InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 11

IN REVIEW ONLINE 

FEATURES 

SXSW 2023 

I USED TO BE FUNNY — 1 

THIS CLOSENESS — 2 

PARACHUTE — 3 

ANHELL69 — 5 

CONFESSIONS OF A GOOD 

SAMARITAN — 5 

THE ARTIFICE GIRL — 7 

CITIZEN SLEUTH — 8 

REVIVAL69 — 10 

ANOTHER BODY — 11 

ABERRANCE — 13 

WAR PONY — 14 

STILL: A MICHAEL J. FOX 

MOVIE — 15 

TALK TO ME — 15 

KICKING THE CANON 

MERLE HAGGARD — 16 

FILM REVIEWS 

SHAZAM! FURY OF 

THE GODS — 19 

FULL RIVER RED — 20 

BOSTON STRANGLER — 21 

FURIES — 23 

RODEO — 25 

MOVING ON — 27 

MONEY SHOT — 28 

ARE YOU LONESOME 

TONIGHT? — 30 

RIMINI — 30 

COUNTRY GOLD — 31 

SELF-PORTRAIT — 31 

INSIDE — 32 

THE ORIGIN OF EVIL — 32 

ALBUM REVIEWS 

MILEY CYRUS — 34 

YVES TUMOR — 36 

ONEW — 38 

March 17, 2023 

Volume 1, Issue 11

SXSW 2023 

I USED TO BE FUNNY 

Ally Pankiw 

An angry young girl runs away, leaving behind an affluent but 

troubled home life to throw in her lot with unsupervised older 

teenagers and low-level drug dealers. Her former caregiver, 

straightjacketed by PTSD, must shake off her mental cloud and 

track the girl down, venturing into the criminal underworld to 

bring her home so she can be cared for by her family. In that 

particular framing, Ally Pankiw’s I Used to Be Funny perhaps 

sounds like a Schrader-esque, quasi-reactionary, deep dive into 

moral decay. Of course, that’s not really what the film’s about, but 

it’s easier to talk about it in those terms than what the film’s 

actually attempting to do. That’s because I Used to Be Funny is 

about very, very slowly revealing that trauma at the center of its 

main characters’ shared pasts — an event that inextricably 

altered the course of both of their lives, the full nature of which 

isn’t revealed until nearly an hour into the film. It would be unfair 

to the film, premiering this week as part of SXSW, to give away 

what that trauma is, but that speaks to the fundamental problem 

with it: there really isn’t much to chew on here other than 

navigating the obfuscation. One must wait a small eternity for I 

Used to Be Funny to finally come out and simply acknowledge the 

thing we’ve been watching its characters endlessly talk past. 

Indie it girl Rachel Sennott (Shiva Baby) plays Sam, a 

Toronto-based standup comedian and nanny mired in a crippling 

depression (she receives mock adulation from her roommates 

simply for bathing). We learn from a local news broadcast that 

14-year-old Brooke (Olga Petsa), whose family Sam had worked 

for two years earlier, has run away from home. Sam had a 

fraught confrontation with Brooke only days earlier — the teen 

showed up at her house, drunk, demanding to be let in — which 

just adds to her former nanny’s guilt. In spite of this, we watch 

Sam attempt to resume a normal life, gravitating toward the local 

comedy club she used to perform at and where her network of 

comedian friends congregate backstage. At the same time, the 

film repeatedly flashes back to years earlier, when Sam first met 

Brooke and her family. We learn Brooke’s mother was in the 

hospital, battling a chronic illness, leaving the tween especially 

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FESTIVAL COVERAGE 

moody and disinterested in being saddled with a “babysitter.” 

Hired by Brooke’s police officer father, Cameron (former The Daily 

Show correspondent, Jason Jones), who is himself not taking his 

wife’s sickness especially well, Sam becomes an adjunct member 

of the family, practically living out of their enormous house and 

eventually serving as a confidant and friend to Brooke. 

Regularly jumping between the parallel narrative tracks, we 

alternate between Sam, then and now. Old Sam had a supportive 

boyfriend, Noah (Ennis Esmer), an ascendant comedy career, and 

an almost older-sister-like relationship with Brooke, serving as a 

literal shoulder to cry on in the wake of her mother’s eventual 

passing. Present-day Sam is practically a ghost haunting her own 

life; incapable of performing on stage and isolated, having 

pushed away Noah and tensing up at the mere mention of his 

name. This hazily defined, traumatic life event casts a long 

shadow over Sam as well as the film itself. Characters make 

snarky allusions to Sam being desperate for attention or being 

subject to online trolling campaigns. Her roommates (Sabrina 

Jalees and Caleb Hearon) try to maintain a positive attitude but 

Sam’s inability to pay rent or even stomach houseguests is 

clearly a hardship for them. 

“The fundamental problem 

with [the film is] there really 

isn’t much to chew on here 

other than navigating the 

obfuscation. 

And then there’s Brooke, who long before she ran away from 

home had soured on Sam, weaponizing the Internet as only a 

teenage girl can to make her life miserable. Crumb by crumb, the 

film fills in exactly what happened between Sam and Brooke 

(although most attentive viewers will be far ahead of the film and 

its miserly dispensing of exposition) and why they’re no longer 

on speaking terms. But at some point along the way, I Used to Be 

Funny stops giving us a reason to care about Sam or the 

explanation for her depression, and it becomes an exercise in 

hiding the football for as long as humanly possible. The film is so 

determined to keep us at arm’s length about the vague nature of 

Sam’s trauma — it’s even unclear for much of the runtime 

whether Sam was the perpetrator or victim of the very bad thing 

— that we’re simply left to infer motive behind her sullen 

behavior. And “why won’t Sam get out of bed or wash her hair?” 

just isn’t enough to sustain a feature film. 

By the time all the pieces have fallen into place and the audience 

is up to speed, the film is already in its homestretch and the 

search for Brooke becomes little more than a hasty formality (it 

turns out the girl isn’t as hard to find as the local news media 

would have us believe). The film emphasizes the wrong things, 

teasing out “what happened that night?” when the more 

constructive question would have been “...and knowing that, how 

did that change everything?” Pankiw may believe she’s saying 

something about trauma and the corrosive effect it has on a 

happy, successful, and semi-public young woman, but in treating 

the event itself like a game of twenty questions, it reduces it to a 

storytelling gimmick — a manipulative means of introducing 

tension and imposing an ad hoc structure upon the film by 

treating the misery of its characters as an almost tawdry 

mystery, with misdirection and red herrings aplenty. Like a house 

of cards built upside down, it contains all the necessary elements 

to succeed, but the manner in which it is constructed is 

self-defeating. — ANDREW DIGNAN 

THIS CLOSENESS 

Kit Zauhar 

In contrast with the high-profile and ostentatious trappings of 

Everything Everywhere All At Once, which enmeshed the 

idiosyncrasies of genre with patent identity politics, Kit Zauhar’s 

survey of contemporary millennial society takes place within the 

microcosms of locale, character, and affect. Her first feature, the 

caustic but self-reflexive Actual People, was a study of 

disconnected youth struggling to both fulfill and reject the 

cultural labels imposed upon them, following a soon-graduating 

philosophy senior around the last weeks of college life as she 

flitted in and out of ennui and desperation, and toward the 

banality of the working world. Actual People resonated with its 

audience in part because they saw themselves in the somewhat 

amorphous character of Riley — played by Zauhar herself — 

whose professional and personal anxieties were unwoven to an 

almost cringeworthy, but hardly reductive, extent. The question 

of racial identity undergirding the film, in addition, posed at the 

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SXSW 2023 

very least some thoughtful questions pertaining to lived, ongoing 

circumstances: Riley, as an Asian American, seems to order her 

dating preferences around this essentialist attribute, and her 

pursuit (with mixed results) of a career not typically grounded in 

job security or financial stability runs counter to the stereotyped 

traditionalism of her family. 

This Closeness, Zauhar’s follow-up to Actual People, retains much 

of this resonance but refines it for a slightly more ambitious 

crowd of three. Tessa (Zauhar) and her boyfriend Ben (Zane Pais) 

rent an apartment room in Philadelphia, where they’ve gone for 

the latter’s high school reunion; but their co-tenant is Adam (Ian 

Edlund), a long-term inhabitant by the looks of it, and an oddball, 

weirdo, incel, sociopath — whatever’s quick to roll off the tongue. 

Quickly, the tension notches up among the three; multiple 

tensions in fact, as romantic distrust thaws unresolved 

insecurities and overt hostility awakens performative sexual 

crisis. Tessa and Ben are otherwise intimate, but the arrival of 

Ben’s high school crush over beers provokes jealousy and 

instigates the use of defensive and poisonous rhetoric in 

response. Adam’s intermittent presence, similarly, colors the 

politics of cohabitation, as an outsider from within threatening to 

displace the unchallenged but inherently unstable notion of 

masculine self-confidence. 

Zauhar, like before, doesn’t shy away from portraying her 

characters as stereotypes in some way — Adam’s indeed a bit of 

a recluse, with a menacing demeanor to boot, while Ben is 

nothing short of a mellowed-down, frat-boy douchebag — but this 

doesn’t detract from the film’s merits. If anything, she makes a 

point with this stereotyping, that within the generality of the 

Airbnb apartment lie conceivable and relatable specifics which 

articulate our prevalent culture of individualism commingling 

with helpless suspicion. Despite the apparent candor all three 

individuals display at some point with one another, there persists 

a breakdown in communication, frustrating desire, resentment, 

reconciliation, or some coordination among them. To pigeonhole 

this languid pessimism as yet another instance of American indie 

mumblecore wouldn’t be inaccurate, but it also glosses over the 

hermetic framing carefully employed here, a composition meant 

to reflect the very ironies of pigeonholing and typification. That 

all three adults work in some area of communication (ASMR, 

journalism, video games) further ironizes, 

without necessarily wallowing in, their lackluster situation. The 

funny thing about isolation, which This Closeness skilfully 

realizes, is that the furthest distances are sometimes felt within 

the confines of four walls. — MORRIS YANG 

PARACHUTE 

Brittany Snow 

At first blush (and the next few, for that matter), actress Brittany 

Snow’s directorial debut, Parachute, which premiered in the 

Narrative Feature Competition at the 2023 SXSW Film Festival, 

seems lab-created for a certain other, Park City-set fest. It’s a 

drama cut through with some messy romance and a twinge of 

darkness, is peppered with recognizable Hollywood faces in 

mostly thankless supporting roles, trades in the subject matter of 

mental health, and is goosed by plenty of screenplay quirks (Kid 

Cudi shows up to sing karaoke and wear a series of 

dad-approved button-ups; cinema’s greatest cheat code Dave 

Bautista runs a muder-mystery dinner theater; the adult 

romantic leads almost immediately build a blanket fort). Then 

there’s the plot: Riley (Courtney Eaton) and Ethan (Thomas Mann) 

meet under less than ideal circumstances. He has just gotten out 

of jail after a night of drunken tomfoolery that involved a flaming 

bottle of Fireball and broken up with his girlfriend; she has just 

been discharged from rehab for reasons she initially remains 

vague about — but which we later learn is a cocktail of body 

dysmorphia, an eating disorder, fear of abandonment, and an 

obsessive personality, which the official synopsis refers to as 

love addiction — and has committed to a year of singledom. 

Despite the shambled nature of their meet cute, however, they 

immediately click. But soon Riley’s interior tempest returns, and 

their relationship (sort of platonic in its sexlessness, but mostly 

not) begins to deteriorate. 

If that all sounds fairly gauche in description, the experience of 

Parachute never dips below innocuous in even its worst moments 

— mostly when Snow and co-writer Becca Gleason invoke the 

indie film template for filler and temporarily disavow nuance, 

such as when Riley’s rich, unempathetic mother shows up to 

castigate her daughter’s lifestyle, deny her very real mental 

health struggles, and bandy a few passive-aggresions about her 

(very healthy) weight. The script then asks Ethan to verbally 

indict the bad parenting and lingering trauma it caused, 

13


ill- advisedly even suggesting a possible origin for Riley’s 

pathology. Plenty of these sins are covered, however, thanks to 

Eaton’s anchoring, viscerally pained turn (which won SXSW’s 

Special Jury Award for performance). She is both physically and 

emotionally raw in Parachute, often occupying the space where 

intimacy bleeds into obsession, and equally as adept at 

communicating Riley’s cracked-glass fragility as she is at 

channeling the character’s anguish and self-loathing into vitriolic 

lashing-outs. Eaton understands how tenderness is flayed from 

this young woman in even seemingly run-of-the-mill interactions, 

and the emotional disintegration becomes palpably more brutal 

as the film moves forward. 

Snow deserves much of the credit for the film’s successes as 

well. As a director, she doesn’t bring much formal swagger to the 

table — inserting a few indie rock-set photo montages as 

interstitial fodder is about as flexing as the movie gets visually — 

but she does imbue the proceedings with a level of specificity 

that enriches the material. Snow has been open about her own 

past with an eating disorder and mental health struggles, and 

that experience comes through: Riley’s fidgety, anxiety-induced 

physical tells; the thought patterns and compulsive behaviors 

she dips in and out of; the infrastructure and shifting dynamics 

of recovery support — these details speak to Parachute’s 

distinctly personal construction. 

