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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RM: Of course. It never goes away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SE: Do you remember what you said?

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

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

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

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

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

SE: Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

SE: He’s just a good actor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CB: I can understand the vulnerability he was feeling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CB: Layers of experience?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CB: And can’t be predetermined.

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

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

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

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

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

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

LC: Yeah, it’s true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RS: Do you storyboard?

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

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

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

RS: The immediacy gets lost.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KS: And you were in the class, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CS: And what about The Woodsman?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Everyone laughs]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SF: [laughs] No way!

CS: How is that even possible?

KB: They wear it like a badge of honor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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