing. Although it had a lot of potential, it only lasted about two years before dying out.

DS: So many peripherals end up as historical footnotes for precisely these reasons you describe. That’s a symptom of a broader issue within the game industry, which is constantly chasing new technology. It fits their bottom line well, forcing consumers to continually upgrade. And it’s exponentially more difficult to preserve a game along with whatever arcane controller they made specifically for it.

KC: Since I basically missed a generation of consoles, my experience of this is, again, primarily through the Rock Band, Guitar Hero, DJ Hero genre of games with bespoke peripherals that you would buy with those games. Sometimes, the player base innovates by having these quirky adaptations of those controllers to see if they can beat Halo 3 just using a Guitar Hero controller or something similar. But outside of this, I wonder how much said adaptability was supported by developers as well. Did anyone think, "What if we could use the DJ Hero controller for our own purposes, and figure out how to build around that?" It's almost like having a single-use tool for your kitchen. "This crushes garlic and doesn't do anything else."

HG: Yeah, honestly, that right there is the reason I avoided some of the more popular games that did have those single-use peripherals. There was that Donkey Kong game that you play with the Bongo drums—Donkey Konga? Beautiful pun. But not having all the space for that in my 900-square-foot condo is definitely a deterrent; that space issue is part of why I didn't get into Rock Band. For a long time, I was a Dance Dance Revolution player. And the nice thing about those games was the dance mats, which you could fold up and store pretty well. Then the Kinect came out and solved that space issue once and for all. Just one small device that took up a little bit of space outside your TV.

I'm really fascinated by the modded uses of these peripherals in order to extend their usability, but also just their general usefulness. If you do some research about the Kinect, you’ll see it has all these different medical applications that, because of the emphasis on commercial entertainment, never really met their full potential. People used the Kinect to train surgeons and help stroke patients recover from injuries, and also elaborately modified Wii U devices, which is probably the most use the Wii U got at all.
In the Dance Dance Revolution community, for example, some people use the dance mats to improve accessibility by changing out the controls to be foot-based instead of hand-based. On the opposite end of that, some increase the difficulty of games by playing a game of Elden Ring with no kills entirely with the Dance Dance Revolution mat. It's absolutely fascinating the range and the spectrum between those two experiences. Not only is it a wonderful way to eliminate the waste of these plastic peripherals, but it’s also a way to give these devices a new life and increase the range of our experiences.

ER: I'm glad you brought up the “beating Elden Ring on a DDR pad” phenomenon. What's interesting to me is the novelty o fartificially inflating the difficulty. The challenge comes from using an "improper" method of input to beat the game. First of all, you have to sync up all the different parts on the pad to particular functions on a controller, essentially translating the input from one device to another.

Peripherals that are unique and have a lot of different capabilities run into the same issue: people who play a lot of video games are accustomed to the traditional controller layout. I remember when the Kinect came out around the same time as Mass Effect 3, and there were promotional videos showing players using voice commands to activate abilities. Instead of pressing a button to tell Liara to use Warp, you can say, “Liara, Warp!” as though you’re actually commanding her in battle.

It seems cool in a commercial, but a lot of people would look at that and say, "Well, I can also just press left on the D pad and do the same thing." We have these items that have interesting, fun use cases, and a lot of the time, the reason they don't succeed or catch on is that the traditional controller has just become too ingrained. So instead, they take on the second life as like, "I used the DDR pad to beat Elden Ring” because it's way more finicky and complicated. The peripheral creates an extra barrier, whereas the peripheral was created to eliminate it.

HG: I do a lot of research and writing on the topic of cognitive issues within games, and what you're bringing up relates to how our brains map onto controllers, assigning certain buttons to do certain things, and then we map our brains onto that configuration. Anyone can tell you, switching between the PlayStation and Xbox controllers is no big deal. Switching from one of those to the Nintendo controller with just a two-button swap of what creates functionality, you're in shambles, right? And that constant remapping is very taxing and fatiguing to our brains. When I'm playing Mario Kart with that steering wheel, I'm Fast and Furious–style, arm locked straight out ahead of me, pretending to rev that gas pedal. It just gets me there, because I feel like I'm actually driving. I would love to see more studies done on that sort of thing. How do peripherals improve our performance by improving the self-insertion fantasy?
Anyone remember that one Wii peripheral that looks like a gun, where you’d slide the Wiimote in?

DS: That was the Wii Zapper, named in tribute to the NES Zapper. I had that. I only used it for the game it came with, Link’s Crossbow Training, and with Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles, one of the worst Resident Evil games. You’re getting at how peripherals can strengthen the mimesis between your own action and what you’re doing in the game. With a gun peripheral, you’re actually aiming a weapon.
The YouTuber Nerrel has explored different control schemes for shooting games in multiple videos. In one video, he runs a performance test for a control stick vs. a mouse vs. a trackpad vs. gyroscopic aiming. The conventional wisdom goes that a mouse is the best way to aim, that it’s fastest and most precise. But he found that gyro controls actually worked best. Gamers have this idea that it’s too much physical movement, but it actually allows for some very subtle control. You don’t even need a gun-shaped peripheral; tilting a traditional controller works perfectly.

KC: I did find that using gyro aiming made using the bow and arrow in Breath of the Wild much simpler than aiming with the stick, even if I didn't like the idea at first. Your suggestion of the Zapper as a halfway point between the analog stick and the keyboard and mouse also makes me think of it as recognition of the controller having some limits. I'm playing Marathon at the moment, and there are people coming up with combat strategies intentionally made to wrong-foot console players, basically aiming to duke around console players so fast that they can't use the stick to turn in time compared to a keyboard and mouse player. I guess this ties back into what Esther was saying at the beginning, that the best peripherals are literalizing the way we feel playing these games, as well as anticipating what we instinctively want to do in reaction to playing them.

HG: In that sense, there’s one peripheral I've always wanted that has never existed, or not a peripheral, rather, but an effect that we could have but don't: when I'm playing stealth games or any games where I have to sneak around, and there's an enemy that's particularly sensitive to noise… I want there to be a situation where the mic has to be on, and if I make any noise in real life, it blows my cover. When I'm playing Fallout 76, I'll be sneaking around and suddenly cough or say something to my husband in passing, then get all tensed up as if a nearby ghoul is actually going to hear and come after me. Obviously, my cats and the ambient noise of city life would sabotage me at times, but I think it would add a lot of fun to certain experiences.

KC: Someone on the street yells at you, and Mr. X turns around.

HG: We talked earlier about preservation issues from video games and how peripherals infinitely complicate that. There was a long time when I never would've thought they'd try to bring back the Virtual Boy in any form, but it’s actually heartening that they did with the Switch 2 and the Nintendo classics collection, keeping that alive and helping people play those old games.I just really respect how Nintendo will try new things, and they maybe don’t land the first time, but they'll hang on to those ideas even if they only come back decades later and find a better way. Sometimes Iask, is it just that they were so fascinated with the idea that they wanted to make it work later? Is this a saving face kind of thing? Or do they simply refuse to be beaten by their own ideas?

DS: Kam already mentioned the Joy-Cons. In some ways, they feel like the actual realization of what was promised with the Wii. Nintendo has been iterating constantly. When the Wii was first released, you could only make broad gestures that would loosely correlate with actions in the game. It wasn’t until the Wii Motion Plus attachment came out that a Wiimote could actually match your precise movements. And now, with Joy-Cons, motion controls work very smoothly. And in between, there was the Wii U, which was Oops! All Peripherals! Did anyone even have a Wii U? I didn’t.

ER: It's funny, though, because they really proved themselves right with the Switch. The dream of the Wii U is that you can just grab it and turn it into a handheld, and other people can use the TV. They did that with the Switch to great success. It's another great example of Nintendo just not giving up on a concept and saying, "You don't like it now, but we will be proven right eventually.” They've been vindicated by other companies as well with the PlayStation Portal and the Xbox ROG Ally.

DS: We talked earlier about how the Kinect and other peripherals have found unintended usages in medical contexts. Fellow Reverse Shot gamer Forrest pointed out that the Kinect has also found a second life amongst ghost hunters. It was featured in Paranormal Activity 4, and this led real-life ghost hunters to believe its motion tracking could spot ghosts.

ER: There's the implicit idea that the Kinect can see better than the human eye. And of course, no, not really, but we naturally assume that if this device is designed only to see things, it must be extra good at seeing things.

DS: That goes back to reducing the abstraction involved in control. A successful peripheral has that balance. The Guitar Hero controller lets you feel like you're playing a guitar, but you don't have to actually know how to play a guitar to use it. At least theoretically; I also sucked at using it.

