In the history of licensed video games, there may never have been a greater match between studio and property than IO Interactive and James Bond. For the last ten years, IO’s Danish developers worked on their magnum opus, Hitman: World of Assassination, a trilogy of stealth puzzle games wherein the master assassin Agent 47 jets around the world to snuff out rich and powerful targets and uncover their conspiratorial associations with a New World Order organization called Providence. The Hitman game play like spy thrillers, with Agent 47 navigating the intricacies of each map using disguise and social engineering rather than gunplay.

Who better, then, to bring James Bond back to video games? The Bond franchise is as storied in cinema as it is checkered in gaming. For every beloved entry like the Nintendo 64’s GoldenEye 007, there are several notorious trainwrecks. It has been historically difficult for games to capture the attraction of a Bond story—technological limitations have often rendered video game narratives flimsy, and general player taste leans so regularly towards action and gunplay. Even GoldenEye 007 consists almost entirely of first-person shooting. This kind of action is, traditionally, only one ingredient in the Bond movie stew. Where are the Bond games with spy craft, covert investigation, or flirtation with beautiful women with ridiculous names?

Such elements finally come to the fore in 007 First Light, IO Interactive’s long-gestating reintroduction of Bond to gaming. Rather than directly adapting existing Bond films or Ian Fleming novels, First Light is an original narrative, an origin story for a Gen Z Bond. Almost nothing was written by Fleming or filmed regarding Bond’s youth, except that he was orphaned at a young age and recruited to MI6 out of the Navy. The youngest Bond on film was seen in 2006’s Casino Royale, which opens with the moment he becomes a 00-agent. Going back further, to explore his pre-spy days, is a curious decision.

First Light makes a strong case that Bond needed this kind of reset. The Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig films struggled to find a place for Bond post-Cold War, half-heartedly opining on the relevance of human spy craft in the age of technology or the challenge of locating explicit national enemies in a War on Terror context. IO Interactive’s Bond, played by Patrick Gibson, is young enough to have a birth year starting with a 2; there is no awkward chafing between him and a world where drones and artificial intelligence represent existential threats.

Things kick off as Bond, a lowly Navy aircrewman, is the lone survivor of a downed helicopter on a small Icelandic island where some international mercenaries are trying to steal a crashed satellite. At the radioed direction of MI6, Bond does impressive impromptu spy work—he is later whisked away to become the newest addition to a recently rebooted 00 program. Familiar faces like M, Moneypenny, and Q are here, though the real highlights are the original ones: Bond’s fellow recruits, brainy rich girl Cressida and brutish blond Monroe, plus the program’s instructor, a gruff retired agent named Greenway played by Lennie James. The latter is a standout—having a youthful Bond deal with the skepticism of a grizzled superior is a dynamic that pleasingly plays against the more assured Bond with which players will be familiar. First Light mostly avoids irritating prequel-bait, landing its few overt lore references with aplomb; the given reason why Bond grows up to order his martinis shaken, not stirred, has stimulating implications.

First Light most surprises with its writing. Even the best Bond video games have more or less eschewed cinematic storytelling, instead draping a thin veneer of narrative onto a gameplay-forward experience. Narrative was never IO Interactive’s strong suit, either. The stories stringing together their assassination sandboxes are background color for the puzzle design of the spaces themselves. First Light rather ambitiously aims to stand alongside the films, a playable Bond movie rather than an ancillary spinoff. Against all odds, it succeeds. First Light captures Bond in the broad strokes—the smirking charisma, thuggish brutality, sexual dynamism—as well as the world of glamorous travels and larger-than-life villainy he inhabits, and it does so without displaying the meek embarrassment of the most recent films.

First Light would make a great Bond film, but the video game medium has more complicated demands. IO Interactive hasdesigned itso that the player switches between various gameplay modes which simulate the rising and falling action of a movie. The standout segments are the ones that borrow most heavily from Hitman. Each of First Light’s main levels has periods where Bond is let loose in a large location and mustuse spy craft to accomplish objectives. An early mission sees him inside a Slovakian hotel while it hosts a prestigious chess tournament, trying to track down a mysterious assassin. Since he’s undercover, he has to use social engineering and stealth to track his target through the hotel’s restricted areas. IO Interactive has left segments like this refreshingly open-ended, with numerous ways to solve any given situation and little explicit direction.

First Light doesn’t give you full access to its maps at any point; even if you know Bond’s investigation eventually leads him to a specific hotel room, replaying the mission doesn’t allow you to skip straight there. It’s an understandable restriction—First Light rewards skill expression and creativity, but above all it is trying to convey the legible contours of a James Bond story. Its open-endedness asserts itselfnevertheless. You can get the four-digit code to open the hotel’s laundry room from multiple sources, but you will need to enter the laundry room no matter what. While it can be frustrating to run up against such explicit limitations in player choice, the developers have done a good job of disguising them. On my first playthrough, I can hardly remember a single moment where I felt meaningfully restricted. You can even flow in and out of specific opportunities at your discretion. At multiple points I found myself abandoning the pursuit of one plan to seamlessly begin another one.

The second mode of First Light gameplay is the stealth sandbox, big open arenas that Bond must attempt to traverse without being spotted. Because the Hitman games are oriented around sneakiness first and foremost, Agent 47 has terrible combat capabilities. If you get spotted in Hitman, 47 will die to gunfire almost instantly.Hitman’s design encourages you to remain unseen. First Light takes the opposite tack. While it’s possible to complete these segments without breaking stealth, the game is designed around engineering situations where Bond will be spotted and must frantically beat down whoever saw him before things spiral out of control. Bond’s fighting form is fluid and agile, not unlike the combo-heavy beat-’em-up approach in the Arkham games. He’s not a superhero, of course—he can only take so much punishment—so First Light lets him improvise. In the course of a fistfight, he can grab bottles or wrenches in the environment and toss them in people’s faces, or fire off flash bombs or lasers at enemies. It feels as though you’re choreographing a great action scene on the fly. The developers put a lot of work into making these emergent encounters exciting, so while they give you tools to maintain a stealthy playthrough, they tip the scales toward outbreaks of chaos. First Light, at every moment, encourages you to just keep going.

Nowhere is that truer than in the third gameplay mode: the big set piece shootouts. When things start getting serious, Bond’s license to kill is activated (he’s just a trainee, after all), announced by way of a brassy, Bondian musical sting. These are bombastic blockbuster sequences full of explosions the player is encouraged to run through without thinking too much about it. These bits largely feel obligatory, the kind of thing that has to be here because Bond movies have explosions and shootouts, and while you are clearly intended to rush through them to create a cinematic effect, their difficulty can mean frequent engagement-breaking restarts. IO Interactive wants to strike a balance between Uncharted-style bare-minimum interaction and the friction of a fully playable fight, and they don’t quite hit the mark. The best license to kill segments are smaller-scale shootouts that resemble something like Hotline Miami in three dimensions, with Bond constantly repositioning behind cover, tossing empty guns at people’s heads, and doing instant takedowns. It’s a rewarding rhythm when the game lets you settle into it, but too often it doesn’t have enough faith in the player to make their own gunplay fun.

Where First Light seems to understand Bond best is how it goads the player into being a bit of a troll. Bond can be effortlessly cool, but he’s also a rascal, a smarmy instigator, always ready with a raised eyebrow and a quip. First Light induces a playstyle that is in this spirit. Don’t just sneak past a guard, shoot a laser in his eyes. Drop a ceiling fan on his head. Shoot him with a dart full of rat poison. Push a big shelf on top of him. Turn on a vacuum cleaner to lure him near an exposed wire and then electrocute him. Grab him by the collar and literally toss him off a roof. Anyone can make a game about being a cool action hero. IO Interactive excelsin this more impish mode, making worlds designed for mischief.

