In 1995, Ngozi Onwurah’s Welcome II the Terrordome became the first British film made by a Black woman to receive theatrical distribution. The film takes place in a dystopian world where Black people struggle in a slum nicknamed “The Terrordome,” hunted by corrupt police officers, racists, and a white supremacist government. Deeply affected by the hate crime murders of Black teenagers Rolan Adams and Stephen Lawrence in London in 1991 and 1993, respectively, Onwurah wanted to make a film that shed light on her country’s violent bigotry towards its Black citizens. Not much has changed today. Inspired by Spike Lee’s seminal Do the Right Thing, she crafted a visceral film that fearlessly depicts violent resistance.

Onwurah began her career as a filmmaker with the 1988 short Coffee Coloured Children, which explored the difficulties that come with being a child with a Black father and white mother. Onwurah (herself the daughter of a Nigerian father and white British mother), felt driven to interrogate her own biracial identity in her films. Another early short, The Body Beautiful, explores the relationship between a Black daughter and her white mother. (The star of that film, Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Berre, also has a role in Terrordome, as Chrisele, a kindhearted woman suffering from drug addiction.) Her debut feature, Terrordome, tells the story of a family and a community torn apart by economic hardship and racial prejudice. The narrative is bookended by the fable of Ibo Landing, an important piece of Nigerian folklore Onwurah first heard as a child. In the legend, the Ibo people reject slavery, choosing death instead.

At the center of the film are two mothers, one Black and one white. Suzette Llewellyn plays Angela, a Black mother searching for her young son who has snuck out after dark. On the streets, where the gangs fight each other and the police, no one is safe, especially not the children. When her child is killed, Angela snaps and begins to fight back. Saffron Burrows plays Jodie, a white woman in love with a Black man and pregnant with his child. She lives in the Terrordome with her boyfriend Spike (Valentine Nonyela), a drug dealer and gang member. But when Jodie’s racist ex-boyfriend finds her, he attacks, killing her son while still in the womb. This too is based on a real event that occurred in early ’90s Britain. But along with this despair, Onwurah shows us resonant moments of resistance and hope for a better world. I had the privilege of speaking with the director about her radical vision upon Janus Films’ 2026 restoration and re-release of the film.

Reverse Shot: What was it like working with the Black actors on this film, considering how painful the material must have been for them?

Ngozi Onwurah: Obviously, Welcome II The Terrordome was shot 30 years ago, right? Now, the safeguards people have on set for actors revisiting trauma… It’s much more ingrained in what is expected and how you deal with things. I think we were right at the beginning of doing that kind of thing, and so we were just feeling our way through it. So, what you've got to understand is, in Britain, Black people are a very small minority of the population, much smaller than it is in America. I think in America, you guys are maybe 13 or 14% of the population? In England, we're about 2 or 3%. So for Black actors there's very few roles, especially roles that people want to really get stuck into. So, when Terrordome came along, there was really an excitement amongst Black actors in Britain we approached. It's also a small world: I was already friends with a lot of the actors and had worked with them before. Brian and Suzette and Valentine, they were all really established Black actors, some of the few that were making a living as actors. However, they all signed up to do Terrordome immediately. And nobody got paid. It wasn't even just that nobody got paid. People had to pay to be in it. Like, we couldn't send drivers to pick them up. They had to pay for their tube to come to set, and things like that.

There was a lot of discussion, especially with Angela's character, because she was going to be the person trying to keep the family together. Her son disappears, she can't find him, she finds him dead. She decides to kill people. So there's a whole range of emotions and storytelling there. We did mine a lot of historical and current news about things that had happened to Black people, and how we thought we'd feel if it had been us.

Now you would have more safety rails and context about how you would support people. Poor Suzette, she's been in four films of mine! And the things that have happened to that woman… As a director, I must say “Imagine the story of this woman, and this happened to her.” You're just asking them to go to those places of pain, and then you move on to the next scene. We talked a lot to each other, but we’re not psychiatrists or therapists.

RS: What was it like working with Saffron Burrows on her character? It's one of those characters where you're watching it, and you're wondering: does the actor know the enormity of what she's representing historically in this context?

NO: Saffron is still one of my best friends. And she was 17, so she was really young. And the thing is, she was a top model. She was earning serious money as a model, so every time she came on set, she was losing money. Now, she grew up in a neighborhood in London called Hackney. And there's a joke in Hackney where you say, “What do you call a white woman with a white baby?” And you say “a racist” because it's one of those neighborhoods where white people embraced Black culture. She went to a school with lots of Black people. Her boyfriend was Black. But she isn't Black, and she knows that. Not only is she not Black, but she's also a tall, blonde, beautiful woman, right? White woman. But she was aware that she was carrying the weight, not only of her character but also the symbolic role as well, of a white woman in that story, in that landscape.

She knew from the get-go where the ultimate scene was going to end. It was going to end with having the fetus beaten out of her. And she was going to go through that, because she knew that the whole way. I hadn't quite decided at that point that she was going to be so completely abandoned. The script was written in three parts, because it kept getting bigger. So I still hadn't quite worked out what was going to happen to her at the end. She was going to go through all that, and she was going to be left to bury her fetus by herself without her partner, and without any of the community that she'd now gone to after having given up her own community.

Jodie’s character is based a little bit on my mum. My mum's white, and I’m always thinking about where white women fit in the story, and is there space for them to work towards the solution? So, she knew that. She was absolutely open to it in a way that was unbelievable. In the scene where she has to bring the baby back to bury him, I wanted her to be really raw. So I asked if she would stay up all night so that she would come to set really kind of jagged. And, it was just brilliant. She was great.

RS: There are so few films, even now, that have this look, this feel, this honesty and brutality. How did you come up with the look of the film?

NO: We were film students when we were making the film, so we were very ambitious. But the essential thing was I wanted it to be really cinematic. Especially in England at the time, a lot of Black films were ridiculously low budget, the scripts usually had to be about urban deprivation and brutality and that kind of white savior thing involved in it. So a lot of it was always handheld, it was always this feeling that the aesthetics didn't matter as much as the story. Getting the story out was what mattered. And I don't mean, like, in The Wire, where it was a part of the story; it was because it was quicker and easier, and that's what the budgets allowed you to do.

And then there was this lack of experience and lack of patience and lack of willingness to light Black skins the way they deserved to be lit. You know, this is shot on film. Fuji was balanced for Asian skin. Kodak was balanced for white skin. Black folks who have the biggest range of skin color, you can go from light to black-blue, and if they were in a scene with a white person they would always light for the white person, and the Black person would end up with this sort of, you know, teeth and eyeball kind of aesthetic, standing next to them. So I wanted really light black skins. I wanted them to look beautiful. I wanted the film to feel cinematic. I almost bit my own nose off because I almost banned handheld from the set. It's like I didn't want that feeling that we were just grabbing it. I wanted to feel like this was a cinematic world that they were living in, because there was a lot of story in the dressing of the set, there was a lot of story in the background.

It was bookended by the story of Ibo Landing. I wanted Ibo Landing to feel very poetic, because it's based on a legend and a myth, and also to feel historical, because those moments are meant to be real in The Terrordome. Are they real? Is it dystopian? Is it purgatory? There's a very cinematic world that exists in the Terrordome, whereas Ibo Landing was supposed to be the anchor, and I wanted it to look very different. African storytelling is very elemental; it's got a lot of fire in it, it's got a lot of water, it's got a lot of wind, and I wanted to really incorporate that into the aesthetic. So there's a lot of fire everywhere. The light from the fire provides light in contrast to the fluorescent lights or neon signs.

RS: What was it like screening this film in 1995?

NO: We had very different experiences based on what the audience was and where we were. So, the first couple of screenings we had in London were just fantastic, because they were friends and family and people we knew. And then as we started to have a few press screenings, the kind of questions that were coming at me afterwards were a lot to do with violence, and violence not being the answer. Was I saying that violence was the only way, the solution to the problem? So there was this feeling that I presented this world where everybody was just really angry, and everybody was taking revenge, and they were excluding the white woman, they were abandoning the white woman, and was that my solution? And so it was this idea that I should come up with a solution, a palatable solution. Instead of just going with my characters: this is what happened to my characters, this is how they felt, and this is how they responded to it, and that's logical. What you're saying is there has to be an add-on to that, where I, as a member of that oppressed group, have to give my oppressors the solution to the problems, right? I can't tell the story without also having the solution. I don't know the solution. I still don't know the solution. But that doesn't mean I have to stay silent, or it doesn't mean I don't get to be angry until I come up with a solution.

So that was the response in England, and it was varied between white audiences, and when we showed it in only Black places, it was a completely different response. In America, it was different, because America is just intrinsically a more violent country.

RS: Usually when there are films like this, it feels like, for a white audience, there's this idea that the film has to hold you at the end. In the end of Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days, also released in 1995, Angela Bassett is beaten by police, but she survives. It was such a stark contrast to your film. I just had to really take some time afterwards to fully come down emotionally from Terrordome. I wonder if there's going to be a difference between the way the white audience felt then and now, considering how little has changed.

NO: I think if you make a film that doesn't allow a white audience to find themselves they have to be completely and utterly absent from it, right? So, take Moonlight, which is a classic. The difference between the response to Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk was quite telling. The white folks in Beale Street weren't good, and there wasn’t much space for them. Whereas with Moonlight, you could watch it as a voyeur. Oh, this is a Black world, let me in it. And so that was interesting also in Sinners, because in that film, there wasn’t any redemption. It was death for the white characters. If you look at Hidden Figures, if you look at so many of them, there still has to be a white savior, there still has to be room for a white character to have a place in the story that isn't just being bad, or being the one that gets left behind.

I don't know how they're going to feel about what happens to Jodie, because Jodie is a good white woman. She's a white woman who's thrown her lot in with Black folks, and she has been abandoned. I'm interested to see whether that's mentioned, because in England, that was mentioned a lot.

I made a film called Coffee Coloured Children. And in the end, I said this line about, oh, the man I love might be white, but the father of my child will be Black. Oh my god, the blowback I got from white people about that line! So it'll be interesting to see how white audiences will view Jodie's storyline, and if Jodie's storyline will be the predominant storyline, or whether they'll see the other stories as all being even, and that's the end of each of those different stories. Angela and Jodie are both mothers who have lost their children. One's still alive, the other dies, but I still think Jodie is the character that a lot of people believe lost the most.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
Dir. Jane Schoenbrun, U.S., MUBI

“I don’t feel great about the progress queer storytellers have made over the past decade.”

Jane Schoenbrun posted this quote to Twitter in June 2026, taken from their own interview in People. In that piece, they go on to lament that despite the wealth of trans filmmakers, there is a conspicuous lack of support for their work.

Since 2021’s The Matrix Resurrections, a film I referred to as “a death knell for the unspoken modus operandi of trans cinephilia” on this very site, there have only been two movies from a trans filmmaker to receive a national release in more than 100 theaters. Both of them were directed by Jane Schoenbrun.

My friends and I joke that the only thing every trans person has in common is that they have an opinion on Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow. That film is being stripped for parts aesthetically and thematically by every trailer house and pitch deck. How do you follow-up a film like that, one that meant something to everyone “like you?” How do you make a film that feels like your own, when everything about your form has been tokenized, appropriated, wrongly treated as representative of your entire community? This is the impossible, infuriating task at hand for Schoenbrun’s new film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, a dizzying, sybaritic jaunt through the intellectual ouroboros of desire.

The film opens with a shaky POV shot of someone walking through a forested film set, deliberately evoking the prologue of the original Halloween and The Blair Witch Project. But the illusion of danger is abruptly shattered upon the revelation that it is a diegetic camera, rigged in place to film a ridiculous 30-foot geyser of fake blood. This is the movie’s first (and by no means last) zag, deliberately deflating the tension for an absurd sight gag. We’re on the set of one of the dozen-odd Camp Miasma films, a fictional late-century series of trashy horror flicks. After that cold open, the film jumps to the present day to follow Kris, a not-so-veiled insert for Schoenbrun. Played by Hannah Einbinder, Kris is a 29-year-old “Sundance wunderkind" who has parlayed her buzzy debut into a shot at resurrecting the eponymous slasher series. They are, in many ways, the archetypal young queer: ambivalently polyamorous, sexually inhibited, a geek with a nostalgic penchant for reactionary media. She also fancies herself something of a sommelier for novelty sweets.

