InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 10

IN REVIEW ONLINE 

FEATURES 

RENDEZ-VOUS WITH 

FRENCH CINEMA 2023 

BROTHER AND SISTER — 1 

SMOKING CAUSES 

COUGHING — 2 

THE ORIGIN OF EVIL — 3 

SATURN BOWLING — 5 

FOREVER YOUNG — 5 

NENEH SUPERSTAR — 6 

THE GRAVITY — 8 

THREE NIGHTS A WEEK — 9 

REVOIR PARIS — 11 

DIARY OF A FLEETING 

AFFAIR — 11 

HARKIS — 12 

MOTHER AND SON — 12 

THE NIGHT OF THE 12TH — 13 

WINTER BOY — 13 

THE WORST ONES — 14 

OTHER PEOPLE’S 

CHILDREN — 14 

KICKING THE CANON 

ORNETTE COLEMAN — 15 

FILM REVIEWS 

SCREAM VI — 18 

65 — 19 

CHAMPIONS — 21 

UNICORN WARS — 22 

OPERATION FORTUNE: RUSE 

DE GUERRE — 24 

99 MOONS — 25 

OUT OF TIME — 26 

GLASS LIFE —28 

REWIND AND PLAY — 30 

STONEWALLING — 30 

FUGUE — 31 

ALBUM REVIEWS 

MISS GRIT — 32 

March 10, 2023 

Volume 1, Issue 10

RENDEZ-VOUS WITH FRENCH CINEMA 2023 

BROTHER AND SISTER 

Arnaud Desplechin 

Somewhere along the line, not all that long ago, Arnaud Desplechin ceased to be a marketable 

name in the U.S. film biz. While certainly never a properly, consistently lauded figure over here, the 

now-62-year-old French auteur and Cannes mainstay has nevertheless found audiences via the 

likes of IFC and Magnolia, who put out his last film, Ismael’s Ghost, to get U.S. distribution. That was six years ago now, and in the time 

since, Desplechin has released two more features (the misunderstood procedural Oh Mercy! and the pokey, elliptical Philip Roth 

adaptation Deception), a television miniseries (En thérapie), and directed (and filmed) a production of Angels in America for 

Comédie-Française, though none of these have found their way to American audiences. 

It seems excitement has waned for this formerly hip filmmaker, yet little about his approach and voice has changed since his 1996 

breakthrough My Sex Life… or How I Got Into an Argument, nor has his stable of actors, an elite crew he largely discovered, boasting the 

likes of Matthieu Almaric and Marion Cotillard, which makes the disinterest in getting his recent work distributed here all the more 

baffling and frustrating. That said, one can imagine the mischievous, purposefully indulgent self-referentialism of Ismael’s Ghost and 

its predecessor My Golden Days to be a turn-off for the uninitiated (they both act as pseudo-sequels to my Sex Life...), compounded by 

those films’ mean, unemphasized sense of humor and ironic self-critique; the dry dramatics of Oh Mercy! and Deception operated less 

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RENDEZ-VOUS WITH FRENCH CINEMA 

like an antidote to these potential marketing hurdles, and rather 

more like another potential hindrance. 

Still, despite these recent setbacks, there’s good reason to 

believe that Desplechin could make a grand return to U.S. art 

houses and critical favor, and that his latest, Frère et Soeur (AKA 

Brother and Sister) could be the film to make this happen. 

Premiering in the U.S. thanks to Film at Lincoln Center’s 

Rendez-Vous with French Cinema festival, Brother and Sister 

bears the filmmaker’s off-kilter sensibility channeled into a 

searing domestic drama starring Melvil Poupaud and Marion 

Cotillard as the brother and sister of the title, Louis and Alice. 

Opening on a pair of tragedies — first, a wake for Louis’ 

(Poupaud) young son, and then an elaborate car accident that 

leaves the duo’s parents hospitalized and near death — Brother 

and Sister skips back and forth through time to fill in the siblings’ 

backstory and reveal the origins of their oft-referenced hatred 

for one another. Although we’re initially lead to believe that the 

rift began somewhere around the child’s wake in the opening 

scene, Desplechin’s screenplay ends up taking us further into the 

past (and then back again to the dreary present), attempting to 

get us closer to the truth while never quite allowing us to see the 

whole picture. 

This narrative approach proves key to Desplechin’s vision for 

Brother and Sister which 

might have otherwise 

been camp-adjacent 

high drama, but is 

instead redirected 

toward a classically 

cinematic exploration of 

selective memory and 

subjectivity (not unlike 

My Golden Days, but 

without the meta 

elements). We are 

allowed to glean a 

general picture, and by 

the film’s conclusion no 

grand mystery truly still 

persists, but important 

plot and character 

Details still elude us, especially in the case of the family 

matriarch, who remains in a coma for the picture’s duration, 

unable to defend herself against accusations of cruelty. Open to 

appreciation on a number of different levels, Brother and Sister is 

pure Desplechin minus the self-mythologizing, a slight reset that 

still maintains the director’s sly humor and destabilizing 

approach to sequencing, and featuring two major performances 

from Poupaud and (especially) Cotillard, who navigate the film’s 

significant tonal shifts with considerable, affecting grace. — M.G. 

MAILLOUX 

SMOKING CAUSES COUGHING 

Quentin Dupieux 

Reinventing the superhero genre often entails energizing it, 

usually with piled-on camp (as with Troma Entertainment’s The 

Toxic Avenger and, more recently, Marvel’s Deadpool) or pointed 

critique (as with Eric Kripke’s series The Boys). Typically, the 

assumption is that the genre needs reinventing because it’s stale, 

and staleness is a bad thing. But what of jettisoning staleness 

only to restore it? With neither gaudy bloodlust nor dramatic 

reversal, Quentin Dupieux’s “Avengers assemble!” moment 

collapses upon itself, and deliberately so. A loosely construed 

series of wacky vignettes, Smoking Causes Coughing is calibrated 

to an uncanny tonal wavelength, entreating 

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FESTIVAL COVERAGE 

eavesdroppers to indulge in the simultaneous exhibition of the 

comical and the creepy. Think midnight hangout movie, with 

quasi-stoner philosophy to boot — it’s quite a hoot.There’s literally 

a campfire session way past working hours, all for the purpose of 

building group cohesion. You see, Dupieux’s protagonists this 

time around aren’t some hapless good-for-nothings, bewildered 

couples, or killer wheels; they’re the new Toxic Avengers, now 

branded — in endearingly French fashion — as the Tobacco 

Force. The quintet of carcinogens (each of them named after one 

of cigarette smoke’s sightless killers) don Ultraman-style 

costumes, complete with helmets, and they harness the clouds of 

their powers for the honorable cause of fighting, no, exploding 

evil. 

An opening sequence featuring some gawking passers-by 

witnesses this task force, headed off-site by a talking, 

acid-drooling rat, ganging up on a rubber kaiju tortoise. With 

cheeky Gallic irreverence (the playful banter of early Godard with 

the tongue-in-cheek setup of the OSS 117 films), they finish him 

off, rinse clean, and head off to a work retreat, the bane of 

modern capitalism. Camped by a picturesque river and stocked 

with supplies — a minimart with live-in assistant included — from 

an über-sleek underground bunker, Ammonia (Oulaya Amamra), 

Benzene (Gilles Lellouche), Mercury (Jean-Pascal Zadi), Methanol 

(Vincent Lacoste), and Nicotine (Anaïs Demoustier) thus prep for 

their next episode by exchanging horror stories, the stuff of 

nighttime and existential terrors. 

There’s a Thinking Helmet sometime from the 1930s, Cartesian 

dissociation by way of possible Nazi etiology; a grisly swimming 

pool murder featuring Adèle Exarchopoulos as a voluptuous 

housewife; bodily dissociation via grape presser; ecological 

statement cursorily received; as well as — to justify its superhero 

veneer — the impending threat of global extermination, courtesy 

of alien malevolence. But Smoking Causes Coughing also isn’t 

quite the superhero flick it’s billed as; the loopy director’s 

sensibilities, here, are trained more toward the superhero 

anti-movie, with or without political intent. It could be had that 

the eponymous proposition be taken as less-than-subtle slight 

against the empty calories of banal military-industrial addictions, 

sponsored by Feige, Marvel, and Co. It could also be a converse 

extolling of simple-life virtues: have a smoke in France and drift 

back to Cold War nostalgia, where bodies and minds 

were, relative to today and, for the most part, freer to think, 

make love, procreate. 

That the bulk of the film’s comic horror hinges on some physical 

mishap, played out to (eagerly expected) absurd proportions, is 

probably no accident. “God is a smoker of Havanas,” croons Serge 

Gainsbourg over the title cards; your penchant for coughing, 

then, relies on how much you believe in Him, or vice versa. As a 

standalone feature, this already rocks, but further contextualized 

against whatever capeshit dreck your local cineplexes are 

putting out, Smoking Causes Coughing is a quietly potent banger. 

—MORRIS YANG 

THE ORIGIN OF EVIL 

Sebastien Marnier 

Sebastien Marnier’s latest breezy, twisty thriller The Origin of Evil 

may lack any deeper interrogation in its Agatha 

Christie-reinvention of deception, but its strong ensemble cast 

makes the endeavor worthwhile, if not substantial, viewing. 

Stéphane (Laure Calamy), a worker at a fish cannery, rediscovers 

the family who gave her up at birth, reaching out to her father 

Serge (Jacques Weber), vague as to whether she is seeking 

connection or waiting for his grave to be dug. Though the women 

around him try to hide it, Serge is in poor health, and though 

nothing is as it seems, it's the perfect setup for Victorian 

melodrama. Wary of Stéphane’s arrival, his wife Louise 

(Dominique Blanc) and daughter George (Doria Tiller) are prone to 

quips, long drags from cigarettes, and and a view of life that is 

mostly through a camera lens — more playing pieces in a bored 

game of middlebrow intrigue. Serge’s home is one fit for a Bond 

villain — an impersonal setting that seems more fit to be ogled 

for its production design aesthetics than its enhancement of 

dull-bladed gameplay — in stark contrast with his long-lost 

daughter’s shared apartment. There are family fights and lines 

drawn by class and generation, but in the end, formula and 

structure win every argument. 

If anything, the roll of the dice in Clue more closely recalls 

François Ozon’s campy murder mystery 8 Women than it does 

2022’s popular Glass Onion. Here, though the background of 

Stephane’s class and sexuality inform her character, Marnier is 

similarly more concerned with the icons of genre than he is the 

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messaging of his familial power struggle. The family in The Origin 

of Evil is largely made up of caricatures: the ever-watchful maid, 

the restless teenager, the dubious executor. These are individual 

women less primed for social commentary, and more cast to 

fulfill genre tropes. Though often frothy, Marnier isn’t unaware of 

those present tropes, frequently casting a wink toward a secret 

passageway or rack of sharpened knives. The whodunnit-style 

caper is often even presented in split screen, The Talented Ms. 

Ripley by way of de Palma, a scrolling gallery of suspects in a 

family game night of deception. Calamy is as delightful as usual, 

her everywoman character brightened by her customary 

rom-com-forged optimism (though not quite the delight of a 

summer crowd pleaser like My Donkey, My Lover & I). The dynamic 

between Stéphane and her father is particularly strong, given 

their situation as mysteries to each other and her feeling the 

need to lie to increase her social standing. Does she claim that 

she owns the cannery simply to be perceived as closer in class 

status, or is the dynamic of a disapproving father she never had 

already trickling into her considerations? 