When MGM called for pitches to revitalize Bond’s presence in gaming, IO Interactive put Daniel Craig’s head onto Agent 47’s digital model and showed them an otherwise unaltered Hitman mission. First Light is most successful when it fulfills that promise, of an evolved Hitman game wearing a 007 skin. It falters when trying to be palatable for a wider audience. The most egregious example is Bond’s AAA game chattiness. He simply will not stop muttering to the player about where to go and what to do. Far too often, moments of exploration and discovery are interrupted by irritating voice-over saying something to the effect of “I should really get back to the mission.” This kind of handholding is industry-standard for games of such large scale—as soon as the credits roll and you’re directed to the surprisingly bare-bones “tactical simulation” mode, where you can replay alternate versions of missions and encounters, it becomes clear what First Light has given up in its pursuit of blockbuster success. The Hitman games are so open-ended that their maps and missions can be remixed infinitely. First Light is an immaculately crafted experience, but the concessions made in service of commerce number a few too many.

Where so many works of cinema end as middle age begins, the River Trilogy, from pioneering American documentary filmmaker Robb Moss, continues beyond the (in his words) “young and naked” days of his friends’ lives depicted in his exuberant 1982 film Riverdogs. In 2003, he released a startlingly honest depiction of the process some might call settling down in The Same River Twice, seeing those same Dogs shaking off the days of abandon on the river as they tend to children, careers, and other grown-up concerns.

Now, nearly 50 years after documenting that epic trip down the Colorado River, we revisit the friends on the precipice of old age in Moss’s The Bend in the River. Each successive film incorporates footage from those that preceded it, creating a portrait that moves freely through time. This rejection of traditional linear structures and the willingness to submit to the flow of nature allow Moss to capture the deeply moving ordinariness of human experience. Beyond that, this third film doesn’t try to mimic the experience of time passing—it wrestles with time itself: what it means to us, how it functions in both life and the witnessing of it, how to comprehend that one day it will run out.

During its recent NYC theatrical release at Film Forum, I spoke with Moss about mortality, making art, and friendships that last a lifetime.

Reverse Shot: How did you approach the construction of the film, which is a work of unfolding moments that also incorporates scenes from the past?

Robb Moss: I think of it as creating its own archive, but it still has to be transformed into something that makes sense for the new film. It's not the same as repurposing found archival footage, it's something else. The premise of all the films is, at some level, the view from that moment in time as the filmmaker, and in their lives, are twinned. These are my friends, and they're aging as I'm aging, or I'm aging as they're aging, and filming their aging is a way to film my aging. The use of the older films is a complicated thing, because the old footage can mean what it meant then, or it can mean something quite different. And then the film itself, in terms of its organization, is also a film about aging, but in any moment it can go backwards or forwards in time. And the juxtapositions between the backwards and forwards sheds light on the thing you just were looking at, or sheds light on where you might be going. What an amazingly complicated thing, to try to make a film that actually moves forward without paying any attention to chronology.

It’s an emotional approach. When I think of somebody that I love, I don't think, “oh we did this, and then we did that,” It’s more that something triggers a thought or a memory . . . it's an emotional circuitry. And the film tries, at some level, to function in a way that acknowledges that our inner lives are not chronological. They don't organize themselves neatly from one thing to another. We're trying to find a way to keep it moving forward, and to keep people's attention, by constructing in a non-directive way that allows people to interpret the film from their own experience

RS: I would love to hear you talk more about the act of portraiture. How does this idea connect to what you were saying around emotional logic, rather than chronological narrative?

RM: You know, I went around and asked people if there was anything in the film that put them off, that they didn't like. And Barry [one of the film’s subjects] said, no, but there's lots of things that aren't in the film that I wish were. And those wishes are always around biographical pieces, what people did with their lives. If you're making a film that purports to be about people's lives over nearly a half a century, it's not unreasonable for them to say, “I was the mayor of my town. I had a whole political life. I’m proud of that, but none of it is in the movie.” And I totally agree. It’s completely true. But what I found in the editing is that the more biographical it was, the more plodding it was. The film would get lost in a certain mode of storytelling and portraiture. And that it seemed by taking out—not all biography, but a lot of the biography—something else seemed to emerge, about what lives are constructed out of. Lives are constructed out of these infinite gradations of forgotten intimacies.

Things happen that are just the most casual, but beautiful, and forgettable…but the camera doesn't forget, if you film them. The film that’s made of these moments and fragments of moments becomes a little like a stained glass window or a mosaic, rather than a linear narrative. And then there’s the way a film takes those moments and juxtaposes them with others

So, for example, there's a shot in the film where we see Barry has his toddler daughter in his arms. And he comes into the room, and he sets her down, and he goes to get a fresh diaper, and then he sort of looks at her while he has the diaper in hand, and he looks at 2-year-old Teague and says,” Here, catch!” and he tosses the diaper. And it hits her on the belly, makes this little sound that's incredibly beautiful, and she laughs, because it's funny. Then it cuts to him sitting with Deb, Teague's mom, and his first wife, and he's describing to me how Teague came to be conceived. It's a beautiful little story. And he says at the end of it, you know, and that night, we conceived a little girl, unbeknownst to us, and that was Teague. And then it cuts to Teague 20 years later, rowing a boat down a river. And you know that cut—that's my experience as a parent. You're with your children, and it seems like each moment's gonna last forever. It's so intense, and such a big moment, which you were experiencing this morning. And then you blink, and it's 20 years later. Film can do that. It can make cuts that are suggestive of a big picture. That is the daunting opportunity of trying to make a film like this.

RS: What is it like for you to understand yourself and your friends anew? What has it been like for them to confront that image that you've constructed to reflect them back to themselves?

RM: When people first see themselves on the screen—and I’m like this too—really all you see is yourself. “Am I okay?” You're holding your breath and hoping not to die of embarrassment. “How am I doing in this one? Why did I do that?” Or you're so grateful that nobody saw this thing that was coming out of your nose, that you’ve been worried for the last several years was going to show up on film. But then, you see it a couple of times, and see it with audiences, and it begins to move away from being you. Being part of a film, to the extent that people can see themselves as part of a film, one can lose that complexity of self-presentation and, hopefully, start to feel part of something else, which has a larger meaning than just a personal biography. I mean, I think it's an incredibly big ask of them.

It was different with Riverdogs. That was 35 days on the Colorado River. People are often without clothes, they're really good outdoors, they're incredibly comfortable, there's a real community. Some of these people I met on the river, but many I've known for my lifetime, and we all joined forces and became part of a larger community. And so I wasn't noticed. I just wasn't. For the second film, I showed up with my little, dinky video camera, so it wasn't even professional like the 16mm was, with the wires and big cameras and changing bags, and the NAGRA. And this little dinky standard definition video camera, like a home movie machine. I would film them doing the most ordinary things, and who knew what kind of movie that was gonna be?

By the third film, they were not that comfortable being filmed at the beginning. They were aware of the fact that they were actually being recorded. For really the first couple of years people were a little standoffish. And then over time, it's just harder to not be yourself than to be yourself. And also, I'm filming in a way that's not asking very much of anybody, I'm just there. And every once in a while, I am talking in a more direct way, but a lot of times I'm just there. And just showing up, year after year, and gathering material that you can only get by staying with something for so long.

RS: Can you talk about that experience of having to slow down, of not being in control of the timeline?

RM: For a long time during the making of these films, I was married, I had three kids and a full-time teaching job. If I had been on my own with this idea, I would have tried to finish the film in a year or two. But because of my own circumstances I was required to slow everything down. At the time, it seemed like a real problem, but as it turns out, that reality is what allowed the film to live in a different way. And I'm incredibly grateful for that. I was also mindful of how we all needed to survive this time of filming, because that was no longer a given. When I started shooting, it was like, “are we gonna stay around forever? We're not gonna stay around forever…” So, when do you start a film like that?

RS: And when do you end a film like that?

RM: That's for sure. But you know, in a way, because of the conception and momentum of the films, each has gotten done for different reasons, and then there’s always the next film. So this one is done—is there going to be a fourth film? And this time, the answer to that is utterly a question of people's health and what happens to them, let alone people being willing to put up with another film. I'm 76, so I'm not young. It feels like I'm in the portal of old age; I'm not entering it, I'm in it, but it’s an early part of it, and it's still unfolding. But the next ten years are going to be much more challenging. It's just harder to be 86 than 76, harder to be to 76 than 66. And the next film would have to account for those things, no doubt, in some kind of way. Assuming the filmmaker is even around, and assuming the people in the films are around.