Anybody could tell you that the mountains of candy throughout Teenage Sex and Death, visible in multiple promotional stills, are a metaphor. Here is something “bad for you,” designed to appeal to your basest affections, a cheap thrill and an opportunity for brand synergy. Schoenbrun emphasizes this symbolic overlap between commercial art production and sexual liberation. Throughout the film, Kris rambles to anyone who will listen about what is expected of them and their art. They are being asked to make something unique but impersonal, something to represent their non-normative identity in a totally standardized way, to offer their personal connection to the source text as a sacrificial lamb at the altar of a self-cannibalizing industry.

So, Kris tracks down Billie Presley, the reclusive star and ‘final girl’ of the original film. In our world, Billie is Gillian Anderson—star of The X-Files, Hannibal, Sex Education. She is the formative sexual awakening for three generations of gay losers, and the perfect romantic foil to the prudish, insecure Kris. It turns out Billie has made her home on the abandoned campgrounds where they shot the first Camp Miasma—one of the cabins has even been retrofitted with a projector. The two spend a few nights together, trying to parse their respective obsession with the film and one another.

TV Glow sidelines the minute machinations of its central fictional series The Pink Opaque. In contrast, a solid 20 minutes of Teenage Sex and Death is devoted solely to footage from that first film in the Camp Miasma franchise. The title sequence doubles as a survey of mass-produced Camp Miasma merchandise and a dozen-odd sequels. Schoenbrun and Kris are both eager to fixate on and relitigate the politics of various plot points and individual shots. By the end, it doesn’t feel like you’ve watched the original Camp Miasma, but it feels like a movie that exists, one you know from Treehouse of Horror, or the wall of graphic tees at Hot Topic.

It helps that Little Death, the monster from Camp Miasma, is so persuasively conceived. He was an ill-begot invention, an unholy fusion of Friday the 13th’s Jason and Sleepaway Camp’s Angela (Zach Cherry, telling stories at the campfire, reveals the supposedly revolting rumor that “Little Death changed his gender every day!”). His weapon of choice is a massive harpoon, though he is not opposed to using his hands. He marches up from the bottom of the lake where he was murdered. He wears a silver jumpsuit, suspiciously similar in appearance and texture to a movie theater screen, and a giant metal helmet shaped like a ceiling vent one only notices during missionary, or a night terror.

But there are no true scares, to my recollection, in the entirety of Teenage Sex and Death. It is best approximated as a “stoner rom-com,” with the accompanying submission to trippy, roundabout narrative and characters liable to flirtatious, zonked giggling. It is a celebration of chiller hedonism and lowbrow bacchanalia. Kris and Billie eat KFC out of yonic dipping sauce cups. Gillian Anderson speaks with an unplaceable accent, somewhere between Southern belle and Transatlantic dame. The type of intimacy on display could be triangulated by treating its hypothetical fan-fiction tags like they’re nautical coordinates; for maximum voyeuristic pleasure, Schoenbrun leaves Kris’s anatomy ambiguous.

Halfway through the film, the “age-gap yuri slowburn” is consummated. The previously awkward Kris walks out one night in nothing but boxers, and the two lie together on a bear rug in front of the fireplace. They begin to have sex, only for Kris to almost immediately recoil. They reveal a lifelong struggle with sexual dissociation. In a movie that has so far embraced a heightened style of performance, Einbinder delivers these lines with a disarming, unsettling level of realism.

Each of Schoenbrun’s films comes equipped with a mantra of sorts. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair had, “Keep posting so I know you’re okay.” In TV Glow, the phrase, “There Is Still Time” is etched in chalk. This time around, Billie flirtatiously coos, “If it gets too real, you can always turn it off,” in Kris’ ear. These lines point respectively towards both a central theme and the dramatic thrust. Such signposting makes their work legible to straight audiences as much as it lets people wrongly dismiss their work as superficial or corny. This bad habit is validated by cis people who crave chic proximity to us through art as a kind of cultural tourism. But gay art is only about being esoteric if the audience will only ever be adjacent to gay living. Whether it’s the New Narrative movement of the 1970s and ’80s or John Waters, dorky pastiche has been perhaps the great constant of all American queer cultural movements. Teenage Sex and Death is defiantly, subversively uncool. It likes R.E.M. and plastic kitsch. Schoenbrun’s script, especially in the first act, embraces Whedonesque quips at a time when that style is approaching the nadir of its cultural relevance. Yet Jane’s newest shares a great deal of DNA with something as chic as Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome; both are obsessed with deviancy, music, and incessant reference.

Like the Wachowski sisters’ films, it is about internal desires projected onto formative, schlocky media. This is similar to the dysphoric creepypasta in World’s Fair or the repressor purgatory of TV Glow. Yet here, Schoenbrun has abandoned the emo Americana of their previous work. Teenage Sex and Death recalls Guy Maddin, not just in the painted backgrounds and low-frame rate windswept kisses but also in its Matryoshka doll structure and bawdy psychoanalytic lampshading. But most crucially, this movie is about adults having sex. It is not about solitary activity or hypothetical situations; it is not about being a teenager. Like Resurrections, it is about a messy and difficult interpersonal phenomenon.

Schoenbrun is insistent that their signature style can safely harbor something so emotionally mature, something that looks out as much as in. Perhaps that is why the screen is bursting with other trans and nonbinary filmmakers. Avalon Fast, Eva Victor, Louise Weard, Jess McLeod all fall lovingly victim to Little Death. Behind the camera, Alice Maio Mackay, a 21-year-old trans woman with seven micro budget features to her name, shadowed Schoenbrun on-set.

The last third of the film loses its already tenuous grip on reality, gleefully submitting to a role-play session in which Kris and Billie are transported into the original Camp Miasma so that Billie can coach Kris through a truly embodied orgasm. Our initial encounter with these scenes came through a diegetic screening, accompanied by Kris’s preemptively neurotic political commentary, despite Billie’s repeated attempts to shut her up. In contrast, the film’s extended finale is immersive, luxurious, and joyful.

Camp Miasma is steeped in ironic postmodernism, although where said distance pops up is deceptive. The finale, for instance, might come off as a joke. The combination of Donna Lewis’s “I Love You Always Forever” and a split-diopter shot (a camera trick which Kris noted while watching the original Camp Miasma) certainly feels like a punchline. In practice, though, this is Schoenbrun deploying a memetic, universally recognized device of genre film in idiosyncratic but terms. And sure, it might be a silly song to use, but its titular romantic proclamation is totally earnest.

Conversely, the unspoken implications of the film are noticeably more brutal. Take Little Death: Jack Haven, a thirty-something transmasc, plays a demonic, offensive stereotype of a trans child with overt, proud sensuality. Little Death, a murdered trans kid, is transformed into a sexually liberated heartthrob.

In order to be satisfied, Kris reframes this clear victim in her fantasy as the person in control, the literal lens through which she can finally resolve her dissociation in ecstasy. In such an optimistic and blunt movie, this cruel and subtle narrative maneuver is a bit shocking. The climax, in which Kris gets every other person in her life slaughtered so she can cum, her orgasming face intercut with images of a child sitting beneath the light of a CRT, is a boldly personal, “problematic” referendum on the typical narratives of self-discovery through art.

None of this would work without Jack Haven’s visceral, full-body performance. The keystone for the entire film comes about a third of the way through. In a scene that blurs the line between Teenage Sex and Camp Miasma itself, Little Death butchers a dozen people in ludicrous mountains of flesh, set to the anachronistic but intuitively correct inclusion of “A Long December” by Counting Crows. What might, in other hands, feel goofy or extreme is here totally sincere. The gushy, unnatural CGI bloodletting is tender. In a film that routinely deploys POV shots, here we finally see the camera turn, an elaborately choreographed single take that follows Little Death as they spin around in orgiastic exultation for kill after kill. There is no ironic distance in the split second where Haven’s eyes appear from beneath the helmet’s shadow. It’ll become clear later that the entire film is calibrated around this one moment. Schoenbrun allows everyone—skeptics, academics, fail lesbians—a glimpse of real bliss before taking it all for themselves.

I Want Your Sex
Dir. Gregg Araki, U.S., Magnolia Pictures

Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex opens with a corpse floating in a pool. It’s an obvious nod to Sunset Boulevard, with the dead body of Olivia Wilde’s provocateur artiste Erika Tracy recalling William Holden’s Joe Gillis. But this reference is tossed aside almost immediately, and much of Sex operates similarly, blithely barreling through gags, allusions, discourse points, and softcore sexual imagery without settling too long in one place. The film has been heralded as a “return to form” from one of New Queer Cinema’s brashest voices ever since its premiere at Sundance, yet it turns out to be a fairly conventional coming-of-age story.

So, what is Gregg Araki into now? Pretty much the same stuff as decades ago, this time filtered through a tale of (barely) forbidden love between a dominant artist and her submissive assistant. In I Want Your Sex, Cooper Hoffman’s Elliot is bright-eyed and bushy tailed, a lustful little golden retriever of a boyfriend who has a girlfriend (a perpetually deadpan and disinterested Charli XCX) who barely fucks him and who soon finds himself in a consensual affair with his boss. With the image of Erika’s dead body and a number of cutbacks to an interrogation room (populated by a wooden Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville) where Elliot is being questioned, Araki plants the seed of misfortune. But any gesture toward something darker is a red herring; there’s no real danger other than the usual follies that come with sexual exploration and growing to understand oneself.

In Araki’s oeuvre, I Want Your Sex most closely resembles his gleeful romantic comedy Splendor, which followed a young woman trying to manage being in a throuple with two men. Just as Splendor presented an “alternative lifestyle” (albeit a straight one with a splash of bisexuality) as appealing, I Want Your Sex rejects shame. Where the former film leaned into the potential romance of polyamory, the new film aims to offer a learning lesson for a young man who needs to embrace his sexuality and submissive personality.

Others have noted that Sex is like the straight version of this year’s Pillion; and, yes, the two function similarly from their respective twenty-something shy boy bottoms to dominant and dismissive tops. Yet Araki’s film, co-written by Slutever founder and Now Apocalypse co-writer Karley Sciortino, is far less interested in its leading man’s growth beyond the traditional beats of maturity. He’s largely content to use Hoffman like a rag doll eager to be tortured and pleasured, while offering up jokey sexual imagery. The film coasts on the lead actors’ charisma, whether they’re coyly flirting, loudly fighting, playing drunk, or frustratedly crossdressing.

Wilde gets to chew the scenery like a contemporary art world Norma Desmond, while Cooper rolls his eyes back in ecstasy at everything from a gentle whipping to a thoroughly lubed-up dildo. There’s so much levity that when the film tries to raise the stakes by way of its noir trappings or bluntly reminding us of the skewed power dynamics between boss and employee, Araki loses control of the tone. A collection of frivolous supporting performances don’t help. Chase Sui Wonders gets the most chance to shine, playing Elliot’s best friend, Apple, who gets dragged into an uncomfortable threesome with the toxic duo. That scene shows her skill at physical comedy, especially when compared to Mason Gooding’s Zap, who seemingly only exists to deliver tossed aside gay jokes that would feel dated and out of touch for even Michael Patrick King.

Much like the film’s characters can’t commit without hurting each other, Araki can’t seem to commit to what truly works about his picture without getting distracted by peripheral ideas and satirical asides. In contemporary mainstream film culture where, as the phrase goes, “Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny,” Araki’s I Want Your Sex is as proud of its horniness as its leads are. But that horniness doesn’t necessarily come across as erotic, no matter how much nudity there is, or how many light references to erotic dramas and thrillers there are (an intertitle saying “9 ½ Weeks Later” drops almost immediately).

That may very well be because this is a film about what it’s like to discover your kink in your early twenties made by a man in his mid-sixties. There are various moments that lean into pointed criticism of how Gen Z doesn’t fuck. When Wilde has to deliver lines like “woke police” or “do you know what eroticism is?”, it feels like Araki is talking to others who think like him rather than the kids he claims to be encouraging to go out and hook up. The film also betrays an easy cynicism toward the art world and today’s “content creator” landscape, showing an artist willing to exploit those she even mildly cares about for fame, complete with shrugged-off jokes about selling your personal story for an opportunity. Erika serves as a mouthpiece for Araki’s own musings on both the industry and contemporary sexuality; her anxiety about being considered “over” by the scene that once loved her comes across like an admission from the director that the world has left him behind.