The broader class dynamic, however, is somewhat light on 

nuance. In the vein of popular recent releases like Parasite, the 

dichotomy between the bourgeois family and factory worker, 

with Stéphane representing the proletariat, is limited to two 

polarized ends only maneuverable via the absorption of the 

family unit. The populist sentiment in this recent wave of 

class-metaphor genre films frames every conflict as a simple 

good versus evil; the wealthy are cartoonishly evil and the 

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working class, even when conniving, are good at heart. In what is 

often functionally airplane fodder, the disparity between the 

characters in itself is not enough conflict, and there must always 

be a stark villain in the equation. The Origin of Evil does muddy its 

waters a bit, with the addition of Stéphane’s girlfriend (Suzanne 

Clement), who’s currently serving a five-year prison sentence. 

The relationship between the two women serves to counteract 

the façade of a perfect liar driven only by necessity, and the 

film’s queerness is a pleasant surprise even if it isn’t textually 

central. But where the film’s greatest benefit comes from its 

particular context: French commercial cinema tends toward the 

most trying forms of comedy — see, for example, the popularity 

of the insufferable Astérix & Obélix franchise — so the self-aware 

genre homage of The Origin of Evil is much welcome, even if it 

doesn’t break any new ground.— SARAH WILLIAMS 

SATURN BOWLING 

Patricia Mazuy 

Patricia Mazuy, now six films deep in a three-decade-plus career 

with Saturn Bowling, has always risked a certain, tantrum-centric 

filmmaking, favoring characters with shared psychoses who butt 

heads with one another and all those around them. She alienates 

via general unpleasantness, but it’s even more rewarding to 

penetrate those barriers and discover the primalness that 

charges her work. In a filmography populated by violent 

burnouts, obsessives, and the like, Saturn Bowling still earns the 

distinction of being her most male film. 

A pair of mildly estranged half-brothers, Armand (Achille 

Reggiani) and Guillaume (Arieh Worthalter), tenuously reunite 

following their father’s death, when it comes time to decide 

ownership of the family’s beloved, subterranean bowling alley. 

The former is effectively unhoused, spending his nights at his 

club security job after everyone’s left; he’s also desperate for sex, 

ogling any and all exposed flesh, masturbating in the rain, 

deploying failed pickup lines. Guillaume, too busy with his police 

work, offers the bowling alley to Armand, who also gets their 

father’s opulent apartment, decked out with snakeskin jackets, 

hunting trophies, rifles, and a German Shepard. It’s not long 

before Armand, his lack of self-control already telegraphed, 

commits a murder or two. 

Mazuy attempts an impressive gambit of divided perspectives, 

Armand’s unsettlingly impressionistic subjectivity shifts to a 

more procedural temperament after that first shock of violence. 

The first murder explains the rest, and thus, we’re only subjected 

to one interval of absolutely misogynistic depravity; to achieve 

restraint, Mazuy indulges just once. Guillaume has to shoulder 

that moral weight of suspecting his half-brother, while 

navigating the vicissitudes of his own life. The film admittedly 

loses momentum as it mounts toward a more straightforward 

climax that isn’t exactly expected from the prologue’s 

disorienting visual and aural excisions, where the dramatic 

development lumbers along in a gait similar to the seething 

Armand. Perhaps if Saturn Bowling were intent on a more equal 

alternation between brothers, as in 1989’s Thick Skinned, it would 

play as less mismatched than it ultimately is. Thankfully, then, at 

least, the muscle of this experiment is still commendable enough 

in and of itself, leaving plenty enough to chew on despite some 

notable imbalance. — PATRICK PREZIOSI 

FOREVER YOUNG 

Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi 

The latest film from French actor-director Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi 

is difficult to evaluate. One could argue that, for what it is, it is 

fairly accomplished. A showcase for mostly young talent, 

including some performers making their film debut, Forever 

Young is exuberantly melodramatic, the film’s form matching its 

protagonists’ heightened emotions and desperation to be 

understood. I suspect that a certain kind of viewer might well 

find Bruni-Tedeschi’s film swoony and romantic, a full-throttle 

tribute to the heedlessness of young adulthood. 

All of which is to say that Forever Young is two solid hours of 

theater-kid energy, a film that wholeheartedly believes that the 

art of acting is a beautiful, agonized, possibly holy mission, and if 

(like me) you don’t exactly subscribe to that ideology, this is an 

incredibly irritating film. Its French title, Les Amandiers, refers to 

a real-life theater studies program that Bruni-Tedeschi herself 

took part in in the late 1980s, one that was led by legendary film 

and stage director Patrice Chéreau (here played by the 

omnipresent Louis Garrel). But the English title, probably 

intended as a celebration of the freedom of youth, actually 

betrays a deep investment in arrested development. 

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This is an autobiographical work, but one that is entirely 

self-serving and ego-driven, the sort of thing you might expect if 

Glee’s Rachel Berry were a real person and got the chance to 

vomit her blinkered worldview onto the silver screen. Lead 

character Stella (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), like the director herself, is 

a child of enormous privilege. I don’t know exactly how 

accurately Forever Young reflects Bruni-Tedeschi’s own 

upbringing. Whether she, like Stella, grew up in an upper-class 

compound and had a butler (Franck Demules) for a surrogate 

parent, I can’t say. But it’s hard to ignore the rather flattering 

self-portrait Stella represents. Like the director, she is blonde, 

with piercing blue eyes, and — in the film’s dramatic universe — 

almost everyone is dying to sleep with her. 

To be fair though, practically everyone is screwing everyone else 

in this demimonde, but most of the focus is on Stella’s benighted 

relationship with Étienne (Sofiane Bennacer), the “bad boy” of the 

theater class who is intermittently homeless and consistently 

hooked on heroin. Bruni-Tedeschi asks us to understand these 

young performers’ dissolute personal lives not as a hindrance to 

their art but as its spiritual fuel. Method acting is a fetish, and 

possibly a cult, in that it assumes that theatrical creation is 

borne only from torment, the demand to push one’s behavior 

beyond the borderline of rationality. Industry actors live for this 

stuff, which is why they love to bestow awards on their peers for 

conspicuous suffering — losing or gaining 50 lbs., consuming 

raw bison liver in subzero conditions, or “bravely” abandoning 

glamor in favor of disconcerting ordinariness, with split ends and 

bad teeth. 

A few years ago, Robert Pattinson made a shrewd observation. 

“You only ever see people doing method when they’re playing 

anasshole,” he remarked. “You never see someone just being 

lovely to everyone going, ‘I’m really deep in character.’” In a way, 

Forever Young is a tribute to precisely this kind of asshole 

behavior as well as to a coterie of performers for whom tedious 

solipsism — the fundamental state of being for middle-class 

white people in their early twenties -- is treated as the 

precondition for a visionary avant-garde. In Bruni-Tedeschi’s 

precious bubble, the loss of loved ones and even the AIDS crisis 

are little more than affect-fodder, a set of emotional memories 

that seize these children and then quickly dissipate, all to ensure 

that the show will go on. — MICHAEL SICINSKI 

NENEH SUPERSTAR 

Ramzi Ben Sliman 

Ballet school drama Neneh Superstar is the kind of film that gives 

festivals like Rendez-Vous with French Cinema a reason to reach 

out to younger teens like they do with the film’s initial free 

6


screenings. While it’s YA in scope, Neneh-Fanta Gnaoré’s (Oumy 

Bruni Garrel) story — directed by Ramzi Ben Sliman — is both 

heartfelt and bitterly honest about the truth behind so many 

lauded institutions. She dreams of becoming a ballet dancer, 

something that shows in her every movement on the playground, 

teeming with energy. Dreaming of the Opera de Paris Ballet 

School, she hasn’t quite contended with the precise nature of 

that school’s mission. Her supportive parents (Steve Tientcheu 

and Aïssa Maïga) encourage this dream, though her working-class 

background outside of Paris puts her at odds with the wealthy 

student body of young ballerinas with private tutors, and that’s 

well before race comes into play. Even once she’s admitted, just 

one of seven girls in a vast sea of hopefuls, school head Marianne 

Belage (Maïwenn) reminds her that she is here to be challenged — 

which is a lot of weight to put on a child’s shoulders. 

Garrel, in her first role in a feature not directed by one of her 

actor-director parents, often comes off as a bigger star than the 

rising talent she plays. She's incredibly kinetic, always in motion 

even when preteen restlessness hurdles away from a dancer's 

grace; cocky and not quite in control of her own growing body. A 

young performance can make or break a film, and her 

commitment means that her wide-eyed admiration for a director 

she wants to be her mentor and the power struggles that 

subsequently ensue between student and teacher make the two 

parties into equals in their intensity. 

From an American perspective, the overt nature of the school’s 

institutional racism seems a bit overtly presented, but the 

cultural difference does prevent more covert forms of prejudice 

from taking the lead. When filling out applications, the girls are 

reminded to list many details about their parents, down to height 

and weight (in order to extrapolate the not-yet-grown children’s 

physical development, and therefore, their worthiness), which 

serves as a reminder that they do not get to leave their 

backgrounds behind for their talent. Aggressors are punished 

less severely than Neneh when she finally fights back, and she is 

admonished by being blatantly excluded from a chance to lead in 

the class production of Snow White. Marianne subscribes to a 

7


belief in “guaranteeing the tradition of white ballet,” and even 

when she admits to relating to the young girl’s struggle for 

perfection, she is still distanced by her own prejudice. But Neneh 

herself is never painted as a perfect victim in this situation. She’s 

often rude and distracted and interrupts because she’s twelve — 

a child forced into adult games. 

This film also features one of the most eye-roll-worthy needle 

drops imaginable. Perhaps Sliman hasn’t been inundated with 

years of repetitive TikTok, but Masked Wolf’s “Astronaut in the 

Ocean” is too new to be divorced from its own virality, even if it 

may genuinely be what a twelve-year-old would dance to for fun. 

At times, the ballet world also seems so cold and unwelcoming 

that you’d wonder why she, with all her flair for performance, 

would desire it for anything beyond the mausoleum-cold image 

of pain and success — the transfixion isn’t effectively articulated. 

And so, though Neneh Superstar boasts some young talent, and 

the first truly great performance from Maïwenn since 2016’s My 

King, it seems best suited to be an awakening for a younger 

audience rather than any more substantial interrogation into 

persisting, insidious power structures. — SARAH WILLIAMS 

THE GRAVITY 

Cédric Ido 

There are strange goings-on in the Stains suburbs of France, an 

assemblage of stark high-rise buildings that are home to a 

collection of everyday working-class people, the elderly, and rival 

gangs of drug dealers looking to consolidate their control over 

the area. Christophe (Jean-Baptiste Anoumon) has just been 

released from a three-year prison stint and returns home to find 

that things have changed. His estranged childhood friends, 

brothers Daniel (Max Gomis) and Joshua (Steve Tientcheu), are 

dealing on the sly, hoping not to run afoul of the “Ronin,” a roving 

pack of wild teenagers who have declared themselves masters of 

the entire housing project. As someone explains to Christophe, 

these kids are different — disinterested in money, and with no 

official leader, they are instead concerned with fairness and 

equality, although they’ll employ violent means to maintain their 

dominance. Much of the first half of the film charts these various 

shifting dynamics; Daniel is about to leave the country with his 

girlfriend and child to move to Canada, but can’t bring himself to 

tell Joshua or his running coach. Joshua is an inventor in his 

8


free time, tricking out his wheelchair to hide drugs from the 

Ronin and tinkering with something or other in the basement of 

his building. Christophe thinks the Ronin dropped a dime on him 

to get him out of the way, and wants to rob their stash houses to 

get recompense for his time served. An aura of potential violence 

hangs over every scene, as various encounters threaten to 

tumble over from loaded conversation to outright warfare. 

This is largely the stuff of “cinéma de banlieue,” a familiar genre 

of French cinema charting life in these suburban spaces typically 

home to the poor and immigrants. Writer/director Cédric Ido, 

himself French Burkinabe, knows the milieu well. But if The 

Gravity begins as something akin to La Haine, it gradually 

transforms into something much odder, and more interesting. 