RS: What you are describing sounds so humbling for a filmmaker— and I also felt humbled as a viewer. I felt this sense of collapsing time; like at any given moment I could most see myself as someone’s child, or someone in middle age, or craning my neck to see what is coming next. I want to talk more about how the film considers aging and mortality, and trying to contain not just a moment, but a lifetime of moments at once.

RM: That's beautiful. A lifetime of moments at once. I think part of that arc is reflected in the media archaeology of things. So, the 16mm at the beginning; when that came out, it was glorious. The color, the ways in which light is rendered in cinema, and people being young and naked. We're a part of this landscape, in the garden. We had this incredibly extended adolescence, very beautiful, and a kind of extravagant vision of youth at that moment. And then we left the garden, to live in the temporal world, and have knowledge of the temporal world. That next period of life is filmed in standard definition. Our aging is now quotidian; there's not that much resolution, everything's a bit blurry. That’s the way that middle age is. You're just moving so quickly through all the things you have to do. Now it’s like high def, and then 4K or 20K, whatever the K is when the next film happens.

I think there's something moving about seeing people heading into being old and having mortality closer and closer. I think the film has you experience that in a way that surprises you. You're watching it, and they're sort of funny, and things are going along, and there’s all this cutting back and forth between people and different moments in their lives, but really, the whole thing moves from being young to being old. Young to old is a powerful thing. I'm asking the characters in the film, my friends, to house mortality. That in itself is a big ask—it’s incredibly generous. I'm endlessly moved by how generous. But then it also gave me a chance to witness my own mortality, without looking in the mirror, but by looking in the mirror of my friendships.

RS: And perhaps that made it easier to witness your own mortality?

RM: Absolutely, because it was shared.

RS: How does it feel to say you are in the portal of old age?

RM: When I was about to turn 50, so when I was 49, I spent a lot of time telling people I'm going to be 50. I figured I must be looking for a way to work it into my vocabulary and get used to the idea. And at some point, about two-thirds of the way through the year in which I'm constantly telling people that I'm turning 50, I realize I'm not doing it to familiarize myself with this change. I'm doing it so they'll say to me, “You don't look 50!”

RS: [laughs] That is a hard thing to admit.

RM: It was completely true. But in a way, the same thing is true now, at 76. In some ways, I feel lucky to be this old. I feel lucky to have had the life that I've led, and incredibly grateful, and that I'm still intact. Even if diminished, in some ways. And then, probably, when I'm 86, I'll say the same thing, that I'm sure I'm doing better now than I will at 96. There's some way in which we keep putting off completely confronting our mortality. I think if you are your age, looking at my age, you wonder, “How does it feel to have arrived there?” But I don't quite absorb it in the same way, my age, I don’t feel that I’ve arrived somewhere. Because I'm still in my body, and I'm still thinking about things, and I'm still doing stuff, and it's continuous.

RS: Your film made me think about how nothing looks like you thought it would 20 years ago. I did not think this is what 42 was, or what marriage was. I just had a different vision of what the interior life of a middle-aged person might be.

RM: Yes, I think we have these ideas. I mean, when young people see Riverdogs, and then Same River Twice or Bend in the River, they reckon with the inevitability that, with luck, they will get older. And then they wonder, “Does it hurt to get old? What's that like?” A student of mine saw the film in the fall, and then wrote me this really beautiful note. Part of it was about being a 20-year-old trying to make a resume out of her life, and being reminded that life isn't built out of resumes was comforting for her. Learning that a lot can happen after 30 was also comforting, and this idea that people seemed to hold on to themselves, even as they got older. Something that Jim says in the film, is that there's a way in which you can see life as the perfection of what is. Which is to say, just be present to the moment.

RS: What has surprised you about aging, in life, and in the film?

RM: I'm grateful to know that it's possible to keep your friends for your lifetime. I think what you see in the film is that people do stay the same to a large degree. But aging also deepens us. I met Jeff when I was 11 at a summer camp, Danny when I was 13 in junior high school, Barry when I was 15 at a summer camp, and Jim and Cathy when I was 25 and running rivers. To stay friends with people that long, and to have our lives intertwined in this way, and being able to chronicle that, is an incredible privilege. It's surprising that we can age and change, and all kinds of things happen to us, but we can stay friends. I don't feel like the film has a message, particularly; it's not designed that way. But if there were any kind of overriding message, it would be to stay friends with your friends.

The End of Oak Street
Dir. David Robert Mitchell, U.S., Warner Bros.

When the logo from J.J. Abrams’s production company “Bad Robot” comes up, followed by opening images of sun-dappled suburban Americana set to Michael Giacchino’s syrupy John Williams-like score, you would not be blamed for nervously anticipating some generic, ersatz-Spielberg on par with Abrams’s vacuous Super 8 (2011). The concern might grow as the craning camera settles into a cul-de-sac’s block party, with its just-so idyllic family contests like a sack race and water balloon toss. But, while there is a loving nostalgia in the setting (a “Turning Japanese” music cue and costumes place it around 1980, while a Tigers sports page clipping and license plates put it in the kind of Detroit suburb where writer-director David Robert Mitchell was raised), and though Spielberg set this particular paradigm, it soon becomes clear that the film isn’t interested in homage or imitation. At the block party, some bickering between married couple Denise (Anne Hathaway) and Greg Platt (Ewen McGregor) presages an anarchic nastiness and cynical streak, which will in turn be humanized by the sensitive performances and a sentimental final reel.

The Platts’ marital rift stems from Denise’s embarrassment that Greg has to deliver pizzas as a (she thinks) secondary job—out of shame, she makes him remove the glowing “Pete’s Pizza” car topper when parked in their driveway. She also does not love Greg’s pulls from his garage whisky bottle. Greg, meanwhile, resents Denise’s palpable unfulfillment, and her hobby of writing fiction in the basement that (autobiographically, Greg assumes) concerns an unhappy wife and mother. The couple’s acrimony trickles down to son Brian (Christian Convery) and Audrey (Maisy Stella), causing the boy to start fights with local kids and the Carl Sagan–reading girl to stargaze and dream of a happier life. Next-door neighbor Mel (The Wolf of Wall Street’s P.J. Byrne) is no sunnier, snapping at Denise that the family dog Starbuck has been digging and defecating in his yard. Radio snippets about “unusual ripples in space” hint at the supernatural events to come that will render all these domestic concerns quaint. The neighborhood is soon hit with strange, intermittent bright flashes of light accompanied by ear-popping whooshes that disrupt the weather, and leave behind anachronistic flora and rhino-sized dung piles.

A prehistoric time is somehow physically encroaching on the present-day environs (or vice versa?) of the Platt’s Oak Street. Concerns over random hot geysers and the new jungle foliage soon give way to the much more immediate danger of gigantic, roaming avian raptors, plant-eating brontosauri and ankylosaurs and, eventually, the inevitable Tyrannosaurus rex. While there are breadcrumbs sprinkled, the escalation to utter mayhem is still jarring, and permanent—except for a few brief pockets of repose, the rest of the film is a thrilling battle for survival. The violence can be shocking in its suddenness, like neighbors unceremoniously decapitated and a carful of family gruesomely dispatched (since it’s not the protagonist family, the empathy is fleeting). The nihilistic carnage is just as likely to elicit laughter as screams. Even established characters are shredded with brutal flippancy, including a major one whose stunning, gory demise prompted the loudest shrieks and cackles at my screening.