But there’s still the problem of narrative shape. So many, even 

most, films dealing with recovery storylines rely on the art of 

de-glamming and stick to the reliably dramatic beats, forgoing 

the unsexy process of incremental progress. These films usually 

trace the same arc: a character starts low, sees improvement, 

crashes to an all-time low, and then signs things off with a weary 

smile that signals acceptance and the promise that things will 

eventually be okay. It’s understandable: that’s both more 

cinematic and provides substance for story, but it can also often 

result in the impression that viewers are being asked to gawk, to 

exoticize the pain of others. Parachute never deviates from that 

frustratingly pat approach, but Snow at least finds balance to 

this essential artifice in the intimate texturing she brings to 

Parachute’s more familiar parts. She also understands the 

importance of picking the right song to soundtrack a film’s 

emotional climax, here savvily choosing Broken Social Scene’s 

“Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl,” its warped, haunting 

falsetto, underlying melancholy, and droning lyrical repetition 

making for a fitting thematic punctuation for Riley’s experience. 

For all these strengths, Parachute remains an undeniably flawed 

and limited film, but it’s also one that effectively articulates the 

immense feeling that was poured into it, which is a rare find in 

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SXSW 2023 

the prevailingly soul-dead cinematic realm of shallow reboot and 

recycle. — LUKE GORHAM 

ANHELL69 

Theo Montoya 

There have been a number of meta-cinematic works over the 

years that detail the plans for a film that a maker had in mind, 

but was unable to complete for one reason or another. But 

Anhell69, by Colombian director Theo Montoya, is quite different 

from other such experiments in failure. That’s because Anhell69 

is a brutal examination of cinema as a kind of makeshift 

memorial, and how the present moment is everything when life 

itself becomes unfeasible. This is a story of fragile existence 

focused on the queer community in Medellín, a city ravaged by 

authoritarianism, narco wars, and relentless homophobia. 

In the beginning, Montoya planned to assemble some young men 

and women from the drag scene in order to produce a 

low-budget allegorical fiction, involving the coexistence of the 

living and the dead in the streets of Medellín. As ghosts 

accumulate in the city, a group of outcasts begin having sex with 

ghosts, an act that is perceived as a threat to the natural order. 

These “spectrophiliacs” become the target of death squads, 

which of course only adds to the crisis. Whereas death is 

supposed to be a terminus, Montoya conjures a world in which it 

is merely a new state of being, a way for Colombians to reconcile 

their inability to project themselves into the future. 

Montoya begins with a series of casting calls, which show him 

interviewing various street kids about their lives, and the one 

constant is that none of them believe they have a future of any 

kind. This proves entirely too true, as two of the prospective 

actors die before Montoya can even begin the film. This results in 

a pivot into a different project, a mournful essay film about the 

precariousness of life in a nation that seems all too willing to 

forsake its gender-nonconforming children to violence and drug 

abuse. 

Anhell69 takes its title from the Instagram handle of a young 

man, Camilo Najar, who Montoya wanted to be his star. After he 

dies suddenly, the film becomes a concerted effort to document 

a milieu under siege, an attempt to create a material record of 

brief lives that the dominant society is all too eager to forget. 

From its ominous drone shots over Medellín to the pleasures of 

the city’s queer nightlife, Anhell69 conveys the stark contrast 

between freedom and fascism in contemporary Colombia. 

But as the film makes clear, death is ever-present. Montoya and 

his cast conclude their journey in the cemetery, honoring the 

deceased while squaring off against their own looming demise. 

As a rhythmic motif, Montoya continually cuts to a hearse driving 

at night, with the director himself serving as the man in the 

casket. With Anhell69, Montoya has constructed an indelible, at 

times shattering portrait of a collection of lovers and fighters 

who have embraced hedonistic nihilism, just in order to find a 

place to exist. — MICHAEL SICINSKI 

CONFESSIONS OF A GOOD SAMARITAN 

Penny Lane 

In 2019, the documentary filmmaker Penny Lane donated one of 

her kidneys as part of an altruistic donor program, meaning the 

organ would be given to an individual that Lane didn’t know and 

would likely never meet. Her motives for doing so are outwardly 

uncomplicated; essentially, she’s healthy, recipients are in 

desperate need, and, ultimately, “why not?” In making herself the 

subject of her latest film, Confessions of a Good Samaritan, 

chronicling the years-in-the-making decision as well as the 

battery of physical and psychological tests leading up to the 

operation and the recovery period afterwards, the filmmaker 

places herself under her own microscope in trying to understand 

the very nature of empathy, approaching the subject on both a 

micro and macro level. What kind of person willingly hands over 

part of their body to someone in need, why isn’t this a more 

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common practice, and how is one supposed to feel in the 

aftermath of such an act of generosity? 

Being interviewed mere days before her operation, Lane presents 

herself as sanguine while fending off anxieties about 

undertaking elective surgery. Single and childless — the glimpses 

of Lane’s homelife primarily involve her feeding her cat — the 

director lacks many of the external factors that often prevent 

people from donating their kidney to a stranger — we hear 

several anecdotes from people saying their spouses would 

threaten to divorce them or stop talking to them altogether 

should they go through with their donations — but Samaritan 

never quite addresses whether the act itself is providing 

something she’s otherwise lacking in her personal life. The film 

nibbles around the idea of deriving self-worth and personal 

satisfaction from such a benevolent act, but it largely plays the 

subject matter straight down the middle: devoting the majority of 

its runtime to exploring the semi-recent history of organ 

transplants — for example, we learn the procedure was initially 

limited to identical twins, the only people whose bodies wouldn’t 

reject the foreign tissue — while also attempting to find a 

scientific explanation for why some people are more inclined to 

respond to other people’s fears with empathy. At the same time, 

the film presents a segment of the donor community who argue 

that, facing a shortage of willing donors, society should cross the 

rubicon of paying organ donors, long illegal in the U.S. and 

morally frowned upon, yet a potentially transformative act for 

both a recipient and impoverished donor. 

Lane’s previous documentaries are known for taking a 

particularly askew approach to incendiary subject matters, 

including presenting a sympathetic view of the religious 

organization/First Amendment concern troll organization the 

Satanic Temple, and, even more inflammatory, critical punching 

bag and smooth jazz musician Kenny G. But the filmmaker’s body 

of work is arguably working against her here, creating 

expectations that the film will present some sort of 

counterintuitive thesis for the viewer to consider when much of 

the film plays like an earnest act of advocacy, all but urging 

people to consider altruistic donation themselves (it stops short 

of throwing up the website for the national donor registry in the 

end credits). Confessions introduces talking heads, ostensibly to 

argue the ethics for and against altruistic donations, but there is 

no particularly strong argument against it. Even with one of the 

medical experts making the less than comforting claim that 

there’s a 1 in 1,000 chance of the donor dying during surgery, 

that's still being weighed against the perpetual agony of dialysis 

patients. Further, in cherry-picking its interview subjects (they 

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SXSW 2023 

all but glow in describing how the experience of donating made 

them feel), the film comes awfully close to evangelizing about its 

subject, reserving any nagging doubts to those occasionally 

vocalized by the filmmaker herself. 

To that end, the film is far more notable as a window into Lane’s 

vulnerability. For example, her consternation over not having a 

will (who will take care of her cat?) or having an emergency 

contact she feels strongly about, even confessing to making up 

names and phone numbers for the hospital forms. Demonstrating 

an admirable lack of vanity, Lane allows herself to be filmed in 

the immediate aftermath of surgery, calling attention to the 

puffiness of her face, sharing the assorted rashes and 

unglamorous ailments she suffered in the immediate aftermath 

and showing off her incision scar which dips below her bikini 

line. Even more revealing are the more recent interviews where 

— in addition to candidly admitting that she’s gained weight since 

filming began and that it bothers her — Lane wrestles with her 

own depression and uncertainty; essentially, why doesn’t she feel 

“better” or more fulfilled by having gone through this process? 

Having committed one of the most selfless acts imaginable, Lane 

sheepishly confronts her earlier self’s flippancy as well as the 

disappointment that she still doesn’t like herself more, which the 

filmmaker acknowledges wasn’t the point of donating a kidney 

but “it would have been nice to be surprised by it.” It’s a 

remarkably candid and complicated revelation and one wishes 

the film had gone even further in giving voice to that 

perspective. Sometimes the most altruistic acts are the ones 

that don’t also come with a measurable increase of the warm and 

fuzzies. — ANDREW DIGNAN 

THE ARTIFICE GIRL 

Franklin Ritch 

Sci-fi books and movies have been enamored with the 

remarkable possibilities of, and dangerous risks inherent to, 

artificial intelligence for almost as long as the genre has been 

around. HAL needs no introduction, of course, nor does Skynet, 

and Donald Cammell’s underrated Demon Seed is almost 50 years 

old now. But Franklin Ritch’s The Artifice Girl is arriving right on 

the cusp of a new found fascination with the subject, as ChatGPT 

and AI art have taken the world by storm. Think pieces both for 

and against are strewn about all over social media, with tech 

companies touting endless applications that may or may not ever 

come to fruition. Could this ultimately all be to the betterment of 

the human race? Or is it just another venture capitalist-funded 

shell game? We don’t know yet, but The Artifice Girl suggests 

some new potentialities to fret over. 

Ritch’s film approaches this complicated subject with a certain 

ambivalence, concocting a low-budget, extremely lo-fi chamber 

piece that centers around philosophical questions of ethics and 

morality, and whether or not these things apply to a fully artificial 

intelligence that just happens to look and sound like us. Divided 

into three discrete chapters, plus a brief prologue, each part of 

the film takes place in one location, with mostly the same cast, 

but spread out over the present, then the near future, and finally 

decades later. Chapter one introduces Gareth (played here and in 

chapter two by the director himself) as he interviews for what he 

thinks is a grant proposal. But he’s actually been targeted by two 

federal agents who think he’s a pedophile. Deena Helms (Sinda 

Nichols) is the hard-hitting, take-no-shit bad cop to Amos 

McCullough’s (David Girard) slightly kinder good cop. The two 

bombard Gareth with questions, the rat-ta-tat of the 

interrogation wearing him down until he admits the truth — he’s 

not a pedophile, but is instead frequenting chat sites under an 

alias to lure actual predators into admitting their crimes. Amos is 

impressed, but Deena remains unconvinced. There’s no way 

criminals would reveal so much about themselves to a man, even 

online. 

Finally, Gareth drops a bomb — he gets his information by using a 

proprietary AI program that he designed that looks and sounds 

like a little girl. Gareth has named it Cherry (first voiced by, then 

portrayed by, Tatum Matthews), compiling information about 

17


suspects and then reporting them to the feds. Gareth is a 

cyberspace vigilante, forging ahead where officially sanctioned 

authorities can’t go. Amos and Deena are stunned, not only at 

how realistic Cherry looks, but how she’s able to imitate real 

human conversation and react in real time to different kinds of 

questions. Chapter one ends with the trio agreeing to join forces, 

embarking on a “technological solution to a technological 

problem,” as Gareth puts it. Chapter two, then, begins some years 

later, the principal players visibly aged and arguing over whether 

or not to take Cherry and their operation to the next level. To 

reveal more of the plot here would be a disservice; there’s not 

exactly twists, but Ritch’s screenplay is carefully designed to 

gradually grow and expand as more of Cherry’s abilities are 

revealed. There’s just enough jargon peppered throughout to 

make things sound authoritative, but Ritch’s real talent lies in his 

ability to raise the dramatic stakes with such limited means. We 

get tidbits of backstory for each character, including important 

motivating factors for Gareth and Deena, but exposition is 

otherwise kept to a minimum. Instead, character is conveyed 

entirely through actions, as Amos grows increasingly weary of 

the others and seems to sense that Cherry is more evolved, more 

human, than it’s (she’s?) letting on. 

It’s almost a shame that Ritch has to end his film, as the third and 

final chapter has to attempt to answer many of the questions 

raised in parts one and two. It’s a quieter, more solemn stretch, 

with a lovely turn from Lance Henriksen as he embarks on one 

final conversation with Cherry. At the heart of the matter is not 

only self-awareness, but emotions; if a computer program can 

learn to affect human emotions by imitating them, at what point 

does the line blur and the emotions become real? Ritch seems to 

have his mind made up, although some viewers might not be so 

convinced. Still, wherever one lands on such profound questions, 

The Artifice Girl is a very welcome addition to the no-budget sci-fi 

canon. It doesn’t take millions of dollars and tons of CGI to make 

a genre movie, just a screenplay as good as this one. — DANIEL 

GORMAN 

CITIZEN SLEUTH 

Chris Kasick 

Society has always had something of a morbid curiosity with true 

crime. From Jack the Ripper and In Cold Blood to the 

near-constant stream of new Netflix docuseries on the killer of 

the week, it’s clear that we really love learning about and 

delighting in the grisly details of murder. Since the 2014 release 

of Serial, podcasts have been feeding the flames of that 

obsession. Just take a look at the most downloaded podcasts on 

Apple or Spotify, and you’ll see titles like Crime Junkie, My Favorite 

Murder, and Morbid: A True Crime Podcast — and that’s just in the 

top ten. This surge in popularity has in turn triggered multiple 

studies into how the constant barrage of true crime content 

affects our psyches. Some blame the 24-hour news cycle, while 

others claim its consumption actually has an evolutionary 

benefit. All of this to say, it doesn’t matter much what your 

personal interest level is in hearing about Alex Murdaugh or 

watching the latest Making a Murderer rip-off — true crime is 

inescapable. 