Because while these characters act out their interpersonal 

conflicts, a strange cosmological event begins taking shape. Ido 

allows details to creep in slowly at first, mostly via TV news 

broadcasts emanating from the background; the planets are 

slowly converging in a once-in-a-lifetime happening, and 

commentators disagree on what, if any, effects this convergence 

might have on the Earth. Meanwhile, Ido and cinematographer 

David Ungaro slowly complicate the visual scheme of their film. 

Brief cutaways track the slow movements of various celestial 

bodies, while drone shots of the banlieue skyline take on the 

portentous dread of the long Steadicam shots in The Shining. The 

film slowly drains the life out of the banlieue until it seems 

populated only by the main characters and a seemingly endless 

number of Ronin, who have been driven mad by the convergence. 

Ido, a self-confessed “fanboy,” seems determined to expand his 

narrative into increasingly strange, genre-adjacent digressions. 

There are comic book-style transitions between scenes, while 

the Ronin seem plucked from Walter Hill’s The Warriors. Things 

eventually deteriorate into outright horror territory, while an 

action sequence late in the film seems inspired by the 

concussive, blunt object-head trauma choreography favored by 

South Korean action movies (and the Oldboy hammer fight in 

particular). Even anime elements make an appearance, with a 

mech-like contraption that appears in a fist-pumping moment of 

triumph. It’s all very exciting, and while Ido risks absurdity with 

his disparate influences, he’s so gleefully committed to his 

scenario that it all somehow manages to work. It remains to be 

seen what kind of adventurous distributor might take a chance 

on such a strange, willful genre hybrid, or how they would even 

market it to an unsuspecting audience. But it’s a remarkable film, 

thrillingly unpredictable and even beautiful in its own way. Ido is 

a major talent, that’s for sure. We need more films like The 

Gravity, willing to bend and shape genre to its own idiosyncratic 

ends. In this sense, at least, it bears a resemblance to Clement 

Cogitore’s Sons of Ramses, another nocturnal excursion into the 

underbelly of French society. Make seeking this film out a 

priority. — DANIEL GORMAN 

THREE NIGHTS A WEEK 

Florent Gouëlou 

Three Nights a Week is less the love story between a straight man 

and a drag queen it has been billed as, and rather a love letter to 

a subculture and the invitations that it opens. Photographer 

Baptiste (Pablo Pauly) is ostensibly straight. He visits a World 

AIDS Day awareness event that his girlfriend Samia (Hafsia Herzi) 

is involved with, intending to use some of the local drag scene in 

his art. Though he is intrigued by the images of freedom through 

performance and the glitter from ashes on an artistic level, one 

particular queen does catch his eye. Cookie Kunty (Romain Eck) 

is strangely hypnotic and calming, whether through Baptiste’s 

eyes or not, and, as she takes a slow, practiced drag of a 

cigarette lit, with confidence, by a male admirer; more alluring to 

him than she is to Samia, and a reminder of Baptiste’s marriage 

to another, matte-r world. 

The relationship begins just like so many on screen: a love story 

between the idea of a man and the idea of a woman. Only it’s not 

long before Baptiste finds himself running into Quentin, the man 

behind the magic, and reconciling the reality of a gay 

relationship with the larger-than-life partner he has in Cookie 

proves hard at first. Even Quentin is shyer without the avatar of 

Cookie, hiding painted nails from a server and markedly less 

overwhelmed with confidence by his lover’s side. But the “it’s not 

guys, it’s just him” (though in this case, it’s just her, to begin with) 

excuse is trite and uninteresting even with the genderplay twist, 

and Baptiste’s insistence to his girlfriend as their relationship 

devolves — that this is an exception, not a rule for him — may be 

sometimes realistic but narratively does feel like conflict invoked 

for the sake of romantic complication, somewhat unnecessary 

when the leads have chemistry from the start. 

9


The introduction of Baptiste’s queerness via the avatar of Cookie 

Kunty recontextualizes drag not as a final art in visible 

queerness, but as an inviting exploratory space for desire. Queer 

femininity isn't an object of fear for him, but one of familiarity, 

painted not in proximity to heterosexual gender performance but 

in homage to it. At the start, he may still be primarily in the world 

of heterosexuality, but a few nights a week, starting slowly, 

Baptiste is eased into his own desires through his own art. As a 

photographer, he is initially stricken by the image of Cookie as 

one of purer expression; it’s only a matter of time before he 

realizes how closely that image is tied to his own hand. Cookie, 

and many of the other queens in the Paris scene, exemplify the 

convoluted image of what men are told they should desire in 

women. They are gracious yet spirited, curvy yet padded and 

corseted in the right places to match an image, confident yet 

bound to an audience. It’s no wonder that even the most blazing 

personality in the room allows Baptiste the safe space to explore 

his queerness: she is what he believes in. 

That Baptiste’s wide-eyed wonder at his first queer love is so 

authentic, as is the film’s immersion in European drag culture, is 

thanks to the first-hand experience of many of the cast and 

crew. Director Florent Gouëlou has performed as drag queen 

Javel Habibi by night, but he is not alone in his ties to the scene; 

Eck’s Cookie Kunty persona has existed for years, and although 

Three Nights a Week is a fictionalized story when it comes to 

Quentin, Cookie as a stage persona is very much real. This 

personal respect for drag as an art form means that the 

performance spaces and club scenes hardly feel staged (beyond 

a literal one), and the nightlife is vibrant and beautifully lit. The 

authenticity is a large part of why the more grounded social 

points — where the glamorous romance pauses to remind our 

lovers of its historical reality: a culture decimated by AIDS and 

social homophobia — don’t feel out of place, because they are 

just as much a mark on the scene as the swept-away romance is. 

— SARAH WILLIAMS 

10


REVOIR PARIS 

Alice Winocour 

“But as much as this search for lost memories and joys enables 

Mia to both discover hitherto unseen aspects of Paris (notably, in 

her search for a Senegalese kitchen worker, she finds herself in 

a poor immigrant district) and have a deeper understanding of 

other victims’ damaged psyches, forging more intimate bonds 

with strangers in the process, the film’s somewhat loose 

narrative does not always demonstrate conviction; Paris 

Memories’ most tender side isn’t entirely fleshed out organically, 

though it’s perhaps more apparent in certain instances… Still, 

despite the lack of an entirely taut story, and the sense that 

Winocour’s directions remain conservatively rooted in a familiar 

sense of mise-en-scène, what does count — apart from Efira’s 

effectively moving presence — is the filmmaker’s gentle tone and 

observational approach, both of which help create distance 

between the film’s core — Mia’s interiority — and the clichéd 

socio-political intrusions that pepper its narrative.“ — AYEEN 

FOROOTAN [Originally published as part of InRO’s 2022 Torinto 

International Film Fest coverage.] 

DIARY OF A FLEETING AFFAIR 

Emmanuel Moret 

“The flair and flavor of Mouret’s slick style in Diary of a Fleeting 

Affair is exactly what he’s been refining for almost two decades, 

transforming even the most abstract and almost implausible 

scenarios into convincing streams of events without ever slightly 

skewing toward an openly naturalistic approach. Through various 

modes of verbal and bodily expressions, concise framings, 

heightened spatial awareness, brisk music scores, and an 

easygoing chemistry between Kiberlain and Macaigne, who prove 

convincing in their roles of an incompatible couple — Charlotte 

as an amiable, open-minded, and playful extrovert to Simon’s 

mostly anxious, awkward introvert, physically defined by his 

usually dwindled posture (viewed best during a teasing 

threesome scene) — Mouret delivers both a jovial and surgical 

inspection of the moral and philosophical dilemmas inherent to 

modern affairs —especially those of the middle-aged — in 

bittersweet dramedy form.“ — AYEEN FOROOTAN [Originally 

published as part of InRO’s 2022 Cannes Film Festival coverage.] 

11


HARKIS 

Philippe Faucon 

“Harkis is pretty much the sort of foursquare historical drama 

one would typically associate with Rachid Bouchareb… 

Serviceably directed by Philippe Faucon, Harkis chronicles the 

final months of the Algerian War, as experienced by the so-called 

harkis, those Algerians who signed up to fight on behalf of France 

and against the FLN… While there is nothing cinematically 

remarkable about Harkis, it makes its point with admirable 

economy (it’s a slim 85 minutes) and speaks frankly about a 

group of Algerians who were uniquely screwed by the false 

promises of colonial history, asked to betray their fellow Muslims 

in the name of some higher ideal that, as far as the Gaullists 

were concerned, evaporated as soon as these soldiers had 

outlived their usefulness.“ — MICHAEL SICINSKI [Originally 

published as part of InRO’s 2022 Cannes Film Festival coverage.] 

MOTHER AND SON 

Léonor Serraille 

“As the film progresses, these themes become increasingly 

hamfisted, as if Serraille is trying to ensure that audiences are 

privy to how the internal worlds of her characters are linked. 

When the film moves to focusing on Jean, who at this point is a 

teenager, we watch as he becomes intimate with a white girl as a 

track from Lambarena’s Bach to Africa plays — its mixing of 

African music with the works of J.S. Bach is laughably on the 

nose. Serraille simply can’t help but connect her ideas across the 

film’s three parts in clumsily overt manners. Early in the film, we 

watch as Rose and her two sons paint each other’s faces and 

revel in their time together. But [Serraille is] unhappy with letting 

that scene live as its own sublime moment.“ — JOSHUA MINSOO 

KIM [Originally published as part of InRO’s 2022 Cannes Film 

Festival coverage.] 

12


NIGHT OF THE 12th 

Dominik Moll 

“The main problem with Night of the 12th is that Moll and 

Marchand (adapting a book by Paula Guéna) seem to think their 

audience is as incompetent as the police. Every primary theme 

of the film is stated outright in the dialogue, to make sure we 

don’t miss anything along the way. An insensitive cop remarks 

that Clara got around, which prompts the film’s second full 

discussion regarding victim-blaming and misogyny. And near the 

film’s end, Vivès remarks to a magistrate (Anouk Grinberg) that, in 

fact, “all men killed” Clara… These are not dumb ideas. In a sense, 

this is the ultimate takeaway from Bruno Dumont’s L’humanité, 

and Night of the 12th’s concern with the obsessive psychology of 

damaged cops recalls David Fincher’s Zodiac. But those films 

understood the power of subtext. Night of the 12th insists on 

signposting its every move, to such a degree that Moll doesn’t 

seem to really need the viewer at all. 

“ — MICHAEL SICINSKI[Originally published as part of InRO’s 2022 

Cannes Film Festival coverage.] 

WINTER BOY 

Christophe Honoré 

Honoré, in this way, takes an ostensibly personal film and 

dresses it up in the polished realism of less distinctive directors 

like Audiard or Sciamma… Instead, the incidents Honoré 

highlights are outgrowths of Lucas’s transmuted emotions: he’s 

aloof with his friends, overshares with hook-ups, and 

possessively tries to seduce his brother’s boyfriend. None of 

these threads culminate; rather, the film ascends into 

near-tragedy and schmaltz. As a portrait of grief that avoids 

extremes, Winter Boy is tasteful to a fault. We can see that, 

denied the normative rite-of-passage markers of 

late-adolescence, Lucas is casting about for something new to 

aim for: he seems to have no particular interests of his own, nor 

does he want to adopt those of the people around him. To 

surround this chaos with near-diagnostic maturity is less a 

useful balance on the part of Honoré, and more a stodgy 

mischaracterization. 

— MICHAEL SCOULAR [Originally published as part of InRO’s 2022 

TIFF coverage.] 

13


THE WORST ONES 

Lise Akoka 

“But the neighbors who refer to the film’s cast as ‘the worst ones’ 

are less concerned with the exploitation of the actors than with 

that of their own image. They are more concerned with attracting 

more wealthy residents to the neighborhood than they are the 

wellbeing of kids like Lily or Ryan who they actively spurn. If 

anything, the set, for all its questionable ethical practices, 

provides something of an escape from reality and a new, fulfilling 

experience for Lily and Ryan. This is especially true when the 

scope of the set expands outward from the director to include 

the crew who are more friendly and down to earth with the kids, 

providing them with more helpful guidance and encouragement. 