It's always a little embarrassing to score how “good” or effective a movie’s special effects are, better suited for old Ain’t It Cool–style message boards than these august digi-pages, but it’s obligatory to note that The End of Oak Street’s visuals are, to my eyes, terrific. As in the original Jurassic Park, there are some models and puppets used for the close shots, but the CGI elsewhere is unobtrusive. Overhead views of the area show how it has been sliced off and raised from the surrounding environs (settling that this phenomenon has not happened everywhere). There’s the Titanoboa, a giant, white, scaly sea snake whose cute face hides a machinery of fangs and a deadly appetite, and which, in one of the film’s tensest scenes, quietly slithers through the momentarily peaceful Platt house as the family moves about unaware. The unwelcome trend of CGI dogs (2025’s Superman too) unnecessarily continues here with little Starbuck, but some vegetarian brontosauri provide the most obvious dose of comic relief (if you’re not the type to chuckle at dismemberment)—when Denise and Greg stumble on two of them mating, Denise asks Greg to pose in front for a Polaroid.

The performers excel too, particularly Convery and Stella as the kids whose teenage angst and anxiety graduate into breathless fear. (When the family picks up a newly orphaned Catholic school-educated neighborhood girl, there is even some romantic rivalry between the siblings, though the orphan is drawn to Audrey—a side plot the film does not explore too closely.) McGregor has fun playing something of a loser, while Hathaway excels at conveying bewildered, nonverbal trauma, especially after one act of violence.

As for Mitchell, his career is following a timeworn path. Out of film school, he made his scrappy microbudget indie (The Myth of the American Sleepover), then a breakthrough success (It Follows, a chilling allegory about teens and STDs also set in the Detroit suburbs), and then, using his new clout, a big-swing “one for me” follow-up (Under the Silver Lake), which garnered enough cult admiration to earn him this big-budget summer multiplex filler (and presumably a fat paycheck). It was remarkable how much It Follows did with an excellent amateur cast and the horror of random people walking towards you at a normal pace. I’ll confess I found Under the Silver Lake’s attempt at a conspiratorial Long Goodbye riff and kaleidoscopic portrait of Los Angeles a trifle annoying, but Oak Street has convinced me it’s due a rewatch. Like Blue Velvet’s famous opening journey from picket-fence perfection into the bug war hell below, Oak Street is about America, the deceptiveness of surfaces (that idealized first look at cul-de-sac)and the paper-thin veneer of civility masking latent bedlam. Zeroing in on one family’s story, Mitchell asks, what if the secrecy slowly torpedoing the Platt marital unit (his covering up career woes, her clandestine literary efforts) manifested not just in spats, tedious divorce and custody battles, but in dinosaur-strewn pandemonium?

Of course, Spielberg himself also had a movie out this summer, and Mitchell’s more get-to-the-point, funhouse style provides a welcome complement (not corrective) to Disclosure Day, in which the (abundant, masterfully engineered) thrills are balanced and sometimes suffocated by reams of David Koepp exposition. The reasons for Oak Street’s supernaturalism are tossed off in the visual of an undulating portal blob, a line or two about wormholes and a (somewhat unsatisfying and plot-hole-creating) news segment. Which isn’t to say Mitchell has nothing on his mind; in the same spirit of his film being about the violence always dormant in America, it might also be about the deficiency of nostalgia, the cruelty and violence that rose-colored reminiscences miss, especially when you go way back.

The Samurai and the Prisoner
Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan, Janus Films

While it would be foolish to downplay the influence or the achievement of the films that made Kiyoshi Kurosawa a de facto figurehead of the late ’90s and early ’00s wave of Japanese horror, using his facility with the genre to set expectations for all his work does a disservice to the breadth of his abilities. The key to Kurosawa's cinema is his multifaceted approach to various forms, each storytelling configuration providing its own archetypes and stylistic markers that can be freely mixed even as he maintains control over tone and aesthetic style. Accordingly, films like his exquisite domestic drama Tokyo Sonata (2008), the introspective travelogue To the Ends of the Earth (2019), and the pitch-black Internet thriller satire Cloud (2024) refuse to belong cleanly to a single genre, and even a more easily classifiable horror film like Pulse (2001) gradually morphs into a mournful, apocalyptic death march.

With this in mind, his 40-plus-year career reaches a kind of apotheosis in The Samurai and the Prisoner. Adapted from Kokurōjō—also the film's Japanese title, which translates to “Black Prison Castle”—Honobu Yonezawa's collection of short mystery novels, it represents only Kurosawa's second period film, after his World War II–set Wife of a Spy (2020), and his first far removed from the present day. As the opening titles speedily establish, it concerns the mysterious 1578 rebellion of the daimyo Araki Murashige (Masahiro Motoki), a former retainer of the mighty Oda Nobunaga, who resists his former master’s aims to rule all of Japan. While carefully planning his actions in Arioka Castle, he kidnaps Nobunaga's envoy, the wily Kuroda Kanbei (Masaki Suda, the lead of Cloud, adroitly playing a significantly more expressive character), only to forge an unexpected bond with him as he attempts to uncover the truth behind several bizarre events, beginning in winter and continuing over the course of four seasons. After Wife of a Spy, a film made for Japanese television that even in its theatrical version thrums with an uncannily digital, high-frame look that creates a no-man’s-land of bright environs in purposeful contrast with its characters' hazy intentions, it can be something of a shock to see how straight The Samurai and the Prisoner seems to play its setting and attendant genre conventions.

Handsomely mounted on elaborate castle sets and utilizing Kurosawa's steadier-than-ever compositional mastery to capture long walkways, imposing towers, and the shadowy basement dungeon in which Kanbei is perpetually confined, the film conforms at first to the appealing logline of a murder mystery that happens to take place in 16th-century Japan: the son of a lord who broke his allegiance with Murashige is held captive, despite his plea to be killed as per samurai custom, only to die inside the castle from a mysterious wound to the back. Through both Murashige's investigations (involving arrow trajectories and interviews with his servants and soldiers) and Kanbei's intellect, which is cloaked in diffident inquiries and poetic riddles, the men uncover the ingenious and tidy solution.

This first mystery is by far the shortest and most concrete that The Samurai and the Prisoner will unfurl over its measured two-and-a-half hours, and by the end the panoply of names and competing allegiances stretching across Arioka Castle dwarfs the plot convolutions of any of Kurosawa's previous films. While it is possible to view the accumulation of details as mere busywork, it feels more in line with Kurosawa's interests to regard them as a slow, increasingly nightmarish downward spiral, each breach in security another step into an illogical realm perceived by many of Murashige's retainers as divine punishment. In that sense, The Samurai and the Prisoner is strikingly reminiscent of Kurosawa's masterpiece Cure (1997), the ultimate cop movie as all-consuming horror, where the temporary cessation of mounting bodies only demonstrates the impossibility of halting evil itself.

Kurosawa is not after such frightening aims this time around, but his ultimate destination is equally ambitious: a moral exploration of an entire epoch. For the first time in his filmography, the Sengoku period allows him to depict codes of honor that are not the nebulous concept only sometimes obeyed in modern society—the abstruse yakuza loyalties of Serpent's Path or the settlement money reluctantly paid to a car accident survivor in License to Live (both 1998)—but instead the rigid backbone of this era's behavior. Despite the many underlings who urge Murashige to show no mercy towards his captives or enemies, he demurs, instead forging his own path. Through lengthy tea ceremonies as tests of character, confrontations that begin rancorous and end with attempted reconciliation, and roundabout negotiations using the least likely of collateral, Murashige's approach—in tandem with the intense dignity of Motoki's performance—never quite adheres to the prescribed actions demanded of him by the weight of tradition, proceeding in odd, even ungainly feints and changes of heart that resemble the film's unpredictable rhythms. His attempts to spare his hostages often only result in further bloodshed, and yet his unyielding nature becomes a fully formed ethos, one yearning to be understood by lionhearted vassal and shrewd tactician alike.

In the end, a choice on Murashige's part—the most significant deviation from Yonezawa's text, which instead ends from Kanbei's perspective—thrusts the daimyo into newfound territory, exiting the center stage of history to pursue a different way of life. This rejection of the expected, easily definable forms of behavior in favor of a more unconventional, indefinite existence, pushes The Samurai and the Prisoner closest to Kurosawa's past works. Like his quietly enigmatic protagonist, the modern master offers no easy answers for how even a lord can reckon with the crushing forces of conquest that he helped set in motion, but the patient eloquence with which he poses these questions builds a film as labyrinthine and monumental as Arioka Castle itself.