It’s unsurprising then that a documentary like Citizen Sleuth is 

premiering at SXSW, a festival that itself features a lineup of 

podcasts, because it’s a film about a podcast about a murder. 

Emily Nestor is the host of Mile Marker 181, a show that 

investigates the death of Jaleayah Davis, a woman who was 

killed in Nestor’s hometown of Parkersburg, West Virginia in 2011. 

“Murder, or a freak accident? Cover-up, or just rumors?” reads 

the description of the podcast, which debuted in 2018. Jaleayah 

was found dead after having been struck by her own car. 

Reported as a tragic accident, Jaleayah’s mom and others in the 

community believe there was foul play. Authorities found 

Jaleayah’s car just down the road, her clothes neatly folded over 

the guardrail, and the other people involved in the accident 

happened to be the son of a former police officer and the 

granddaughter of a former sheriff. 

Director Chris Kasick began following Nestor early on in the 

podcast’s life. The documentary’s opening scenes show her 

explaining her homemade studio (i.e. a small padded box she 

puts around her microphone to deaden the sound) and 

contacting potential sources for interviews. She’s palpably fired 

up; it’s clear she truly believes there is more to the story of 

Jaleayah’s death, and she’s determined to find it. She’s also a 

certifiable true crime freak, to the point that we watch her get a 

tattoo of the phrase on her calf. As the film continues, Nestor’s 

podcast gains traction: she eventually attends CrimeCon, where 

she connects with Fox News’ true crime pundit, Nancy Grace; she 

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sells Mile Marker 181 merch; she hosts events at local libraries 

where people profess their love for her work. 

The turning point in the film comes when Nestor visits a psychic 

who, in addition to a lot of talk about angels, tells her, “The 

career you choose is supposed to benefit others, but your 

talkativeness is gonna bring you harm. Use it to your advantage. 

Remember this, Emily, your words have power. You’re like a 

vehicle. They can go forward, backward, or run amok. Watch 

what you recycle.” At this point, Nestor’s belief has clearly 

crumbled, and her inexperience and naivete become obvious. 

Also around this time, Jaleayah’s mom starts to disentangle 

herself from Nestor, and even shows support for a Change.org 

petition for Nestor to end the podcast. Nestor confesses that she 

hasn’t talked to key people involved in the case, including the 

others in the car on the night of Jaleayah’s death. Kasick, 

however, does interview those individuals, all of whom agree that 

the entire premise of Nestor’s podcast is flawed and that she 

shouldn’t continue. Nestor eventually, reluctantly, makes the 

decision to end the podcast, and has since taken all episodes 

offline. She even gets her beloved true crime tattoo removed. 

Were it not for its aesthetically familiar documentary style, 

Citizen Sleuth could be mistaken for a feature film. Kasick has 

taken four years of footage and crafted an engaging emotional 

arc, following Nestor from innocent investigator to exploitative 

fraud and back again. The documentary is even structured as 

something of a whodunnit; even if you come to this already 

aware of the outcome, following all of the switchbacks still 

proves intriguing enough. Kasick keeps things moving along, and 

at a tightly-packaged 81 minutes, the film never lulls or risks 

feeling lazy; every scene, every interview, every question has a 

clear purpose. But building suspense is rarely a challenge for this 

kind of product. What should be a bigger concern for a film like 

this is how to translate a podcast-oriented narrative to a visual 

medium, and this indeed proves to be a struggle for Citizen 

Sleuth. Images rarely feel necessary here, and, somewhat 

ironically, it wouldn’t be unfair to argue that this would be just as 

effective as a podcast. Still, what ultimately matters most about 

Citizen Sleuth is its essential question: where exactly is the line 

between reportage and entertainment, and what are the ethical 

quandaries of straddling that line? Kasick’s film may not offer a 

complete answer, but as the space between true crime media 

and conspiracy theory continues to shrink and blur, it’s a 

question that more people should be asking before they tune in 

to the latest episode. — EMILY DUGRANRUT 

19


REVIVAL69 

Ron Chapman 

In the summer of 1969, thousands of music fans gathered for a 

once-in-a-lifetime show that would change the course of rock 

history. Bona fide legends delivered electric performances to 

critical acclaim. Then-unknown artists were catapulted to the 

spotlight overnight. A spontaneous all-star supergroup gave their 

first live show, ending the career of another band in the process. 

A biker gang provided security detail. A chicken met an untimely 

death. It was all captured on film, aside from one stubborn 

iconoclast who refused the camera’s eye. No, this wasn’t 

Woodstock. And it certainly wasn’t Altamont. It was the Toronto 

Rock and Roll Revival. And odds are, you’ve never even heard of 

it. 

Directed by Ron Chapman, Revival69: The Concert that Rocked the 

World is an engrossing, enlightening, and even funny 

documentary shining a light on this forgotten moment in rock 

history. Similar in spirit to 2021’s fantastic Summer of Soul, which 

finally gave the Harlem Cultural Festival its due, Chapman’s film 

succeeds in bringing out the Toronto Revival from the shadow of 

Woodstock and sands of time. 

Following a chronological timeline, Revival69 takes us through 

the story of how this historical event grew from its seed as a 

humble idea to the massive event it became, thanks to the work 

of a scrappy but dedicated (and well-connected) team. At its 

helm was 22-year-old newbie promoter John Brower. Fresh off 

the success of organizing Toronto’s first pop festival in 1969, 

Brower was hungry for more, and the idea for the Toronto Revival 

was born as a way to pay homage to the icons of the ‘50s who 

pioneered rock and roll. Brower’s team secured Chuck Berry, 

Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, and Bo Diddley for the festival, 

and booked Varsity Stadium as the venue. How it all came 

together couldn’t be more foreign to the way festivals are 

organized in the 21st century, an era dominated by corporate 

interests like AEG and Live Nation. “In the 60s, it wasn’t the music 

business, it was the music,” Shep Gordon, legendary manager of 

Alice Cooper, states in the film. That this show even happened is 

impressive in the first place, but it wouldn’t have mattered if the 

performances didn’t live up to the hype. 

Revival69 is anchored in a tangible tension from the start. 

Specifically, can they pull this off? While core to the concert’s 

ethos, ‘50s rock and roll acts weren’t exactly in vogue at the time. 

In need of a contemporary act to attract a younger crowd, The 

Doors were named as headliners — costing organizers a pretty 

penny. Yet even this wasn’t enough to manufacture the hype 

needed to fill 20,000 seats. With ticket sales stuck at 2,000 just a 

week before the show, and with the event on the verge of 

cancellation, a true sensation needed to be booked. The answer: 

John Lennon. Thanks to a lucky connection at The Beatles’ Apple 

Corps HQ, organizers sold John and Yoko on the idea of honoring 

Lennon’s longtime hero Chuck Berry. Arriving at the peak of John 

and Yoko’s famous Bed-In for Peace, and also at a peak of his 

heroin abuse and depression, Lennon was excited about the idea 

of returning to the stage without the band that brought him to 

fame. He assembled a supergroup consisting of Yoko Ono, Eric 

Clapton, Klaus Voormann (bassist, artist, and friend of The 

Beatles), and future Yes drummer Alan White. This would be the 

debut of The Plastic Ono Band, mark a new chapter in the lives of 

John and Yoko, and hopefully prove to Lennon that a career was 

possible for him outside The Beatles. Seeming almost too good to 

be true, the press didn’t believe it would happen, and even the 

morning of, Lennon told organizers he wouldn’t play, before being 

pushed back into it by Eric Clapton. As it was, the gamble paid 

off. 

And it pays off for the film, as well. Given the mystery 

surrounding the festival, most viewers won’t know if or to what 

extent it will all work out in the end, and observing how it all 

came together is a thrilling part of the ride. Fittingly, then, where 

the film truly shines is in the festival footage Chapman has 

assembled. Much like Summer of Soul, it’s thrilling to be able to 

see these stage icons in living color. Shot by a team led by the 

late, great D.A. Pennebaker, not only was the concert itself 

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filmed, but we’re treated to incredible footage of its setup, 

backstage, crowd, and the surreal motorcycle caravan that 

escorted John and Yoko from the airport to the field (one of the 

film’s best sequences). This isn’t exactly a by-the-book concert 

documentary — we don’t get full performances from any artist — 

but it still manages to convey a palpable energy from each 

performance. The film is also chock full of endless amazing rock 

anecdotes: from the birth of Alice Cooper and his unhinged 

on-stage antics, to the undeniably weird yet forward-thinking 

avant-garde of Yoko Ono, to the crowd raising a sea of lighters to 

welcome Lennon to the stage (now a time honored practice at 

every concert ever). Yet it’s Chuck Berry’s performance that 

proves to be the film’s standout sequence. Backed by a group of 

teen musicians he’d never played with before, Berry overflows 

with joy and charisma. And there’s something so pure and bygone 

about his performance that it’s simply a marvel to see on screen. 

The wealth of talent interviewed for the film offer great insight 

into the significance of the day — as well as lend it more humor 

than expected. Two particular highlights are Edjo Leslie, a 

rough-riding heartwarming Santa Claus and founder of the 

Vagabonds Motorcycle Club who provided security detail and 

funds for the show, and Rush’s Geddy Lee, who was in attendance 

that day and apparently tripping balls. The only two living artists 

not featured are Yoko Ono (who declined to appear) and Eric 

Clapton (who never responded to the filmmakers’ requests). Both 

polarizing figures, Clapton’s presence isn’t particularly missed, 

yet Ono’s would have added an extra dimension to the story given 

her complicated legacy, love story with Lennon, and unapologetic 

boldness she demonstrated on stage in Toronto. 

“… observing how it all came 

together is a thrilling part of 

the ride. 

Over the 50 years since the decade that transformed culture as 

we now know it, many moments have been recognized as the 

symbolic end of the idealistic ‘60s — from the police riots at the 

1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago to the murders 

of MLK and RFK to the disastrous Altamont Speedway Free 

Festival. Even more have been given for the end of The Beatles. 

The Toronto Revival invigorated Lennon with the confidence he 

needed to leave the group, sparking music’s greatest divorce. 

Given the incredible legacies swirling in Toronto during that 

summer of ‘69, Revival is a welcome addition to the history books 

and concert doc canon (and yet further required viewing for 

Beatles fanatics who need no convincing). Brimming with both 

revelry and reverence, Revival69 remembers a time when 

anything felt possible and arrives at a moment when we could all 

use a little bit of the optimism that felt so potent back then and 

so foreign to us now. It’s a welcome trip down a memory-holed 

alley of memory lane.— NICK SEIP 

ANOTHER BODY 

Sophie Compton & Reuben Hamlyn 

A sobering reminder of the minefield the Internet can be for 

women, the documentary Another Body, from filmmakers Sophie 

Compton and Reuben Hamlyn, is perhaps one of the more 

unnerving recent examples of form being shaped by subject 

matter. We’re introduced to college-aged engineering student 

“Taylor.” “Taylor” is ambitious, academically accomplished, and 

outwardly happy until one day she learns from an apologetic 

male friend that there is a video on a popular porn website which 

appears to feature her engaged in an explicit sexual act. “Taylor” 

is mortified to discover that the video is not actually her but is a 

deepfake. For those blessedly unfamiliar with the term, 

deepfakes are a controversial form of video where, using 

commercially available software and A.I., “regular people” 

(although, boy, is that a relative term) are able to create 

photorealistic, full-motion facsimiles of human beings appearing 

to say and do things that they otherwise never would. Alarm bells 

first sounded about this technology years ago, primarily in 

anticipation of it being employed to spread disinformation and 

potentially swing elections (Jordan Peele even made a PSA on 

the subject back in 2018 which made convincing use of his 

Obama impersonation). However, as with all emergent 

technology, it’s primarily been applied toward pornography. More 

specifically, creating reasonably convincing video clips where 

everyone from movie stars to politicians to amateur citizens can 

have their faces nonconsensually imposed upon porn actors, at 

which point the videos are uploaded online and viewed by 

millions of people. 

This may be the appropriate place to discuss Compton and 

11


Hamlyn’s fascinating, if not entirely successful, formal gambit (as 

well as dispense with at least some of the scare quotes). As you 

can probably infer, the woman at the story’s center is not really 

named Taylor, and the school she claims to be attending isn’t real 

either. But, in what is either a commendable attempt to preserve 

the anonymity of its subject or a chilling glimpse into a 

post-truth future, the filmmakers have taken the remarkable 

step of creating a deepfake of Taylor, hiring an actor whose face 

has been mapped and placed onto her body for the entire film. 