ER: Something that makes games unique as a medium is that the controller presents a learning curve to interaction. I've been playing games and I know what all the buttons do and I don't have to look at the controller, but that's a barrier for a lot of people. I saw a post not too long ago where someone said, it would be great if games had a feature that gives you a refresher on the controls if you haven’t played in a while.

For people who don't play games as much, they don’t have the ingrained muscle memory to know what to do when told to “press triangle.” Especially if you're coming from another console. I remember when I got my first PlayStation but had grown up on Xbox, I had to create this mnemonic system: Y is now a triangle, and the Y shape, the shape of the prongs of the Y is kind of a triangle. And if you look at the circle, the B is kind of a round letter, so that's a circle. This is a barrier that no other medium has to contend with. It's funny to think that while a lot of peripherals are designed to break down that barrier of entry and make the act of playing the game more natural, it's clear that some are about making your interaction more elaborate and complicated.

KC: We've been talking a lot about the tactile experience of playing games, and that feels like something unique to how you engage with it as a visual medium. Many of my favorite peripheral or controller experiences inspire different ways of thinking about how your hands interact with what's on screen. And even something as small as the quirks of the PS5's Dualsense, not the fancy haptic rumble but how developers [like Housemarque on Returnal or Insomniacon Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart] have sometimes been playing with different levels of trigger squeezes and how that can serve different functions. So you're not just thinking about the button on the face of the controller, you're also thinking about the pressure that you're applying. It's interesting seeing new ways of tactile interaction open up to different game pads and stuff, like the touchpads on the Steamdeck.

ER: I love the touchpads on the Steam Deck, by the way. It's such a good fidget toy to roll your thumb over and it feels like you're rolling a ball.

KC: I cannot wait for the Steam controllers. They've done the Steam controller before, but this time it's maybe with the understanding of the SteamDeck and how it can replace a mouse touchpad. And the extra buttons on the back. Those minor iterations on very traditional console game pads have been interesting, even if the number of more bespoke peripherals has thinned outside of Nintendo's work.

DS: That gets back to what you said about how controllers themselves are peripherals. And games are continually iterating to fit more complex interactions within the confines of what a controller is, how it fits into human hands, and what's possible for mapping the buttons in ways that are intuitive and comfortable.

I Love Boosters
Dir. Boots Riley, U.S., NEON

The sway of a tailored, wide-legged trouser. The swish of a circle skirt against a stairwell. The sheen of a cinched turquoise dress—or is it aquamarine?

The sumptuous pleasures of clothing don’t start or end with the label but are stitched from a series of banal but glorious bodily encounters. Anyone drawn to fashion likely intuits this truth, and those drawn to fashion tend to also be drawn to movie screens. Prankish polymath Boots Riley is one such figure, but unlike many aesthetes, his penchant for excess accompanies a firm commitment to leftist principles. With its gumball visuals and zany costumes, Riley’s sophomore feature, I Love Boosters, joyfully indulges in sensory splendor—on screen and on skin—while equally insisting on a just world.

“I’m lonely,” Corvette (Keke Palmer) admits to her friend Mariah (Taylor Paige) early in the film, while sitting in the shuttered fried chicken joint in which she squats and schemes. Along with single mom Sade (Naomi Ackie), they form Oakland’s notorious “Velvet Gang”—whose motto “Fashion Forward Filanthropy” justifies their “booster” ambitions: filch clothes from local shops and resell for discount prices. But the thrill of the haul—and the constant hustle—has left Corvette running on empty. Stealing and shilling drip can’t compare to creating her own designs—designs “too weird” to submit to the contest run by fashion titan Christie Smith (Demi Moore), the self-proclaimed “visionary” whose Metro Designer franchise is a steady Booster target.

Corvette needs a purpose, which comes in the form of sweet sartorial revenge. Upon discovering that Christie has pilfered a jumpsuit idea from Corvette’s Insta-feed, she gathers the troops to do the impossible: clear every Metro Designer store in the Bay Area. But first they need to infiltrate enemy quarters. “I just want to take it all home, eat it up, and shoot it out of my eyes,” is the reason she gives for seeking Metro Designer employment—the “it” referring to the clothes themselves. “Give it to me. It’s mine anyway.”

Boosters hyperbolizes the cycles of appropriation within the fashion industry: the Velvet Gang’s urban community admires and desires Christie’s take on the avant-garde, while the designer “fucking making art” blithely rips off Black subculture. A character who functions as a jab at the impractical pretenses of the creative class, Christie lives in a glassy tower slanted at a 45-degree angle; she strains to walk up and down the floor of her own home, as do her browbeaten entourage of Gen Z employees.

Boosters also doesn’t shy from mocking film archetypes. A pinky-ringed parody of a romantic male lead, LaKeith Stanfield plays a mysterious man who, when not brooding over Midnight’s Children, courts Corvette’s affection. But his overwrought pickup lines are mostly for laughs; the real heart of the film thumps between the women of the Velvet Gang and those they come to platonically love outside their tight-knit circle. In many ways, Boosters is as much about kinship networks of support as class-conscious comeuppance.

When a rival thief surfaces in the form of Jianhu (Poppy Liu), a bubbly vigilante teleported from China to fight Christie’s exploitation of garment workers, the gang adopts a fourth member with a more noble immediate cause. Boosters’ femme-tastic moxie and time-travel twist might remind one of Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), but a more salient influence might be Věra Chytilová’s New Wave classic Daisies (1966), a surrealist smorgasbord that invites us, like the women onscreen, to gleefully consume to the point of exhaustion, all while indicting the larger systems that disempower its plucky heroines.

Like Daisies and Riley’s Sorry to Bother You (2018), Boosters relies on traditional practical effects to achieve its zany vision. But unlike his debut film, made for a meager three million dollars, Boosters spared no expense in crafting its Wonka-hued universe. The film was shot with specialized vintage anamorphic lenses to maximize the visual content available onscreen; to intensify the color palette, cinematographer Natasha Braier manipulated the lens surface, in some cases physically painting their edges. Production designer Christoper Glass incorporated miniatures, matte paintings, and stop-motion animation to achieve a viscerally nostalgic vibe. Even the trippy title font, hand-drawn by children’s illustrator J. Otto Seibold, contributed to this effect—reminiscent of Disney’s animated Robin Hood (1973). Merrell Garbus and Nate Brenner, of Oakland-based art pop duo Tune-Yards, composed and performed the loopy, polyrhythmic score. The end credits span a full ten minutes, revealing the collective labor and creativity celebrated onscreen, and integral to the film’s existence.

“People don't want to be the art,” Christie’s bookish assistant tells her toward the film’s raucous climax. “They want to be artists.” Christie might see her consumers as “human canvases,” but the pleasures of commodity culture pale in comparison to creating something—on one's own or with others. Solidarity in the fashion ecosystem—between the cash-strapped buyer, the midlevel retail staff, and the factory workers toiling abroad—trumps the fleeting highs of shopping every time.

During a spring when union organizers staged a runway show to protest the Met Gala and Everlane fans are livid that the sustainable brand has been sold to fast-fashion behemoth Shein, I Love Boosters’s anti-capitalist credo feels especially timely. In the long run, the film’s appeal will rest on Riley’s singular mix of polemics and pleasure: our eyes may deceive us, but shared delight might lead us somewhere better.

The next time you go to the movies on a hot summer’s day, try to be conscious of that moment when the first wave of cold air hits your skin—your heart might soar a little—and spare a thought for the guy who invented air-conditioning: the Chinese engineer Ding Huan. Like nearly all inventors, he didn’t come up with the idea himself, nor was his version the very first. But Ding Huan researched, designed, recorded, and effectively patented two different mechanical air-conditioning methods: evaporative cooling and his own prototype of the rotary fan (on wheels). I should mention that Ding Huan lived and worked during the Han dynasty, in the 2nd century A.D. The subject of this essay is based on a sister invention of Huan’s: the stabilization mechanism known as a “gimbal.” It permits an object (in Huan’s case, an incense burner, explicitly designed for use amongst highly flammable cushions) to remain stable, while outside forces operate to disrupt it. A gimbal uses rotational impulses which work counter-cyclically to the stimuli that are brought to bear upon it, meaning that a camera rig comprising two or more gimbals can stabilize a moving image that would otherwise look uneven or skittish due to the circumstances of its capture. In other words, cinema really has a lot to thank Ding Huan for.

The most technically advanced example of a gimbal in existence predates even Huan’s: it’s the three-axis stabilization instrument located inside the human eye. Everything we watch and see in our daily lives, and to a lesser extent on a cinema screen, is stabilized by the floating mechanism lodged inside our heads, heads which tend to move across three axes (four, if you were to count the eye’s ability to focus, but let’s not go down that rabbit hole). If we didn’t have gimbals in our eyes, our entire lives would look and feel like a Neill Blomkamp movie. Huan’s original incense burner gimbal (180 AD)—based on the Ancient Greek antikythera—begat more prominent inventions, such as Léon Foucault’s gyroscope, which he used to demonstrate the rotation of the earth (1852), and closer to our theme, Garrett Brown’s Steadicam (1975). These were all essentially defensive contrivances, attempts to overcome instability by replicating or emulating the unimpeachable biological magnificence of the human eye.