It’s safe to say that in 2026 a majority of cinephiles watch more movies at home than in cinemas. Especially for those living outside major metropolises, the act of filmgoing has become, at best, a fitful activity. For reasons both personal and professional (and despite living in Los Angeles), I too only sporadically watch movies as the people who made them probably intended. And while I tend to agree with Richard Brody’s assertion that streaming has benefits distinct from the theatrical experience—in the way that the modern cinema, as he wrote in The New Yorker, “presents experience in intimate dimensions that are […] better suited to viewing in private”—it also leaves the viewer much more susceptible to external forces.

Over the past few months, I’ve watched several films that got me thinking deeper about this issue, and in particular how it relates to experimental cinema, which is far more dependent on the conditions of its presentation than narrative filmmaking and yet is rarely seen in the proper context, let alone format. Some of these titles I streamed at home; others I viewed with audiences at festivals. One I watched at a museum; at least two of them I saw twice, weeks apart and in very different environments, and had a unique experience each time.

Krakatoa
Dir. Carlos Casas
Seen at Play-Doc, April 30, 2026, and on Vimeo, May 9, 2026

Having missed Carlos Casas’s Krakatoa at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, I was happy to see that it was screening a few months later at Play-Doc, another European festival I regularly attend—and in an expanded cinema version to boot. In this case, encountering the film first in a gallery setting, with “live Foley, musical improvisation and real-time editing,” per the festival’s catalogue, proved instructive for a work of speculative fiction built around ideas related to sound, spectacle, and the volatility of the natural world. While ostensibly centered on a Javanese fisherman (played by Roni Herliansyah) who is swept away by a tsunami following an eruption of the Krakatoa volcano (a gloss on the original 1883 tragedy), the film takes shape sensorially rather than narratively, with the fisherman being deposited on a remote island where he then embarks on a journey into the molten depths of earth.

At just 40 minutes, this iteration of Krakatoa is an enveloping experience. Casas, a Spanish-born artist and filmmaker, has a versatile visual sense, with wide, symmetrical images of the fisherman’s bamboo boat and the surrounding sea quietly setting the stage for the psychedelic abstractions and approximations of roiling, substratal phenomena that eventually overtake the film’s quasi-folkloric opening. In the live setting, the aural elements of the film are especially dynamic, as sound designers Nicolas Becker (who won an Oscar in this department for 2019’s Sound of Metal) and Armand Lesecq swarm the ear with swelling ambience, furious resonance, and enough ricocheting frequencies to induce synesthesia. I happily stood for the entirety of the performance, behind a couple rows of people seated on the floor, and to see and hear the multicolored light and stuttering drones bounce around the venue only added to the three- dimensional feel of the event.

Knowing that the theatrical version of the film was significantly longer—79 minutes, or about double the length of what I had just witnessed—I was curious to see how it played without the bells and whistles. What I discovered when I watched this version of Krakatoa the following week on my TV was a mannered and far more monotonous movie than anticipated. For one thing, the longer cut adds almost nothing to the already threadbare story beyond protracted scenes of the protagonist either milling about his makeshift raft or, later, wandering the island in the wake of the tsunami. What’s more, it draws attention away from the formal qualities of the film and puts the focus on the stylistic touches—the color filters, exaggerated camera angles, and portentous music cues—that in the expanded version feel like logical accoutrements to an immersive encounter rather than devices to keep the audience involved. Where the images in the live version act as a kind of visual guide for the auditory explorations of Casas and his sound team, in the theatrical version they labor under the weight of film’s themes. In this context, even the score feels overdetermined.

NOTE: Krakatoa screened in New York at Museum of the Moving Image this May as part of First Look 2026.

Birth of a Nation
Dir. Stan Douglas
Seen at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, April 3, 2026

A highlight of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s superlative MONUMENTS show, an exhibition pairing decommissioned Confederate statues with works by 19 artists, Stan Douglas’s five-channel video installation reimagines a pivotal moment from D. W. Griffith’s notorious 1915 feature through a selection of scenes from the original film and sequences that restage the action from the perspective of two new Black characters. Across 13 minutes, both the infamous scene in which Flora, a white woman, is stalked to her death by Gus, a Black army captain played by a white actor in blackface, and Douglas’s reinterpretation of that sequence (and its aftermath) unfold simultaneously in five frames split between two rows.

Considering that my exposure to Griffith’s ahistorical epic over the years has been primarily piecemeal, with sequences variously excerpted and studied in college film courses or seen in any number of documentaries about cinema, it seemed appropriate to reencounter the film in this form. I watched Douglas’s version three times as people shuffled through the Geffen’s white-walled viewing space, each time focusing on a different narrative strand, which either way you approach it ends like the original sequence does, with Gus being lynched by the Klan. Opting to reframe rather than revise the character’s fate à la Tarantino, Douglas depicts Gus as a racist hallucination of the white characters. Here, Flora throws herself off the cliff unprovoked, in a fit of paranoia over Gus’s mere presence, while the infuriated white locals project their deep-seated prejudice over the incident onto the two new Black characters, who, like Gus, are both freedmen and Confederate captains.

Arguably more troubling than even these scenes are the quiet moments where Douglas lingers on an empty room or an unpopulated field, sites of past or possible violence that are fraught with meaning and the kind of ambient dread associated with horror films. (It’s been years since I’ve seen Griffith’s film, but many of these segments from the original appear to have been slowed down and then recreated or echoed by Douglas in an opposite channel.) Watching among waves of largely white patrons in a museum space with its own history of institutional racism only added to the poignancy. Indeed, if Douglas’s piece, in the words of the exhibit’s wall text, “prompts the question, in what ways is our present accountable to the legacies of slavery,” then the group dynamic of the installation format, as well as the work’s physical location, is at least as important to its presentation as any of its textual interventions. The fact that the piece wouldn’t work in any other context is part and parcel of its power.

Forever…Forever
Dir. Johann Lurf
Seen on Vimeo, February 22, 2026, and the Jeonju International Film Festival, May 7, 2026

Forever…Forever, a new short by Austrian filmmaker Johann Lurf, premiered in the Forum Expanded section of this year’s Berlinale, where its 65mm images were projected on 70mm. Due to a scheduling conflict, I wasn’t able to see the film at the festival, so I was eager to catch up with it when I got home, even if it had to be through a Vimeo link. Pressing play and already regretting the missed opportunity to see the film in its proper format, I was met with the following message: “This is a low-resolution preview with a reduced number of audio channels. A screening in cinema is the only way to experience this film as intended.” Great, I thought, before proceeding as planned; after all, my initial encounter with all but a handful of Lurf’s 20-plus films has been via streaming link, and that includes 2024’s Revolving Rounds, a 3-D short that Lurf co-directed with fellow Austrian Christina Jauernik that I’ve only seen at home and in two dimensions, but which I still consider among the most conceptually rich experimental films of recent years.

If Forever…Forever eclipses anything that Lurf has done to date, and I think it does, it’s an open question (at least for me) as to just how strong of a work that it is, as it’s risen in my estimation with an equal but opposite force between that first viewing online and a second one a few months later in Jeonju, where I did see it in a cinema but not in 70mm. Like a lot of Lurf’s work, Forever…Forever is a landscape film, but that’s officially an inadequate term for what he’s accomplished with this 21-minute marvel, which is less an earthbound document than a monumental transcription of celestial motion. Shot from a fixed perspective with a specially designed camera over the course of 22 months, the film presents a time-lapse view of Austria’s Ottenstein Reservoir, a deceptively tranquil setting that holds untold wonders above its lakeside surroundings.