When Erika (a harassment lawsuit waiting to happen) talks about “cutting through the bullshit,” it’s hard not to wonder why the film’s director isn’t doing precisely the same thing. The precious few moments where Wilde reacts like a real human being instead of her dominatrix persona reveal a vulnerability to both character and storyteller; both seem to be poignantly wondering what a future without them and their provocative work might look like. But in choosing to focus mostly on Elliot’s evolution, Araki ensures the façade of coolness remains all we really know about Erika (and himself, by extension).

In the twelve years since his last feature—the misunderstood White Bird in a Blizzard, a smart and sensitive adaptation of Laura Kasischke’s novel that came out just before the lifeless YA boom of the streaming era—Araki found himself in TV no man’s land. Though he was largely anonymous in his Ryan Murphy series contributions, and merely pleasantly self-referential in the TV adaptation of Heathers and his own series Now Apocalypse, there were still glimpses of the Araki we love. I Want Your Sex shows he’s still the same filmmaker, though perhaps lacking the same edge.

I Want Your Sex may not have the anger and tragedy of The Living End, Mysterious Skin, and The Doom Generation; there aren’t any images that feel as incendiary or surprising as those in Araki’s earlier work; and even the soundtrack doesn’t feel as inspired or eclectic as usual. (The on-the-nose use of Jessie Ware’s “Free Yourself” in the credits is missing the energy and impact of New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle” at the end of Splendor.) But it’s still a welcome burst of color in a depressingly grey world, rejecting the dull, digital sameness we’ve become accustomed to. Even the distracting digital effects, like badly animated breasts popping out of Charli XCX’s chest, aren’t enough to detract from these performers’ natural live-action cartoonishness; Wilde and Hoffman often seem like Tex Avery’s horniest characters come to life.

A movie this silly doesn’t have to say much more than “go have sex and discover something new about yourself and the world.” If this new generation is as conservative and sex deprived as Araki claims, maybe this is the call to action they need. I find myself thinking about a scene in Splendor in which Kathleen Robertson, in one of her many direct addresses to the audience, says, “I thought Three’s Company was pretty progressive for its time.” Similarly, watching Splendor in the 2020s makes one wonder how Araki so impressively captured the nuances and beauty of a polyamorous relationship in the 1990s. As entertaining as it often is, I Want Your Sex doesn’t feel all that progressive beyond its hope that people might get a little messy in their attempts to find fulfillment.

Supergiant's latest game Hades II marks a new kind of iteration for the acclaimed studio: it's their first sequel. Sequels in games hold different significance than in film and television. In addition to narrative and visual continuity, games must address the tactile dimension of player interaction. The Empire Strikes Back carries with it the expectation of detailing what happened next to Luke, Han, and Leia. But while Breath of the Wild tells the same story as ever—Ganon needs to be beaten, Princess Zelda needs to be rescued—how the player interacts with that same story might be wholly different from the previous installment. Although these changes might be considered "improvements" for an average tech consumer, in the case of Hades II, they are not so much "improvements" from the previous game as they are lateral moves.

Most developers strive to retain players and keep them excavating the depths of the world they built. Supergiant Games and its creative director Greg Kasavin perfected this in the first Hades, in part by making failure a motivating element. Each death in protagonist Zagreus’s quest to escape the eponymous underworld and find his mother constitutes story progression and character work. Supergiant had been making acclaimed games for 15 years (including 2017’s fantasy sports fame Pyre which featured variable story outcomes), but Hades, combined the illustrative art style of their previous action games, with a type of action game loop they hadn't yet explored.

In Hades each level comprises randomized rooms full of enemies. Completing each room means a reward: either an upgrade for the player to use during this single run (to expire at the end, or upon death) or a material (or currency) through which to craft permanent upgrades. The temporary upgrades stem from the game genre broadly known as “roguelikes” (named for the 1980 game Rogue). But the permanent upgrades connect Hades to the subgenre of “roguelite,” a version of the format more accessible to the average player. Big-budget studio games like God of War: Ragnarok and the sci-fi shooter Destiny 2 have toyed with gentler takes on the framework. Hades remains unique among such titles for incentivizing dying; you have to die, and often, to see a lot of the game. Iteration is so central in Hades that even the ending was retooled for an updated edition.

Hades II is set untold eons after the first game—fitting, given that the first has a running gag about no one in the underworld ever knowing whether it was day or night. The House of Hades has been usurped by the Titan of Time, Chronos, father to Hades and grandfather to main character Melinoë, who escaped the attack on her home as a baby with the help of the witch Hecate. Melinoë was raised to exact revenge on Chronos, so her mission, and the player’s mission is to infiltrate the underworld and find a way to slay the immortal Titan of Time. At the same time, Melinoë, who is Zagreus's younger sister, must also help her extended family of Olympian gods during Chronos's assault on Mount Olympus and the surrounding regions.

The gameplay loop is largely similar to the first game: the player (as Melinoë) fights through about four levels in a single run. But it's in the details where Hades II shines. Because the outline of Hades II is similar to the first game—progress through a series of levels fighting off folkloric creatures and the undead, various boss battles ripped from Greek myth—a new style of engagement makes a significant difference in the actual tactile experience of playing it compared to its predecessor. Melinoë’s offensive capabilities are steeped in her background of witchcraft, resulting in deliberate and complex (and often slow) attacks compared to Zagreus's twitchy melee in the first game.

This minor change in pace befits Melinoë as a character and where the story takes her. Compared to her cocky and hot-blooded older brother Zagreus, who barrels headfirst into conflict, Melinoë is much more coldly pragmatic in how she tackles her cataclysmic family drama and those pulled into its orbit. Supergiant reconfigures the mechanics of Hades to resemble its protagonist's temperament and background. Hades and Hades II are similar in appearance but different in personality. New depths of customization express this: as in its predecessor, each weapon comes with a series of “aspects,” which tweak how they function, but the introduction of “familiars” adds complementary bonuses and defensive capabilities like a polecat who can block instances of damage a limited number of times in each level.

Similarly, design of the levels differ from those of the prior game, through a mix of more open spaces and winding corridors, even revisiting a locale from the first game, here approached in the opposite direction now that Melinoë fights to get into the house rather than escape it. That inverse journey is reflected in every component of Hades II, its soundtrack included. Supergiant's regular composer Darren Korb (who also voices a handful of characters in the game, including Zagreus) threads in familiar motifs among a breadth of newer sounds, the most exciting of which often in on a guest instrumentalist. One standout is jazz drummer Louis Cole's ferocious drum solo from “The End of Time.” Focusing on specific instruments, an unsual approach to video game soundtracking, distinguishes the sequel from its predecessor by pushing specific elements further without compromising the fundamental identity.

Melinoë’s entire life is built around attempting one thing over and over, so what happens when that's done? Some kind of routine has to take the place of her life's mission, so the game continues into perpetuity. Even if the story is set by the writers, players are responsible for ongoing “emergent” storytelling. Maybe in one run the player snatched victory from the jaws of defeat with few health points remaining. Maybe in another the player had a great bit of luck. This is what keeps a game’s narrative shortcomings from feeling fatal—just as critic Rollin Bishop said of the "just one more go" temptations offered by Kirby: Air Raiders in his review. It's all in step with Supergiant's approach: each game from Bastion and Transistor to Pyre and Hades is so different in tone and genre that even with the mechanics or narrative design maintained between each game, there's no sense of any of them feeling outdated.

Perhaps Hades II is the platonic ideal of a video game sequel, far enough removed that new players won't be lost (like NieR: Automata) while developing changes which bend the formula without breaking it. Each entry in the Dark Souls series, another group of games built around the idea of violent trial and error, feels unique because it essentially starts fresh. A sequel like Alan Wake 2 aggressively leans into mechanical and tonal differences, while others (often more mainstream action games like Spider-Man 2) look for addition. Hades II leans on subtle differences of character both in the story and in the game mechanics: cutting features from the first game as well as adding new ones makes this feel like it looks to exist in harmony with the previous game rather than supersede it.

Carrie screens at the Museum of the Moving Image on July 25, 2026, as part of De Palma: Summer of Suspense.

Sissy Spacek auditioned for Carrie (1976) in a pale blue sailor dress that her mother had paid someone to make for her daughter in the seventh grade. She was 25 at the time and had skipped a well-paying commercial shoot for a headache reliever to film a screen test that the studio brass at United Artists had attempted to cancel, until director Brian De Palma intervened on her behalf. As Spacek tells it, this was more an act of kindness than of confidence; the two were casually acquainted through Spacek’s new husband, the production designer Jack Fisk, and the actress had served as a (self-described) “worthless” set dresser under Fisk after losing out on Jessica Harper’s role in De Palma’s 1974 musical Phantom of the Paradise. Spacek’s performance as cinema’s most adorable accessory to murder in Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973) had earned her praise though not a range of meaty parts; she did most of her acting immediately after on the small screen, then considered second-class. When De Palma told her that she would be better off doing the commercial, Spacek became hellbent on getting the role of Carrie White, the doomed, telekinetic teenager first introduced in Stephen King’s 1974 debut novel of the same name.

On the morning of her test, she refrained from showering, streaked globs of Vaseline through her long locks. Once on set, she steered clear of the hair and makeup people who insisted on touching up her appearance. She kept in mind someone she knew from her adolescence in small-town Quitman, Texas, a reclusive classmate who dressed solely in dowdy hand-me-downs and whose sweetness shone through her high-strung habits. “It made you want to save her,” Spacek remembers in her 2012 memoir, My Ordinary Extraordinary Life. After the film was processed, Spacek waited in the car as De Palma, Fisk, and others screened the tests with the producers. It was Fisk who broke the news to Spacek that the decision to cast her had been a unanimous one.

My critical faculties largely escape me when considering Spacek, an actress whom I tend to regard with profuse and uncomplicated adoration. “You felt a core in her that you trusted,” Malick has said of Spacek’s work in Badlands. “It wasn’t all performance. You felt in safe hands with her. And you could imagine that her life goes on off-screen.” Time has not remotely diminished this assessment of Spacek’s peculiar magnetism. Her participation, however brief, in even the most trifling films and series can be a balm, a stabilizing force for narrative and viewer alike. Although I wonder now if this all-consuming affection that Spacek so effortlessly summons has perhaps narrowed the imaginations of casting directors, who have lavished far more sizable opportunities on her peers in recent years. Spacek has not had the 21st-century resurgence that Meryl Streep and Diane Keaton experienced via middle-of-the-road comedies. She has strangely, if blessedly, circumvented the Ryan Murphy Termagant Factory that has ensnared Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates, and Glenn Close. In the quarter-century since her slow-burning “comeback” performance as a flinty, grief-choked Maine mother in Todd Field’s In the Bedroom (2001), Spacek has seldom been called upon to essay a lead role of equally unsentimental substance—or any lead role, for that matter. Instead, she has mostly played maternal figures of meager screen time to A-listers such as Charlize Theron, Julia Roberts, Michelle Williams, and Jennifer Lawrence, the latter of whom wore a Dior t-shirt of a coronated Carrie White during joint press junkets with Spacek for Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love (2025).

Our love for Spacek may have limited our collective ability to envision her as more than a beatific, wisdom-dispensing presence. Surely she can still claim the center of a film by signaling the turbulent depths beneath a stoic facade, as Mary Kay Place did in Kent Jones’s Diane (2018), or, conversely, reach the heights of gonzo greatness that Amy Madigan traversed as diabolical Aunt Gladys in Zach Cregger’s Weapons (2025). After all, few have made a more iconic impression in the realm of horror than Spacek, whose Carrie White has been endlessly imitated and circulated. “Early in my career, I thought that making it in the business meant appearing on the Johnny Carson show,” Spacek writes in her memoir. “These days, a mark of success is having one of your characters tattooed on someone else’s body part.”