Naturally, the Steadicam has for the last half-century provided a hyper-effective gimbal-based stabilization mechanism for long traveling takes. It removed the need for miles of dolly track, and opened up an intimacy with the action in spaces where a dolly won’t fit, as well as new aesthetic dimensions. Whereas Alan Clarke uses the persistent, lingering effect of Steadicam to create raw psychological intimacy in Christine (1987), Kubrick harnesses the same technology to situate Eyes Wide Shut (1999) in a dreamlike state. Here and now, the makers of the Indonesian martial arts film The Raid 2 (2014) have demonstrated an additional development, which takes that spatial facility and adaptability one step further, by freeing the camera from the body rig of a Steadicam and enabling the whole gimbal apparatus to be held in either one or two hands. This liberates the movement of the camera much more than before: exponentially multiplying the positioning options, allowing shots to evolve at high speed. It also eliminates numerous obvious obstacles which would otherwise obstruct a Steadicam operator or appear in the take, while preserving the crucial narrative and forensic impact of the single-take aesthetic, and in many cases boosting it.

The Raid 2 (AKA Berandal—“thug” in Indonesian) is ostensibly a sequel to the breakout 2011 crime flick The Raid (for the few who haven’t seen it, imagine the political conceit of Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer, but being set in a tower block, vertical instead of horizontal, with a higher body count and a more credible payoff). In truth The Raid 2 is only a sequel to The Raid in the sense that The Hound of the Baskervilles is a sequel to The Sign of Four—the two stories have nothing in common except their central character: Rama (Iko Uwais), an incorruptible police officer inhabiting a world of violent gang crime. In The Raid 2, supercop Rama inveigles himself into an Indonesian criminal gang by befriending the gang boss’s son, Uco, in prison. Naturally, Rama needs to pass a series of self-imposed and ultraviolent tests while in captivity, to both seduce and convince his new friend Uco that he is thug material. On release, he learns that his new gang buddies are in a triangular turf war with a rival Japanese mob and a third-party Indonesian pretender, Bejo. Uco, who has terrible daddy issues, joins forces in secret with Bejo to destabilize his own father by fomenting a breach of a truce with the Japanese. He promises Bejo a cut of the business once he has taken over. Rama does his best to navigate this ungodly mess while keeping his own nose relatively clean. There is a pleasing classicism, in action terms, to this kind of crime film screenplay, which is designed to keep the violent confrontations rolling along while slowly releasing a persistent stream of suspense around the risk of Rama being burned.

Uwais, who comes from a family of martial artists, shares with Buster Keaton an immaculate stone face and a gift for jaw-dropping physical performance. In addition to being the leading man, he served as the fight choreographer and stunt coordinator in both Raid films, exhibiting his mastery of pencak silat, a specific strain of hand-to-hand martial arts native to Indonesia and Maritime Southeast Asia. The improbable director of these violent films, the genteel Welshman Gareth Evans, was originally working in Indonesia on a documentary about silat when he “discovered” Uwais and immediately set out to build a fictional genre film around him, which became Merantau (2009).

The simplest way to distinguish silat from more familiar cinematic martial arts, such as those within the vast Chinese umbrella term of kung fu, is by its emphasis on speed and aggression as the most effective methods of self-defense. A silat master advances swiftly toward an opponent, even—especially—if they are armed, and refuses victim status even when palpably outmatched. The dynamics of silat are characterized by relentless and lightning-quick mini-attacks designed to destabilize, through a mixture of anticipation, surprise and pain. In response to a single flick of a knife by an aggressor, a silat master would deploy at least a dozen blows (even more, if the assailant doesn’t immediately go down). Unlike more traditional screen pugilism, the fighting on screen in the Raid films is not designed simply to provide an emotional catharsis (e.g. seeing bad people getting hurt), but a cardiac event: it raises the pulse through the multiplication and acceleration of intricate moves.

Crucial to this hyperdynamic effect on a cinema audience is the single long take, engorged with movement and clarity. Cutting would add kinesis artificially, which would destroy our appreciation of the natural speed and evolution of the movement itself, and thereby dilute the intensifying effect which organically belongs to silat. The ability of Evans and his crew to capture and harness the controlled chaos of silat in minute detail without cutting is fundamental to the formal design of The Raid 2. Without image stabilization, a lot of that precious detail, and consequently the viewer’s appreciation of the pace and skill on show, would be lost.

In addition, a key stylistic asset of the handheld gimbal’s relatively low mass is in the camera’s ability to jerk quickly away from the center of a particular confrontation to follow a rogue element (such as a new weapon being unsheathed, a new assailant appearing, or even an impact spatter), then return the camera back to its original position with tremendous speed, without destabilizing the viewer’s visual understanding or breaking the rhythm of the action. Immediately we can detect that the handheld gimbal outperforms not only a straight handheld camera, which could not make such a capture with clarity, but also a Steadicam body rig, which would be too slow. By retaining the structural integrity of what is being filmed, and expanding the possibilities of gimbal technology, Gareth Evans and his DP Matt Flannery may have created a new normal in practical action cinema.

An early example of the ambition and scope of The Raid 2’s action credentials is a close-quarter fight between at least a dozen men in a prison toilet cubicle built to fit two at most—where Uco’s men first attack Rama. This is followed in short order by an epic prison courtyard free-for-all, characterized by being shot in driving rain and ten inches of mud, where Rama first performs heroics on Uco’s behalf. The toilet sequence is overtly stylized around the space and features an overhead shot in the manner of the moment from Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956) when Henry Fonda is filmed in high angle long shot as he is thrown into a tiny jail cell. But where Evans and Flannery take the adaptability of the handheld gimbal into uncharted territory isin the epic mud fight. The camera shifts seamlessly between individual confrontations, and in the same shot closely follows a more developmental chase sequence over the fence of the courtyard—a shot that would not have been physically achievable with the Steadicam. Although filmed in a completely different way, the courtyard scene bears striking resemblances to the battle of Shrewsbury in Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1965). While both sequences showcase the terrible challenge and vulnerability of fighting in mud—the drag on movement, the exhausting weight of everything, the risk of drowning—Welles cut furiously, assaulting the viewer with shot after shot (many less than a second long) piling on the filth, death, and degradation. Gareth Evans by contrast keeps everything rolling as the bodies romp and die in the mud. Welles’s film deplores the violence by exaggerating its monstrosity, while Evans revels in its choreographic dimension and doesn’t let you draw breath while you do the same.

In later fight sequences, as Rama further embeds himself into the criminal organization and takes on Uco’s rivals and unhappy collaborators, another stylistic brushstroke emerges, relating to the viewpoint of the camera. Here, The Raid 2 contrasts sharply with established gun-fu methodologies. For example, when a man goes through a plate glass window in a John Woo film, the camera will generally film around him (from a gap in the set) with a dolly track or Steadicam, giving a fluid, balletic quality to the action. Conversely, when a man goes through a plate glass window in The Raid 2, the camera goes through the window as well, filming the stuntman so tightly that as he lands, the shot finishes up—as he does—at a 90-degree angle. One imagines that on these occasions, if the gimbal is used, it must be locked at the crucial moment to allow this shot to be performed without the gimbal trying to correct it. This effect is deployed numerous times in The Raid 2—most notably in a climactic kitchen fight between Rama and a terrifying hoodlum played by Cecep Arif Rahman. This kitchen scene—dramatizing a situation where Rama has finally met an opponent at his level—is the centerpiece of the film: a pulsating exhibition of martial arts prowess, camerawork, choreography, and editing.

Despite the gimbal’s abrasing mechanism, the images within the fight sequences in The Raid 2 are not entirely “fluid” in themselves. They are frenetic, and they still contain a handheld quality (in the same way as the Panaglide image in Halloween, for all its smoothness, still uncannily reflects the cameraman walking). But the key is that within this frenzy, thanks to the gimbal, the finer details are both accessible to, and processable by, the viewer, rather than confusing or destabilizing. The outcome brings us closer to the rhythmical appeal of an immaculately timed dance sequence by Stanley Donen, where the impact of a particular dance move, however eye-catching or explosive, cannot interrupt or detract from the overall musical flow.

Along the way, The Raid 2 introduces us to more colorful assassins and their set pieces, including a man who kills people by barreling baseballs at their heads (played by Very Tri Yulisman), and a terrifying young woman with dark glasses (Julie Estelle). In a clear homage to Cheng Pei-pei's character Golden Swallow from King Hu’s Come Drink With Me (1966),Estelle dispatches an entire gang of men in a tube-train with the aid of just two clawhammers, a scene for which the handheld gimbal negotiates the chaotic speed and tightness of space without any need to cut out a wall from the set.