Beginning like a stolen moment from James Benning’s 13 Lakes (2004), the film quickly accumulates an internal energy as the morning mist clears and the sun swiftly rises, summoning an array of meteorological movement, all of which is mirrored in the water below, along with the trees, rocks, sheds, and telephone poles that dot the distant shoreline. Then, just over two minutes in, darkness descends and a smattering of lights appear in the distance, creating an imprint of the horizon out of these now invisible structures, including a bridge that sits at the center of the frame. From there, Lurf lengthens the exposures so that days and nights begin to pass in a manner of seconds, turning otherwise imperceptible occurrences—drifting clouds, streaking stars, the movement of the sun and moon—into a dazzling display of atmospheric skywriting, all while the color palette changes in conjunction with the seasons and a storm of alien tonalities echo in a quasi-melodic manner reminiscent of the iconic five-tone motif from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Given the sheer scope and majesty of Lurf’s vision, it’s no surprise that these sci-fi associations translated more acutely in my theatrical viewing, where the film’s cosmic elements were able to unfurl on a much larger canvas, with louder and more overwhelming sonics to complement the visual fireworks. So while the film works at scale, there are clearly degrees to its power, dimensions to its splendor, and possibilities inherent to its presentation that even the artist’s most ambitious prior works haven’t fully exploited. Not so here: utilizing every inch of the 65mm frame, Lurf transforms the unassuming rhythms of the natural world into a pulsating panorama of activity that I have to believe the human eye can only fully register in the film’s native format—meaning that, even after two viewings, there’s still more for me to discover in the depths of this spatiotemporal wonderland. Until then, I’m happy to continue exploring its surface pleasures in whatever way is available to me.

NOTE: Forever…Forever will screen in New York at Film at Lincoln Center this fall as part of the Currents section of the 2026 New York Film Festival.

“I hope you will enjoy, more or less, the movie,” said Claire Denis in September at the world premiere of The Fence at the Toronto International Film Festival. More or less, I did. Freely adapted by Denis and Andrew Litvack from a 1979 play by the late Bernard-Marie Koltès—a frequent collaborator of Patrice Chéreau and a major voice in French theatre before his death of complications from AIDS in 1989 at the age of 41—the film takes place in and around the grounds of a construction site somewhere in West Africa. The outfit employs mostly men from the surrounding villages; its globalized ownership (with British stewards giving way to a Chinese consortium) belies a symbolic lineage as an outpost of white colonialism, a re-entrenchment of hierarchies no less abject for existing at the lower end of trickle-down economics.

The ruling authority on the ground is Horn (Matt Dillon), a weathered, ugly-American type tasked with overseeing the crew and liaising with the locals; he’s a heavy drinker nursing wounds real and imagined. The action unfolds over the course of a single day and night, during which time Horn is approachedby Alboury (Isaach de Bankolé), a Nigerian man resplendent in a pinstriped suit, planted firmly on the edges of the property. His request to collect the body of his dead brother, apparently killed on the job in an unspecified accident, carries a bristling sense of implication; ditto Horn’s reluctance to give him what he wants and send him on his way. Alboury won’t come inside, and he won’t go home, either; the more the two men try to feel each other out, the less likely it becomes that one or the other is going to budge.

This is a compelling setup, sociologically and emotionally loaded; Horn and Alboury are as much free-standing symbols of interracial suspicion and animosity as the compound itself, with the massive, barbed-wire fence (and attached guard towers) serving as a locus of mobile, shifting perspectives. (The low-light cinematography by Éric Gautier is attentive to the shadows and patterning of the metal, which visibly imprisons the actors in close-ups and two-shots alike). The mostly mixed—verging on skeptical—reception of The Fence at TIFF hinged on the paradoxical consensus that Denis had chosen source material that was somehow both wrong and a little too right; wrong, because Koltès’s Black Battles with Dogs seemingly isn’t a particularly great play, plunging as it does into dramatic convolution and increasingly declamatory dialogue; too-right because the basic scenario—which involves the characters of Horn and his new young wife, Leonie (Mia McKenna-Bruce, best in show), who has arrived from overseas to consummate what would seem to be a marriage of convenience—hews so closely to the narratives and themes of the autobiographically inflected Chocolat and White Material, for some perhaps to the point of redundancy.

I don’t know if Black Battles with Dogs is a great play (trawling through reviews of different productions suggests a generally respectful reputation), but its mix of broad political commentary and hothouse perversity—with Horn and Leonie both parrying the spiteful, desirous thrusts of his younger, sexually frustrated second-in command Cal (Tom Blyth)—clearly meshes with Denis’s sensibilities. Koltès was compared during his life to Samuel Beckett, and there is some of the latter’s absurdist goldbricking in Horn’s exchanges with Alboury, who intuits that he’s probably more likely to encounter Godot than his brother’s corpse and doubles down on his wraithlike patience anyway.

The Fence isn’t funny, exactly, but it is rueful, a quality that, when duly pressurized, can lead to uncomfortable (and not quite cathartic) laughter. The diegetic use of Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” to connote the multi-directional erotic obsession festering amongst the three white characters prompted giggles from the people around me; I was less keen on the one-to-one-ratio of erotomaniac Cal’s theme song being “Beds Are Burning” but if any director has earned the right to their pop needle drops, it’s this one. Meanwhile, the production’s intimate scale—and visibly modest budget, including multiple images captured on an iPhone—has brought out something ornery and resourceful in Denis’s filmmaking—more ornery, maybe, than usual. The common denominator between the scenes and performances that work and the ones that don’t—I can’t tell if Dillon is miscast or inhabiting Horn’s gnawing recognition of his own inadequacies—is the sense of an artist who’s backed herself into a corner and is trying to claw her way out, or through, the material itself. Despite its tarnished reputation, there were parts of Stars at Noon that clearly felt masterful; the rhythm here is ragged, chancier. Denis’s collaboration with Saint Laurent as a financier seems instructive, somehow, with each character defined by—if not reduced to—their increasingly rumpled designer duds, pragmatism and elegance threaded together. An early, CGI-assisted sequence of a snarling canine—a stylized depiction of one character’s subtext-heavy nightmare of white aggression, staged against an abstract black void—becomes similarly emblematic of the project’s pent-up energies.

As for whether or not The Fence fits—neatly, jaggedly, or otherwise—with its director’s other films about interlopers trying to gain a foothold on the physical and psychic terrain of the Dark Continent, that’s a question for everybody except Denis herself. Her long-standing reluctance to conceptualize retrospectively about such resonances doesn’t register as evasiveness. It seems more like a matter of her trying to take—and make—each new movie on its own terms. That it’s hard for those of us who consider ourselves admirers to do likewise speaks to the double bind of seeing certain filmmakers as setting a standard—for themselves, for their peers, and for critics. A month after seeing The Fence, the various hitches and hiccups in its dramaturgy have faded from my (selective?) memory while certain images—a forlorn cot made up as a wedding bed; Leonie’s red dress clinging to her shoulders; a closing shot that rhymes, fleetingly, with the coda of Chocolat—have stayed; one camera movement that comes to rest on a pair of fists clenching takes pride of place in the great Denis encyclopedia of body language.

I talked to Claire Denis in Toronto; as ever, I enjoyed it, more than less.

Reverse Shot: Can you talk about the location in the film? Did you use a real construction site?

Claire Denis: The location is a jail. And we had to build it. I looked at some real construction sites, which are very well guarded. Barbed wire and fences, and walls, people with guns. In Senegal, I found a spot which was going to be used as an industrial site. We didn’t have a big budget. We decided we would do things as small as possible but with a sort of perspective in mind. The whole thing—the house—is built out of containers. Everything is a metallic box. I saw places where containers get used like this: they become rooms, or offices, for workers.

RS: In Chocolat and White Material, the white characters are living very comfortably; they feel like they’re at home. Here, Horn seems resigned to his quarters; he’s been there forever, but he doesn’t necessarily want to be.

CD: He dreams that he will be leaving soon, that he and his wife will go somewhere else. He wants it to be the end of his career.

RS: The image of the little bed he makes up for her is very striking; he’s trying to make this inhospitable place feel cozy, and it’s not exactly convincing.

CD: It’s their wedding night!

RS: Yes, although it’s not going to be much of a wedding night for a few reasons; their dinner never gets started, and we find out that he’s been injured in a very particular way.

CD: They talk about his wound, yes. He says that if she wants to sleep alone, he has a cot in his office. But she also says they have great sex. She knows what to do. She’s a nurse. She knows about his wound, and it doesn’t affect their sex life.