Carrie itself might hold the key to Spacek’s enduringly endearing appeal. She is a singular star who has always seemed at once of this earth and flung out of space, the ineffable made incarnate. Pauline Kael compared the freckled, five-foot-two actress to a frog, a fetus, and a changeling in the same adulatory review of Carrie where she wrote, “I don’t see how this performance could be any better.” Spacek’s bloodstained, ramrod-straight body is the film’s signature image, though what endures in my memory is not so much the havoc that Carrie unleashes as the warmth radiated by Spacek. Her surplus of sensitivity, her alien tenderness, deepens the film and gives it an emotional immediacy that it would not otherwise possess. Watching Spacek in Carrie can only be compared to the brilliant micro-expression that quivers across the face of Betty Buckley, undervalued in estimations of De Palma’s film for her immensely sympathetic performance as Miss Collins, Carrie’s lone defender. As Miss Collins forces Carrie to stare at herself in the mirror and appreciate the beauty that she keeps buried beneath a bulwark of hair, Buckley’s face slides from doting regard to wincing worry. She sees what we see: a creature too gentle for this or any world. It is the same sensation one feels when beholding so many of Spacek’s characters, but none more than Carrie. She makes the heart flutter and tautens the protective impulse so that we want to reach through the screen and shield her from harm’s way.

But her Carrie is also an intensely crafted performance, borne of a process that Spacek was still refining at this nascent stage of her career, only a few years after she had chosen to defer her dream of becoming a singer-songwriter in the vein of Joni Mitchell and give acting a shot. She had been introduced to Lee Strasberg’s conception of the Method while residing with her cousin Rip Torn and his wife Geraldine Page in Manhattan, and although her instruction at the Lee Strasberg Institute was short-lived, she had absorbed some of its techniques, most notably sense memory, and drew on them at liberty. Fisk’s presence on set was a comfort, especially when it became clear that De Palma intended to disregard the no-nudity clause written into Spacek’s contract. In the opening sequence where Carrie gets her period for the first time while showering in the girls’ locker room, her husband was perched at her feet, squatting out of frame with the fake blood that needed to be poured into her hand. (When De Palma told her to play this scene like she was getting hit by a Mack truck, Spacek internally ran through Fisk’s remembrances of being struck by a car as a child.)

Spacek delighted in playing against the no-holds-barred maximalism of Piper Laurie, who achieves Grand Guignol indelibility in fewer scenes than memory might suggest as Carrie’s fiendishly fanatical mother. But for the most part, Spacek alienated herself from the ensemble. As Nancy Allen, Amy Irving, John Travolta, and the other actors cast as Carrie’s tormentors bonded on set and partied off it, Spacek holed up in a dressing room decorated with religious paraphernalia. Inside, she blasted classical music and pored over the Biblical etchings of the French illustrator Gustave Doré, whose epic, eldritch figures she aspired to replicate in Carrie’s physicality with its mixture of fearful frenzy and spellbound solidity.

It is the latter trait that typifies Spacek’s performance in the film’s most technically virtuosic sequence, in which a prettified Carrie attends the prom with the hunky athlete Tommy Ross (William Katt) and gets drenched with a bucket of pig’s blood upon being crowned prom queen. Carrie proceeds to dispense with her classmates and teachers in a nearly stock-still trance, a state of chillingly calm concentration that allows De Palma and his collaborators to whip up a homicidal maelstrom that pivots around Spacek’s widening eyes and swiveling head, the surrounding activity enhanced by slo-mo, split-screen, and some of the director’s most sinuous long takes. Little is required of Spacek here beyond stamina and precision, but it is doubtful that the whiz-bang wonderment of prom night would mean anything were it not for the emotional arc that the actress has traced beforehand. As the massacre nears, Spacek plays Carrie less as a latent demon child than as a lifelong wallflower of quite ordinary shyness who is slowly unfastening herself from the perimeter of the room and stepping bashfully into its center. (In a sweet bit of irony, Spacek had been a drum majorette in high school and was actually popular enough to be elected homecoming queen in her senior year.) Just as devastating is the post-prom comedown as Carrie sits naked in the bathtub, a sob rippling her body after scrubbing the porcine blood from it. There is no dark underbelly to her radiant, credulous sincerity, and it is this choice of Spacek’s, her prioritization of genuine feeling, that ensures that Carrie is both a rip-roaring chiller and a tragedy about a young girl who kills the classmates that she just wanted to like and befriend her.

Carrie made Spacek into a household name, as much for her performance as for the evident physical and temperamental transformation required for a sweet-faced, tomboy-leaning twentysomething to become a maleficent teenage terror. “Like De Niro, when she makes contact with celluloid, there’s a transformation,” raved De Palma of his leading lady. Spacek earned her first Academy Award nomination and hosted Saturday Night Live a month later, merrily twirling a baton in a majorette’s leotard during her opening monologue. That same year, Spacek would send Carrie’s naïveté through the trick mirror of Robert Altman’s 3 Women (1977), mutating from lamblike misfit to gum-snapping vixen. She graced the covers of Interview, whose editor Andy Warhol interviewed her himself, and Newsweek, which made Spacek the face of an issue devoted to the “Year of the Actress” and proclaimed her to be “the most promising of all” the decade’s burgeoning female stars. De Palma’s film guaranteed Spacek a career, but it is Spacek who guaranteed De Palma’s film a place in the pop-cultural firmament and a poignant afterlife. Somewhere along the line, Spacek decided that it was not enough that Carrie White suffer and slaughter for our consumption, but that her ache become something undeniably potent, a hope-starved sorrow capable of seizing the viewer and sending a silent wail down the spine. She wants us to know how it feels.

The year 2001 was the beginning of an end for what we now call the “New Korean Cinema.” In the mid-90s, a new generation of filmmakers such as Hong Sang-soo, Lee Chang-dong, and Bong Joon-ho made their first films, which reshaped the national cinema. None of their early films were commercial successes, yet these directors were given second and third chances to eventually make their career-defining works. That period of generosity and patience started to dissipate in 2001, a punishing year for those just starting out. Sorum, Waikiki Brothers, Tears, and Nabi are every bit as critically acclaimed as The Day a Pig Fell into the Well, Barking Dogs Never Bite, and Peppermint Candy, but their dismal box-office dampened the filmmakers’ career prospects. The most lauded of the bunch was Jeong Jae-eun’s Take Care of My Cat, the only one that has enjoyed an international rediscovery so far. Thanks to the 25th-anniversary release in the United States via Kani Releasing, American moviegoers can finally experience the film, which critic Shiguehiko Hasumi placed on his list of “feature debuts that shook up the history of cinema” alongside They Live by Night, Fists in the Pocket, and Xiao Wu.

At the center of Take Care of My Cat are five recent high school graduates from Incheon, South Korea’s third most populous city after Seoul and Busan. Ji-young (Ok Ji-young), an orphan living with her grandparents in a dilapidated house on the verge of caving in, is adrift after losing her factory job and wishes to become a textile designer one day. Hae-joo (Lee Yo-won) is the most career-driven of the five, employed as a secretary at an investment firm in the capital. Overseas xChinese twins Bi-ryu (Lee Eun-shil) and Ohn-jo (Lee Eun-jo) sell handmade jewelry on the street of Incheon’s Chinatown. Tae-hee (Bae Doona in her first major role) comes from a comfortable middle-class home but clashes with her parents who display blatant favoritism toward her brother. She divides her time between working at her family’s sauna without pay, volunteering as a typist for a poet with cerebral palsy, and acting as the center of gravity for the friend group. After a deceptively sweet opening scene, wherein the five girls in school uniforms take a group photo on a dock, the film tracks the quintet’s gradual dissolution in a series of vignettes.

It’s hardly incidental that Jeong situates this story in Incheon rather than Seoul. Long imagined as both gateway and periphery—a port city built on migration, industry, and transit, forever negotiating its relationship to the capital—Incheon embodies the contradictory promises of post-IMF South Korea. It is a city defined by departures and arrivals, where container ships, ferries, commuter rail, airplanes, and buses continually carry people elsewhere. For the five women, adulthood is measured not simply by employment or romance, but by the changing routes they take through the city. Friendship itself becomes a question of geography.

As they navigate young adulthood against the backdrop of economic precarity induced by the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the subsequent neoliberal consolidation, they each pursue different priorities, and their friendships begin to fracture as a result. On the surface, it’s the rift between Hae-joo and Ji-young, best friends in high school, that knocks over the first domino: the former’s well-meaning but condescending life advice and lack of appreciation for Ji-young’s birthday gift—a cat referenced in the film’s title—activate the latter’s deep-seated class resentment and insecurities about her place in the world. But the film does not blame Hae-joo, and instead sheds light on external obstacles that get in the way of their friendship. Hae-joo, following her parents’ divorce, moves to Seoul in an attempt to rise above her vocational school background. Ji-young isolates herself from the group as her financial situation worsens, and ends up in a juvenile detention center shortly after her grandparents’ death. Tae-hee, after desperately trying to mediate between the two, realizes that the time has come for them to move on, and suggests to Ji-young, following her detention, that they leave their hometown and start a new chapter somewhere far away.

Disappointing box-office returns notwithstanding, Take Care of My Cat instantly created a cult following upon its release, especially among young Korean women. For them, the film has proved deeply resonant in its mature handling of interpersonal conflicts between female friends, the thoughtful integration of early cell phones into its plot and cinematography, and the characters’ desires to seek reprieve from classism, patriarchy, and the rapid financialization of the South Korean economy at the turn of the century. The film’s endearing use of Y2K digital communications has come to be regarded as one of its defining virtues among its anglophone fans. While it does stand out as one of the handful of films to have successfully incorporated texting into its mise-en-scène, Take Care of My Cat is much more than a nostalgia trip. In his review, Hasumi praises Jeong’s extraordinary talent for capturing the kinetic forces of human bodies, physical objects, emotions, and cityscapes in motion. Even when the characters remain stationary, the director’s “cruelly transparent” camera, the Japanese critic notes, is able to imbue the frame with the currents of their solitude, vulnerabilities, and youthful daydreams: Ji-young stood up in a cafe, Hae-joo smoking in front of a gray building, and Tae-hee lost in literature while camping outside a juvenile prison.

It’s no surprise that a film this attuned to all things on the move utilizes various modes of transportation to articulate a city’s history and textures, and how these shape its inhabitants’ lives. From the opening scene, the cargo ships docked in the harbor and the off-screen sound of the jet engine seem to be of a piece with the quintet’s adolescent days, when all possibilities feel within reach. Over the course of the film, however, this turns into a psychogeographical image of their restlessness and longing for a solid foundation to anchor their dreams on. Hae-joo moves closer to the Seoul office. Ji-young gets on the bus in search of work and escape from her immediate troubles. Tae-hee fantasizes about a nomadic life on a boat. The three dream of leaving Incheon but with different means and reasons. Curiously, the Chinese twins are never seen on public transportation on their own. By the end, everyone leaves town except for Bi-ryu and Ohn-jo, whose family, like numerous migrant workers from China and Southeast Asia we see throughout the film, found home in Incheon through displacement. The cat is left in the twins’ care while Tae-hee and Ji-young board a plane.

Jeong’s use of transportation as a narrative structure recalls another 2001 film, Millennium Mambo, which takes the opposite approach. Hou Hsiao-hsien, responsible for some of the most exhilarating shots of moving trains and speeding motorcycles, omits protagonist Vicky’s travels between Taiwan and Japan. Strangely, aside from the iconic opening scene, most of the scenes set in Taiwan are interior, while the film’s most memorable exterior shots take place in Japan. By the film’s visual logic, Vicky exits Texound Club in Taipei and finds herself on the snow-covered street of Yubari. Hou constructs the archive of Vicky’s private memories by shrinking the distance between Taipei and Yubari with abrupt cuts.

Take Care of My Cat observes in minute detail how its characters orbit around Incheon. If the film feels much grander than the sum of its subject matter and the ambitions of the five girls, it’s because Jeong manages to capture Incheon as a cosmos, its residents planets orbiting around the city, and interpersonal relationships between them the gravitational field. The girls leave Incheon to forge new orbital paths as their family units and friend group erode—in Tae-hee’s case, she extricates herself from it—but the desire to leave might be the only way to stay connected to a city defined by departure.