Perhaps the ultimate example of the handheld gimbal’s flexibility in The Raid 2 occurs during the central freeway car chase, where Rama—being transported by his captors as part of a convoy of Mitsubishi SUVs—is rescued by Uco’s men, driving Nissan saloon cars. This features perhaps the most technically accomplished and recognizable single take in 21st-century action cinema, wherein the camera approaches a speeding car from the front, enters the car from the front passenger side window, witnesses the driver being shot at, then arcs across and through the car, finally exiting through the rear driver’s side window to identify where the shot came from (a sniper mounted on a car approaching from behind).

This shot was executed with much ingenuity and meticulous planning. The passenger side front seat is in fact a second cameraman disguised as a car seat, who suddenly comes to life out of shot, grabs the camera from the first cameraman (on the low-loader outside) films the action inside the car, then completes the shot by handing the camera through the rear window to a prone cameraman attached by a steel cage to the other side of the car. Behind-the-scenes footage of this stunt, widely seen and vaunted on YouTube, shows how the two-handed gimbal rig needed to be light and nimble enough for such a shot even to be contemplated. The result is as clean as can be expected, which, like much of the film, is a testament to the craftsmanship of the crew as much as it is to the technology itself. While a Steadicam may require a more highly developed skillset to operate than a gimbal, Evans’s ambitions still place significant demands on his crew, who operate almost as stuntpersons in themselves.

As with most technical innovations, cinema purists haven’t all immediately aligned behind the positive potential of the handheld gimbal. After all, great cinema has survived to date without over-stabilizing the image, and very bad cinema is often over reliant on it. Advertorial content places a gimbal in the same “smoothing” category as airbrushing or photoshop, with all the dishonesty that carries. The compromise lies between absolute truth and the ability to express truth. If all that a gimbal does is create a cozier, cleaner image which is more socially acceptable but less meaningful, then it is being wasted. The cinematographer Sean Price Williams (Good Time) has thus far refused to use a gimbal, considering it “a step toward an AI look” and he adds for ironic measure: “the machine is perfect—the only mistake can be with the operator/human.” Evans and Flannery take up the artistic challenge: they see corrective technology not purely as a replacement tool but as a means of preserving and improving the highly tangible effect on audiences of what are essentially still very practical images (before everything becomes/became computerized and painted in). In doing so, they retain the forensic richness of highly choreographed physical movement on screen by capturing it as closely and truthfully as possible, as devotedly and successfully as Frankie Manning’s “Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers” sequence in Hellzapoppin’ sought to do.

In the same way a martial arts audience appreciates the precision and capture of the fighting itself, all cinephiles occasionally enjoy lifting the hood on how a film is made. The thought processes that accompany a demonstrative “single take” sequence (be it in I Am Cuba, Le Plaisir, or Children of Men) can sometimes ride roughshod over the Bazin/Clarke concept of the long take as a portal to reality, by having the opposite effect of removing the viewer from the story and catapulting us into the realm of the filmmaking itself. Analogous to the appeal of stage illusion, part of loving cinema is in our imagining how it came into being. Martin Scorsese, for example, adores the imprecise jump cut in Powell & Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffman, where a necklace appears in Robert Helpmann’s hand (one feels his fondness for this visible slip must have inspired the grotesquely—and magnificently—imprecise dummy cut of Robert De Niro before the car explosion in Casino). Better to think of this not as alienation—as Brechtian scholars would have it—but inclusion. In genre, spectacle is everything, but more than ever today—as we find less to trust in what we watch—a degree of human, physical truth must exist within the eye of that spectacle for the spectacle to have any weight or power. Physical and technical dexterity are both a means and an end in action cinema: the “how” is as important as the “why.”

Hokum
Dir. Damian McCarthy, Ireland/U.K./U.S., NEON

Art is, by nature, derivative. The artistic drive comes, in part, through mimicry, emulation, the ambition to match or outdo that which inspired in the first place. There is no shortage of column inches devoted to Hollywood’s concerted lack of inspiration in the 21st century. Downstream from this conversation about IP fatigue and lucrative but mind-numbing appeals to the lowest common denominator is a discourse about how easily and quickly aspects of a successful film’s style can be cannibalized without any true understanding of how choices worked. This typifies an exhausting set of trends in mainstream horror filmmaking, all of which have been cribbed from prestige indie cinema: center-framing, extremely low lighting, desaturated color grading, split diopter and Dutch angle shots, crash zooms, ironic needle drops, the slow push-in on an emotionally muted protagonist trapped amidst an ever-escalating series of allegorical terrors, and the sudden cut to black.

These aesthetic choices, cut up and reposted without context to showcase little more than symmetry, have become a recognizable crutch in horror cinema, marshaled together as a means of signaling a seriousness and quality that is rarely reflected in the script. The narrative and formal demands of screenwriting are specific to cinema, but the ideas and choices that feed them need not be hermetically bound to a single medium. And yet, even within the wide field of their own chosen art form, it appears many filmmakers have an active disdain for the history and craft of cinema. In an essay titled, “On the Teaching of Shakespeare and Other Great Literature,” a 22 year-old Orson Welles, in collaboration with his high school headmaster, puts it succinctly, “The truth of it is that we in the field of English expression have been indoctrinated with the scientific approach theory so thoroughly that we are making dissecting-rooms of our English classes to the slight buildup of our own sense of importance but to the infinite detriment of our charges. We are tossing away their aesthetic birthright for a dubious and unsavory mess of analytical pottage.”

The films of Irish writer-director Damian McCarthy are a welcome reminder of how a reverence for and attention to classic tenets of filmmaking—indeed, to the rich history of cinema, both mainstream and independent—can still yield surprising, thrilling results. One of the very first thoughts I had after watching McCarthy’s 2024 film Oddity was that it had the rhythms and atmosphere of a short story. There is a distinctly literary quality to McCarthy’s work, which spans several shorts and three features. His settings, so far all staged in his native Ireland, are both mundane and mythic, featuring ancient houses, secluded cabins, remote hotels, and the unsettling sterility of hospitals hidden in the forests of a country whose landscape has eluded modernity’s grasp. The supernatural and uncanny lurk at the edges of this reality, rule-bound creatures of folklore as ancient as they are unforgiving. McCarthy’s films feature characters who exist in a world where a single aberrant request—say, being strapped into a chained harness that limits how far into an unfamiliar house they might travel, as in 2020’s Caveat—is perhaps unexpected but a natural part of its internal logic.

This fable-like milieu recurs in McCarthy’s newest film Hokum, distributed by Neon, making it his highest-profile American release yet. Adam Scott stars as prickly novelist Ohm Bauman, whose bleak Conquistador trilogy is coming to a frustratingly uncertain end. While laconically sketching out what, for Bauman, is a typically dark and violent conclusion to the series, the writer is continually haunted by the tragic murder of his mother when he was a boy. It is in service to her memory that he travels to the Bilberry Woods Hotel in rural Ireland, where his parents spent their honeymoon, to scatter her ashes. It is the week of Halloween, and in Bilberry Woods Bauman encounters the small hotel staff and the denizens that surround it, featuring characters by turns friendly and taciturn, though Bauman’s quick rudeness does him no favors. A deft comedian, Scott is a stiff dramatic actor in the mold of Keanu Reeves, though this is to Hokum’s advantage. His rationalist deadpan delivery turns Bauman’s every line into a pronouncement designed to stifle any intimation of internal depth, his harsh, cold behavior a smoke screen that few are willing to squint through. As such, Bauman is the perfect straight man to which McCarthy’s horrors reveal themselves.

Another literary quality of McCarthy’s films is their careful construction and pacing. The truncated space in which short stories are meant to introduce and convey a narrative privileges vivid but swift descriptions, as in the masterful works of Algernon Blackwood and Shirley Jackson. In Hokum, McCarthy utilizes quick flashbacks and simple idiosyncrasies specific to each character to move the story along. There is always one more wrinkle to smooth out, one narrative complication that heightens tension. Favorite among McCarthy’s stylistic identifiers, and quickly becoming his signature, are totemic props: the mangy stuffed rabbit in Caveat, the life-sized wooden doll in Oddity. There are several items that fit this description in Hokum, including a series of disturbing porcelain figurines, a gas lantern, and an old clock with the likeness of a boy golfer on the top, which are played with and rendered essential as tools of survival by both living and dead characters. McCarthy’s props almost never perform the function one would expect.