The Worst Ones finds its groove by rejecting both the neighbors’ 

scorn for these kids and Gabriel’s artistic pity, showing Lily and 

Ryan in a more varied, lifelike light, unbound by the expectations 

placed on them by others or a camera. And Wanecque and 

Mahaut are terrific playing what amounts to a dual role each; 

they’re easily the best thing about the film.“ — CHRIS MELLO 

[Originally published as part of InRO’s 2022 Cannes Film Festival 

coverage.] 

OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN 

Rebecca Zlotowski 

“Told entirely without the expected, more dramatic (louder) 

moments. Music cues rise or cut in earlier than expected, a 

whole scene can fade to black, or a conversation won’t be 

audible until it’s in the aftermath of conflict. This strategy gives 

the characters privacy, and lends more weight to the subtleties 

of performing reflection rather than action. In particular, the use 

of Vivaldi’s ‘Mandolin Concerto in C Major’ becomes a Kramer vs. 

Kramer nod, intentionally signaling memories of more conflictdriven 

relationships. Further, by choosing to frame this narrative 

— in which multiple relationships, large and small, enter and 

change and leave Rachel’s life — through its emotional aftermath, 

Zlotowski bends what would otherwise be a simple falling-inlove-then-out-of-love 

story into a character study of a woman 

whose every desire is complicated by life itself. In other words, 

this is a narrative that should be a melodrama… And yet, this isn’t 

that; with the leisure of a Sautet or Rohmer drama, the best 

character moments come packaged in peaceful performance, 

rather than affective outbursts.“ — SARAH WILLIAMS [Originally 

published as part of InRO’s 2023 Sundance Film Festival coverage] 

14


OF HUMAN FEELINGS 

Ornette Coleman 

There is perhaps no bolder album title in all of 20th century music than Ornette 

Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come. And what’s more, it was entirely appropriate: 

Coleman’s arrival in New York City in 1959, followed shortly after by the record’s 

release, sent shockwaves throughout the jazz world. There were plenty of doubters 

who dismissed Coleman’s innovations as a fad, an affront to jazz tradition, but the 

test of time has proven that record’s wild proclamation to be true. There’s 

actually a shared theme among most of Coleman’s early album titles 

(Tomorrow Is the Question, Change of the Century) that, correctly, 

positions the jazz provocateur as a progressive force in the genre’s 

development — as well as a figure oriented toward the future. Crucially, 

though, Coleman’s music also has deep ties to the past. Consider a 

record like 1969’s Ornette at 12 — again, the title signals a focus on time, 

but going in the opposite direction. Ornette at 12 tapped into not only the 

music of Coleman’s youth (though that is a permanent consideration, 

too), but the uninhibited intuitiveness of being a child — a notion 

supported by the decision to have his then-12-year-old son, Denardo, on 

drums. Denardo would grow into a formidable player as an adult, but he was 

clearly an amateur in 1969 — and, indeed, his youthful abandon is more or less the 

point. Coleman may be commonly regarded as a forward-looking innovator, but to 

fully understand his work, one must also recognize its debt to the past — both in a 

historical and a personal sense. And there may be no better way to come to that 

understanding than to examine a less heralded period of Coleman’s career, 

which began around 1975 with the formation of his first electric band, Prime 

Time.Listening to Prime Time with 21st-century ears, the music still sounds a 

good deal more radical, more outlandish than Coleman’s ’60s quartet 

masterpieces. By the mid-’70s, the jazz fusion movement was in full swing, but Coleman’s 

electric jazz had little in common with Weather Report, Return to Forever, Mahavishnu 

Orchestra, or any of the other groups that sprung up in the wake of Miles Davis’ adoption of 

electric a half-decade earlier. Even today, there’s hardly any music that sounds like what 

Coleman was doing with Prime Time. The closest resemblance can probably be found in some 

of the more funk-inspired groups from the downtown New York no-wave scene, but none of 

those bands really approach the complexity and abstraction of Coleman’s outfit, nor do they 

embody its improvisational principles (and, of course, Prime Time anticipated no-wave by two 

or three years). 

Part of Prime Time’s uniqueness can be attributed to its unusual instrumentation. The typical 

lineup featured an arrangement that remains uncommon today: two electric guitarists, two 

electric bassists, two drummers, and Coleman on alto sax (with occasional trumpet and violin 

15


digressions), weaving his way in and out of that supersized 

rhythm section. But that’s not all that sets the group’s music 

apart. The free approach that typified Coleman’s ’60s work is still 

intact here, but it’s been expanded, developed into an 

all-encompassing philosophy that the jazz iconoclast called 

“harmolodics.” The precise definition of that term is notoriously 

difficult to pin down, but it’s an approach that’s predicated on 

non-hierarchy: not just the freedom of each individual to 

improvise at all times, but the privileging of each aspect of music 

(melody, harmony, rhythm, etc.) equally. In practice, it’s 

profoundly elastic — Coleman’s music can be frenetic, often 

feeling like it’s on the verge of descending into total chaos, 

though it never does. The free jazz revolution that Coleman 

sparked would inspire all sorts of anarchic improvised music all 

over the world (plenty of it quite good), but within his own band, 

his empowerment of the individual never came at the expense of 

a collective unity. The music bends and contorts and, at times, 

threatens to burst apart, but that amorphous whole always 

remains intact. Prime Time, then, was where that magical 

symbiosis reached its apogee — and of their six studio records, 

it’s probably 1982’s Of Human Feelings that best represents the 

group’s essence. 

“For all the emphasis on 

Coleman’s genius, the 

importance of his collaborators 

can’t be understated, and he 

would be the first to admit it. 

As suggested earlier, Coleman is fascinating not just for the way 

he looks forward, but also for the way he looks to the past. For an 

example of this, look no further than Of Human Feelings' opener, 

“Sleep Talk,” which revolves around a call-and-response motif 

that quotes the famous bassoon melody from The Rite of Spring. 

It’s a playful reference, but one that also carries quite a bit of 

meaning, especially when one remembers that Stravinsky 

himself borrowed that melody from Lithuanian folk music. One of 

Coleman’s peculiar contradictions is that even while his formal 

approach is so progressive, his playing is rooted firmly in the 

antiquated blues and R&B with which he grew up. His melodies 

tend to be simple, easily singable, at times even resembling 

childish nursery rhymes, but by working them through his 

harmolodic framework, these relics of the past are given a 

radical new context, and thus transfigured. One can’t help but 

think of Stravinsky and Coleman as parallel figures in some 

respects — The Rite of Spring itself is a work that draws on 

traditions of the past (folk art, pagan ritual) to fuel its innovative 

modernism, and, indeed, the riotous reception that greeted its 

premiere in Paris is not unlike the uproar that ensued in 

response to Coleman’s controversial residency at the Five Spot in 

1959. As for the jazz giant’s own past, it’s invoked on “What Is the 

Name of That Song?” which reworks a refrain from his 1972 

symphony, Skies of America. What was once a dense cacophony 

of strings is reborn as a loose, danceable piece of avant-garde 

funk. And this sort of thing is an extremely common practice for 

Coleman: 1977’s Dancing in Your Head, the first Prime Time album, 

similarly borrows a theme from Skies and repurposes the melody 

as a motif throughout the entire record, in the process stretching 

and manipulating it until it becomes something totally new. On Of 

Human Feelings, this strategy speaks to the would-be 

disjunctions that lie at the heart of Coleman’s work, and the 

effect is one of collapsed boundaries — temporal, tonal, 

rhythmic, interpersonal. Old-fashioned bluesy melodies collide 

with hard funk basslines, West African polyrhythms manifest as 

quasi-disco beats; the spirits of Charlie Parker, Igor Stravinsky, 

and a younger Ornette Coleman mingle together as one. And 

always, there’s present-day Ornette at the center, gently guiding 

these disordered fragments into a cohesive synthesis. 

For all the emphasis on Coleman’s genius, the importance of his 

collaborators can’t be understated, and he would be the first to 

admit it. This can be illustrated easily by listening to the records 

that precede The Shape of Jazz to Come: his playing and 

principles are essentially the same, but, with the exception of 

Don Cherry, his bandmates, skilled as they were, just weren’t on 

his wavelength. It wasn’t until he and Cherry hooked up with 

Charlie Haden, Billy Higgins, and Ed Blackwell in the late ’50s that 

Coleman’s style was able to flourish. All of those figures were 

masterful musicians, but just as important was their willingness 

to embrace his unorthodox approach. And the results speak for 

themselves. 

The Prime Time generation went even further in their devotion to 

Coleman, and in their commitment to unlearning the restrictions 

16


they’d been taught. By this time, the dynamic within the band 

had shifted to something resembling a guru and his pupils. 

Coleman’s new cohort was quite a bit younger than him, with 

some of them, like drummer Grant Calvin Weston and bassist 

Jamaaladeen Tacuma, still being teenagers when they joined. 

And, of course, there was Coleman’s son Denardo, the only player 

other than Ornette himself to appear on every Prime Time record, 

as immersed in his father’s ways of thinking as one could be. 

These musicians were more than just sympathetic collaborators; 

they were disciples in the school of harmolodics. And on Of 

Human Feelings, that change is easy to recognize: All six players 

are on their own, playing in differing keys and rhythmic 

cadences, but it’s also obvious how deeply they’re listening to one 

another. Listen to the guitar interplay between Bern Nix (the 

ultra-clean tone in the left channel) and Charles Ellerbee (the 

more distorted one panned to the right) on a track like “Him and 

Her.” They’re playing off of each other, ducking in 

and out of each other’s lines, filling in gaps, but they never lose 

their respective individual characters. One can focus on any 

combination of players and observe astounding repartee. It’s 

ironic, perhaps, given how haphazard the music might sound on 

first listen, but Of Human Feelings exists at the apex of musical 

connectedness. 

Returning finally to the question of album titles, we should 

consider Of Human Feelings itself — it doesn’t share the temporal 

theme of those earlier titles, but it may be even more elucidating 

of Coleman’s concerns. Plenty of art claims to abide by a similar 

expressive principle, but few works actually apply that humanist 

impulse to something radical, stripping away all conceivable 

barriers in pursuit of a pure, liberated expression. If anyone can 

be said to have made a music of human feelings, it’s Ornette 

Coleman. — BRENDAN NAGLE 

17

FILM REVIEWS 

SCREAM VI 

Tyler Gillett, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin 

What started more than two decades ago as a completely 

unexpected shot in the arm for a mostly dead subgenre has 

steadily declined into being exactly the thing that its initial 

mission statement railed against. Scream VI, the latest in what’s 

becoming horror’s most insufferable series, is almost 

catastrophically tired, offering not a single novel or surprising 

moment. Instead, it dives deeper into boring self-mythologizing, 

ludicrous sub-TV procedural plotting, and a fully irritating 

continued insistence that this has anything to do with movies or 

meta text, all of it served up by characters nobody could possibly 

be bothered to care about. Without a doubt, it’s the laziest entry 

yet. 

Shifting locations at last from Woodsboro, California — we’re now 

in Manhattan — Scream VI rejoins the last film’s survivors: Mindy 

(Jasmin Savoy Brown) and her brother Chad (Mason Gooding) — 

both, annoyingly, related to Jamie Kennedy’s “legacy” character, 

more on that crap later — and heroines Sam and Tara Carpenter 

(Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega, respectively), all of whom 

have left their murder-besieged hometown for New York City to 

attend college together. All seem mostly OK except for Sam, who 

harbors a nasty case of PTSD due to both the events of Scream 

(2022) and the knowledge that she’s the daughter of Scream 

(1996) killer Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich, once again returning for a 

CGI-de-aged cameo). Welp, too bad, because Ghostface has 

popped up yet again, claiming that he’s going to punish Sam and 

Tara for… apparently not getting killed last time. How dare they? 