The Odyssey
Dir. Christopher Nolan, U.S., Universal

“The Odyssey was shot and finished on film”—an unusual line for the end credits scroll of a studio production, one almost certainly attesting to Christopher Nolan’s ongoing mutual-admiration society with British visual artist Tacita Dean. Both are avid celluloid loyalists who have spoken together on the medium’s irreplaceability at multiple Kodak events; he credits her with teaching him the term “medium specificity,” and it’s improbable that the coinage “finished,” most often heard in the realm of experimental film, snuck in any other way. Both have pushed beyond standard film usages: there’s not such a world of difference between the instinct that led to Dean’s 2011 installation FILM—which projects a 35mm loop on a 42-foot screen—and Nolan’s nearly two-decade quest to normalize IMAX. The shared goal, on some level, is to overwhelm with scale in service of highlighting the stock itself.

The first narrative feature to be shot start-to-finish on IMAX film, The Odyssey showcases lustrous ocean hues and $250 million worth of production value to sporadically radiant color effect. Projected on celluloid, it does meaningfully look like something that avoided a digital intermediate as much as possible. Nolan has taken a great deal of publicized time and trouble to get around the volume of the IMAX camera, whose sewing-machine clatter while operating previously precluded the possibility of recording dialogue. Having designed a new “blimp” to surround the camera and contain its noise (an innovation that required actors positioned around it to make eye contact via mirrors), he offers the first test-case for this as a feature-length narrative medium. After seeing Tenet in both 70mm widescreen and IMAX 70mm and decisively preferring the former’s crisp compositions to the latter’s unwieldy visual bulk, I wasn’t surprised to find I don’t think IMAX 70mm works here either. There are expected pleasures from familiar sources of IMAX’s previously demonstrated strengths: long helicopter shots soaring over cliffs and other images that include humans primarily as reference points for scale. But screen-filling close-ups with lots of headroom do not make a convincing case for this as a compositional strategy. Perhaps it’s the lack of visual texture and attention to color and set design; size aside, the visual effect is generally bland, and it’s difficult to forget that you’re watching a product designed for two entirely different compositional modes and releases. Sometimes, while bored, I would mentally reframe shots for widescreen, which was often easy to do when the set was systematically underlit at both top and bottom in ways that makes that part of the framing’s loss negligible.

Nolan plays the expected hits of Odysseus (Matt Damon) making his way back home after the Trojan War, peaking early with two of the most famous setpieces. This rendition’s Cyclops is very cool indeed, a synthesis of animatronics, puppetry and some kind of CG finishing appliqué that’s decisively uncanny with its humanoid frame, lumbering with a center of gravity and slowness that places him surprisingly close to the smaller but similarly sinisterly lumpy creature in Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April (2024). The transformation of Odysseus’s crew into pigs by the goddess Circe (Samantha Morton) is admirably grody, with the witch sculpting men’s faces into pigs like a rogue, real-time Tom Savini. Thematically, The Odyssey’s larger arc aligns with Nolan’s regular preoccupations. His male protagonists are nearly always haunted by either the possibility of losing their female partner or having actively contributed to their harm, and Nolan’s Odysseus is the definitive wife guy, grinding for 20 years to make it back home. Waking on a beach as an amnesiac, Odysseus tries to recall how he ended up in this situation, something the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron) warns against: “You want to remember, but what if memory destroys your happiness?” We are nearly back where Nolan started, with Odysseus adrift in the literal boat Memento’s Leonard Shelby occupied metaphorically.

Nolan’s big adaptation contribution is to bend the text towards atheistic ends. Rejecting religion is a fine line to walk when your story involves multiple gigantic monsters, but Nolan cordons off the fantastical into the realm of Ray Harryhausen, functionally separate from any of the mythological faiths they were attached to. The opening title card sets the agenda: “A time of apparent magic,” that penultimate word setting the skeptical tone. There are no gods in the clouds debating the mortals’ fates here, and Odysseus is constantly denying their will or existence, as is son Telemachus (Tom Holland). In this context, while “Zeus’s law” is often invoked and defined as the obligation to host strangers lest they be a god in disguise, its usage is bandied out by characters of varying levels of admirability, sometimes quite cynically. The only god Odysseus actually encounters is Athena (Zendaya), whom he converses with and who no one else can see, which is in keeping with the source material, where she’s frequently either disguised or invisible. But Nolan has a final twist: Athena bears the same face as one of the victims slaughtered in the invasion of Troy, and Odysseus talking with her is quite possibly just a form of processing his trauma. Religion is a story we tell ourselves to reconcile with that which we can’t rationalize or comprehend, a less preferable form of storytelling to the purely secular; the final voiceover spells out, with Nolan’s usual lust for clarity, that we will forget the lessons of history until we revisit its stories.

Why Nolan wants to use a lot of resources at this moment to triple-underline “the power of storytelling” is clear enough. We are repeatedly told that we are watching a civilization nearing its end, in which the breakdown of the laws of hospitality is part of the larger decimation of the social contract. It turns out right-wing critics who preemptively decried the film were right to be wary, insofar as it stands against war, violence, and misogyny and for civility. While Nolan’s dialogue is certainly not taken from Emily Wilson’s 2018 translation, he might well have borrowed some guiding principles from her translator’s note, which states that “A translator has a responsibility to acknowledge her own agency and to wrestle, in explicit and conscious ways, not only with the multiple meanings of the original in its own culture but also with what her own text may mean, and the effects it may have on its readers. Because The Odyssey has become such a foundational text in our educational system and in our imagination of Western history, I believe it is particularly important for the translator to think through and tease out its values.”

Nolan takes that principle and extends it out to Circe all but explicitly saying she was raped, then having Odysseus confess that the invasion of Troy, while seemingly his greatest triumph, in fact traumatized him for life, echoing the historical hand-wringing of his Nolan predecessor Oppenheimer. The text can take reinterpretation, but the effect doesn’t seem to land: my audience applauded at the final kill, the opposite of the desired response. Whom the gods wish to undermine, they first make ambitious against the inevitable.

In Six O’Clock News, his 1997 meditation on emergencies, Ross McElwee visits acquaintance Barry, who’s set up a Marion Stokes–like project to constantly record everything on television, running ten sets at once, stacked together like a Nam June Paik installation. Barry’s compulsion is a variation on McElwee’s own—at least based on how he’s presented himself in this and other works, a camera always in hand. In his earlier documentary Time Indefinite (1993), which concerns several simultaneous family tragedies, McElwee narrates: “There must be some way to deal with this through my filming.”

Since his thesis film, 1977’s Charleen, McElwee’s work has acted as a long-form study of his life, like an autobiographical, irregularly released version of the Up series. Along the way, he’s also found methods to interrogate this life logging, and to interrogate his interrogations. In one shot that recurs inseveral of his movies, he films his young son, Adrian, as he toys with the kaleidoscopic image created by pivoting two bathroom mirrors toward each other. McElwee himself can be seen in the reflection, holding his camera. The visual is a useful key to his broader project and its interest in cinema as a mediator for memory and personal identity.

These themes come to a head in Remake, McElwee's newest feature. In it, he grapples with Adrian’s 2016 death. The many clips of his son throughout the years (some seen in his earlier works, some not) represent how he continually turns events over in his head, wondering what could have gone differently. He also follows various misaimed attempts to adapt his 1985 personal epic Sherman’s March as a fiction film (or, of course, a miniseries). Ahead of Remake’s theatrical release, I sat down with McElwee over Zoom to discuss the documentary and his evolving feelings toward his craft.

Reverse Shot: In Remake, you say that you used to call yourself a filmmaker. You say this while making the film. Was it intended as a statement to apply retroactively, or is it more capturing how you felt at the time?

Ross McElwee: That quote occurs right at the beginning of the film; it’s reiterated two-thirds of the way through, and it echoes throughout. It just popped into my mind as I was working. I was confused about exactly what I would do next. It came probably a year after my son had died, and I didn't know how to begin to process that into a documentary. During that year, I grappled with whether to try to write something, like a memoir. I didn't feel I wanted to work with home movie footage of him because it was too painful at that time. Gradually, I got to a point where I could go through the footage, but that phrase—I used to call myself a filmmaker—stayed with me throughout the whole process. “This has upended so much in my life, including what I think of my work. How do I go from here?”

RS: And your films are on time delays from the events they capture. The operetta based on Sherman’s March appears toward the end of Remake, but that happened back in 2014.

RM: Right. I filmed the opera performance in 2014, two years before my son died. I was thinking I’d follow this film, wherever it goes, to anything even tangentially related to the notion of remaking Sherman's March as a fiction film. The operetta was one of the more surreal things that's ever been offered to me. I decided to give the rights to the composer, and later I called him and said, “Wait a minute, I'd like permission to film the rehearsals and the opening performance.” And he of course agreed.

There were other things we filmed after Steve Carr's production. Another Hollywood person wanted to take a crack at it, and she worked on it for at least half a year. I went out and filmed a table read in L.A., which doesn’t appear in the film. Maybe it's obvious, maybe it's not, but I filmed a lot of things with no idea of how they would be interesting or what film they would end up in. It’s all part of the tradition I was rooted in as a young filmmaker, which is cinéma vérité or direct cinema, where the idea was to be alert enough to capture things as best you can.

RS: You’d also documented an earlier attempt to adapt Sherman’s March in Six O'Clock News.

RM: I've always found myself interested in what Hollywood and fiction filmmaking try to do, as opposed to my kind of filmmaking. You could say that on a grander scale, Bright Leaves was pursuing something I thought would be revelatory, a Hollywood movie by Michael Curtiz that supposedly represented the story of my great-grandfather, a tobacco manufacturer in North Carolina. That turned out not to be true. These missteps, the things I expect to happen that go glaringly off course, are what give the films some vitality that they might not otherwise have.

RS: In Sherman's March, you wonder if you're filming your life so that you can have a life to film. Has that feeling persisted?

RM: Of course. It never goes away.

RS: How prevalent has that filmmaking impulse been in your everyday life over the years?

RM: I think people have the mistaken impression that I always have a camera ready to go. There were periods in my life when this was true. But certainly, around family, I filmed less than 1% of the time. But I let the impression stand because I think it has comic potential—this persona, or a character played by me, with his obsessions. Somehow, there's a truthful version of me wrapped up in all that.

RS: How have you preserved everything you’ve shot over the years? How much is digitized?

RM: Most of what has any potential of making it into a film in the future has been digitized. And even that's a risky assumption, trying to choose what's going to be relevant 10 years from now. Sometimes I think I should just digitize everything, but it would be too much. And I don't want the responsibility of going through all that footage. I try to do a pre-edit through my archiving. I don't think there'll be too much lost in that approach. Everything's on drives—some in New York, some here in Boston—and all the films themselves are in an archive at the university. So stuff is being preserved outside my house.

RS: You reuse certain scenes throughout your films, especially this one. How do you get the feel for how much old footage is appropriate to use?

RM: It’s always intuitive. I don't have a formula that says, “Okay, you've used this three times, you can't use it a fourth”’ Also, the older you get, the more there is to look at what from you filmed in the past. I’m a lot older than you are; maybe you feel that way about your writing. You look at this huge volume of stuff that's accumulated over the years. There's just so much more to choose from that I find myself more and more looking backward in my films, as opposed to looking forward. That makes me a little bit sad because I always like the idea of going out, discovering something new, and filming it. I hope my films always have some quotient of that. But as you get older, it's less and less likely—for me, anyway. I have to have faith that whatever I go back and choose has some relevance to the story I want to tell now.

RS: But there's also value in looking back and finding new significance in old footage, seeing how these scenes get recontextualized through what’s happened since.

RM: Yes, I think it's true for all of us. We look at something we shot when we were 20, and then you look again at 40, and things have radically changed. The world has changed, your family has changed. And that's interesting. I think that’s becoming more and more a part of documentary filmmaking. There’s more video coverage of people who, for whatever reason, end up being the subjects of films. That certainly wasn't true 40 years ago, when I was beginning my filmmaking career. I think the world at large has made it very easy to film anything and everything. And the huge amount of possibilities becomes a massive editing problem.

RS: You've taught for many years. How have you seen this technological and social shift play out in your students’ work, or how they respond to your work?