The same is true for the horror McCarthy is interested in mining. Immediately upon his arrival at the hotel, Bauman notes that the honeymoon suite where his parents stayed is closed off. The staff members playfully offer diverging explanations: the room is haunted, a witch has been trapped inside it. Bauman’s eventual journey to that room reveals a supernatural reality he did not think existed. McCarthy favors simple execution with his scares, setting up an empty frame, cutting away, then cutting back to show a shape occupying that same frame. Often, the camera is pointed at a shadowy corner or hallway in which something lurks, but McCarthy’s goal, particularly when it comes to his richly classical lighting, is legibility rather than confusion. As such, when something scary appears, the audience sees it clearly, even if the setting is dark or the frame is crowded with other objects or people.

Juxtaposed with the supernatural is another, more distressingly tangible fear. McCarthy’s films all deal with the silencing of inconvenient women by desperate, unimaginative men. In the parallax between the seemingly impossible and the mundane, McCarthy locates a uniquely uncomfortable niche within the genre, one which subverts the audience’s expectations as to who or where the antagonist will manifest. Ghosts feature prominently in his films, but their behavior is difficult to predict. The British writer Robert Aickman says, “The successful ghost story does not close a door and leave inside it still another definition, a still further solution. On the contrary, it must open a door, preferably where no one had previously noticed a door to exist; and, at the end, leave it open, or, possibly, ajar.”

For Ohm Bauman, not only is his conception of a rational and unsurprising world disrupted, but so is his understanding of the finality of death. The door opened to him can never be closed again. Trapped in the honeymoon suite while the hotel is unoccupied, Bauman dwells on his family’s tragic past and that of others who have met similarly violent ends. At the same time, Bauman is being toyed with by ancient forces that take memorably disturbing forms. McCarthy draws Bauman as a person who lives by the adage that hell is other people. Before the night is out, Bauman just might catch a glimpse of the real thing. The lethal inevitability of Gothic literature, where a threshold must be crossed, a repressed history must be violently revealed, or an ethereal force unlocks a terrifying essential truth about the universe is dramatized most potently in McCarthy’s decision to push Bauman into a kind of chamber of reflection where the writer must face the reality and meaning of his death, whether now or in the future, and a dizzying, unsettling question: what awaits him on the other side?

To the Victory!
Dir. Valentyn Vasyanovych, Ukraine, no distributor

To the Victory! played at Museum of the Moving Image on April 26 as part of First Look 2026.

We first hear the title of Valentyn Vasyanovych’s new film To the Victory! during an early scene when Vasyanovych, playing a version of himself, and his best friend, Vlad, get drunk on a rooftop and make a toast to Ukraine’s recent victory in the war against Russia. Their simple cheers over a shared bottle of liquor places the film in a near, imagined future, one in which Ukraine has prevailed over their aggressor but is also left with an anguished population of young and middle-aged men who stayed behind to fight. In spite of this, Vasyanovych operates in a hopeful mode, colored by the homosocial camaraderie similar to what you might find in a war film, but transposed onto a creative class that now has to navigate its ambient grief.

During that rooftop scene, Vasyanovych and Vlad fall over each other in their mild stupors, embracing almost like lovers one moment and fighting like enemies the next, after he suggests his next film—the one we see him and his collaborators trying to make throughout To the Victory!—should be about the dissolution of Vlad’s family. Elsewhere, Vasyanovych’s son, Yaroslav (Hryhoriy Naumov), drops out of university, plays violent video games, and drinks to excess once he comes into some money from a new job—an understandable if predictable trajectory for a young man whose youth has been marred by war.

This culture of unattended alcohol consumption and erratic masculinity might recall Cassavetes's Husbands. Unlike Cassavetes, however, Vasyanovych doesn’t normally act in his films. Before production on To the Victory! began, he hired a professional actor who, due to his duties in the armed resistance, eventually had to back out. As he is playing a film director trying desperately to get his next project off the ground, Vasyanovych’s presence imparts extra import to a film about how art can best speak to a politically charged moment. The absence of professional actors in the cast (Vasyanovych notes in press materials that everyone in front of the camera had roles behind it) is a comment on the fragile state of Ukrainian filmmaking that goes beyond the normal logistical challenges of the craft. As the scraps of a news reports on the radio in the first scene highlight, Ukraine is in a demographic crisis. There’s no need to fret over logistics when there’s no one left to stand in front of the camera.

Vasyanovych’s presence also lends a metatextual layer to the film’s construction. To the Victory! is not just a film about the making of a film—it’s a film about the making of a film, in which that fictional film is also about a struggling filmmaker trying to make a film. The premise offers delightful, compounding formal surprises as the viewer becomes more attuned to its conceits. Where the opening scene—breakfast between Vasyanovych and Yaroslav that plays out with unremarkable naturalism—is ruptured by the sound of “Cut!” when Vasyanovych exits the frame, a later scene between Vlad and another friend/collaborator (Serhii Stepanskyi), far more natural and emotionally grounded, is subject to elements outside human control, namely a mine-inflicted pothole that violently jostles the car they’re shooting in. This time it’s Vasyanovych's sudden appearance in, rather than departure from, the frame (he was hidden with his monitor behind the backseat) that alerts us to the grim reality that, even under the best of conditions, a director has only so much control over his art.

Perhaps as an act of defiance to a seeming lack of control, there are 23 shots across To the Victory!’s 104 minutes, an even more extreme ratio than Vasyanovych’s 2019 breakout feature Atlantis (28 shots in 108 minutes). At an average of four minutes, each is a self-contained drama with its own formal conceits and emotional crests and falls. Taken together they feel like Vasyanovych’s attempt to make the most of the feature film form; as if, in an unaccommodating political and cultural context (Vasyanovych has been vocal about his displeasure with Ukraine’s film-related governing bodies), an edit would be akin to deprivation.

Adding to the reflexive nature of To the Victory!, Vasyanovych features a scene in which he and Vlad watch Atlantis and commiserate on their slim chances of getting their next film into festivals. As cynicism burrows its way into the conversation, Vasyanovych suggests he and Vlad shoot a sex scene together; “It’s trendy!”, he remarks, not entirely incorrectly. What follows is a jokey procession of pantomime erotic advances. His hand on Vlad’s upper thigh, rising up to his stomach and chest. Vlad protests through giggles until suddenly he’s straddling Vasyanovych. The whole charade is perverse and titillating for all the reasons you can think of—how haven’t they, as best friends in a world functionally without women, fucked already? But seeing these particular straight guys openly playacting queerness is all the more engrossing because of the reality of their bond. As sarcastic as their near copulation is, their tight, minutes-long embrace the morning of Vlad’s departure from Ukraine, captured by the camera’s uninterrupted gaze, is just as sincere.

A constant drive toward political import motivates the fictional Vasyanovych’s artistic choices. This moment in history, he says, calls for something more than simple relationship dramas; the perpetual tragedies of separation are what the film within the film should be about. Of course, in acknowledging this internal conflict, To the Victory!, the film without all the metatextual trimmings, ends up being precisely about family separation without ever spelling it out. Collapsing the emotional distance between a father and son can have the same, or greater, impact as the physical reunion of husband and wife. Making a film with your best friends can be as profound an experience as watching them depart for another country. That Vasyanovych chooses to focus on the former scenarios is proof of the necessity of hope—even if you have to make it up.

Silent Friend
Dir. Ildikó Enyedi, Hungary/U.K., 1-2 Special

Cinema usually relegates botanical life to mise en scène. Exceptions are notable enough to stand out. There’s the eponymous, sinister tree in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Charisma (1999), which might be destroying its forest—and in the end, potentially the whole world. There’s the Tree of Life in Aronofsky’s The Fountain (2006), tempting a conquistador in the past and traveling the stars in a bubble spaceship in the distant future. There’s the camphor in Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro (1988), possessing the gargantuan proportions of a child’s outsized imagination—the characters even have the courtesy to thank it for watching out for them.

Such films throw into sharp relief how movies usually feature plants as background elements or aesthetic objects, rather than living things to be understood. Now comes Silent Friend, which treats its botanical subjects with far greater gravitas. This is familiar territory for writer/director Ildikó Enyedi, who had a houseplant witness and solve a murder in Simon the Magician (1994). Here is a movie that includes the Latin names of every single featured flora in the credits, far dwarfing the human cast.

This is only Tony Leung Chiu-wai’s second non-Asian film after 2021’s Shang-Chi, but the true lead is a magnificent ginkgo in the University of Marburg’s Alter Botanischer Garten. Enyedi depicts the tree with reverence, composing the shots it shares with humans so that it occupies the frame with them as a character of equal importance. In a manner not unlike The Fountain, the film is divided into three time periods, with the ginkgo their sole shared character. In 1908, when young women dance in the tree’s grove to commune with nature, it seems to dance with them. In 1972, the tree cradles a university student in its branches. In 2020, there are shot/reverse shot exchanges of silent conversation between the tree and a visiting neurologist played by Leung. The director’s attention ensures that it never feels like a piece of set dressing.