This time the prospective killer or killers are obsessed with past 

Ghostfaces, even going so far as building a massive shrine to the 

previous crimes in an abandoned movie theater, a cute idea that 

falls apart under the slightest scrutiny, which wouldn’t be a 

problem except that the film is so boring you’ve got nothing else 

to think about except the stuff that doesn’t make sense (why do 

the authorities never once examine this place forensically and 

17 18

FILM REVIEWS 

why do the characters have the keys to it?). Meanwhile, Scream 

4’s Kirby (Hayden Panetierre) is also back as an FBI agent, and of 

course Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) needs a paycheck, too, 

prompting this movie’s movie geek character to embark on a 

truly embarrassing diatribe about the vulnerability of “legacy” 

characters. Why do the Scream movies always have to have their 

characters talk about movies like they’re in an 8th grade 

after-school film club? 

Outside of some briefly effective bits that you could count on one 

hand, there’s nothing exciting about any of this. The Scream 

structure has become so ossified and the films’ direction so 

generic that the entire enterprise is fully diluted. All that’s left is 

for the audience to wait until the end when the villain's or villains' 

identity is revealed. This one isn’t quite as easy to call as the last 

one, but anybody paying the least bit of attention will probably 

still figure out most of it. Meanwhile, Wes Craven’s literate but 

prankster-ish personality is once again sorely missed; Scream 3 

wasn’t a very good movie either, but there’s not a single idea in 

this movie as good as the scene in that one where heroine Sid is 

chased through a film set of the childhood home where she’d 

previously survived multiple murder attempts. As Mindy the 

movie geek says at one point here: “Fuck this franchise.” — 

MATT LYNCH 

DIRECTOR: Tyler Gillett & Matt Bettinelli-Olpin; CAST: Melissa 

Barrera, Jenna Ortega, Courtney Cox; DISTRIBUTOR: Paramount 

Pictures; RELEASE DATE: March 10; RUNTIME: 2 hr., 3 min. 

65 

Scott Beck, Bryan Woods 

One of the most accomplished actors of his generation, equally 

adept at conveying volcanic rage and soft-spoken humility, Adam 

Driver’s greatest gift arguably is that he has fantastic taste in 

material. Cribbing from Tom Cruise’s early career playbook, Driver 

has prioritized appearing in original screenplays and working 

with the era’s preeminent filmmakers over showing up in 

franchises and extended cinematic universes (even his time 

spent in a galaxy far, far away came with the promise of being 

directed by J.J. Abrams, which seemed like a good idea back 

when the project was first announced). Driver’s still in his thirties 

and has already worked with the likes of Scorsese, Spielberg, the 

Coens, Ridley Scott, Jarmusch, Carax, Spike Lee, Soderbergh, and 

Baumbach (and he still has Michael Mann’s Ferrari, presumably 

due later this year). All of which is to say, when Driver appears in 

a dud like 65, it stands out all the more. It’s not simply that he’s 

better than the film, it’s that he must realize it, and so one finds 

themselves leaning forward, trying to make sense of what even 

attracted the actor to the role in the first place. Perhaps he 

wanted to make something his young child could appreciate, or 

maybe he secretly longed to film a dinosaur movie, or (most 

likely) it simply paid well and coincided with a gap in his 

schedule. Whatever the reason, the resulting film doesn’t serve 

him especially well, nor he it. 

Established in an opening title card that the film is set millions of 

years in the past on the other side of the universe — one could 

imagine this playing as a Planet of the Apes-like revelation for the 

audience, spoiled by overeagerness — where stoic spaceman and 

#GirlDad Mills (Driver) has made the difficult decision to embark 

on a two-year-long mission, ferrying passengers across the 

cosmos in order to make enough money for his daughter’s 

life-saving medical treatment. Serving as pilot and sole 

passenger not tucked away in cryostasis, Mills is jarred awake 

mid-mission as his ship flies into an uncharted asteroid field. 

With his ship suffering catastrophic damage, jettisoning cryo 

pods all the way down, Mills makes an emergency crash landing 

on an unsettled planet inhabited by hostile “alien” creatures that 

the viewer will recognize as dinosaurs (again, this is something 

that might have been fun to discover while watching the film 

instead of being front and center in its marketing campaign). 

With his ship irreparably crippled, all his passengers dead, and 

seemingly no hope for rescue, Mills steps outside with the 

intention of blowing his brains out, only to be halted by memories 

of his adorable daughter and the sight of one of the stray cryo 

pods with a passenger still alive inside of it. Upon rescuing young 

Koa (Ariana Greenblatt), a child around his daughter’s age who 

rather inconveniently doesn’t speak English, Mills rediscovers his 

sense of purpose and sets out with his young ward to find the 

escape craft attached to the other half of his ship all while 

avoiding T-Rexes, quicksand, killer parasites, and other 

Cretaceous-era dangers. 

Despite its high-concept premise, 65 is fundamentally modest in 

its ambitions. Running a brisk 93 minutes (one of the best 

19

FILM REVIEWS 

arguments in its favor), there isn’t much fat on the film — we’re 

already well into the story by the time we get to its opening title. 

We’re long past the novelty of seeing prehistoric creatures 

depicted on screen, and the film seems to recognize as much, 

treating packs of Compsognathuses and other “smaller” 

dinosaurs practically like house cats jumping out at the screen, 

simply to goose the viewer before working its way up to the boss 

dinosaurs. With its “modern” adventurer and small child in tow, 

running and gunning at dinosaurs, the film calls to mind a less 

campy version of the old Land of the Lost TV series, something 

which, on the face of it, sounds diverting enough. But Driver’s all 

wrong for material this flimsy, radiating self-seriousness and 

steely intelligence when what the film demands is someone who 

can appear nonchalant popping his shoulder back into place just 

in time to snatch his laser rifle and blast advancing giant lizards. 

There’s an under-served strain of trauma and depression 

ribboned throughout the film — between the crash, the nod to 

suicide, and subsequent rededication to survival, at times 65 

resembles a jankier version of Joe Carnahan’s The Grey, a 

comparison which feels less and less like a coincidence as it 

progresses — which may have been what appealed to Driver 

about the script, but here it’s so cut to the bone it would have 

benefited from being excised altogether. 

The film was directed by the team of Scott Beck and Bryan 

Woods, who, having written A Quiet Place, know of melding family 

drama with a creature feature. But what’s missing is the sense of 

showmanship, an emphasis on visual storytelling, or even the 

sort of drawn-out setpieces favored by their A Quiet Place 

director, John Krasinski. The film’s in such a hurry to get to the 

next “thrilling” moment or to “up the stakes” (it introduces a 

ticking clock element around the halfway point that, if nothing 

else, explains why 20th-century excavators never stumbled onto 

all this cool, intergalactic technology) that it hurtles past any of 

the theoretical grandeur of the premise. It’s not easy to make 

spaceman vs. dinosaurs feel commonplace, but somehow 65 

pulls it off. Not helping matters is how derivative this all is, 

shamelessly reappropriating motifs, shots, and entire sequences 

from the likes of Interstellar and the first two Jurassic Park films. 

In the absence of anything truly innovative or even particularly 

20

FILM REVIEWS 

exciting, any hope of the film succeeding lands on its leading 

man’s shoulders. But without any other adults to interact with, 

the film plays to none of Driver’s strengths, leaving the actor little 

to do but react to CGI beasties, fire futuristic weapons, and 

over-emote in order to convey basic information to a confused 

moppet. Adam, you’re better than this; leave this sort of thing to 

one of the Chrises. — ANDREW DIGNAN 

DIRECTOR: Scott Beck, Bryan Woods; CAST: Adam Driver, Ariana 

Greenblatt, Chloe Coleman; DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures; 

RELEASE DATE: March 10; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 33 min. 

CHAMPIONS 

Bobby Farrelly 

Filmmaking duo and brothers Peter and Bobby Farrelly have 

received more than their fair share of vitriol over the years for 

their particular brand of humor, one where no gag was ever 

deemed too stomach-churning or offensive if it meant a hearty 

laugh from its intended audience. Unsurprisingly, this ushered in 

an era of studio comedies that wore their lack of political 

correctness as a shiny badge of honor, one that could barely 

conceal the hatred that bubbled underneath, even as the 

Farrellys themselves rarely engaged in mean-spirited hijinks. 

Their hearts were always far too big for that, with the duo going 

out of their way to cast persons with physical and developmental 

disabilities in both bit parts and featured roles, steadfastly 

refusing to ever make them the butt of the joke. Even the 

fat-shaming of Shallow Hal ultimately dovetailed with a message 

of acceptance above all else, and perhaps that’s why the Farrellys 

have been maligned for so long — two guys who both 

wanted their cum-covered cake and to eat it, too. 

It has been six years since the Brothers Farrelly parted ways. 

Peter went the Oscar bait route with Best Picture winner Green 

Book — a film far more offensive than anything in the duo’s 

arsenal of juvenalia — and Bobby’s finally having his day in the 

sun with new inspirational sports comedy Champions, in which a 

ragtag group of young adults compete in a regional basketball 

tournament for a spot in the Special Olympics. To find Bobby 

working in this particular narrative lane isn’t the least bit 

shocking, bringing to the foreground he always sought to, well, 

champion in previous features. What’s a tad more surprising is 

that he had nothing to do with the script itself, which comes 

courtesy of first-timer Mark Rizzo, who here adapts the 2018 

Spanish-language film of the same name. (And to be brutally 

honest, both movies should be crediting the creators of Disney’s 

beloved 1992 hit The Mighty Ducks, which Champions copies 

beat-for-beat when it comes to plot). Tell me if you’ve heard this 

one before: Woody Harrelson stars as Marcus, an arrogant 

athletic coach who, after receiving a DUI, is court-ordered to 

fulfill his community service by coaching a down-on-their-luck 

team in need of some guidance. At first appalled by the position 

— a seeming demotion to the NBA-aspiring Marcus if ever there 

was one — the selfish bastard soon befriends the eccentric 

members of his team and discovers the compassion inside 

himself that was long ago buried, falling for one of the player’s 

parental units — oops, this time it’s a sister, Alex (Kaitlin Olson) — 

in the process. Can he be redeemed by his young charges? Or will 

the unrelenting pull of a big-time job in prove his undoing? 

So no, Champions doesn’t go anywhere the viewer hasn’t already 

traveled a thousand times before, but the same can be said for 

most films in this particular genre. It all comes down to the 

details, those small wrinkles that can thankfully distract from the 

well-worn bigger picture, and it helps immensely that Farrelly 

chose to cast actual persons with disabilities as the team’s core 

players, lending an authenticity that is sorely lacking from other 

films of this ilk. Much like 2008’s similarly themed comedy The 

Ringer, Champions paints its protagonists as both no-nonsense 

and the most capable people in the room at any given moment, 

their zeal and forthrightness a refreshing counterpoint to the 

self-absorbed jerk leading the team. It’s of course an obvious 

juxtaposition to operate on, but that doesn’t make it any less 

effective in execution. 