RM: It’s hard for me to say. I don't show my own films in class; they can see them on their own if they want. And it depends on the class, but for introductory-level courses, I prohibit students from making films about their own lives, because I think it's difficult enough to master the technology. These people have never shot with a camera before. They may have shot with cellphones, they may think they know what they're doing in terms of composing shots, but invariably, there's a lot for them to learn. It’s not just me but my colleagues as well: at the entry level, we insist that students go out into the world and find people, places, events, subjects that seem interesting for whatever reason but are not autobiographical, and to film them. And they do it. At first, they're a little intimidated by that mandate, because it's so much easier to film on campus. It’s intimidating to approach strangers in a strange city. Most of them are not from Boston. But they find a way to do it.

And we have more people applying for these classes than we can accept. They’re popular in a way that sometimes surprises me. We have one 16mm course, and it stays on year after year. That course has been taught since way before I was teaching at Harvard, but it keeps going and is very much in demand. Students have heard about 16mm and want to try it. It’s too old for them to be nostalgic for it, because they weren't alive when it was used. I think they're drawn to the arcane and analog qualities of film and audio recording that don't exist in the digital world and their cellphones.

RS: Besides reusing old footage, you also revisit some of the people from your earlier films. There’s Charleen Swansea, of course, and Wini Wood from Sherman’s March. Were there others you tried to reconnect with whom you couldn’t, or who didn’t want to be filmed?

RM: Oh, yes. There were a couple who declined, mainly people with families. There was one person who didn't think returning would be the best thing for her career. But I was delighted with who I got. I wish I'd been able to film more people from the South over the years. It would've been interesting to see how their lives changed. But that was just not possible because I was teaching and had my family in Boston. One person I was able to film in absentia was Phillip, the mechanic from Sherman's March. He died, but I got to visit his son and film in the same warehouse where we filmed in Sherman's March. I think that has a kind of resonance.

RS: Did you also shoot the scenes with Wini on the same island where she was living in Sherman’s March?

RM: Same place. She doesn’t live there anymore, but she was there for a week visiting people she knew. I’d said, “If you ever go back to Ossabaw, it'd be fun to film there.” That seemed like an apt place to film a follow-up with her. And we did. That said, I would've filmed her anywhere. Wini brings the film to life and offers some really complicated and well-taken observations. She's sort of my double, articulating things perhaps better than I could about the relationship between film and memory.

That particular connection is important to me. The surgery scene, where I have a brain tumor removed, and suddenly we're seeing MRI pictures of my brain and its tumor, and moments from past films appear double-exposed. That’s my comment on memory in filmmaking. When you see my son fishing double-exposed over a shot of my brain, people get the idea because they see it, as opposed to me explaining it.

RS: Returning to the existential aspect of I used to call myself a filmmaker, what do you call yourself now? Is it a career, or what you are?

RM: Somehow, I think it's a little bit of both. And the further I get from Adrian's death and the completion of this film, the more I think I will be willing and able and ready to undertake another. I haven't arrived at that decision. Frankly, I've been too distracted by all the auxiliary responsibilities of releasing Remake. So, I hope this isn't my last film. This could very well be the capstone to my career, for whatever that's worth.

Though a smattering of films throughout the 1970s, mostly from Senegal and Tunisia, featured minor queer characters, Dakan, which should arrive as late as 1997, enjoys distinction as the first African film to explore same-sex intimacy. For some time, Dakan commanded a respectable, if mixed international profile, including a feted premiere in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, the same edition where Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together competed, and a far less warm reception at 1999’s FESPACO (The Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou), where its Guinean writer-director (and sometime actor) Mohamed Camara had to change hotels every day and dip out of screenings early to avoid violence. Not that the film's laurels, accrued on the festival circuit, did anything to rescue the standing of Camara, who has not made a feature since.

In Mandinka—better known by its colonial exonym “Mandingo” to describe a people (and their language) stretched across Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Mali, and regions of Senegal—“dakan” translates to “destiny.” This is a curious word to characterize what most in the aforementioned countries have been convinced is not even “natural.” Mali was the rare case that criminalized same-sex relations for the first time in 2024, and only in Guinea-Bissau is homosexuality legal. What is natural rarely requires such aggressive regulation.

Camara’s film comes to much the same conclusions. High schoolers Sory (Aboubacar Touré) and Manga (played by the director’s brother Mamady Mory Camara) kiss and cling to each other with quotidian ease. When we find them, their romance is not new and unexpectedly accepted by their schoolmates. Both Manga’s single mother (Koumba Diakite) and Sory’s businessman father (played by the filmmaker himself) appear aware of their sons’ illicit attachment, albeit frustrated by their persistence, until they can bear their defiance no longer. The boys are separated. Sometime later Manga gets engaged to a white woman (Cécile Bois), a pairing more tolerable to his mother, and Sory has a child with a village woman. But they cannot shake each other.

Dakan is an unusual production, even by today’s standards. Our lovers have a measurable touch of what feels like anachronism: the very first scene of the film is almost comically classical—two adolescents making out in a red convertible—but no such scene between men yet existed in African cinema. (For that matter, Western cinema, certainly at the height of the AIDS crisis, was not much better, with its propensity for either unrequited or largely chaste affairs.) The past 30 years hardly boasts a glut of queer African cinema, amid admirable strides like Senegal’s Karmen Geï (2001), South Africa’s The Wound (2017), and Kenya’s 2018 smash success Rafiki. But Dakan eclipses even some of its worthiest successors—at home and abroad—by giving its heroes a happy, not merely optimistic, ending. What makes Dakan such a striking artifact is that the place where we might otherwise fix Manga and Sory in time is marked instead by gaping absence.

Camara, who is straight, had already established his propensity to experiment or test the bounds of narrative convention, with a marked affection for outsiders. In his Denko (1993), a woman—obliged by the albino healer she rescues from drowning—cures her blind son (again Camara, who began as an actor) by having sex with him. While incest and later child suicide, in his 1995 short Minka, betray a curiosity in the murkier, shadowy dimensions of human possibility, Dakan, a soulful portrait of two young men helplessly drawn together, may trace its origins to a more nuclear experience.

Camara was born in 1959, a year after Guinea secured its independence from France. He came of age as indigenous cinema bloomed across the continent in the wake of the Laval Decree, which had previously restricted African filmmakers from making anti-colonial movies. Ousmane Sembène, Souleymane Cissé, and Djibril Diop Mambéty were surely models and, later, peers; in fact, it was Mambéty who reportedly approached Camara after a screening of Dakan and predicted, “You can be sure that your career is over, but in a hundred years, people will still talk about you.” (It should perhaps be noted that certain scholars have located strands of queerness in Mambéty’s own films, including 1973’s Touki Bouki—or “Journey of the Hyena”—due to the animal’s gendered ambiguity and the sexual subversion the creature represents in Wolof folktales.) African films about queerness invariably announce the wound left by European intrusion. Now we know that many pre-colonial African societies, by no means uniform, embraced diverse sexualities.

Camara would see this up close for himself—after a fashion—planting the seed for his influential film. While shooting Denko in Burkina Faso, the filmmaker observed two teenage boys kissing in a nearby courtyard. Even more curious, he watched as they washed the back of a woman in a public bathroom. Sensing his surprise, the locals explained, “They are girls.” At a Howard University post-screening discussion in 1999, Camara explained, “In [Guinea] people’s view, a male homosexual is someone who is very feminine and imitates women…when there is a party or a social gathering it is the homosexuals who come to make the party come alive.” According to the director, they are usually integrated in their respective communities, but principally as “entertainers” (in this way, we see acute parallels to the West and its own habit of accepting queerness primarily as spectacle). “But the minute you say,” he continued, “that a homosexual is a man who makes love with another man or a woman who makes love with another woman…there is a certain level of confusion in people’s understanding about the situation.”

Far from the performance gender requires across most cultures—generally subject to withering scrutiny on all sides—the first post-colonial generation recoiled from engaging with homosexuality on serious terms, in the face of widespread sexual exploitation and myths about Black hypersexuality. Some Africans believed sodomy was introduced by Arab slave traders and Europeans. This makes it “un-African” and yet also satisfies the actual colonial myths that still cling to the continent. Under patriarchal conditions of sex as an exercise in dominance—something done to women—we begin to see how sex between women is not considered sex at all (the presumed absence of a phallus or penetration) and how sex between men preserves certain reductive gendered implications. Moreover, in the way that Black women are excluded from the category of womanhood, historians have often deemed the far more tragic crisis that Black men cannot fully access the spoils of patriarchy. Thus, the rejection of “femininity” (the dominated) carries an urgency that must feel like an escape from death, or else, a status one suspects they occupy anyway.

Camara translates, with remarkable clarity, all these warring tensions and the humanity behind them; that is, the borders to which we are so woefully beholden. “If God were fair, he’d let me bear your child,” Manga tells Sory, revealing those ineffable strivings that exist purely in the body—the irresistible urge to become whole with another—conveyed, inadequate as language can be, in the only grammar available to them. But their relationship is not free from the shadow of power. Class corrodes their connection from the beginning. Sory is rich (the red convertible is his) and, on occasion, withholding, not unlike his implacable father. Manga lives with his mother in a smaller, much plainer house than his boyfriend’s, and this scarcity surfaces for him emotionally, too, as paranoia and insecurity, when he accuses Sory of flirting with other boys.

Their parents’ respective methods of “purification” reveal much about their class division, too. Manga’s mother, not unlike the desperate mother of Denko, stages a countryside “spiritual” intervention to heal him, as if queerness were contagion. She consults the metaphysical, although curiously enough, their Indigenous rituals demand an earthly return to nature (Manga’s mother covers herself in wet clay and lies in a bed of soil at a cemetery). Meanwhile Sory’s father expedites him into the world of business—an embrace of modernism and capital—though not before he betrays himself: “Everyone will be…terrified by the two of you,” he tells his son. It is crucial that he should name terror—rather than, say, hate or disgust—which suggests he instinctively grasps that the boys mount a dangerous, tribal repudiation. Cloaked in shadows, their silhouettes crouched in doorways, Manga and Sory do not carry their own shame so much as the cloud of a long forgotten history. The late Guinean singer Sory Kandia Kouyaté’s “Toutou Diarra,” a Mande anthem devoted to ancient warriors and Bambara royalty, scores the film, as if to mark Sory and Manga’s story as the oldest one of all.

In The Whole World Is a Lie, a documentary directed by Charlie Birns, a filmmaker named Charlie Birns asks his former acting teacher, Tony Greco, to let him film his class. Charlie had a spiritual breakthrough in the class several years ago, he explains to a doubtful Tony, and wants to figure out how the acting techniques that Tony teaches––which draw directly from his teacher Lee Strasberg and the “method”––led to that awakening. Tony agrees under the condition that Charlie must be a participant in the class, not an observer. So Charlie and his film crew pay the class fees for a group of real students, lightly adjust the basement room in the Gene Frankel theater where Tony has taught for decades, and attempt to capture the experience of the class on film. But something quickly goes awry: the acting students are suspicious, then hostile; Charlie isn’t good at following Tony’s directions; Tony and the students become irate at Charlie’s open-ended creative process. The film’s first half builds to a series of confrontations between Charlie and the actors. At one point, one of them tells Charlie, with earnest intensity, “I want to destroy you.”

The Whole World Is a Lie, which opens with a Zen koan (about the expanded length of a truly rigorous search for meaning), intercuts this rising dramatic action with interviews with spiritual teachers and metaphysicians who act as a Greek chorus for Charlie’s investigations into the meaning and mysteries of life; it also intercuts scenes with Charlie’s father, whose “self-made” uptown-and-Hamptons wealth underwrites the film, a privilege that the filmmaker, to his credit, does not attempt to obscure. Over the course of the film, we learn this relationship is more complicated than it seems. His father’s alcoholism and drug use was the source of continual, frightening domestic conflict during Charlie’s childhood. The title of the film was a kind of catchphrase of his father, who, Charlie insists, would regularly come into his bedroom at night and repeat it to his son. By the end of the film, we hear the phrase as a cynical cliché, a touchstone of childhood trauma, a celebration of theater, and a genuine metaphysical enigma all at once. If the whole world is a lie, how could we possibly get to the truth?