Enyedi has a recurring fascination with lonely people connected by coincidence, magic-realist phenomena, or both. Think of the separated twin sisters who keep crossing paths in My Twentieth Century (1989), or the coworkers who become unlikely lovers after they realize they’re sharing dreams in On Body and Soul (2017). Interacting with the ginkgo bridges lonely people across decades in Silent Friend. In 1908, Grete (Luna Wedler) is isolated as the university’s first female student. In 1972, Hannes (Enzo Brumm) feels out of step with his peers due to his disinterest in the counterculture. In 2020, Tony (Leung) finds himself living on the empty campus during the COVID-19 lockdown.

Silent Friend is most engaging in how it uses its broad scope to accrue a Wunderkammer of vaguely related niche subjects. The film’s conviction that its plants are full characters is best realized through its investigation into how changing technology opens new ways for humans to understand them. Grete develops a fascination with extreme close-up botanical photography that’s inspired by the work of Karl Blossfeldt. A girl whom Hannes has a crush on has hooked a polygraph machine to her geranium to read its moods, which is based on the (highly questionable, consistently unreplicable) experiments of Cleve Backster. Tony, who came to Germany to further his research into infant cognition, finds himself drawn to the question of plant perception, hooking up brain-scanning devices to the ginkgo.

These glimpsed historical errata are more interesting to read about, or perhaps learn about in a well-researched video essay, than they are to watch play out through much of Enyedi’s film.(It doesn’t help that the movie freely blends legitimate open scientific questions and possibilities about plant intelligence with eye-rolling woo-woo, like the geranium sensing Hannes’s presence from a distance.) In too many ways, the script makes the mistake of attempting to induce empathy for plants by anthropomorphizing them. The pinging between time periods tries to capture the ginkgo’s perspective, portrayed as nonlinear within the context of a lifespan measured in centuries rather than decades. But the film’s deliberate pace conveys the opposite effect. The idea that a long life is slow only makes sense from a human point of view. If the ginkgo is seeing these people over the course of its own life, shouldn’t they actually pass it by like flies? A true attempt to cinematically inhabit a lifeform with such a drastically different qualia from humanity might be too alienating for most audiences; think of how Deborah Stratman imagines the inner lives of minerals in Last Things (2023).

And yet I keep thinking about the ginkgo. Enyedi has at least rapturously captured a tree’s physicality, even if she can’t realize its interiority. The characters to whom the ginkgo is a silent friend are not nearly as vivid—and it barely factors into Grete’s and Hannes’s plotlines. The movie creates friction between its leads and their peers through conflicts that verge on the cartoonish. Academics in 1908 being over-the-top boors is believable enough, but the student activists in 1972 are broadly ridiculous, punishing Hannes for leaving a sit-in by… leaving the sit-in themselves to follow him home, where they fuck with the geranium, which is ’80s-movie-level bullying. By the 2020 section, a university groundskeeper is in a resentful petty feud with Tony that only gets more absurd when he discloses what spurred his anger.

It doesn’t help that the movie cuts between the three threads with little regard for meaningful thematic parallels, or sometimes just basic pacing. Hannes’s section feels less like it reaches a natural end than it does like the story stopped bothering to check in on him. The best example of the movie’s lack of conviction in its humans is its use of Léa Seydoux. She gets the first “with the participation of” acting credit I’ve seen, and “participating” aptly describes her here, present only via screens as she advises Tony on his experiments. Its depiction of a socially distanced friendship feels entirely removed from the strides taken in making technologically mediated communication more cinematic, and Seydoux’s affect is of gentle disinterest. Silent Friend’s trees and flowers are wonderful characters; its humans are lacking.

Moonglow
Dir. Isabel Sandoval, Philippines/Taiwan/Japan/U.S., no distributor

Moonglow screens May 3 at Museum of the Moving Image as part of First Look 2026.

In her long-awaited follow-up to Lingua Franca (2019), writer-director and star Isabel Sandoval returns to the Philippines and turns back the clock. As with Sandoval’s other films, Moonglow invites viewers down pathways through her cinephilic lodestars from the atmospheric Wong Kar-wai–inspired vintage neon colors and simmering melodrama to the plot mechanics of hardboiled film noirs like Out of the Past and Double Indemnity. The film is not an all-out pastiche but is rather playful with its genres, remixing and pushing against their conventions. Ultimately, Moonglow is a film about how national memory interlinks with personal, romantic memory. It opens with the James Baldwin quote, “People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.” The characters find themselves in an uneasy age of corruption, defeatism, and Martial Law under the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. In such difficult times, nostalgia remains a lifeblood for characters who risk losing themselves. Moonglow looks back down roads not taken, images and gestures emanating through the hazy humidity of the Manila night like cigarette smoke.

Sandoval plays Dahlia, the name of a flower but also a nod to film noir (the Raymond Chandler-penned The Blue Dahlia). Dahlia is not a classic femme fatale, however; she is a deeply disillusioned police detective in Manila. Dahlia is also not a conventional detective, even beyond her gender making her a minority within her field at the time. Not yet fully hardened by the Marcos regime, she has been using her position to funnel money to the poor under the nose of her corrupt superiors and uses the Catholic church, with help from her Aunt (Agot Isidro), a nun named Sister Therese, to help hide the money. The Robin Hood-like nature of this scheme nods more to Dog Day Afternoon’s Sonny Wortzik than The French Connection’s Popeye Doyle. Technically, Dahlia is committing a crime, but she’s not a “crooked cop.”

Soon, her boss, Bernal (Dennis Marisigan), tasks her with leading the investigation of the crime she committed. Dahlia's rationale for her actions is resolutely unwavering and well-calculated; being Bernal’s right-hand allowed her to observe the ways in which she could manipulate the system. The irony of her self-investigation is compounded when Bernal recruits his magistrate nephew, Charlie (played by Filipino actor-turned-politician Arjo Atayde), who is Dahlia’s former lover. Charlie is an unconventional romantic lead in his bookish looks, which are further contrasted against the oafish and lumbering Bernal, a strongman to the corrupt dictator.

In flashbacks to the late 1960s, Charlie and Dahlia’s past is pointedly tied to a pre-Marcos period, although there are oblique nods to what was to come. This past world is more colorful and realized with a recognizable traditional Hollywood glamor. The film's cinematography, by Isaac Banks (who also shot Lingua Franca with intimacy and notes of solitude), shifts between this brighter, richer palette of the past and a darker, more nocturnal present, filtered through a Gordon Willis–esque vision of the 1970s. The jazzy Keegan DeWitt score and the accomplished soundscape by longtime Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien collaborator Tu Duu-chih bring the past into echoing conversation with the present, highlighting analog technologies, from the of pop music echoing in the distance, to the street and rotary telephones, to radio broadcasts crackling through the airwaves. Yet, despite the evocative period detail and production design, Moonglow does not get lost in nostalgia for its time period, nor does it lose sight of the corrosive realities of the Marcosian era.

Sandoval's breakout Lingua Franca was a New York–set immigration story with a doomed romance at the center, sharing with Moonglow characters navigating systems and red tape, and bending the rules—both personal and lawful—out of romantic and heroic impulses. But that film’s central character, Olivia, was far more circumspect and the narrative was in a more social realist register than Moonglow. It is Apparition, Sandoval's film about a 1970s monastery set in a remote Filipino forest, that Moonglow most resembles. Both films are “ghost stories,” asking what one does as a member of an institution seen as a beacon of morality in a time and place where autocratic kleptocracy rules with an iron fist and immorality begins to consume one’s surroundings. The Marcos regime in these films tests the “better angels” of individuals within these systems who seek out their own forms of resistance.

In Moonglow, we see that resistance is not limited to Dahlia but also applies to everyday, like-minded people, such as the journalist Nick Garcia (Rocco Nacino), who wants to confront the corruption head-on. In much of 1970s cinema, these efforts were often portrayed as futile or reckless actions that inflict collateral damage on innocents. Contemporaneous Hollywood titles such as Alien and Apocalypse Now are seen on cinema marquees, and one character even expresses a love for Robert Redford. This was also the time of Filipino auteurs Lino Brocka, Mike de Leon, and Ishmael Bernal (referred to by Sandoval as “the holy grail” of Filipino cinema) at their zeniths, making names for themselves with urban-set dramas featuring overt social commentary. These films would turn them and other national filmmakers into targets of the censorious Marcos regime during the period of Martial Law. Their critical voices persisted even after the People Power Revolution toppled the authoritarian rule in 1986 and were directed at the succeeding government. Moonglow refuses to define itself strictly in terms of what existed pre-Marcos versus the Marcos era but instead points to the possibilities for what might emerge in the Philippines after the regime change, especially in a jolting flash-forward image. Dahlia is preoccupied with what lies ahead, whether it is her wealth redistribution scheme or a possible future with Charlie even as she is being closely followed by Bernal’s goons.