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Unfortunately, unlike The Ringer, which had edge to spare, 

Champions is as square as they come, its message of acceptance 

and tolerance welcomingly earnest, but packaged and delivered 

in the blandest way possible. The film also feels like a relic from 

another era, specifically the 1990s, with the movie at one point 

stopping dead in its tracks for literally five minutes so that 

co-star Cheech Marin can explain how persons with disabilities 

can lead rich and fulfilling lives — it’s a real yikes moment in an 

otherwise well-meaning project. And then we have the 

soundtrack, which is filled with such modern-day hits as 

Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping,” which is featured… twice. In 

fact, if it weren’t for the constant sex jokes, this would all work 

perfectly for the under-12 crowd, (though the film is being 

released into 2023 America, so there’s really no age limit for who 

needs lessons in decency). And therein lies the rub when it 

comes to Champions: the movie is so well-intentioned that 

criticizing it feels like kicking a puppy, but it also rarely rises 

above the level of patently mediocre. Harrelson and Olson are 

reliably great in their respective roles, no matter how 

two-dimensionally they are written, and plenty of viewers will 

leak a tear or two throughout, but if filmmakers could skip the 

end credits dance party next time out, which is always absolute 

proof of an utter lack of originality, we’d all win. In the meantime, 

for those keeping score, and despite Champion’s obvious 

limitations, it’s safe to say: Peter: 0, Bobby: 1. — STEVEN WARNER 

DIRECTOR: Bobby Farrelly; CAST: Woody Harrelson, Kaitlin Olson, 

Matt Cook, Ernie Hudson; DISTRIBUTOR: Focus Features; 


UNICORN WARS 

Alberto Vásquez 

Alberto Vázquez is the sleeper MVP of the film animation world. 

Japanese auteurs like Makato Shinkai, Masaaki Yuasa, and 

Mamoru Hosoda have comfortably slid into the sphere of 

highly-anticipated “serious cinema”; Pixar continues to 

precariously bob around the drain they’ve been circling for a 

while; and the umpteenth entries of popular anime franchises 

reliably fill theaters across the globe. But Vázquez’s work has 

proven a singular, refreshing presence across this past 

decade-plus. Breaking out on an international scale in 2015 with 

debut feature Birdboy: The Forgotten Children — a macabre but 

movingly beautiful, eco-themed nightmare of post-apocalyptic 

imagery and existential creep — the director (and 

illustrator/graphic novelist) has since stuck to shorts, evolving 

both his visual palette and his thematic ambitions. Unicorn Wars, 

his sophomore feature, hits U.S. theaters this week, courtesy of 

GKIDS, and with it the director delivers an altogether bolder, more 

sensorial affair, confrontational and brutal in ways the eerie but 

sweet-underneath Birdboy wasn’t quite. 

For evidence of Vázquez's more provocative leanings here, look 

no further than his new film’s title: its two words feel at 

immediate odds with each other, one recalling the innocence and 

imagination of fairy tales while the other invoking violence and 

death (press notes even describe the film as “Bambi meets 

Apocalypse Now”). It’s truly a perfect fit for the director’s latest — 

in narrative, visual, and thematic terms. Let’s start with the first 

of those: Unicorn Wars tells the story of the final days of an 

age-old conflict between a race of squishmallow-looking “teddy 

bears” and their sworn nemeses, the unicorns (this plot being a 

robust expansion and reconfiguring of Vázquez's 2013 short, 

Unicorn Blood). Roughly twenty minutes in, we get a bit of 

background exposition, courtesy of a sacred teddy bear 

propagandist text cum religious doctrine (explicated by a 

warpriest) that establishes the fanatical, Crusades-esque charge 

of righteous vengeance against the “demonic” unicorns, as well 

as invoking some Edenesque imagery/mythology in the form of 

the magical forest from which the teddy bears were long ago 

expelled. 

The title of Unicorn Wars also immediately asserts the film’s 

primary schema: specifically, establishing a series of 

dichotomies to smash together and entangle. None is more 

crucial than that of its central protagonist-antagonist duo of 

Bluey and Tubby, twins who are… blue and tubby, respectively. In 

keeping with the thematic vein of religious zealotry, the dynamic 

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of this narrative shares plenty of DNA with that of Cain and Abel, 

though there are also specific details about Bluey and Tubby’s 

childhood and the traumas and resentments that have festered 

in the formative years since their youth. Bluey is ruthless, 

ambitious, and cruel, thirsty for slaughter and merciless in 

tongue and action; Tubby is gentle and kind, prone to stress 

eating and insecurity, and coded as effete. It follows, then, that 

they will ultimately manifest the film’s central construction of 

good vs. evil, to be layered with and played out against the 

ongoing war’s essential binary. 

If that all sounds determinedly allegorical, however, that wouldn’t 

be exactly accurate. Vázquez cribs as liberally from the tradition 

of fable as he does from recent history’s tradition of 

ultra-nationalist military fascism and cinema’s representation of 

war’s atrocities. After a quick foreshadowing sequence featuring 

a young unicorn coming face-to-face with an undulating, 

amorphous blob trying to snack down on the innocent, Unicorn 

Wars opens proper with a series of scenes of the DayGlo-colored, 

claw machine-looking teddy bears engaged in boot camp-styled 

grunt training and barracks-set character mapping, uncannily 

recalling the likes of Full Metal Jacket and Platoon (“Honour, pain, 

and cuddles” is their motto). We see how these soldiers are 

conditioned with hatred for the other; we see the fascist regime’s 

higher-ups safe in their offices, emotionlessly discussing the 

necessity of collateral damage and planning the impending 

suicide mission assigned to Bluey and Tubby’s troop; we hear the 

rhetoric that suggests a Holy War of sorts, reasserting the film’s 

religious infrastructure, yes, but also — in its modern combat-era 

images — drawing in the post-Renaissance’s prevailing religion: 

imperialism. 

But explicit metaphor isn’t Vázquez’s game; he’s far more 

interested in ladling references and evocative imagery on top of 

his distinctive visual design, which offers the foundation 

necessary for any of his tonal maneuvers and 

thematic/intellectual invocations to succeed. Unicorn Wars’ 

visual character establishes the film firmly in horror territory 

(seeing as Judeo-Christian religious imagery is a core foundation 

of a good deal of horror anyway, it already had a headstart); in 

contrast, itsteddy bear characters not only insinuate childhood in 

language and depiction, but act in overtly infantile ways: they cry 

over minor emotional slights and physical wounds, bed-wetting is 

used as a repeated insult, characters accuse others of trying to 

peek at their “willy.” Children are being sent to wage war, in other 

words, but Vázquez envelops that violence and its retributions in 

a tonally discordant technicolor. The animation here is a 

vibrantly colored and effectively disorienting and haunting blend 

of 2D and 3D (as well as some 3D that was converted to 2D), with 

scenes of bloody 

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massacre playing out under foliage the color and texture of 

cotton candy; bobble eyes glow ghostly white after skulls are 

caved in; dark but red-rimmed silhouettes populate the frames 

(building on the look of the director’s 2020 short Homeless Home); 

and unicorn bodies are impaled with a quiver’s worth of 

heart-shaped arrows before a death’s amount of blood drains 

from their bodies. There’s even a trippy, drug-induced freakout 

sequence, after the hungry child soldiers eat the psychotropic, 

rainbow flesh of some forest slugs, that rivals Gaspar Noé’s 

Climax, to roughly as horrific ends. 

“[Vázquez is] far more interested 

in ladling reference and image on 

top of his distinctive visual 

design. 

That Argentinian-French enfant terrible may be the most useful 

reference point for Unicorn Wars, if an unlikely one. As with 

plenty of Noe’s films, the central conceit here — Care 

Bears-meets-Vietnam War — may be too gimmicky for some, but 

like that director at his best, Vázquez’s executes a bold, 

maximalist expression, one committed to building a controlled 

chaos rather than an easily parsable exercise in simple 

analoging. Unicorn Wars is both distinctly anti-war and stealthily 

anti-fabulist, with no moral to glean from its apologue texturing 

— Vázquez has always been a dark creator, tending maybe even 

toward fatalism, and this film’s ending thrillingly reminds viewers 

of that fact. Still, none of this proves reflective of the film’s sum; 

as is the way with binaries, much in Unicorn Wars is easily 

identifiable as a familiarity — good vs. evil, brother vs. brother, 

religion vs. humanism, dominion vs. co-existence; there’s even 

the inflection of a villain’s origin story here, which is itself 

inherently one half of a dichotomy — but none is reducible to it. 

Despite a myriad of influences and references, what’s undeniable 

is that Vázquez is operating from a playbook of his own creation. 

If his work suggests that he doesn’t feel too optimistic about the 

state of modern existence and its future, we can at least feel 

better that he’s bringing something worthwhile to cinema’s 

current era of flattened and soul-dead animated art. — LUKE 

GORHAM 

DIRECTOR: Alberto Vásquez; CAST: Jon Goiri, Jaione Insausti, 

Ramón Barea; DISTRIBUTOR: GKIDS; RELEASE DATE: March 10; 

RUNTIME: 1 hr. 32 min. 

OPERATION FORTUNE: RUSE DE GUERRE 

Guy Ritchie 

It’s the mark of a truly lazy and amateur writer to begin any piece 

with a dictionary definition, specifically one which relates back 

to the title of the piece which they are analyzing. Which is why 

this critic will point you not to Webster’s, but instead to Wikipedia 

(a loophole!) for a description of the French phrase “ruse de 

guerre,” one that is featured prominently in the title of the new 

action flick Operation Fortune: “emphasizing acts against one’s 

opponent by creative, clever, unorthodox means.” Let’s be clear 

upfront: if there are one or two or three things that Guy Ritchie’s 

latest slab of action-oriented machismo will never be accused of, 

those would be “creative,” “clever,” and “unorthodox.” Indeed, 

Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre is nothing more than Ritchie’s 

fumbling attempt at Mission: Impossible, a globe-trotting 

adventure featuring a team of spies and specialists that 

unfortunately has none of that long-standing franchise’s 

creativity, visual panache, or, quite frankly, budget. Ritchie has 

always been a filmmaker who operates best with small-scale 

stories told in the most ostentatious ways imaginable, his 

stylistic tics tempered by the specificity with which he captures 

a particular location and its inhabitants, the seeming 

authenticity oozing out of its pores. Even big-budget studio 

spectacles such as Robert Downey Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes series 

and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword were marked by this 

particularity, if only in fleeting moments. 

Operation Fortune instead finds Ritchie in Man from U.N.C.L.E. 

mode, a breezy contraption that isn’t necessarily good, but never 

reaches the barrel bottom known as Ritchie’s Madonna-starring 

Swept Away remake. Jason Statham stars as — wait for it — 

Orson Fortune, an international spy subcontracted out by the 

English government when the mission is just too damn 

dangerous and covert for MI6. Fortune’s handler, Nathan Jasmine 

(Carey Elwes) — seriously, these names — likes to bilk the 

government for all sorts of expenses like rare wines and a jumbo 

jet the size of Rhode Island, all under the guise that they are part 

of Fortune’s tour rider, and we should all applaud the man for 

screwing over the Royal family. Fortune’s latest mission finds him 

trying to track down a recently stolen Doomsday device, with 

tech specialist Sarah Fidel (Aubrey Plaza) and sharpshooter JJ 

Davies (Bugzy Malone) in tow. Before long, they have acquired 

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another member, Hollywood superstar Danny Francesco (Josh 

Hartnett), who is used as bait to ferret out the nefarious 

billionaire and arms dealer Greg Simmonds (Hugh Grant), who 

happens to be the heartthrob’s biggest fan. For a universally 

beloved actor, such a challenge proves to be his greatest role, 

playing a version of himself while simultaneously saving the 

world. And if all of this sounds remarkably similar in plot to last 

year’s Nic Cage as Nic Cage vehicle The Unbelievable Weight of 

Massive Talent — minus the meta — let it be noted that this has 

been sitting on the shelf for over a year due to the bankruptcy of 

its original studio. 