And it’s not just for her either. As Taylor attempts to make sense 

of how this happened and who might be responsible for the 

videos (we learn there are a ton of deepfakes featuring her), she 

identifies female classmates subjected to the same violation of 

their privacy, including a young woman identified as Julia who’s 

similarly obscured by a benevolent deep fake. Further, in a rather 

extraordinary step, the film fabricates countless innocuous 

snapshots of unwitting women, as well as more insidious 

deepfake porn videos featuring our deep fake actors, blurring 

out the more graphic elements, then populating them on staged 

4chan threads and Pornhub accounts in order to convey the 

pervasiveness of the issue. The film wouldn’t be the first 

documentary to go to extreme lengths to obscure the 

appearance of its subjects (2020’s Welcome to Chechnya also 

used AI to disguise its interviewees, although it purposely called 

attention to itself more), but this feels like an especially bold, if 

troubling, application of the technology. 

It all falls just on the believable side of the uncanny valley, but it’s 

unsettling all the same. As a proof of concept of just how 

convincing deepfakes can appear to the casual viewer, it passes 

with flying colors, only inviting scrutiny with the occasional 

visual distortion (the technology seems to work best with limited 

mobility, which is less of an issue in a talking head format). But 

there’s something undeniably dead-eyed in Taylor’s otherwise 

forceful yet warm delivery; perceptible as “off” yet difficult to put 

your finger on why even before the film comes clean about what 

it’s doing around the 15-minute mark. Further, it’s slightly 

unseemly going to these lengths, in essence creating deepfake 

pornography (albeit presumably with the consent of all parties 

involved) just to make the argument for how pervasive it is. It’s 

not necessarily a question of “ethics” — which itself is a loaded 

term, historically bandied about in bad faith as an excuse to 

attack women on the Internet — but it does raise the question of 

what, if anything, we’re seeing on screen is actually “real.” 

Having found one another, Taylor and Julia share notes and 

collaborate on an informal investigation into who might have 

done this to them. The bulk of the film takes the form of a 

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two-way video chat, capturing their disgusted reactions to each 

new discovery in real time, all while trying to comprehend why 

someone would do this. After wading into the cesspool of 

deepfake porn sites and message boards, they come to the 

conclusion that the offending party is a former male roommate 

of Taylor’s (this individual, like the women in the film, is granted 

anonymity and given an avatar which conceals his actual face) 

who they had a falling out with years earlier. In an all too familiar 

turn of events, this individual allegedly lashed out over perceived 

emotional rejection, acting on his grievances — imagined or 

otherwise — by attempting to humiliate an innocent woman. It’s a 

narrative often associated with revenge porn, but as the film 

makes maddeningly clear, the laws about deepfakes are so 

nascent that there may not actually be criminal recourse for 

victims — the film presents a phone call between Taylor and her 

local police dispatch, with the officer taking the call at an utter 

loss as to whether a crime has been committed or how even to 

proceed investigating it. 

“It’s not necessarily a question 

of “ethics”… but it does raise 

the question of what, if 

anything, we’re seeing on 

screen is actually “real.” 

We’re ultimately left in a disquieting and unsatisfying place 

where comeuppances are in short supply and happy endings are 

measured. The sense of violation for the young women is 

palpable and, as the film briefly argues, these attacks against 

women are primarily a means of cowing them into compliance or 

forcing them off the Internet altogether. But beyond the 

justifiable sense of being skeeved-out, it’s uncertain what’s 

actually to be done to stop this sort of thing (it’s telling that no 

one in the film even mentions the phrase “First Amendment”). In 

addition, the filmmakers may have only further muddied the 

waters on the pliability of ostensibly documentary footage, 

opening the door for far more nefarious applications. You may 

want to take a shower after watching this — for more than one 

reason. — ANDREW DIGNAN 

ABERRANCE 

Baatar Batsukh 

Director/cinematographer/co-writer Baatar Batsukh ends his 

new film Aberrance with a dedication to Darren Aronofsky, 

acknowledging the former indie darling/now-Academy 

Award-winning director’s influence on Batsukh's own low-budget 

psychological horror-thriller. A more proper shoutout might be to 

Park Chan-wook, from whom Batsukh has borrowed a certain 

hyperactive visual hyperbole — slick widescreen images that 

suffer from a surfeit of “one-perfect-shot” syndrome. It’s not a 

great film, in other words, although not without some small 

merits. But Batsukh’s attempt to chart the dissolution of a 

marriage between a mentally unstable woman and her oafish, 

abusive husband mistakes a plethora of ostentatious style for 

substance, employing an insistent score and ludicrous camera 

calisthenics to beat the audience into submission. It’s barely a 

narrative, functioning more like a demo reel or a calling card. 

The film begins with Erkhmee (Erkhembayar Ganbat) and Selenge 

(Selenge Chadraabal) arriving at a well-appointed house in the 

mountains of Mongolia. Selenge seems quiet and aloof, while 

Erkhmee attempts to cheer her up with talk about the clear 

mountain air and how the peace and quiet will do them some 

good. Before they’re done unpacking, a friendly neighbor, Yalalt 

(Yalalt Namsrai), has already introduced himself, leading to some 

glowering from Erkhmee. Then Selenge finds a dead cat out by 

the garbage and things suddenly devolve; in rapid succession, it’s 

revealed that Selenge is suffering from some kind of disorder 

and that Erkhmee is a particularly brutal caretaker, admonishing 

her for refusing her medication and force-feeding her soup when 

she declines to eat. Selenge has vivid nightmares, and despite 

her entreaties, Erkhmee refuses to let her leave the house. Yalalt 

witnesses some of these interactions, and begins snooping 

around to gather more evidence. 

Eventually, his anonymous report to the police backfires when 

Erkhmee instantly susses out that Yalalt made the call, and a 

later effort to win him over goes awry when Yalalt gets drunk and 

accuses Erkhmee of domestic abuse in front of Selenge and two 

of her friends. It’s a volatile mixture of rage and resentment, 

which Batsukh diffuses in the most asinine way possible; rather 

than building tension and following any of these plot threads, he 

13


instead switches gears about halfway through the film and 

begins focusing on Yalalt, who might not be as nice as he 

appears. It's the kind of twist that takes careful calibration to pull 

off, but here it’s simply ludicrous, a bald-faced attempt to 

snooker the audience. Even worse is a last-minute plot reveal 

that wants to be shocking but instead doubles down on the 

already bountiful stupidity on display. 

Throughout the film, Batsukh revels in all manner of over-the-top 

visual trickery and stylistic overkill. Conversations are filmed in 

nauseating whip pans, and there are ridiculous POV shots galore. 

This is the kind of movie where it takes multiple cuts from 

jarringly incongruous angles to convey a simple action like a 

character emptying food into a garbage can. Batsukh has a good 

eye for simple, evocative widescreen compositions, doing 

particularly nice work with the natural beauty of the snowy 

mountain landscapes. But the contrast between modes doesn’t 

work at all — it’s like a solemn A24 picture occasionally 

interrupted by frantic music video antics. All of this adds up to 

nothing much, a 75-minute wisp of a movie that lumbers 

awkwardly from genre to genre — a mishmash of thriller, slasher, 

and crime tropes blended and shaken. One thing is clear: Batsukh 

the director and Batsukh the cinematographer both need better 

collaborators. — DANIEL GORMAN 

WAR PONY 

Riley Keough and Gina Gammell 

“The question of who has the right to tell a story isn’t a new one, 

but in a country literally built upon the exploitation and 

displacement of Native populations and in the context of an 

industry with an unsavory history of Indigenous representation 

on screen, everyone should feel a bit squeamish at this 

proposition… It’s a significant relief, then, that the film proves to 

be a conscientious and measured affair.” — LUKE GORHAM 

[Originally published as part of InRO’s Cannes 2022 coverage.] 

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STILL: A MICHAEL J. FOX MOVIE 

Davis Guggenheim 

“Those looking for long-buried sensationalistic material 

regarding Fox should probably venture elsewhere, as this is not a 

film interested in painting the actor in some sort of negative 

light, mostly because such a thing would prove nearly impossible. 

Yes, the actor did turn to alcohol following his diagnosis, and his 

job kept him from his family for long stretches of time. Yet the 

thing that has always set Fox apart from his peers is a seemingly 

genuine sense of self-effacement, the type of guy who can’t 

believe how lucky he got in winning the lottery of fame, and 

simply went along for the ride.” — STEVEN WARNER [Originally 

published as part of InRO’s Sundance 2023 coverage.] 

TALK TO ME 

Danny & Michael Philippou 

“By no means is Talk to Me [the directors’] first foray into feature 

filmmaking, any kind of profound exegesis on contemporary 

social turpitude or secular excess. There’s a looseness to its 

movements that draws perhaps from the directors’ RackaRacka 

channel, an eschewing of plot over-engineering and thematic 

stuffing that might evoke sniffy opposition from a select few: the 

ones who exclusively worship either John Carpenter or Ari 

Aster… The key to Talk to Me’s formula and future success, 

however, lies precisely in its rejection of overt didacticism or 

narrow identity politics, both of which have become endemic in 

contemporary high-brow horror.” — MORRIS YANG [Originally 

published as part of InRO’s Sundance 2023 coverage.] 

15

I’M A LONESOME 

FUGITIVE 

Merle Haggard 


In 1960, Merle Haggard was released from jail — he served a 

two-year stint in San Quentin for burglary. Before long, Hag 

started recording for the small Tally Records and notched a 

modest hit when Bakersfield icon Wynn Stewart gave his blessing 

to record the as-yet-unreleased “Sing a Sad Song.” But by 1964, 

Hag still hadn’t landed a top 10 on the country charts, and wasn’t 

quite famous. Then a fortuitous meeting occurred: Haggard went 

to the Sacramento home of songwriter Liz Anderson. To read 

about the two sides of this encounter is to experience a 

near-perfect microcosm of the era’s misogyny. Here’s Hag in his 

1981 autobiography: “If there was anything I didn't wanna do, it 

was sit around some danged woman's house and listen to her 

cute little songs. But I went anyway. She was a pleasant enough 

lady, pretty, with a nice smile, but I was all set to be bored to 

death.” Meanwhile, others have pointed out that, at the time of 

their meeting, Anderson already had a top 10 hit as a writer (Del 

Reeves’ 1961 single “Be Quiet Mind”) and was friendly with a lot of 

Bakersfield artists — including a country singer more well-known 

in the industry than Haggard was: his labelmate at Tally and 

future wife, Bonnie Owens. When Owens would send her singles 

to radio DJs, she would often slip one of Haggard’s songs into the 

same envelope; it was Owens who introduced Hag to Anderson, 

and who asked Anderson to come out to one of Hag’s shows when 

he played near Sacramento. In any event, Anderson was 

impressed with her house guest, and for his part, Hag recognized 

the error of his own obstinance quickly, recalling in that same 

passage from his autobiography that the songs Anderson played 

sounded like “one hit right after another” — and soon, they were 

his hits. 

The songs from that initial meeting with Anderson turned out to 

be formative for Hag’s career in a number of ways: One of them, 

"Just Between the Two of Us," was cut as a duet in 1964 with 

Owens on Talley, and later re-released when Haggard signed a 

1 16


new contract with Capitol; another, “(My Friends Are Gonna Be) Strangers,” gave Haggard his much sought after first top 10 single on 

the country charts. “Strangers” also became the namesake for both Hag’s debut studio album on Capitol and his newly-minted backing 

band. Even more importantly, though, Haggard would continue to tap Anderson for his next two albums, including the one that 

represents not only the gold standard of his Capitol years (1965–1977), but the album that best represents his whole ethos as an artist. 

I’m a Lonesome Fugitive was released in 1967, and led-off by a title track penned by Liz Anderson and her husband Casey that spent 15 

weeks on the country singles chart, peaking at number one. For a time, many assumed that “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive" was an 

autobiographical statement from Haggard, but the Andersons in fact were totally unaware of Hag’s still-fairly-recent bid in San 

Quentin, or for that matter his youth spent fleeing law enforcement, when they played him the song — which was actually inspired by 

the David Jansen-starring, 1965-1966 primetime TV series The Fugitive. Nonetheless, Hag’s obvious personal connection to the song, 

and its chosen subject matter, informs this whole album, starting with the song that Hag chose as the B-side to “I’m a Lonesome 

Fugitive”: “Someone Told My Story” (which Hag did write) almost functions as a wry acknowledgment of its counterpart, its stunned 

narrator singing, "I could scarcely believe the song I heard…It was almost like I’d written every word." He’s nominally commenting on the 

echoes of his own doomed romance that he hears in the jukebox’s lament, but plenty is left unsaid about the details of that 

dissolution. The song gains even more weight on the album, where its lover's longing is fleshed out on some adjacent weepers ("Mary's 

Mine" and "Whatever Happened to Me"). But more importantly, it’s also contextualized by songs that represent the other half of this 

album's title — alternately rowdy and haggard (sorry) songs about the inevitable fallout from living a life looking over your shoulder for 

the law. 