There is perhaps no film genre more cynical or bleak than noir, yet Sandoval's oeuvre upends conventions by never defaulting to outright cynicism, even when her characters are faced with impossible dilemmas and cruel disappointment. Ultimately, Moonglow is less about the intricacies of double-crossing and money laundering than about finding what can galvanize you through the harshness and cynicism of the times in which we live. While the political currents of today show how challenging that can be for all of us, Sandoval's romantic filmmaking offers an atmospheric, tantalizing tonic.

Humboldt USA
Dir. G. Anthony Svatek, U.S., no distributor

Humboldt USA plays May 2 at Museum of the Moving Image as part of First Look 2026.

Alexander von Humboldt was a German scientist who explored South, Central, and North America in a series of expeditions between 1799 and 1804. He was, by all accounts, a great humanist and his extensive research across the then-uncharted wilderness of the Americas has earned him recognition as the “father of ecology.” There are more species and places named after him than any other human being. These include the South American Humboldt Penguin and Berlin’s prestigious Humboldt University. Here in the United States, his surname is everywhere: in parks, museums, reserves. Yet if you were to ask most people on the street about him, chances are they’d reply, “Who?”

An admirer of Humboldt, documentarian G. Anthony Svatek decided to focus his feature debut on three locations in the United States named after the renowned naturalist: Humboldt County in Nevada; Humboldt Redwoods State Park in California; and Humboldt Parkway in Buffalo, New York. These sites bear zero trace of Humboldt’s influence despite their names. And, perhaps more importantly, these are all places contending with their own environmental challenges, something Humboldt predicted would only worsen with time in his writings about the emergence of industrial factories. In Nevada, Svatek observes the plight of the dwindling big-horned sheep population; in California, he documents a couple’s attempts to create a 3D render of the state park in the (very possible) event it disappears; in Buffalo, he interviews a couple that lives in what’s considered one of the most polluted stretches of land in the state. Although Svatek’s film is constructed as a love letter to Humboldt, it reveals something larger: the state of a nation that has abandoned his wisdom.

Ahead of his travels to the United States, Humboldt wrote a letter to President Thomas Jefferson expressing his wishes to visit. For Humboldt, like many other Europeans of a romantic bent, the United States’ emphasis on democracy and equality signaled the future—an alternative to centuries of small-minded monarchic conventions. Jefferson welcomed Humboldt with open arms; later on, he’d refer to him as “the most scientific man of the age.”

Jefferson makes an appearance in Humboldt USA. At a shopping center in Nevada, there languishes a Jefferson automaton that can recite his presidential address at the push of a button. He stands alongside his peers—Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and so on—ignored by most shoppers. In what might be the film’s standout sequence, Svatek cuts between these sad automatons and overlaps their speeches so as to produce pure gibberish. It’s a perfect metaphor for a film about forgotten history and a clear example of Svatek’s dark comedic wit. As he cuts between the lonely automatons and the voice-over grows denser, it becomes obvious how distant the U.S. has gotten from its foundational tenets. Propped up to deliver their presidential addresses on demand until they fall into disrepair, the automatons offer a strange vision of a country that appears future-less, its historical highlights transformed into entertainment and its scientific ambition reduced to spooky toys. Later on, Svatek will film a casino in Nevada that loops videos of nature reserves while customers gamble. Few filmmakers have been able to capture American stupidity with such precision.

Another kind of hopelessness presents itself in Svatek’s documentation of Humboldt Redwoods State Park. In one area of the park, Svatek films researchers photographing the forest to create a digital twin that will be fed to machine-learning models. (This process recalls those discussed in Svatek’s 2017 short .TV, in which the citizens of the disappearing island nation of Tuvalu decide to upload a digital copy of their country.) Elsewhere, Svatek follows a ranger who makes TikToks for children about the environmental challenges facing the park. Between the 3D model and the TikToks, Svatek makes it seem as though the park doesn’t exist IRL anymore. Whatever grand natural landscape Humboldt fell in love with in his travels appears abandoned and displaced, only accessible via the Cloud or social media.

Questions of displacement resurface in the scenes Svatek devotes to Humboldt Parkway in Buffalo, where an expressway has replaced the famous green loop that used to connect the city’s two largest parks. It seems that every place in the United States bearing the title “Humboldt” is synonymous with some sort of environmental failure. “Everything is interconnectedness,” Humboldt once wrote in his nature diaries. He penned this to describe symbiotic relationships in nature, his hope being that the maxim would make people more aware of their own impact on the environment. But, in Svatek’s worrisome portrait of the United States, the phrase takes on new meaning.

Present-day America, Svatek argues, is not connected by nature, national pride, or shared ideals. Rather, it is a web of indifference and ignorance: to environmental disaster and of manmade technological damnation. That Svatek never connects any of the discrete chapters in his film is telling and points to how isolated battles against environmental destruction have become. On one coast, an old-growth forest faces imminent danger; on the other, a couple risks lung cancer due to the replacement of trees with concrete. Yet these are separate battles, isolated, much like the kids who tune into the ranger’s TikTok dispatches but can’t hike the same park trails he shows them. Svatek’s documentary, though made with a deceptive lightness of tone, is a tragic one, and it aptly ends with a scene of a middle-aged man who records himself on an iPhone dancing to dubstep in the middle of one of our nation’s most hallowed natural reserves. That image alone should serve as a wake-up call to a new generation of environmentalists… Unless it’s too late.

The Whole World Is a Lie
Dir. Charlie Birns, U.S., no distributor

The Whole World Is a Lie screens May 1 at Museum of the Moving Image as part of First Look 2026.

Since Lee Strasberg’s death in 1982, Method acting has fallen out of favor with the public. Former students of Strasberg like Al Pacino and Ellen Burstyn have attempted to preserve their mentor’s legacy with their celebrity status as co-presidents of the Actors Studio, but his teaching lineage has shifted toward niche environments rather than major institutions. Now, pupils like Tony Greco, an acting coach perhaps best known for teaching Philip Seymour Hoffman, carry on Strasberg’s lineage in a smaller, some might say cult-like, pedagogical setting.

Greco’s acting class at the Gene Frankel Theatre in Manhattan is the primary location of Charlie Birns’s reflexive documentary The Whole World Is a Lie. It’s here that the director, once a student, wants to “elucidate ideas and associations” he discovered while taking this class with Greco 10 years ago. Unfortunately, his vague thesis, tentative demeanor, and camera crew, with its observational yet disruptive position, seem to rub everyone in class the wrong way. The resulting tension undermines Birns’s initial project and becomes the film’s subject, revealing the uneasy power dynamics at play between filmmaker and participants while simultaneously exposing the performative nature of the space, where “emotional truth” and staged expression is often blurred.

Greco establishes his authority with Strasberg’s basic relaxation exercises. As his students chant, slump forward, and roll their necks in foldable chairs, Greco reminds them that this tension is the enemy of the creative process. He’s teaching the fundamentals of Strasberg’s work, but rather than exerting a zen aura, he embodies his former acting teacher’s dogged spirit. Greco maintains this dominance during his first class with Birns in attendance. He calls the director a tool, much to his students’ enjoyment, and reminds everyone that the cameras will heighten and change their classroom dynamic before breaking the fourth wall. This brief moment of eye contact with the camera underscores Greco’s awareness of the filmmaking apparatus. Rather than accepting Birns’s obscure, and possibly self-serving premise for a documentary, Greco controls every scene he’s in. He’s aware of the camera’s presence and actively resists its absorptive framing through direct address that is sometimes passive and other times openly hostile.

Birns is in many ways the polar opposite of Greco. His muted, go-with-the flow mentality is perhaps inspired by all the random talking heads in his film. He enlists tarot card readers, movement researchers, and Buddhist monks to provide commentary on consciousness and transformation. Their anecdotes leave more questions than answers, like why is this happening and who is this film for? Birns’s exploratory nature structures the film, but this doesn’t make his presence any less frustrating for his classmates. It’s clear that the director needs guidance and is struggling with some sort of emotional block, the same one that is holding him back in Greco’s class. During one heated exchange, a group of students attack Birns over his indecisiveness, eventually mutinying. He never matches their vitriol, but the camera captures his disappointment after Greco delivers the death blow, “you’re a very bad producer and director.”