Four years ago, when he started making his movie, Charlie Birns reached out to me and asked for an interview on the topic of method acting. I was intrigued by his combination of irony and credulity. But as we taped the interview, I started to feel like I might be debunking his belief system, and was unsure how he was taking it. I think many common assumptions about acting are historical and contingent: for instance, the idea that motivations are clear and knowable and that expressive communication of them is the ultimate success for an actor, which is a basic tenet of method acting. It’s a belief––that expressing your emotions honestly is the actor’s job––that drives the actors in Charlie’s film to say things like, “I want to destroy you.”

Though I was a little concerned Charlie would cast me in his film as an antagonist to method acting, our interview wasn’t in the final cut, which I’m glad about, because the film says more interesting and unsettled things than I could have said myself. Although the film clearly frames the cult-like commitment of the actors to a dubiously authoritarian teacher, it doesn’t make fun of them, and the final sequence––in which Charlie tries to restage his childhood memory of his father in his bedroom, saying “the whole world is a lie”––ultimately seems to me to make an argument about the efficacy of performance as a method of self-knowledge. I jumped at the chance to lead the talkback after its world premiere at MoMI’s First Look festival. In keeping with the open-ended structure of the film itself, the talkback, rather than a staid experience of the filmmaker’s authority, became a theatrical event when one of the actors in the film broke into the conversation to continue the film’s conflict. After that, I wanted to talk to Charlie again.

Shonni Enelow: The film lends itself to an iterative conversation, so let’s talk about the talkback—especially the moment when the actor from the film spoke up. What do you remember about that?

Charlie Birns: Some of the people asking questions were being antagonistic toward the students in the class. At a certain point, someone spoke up in their defense. I recognized the voice, but the person had shaved his head since I’d last seen him. It was Nicholas, an acting student from the film. He said, “I’m Nicholas, second-year student,” which is how he’s identified in the film. And then he performed his line from the film.

SE: He said: “I still want to destroy you.”

CB: And I couldn’t tell if it was sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek, or what. But it brought an aliveness to the Q&A. Then he asked something like, “Tony calls you vaguely thick in the film—do you still feel that way, or has something changed?”

SE: Do you remember what you said?

CB: I said something like, “Over the course of filming, maybe I didn’t break through the way I’d hoped.” But over years of editing—confronting the footage, constructing the film—I do feel I’ve gained clarity. And then I said something like, “It’s hard to tell how thick you are from the inside.”

SE: Then this other person in the audience came to your defense and attacked the actors, saying she’d never seen participants on a project be so rude and demanding toward an artist.

CB: She was collapsing the distinction between fiction and documentary. She said she’d never heard of an actor speaking that way to a director on a set. I had to step in and say, well, I wasn’t really directing—that’s the slipperiness of the film. And it was all showing up in the Q&A.

SE: What really struck me in the actor’s comment was that he brought up Willy Loman. He had this weird moment, which I think was in reaction to me saying something about how one of the main emotional expressions that this kind of acting tends to bring up is anger. Because I do think the method has a particular dramatic arc, building up to an explosion of emotion, and in the film it’s anger. And then someone in the audience said, “Well, anger is the easiest emotion for an actor to play, so of course they do anger.” And then Nicholas broke in in response to that, and he said something like, “Hey, wait a minute, we do anger because what do you think Willy Loman was trying to express?” That was his go-to example. That really lodged in my mind. I feel like that was so symptomatic of what the method actually is, the fact that it comes from this very specific moment of American drama and American culture. That's why I think the sort of Jewishness of the film is so important. It's a generational thing too with your dad. He's not a Willy Loman because he's successful, but he could have been. So that actor who's this 30-year-old, like, blond white guy citing Willy Loman as the example of what this acting is really trying to do and accomplish––it’s very revealing to me.

CB: Yeah, I mean it's amazing to see the world through the lens of these texts from 70 years ago––

SE: Exactly.

CB: And to use them as justifications for behavior. And you could say that's actually the epitome of the work they're trying to do is to activate these plays, these plays that need actors. Like, plays like that don’t exist till actors bring their soul to them. To bring up Willy Loman in that moment actually reveals an incredible dedication to what Tony is trying to offer them.

SE: Right. That’s one of the fascinating elements of the film for me, these actors learning a method that comes from a specific cultural moment—a very particular moment of tension around masculinity, assimilation, upward mobility—but they’re learning it as if the technique has no history, no content to it. There’s no real sense that it comes from somewhere. And then you have your dad, who does come from that world in a way. The ways he does and doesn’t conform to the method are really interesting.

CB: The review in Reverse Shot mentions my father as a method actor. How Tony and my father are both playing versions of themselves in the documentary.

SE: Yeah, that’s how I felt. That line from your dad, “The whole world is a lie”: I'm acting, you're acting. We're all acting. At least that's how I interpret that line. Like, this is all a performance. It’s like he's avowing, but also at the same time, like, disavowing it, you know, in the way that he disavows that he said that to you when you were a kid in the film. He disavows himself as a performer.

CB: My family at the screening kept asking whether I’d given him a script, or how he came up with the lines. He said: “improvisation.”

SE: He’s just a good actor.

CB: Which brings me to that Meisner line: acting is the ability to live truthfully in imaginary circumstances. To me, that’s the whole thing—the “whole world’s a lie,” the film, the spiritual ideas, even the construction of documentary. How do you locate something truthful in a constructed, artificial paradigm?

SE: Method acting has its answers. And you play those out in interesting ways, especially in the scene work with [the actor] Rosalie. She’s not wrong when she says you’re not doing a good job in your scenes together. There’s one moment that really stuck out: Tony trying to pull a truthful reaction from you and then have you say the line “I love you.” And you refuse—you say you can’t say something you don’t feel. The technique wants a spontaneous response and a performed line simultaneously, and you hit that contradiction head-on.

CB: In early rehearsals I was throwing that line away, saying it easily, readily. The refusal in that moment is complicated. There’s something truthful about admitting I didn’t want to be, I think I say, “I don’t want to be full of shit.” But from another angle, it’s an unwillingness to take a risk. The moment is constructed as a kind of a climax, as a breakthrough. But I think it’s a complicated moment. The character’s truth, in that instant, is the refusal.

SE: The film offers these various ways of completing the sentence: “The whole world is a lie, so…” So what? The whole world is a lie, so be a liar. Or is it, the whole world is a lie, so tell the truth. Or is it, the whole world is a lie, so you don’t have to participate. Or what?

CB: That phrase gets renegotiated throughout the film through the lens of spirituality, psychology, a cynical man from the Lower East Side, and through acting. The phrase gets recontextualized through performance at the end. Rather than having a fixed meaning, it’s transformed—softened, made comedic, made tender, made grandiose. For me, the real question is: if the whole world is a lie, how do we behave? How do we find meaning? The film doesn’t answer it. It’s the big question.

SE: Do you have a sense of what that phrase meant for your father? Is it like, “Don’t be played for a fool”?

CB: Just last night at dinner I asked him: how do you feel about this phrase that you coined being out there? He said, “We’re going to have to retire it in a few years.” I said, what comes next? He had no idea. It’s genuinely slippery—in the film, when I ask him what he means by it, he says, “I never said that to you.” Then: “Well, you were already in college when I said it.” I said, “No, I was a kid.” He said, “Yeah, but you just wanted me to get out of your room.” It’s constantly changing. Superficially it’s about the system—corruption, salesmanship, distrust. But I think there’s a deeper spiritual vision he has that he doesn’t let himself express authentically.

SE: What’s the spiritual worldview that could be attached to it for you?

CB: The film is a search to uncover that. If the central authority figure of my childhood is offering this phrase as a teaching tool, repeating it constantly, what am I to make of it? How do I move forward? For me, it became a search: externally looking for clues, for teachers: Erving Goffman, Buddhism, Vedanta, astrologers, psychics, really going everywhere. Is the world a lie? How do you make sense of that? Tony’s class seemed to be a place where truth was pursued within a context that acknowledged the “play of life”—Hindu philosophy talks about life as a play, too. I found in his class a container, a vessel, a cauldron to explore that. In terms of conclusions? I don’t know if there are any. There’s something about truly not knowing. Bonnie, in the film, says, “The sperm doesn’t know where it’s going, but it knows it’s going.” That’s part of the paradox. The film starts with a koan, a paradoxical statement you can’t resolve. You can only choose how you orient within it.

SE: Part of what fascinates me is the idea of acting studios as spaces away from the audience, but it’s an inherent contradiction because acting directs itself to an audience. You need the audience in order to turn away from them.

CB: One of the issues when the class mutinied was: how can we be private with these cameras here? Tony jokingly calls it “the Tony Greco Little Theater.” But for him, everything is the play—the people in the gallery watching are part of the play. Nobody is outside it. So when Tony says at the start, “I do what I do in that basement for a very specific reason,” he’s entering a space with a topsy-turvy logic.

SE: And you set up these cameras in that space, which he’d initially framed as an opportunity, something to work with. But then it becomes the obstacle.

CB: That’s what I find so fascinating about the climactic conflict being about the lights. The very thing he framed for the class as the opportunity of the project became, for him, the barrier to having his room. He points to lights that had been in that theater for 20 years. “Are these my lights or your lights?” But there’s something that complicates that moment: you hear him, just before, say, “Let’s have a conversation on camera. I want this filmed.” He’s simultaneously seeking the camera and expelling it.

SE: There’s that incredible scene where an actor rips paper and burns it because he’s so mad at you. It feels so much like a performance for the camera. But Tony says, “I don’t know what the fuck’s going on.” You feel the centers of authority shifting. He’s no longer totally in control of the space.

CB: The actor says, “I feel like a monkey dancing for you. I want the fucking cameras out of here.” But in the very first scene, Tony says: “We have cameras, and they’re going to affect us.” That’s the opportunity of this session—to work with how the apparatus of filmmaking affects our experience here. The moment where he freaks out is him both acknowledging that effect—which would be a positive value in that room—and also letting the cameras get in the way of what he’s doing. And so his relationship to power and authority became more important in that moment than anything else.

SE: He needed it to be his room again. The lighting was just a ruse.

CB: I can understand the vulnerability he was feeling.

SE: There are moments where you’re clearly immersed—really in the class, really going through the acting—but then moments where we’re very aware of you as a filmmaker stepping back, organizing and framing it. I think that’s why it feels like an investigation of realism as a dynamic.

CB: That was the central tension. Are you a student or are you the director? There was a safety in being able to move between those roles. Thematically, it’s like metacognition—you’re in it, but you’re also thinking about thinking. Films I love like Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, Synecdoche New York—recursive, reflexive turtles all the way down. My Jungian therapist calls the film “psychoactive.” The drama in it was also outside of it—editors coming and going, quitting, real stakes. It’s hard to concretize in a comfortable way, even for me. When I walked down to the Q&A, I think I blacked out. This was the first time the film had ever been seen. Now I had to sit in front of people who’d watched it for 90 minutes and be accountable, have a position.

There’s a moment in the film I was telling my girlfriend is my favorite acting moment in the film, for myself as an actor—when the second class comes in and I’m talking to this actor Chris, who says the whole project is “very solipsistic.” I’m saying to him something like, “I’m just trying to finish the film,” and watching it I think: wow, he’s really going through something. There’s a clip of Ethan Hawke talking about how the best performances are ones where people have real stakes in their real lives. At that moment, I had real stakes. If this project didn’t work out, what would I have done with the last five years? I was 35. Now I’m 39. I’d spent so much of my life on a film that felt like an utter catastrophe in so many ways.

SE: This Dutch scholar Elly Konijn wrote a book called Acting Emotions where she interviewed professional actors to try to actually answer the question of whether they’re really feeling it, whatever the character is supposed to be feeling while they’re performing. What she found was: you’re definitely really feeling something, but what you’re feeling is the stakes of what you’re doing—the real emotion that motors the character work. She calls it “task-emotion,” and it’s from the action of acting.

CB: And it’s inflected with emotional memory—it doesn’t have to be, but it can be. The real feelings I have right now informing this conversation, or some trauma from when I was eight entering it somehow. In the film, a lot of the critique of me from Tony is about over-intellectualization—that I’m stuck in my head, not following my impulses. He says, “You won’t allow yourself to listen to your body.” “You’re stuck in this idea of Charlie.” “You’ve done all this intellectual work, but I don’t see you putting it into your actions.”