Hag's pseudo-concept album never stops wrestling with the rich tension between its central character’s vulnerability and his 

toughness. That may not be the most original of cowboy archetypes (the presence of Jimmie Rodgers’ classic "My Rough and Rowdy 

Ways" acknowledges the lineage), but arguably there's never been a country singer with a voice more capable of selling both sides, the 

authentic grit and the sensitive pathos, and his execution is flawless. From the anxiousness of the metronomic lick that soundtracks 

"I'm a Lonesome Fugitive," like a ticking clock hot on the escaped con’s trail; to the braiding of romantic and penal angst on "House of 

Memories" ("My house is a prison / Where memories surround me"); to the sober storytelling of "Life in Prison" (one of Hag's best-ever 

17


songs); to unabashed rave-ups like "Drink Up and Be Somebody" 

and "Skid Row" — the breadth of psychological color and lived 

experiences here are a perfect compliment to the 

consummately impeccable musicianship. More precisely, 

though, the Strangers are in exceptional form here: while the 

hodgepodge recording sessions of 1966’s Swinging Doors and the 

Bottle Let Me Down meant that they were still finding their sound 

(taking heavy influence from Buck Owens and the Bakersfield 

style), the chemistry of Roy Nichols's scalpel-sharp Telecaster, 

James Burton switch-hitting 

between electric guitar and 

fretted dobro, Ralph Mooney's 

scene-setting steel guitar, 

and Bonnie Owens' clear 

two-part harmonies makes 

for a rough-hewn honky-tonk 

magic on this album. There 

are also just enough breakout 

moments from the band that 

signify awareness of the era's 

expanding genre ambitions 

(Glen D. Hardin's boogieing 

piano on "If You Want to Be 

My Woman," the softer popstyle 

guitar of a young Glen 

Campbell on “I’m a Lonesome 

Fugitive”). A little over five 

months after I’m a Lonesome 

Fugitive’s release, Haggard 

put out his fourth album, 

Branded Man, which would 

try to double-down on the 

wounded outlaw persona but 

overshoot a bit on the 

sympathy side of things and 

skimp considerably on the 

rockin’ fun — as a result, 

leaving the Strangers with a 

lot less to do. Just under two 

years on from that, Haggard 

put out Mama Tried, probably 

his best batch of songs of the 

'60s, but overall lacking 

Fugitive’s thematic cohesion. Hag and the Strangers would have 

better success tilling this territory with their Jimmie Rodgers 

tribute (1969's Same Train, Different Time) and give arguably a 

better showcase as a band with their Bob Wills tribute (1970's 

The Best Damn Fiddle Player). But the combined achievements of 

Hag's most deft and conceptually characteristic focus as a 

songwriter and the Strangers’ crack playing as a unit make I'm a 

Lonesome Fugitive special — a signature album, even. — SAM C. 

MAC 

1 18

FILM REVIEWS 

SHAZAM! FURY OF THE GODS 

David F. Sandberg 

The otherworldly entities featured so prominently in the title of 

superhero sequel Shazam! Fury of the Gods certainly seem to be 

doing quite a number on the film in the lead-up to its release: 

star and notorious anti-vaxxer Zachary Levi sent out yet another 

boneheaded tweet; the film’s red carpet Hollywood premiere was 

hampered by biblical amounts of rain and flooding; and, most 

recently, co-star and West Side Story breakout Rachel Zegler 

declared in an interview that the only reason she agreed to take 

on the role was because she “desperately” needed a job. Then 

there’s the matter of new DC Films head James Gunn, who 

inherited the movie from an administration that had no clear 

long-term vision, claiming that the upcoming Flash feature will 

reset the entire universe going forward. In other words, you’re 

looking at the costliest “no stakes” venture in many a moon, 

which was precisely both the biggest virtue and hurdle of the 

2019 original. 

One could never accuse director David F. Sandberg of being all 

that faithful to the original source material in the first place, 

going so far as to change the titular character’s name because, 

oh yeah, Marvel already has a Captain Marvel running around and 

doing hero shit. The emphasis was always on familial bonds, a 

thematic sticking point that the seemingly eternal Fast & Furious 

franchise has now turned into a colossal joke. That Fury of the 

Gods boasts a writer from that very series, Chris Morgan, should 

clue viewers in to its essential tenor, where platitudes about 

brotherly love — set in the city of Brotherly Love; how’s that for 

symbolism? — butt heads with big action set pieces and a whole 

lot of quippy quips. 

2019’s Shazam! actually wasn’t a bad film, with Sandberg bringing 

a playfulness that served the material well, even going the ‘80’s 

Amblin/Spielberg route in delivering both kid-friendly scares and 

emotional earnestness, two qualities also present in the sequel. 

Billy Baston (Asher Angel) was an emotionally-stunted teenager 

kicked around from one foster home to the next before finally 

arriving at the Vasquez homestead, where he found love and 

support from both his nurturing foster parents and a ragtag band 

of “siblings.” Oh, and a magical wizard (Djimon Honsou) gave him 

the power of the Gods, because he sensed Billy had the heart 

necessary to use them in the name of good. Billy, in turn, shared 

them with his new brothers and sisters, and with a bellowing of 

the titular word summoning their powers, they turned into 

full-fledged adults — but saddled with the same juvenile brains. 

Perhaps it’s that dissonance that made the various goings-on of 

Shazam! feel a tad more organic and, quite frankly, tolerable, 

watching literal man- (and woman)-children 

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figure out the best way to save humanity, instead of figurative 

man-children who just need to grow the fuck up. 

Fury of the Gods finds the Vasquez clan still up to their superhero 

shenanigans, but not as respected as they could be by the city 

they call home, with news outlets dubbing them The Philly 

Fiascos. Billy is trying to keep his new family a cohesive unit 

through it all, but as independent youths thirsty for their own 

individual experiences, that’s easier said than done, with little 

brother Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer) proving especially rebellious. 

Yet they will have to learn to work together if they want to defeat 

their latest foes, a trio of vicious sisters and literal Gods who will 

stop at nothing to gain back the powers that were stolen from 

them at the hands of the wizard. This trio is made up of Helen 

Mirren (as Hespera), Lucy Liu (as Kalypso), and the 

aforementioned Zegler (as Anthea), all slumming it in roles as flat 

as the photography around them. 

Given all of that narrative gobbledygook, and the fact that 

superhero film fatigue is indeed real in 2023, it helps immensely 

that the majority of Fury of the Gods has tongue planted firmly in 

cheek when it comes to its more fantastical elements — there’s 

nothing worse than a belabored, self-serious superhero 

treatment, so the winking breeziness of the Shazam!s is 

appreciated. On the other hand, it also makes it near impossible 

to care about anything happening on screen at any given 

moment, even as viewers are likely to genuinely laugh more than 

a few times. At least, the ungodly — though apparently now 

standard — two-plus hours thankfully move at a clip. And despite 

any opinions you might bring to the film of Levi the man, Levi the 

actor is once again so puppy-dog earnest in his portrayal of 

Shazam/Billy that it’s hard not to be mostly charmed, despite the 

inanity of it all. 

On the filmmaking front, Sandberg is also to be commended for 

his use of actual sets and costumes, bringing a surprising 

tactility to the film’s visual design that’s sorely lacking from the 

likes of Marvel’s digital wasteland (though what does it say about 

cinema writ large that we are forced to consider this as worthy 

of praise?). Unfortunately, like everything else Marvel and 

superhero-adjacent, the big climactic battle takes place in the 

dark, is ass-ugly, and its action is nearly impossible to follow. And 

then there’s also a Big Cameo at film’s end that completely 

undoes everything that occurred prior, just in case viewers didn’t 

find the material consequence-free enough already. In fairness, 

Shazam! Fury of the Gods isn’t likely to inspire such titular rage in 

viewers, but that’s mostly because it isn’t doing enough to 

warrant any kind strong response at all. — STEVEN WARNER 

DIRECTOR: David F. Sandberg; CAST: Zachary Levi, Helen Mirren, 

Lucy Liu, Grace Caroline Currey; DISTRIBUTOR: Warner Bros.; IN 

THEATERS: March 17; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 10 min. 

FULL RIVER RED 

Zhang Yimou 

The numbers aren’t wrong: the most successful film of 2023 to 

date, and the most successful film of Zhang Yimou’s career, is 

also one of the best films the director has ever made. The crown 

jewel of Zhang’s late period, in particular, Full River Red is a 

magnificently constructed and plotted work — though its 

occasional brutality and, perhaps more so, relentless plot twists 

may become a bit too much for some Western viewers. That 

complexity is much more rewarding than it’s been with some of 

the most recent Zhang films. It can be a bit hard to grok on one 

viewing, but the film is structured beautifully — the constant 

redefinitions and revelations of who’s on whose side feel both 

shocking and thrilling without forfeiting any of the narrative 

propulsion. There’s a dizzying amount of perfectly calibrated 

twists planted throughout Full River Red (making it particularly 

hard to lay out specific plot details, though you get a glimpse 

with the first words of the plot synopsis: “A pawn tries to get rid 

of a traitorous minister”), and while the film constantly threatens 

to collapse under that weight, its penchant for comic relief, in 

the form of Shen Teng’s bumbling sidekick, keeps it buoyant. Of 

course, that character isn’t quite who he seems either; and that 

intermingling of elements — light and darkness ever shifting — 

keeps Zhang’s film endlessly engaging, and never as dour as it 

could have been on paper. 

It’s kind of astonishing how Zhang has managed to pull 

something like this off at this stage — a “late-style” masterwork 

that resembles the living chess-pieces approach of earlier films 

like Hero and House of Flying Daggers, and even the recent 

Shadow, but completely strips out the action set-pieces. But it’s 

never made boring through the lack of action because spectacle 

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is instead found within the characters’ frequently shifting 

natures; this is a blockbuster fueled entirely by clever character 

dynamics. We trade combat for wordplay, battle for palace 

intrigue, and yet it all seems to induce the same sense of 

exhilaration as those earlier, grander action epics. Of course, 

Zhang is always interested in something more than the simple 

mechanics of structure, but the hyperfocus on narrative here — 

generally speaking, he is one of our modern masters of “plot” — 

works in a manner that simultaneously elevates the form and the 

content at once. Zhang’s major target here seems to be the 

illusions which allow for the functioning of a cultural hegemony 

within a basic society, an idea that could have become dense or 

confounding, but is instead, when packaged in a film like this, 

not just intellectually accessible — it’s thrillingly entertaining. — 

NEIL BAHADUR 

DIRECTOR: Zhang Yimou; CAST: Shen Teng, Jackson Yee, Zhang 

Yi; DISTRIBUTOR: Niu VIsion Media/Beyond Events; IN 


BOSTON STRANGLER 

Matt Ruskin 

A boogeyman from a time that predates 24-hour news cycles, 

podcasts, and true crime docuseries, the Boston Strangler 

represents something of an unsolvable problem for filmmakers. 

Terrorizing Boston from 1962 until early 1964, the Strangler was a 

prowler who sexually assaulted and murdered thirteen women, 

asphyxiating them with their own garments after talking his way 

into their homes by pretending to be a handyman. The salacious 

details, as well as the fact that the victims invited their killer 

inside, cast a pall over a city already prone to distrust and 

provincialism until the murders stopped with the arrest of career 

criminal Albert DeSalvo. But DeSalvo was and remains an 

unsatisfying conclusion to the story: a mentally ill sex offender 

already in police custody at the time he was fingered as the 

Stangler — for what was, at the time, deemed an unrelated 

assault charge — DeSalvo confessed to all thirteen murders but, 

controversially, never faced prosecution for them and later 

recanted his confession. That, along with his poor recollection of 

crime scene details, has led to various theories over the years 

that he may not have been responsible for all of the murders 

(only exacerbated by his own jailhouse murder in 1973 by an 

associate of the Winter Hill Gang). Filmmaker Matt Ruskin’s new 

film, Boston Strangler, shares that skepticism and uses the film 

as a means of questioning the official story. But it’s stymied by 

the facts of the case, which lack any obvious heroes or especially 

compelling advancements in the investigation. Here, as in real 

life, the absence of any sort of forward momentum creates a 

vacuum which is only filled by wild speculation. 

Perhaps recognizing that the Strangler case didn’t cover law 

enforcement in glory, the film presents the story from the 

perspective of real-life Record American reporter Loretta 

McLaughlin (Keira Knightley), an ambitious journalist whose 

talents are wasted reviewing toasters for puff pieces meant forh 

ousewives. Loretta longs for the kind of impactful assignments 

that her colleague, the no-nonsense Jean Cole (Carrie Coon), 

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takes on. However, after identifying what she believes to be a 

pattern in a series of purportedly random murders reported on 

by her own newspaper, Loretta wills herself into the middle of the 

story. Corroborating crime scene details during her off hours, 

Loretta deduces that all the women were killed by the same 

assailant, a conclusion the Boston police department was either 

unaware of or desperate to keep a lid on. Having blown the story 

wide open, Loretta earns the begrudging respect of her editor, 

Jack MacLaine (Chris Cooper, in the long tradition of stern yet 

supportive newspapermen), as well as the ire of the police 

department, who push back hard against her reporting. Facing 

increasing scrutiny, Jack keeps Loretta on the story on the 

condition she partners with the more seasoned Jean, even 

playing up the crusading “lady journalists” angle to sell more 

newspapers. But bodies continue to pile up, and Loretta’s dogged 

reporting puts a strain on her marriage and a target on her back. 