The Whole World Is a Lie has a conventional visual language that highlights its reflexiveness. Birns includes scenes where he consults his cinematographer, Peter Butaine, and camera operator, Marina King, who remind him that “actors are crazy,” and he doesn’t shy away from the less glamorous moments of moviemaking (lights being repositioned, boom mics dipping into frame). But because Birns’s on-screen persona is often verbally withholding, these choices suggest he has the intelligence and financial resources to assemble a skilled and capable crew. When the director’s father, Michael, asks, “How much money are you wasting on this documentary?” while driving around the Hamptons in a BMW, the question registers both as a cruel joke and a pointed reminder that Michael is most likely funding the film’s production in one way or another.

Method acting is built around the conviction that audiences desire access to an actor’s emotions. Unlike real life, in which people are often self-conscious, Method performances are expressive. Michael adheres to this principle despite, like Greco, playing himself. As a self-made man from the Lower East Side, he embodies a certain chutzpah despite his age. Michael is not afraid to chastise his son in front of the camera, perhaps as a way of toughening him up or asserting his dominance. Rather than arguing with his father, Birns shows himself taking most insults on the chin, internalizing his pain rather than reacting to it. The director admits as much during one of Strasberg’s “song and dance” exercises. After singing “Happy Birthday” and looking his classmates in the eye, he becomes visibly upset as Greco presses him about his complicated relationship with his father. His voice cracks as he admits to numbing himself so that he could “move through these violent spaces without seemingly being affected.”

The Whole World Is a Lie can be read as an unintentional form of filmmaking-as-therapy, aligning with executive producer Robert Greene’s process-based documentaries, where performance becomes a way of working through experience rather than resolving it. This is evident during the film’s final scene rehearsal of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters. Birns admits to Butaine that he needs to give the audience what it wants: catharsis, so he moves to stage it. He experiences affective memory, the core component of Strasberg’s Method techniques, and for a brief moment, Birns, not Greco, is in command of the film as both an actor and director. He is present, unguarded, and momentarily at ease, suggesting that the film is less invested in resolution than in the process of working through the past.

Joybubbles screens May 2 at Museum of the Moving Image as part of First Look 2026.

The overwhelming presence of smartphones and laptops reduces in-person opportunities for human connection. Archival producer Rachael J. Morrison examines what life looked like pre-social media in her debut feature, Joybubbles. Her subject is phone phreak subculture luminary Joybubbles. Born blind and into a working-class family, Joybubbles (which he adopted as his legal name later in life) whistled and tapped specific patterns over a landline at age four and discovered the telepathic wonders of the world when he could call people domestically and internationally without paying. Despite his talents and tabloid fame, he was harassed by authorities during his time at the University of South Florida, where he was suspended and fined $25 per illegal phone call, and faced systemic ableism in the marketplace.

Her film includes interviews with phone phreak experts like Phil Lapsley and future Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, but Morrison largely draws on archival media and relies on soundbites from Joybubbles’ “Funlines” (offline radio shows) Dial a Conversation, Zzzzyzzerrific, and Stories and Stuff, to trace his legacy and reflect on the many forms of loneliness he endured. (He says early in the documentary that he likes the word lonely.) Through clips from mainstream films like Penny Marshall’s Big (1988) and episodes of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Morrison examines how certain methods of spreading joy have been policed by managerial figures as childish, indecorous, and unprofessional. If Joybubbles, both the film and the person, taught us anything, it’s that relationship-building transcends order and that happiness makes ideas come to fruition.

I caught up with Morrison at a Brooklyn cafe before the film’s New York premiere at First Look on May 2. We spoke about crafting Joybubbles’ story through audio, how he expressed his inner child in an ableist society, and living in a highly digital reality that is the polar opposite of the eponymous protagonist.

Reverse Shot: What was your relationship with Joybubbles, the person, before you embarked on the doc?

Rachael Morrison: I never knew him, so I found out about him when he passed away. I read his obituary in the New York Times. And I didn’t know that there were phone phreaks. I didn’t know there were people hacking phones before computers. So, I was just fascinated by the fact that he changed his identity later in his life, and I thought there would be a movie about him, or a book, or something, and there wasn’t really any big piece of art or work about him. And so that’s when I decided to start making the film. So, I got to know him, you know, posthumously, like through the process of making the movie. Like a lot of people, they would call his fun line, listen only to his fun line, and that’s how they “knew him.” And so I feel like I kind of had a similar experience. I never talked to him. But because I listened to all these tapes of him talking, I know him, almost as if I were listening to him.

RS: You have a background in archival producing and working in libraries. There's a great deal of media on Joybubbles. Were you aware that you would have to primarily use archival materials to tell Joybubbles’ story?

RM: I knew right away that I would have to use archival [material] because when I first started making the film, I hadn't discovered any. I barely found any audio of him, and I only found it through interviews with people. That really changed the whole scope of the documentary. But my plan was always to use archival material to fill in the visual elements.

RS: How many hours of tapes did you work with?

RM: So, the audio probably had like, maybe almost 50 hours of stuff. Yeah, because somebody recorded all of his “Funline” called "Stories and Stuff." And those were what I had and are on archive.org. And so those episodes were like 20 minutes each, and they recorded like 72 of them. We sifted through all those, and then I had a bunch of other cassette tapes I had found from people along the way, so, more than footage, we were sifting through a big archive of audio, and that's kind of how we started the edit. We did “a radio edit,” where we just did an edit of the audio, only as a bed at the beginning, and then we layered the visual elements on top of that. So, for a while it was just interviews and audio, because that's really where the story comes from: the phone. It felt right.

RS: How many of the storytelling decisions you made were more determined by listening rather than seeing? Most people never saw Joybubbles’ face.

RM: It was an audio-focused story, for sure. The storytelling is 90% through the audio. I consider a talking head interview to be audio because you're just listening and the visual is not wildly compelling. When you're watching someone being interviewed, it's nice to see them, but it's more about what they're saying than what they look like. Then it was like finding the archival footage that would fill in the visual space.

RS: I want to ask about age regression, because people with disabilities—mental or physical—experience the childhood that they never truly got after acquiring their disabilities in their youth. Joybubbles was experimenting with telephones before he would get criminalized for something that he didn't know was illegal.

RM: When he discovered how to make a free long-distance telephone call, he had no idea that he was doing something illegal. He was just a kid, and his intent was never malicious. When he was making free calls and hacking into the phone, he was sort of a pure hacker. He just wanted to take the machine apart and put it back together. He wasn't trying to break something. I think he wanted to relive a childhood that he felt was lost to trauma. But I do think it might have been a response to feeling like people had infantilized him his whole life, which you do see in the film, like people just didn't believe. You know, at one point, he says that his boss wouldn't let him get up and walk around the telephone office because he thought he was going to trip or fall over or something ridiculous like that. So, I do think it was a response to feeling that way and maybe sort of trying to take control over that feeling, but I don't know. I can't speak for him, but I do think it's complicated for sure.

RS: As depicted in Joybubbles, phone-hacking later evolved into computer hacking. This occurred before the smartphone.

RM: Oh my gosh, way before. Did you know that people were hacking into phones before computers? Before you watched the movie.

RS: No.

RM: Most people don't. So it's cool to be giving him his due. He's an important person in the history of tech, but no one's ever heard of him.

RS: The phone is a device that should unite people instead of adding barriers in how to communicate.

RM: I totally agree with you. One of the big things that I want people to take away, and it sounds like you did, is the beauty of human connection, like a one-on-one connection with someone, just a phone call. It's so simple, and now we're just so saturated with technology. It's like we forget that that was the beginning. You know? It was just like talking to a friend, a family member, or a co-worker.

RS: Do you think modern day technology has benefited humanity or put us as a society backwards?

RM: It's complicated because, you know, when I work as an archival producer now, I am remote. I don't go to an office anymore, and I don't work with people in person. So that's a bummer, because it's nice to get, you know, face time with people and be with people, and it can be a lot more collaborative, but at the same time, I work with people who live all over the United States, so it can be like a totally different group of people. It's certainly very easy to communicate with people, but it's kind of too fast, and so we don't feel as precious or valuable.

RS: I wonder how the modern-day smartphone affects phone hacking today. I can't whistle to a digital button.

RM: In the ’80s, when the telephone system switched from analog to digital, it was really just the analog system where you could use tones. The phone company got hip to this whole thing because it did get out of control, and it was a major security flaw. So, when they were, I think, building the new system, they made sure that they were putting measures in place that would not allow people to do that. If you wanted to hack a phone, now, it's just a completely different game. Because back then, they were hacking a free long-distance call, and that's meaningless now. We have our plans, and we can call anywhere in the world. Now, hacking is just really malicious. It's like all the spam that we're getting and stuff like that on our phones.

RS: Joybubbles lived in a different world than ours.

RM: I wonder what he would think about the world. He passed away in 2007. He could have been doing things with computers, but he just wasn't interested. He just loved the phone from the beginning to the end.