But that’s not to suggest anything even remotely clever is done 

with this particular subplot; in fact, the film that houses but 

barely addresses it. Operation Fortune has the distinct whiff of 

severe producer interference, the 150-minute cut that obviously 

existed at one point now arriving in a slim 114-minute package 

that glosses over major plot points with obvious ADR, and rarely 

gives Ritchie the opportunity to indulge in his usual kinetic 

schtick. Aside from a few moments of split screen and a climax 

backed by an overactive symphonic score, Ritchie’s latest could 

be the work of any mid-tier director-for-hire simply biding their 

time for a bigger opportunity. It’s not hard to see what attracted 

Ritchie to the project, but he ultimately seems as disinterested 

as his overqualified cast, save for Grant, who is currently in the 

stage of his career where no part is too small and no scenery too 

insignificant to be leveraged for maximum mastication. Still, that 

also means at least someone in this production has something 

resembling a pulse. Meanwhile, the plot moves forward with such 

breakneck speed that it all but eliminates boredom as a potential 

viewer response, even as the action scenes themselves are shot 

and executed with all the grace and excitement of a local news 

station’s coverage of a new Wendy’s opening. The door is 

predictably left open for a sequel, but that implies anyone 

involved would want to return, viewers included. The only fortune 

that exists here is the kind that made this cast and crew sign up 

in the first place. May they enjoy their rewards; at least someone 

got something out of this 

absolute nothing. — STEVEN WARNER 

DIRECTOR: Guy Ritchie; CAST: Jason Statham, Aubrey Plaza, 

Josh Hartnett, Hugh Grant; DISTRIBUTOR: Lionsgate; RELEASE 

DATE: March 3; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 54 min. 

99 MOONS 

Jan Gassmann 

Writer-director Jan Gassmann’s Swiss import 99 Moons joins the 

weirdly burgeoning list of numerically titled films — 9 Songs, 28 

Hotel Rooms, and 365 Days included — that take an episodic 

25

approach in chronicling the sexually explicit exploits of a doomed 

relationship. This particular film’s moniker refers to the number 

of full moons that transpire over the course of one young 

couple’s cautionary tale of a fling, which starts on a note of 

sexual degradation and somehow winds up in Hallmark territory 

before the end credits mercifully roll. 

Bigna (Valentina Di Pace) is a highly intelligent researcher whose 

work with mountain goats and their ability to predict inclement 

weather(!) has rendered her financially successful but with little 

time for personal relationships — not that she is even interested 

in anything resembling commonplace domestication. As is soon 

revealed, Bigna has a very specific kink, one that involves her 

hiring men who, while adorned in a mask, will attack her in a 

secluded public place, resulting in her taking dominance by 

sitting on their face and forcing them to perform cunnilingus 

while she chokes them. Bigna never repeats these acts with the 

same man twice, yet is somehow taken with her latest conquest, 

Frank (Dominik Fellmann), a zero-motivation bartender who 

shows a surprising amount of emotion when he begins crying 

after their initial encounter. Bigna is initially hesitant, but soon 

finds she cannot get Frank out of her mind. He, too, is equally 

infatuated, and what transpires is a tale of two individuals whose 

love for one another is equal parts madness and poison, from 

which escape proves impossible. 

But 99 Moons isn’t particularly interested in plumbing the depths 

of this relationship or addressing the whys. One need only look at 

the title for clarification, as Bigna and Frank seem irrevocably 

drawn to one another, like the gravitational pull between Earth 

and moon, because Gassmann is incapable of finding a metaphor 

he couldn’t beat to death. Unfortunately, such so-called 

profundities feel like a cop-out, an excuse for the script to jerk 

its protagonists around in ways maddeningly inconsistent. A 

knee-jerk reaction would be to label this a character study or, 

more precisely, an observational portrait of its central couple, 

but the two leads are barely developed, with their decisions 

making increasingly little sense the longer the sordid story goes 

on. It would also be easy to dub the film progressive in its 

portrayal of Bigna, an intelligent and sexually empowered young 

woman whom Gassmann never judges or kink-shames. Yet Bigna 

is also the kind of woman who will give up her dreams and quit a 

highly successful job all for the sake of a man, and that’s not 

even mentioning how her various whims and flights of fancy 

cause severe collateral damage to everyone around her, a 

harmful stereotype that the film never even bothers addressing. 

FILM REVIEWS 

Perhaps more could be forgiven here if the graphic sex acts on 

display—which, let’s be honest, are what a not insignificant 

number of audience members are here for; and more generously, 

sex in cinema remains remarkably tame on the whole and its 

presentational evolution is interesting to chart —were the least 

bit sexy, but they play more like a cheap attempt at bland shock 

than at actual titillation, Gassmann seeming to believe that all it 

takes is an erect penis and some full-frontal digital penetration 

to get monocles a-poppin’. Suffice it to say, viewer interest isn’t 

the only thing that will fail to be aroused. Ultimately, 99 Moons is 

the kind of deeply frustrating film that mistakes provocation for 

depth, losing sight of the humans for the genitalia. Talk about a 

tease. — STEVEN WARNER 

DIRECTOR: Jan Gassmann; CAST: Valentina Di Pace, Dominik 

Fellmann, Danny Exnar; DISTRIBUTOR: Strand Releasing; 


OUT OF TIME 

Balin Schneider 

Alternative music was serious business in the 1980s and '90s. Fed 

up with not just stale, bombastic radio rock but hardcore punk's 

stylistic blinders, underground bands splintered, creating a new 

ecosystem of subgenres. While acts like Big Black, Swans, and 

Ministry made use of the harsh sounds of industrial music, bands 

like Hüsker Dü, Embrace, and Squirrel Bait opened punk up to 

new melodic possibilities. Spurred by alt-rock's newfound 

appreciation for hooks and sweet melodies, Chicago power 

poppers Material Issue inhabited a unique space in the Chicago 

music scene by eschewing punk aggression in favor of jaggedly 

melodious choruses in the vein of the Dictators, Big Star, and 

fellow Illinoisans Cheap Trick. 

Although the band was a semi-sensation after the release of 

their first album, 1991's International Pop Overthrow, and saw 

singles like "Diane" and "Valerie Loves Me" climb the college radio 

charts, their trajectory was cut short by middling sales, changing 

tastes, and the eventual suicide of frontman and mastermind 

Jim Ellison. Balin Schneider's slender rockumentary Out of Time: 

The Material Issue Story, follows the band's development from 

their early days to their tragic demise, making use of rock doc 

staples like collages of TV appearances, rare concert footage, 

home videos, alt-chic black-and-white photography reminiscent 

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of Charles Peterson's work, and of course, a gallery of talking 

heads, including Chicago music legend Steve Albini of the 

aforementioned Big Black, former 120 Minutes host Matt Pinfield, 

and surviving Material Issue members Mike Zelenko and Ted 

Ansani. 

The power trio blazed the trail for bands like Green Day and 

Superdrag to find success in the mid-'90s, and editor Cara Myers 

makes good use of the (often grainy) footage to evoke the 

atmosphere that pervaded the culture of the early '90s. There are 

the obligatory mentions of grunge, Nirvana, and the Seattle 

scene, but a clip of Dennis Miller introducing the band on his 

show — bobbing his mulleted head while proclaiming, "The gals 

love them," to an enthusiastic studio audience — feels more 

authentically of the time than rehashing the early-'90s 

alternative rock explosion for the umpteenth time. Out of Time 

wisely keeps the Seattle-adjacent talk to a minimum, putting the 

equally vibrant Chicago music scene at center stage. Even so, 

Schneider doesn't interrogate the band's place within that scene, 

which was often fraught with tensions and conflicting ambitions 

— and a band as eager to shoot for superstardom as Material 

Issue must have ruffled at least a few feathers. 

The documentary's title derives from the group's status as "a 

band out of time," as one of the interviewees so aptly puts it, 

their '70s-inspired guitar pop seemingly at odds with both 

grunge's metallic thrum and the shruggy lo-fi production values 

of their contemporaries like Liz Phair and Sebadoh. As is the 

case for most documentaries focused on not-as-famous-as- 

Nirvana alternative and indie groups — Silkworm's Couldn't You 

Wait, Slint's Breadcrumb Trail, even Mudhoney's I'm Now fits that 

bill — Out of Time doesn't stray too far from the well-trodden 

indie documentary path, telling the story in a relatively 

straightforward, surprisingly conservative way. Sure, trying to 

impart actual history makes formal experimentation difficult, but 

it remains surprising that we've yet to see a lower-budget, 

after-the-fact documentary attempt to mirror its subject's 

musical sensibilities. 

It might be unfair to expect an exuberant, raucous take on the 

Material Issue story, given that their journey ended with their 

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founder's suicide, but it's nonetheless unfortunate just how much 

time is devoted to Ellison's passing, his untimely death looming 

over the entirety of the film's final third. It's an affecting, 

heartbreaking way to end things — on a purely dramatic level, his 

suicide happens to come at the end of a string of professional 

and personal misfortunes — that unfortunately grows numbing 

the longer it goes on, an especially moving segment from 

producer Mike Chapman notwithstanding. Things do end on a 

slightly uplifting note, as Ellison's mother, who herself passed 

before the documentary was completed, touchingly reflects 

onher son's enduring legacy, but the fact remains that, perhaps 

unavoidably, the film takes a remarkably dour turn from which it 

never really bounces back — unbefitting of the art the film's 

subjects created. 

Similarly, the film displays a surprisingly laissez-faire attitude 

towards binge drinking — Ellison's wake took place at a bar which 

was swiftly relieved of its vodka reserves — even though it 

is speculated that excessive drinking might have been a factor in 

his death. It feels as if Schneider wants to have it both ways: hint 

at the dangers of substance abuse without harshing anyone's 

vibe too much. Regardless, any potential enjoyment will 

ultimately come down to individual viewers' familiarity with and 

affinity for the band's music, or at least the scene that birthed 

them. Material Issue's impeccably-recorded and wonderfully 

melodic pop songs seem like an easy sell on their own — 

especially in an era where terms like "careerist" or "sell-out" 

aren't legacy-tarnishing jibes anymore — yet mainstream 

recognition has continued to elude them, as if they are doomed 

to remain a band out of time forever. The group still has its 

admirers; whether or not Out of Time will gain them any new ones 

is another question. — FRED BARRETT 

DIRECTOR: Balin Schneider; CAST: —; DISTRIBUTOR: Factory 25; 

RELEASE DATE: February 24; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 8 min. 

GLASS LIFE 

Sara Cwynar 

Sara Cwynar's new film Glass Life ends with halting credits that 

scroll up and down, then back up and back down, over and over, 

listing a veritable syllabus' worth of philosophers, theorists, and 

essayists; names like Adorno, Benjamin, Camus, Dillon, Duras, 

Heidegger, Lacan (amongst many, many more) flit across the 

screen like a laundry (or graduate-level seminar) list. It’s not 

exactly a bibliography, but it speaks to the enormous collaging 

project that Cwynar is attempting with her films. An offshoot of a 

pandemic project, Glass Life began as an annotated book 

collating data, production notes, stills, and texts from Cwynar's 

aughts trilogy, comprising Soft Film (2016), Rose Gold (2017), and 

Red Film (2019). The then-book transformed into a 6-Channel 

video installation piece, consisting of multiple sequences 

projecting simultaneously on different surfaces of a gallery 

space. Without having seen the original installation, it's hard to 

know how much this new incarnation of Glass Life, a relatively 

tidy 20 minutes long, resembles the former. But Cwynar has 

made clear in the past that her various modes of creation — 

photography, video installation, and film — are all equally 

important, with each medium’s formal qualities emphasizing 

various aspects of her overall project. That project is nothing 

less than the commodification of both aesthetics and the body 

by an increasingly aggressive culture industry. Cwynar herself 

discussed the origins of the film's title in an artists' statement in 

the September 2021 issue of Artforum, saying that “‘Glass life’ is a 

term coined by Shoshana Zuboff to describe how we are living 

under constant surveillance without the privacy needed to really 

form ourselves against the world of images. Our actions are 

always being monetized. We start to lose who we are. It is 

presented as a convenience or even a necessity to participate.” 