Ruskin cribs liberally from David Fincher’s Zodiac, another true 

crime opus that denies the viewer pat answers or any sense of 

comfort, but the connections are all superficial. The gloomy, 

desaturated photography, the conflicting evidence causing 

whiplash as one suspect falls away while another steps to the 

fore, the marital discord, the menacing anonymous phone calls, 

and so on. At one point, Loretta pays a visit to the home of a 

source, and it plays, almost beat for beat, like the scene from 

Zodiac where Robert Graysmith visits the home of Bob Vaughn, 

only here sapped of all tension (the film attempts to compensate 

for this by randomly populating the location with abundant 

mannequins). What’s really missing here is any kind of unique 

perspective on the personal toll that this case takes on Loretta — 

Knightley is strictly a cipher here, forced to go through the 

motions of rote kitchen table arguments with her long-suffering 

yet somehow not supportive enough husband — or anything 

beyond the most glancing of blows against the organizational 

failings of the police. 

Boston Strangler also has little feel for the era or setting; it was 

filmed in and around Boston, but aside from a couple of aerial 

shots, you’d be hard pressed to tell. It’s probably for the best that 

the entire cast foregoes even attempting the non-rhotic accent 

(Boston-born Alessandro Nivola as Conley, a sympathetic 

homicide detective, is the notable exception, making a meal out 

of words like “department”), but it only adds to the suspicion that 

the film’s interest in the city, its victims, and the scared citizenry 

is cursory at best. Instead, Boston Strangler is primarily a critique 

of patriarchal institutions which conspire to intimidate, discredit, 

and demoralize Loretta and Jean, strictly on the basis of their 

gender. One can imagine an alternate universe where She Said 

had any sort of cultural impact, whetting the audience’s appetite 

for other examples of intrepid female journalists bravely bringing 

sex pests to justice. Instead, this simply feels late to an already 

under-attended party. 

But then there are those niggling doubts and inconsistencies 

about the case. Just when it appears as though the film is surely 

wrapping itself up, with DeSalvo safely tucked away in a 

maximum security facility, it simply keeps going, spinning out at 

the eleventh hour to consider a string of murders halfway across 

the country and the dim possibility that DeSalvo was in fact only 

one of several killers. Ruskin expends so much energy setting the 

table and presenting with a straight face scenes like the one 

where Loretta has to tell Conley that DeSalvo didn’t actually have 

an alibi because he was released from prison early — did he, the 

lead detective on the case, not think to check on this himself? — 

that its multiple-killer theory, the ostensible reason the film even 

exists, ends up coming across like a hasty afterthought. Rather 

than carefully leading the viewer down the path of an alternate 

scenario that flies in the face of widely held beliefs, Boston 

Strangler seems to be surprised by its own conclusions, left 

scrambling to incorporate all the extraneous parts as if it were 

Ikea furniture with half a dozen leftover pieces sitting on the 

carpet. If the film wanted to do the “this book presupposes that 

Custer didn’t die at Little Bighorn” thing, perhaps it shouldn’t have 

buried it in an appendix. — ANDREW DIGNAN 

DIRECTOR: Matt Ruskin; CAST: Keira Knightly, Carrie Coon, Chris 

Cooper; DISTRIBUTOR: Hulu; STREAMING: March 17; RUNTIME: 

1 hr. 52 min. 

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FURIES 

Veronica Ngo 

Real heads know that the truly exciting martial arts movie sequel 

coming out this week is not Keanu Reeves vehicle John Wick 4, 

but actress Veronica Ngô’s straight-to-Netflix follow-up to her hit 

2019 starrer, Furie. It’s fun to think that Ngô just walked into the 

Netflix offices and wrote “FURIE” on the whiteboard, and then 

added an “S.” (or $). With Lê Văn Kiệt (the director of the original 

film) busy with last year’s English-language The Princess, Ngô 

herself (billed as Ngô Thanh Vân) takes over as director. She also 

acts again, this time playing Jacqueline, the head woman in 

charge of a crew of lost women whom she trains up in the deadly 

martial arts in order to take down a ring of sex traffickers and 

drug dealers. Đồng Ánh Quỳnh takes the lead role as Bi, who may 

be a young version of the character Ngô played in the first film 

(it’s not really clear, but all the press for Furies calls this a 

prequel). We meet Bi early on and get a flashback to her horrific 

childhood: a prostitute mother who is abused by men, rape and 

murder to follow, leading to years on the streets, committing 

petty crimes, and fighting off further sexual assaults. Bi joins 

Jacqueline’s crew, made up of two other young women, Hong and 

Thanh (Rima Thanh Vy and Tóc Thiên, respectively) with similar 

backgrounds. They form a makeshift family and take part in a 

training montage. Then things really get rolling. 

The action, choreographed by Samuel Kefi Abrikh (who also did 

both Furie and The Princess), is swift and brutal, emphasizing 

quick punches and twists, stabs and pistol shots. While it doesn’t 

boast the intricacy of Furie, it makes up for it with scale: lots and 

lots of men are killed in this movie. Ngô films it all with style to 

spare, keeping the focus on the actors’ and stunt performers’ 

movements while cutting it all together in a kinetic style that 

matches the pounding electronic score and psychedelic lighting 

of the first film (almost every scene is awash in some kind of 

colorful illumination: pink, green, purple, red, or blue). Computer 

effects are mercifully rare, but for one uncanny motorcycle 

chase sequence where two women are pursued by a gang of 

men; the humans and the bikes appear to be real, but the 

environments they’re ostensibly speeding through are obviously 

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fake. It all looks like something out of Speed Racer, right up until 

one of the men gets smacked in the head by what should have 

been a CGI sign. From there on, the sequence freely mixes the 

faux and the real, in one of the few bits of action whimsy in an 

otherwise deadly serious film. 

But as good as all that action is, what’s most interesting about 

Furies is the way the film interrogates the rape-revenge genre. 

Jacqueline rescues her girls from the predations of evil men, and 

instills in them the skills necessary to take revenge on the kinds 

of people who abused them, while also preventing those terrible 

men from inflicting similar harm on other young women. It’s a 

feminist superhero team, dedicated to protecting the innocent 

with righteous violence. True to the rape-revenge genre’s 

exploitation roots, we see a lot of violence against women, only 

for that horror to be cathartically released when even greater 

violence is inflicted upon the abusers. But Bi never feels that 

catharsis — in fact, the infliction of bloody mayhem only seems 

to deepen her trauma, sending her into a kind of dissociative 

state after she kills for the first time. Her friends help her out 

and convince her that they’re on the right path, though she 

begins to have doubts about all of this, as well as Jacqueline’s 

motives. She’s known only cruelty and degradation in her life, but 

her friendships, as well as her memory of her mother, give her a 

glimpse of another kind of human relationship. Revenge may be 

satisfying (though not for Bi), but it also merely continues the 

cycle of violence. In the same way, a genre that is in many ways 

about female empowerment relies, to an often uncomfortable 

extent, on images of violence visited upon women. 

Ngô navigates this conundrum in a fascinating way by casting 

herself, the director/star/producer/screenwriter, as the 

character who assembles the revenge crew, but also (SPOILER) 

as the film’s ultimate villain. Jacqueline, it turns out, is merely 

using the language of feminine empowerment to get the 

(wo)manpower necessary to revenge herself on the gangster who 

murdered her husband and son. The auteur of the film is thus the 

architect — both literally and within the world of the film itself — 

of almost all the violence we see. She didn’t cause the young 

women’s initial traumas, of course, any more than a filmmaker 

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can be responsible for the state of the wider world. But her 

actions in response to that trauma only serve to perpetuate the 

kind of destruction and loss that creates so many lost souls, and 

as such, Ngô seems to be suggesting that films like this, which 

under one reading are feminist texts, ultimately only serve to 

feed the culture of violence, and violence against women in 

particular. 

It’s a fascinating kind of self-critique, clever and effective, albeit 

one that is in turn undermined by the fact that one of the men 

prominently involved in the production, serving as producer as 

well as helping with the English subtitles, is former Weinstein 

associate and accused sex pest Bey Logan, a man so odious that 

boutique label 88 Films recently had to back down in the face of 

a boycott after rumors spread that they were going to hire him 

for some upcoming special features. It’s a truly baffling decision 

for an otherwise thoughtful and self-aware film and filmmaker. — 

SEAN GILMAN 

DIRECTOR: Veronica Ngo; CAST: Đồng Ánh Quỳnh, Rima Thanh 

Vy, Tóc Tiên, Thuận Nguyễn; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; STREAMING: 

March 23; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 49 min. 

RODEO 

Lola Quivoron 

Outside the confines of polite Parisian society, there lies a wild 

west on wheels, in a subculture known as the urban rodeo. 

Though participation is criminalized and heavily criticized, the 

exhilarating, and dangerous, motorbike subculture at the center 

of Rodeo acts as a catalyst for community. This is director Lola 

Quivoron’s narrative feature debut, but it isn’t her first time 

behind the camera — she released Au loin, Baltimore, a short 

documentary set within the same scene, in 2016. Rodeo follows 

Julia (played by first-time actor Julie Ledru, who Quivoron 

discovered via Instagram bike clips), a lone wolf dirt bike rider on 

the fringes of a larger crew on the circuit called the B-Mores, who 

run a bike shop repairing and selling stolen bikes. Though she 

hasn’t mastered the risky stunts the group is known for, she 

shares their bravado, and better yet, a penchant for risk, stealing 

bikes for them later on. The crew is ruled from afar by Domino 

(Sébastien Schroeder), currently behind bars, but it’s Kais (Yanis 

Lafki) who invites Julia into the fold. In another film, this would 

be a setup for a romance over their shared interests, but Rodeo’s 

script is far more interested in thornier dynamics. 

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Choosing high-octane impulses over the more popular naturalism 

of late, Rodeo is a gasoline western where the outlaw hasn’t yet 

mastered the reins. Julia remains feral, untested when it comes 

to the wheelie-popping showmanship of the crew, instead 

gaining respect via theft. Her Robin Hood stunt relies on 

expectations of her youth and gender. She approaches wealthy 

men in the French countryside posing as a new rider buying a 

bike, and rides off into the horizon when she is offered a test 

drive by the seller who's none the wiser. Her routine is helped by 

the time she spends with Domino’s wife Ophélie (co-writer 

Antonia Buresi), who disguises Julia in a more feminine persona, 

an act that appears akin to drag. Ophélie is a foil to Julia’s 

freewheeling life, trapped in a determinist narrative of her own 

life, a housewife with a young son in the suburbs sitting and 

watching a different life that excites her. The dynamic between 

the two, and a more lighthearted scene where Ophélie rides on 

the back of Julia’s bike, is the heart of a film that would 

otherwise be shallow in its grit. Though it is clear in these scenes 

that Ledru’s straight-from-life acting is somewhat amateur, 

Buresi plays the role with a haunting subtlety that humanizes 

both characters.The film’s nomination for Cannes’ Queer Palm 

award came as a surprise to some, as its queerness was less 

textually overt than, say, WIll-o’-the-Wisp in the same year. But 

despite this, the thematic throughline of Rodeo deconstructs a 

binary of gendered actions, and the relationship between Julie 

and Ophélie, though intentionally ambiguous, grounds an 

emotional arc for our unbound protagonist. Julia’s gendered 

dynamic within the rest of the bike group is never simplified as a 

lone otherness in the testosterone-fuelled culture. Rather, a 

bonfire sequence shows her moving seamlessly among the crew, 

and an assortment of women, mostly partners, who have come 

with them. She neither belongs to nor is outwardly excluded from 

either group — an in-between that parallels the purgatory 

between life and death that some of the film’s most dangerous 

and abstract sequences inhabit. Her nickname within the group 

is “Unknown”; speaking to an alienation in a group that doesn’t 

quite accept her, but also a desire to not be recognized solely for 

her gender. 