RS: There’s a lot of repressed sexual energy in the film; Cal gives Leonie a hard time when he picks her up at the airport, but there’s desire there, and of course there’s unspoken tension between Cal and Horn as well.

CD: Tom’s character is very jealous! Cal wants Horn all to himself, not to share.

RS: At the Q&A last night at TIFF, Tom Blyth said that Cal sees Horn as sort of a father figure and a brother, which you laughed at. I guess incest isn’t off the table in your movies, so…

CD: It’s not incestuous, I don’t think. It’s just love.

RS: But there is an ambiguity to the relationship between those two men, yeah?

CD: It’s all in the play, yes. The ambiguity of two men together, and the woman who arrives and breaks the balance. She’s maybe as disturbing to them as the black man outside asking for the body of the brother.

RS: Can you talk about your memories of seeing the play in 1979?

CD: When I met Bernard, he was working with Patrice Chéreau. It was Bernard who first introduced me to Isaach. Bernard had wanted him to be in the play; the part was written for him. I remember that on stage, Alboury is in the shadows, and Horn is on the veranda; it’s staged so that the audience is on the veranda with him. Here, Alboury’s point of view exists, which isn’t possible on stage. In the play, though, the two men inside are drinking more heavily, they’re drunk, drunk, drunk. And they’re both older, much older than Tom is in the film.

RS: Did you make a lot of changes to the characters or the dialogue?

CD: Yes, because translating from French to English…it’s so different, especially when it comes to white and Black characters. Of course I prefer to work in French…Alboury and the guards are speaking in Yoruba, the language of Nigeria…if you watch a lot of Nigerian films, you hear it all the time.

RS: Beyond the language, though, do you think you fundamentally altered the material?

CD: I don’t think the play could stand today. I had to make some parts more modern. The character of Leonie, for instance…In the play, she’s like a woman of the 19th century, discovering Africa for the first time. The moment she sees Alboury, she falls in love with him. That’s something that I changed completely. I didn’t do this to betray Bernard; I think he would have been happy with it.

RS: Was there ever a thought of doing it as a period piece?

CD: No interest in doing it as a period piece. I visited so many of these sites and they’re basically functioning the same way today.

RS: The title of the play is Black Battles with Dogs, and the movie opens with a monologue describing a very violent dog; the imagery you added to illustrate the words is surreal and terrifying, close to the style of a horror movie.

CD: The nightmare of the dog was only in the notes for the play. It was never actually described onstage. But it was always this terrible little white dog. In the movie, it’s a special effect. We filmed a real dog, and then the special effects made it into a monster. They can do everything with special effects now.

RS: How did you decide on Matt Dillon for the role of Horn? Obviously the character being American required a very different sort of actor from Michel Piccoli, who played the part on stage.

CD: Matt Dillon for me is a legend! We had known each other for years, so maybe there was a little shyness about working together. He came to Paris to organize a painting exhibition, and we ran into each other in the street. He asked me why we hadn’t done anything together. I told him I would send him the script for The Fence as soon as it was done.

RS: The other major collaborator I wanted to ask about was Saint Laurent, which has gotten into the business of helping to finance films; they had money last year in The Shrouds.

CD: I knew Saint Laurent wanted to be part of certain films. They choose a certain kind of film or director that they like, and they make an offer. So all the clothes in the film are Saint Laurent. I thought that the best thing was to take everything. I don’t think I’ve made a movie where costumes are unimportant. Elegance in wardrobe is something that can give strength to a character. When I did White Material, we worked a lot on the details for Isabelle Huppert’s dresses.

RS: All of the clothes in the movie are very beautiful, but they also get very distressed as the story goes on. It’s a rumpled sort of elegance, no?

CD: The shirt looks great on Matt. That’s its purpose.

RS: You mentioned White Material; do you think this movie has a particularly strong connection to that one, or to Chocolat? Do they go together for you as movies about white characters grappling with a sense of belonging or difference in West Africa?

CD: Geographically, yes. In my thoughts, I’m not sure. It’s been almost 40 years since Chocolat, but working with Isaach, the link is still very strong. We were the ones who had met and known and loved Bernard.

RS: Alboury is a powerful character; he can’t penetrate the fence, but he pressurizes the entire story. I love the stillness in Isaach’s performance.

CD: That stillness is in the script. I wanted Alboury’s presence to feel like its own sort of danger.

RS: There’s a duel-like quality to the exchanges between Horn and Alboury, with all of these repeated questions and deflections. It’s an element of the movie that feels rooted in something theatrical—something that reminded me of a play.

CD: I want to disagree with that! That kind of fake politeness between a Black man and a white man, who are about to fight for something…politeness can be like a little war. Those repetitions are part of that.

RS: You mentioned that this is the first movie that you’ve ever shot in sequence. How did you and Éric Gautier approach the production and the lighting design?

CD: I had no continuity person with me. I did have a first AD and a great crew, but we were working very fast, in the night and in the wind. Working in sequence made it easier, from one to another. I didn’t have to think as much about the angles. It made it a bit more open in my mind. Éric and I only had a few days to prepare; it was because of the location that we shot in that way [in sequence]. We tried to be very clear between the white light of the road and the warmer light inside the house. And we did all of the day scenes—the driving scenes out on the road—with a cell phone before we started the night shoot.

RS: Given the small budget it’s pretty impressive that you got music from Midnight Oil and Kylie Minogue…

CD: The artists were very helpful.

RS: They’re both Australian, which is probably a coincidence.

CD: I did that on purpose. I love both of them. “Beds Are Burning” was great for Cal. In Australia, Midnight Oil is a very political band. And Kylie is a friend.

RS: There’s less score in this movie than usual.

CD: The score wasn’t working. We tried to use more. Stuart was there from the beginning, as usual; during the editing, we talked about it and we agreed that music was going to be hard.

RS: Do you think that directing has gotten easier for you over time? Or harder?

CD: I don’t know if it gets easier or harder. Maybe getting older makes things harder? Directing has always been hard. Producing movies now, though, is harder.

RS: You’ve talked before about having doubts whenever you make movies. I wonder if that doubt is also where your confidence comes from?

CD: My confidence is a confidence in the script. Or, maybe more deeply, it’s the confidence I have in the performances of the actors.

RS: I wanted to ask you about one shot in the film. Cal says something to Leonie about being a kind of trophy wife, and the camera pulls down to capture her reaction and it’s not in her face—it’s in her clenched fists. That image has stayed with me.

CD: He says she’s like a piece of money that falls on the ground and falls for nobody. I knew that line mattered a lot. It’s so offensive. The line is in the play. I wrote the reaction for her body.

In an essay for the Blu-Ray release of Kent Jones’s directorial fiction debut Diane, screenwriter Samy Burch observed of the title character, an aging widow who lives to help friends, family, and the people of her New England town, that in “many of the scenes where Diane is not in service to others, she is alone. Writing her name in a fresh notebook. Making lists of things to do, and later, poetry. The line between the two may be thinner than is assumed.” Enthralled by Diane’s quiet emotional power and thoughtful construction, Burch sought out Jones to direct her adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1895 novella Late Fame, whose main character also writes poetry. Or rather, used to write poetry. Ed Saxberger is a former poet who now works at a post office, until he is discovered by and invited to join an admiring group of would-be bohemians. Learning of Saxberger's new job, one of them quips, "Well, you're still a man of letters."

Burch transposed Schnitzler’s tale from Vienna to modern-day downtown New York, in part to satirize the privileged strivers whose artistic ambitions may exceed their actual talents. But while Schnitzler took an acidic view of the cultural milieu he was observing, Burch and Jones teamed up to create a more nuanced and bittersweet character study. Just as Jones built Diane around Mary Kay Place’s career-best performance, which captured the simmering depths beneath Diane’s eternal hospitality, Late Fame draws power from Willem Dafoe’s seemingly effortless embodiment of an artist who wants to believe in the newfound adoration he is receiving, at the same time that he has the wisdom to know better. He is sparked by the attention and seductive power of the actress Gloria, played by Greta Lee in an exuberantly theatrical performance very different from her quiet star turn in Past Lives.