How do you see this training in relation to being a person? Like, for example, there's a 21st-year student in the class. She's been in the class for 21 years. She's not in the class for an acting career. She's in the class to explore something about what it means to be a person or how she is a person. And that's why I took the class. So how do you conceive of those impulses?

SE: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think at its best––although I don’t really know if it’s ever at its best because part of what it’s doing is staging scenes of power and conflict, so I’m not sure that’s ever wholly benevolent or positive––but I do think there’s something about realist acting that can make us aware of layers of experience that could enable a different kind of relationship to the roles we play in our lives.

CB: Layers of experience?

SE: Yeah. Right now, we're sitting over coffee and babka and I'm very aware of being in my house, but I'm also thinking of four years ago when we were here, and I'm aware of feeling a kind of sympathy and solidarity with you. Method acting at its best can bring awareness to the real feelings that we all have in relation to others and how we're using them or not using them.

CB: You’ve talked a lot about emotional blocks in relation to Strasberg's work, his method. Like this goal of getting through emotional blocks, right? Is that similar? Is that part of the experience of recognizing different layers?

SE: Honestly, I think that's a really specific historical, gendered, ethnic thing. Like, this whole idea of blocks and repression comes from this mid-century American idea that we're all repressed and we need to, like, let loose. I don’t see that in the world today. I don't think people are actually that repressed. In fact, if anything, people should maybe be a little more repressed, think more about how they're affecting other people, you know. So that feels to me like this weird historical relic. At the same time, actors do need to be in their bodies in a way that most human beings are not. So I get the physical training element, but I think the whole Strasbergian idea that we're in some way hobbled by our repressions is this mid-century Freudian, American, also Jewish male thing. Those kids in that class do not seem to me like people who struggle with a lot of repression. That doesn't feel to me like their problem.

CB: I think the film presents that dynamic as one lens on reality. I don't think it’s the only lens. You're saying it’s an outdated lens. It might not be a relevant lens.

SE: At the same time, it still seems to work for people. They like the idea of getting over their blocks. It’s clearly doing something for people. I studied the Strasberg archive for my book, and this version of method pedagogy seems very much in line with it. Though Strasberg was meaner. He monologued. You really feel the tension in those tapes, the hostility. He's very circuitous, he doesn't really make sense. Tony seems like he’s pretty direct. Whereas Strasberg talked in circles constantly.

I want to go back to the end of the film, when you try and then give up on restaging a scene from your childhood with your dad. What I see in that scene is a recognition that staging––acting––will always fail to get at the truth. And the fact that you’re trying to stage a scene from your childhood––a memory––just emphasizes that further. But then there is, kind of surprisingly, this moment of emotional truth that comes out of it: a private moment of real connection between you and your dad. It felt to me like the film was saying that such a moment of emotional intimacy could only happen in the context of an attempt to stage, and a failure of staging. You had to create this apparatus to push against in order for something true to emerge.

CB: That scene was shot for a completely different purpose. I just wanted a close-up of him for a dreamlike sequence. So, the bed is disheveled, deflated, it’s like a primal scene. The lights are on. All the theatricality has been disassembled. If you notice, the crew is really uncomfortable, they’re looking away, as if what’s actually happening between us is too intimate for them to witness—even though we’re in a theatrical space.

SE: It’s the contradiction at the core of realism: how do you construct something that feels like it isn’t constructed?

CB: And can’t be predetermined.

The risk in calling Lucio Castro’s Drunken Noodles “dream-like” is that it puts this mellow magical mystery tour of a movie into the realm of pure sexual fantasy. And while twenty-something art student Adnan (Laith Khalifeh), seen from the get-go coming down the stairs of a subway station and drifting into an urban summer with all its heat and libidinal promise, is hardly chaste across the film’s 80-plus minutes, there’s something about the way Castro mixes sex with art, food, poetry, and the natural world that makes the film feel both wholly invented and stubbornly, sensuously real.

The director, best known for his 2019 film End of the Century, divides his film into four parts, presented out of chronological order, each prefaced by section titles embroidered by hand. That hand belongs to Sal (Ezriel Kornel), a kind of queer Falstaff figure of the Hudson River Valley, whose candy-colored needlepoint erotica gets the white-cube treatment at the gallery where Adnan interns. From the strange city swirling with amorous food deliverymen on bikes, who eventually join Adnan in a nighttime orgy that’s cut together as a series of frozen poses; to the countryside, a place of easy cross-generational friendships, haunted by eros and death; to the pristine and impersonal rooms of the summer vacation home that Adnan will share with his boyfriend (Matthew Risch), the film puts a single character in a rake’s progress that isn’t really a progress at all, but a series of recursive encounters charged with resonance and intrigue.

It’s a lovely film. What follows is a conversation about how it was made and what it discloses.

Reverse Shot: Does the movie change for you when you rewatch it? Do you learn things about yourself that you didn’t realize while making it?

Lucio Castro: There’s something that happens, especially at the beginning of a movie, that I only become aware of with an audience. It’s like walking a tightrope. There are moments where it feels like it’s about to fall: a frame too long, a shot too short. I only experience those micro-imbalances when I’m sitting with other people. Maybe because you’re more exposed, more sensitive to them. That’s why the first screenings are so nerve-wracking. Then you get used to the film’s rhythms and everything becomes permanent, fixed in time. But that first time with an audience, you’re still so close to tweaking things. After a while, the film becomes what it is and could never have been different.

RS: You’ve pointed out—and I think one of the characters says it—that desire is sparked by looking at something with another person.

LC: Yeah, it’s true.

RS: As a filmmaker, watching your own work with other people is a strange experience because it usually feels disembodying.

LC: That’s a great way to say it. You’re forced into being someone else. And that’s probably the source of every filmmaker’s awkwardness at screenings. The person you’re trying to become is almost like a strange average that doesn’t really exist. Oh, someone moved in their seat—but who cares? Who is that person? It’s a really uncomfortable position. But I do learn things, especially with humor. If humor doesn’t land, it’s like jumping and not landing; it feels terrible. If you’re not attempting anything funny, you’re never at risk. But when you are, you’re exposed. What I’ve learned from watching the film many times is that if the actor truly believes what they’re saying, the humor works. If they’re too in on the joke, it kills it.

RS: When the actor is too close to the joke, they’re identifying with it conceptually. It sounds like you’re working against that, both in writing the script without a fixed trajectory from point A to point B, and in encouraging the actors to have a looser relationship to the material. You’ve spoken about how writing is probably the most pleasurable part of the process, partly because you don’t need money to write. Can you talk more about that? And is this approach a homecoming to how you worked on your earlier features, or something you adopted for this film?

LC: For the film I’m making now in Argentina, I’m working the same way I did on Drunken Noodles: tiny crew, just myself, a sound person, and my niece, who’s studying film, as the producer. I gather locations, think about possible actors, and once I have all that, I write. But I write without a map—with a cloud. I use this for every movie: films that orbit the one I want to make, books, ideas, places, lines from books. When I start writing, it becomes very free. I don’t know where it’s going, but I have this cloud of images and possible locations.

When I make a movie without asking anyone for money—zero budget, just feeding people, renting a light—it allows me to be bad. I really believe in working against quality. When you’re writing to make something good, it’s very stifling. It’s like writing with someone else’s mind: your favorite filmmaker, your favorite critic, your favorite audience. I find that constricting. I want to make something where it doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad. Then hopefully my instincts guide me toward things that feel interesting, fresher, less explored—a moment in a movie that I want to see.

Film is the only artistic medium where you have to explain exactly what you want to do—in a very abstract way—to someone who will give you money. It’s not like writing, where you can draft freely, or painting, where you can make something and then sell it. Film reverses that. It’s perverse. You’re selling something you don’t fully know yet, and at the same time you’re pretending to know too much about it. But art is a dance with the unknown. If you explain it too much, you kill something.

RS: The way the film sets itself up is very striking. The first thing we see is Sal with his needlework, giving us the title—almost like an overture. He’s this gregarious, aging, bearded figure, a little mischievous, almost magical. It’s like someone weaving us into the movie. Then we see Adnan descending from the elevated subway stop, and from that moment it feels almost like Alice in Wonderland. We don’t really know who he is. He’s impassive, wandering. Were those images there from the beginning?

LC: You’re giving me ideas. But yes, I always write fairy tales. I love the fairy tale as a format. It’s always about an arrival, a beginning. And the weaving. Have you seen [John] Carpenter’s The Fog? One of my favorite openings, with the old man telling a story to the kids. Sal was my version of that. We don’t really see his face, just sideways, white beard. It’s a connection between the old and the young, and then the movie starts. The fairy tale works for me because it’s such a strong structure that you can break it. And when you do, you feel it even more. If you start very loose—Altman-style, lots of characters milling around—there’s nothing to rupture. But if you create a solid fairy-tale beginning, an arrival, you establish clarity. And when that clarity destabilizes, you feel it deeply.

There’s an Argentine writer, Cesar Aira, whom I love. In one novel, a character is in the bathroom putting shampoo in his hands, and it feels slightly more liquid than usual. That small perception sets off everything. Something very concrete becomes unstable. But for something to become unstable, it needs to start stable.

RS: I like how playful the film is with identification. When Adnan listens to the delivery guy’s headphones, we don’t hear the music until the second time, when the delivery guy puts them back on. These shifts in point of view feel like writing choices but also staging and editing decisions. How coordinated was this during the shoot and in post? Are you the same filmmaker on set and in the editing room as you are at the desk?

LC: All of that was in the writing. It was connected to the idea of maybe making a bad film—switching point of view abruptly. When the delivery guy suddenly explains the paintings to the other delivery workers, it’s such a drastic shift. That’s my favorite moment in the movie. After that, I can relax.

At first, maybe it could seem like a conventional film about class dynamics. But that moment breaks something fundamental. The film falls off the track. And then I’m free. Once the rules of storytelling are broken, I can go anywhere. The music detail was very clear in the script: when we hear it and when we don’t. It’s a hint of what’s coming later, and also about artifice. We strive for naturalism, but it’s fun to let the puppeteer become visible.

Even though the writing feels free, I never improvise. Everything happens as written. In the edit, I moved only one thing: the scene where Adnan spits out the cum was originally at the end. I placed just the entrance earlier. That was the only major change.

RS: Do you storyboard?

LC: Yes. I work with my DP, Bart Cortright, and we sit together. I draw the storyboards because they help me understand how things will cut. I’m not a perfectionist. After fifty, you understand your limitations. There’s looseness, but I don’t improvise. On a slightly bigger-budget film I made, the actors wanted to improvise a sequence in Puerto Rico. We spent a week doing it. I cut it all. It wasn’t my voice. That’s when I realized the writing needs to remain intact.

RS: You teach film, and you’ve said that you emphasize how important it is to write the movie you know you can make.

LC: Film school is still structured around an old model: write a screenplay, find a producer, spend a decade trying to make it. By the time you do, the film isn’t interesting anymore because it’s been softened by too many voices. Students need to connect with their limitations—that’s part of style. I’m slightly against polishing. Some film schools have a philosophy that writing is rewriting. I don’t fully agree. When you write something concentrated and then pull it apart, it becomes something else. Then you’re fixing that new thing, and you lose the original impulse. Rewriting can become the imposition of something already proven—quality interfering with freshness.

RS: The immediacy gets lost.

LC: Exactly. And if you lose the joy of writing, you stop doing it. Discipline is hard enough. You can only sustain it if you enjoy it.

RS: Is the idea of home important to you? There’s a recurring pattern—Airbnb, house-sitting, temporary spaces…

LC: Now that you say it—yes. Movies are so tied to nationality: title, director, year, country. Those four things frame how we view a film. I’m Argentinian, but I’ve lived half my life in New York. I have an American passport, but I’m not fully American as a filmmaker. And I’m not fully Argentine either. There’s always something slightly off. That sense of displacement connects to the fairy tale again. Fairy tales begin with someone arriving somewhere new. All the rules have to be discovered. It’s a powerful entry point for an audience.

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.