The shaky-cam-heavy cinematography and cast of mostly 

non-professional actors lends an impression that this is the 

veristic sort of contemporary coming-of-age film that treats 

diegetics as a sole virtue. Instead, the result is more akin to 

Titane than the Dardennes, seamlessly constructing a 

transhumanist bond with the fantasy of the machine world. Julia 

says she was “born with a bike between her legs,” an assertion of 

her own desire to avoid gendered interactions (more subtle than 

the tiresome balls jokes that bring an otherwise serviceable 

script down). Her freedom when connecting with the machine will 

be her downfall, as it will be for the rest of the crew, but this 

conflagration is rendered poetic in the film's coda. The 

out-of-body experience, as Julia and Kais have to accept the 

danger of the life they’ve chosen, one last heist, lifts them from 

reality, and for once the camera sits still long enough for the 

flames to subside and the ghosts to turn the corner. — SARAH 

WILLIAMS 

DIRECTOR: Lola Quivoron; CAST: Julie Ledru, Yannis Lafki, 

Antonia Buresi; DISTRIBUTOR: Music Box Films; IN THEATERS: 


MOVING ON 

Paul Weitz 

2023 may still be in its infancy, yet here comes the second 

release of a high-concept comedy starring old pals and beloved 

Hollywood icons Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, following last 

month’s senior citizen sensation 80 for Brady. Those expecting 

the usual raucous octogenarian shenanigans, however, would be 

wise to look elsewhere, as this duo’s latest feature, Moving On, 

inspires laughs only in dribs and drabs, the result of an essential 

tonal mishmash found in writer-director Paul Weitz’s script. The 

filmmaker is certainly no stranger to the land of dramedy, having 

helmed a number of respectable yet forgettable entries including 

In Good Company, Fatherhood, and Tomlin-starrer Grandma. But in 

tenor, Moving On is closest to the director’s one outright 

catastrophe, 2006’s American Dreamz, a dumpster fire that tried 

to satirize both reality TV competitions and post-9/11 anxieties, 

concluding with a suicide bombing played for laughs. Real 

provocative stuff. 

Moving On is similarly “of the moment,” a comedy that wants to be 

both woke and topical, but whose desperation makes it feel like 

an artifact from a distant and unenlightened era. There’s also the 

matter of the plot itself, which certainly doesn’t lend itself to 

easy laughs. Fonda stars as Claire, an uptight yet effortlessly 

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classy retiree who, as the film opens, is headed across the 

country for the funeral of a dear old friend. Yet Claire has more 

up her sleeve than just mourning, a fact made clear when, at the 

service, she informs her deceased friend’s husband, Howard 

(Malcolm McDowell), that she is going to murder him, sparking 

interest in fellow attendee and former confidant Evelyn (Tomlin). 

But what could inspire such a seemingly heinous — not to 

mention, you know, illegal — act? 

At only 84 minutes, Moving On wastes no time in getting to the 

point, even as nothing of much interest ever happens, regardless 

of the sensationalistic hook of its plot. As it turns out, Howard 

had sexually assaulted Claire 46 years prior, leaving her a shell of 

the vibrant person she once was, ultimately dooming her 

marriage at the time, and making it impossible for her to form 

and maintain any sort of meaningful relationship with others. It’s 

certainly heavy material, and Weitz’s move is to try to offset it 

with a lot of painfully contrived jokes involving everything from 

the procuring of a gun through bacon cookery (don’t ask) to 

geriatric sexcapades. It ddidn’t seem like this needed saying in 

2023, but the last thing the world needs at this moment is a 

comedy about the PTSD-laden trauma of sexual assault, and yet 

here we are, courtesy of the man who made American Pie. 

The thing is, this material actually could have still worked, had 

Weitz pushed the humor into the darkest recesses imaginable, 

pitch black, dripping with acidity, and genuinely interrogative of 

psychology. As it stands, Moving On is too sunny by half, content 

to merely pat itself on the back for being topical yet failing to 

engage with its provocative themes in any sort of meaningful 

way. Most of the movie feels like Weitz simply working his way 

down a checklist of trending Twitter topics, whether it be the 

#MeToo Movement or trashy tales of true-life criminality. This is 

also a film that includes a completely superfluous subplot about 

a young boy who visits Evelyn’s independent living facility and 

likes to wear her clothes and jewelry, because Weitz is apparently 

nothing if not a most inclusive edge lord. He also presents 

homosexuality and interracial marriage as shocking realities in 

this 2023 film, so perhaps he isn’t quite as hip and progressive as 

he believes himself to be. 

Fonda and Tomlin are at least reliably good, but even they seem 

stuck in neutral here, hamstrung by a script that mistakes good 

intentions for depth. McDowell, meanwhile, is written as such a 

one-note cartoon villain that it makes Fonda’s one-note 

characterization seem profound in comparison, further 

highlighting the inauthenticity that coats nearly every frame of 

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the film. A shoutout is deserved for Richard Roundtree, who pops 

up as Claire’s ex-husband and shares such an easy and gentle 

rapport with Fonda that one longs for a movie focused solely on 

the two of them. At this point, such an endeavor would prove 

bolder and more novel than anything found in Moving On, which, it 

must be repeated, is a comedy about the decades-long fallout of 

sexual assault. Potential viewers would be wise to heed the 

titular advice. — STEVEN WARNER 

DIRECTOR: Paul Weitz; CAST: Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Malcolm 

McDowell; DISTRIBUTOR: Roadside Attractions; IN THEATERS: 


MONEY SHOT: THE PORNHUB STORY 

Suzanne Hillinger 

If any company does brand recognition right, it’s Pornhub, 

launched in 2007 and now one of the largest purveyors of 

Internet pornography. Whether you’ve visited the site or not — 

you have — you’re familiar, from the minimalist logo taking up 

space on a Times Square billboard to the iconic percussion intro 

inaugurating every video. No matter your kink, you’re sure to find 

the perfect video for your self-pleasure needs on its monolithic 

platform. And if you’re a true data nerd, you can even get your 

rocks off to their wildly popular Year in Review. Supporters of the 

site will quickly tell you it’s not just about inflation porn or BBW; 

there’s an entire movement promoting sex work as a career — 

because it is — and championing performers’ rights. But on the 

flip side, you have the Nancy Reagans of the world who think 

anything more than a firm handshake is pornography, laying 

waste to the minds of anyone who dares to open their web 

browser. 

Somewhere between these two extremes lies the premise of 

Money Shot: The Pornhub Story. Directed by Suzanne Hillinger, the 

film chronicles the rise of Pornhub, told through the voices of 

content creators and detractors alike. Early on, the porn provider 

was something of a free-for-all; like Limewire or The Pirate Bay, 

Pornhub championed the idea that all videos should be available 

to anyone and everyone. Through advertising and excellent SEO, 

the site’s profits began to skyrocket, but very little of this money 

was going to the actual stars of the videos. In 2018, Pornhub 

launched ModelHub, a place where performers could monetize by 

producing and uploading their own content, which boosted the 

careers of many of the performers you know and love today. By 

not having to work with the slimy studios, adult stars could 

control what and how they displayed their bits for your pleasure. 

Unfortunately, these sex worker successes are only half the 

story. Because Pornhub didn’t require verification for uploads, 

for every consensual video created by willing participants, there 

was an objectionable one; those who were victims of revenge 

porn, sex trafficking, or child sexual abuse might find videos of 

their worst experiences uploaded for the world to see. An 

anonymous former employee in Money Shot describes their 

moderation policy, which included individual people viewing 

more than 700 videos a day to determine if there is illicit 

content. This sharing resulted in the National Center on Sexual 

Exploitation (NCOSE) launching #TraffickingHub, an anti-Pornhub 

movement that argued the site should be shut down. Eventually, 

the movement gained the attention of Nicholas Kristoff at the 

New York Times, who wrote an op-ed piece calling for the site to 

remove all questionable content and institute a verification 

process. But it’s important to note, as Money Shot explains, NCOSE 

is a religiously-funded organization whose motivations lay 

beyond just protecting victims: according to them, there is no 

difference between sex work and sex trafficking. Uninformed 

activists began insisting all porn is abuse and Pornhub should be 

shut down, and the demands that Nicholas Kristoff made (which 

Pornhub eventually complied with) subsequently caused 

companies like Visa and Mastercard to suspend payment 

processing with Pornhub. However, as the performers in the film 

make clear, this hurt them more than the company because now 

they couldn’t get paid, while Pornhub continued to make money 

through advertising. 

Money Shot takes a virtually neutral view on the topic, dedicating 

the same screen time to the religious nuts as it does to the 

performers getting paid to nut. But therein lies the rub: the 

aggressive commitment to objectivity results in a film that never 

connects with the viewer in any meaningful way. Whichever side 

of the argument you’re on entering the film will only be 

reinforced because Money Shot offers such a dull version of the 

facts that it’s impossible to even be narratively stimulated, let 

alone ideologically swayed. It’s fair to assume that the 

filmmakers are trying to assert that the “truth” lies somewhere in 

17 28

FILM REVIEWS 

the middle, that supporting sex workers and condemning sex 

trafficking and child sexual abuse are not mutually exclusive. 

This is, of course, the case, but the film only passively suggests 

any messaging at all, and so the whole project seems merely, 

blandly informative. In fact, this tip-toeing results in both sides 

coming across somewhat poorly, with activists presented as 

impossible-to-please prudes, while the Pornhub supporters 

frequently come off more like basement-dwelling Redditors or 

Regina George-esque mean girls. 

Perhaps most frustrating of all is that Money Shot also takes 

itself entirely too seriously — for a film about porn, it’s 

remarkably tame; if the goal wasn’t to meaningfully interrogate 

the arguments and factions it introduces, it could at least bring a 

little more panache to the table than a fake cum shot and some 

blurred screengrabs (which is not to suggest that anyone is in 

need of any more “dick pics” in their life, especially when sitting 

down to enjoy a Netflix documentary). Frustratingly, even when 

Money Shot briefly hits on interesting material less often 

discussed in the world of porn — the way the industry supports 

conventional beauty standards and how its algorithm censors 

anyone who doesn’t fit the mold — it closes the loop as 

prematurely as Jason Biggs in American Pie. The optimistic might 

say that any discussion around the film’s subject matter is a good 

thing, but the other side could — nay, should — argue that the 

attention the film commits to the religious right’s side of the 

argument introduces more harmful rhetoric than productive. In 

either case, Money Shot is as limp as docs come. — EMILY 

DUGRANRUT 

DIRECTOR: Suzanne Hillinger; CAST: —; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; 

STREAMING: March 16; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 34 min. 

17 29

FILM REVIEWS 

OLD REVIEWS NEW RELEASES 

ARE YOU LONESOME TONIGHT? 

Wen Shipei 

“The narrative Wen is weaving is a familiar and fairly shallow one 

involving a hazily-remembered night, a bag of money, and some 

gangsters out to collect, and, in individual scenes, Wen hits the 

right notes competently if unexceptionally. Trouble is, he’s 

chosen to tell this story with fractured chronology and a 

sad-sack voice-over delivered by Xue Ming from prison. It adds 

about as much as the constant refrain of the title song, which is 

to say almost nothing save for applying an artsy sheen to the 

labored endeavor. At first, the nonlinear approach seems poised 

to lend the film the fractal quality of memory, as if the lead 

recalling the events would naturally remember the story out of 

order, but as the thriller plot begins to kick in, the technique is 

largely used only to superficially complicate the action and show 

off the simplistic web being constructed.” — CHRIS MELLO 

DIRECTOR: Wen Shipei; CAST: Eddie Peng, Sylvia Chang, Yanhui 

Wang; DISTRIBUTOR: Film Movement; IN THEATERS: March 17; 

RUNTIME: 1 hr. 35 min. 

RIMINI 

Ulrich Seidl 

“Allll this is trademark Seidl: a tad too clinical, a pinch too 

predictable at times, given that the absence of further backstory 

— hinted at with Richie’s brief encounter with his brother Ewald, 

and likely to be explored in an upcoming companion film, Sparta 

— frustrates attempts to elevate Rimini from caricature. 

Especially so for the filmmaker’s acolytes, who might reject its 

mellowed, almost adulterated causticness, but also a concern for 

his neophytes, more susceptible to habitual pigeonholing within 

a larger corpus of Austrian miserabilism. This caricature, 

nonetheless, possesses a frigid sociological potency whose 

disparate elements capture a stratified generation’s cultural and 

libidinal imaginary, typically white, male, middle-class, and 

anchored to little beyond the bygone echoes of social eminence 

and utopian intimacy.”— MORRIS YANG 

DIRECTOR: Ulrich Seidl; CAST: Michael Thomas, Tessa Göttlicher, 

Hans-Michael Rehberg; DISTRIBUTOR: Big World Pictures; IN 


30

FILM REVIEWS 

COUNTRY GOLD 

Mickey Reece 

“This bit of absurdism doesn’t seem remotely out of place in 

Reece’s filmmaking — just look at the way last year’s haunting 

and inventive Agnes shifts gears halfway through from a spooky 

exorcism movie into something altogether more thoughtful — 

and he deploys it as the perfect weapon to force Troyal to 

examine the legacy he thinks he’s building, not just as a musician 

but as a husband and a father. He’s also made to reckon with his 

healthy ego; it quickly becomes clear that he’s a sincerely 

vulnerable guy, especially when that ego is attacked, as in an 

early scene in which Jones chastises him for ordering a 

well-done steak.” — MATT LYNCH 

DIRECTOR: Mickey Reece; CAST: Laurie Cummings, Cate Jones, 

Ben Hall; DISTRIBUTOR: Cinedigm/Fandor; STREAMING: March 

16; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 24 min. 