Vaguely resembling the cut-up collage animation of Lewis Klahr 

on the one hand and the process-oriented tactility of Jessica 

Rinland's Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another on the 

other, Cwynar arranges her images — magazine ads, old photos, 

text, 3D graphics — on panes of glass, and then uses optical 

printing to superimpose these different layers of images on top 

of one another. She also employs something akin to stop-motion 

animation to build up and then deconstruct her compositions, 

the stuttering movements of arms and hands a tell-tell sign of 

frame-by-frame photography. All of this visual information is 

overlaid with a dense soundtrack of utterances, quotes, and 

recitations courtesy of Paul Cooper, who has collaborated on four 

of Cwynar's films. But despite the academic jargon on display, 

Cwynar’s films are playful, frequently quite funny, and feel 

uniquely handmade. As Michael Sicinski has written, “Her work 

centres on design and display, in particular the visual 

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vernacular of late capitalism. Using both the internalized 

language of corporate publicity and the hoarder’s logic of 

consumerist agglomeration, Cwynar’s images treat colour and 

texture as though the muted, manicured gestures of graphic 

design suddenly exceeded themselves…” Elsewhere, Phil Coldiron 

describes Cwynar's work as a “pile up of words, thick and 

consistent.” 

To wit, Glass Life begins with Cooper’s voiceover accompanying 

footage of a protest: “In the glass life, everything can be used. It 

is all material — we are smooth as glass, frictionless, porous, 

sourceless.” “The sky is falling, Apple stock is rising.” Less than a 

minute into the film and the soundtrack and images have already 

conspired at head-spinning speed to unmoor the viewer, allowing 

only snippets of legible information to emerge. “Will I be nostalgic 

for this time?” they ask. A repeating beat keeps time in a kind of 

rhythmic monotone, while a 3D model of a swimming woman 

bobs and weaves between the foreground and background 

images. Cut-outs of naked women are juxtaposed with images of 

Marilyn Monroe, followed by glamor shots of Kim Kardashian. 

Fingers scroll through a smart phone screen at impossible 

speeds, the digital animation standing in stark contrast to the 

magazine pages and 16mm film images. Different textures jockey 

for attention. “How do you know what size you are in the glass 

life?” Cooper asks. Optical zooms enlarge images 

into pixels, mixed with old CRT TV news footage. “Fascism 

promises you a part in something bigger than yourself, too,” we 

hear. “The voice is what’s left when signifying is done,” he says, 

while an adorable pig bitmoji dances across the screen. 

Glass Life is ultimately more expansive, more complex than 

Cwynar’s previous films (fittingly, as it is, in part, a compendium 

of those works). It’s fully in keeping with her established 

aesthetic concerns — kitsch, ephemera, items lost to history, the 

process of creation — while representing a marked increase in 

ambition and technical achievement. There’s enough visual and 

aural stimulus here to suggest that one could never exhaust or 

“master” the film, and that overabundance is certainly part of the 

point, a bombardment that suggests the entirety of the 21st 

century crashing down on the viewer all at once. But there is 

profound beauty here, not just despair. The act of creation 

reaffirms our humanity in the face of digital obliteration. Glass 

Life ends with a clear blue sky, the horizon line cutting through 

the frame in a simple, balanced composition. We get our bearings 

back just in time. The noise has reverted back to a kind of 

equilibrium. Maybe that’s the best any of us can hope for. — 

DANIEL GORMAN 

DIRECTOR: Sara Cwynar; CAST: —; DISTRIBUTOR: Mubi; 

RELEASE DATE: March 3; RUNTIME: 19 min. 

29

FILM REVIEWS 

OLD REVIEWS NEW RELEASES 

REWIND AND PLAY 

Alain Gomis 

“Much of Rewind and Play revolves around the quiet tension 

between the interviewer — jazz musician and producer Henri 

Renaud — and Monk. Some of the interactions are awkward due 

to amateurish questioning, such as asking why Monk put his 

massive Baldwin grand piano in his kitchen… But Renaud 

continues to flail and offend in his desire to narrativize, 

becoming the sort of journalist who foolishly inserts personal 

stories because he can’t pry more details from Monk… To 

Renaud, Monk is merely a marketable product, and that notion is 

deeply felt in his constant desire to qualify the pianist’s work; he 

constantly repeats how this music, despite being too 

avant-garde for audiences in the past, is now highly respected. 

The work can never speak for itself.” — JOSHUA MINSOO KIM 

DIRECTOR: Alain Gomis; CAST: —; DISTRIBUTOR: Grasshopper 

Film; IN THEATERS: March 10; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 5 min. 

STONEWALLING 

Huang Ji & Ryûji Otsuka 

“At a more fundamental level, this film and the works that directly 

surround it represent a plateauing of the trajectory of Chinese 

art cinema; while films like Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains and 

Mama legitimately succeed and contribute to the time-honored 

lineage of Chinese visual artistry, it’s tempting to imagine what 

could have been in their place. The avant-gardism of 2000s 

digital has been sublimated by analog thinking and higher 

definitions of hyperreal HD, and while this hasn’t been unique to 

China — indeed, it has more or less been the story of the last 20 

years of global cinema — it’s particularly disheartening given that 

China has had one of the largest and most radical digital arts 

scenes in the world.” — NOEL OAKSHOT 

DIRECTOR: Huang Ji & Ryûji Otsuka; CAST: Honggui Yao, Zilong 

Xiao, Xiaoxiong Huang; DISTRIBUTOR: Kimstim; IN THEATERS: 

March 10; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 28 min. 

30 

16

FILM REVIEWS 

FUGUE 

Agniszka Smoczynska 

“Smoczynska’s camera makes estrangement its primary subject: When Alicja enters her parents’ home for the first time, the frame 

stays tight on her, following her upstairs and through hallways, panning to reveal rooms as Alicja discovers them, presenting the 

experience as alien and new. Fugue produces an abject disconnect between Alicja and her former identity of Kinga, and while there’s 

little in the way of plot here, the struggle to uncover the reasons why she left this family in the first place keep the possibility of Fugue 

becoming a thriller at the margins, infecting the film with an air of mystery that threatens to unravel the reconstructed domestic 

scenario. The point throughout is clear: Smoczynska questions the contrivance of women’s roles in marriage and motherhood, using 

amnesia to create that critical distance. The trouble is that Fugue never reaches beyond this conclusion, which it arrives at in its first 

half-hour — and this thesis, in and of itself, is nothing new.” — CHRIS MELLO 

DIRECTOR: Agniszka Smoczynska; CAST: Gabriela Muskala, Lukasz Simlat, Malgorzata Buczkowska; DISTRIBUTOR: Dekanalog; IN 

THEATERS: March 10; RUNTIME: 1 hr., 42 min. 

31

ALBUM REVIEWS 

FOLLOW THE CYBORG 

Miss Grit 

On debut LP Follow the Cyborg, Margaret 

Sohn (AKA Miss Grit) explores the figure of 

the cyborg as a vision for liberation. As a 

non-binary Korean-American trying to 

parse the various aspects of their identity, 

Sohn looked to the world of sci-fi and the 

tangled, messy road to autonomy taken by 

cyborg characters in Mamoru Oshii's Ghost 

in the Shell or Spike Jonze's Her. Sohn was 

also influenced by feminist posthumanism, 

namely Donna Haraway and her 1985 essay 

A Cyborg Manifesto. 

Following the cyborg — defined by 

Haraway herself as "a hybrid of machine 

and organism" — Miss Grit makes use of 

both the digital and the analog, synths and 

guitars, percussive loops and live drums. 

Their music, like Sohn themself, frequently 

inhabits the space between, or beyond 

fixed binaries, and on Follow the Cyborg, 

they escalate that tension with enveloping 

electronica that scrapes against 

hook-laden alt-rock. "Perfect Blue" — 

named after Satoshi Kon's 1997 animated 

psychological horror noir, one of many 

anime references here — starts off with 

synth swells that mellowly carry the track's 

first two minutes before they're pitted 

against fuzz-stacked guitars during the 

dense, chaotic outro. 

The record momentarily regains its 

composure for "Your Eyes Are Mine," whose 

elegant electro-rock confidently struts 

along with a syncopated drum beat before 

it erupts into guitar leads that wriggle 

around the infectious synth line. It's a 

hybridization which Sohn is quick to 

comment on — "I speak my own language 

now," they sing — after the fireworks are 

subsumed by the tense electronics. It 

isn't all about melding human and 

machine, though; "Nothing's Wrong" is a 

lumbering, comparatively straightforward 

slowcore beauty, beating stick-and-poke 

indie rockers like Slow Pulp at their own 

game. 

The album's title track, appropriately 

enough, forms the thematic and musical 

centerpiece with an exciting mishmash 

of styles — club music, swirling new 

wave, cerebral art rock — that invokes 

the likes of St. Vincent, Sleater-Kinney's 

2019 album The Center Won't Hold, and 

even David Bowie in its sleek, 

sophisticated musical adventurousness. 

Sohn elevates the cyborg to a new 

archetype — to quote Haraway again, "a 

kind of disassembled and reassembled, 

postmodern collective and personal self" 

— and the obliteration of stylistic 

boundaries exemplifies this dis- and 

reassembled postmodernism while still 

finding the space for an exuberant 

chorus. The song finds Sohn concretizing 

their ideas regarding gender identity — 

"I'm a living girl / A real living girl...I'm a 

living boy / A real living boy" — as 

spaceship flange and digital pings 

cascade around them. Throughout, Follow 

the Cyborg is a texturally rich and 

thematically rewarding work that really 

only falters whenever the execution 

doesn't live up to its lofty ambitions. "Lain 

(phone clone)," for instance, references 

the cult anime cyberpunk series Serial 

Experiments Lain while its lethargic pace 

and nondescript melody dooms it to mere 

adequacy, only saved from unbearable 

dullness by its lyrical inquisitions into 

techno-existentialism: "And what's the 

point of being so profound / When all I'll be 

is contained in the so vague 

membrane...Hold up your hands and let go 

of your phone clone." Luckily, this lull 

remains the album's only misstep. 

Although Follow the Cyborg continuously 

oscillates between progressive digitalism 

and retro guitar rock (often within the 

same song), Sohn looks to their alt-rock 

roots — the guitar is their first and most 

familiar instrument — towards the end of 

the LP, offsetting the brief introductory 

robot-voiced sample and subdued 

ambience of “The End” with a sweeping, 

post-rock-flavored coda. Closer "Syncing" 

ends things dreamily with an ode to 

cyborg autonomy and leaving the 

(exclusively) human realm behind. "I'm 

starting to move on my own now / And I 

don't want to forget how / And so I'll go / 

And I won't be back," they sing, 

articulating both their own journey as 

well as providing a template for anyone 

who wishes to follow in its liberatory, 

mesmerizing footsteps. — FRED BARRETT 

32

Photo Credits: 

Cover - Paramount Pictures; Page 1 - Shanna Besson; Page 2 - Daniel McCarthy-Bowles; Page 4 - 

IFC Films; Page 6 - 2022 - Ad Vitam Production – Agat Films et Cie – Bibi Film TV – Arte France 

Cinéma; Page 7 - 2023 Gaumont - France 2 Cinéma - Gaumont animation; Page 8 - Film 

Movement; Page 8 - Grégoire Graesslin; Page 10 - Alberto Alvarez Aguilera; Page 11 - Music Box 

Films; Page 12 - Blue Monday Productions - France 3 Cinéma Louise Richard; Page 13- Courtesy of 

Jean-Louis Fernandez and Alberto Alvarez Aguilera; Page 14 - Music Box Films; Page 17 - Antilles 

Records; Page 18 - Paramount Pictures; Page 20 - CTMG, Inc. and Sony Pictures; Page 21 - Shauna 

Townley and Focus Features; Page 22, 23 - GKIDS; Page 25 - Dan Smith, Lionsgate; Page 27 - 

Factory 25; Page 29 - Mubi; Page 30 - Venice International Film Festival; Page 31 - Dekanalog; Page 

32 - Mute Records; Back Cover - GKIDS

InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 10

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