Kent Jones grew up in Massachusetts and moved to New York in the early 1980s; he brings a strong personal connection to the worlds of Diane and Late Fame. Jones has been an essential part of the film world since his arrival in New York, working in many capacities for Martin Scorsese (as production assistant, archivist, screenwriting partner, and co-director of several documentaries), as a film critic, programmer for Film at Lincoln Center, and head of the New York Film Festival. I talked to him recently about what now seems to be a full transition to film director, a goal he has had since his arrival in New York.

Reverse Shot: You have a 35-year working relationship with Scorsese. Has your time with him helped prepare you to become a director?

Kent Jones: Seeing Taxi Driver at 17 really pierced my core. And then New York, New York, and Raging Bull. Through sheer happenstance I started working in his office. I always aimed to direct films; that was what I wanted. I was writing criticism, looking at film from one angle. The more I went into it, the more I wanted to penetrate what it actually was from the outside looking in. But I vowed to myself that were I to make a fiction film, I would do it without leaning on Marty.

After I made Hitchcock/Truffaut, my mom died. I was writing Diane, and realized later that the two had to do with each other. When I started directing it, there was a moment on the second day of production when I was just sitting down, and I felt like I don’t know if I can do this. I don't know if I'm up for it. And then a light went on in my head, and it was just sort of like, it doesn't matter how I feel. I just have to do it. That was great. That's a big part of it. Sounds simple, but it isn't.

RS: I went to film school with Hal Hartley. He really seemed like he’d become a director. He had a kind of self-confidence. I always felt that being a director requires a certain kind of personality.

KJ: I did have one thing that was foundational, which is a real appreciation of acting. My first wife was an actress. And she and I were in an acting group together for a while. I grew up around a lot of theater in the Berkshires, and got very interested in acting through that experience. I read a lot of plays. And Marty and I made the Kazan film [A Letter to Elia] together. A lot of critics that I know and a lot of programmers that I know say “I don't understand acting. It's a mystery to me.” That's a running theme.

RS: Both Diane and Late Fame are really built around the performances. Very often, films by first-time directors are more focused on formal concerns.

KJ: I would put it another way: for me performance and behavior and gestures in the frame are cinematic elements. I'm glad that I didn't start earlier because I would have made films exactly like what you're describing. And the actors would have come to me and said, what should I do? And I'd be like, I don't know, just stand here and, you know, take three steps closer. I’d be making cinephilic films.

RS: On the surface, Diane and Late Fame are very different. But there are threads that hold them together. They’re about aging, about being alone versus being part of a group. How do you see the films relating to each other?

KJ: I don't, but maybe I will. I know what you mean, but I'll let others decide. For Late Fame I was attracted to the idea of doing something that originated not with one other person but with two other people; Arthur Schnitzler and Samy [Burch]. And not necessarily in that order because I preferred Samy’s script. I first knew about her because of May December.

RS: What did you prefer about Samy’s script to the novella?

KJ: It's not as harsh. There's a harshness to the Schnitzler. What was interesting was preserving what's frank versus what's harsh. When Willem at the end says [to Winn, a young admirer], “You don't read mine, I don't read yours,” that's just being frank. He's not being brutal, he's just being brutally honest. But he's just saying to Winn, it's an illusion to think that you can look at me and divine something from me. That is definitely something I related to in terms of what I've seen people do around Marty.

RS: Treat him like a Saxberger?

KJ: I've just seen it over and over again with him and with other directors, where younger people approach them. Like at Q&As, they'll raise their hand and they don't really have a question. They just kind of want to plug into you and get some of what you have. I've seen it in extreme ways with Marty.

RS: That line, “You don’t read mine, I don’t read yours,” is in the novella, but there it plays more as satire…

KJ: …than something sort of sad. And Willem's reaction is that it just makes him sort of sad in a way. Listen, there's so many different movies that could have been made from that novella. And a lot of people were thinking about it, as it turns out. It's interesting, because it was found not that long ago. It's easy to picture Billy Wilder making a film of it, since they're both Viennese. He would have made a hilarious movie and a brilliant one. I love Billy Wilder, I just don't gravitate in that direction.

RS: I think the film teases out the insecurity of all the characters in different ways. Greta Lee’s character is even more important here than in the novella.

KJ: I didn’t know Greta before I went to see Past Lives. I was amazed because I felt the movie wouldn't have held together without her. It needed that kind of concentration and focus and energy. Being quiet is a very, very difficult thing. Then I saw Russian Doll and I was like, “Oh, she comes out of comedy. Even better.” Mary Kay Place came out of comedy and Andrea Martin, too. So I was excited and we met, and just immediately joined forces. Then she and my wife, Carisa Kelly, the costume designer, started working together and she came up with that outfit for when Gloria sings “Surabaya Johnny.” We were talking about Sternberg as a visual reference, and she was so excited to sing that song.

In the script, the character was supposed to do a strip tease, at a kind of Bushwick-ish place. And I said, that doesn’t sound like a great idea. I’d rather have a sort of echo of a gay bar that doesn’t exist anymore. And I thought, maybe singing “Surabaya Johnny.” And she said, “Stop talking. Once you’ve said it you can’t unsay it.” And she just immediately got to work, and it was great. I just loved her. In the novella the way that Schnitzler deals with her character is much harsher. They’re all kind of charlatans in the book.

RS: She gets the comedy about how Gloria is putting up a front, and you can see through that. And the sexual chemistry is so interesting between her and Willem.

KJ: Or the lack thereof. There was this really interesting comment from a programmer from a film festival. I won't say which one or who, but who rejected the film. But she said, the thing about the movie is that ultimately none of the characters connect with each other and they all go their separate ways. Accurate. [laughs] You know, if that’s a criticism, I don't know what to tell you, but if you want movies where everybody connects with each other and has a learning experience…well, I am very interested in the idea of delusions, and Saxberger’s delusion just builds.

RS: Saxberger and Gloria don't actually connect that way, but she excites him. I don't know if he would have agreed to write a new poem, but she just happens to be there when it’s suggested, and it felt like he agreed to it to impress her, and to recapture his youth.

KJ: My friend Peter Gizzi, whom the film is dedicated to, called me one day during COVID and said, I just had this feeling, I was listening to Steely Dan in the car. And the energy that I felt when I was 17 came back to me. And he said, I'm just going to chase that feeling. And I just thought that's great and a little sad because he'll chase it and then it'll run away from him because it's ephemeral. And I felt like that's at the heart of what this story is. I mean, who wouldn't? Everything inside Willem is saying to him, oh, come on. A kid read your book and he's coming to you and he's telling you you're a hero. But who would resist it? He can sort of go back and forth.

RS: Knowing it’s BS but thinking maybe it’s true.

KJ: Yeah and I mean, you know, the minute that Greta’s character says to him, you must have been beautiful when you were young, the air starts to go out of the tire a little bit.

RS: Quite a moment, yeah. Because that's not what you want to hear. For both Willem and Greta, the roles offer chances to reflect on where they are in their lives and careers.

KJ: At a certain point when it was coming down to casting, there just wasn’t anybody else. I don't buy anybody else as a poet. He played Pasolini, but more than that, it's part of his being. I think the particular training he had as an actor, the origins of his acting career coming out of the Wooster Group. And his temperament, it just seemed like it had to be him.

RS: Who wrote the poem that Willem reads at the end? You?

KJ: Yeah. It was a very long process getting there. Samy’s original draft has a poem there. Samy said that it was just a placeholder, that poetry is not her thing. And she had something called “Evening Moods” that was tuned in to the Schnitzler style. I just thought, what would have come out of somebody of that era? From that era? And then my friend Pete said, why don't you write something? And I thought, it has to relate to the character. It can't just be a poem. And it has to hit like the New York school. It has to hit the right note. It also has to be legible to an audience that is not necessarily conversant with the New York school of poetry. So it can't be too abstract. And I borrowed imagery from a lot of different places for it. The Treasure of Sierra Madre and [the song] "Paper Moon," The Odyssey. That's something that a poet like Frank O'Hara would have done.

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.