SELF-PORTRAIT 

Joële Walinga 

“It takes a few minutes to get acclimated to the constant stream 

of images; some suggest liminal spaces devoid of human figures, 

while others are teeming with people. Lush landscapes are 

paired with extreme close-ups of claustrophobic interiors. Some 

images are almost purely abstract, as the digital cameras 

struggle to record raindrops or snow flurries and instead register 

them as pixelated flecks of light. There’s also the progression of 

Walinga’s approximation of color grading; the film begins in 

winter, and accordingly each scene features snow or ice and cool 

tones. As we move into spring, and then summer, the images 

become warmer, each scene bathed in natural light.” — DANIEL 

GORMAN 

DIRECTOR: Joële Walinga; CAST: ; DISTRIBUTOR: MUBI; 

STREAMING: March 17; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 7 min. 

31 

16

FILM REVIEWS 

INSIDE 

Vasilis Katsoupis 

“Inside benefits from a clear-headed spatial orientation. Shot in 

sequence, the movie maintains an impressive continuity, as all 

the debris from each of Nemo’s actions accumulate evidence 

strewn across the apartment — each action leaves a souvenir. As 

a central project, Nemo fashions a hodgepodge ladder out of 

various furniture pieces, reaching upwards toward the skylight: 

the most feasible means of escape. Throughout Inside, the 

makeshift ladder towers like a Dadaist sculpture; it becomes a 

centerpiece in an apartment full of art pieces.”— RYAN 

AKLER-BISHOP 

DIRECTOR: Vasilis Katsoupis; CAST: Willem Dafoe, Gene 

Bervoets, Eliza Stuyck; DISTRIBUTOR: Focus Features; IN 

THEATERS: March 17; RUNTIME: 1 hr., 45 min. 

THE ORIGIN OF EVIL 

Sébastien 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… 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. — SARAH 

WILLIAMS 

DIRECTOR: Sébastien Marnier; CAST: Laure Calamy; 

DISTRIBUTOR: IFC Films; IN THEATERS: March 17; RUNTIME: 

2 hr. 5 min. 

32

FILM REVIEWS 

THE DIABETIC 

Vasilis Katsoupis 

“The narrative Wen is weaving is a familiar and fairly shallow one involving a hazily-remembered night, a bag of money, and some 

gangsters out to collect, and, in individual scenes, Wen hits the right notes competently if unexceptionally. Trouble is, he’s chosen to 

tell this story with fractured chronology and a sad-sack voice-over delivered by Xue Ming from prison. It adds about as much as the 

constant refrain of the title song, which is to say almost nothing save for applying an artsy sheen to the labored endeavor. At first, the 

nonlinear approach seems poised to lend the film the fractal quality of memory, as if the lead recalling the events would naturally 

remember the story out of order, but as the thriller plot begins to kick in, the technique is largely used only to superficially complicate 

the action and show off the simplistic web being constructed.” — CHRIS MELLO 

DIRECTOR: Mitchell Stafiej; CAST: James Watts, Travis Cannon, Oscar Aguirre; DISTRIBUTOR: TUBI; STREAMING: March 10; 

RUNTIME: 1 hr. 34 min. 

33 

16

ENDLESS SUMMER VACATION 

Miley Cyrus 

The real story with Endless Summer 

Vacation might be that this is the album 

where pop’s forever fickle princess finally 

finds her sound. In truth, she kind of 

already did on 2017’s fantastic Younger 

Now, but either the tepid commercial and 

critical response or commitment to a 

holistic roots music out-of-step with her 

more radical impulses soon sent Miley 

careening in other different directions, 

first with a 2019 EP of resolutely 

contemporary hip-hop bangers, dance 

floor fillers, and power ballads (part of a 

subsequently aborted trilogy), and then 

with the classic rock pastiche of 2020’s 

Plastic Hearts, which wore its 

ALBUM REVIEWS 

retrofetishism so transparently that Billy 

Idol, Joan Jett, and Stevie Nicks showed 

up for features. Miley has tended to have 

trouble getting all the constituent parts of 

her massive talent moving in concert, and 

while Plastic Hearts boasts some of the 

most accomplished and consistent 

writing on any of her albums (with pop 

fixers Andrew Watt, Mark Ronson, Ryan 

Tedder, Louis Bell, and Emile Haynie all in 

the credits), it’s also the least sonically 

adventurous effort since her Disney 

Channel days. 

So Endless Summer Vacation is another 

reset in a career full of them. But it’s also 

the first Miley album that seems like it 

cracks the code of creating a coherent 

fusion between her most out-there 

psychedelic experiments (there are songs 

that could slot into the sprawl of 2015’s 

90-minute Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz) 

and her commercial pop ambitions. 

Unfortunately, the work gone into 

thinking through the sonic identity of this 

project isn’t met at the other end by the 

writing. It’s also notable that while 

Endless Summer Vacation continues the 

trend of Miley teaming with a small army 

of industry-proven writers (after 

retaining almost sole credit for the lyrics 

on Younger Now), the personnel this time 

is largely different than it was on both 

Plastic Hearts and the She Is Coming EP. 

Two recurring names in particular from 

the credits here — Thomas Hull (AKA Kid 

Harpoon) and Tyler Johnson — are also 

best known as a pair for being the chief 

34

ALBUM REVIEWS 

architects behind the last two Harry Styles 

albums, and there’s a similar vacuousness 

and posturing substituting for real 

personality that defines the lyrics to many 

of these new songs. 

The major exception to that rule is 

“Flowers,” the lead single and opening 

track of ESV and its unassailable peak. 

Like few other popstars working, Miley 

(and her collaborators) can be counted on 

for an empirically perfect song every five 

years or so that represents the ideal 

synthesis of her genre ambitions during 

that era (see: “The Climb,” “7 Things,” 

“Malibu”), and “Flowers'' adds to that tally: A 

chilled-out, slow burning neo-disco 

confection pitched right at a level of 

mature edification that deliberately 

betrays the raw heartache beneath its 

surface. Some have dinged the song as 

maudlin self-love, but the tame 

ordinariness of the imagery (“I can take 

myself dancing / I can hold my own hand”) 

is entirely the point, the simple pleasures 

of a woman rebuilding her confidence one 

comforting thought at a time — and the 

lightly perceptible change in intensity of 

Miley’s vocal sell that gradual 

transformation. Miley has proven a better 

vocalist than almost anyone in her bracket 

when she wants to be; it’s her instincts 

that are sometimes questionable. On 

“Flowers,” the reserved nature of the lyrics 

have her hold back that caterwauling she’s 

often prone to with her bigger pop 

moments — which is to say, she sings it as 

well as she does her ballads, but with the 

added buoyancy and tempo of a banger. 

That restraint is short-lived, though, as 

“Jaded” (produced by that menace of 

in-the-red mixing Greg Kurstin) favors a 

sky-scraping vocal that wrings out any 

character. More frustratingly, its lyrics 

don’t really justify the intensity: “I’m sorry 

that you’re jaded” is a pretty weak 

missive. 

This album’s lyrics constantly drag down 

and prevent a generally grooveful set 

from selling itself with the charismatic 

personality of Miley at her best. “Rose 

Colored Lenses” rides a squelchy, 

psych-rock beat and fuzzed-out guitar 

licks like a more cleaned-up and 

accessible version of what she cooked up 

with the Flaming Lips a few 

reinventions back, while the free jazz-lite 

saxophone solo the song goes out on 

provides a nice touch of idiosyncrasy. 

But the repeated refrain of “We could stay 

like this forever / Lost in wonderland” is 

filler writing at its most obvious, and the 

attempts at more descriptive detail 

(“Somehow the bed sheets are dirty / Like 

sticky-sweet lemonade”) feel generated by 

the same Mad Lib logic as Styles’ 

“Music for a Sushi Restaurant'' and 

“Watermelon Sugar.” The country-ish 

ballad “Thousand Miles” (with a 

harmonizing Brandi Carlile) fares worse, 

alighting on the genuine word salad 

chorus of “I’m out of my mind but still I’m 

holding on like a rolling stone / A thousand 

miles from anywhere.” There’s no good 

reason for this: In the Backyard Sessions 

concert movie that she released to 

Disney+ the same day as this album, Miley 

proves that the original lyrics for 

“Thousand Miles” weren’t nearly so 

convoluted. In a clip before her 

performance, she explains that the 2016 

version (then called “Happy Girl”) was 

written in response to a friend’s suicide, 

and sings a verse a capella: ”There was a 

friend of mine, her name was Darlene but 

all of us called her Becky. I don’t know why, 

I knew she was hurting. But I never thought 

I’d wake up to that call.” 

Miley rarely allows herself that level of 

vulnerability and directness here, 

seemingly out of a concern that getting 

too personal might make it harder for 

others to connect with her songs (she 

always tends to pivot when there’s 

evidence of some receding cultural 

attention). And there’s nothing wrong with 

writing for the cheap seats, per se — she 

largely did that on Plastic Hearts — but 

the effort to court that audience here 

tends to vacillate between painfully 

played-out cliché (“Wildcard”) and 

genuinely head-scratching strangeness 

(“Muddy Feet”). Occasionally, the music is 

strong enough to overcome its lyrical 

shortcomings: The wild and horny 

synth-pop grenade of “River” (as in, 

“you’re just like a river / you go on 

forever”) plays like the strutting She Is 

Coming runway song “Cattitude” on 

steroids, and manages to invigorate what 

could have been retro genre drag with a 

distinctly modern energy. Even better is 

“Island,” which also boasts one of the 

sturdiest metaphors of this whole set 

35

(“Am I stranded on an island? / Or have I 

landed in paradise?”), as Miley weighs the 

utopian company of her own individuality 

against the distance she feels from others. 

The chorus is big but never over-sung, and 

the production again finds a comfortable 

middle ground between its various vintage 

signifiers and a sharper, more 

contemporary form of synth-pop. 

It’s not hard to imagine Endless Summer 

Vacation eventually having value as a 

transitional album for Miley — that is, if 

she goes against her record and commits 

to this sound for longer than one release 

cycle. Chances are better than usual for 

that to be the case because, this time, she 

seems more willing to embrace all the 

different directions she’s explored in the 

past, and even command more agency 

over them (producer Mike-Will-Made-It has 

three credits here, but it’s actually some of 

the songs on which he doesn’t, like the 

rap-rock of “Handstand” and the prowling 

verses of “River,” that sound closer to his 

work on 2013’s Bangerz). Ultimately, there 

are some pop stars who do well ceding 

some writing and conceptualizing duties 

to their crew of collaborators, and some 

who come out feeling a bit 

straight-jacketed and focus-grouped by 

that generally accepted modern pop 

practice. Miley can honestly go either way 

— certainly Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz 

could’ve been improved with a little more 

outside intervention to reign-in its 

ridiculous bloat — but here not only is too 

much of Miley’s unique voice as an artist 

sacrificed in the name of accessibility, but 

the attempted professionalism isn’t all that 

well executed. A simple recalibration of 

her own presence within this music and 

some more compelling material could 

reap substantial rewards next time out, 

but on Endless Summer Vacation, Miley 

takes her holiday a little too literally. — 

SAM C. MAC 

LABEL: Columbia Records; RELEASE 

DATE: March 10 

PRAISE A LORD WHO CHEWS 

BUT WHICH DOES NOT 

CONSUME; (OR SIMPLY, HOT 

BETWEEN WORLDS) 

Yves Tumor 

Just as rock music has fallen out of 

fashion, Yves Tumor has become 

increasingly 

insistent on 

performing it. What 

does it mean to 

become a rock 

star,dripping 

swagger and 

larger-than-life 

mystique, in an age 

where achieving 

actual mass 

popularity playing 

this kind of music is 

almost impossible? 

(In a conversation 

with Courtney Love 

for Interview 

magazine, Tumor 

insists on the 

importance of 

protecting their 

privacy rather than 

exposing the details 

of their life to a 

potentially hostile 

audience.) Tumor’s 

ALBUM REVIEWS 

music has never felt cynical, but their 

presentation in live shows and videos 

suggests a certain degree of irony. 

Guitarist Chris Greatti plays the Mick 

Ronson to Tumor’s Bowie, with long hair 

and makeup making him look as though 

he stepped out of an ‘80s Sunset Strip 

metal band. (Greatti’s YouTube channel 

shows him playing guitar solos from Van 

Halen and White Lion and inserting 

shredding leads into Lady Gaga and Dua 

Lipa songs.) 

In a review of glammed-out Eurovision 

rockers Maneskin’s latest album, Steven 

Hyden described that group as 

“cartoonish caricatures of rock stars,” 

and added Yungblud, Ghost, Greta van 

36

ALBUM REVIEWS 

Fleet, and even Harry Styles to a list of 

popular acts who fall into the same 

category, before going on to say that “the 

caricature is fun.” On Praise a Lord Who 

Chews But Which Does Not Consume; (Or 

Simply, Hot Between Worlds), Tumor’s 

verbosely titled new album, the artists 

addresses this very subject head-on: “A 

parody of a pop star / You behaved just like 

a monster / Is this all just makeup?” But 

wearing a ripped Slipknot T-shirt, leather 

mini-skirt, and fishnet stockings — as 

Tumor did at Pitchfork’s 2021 festival — 

might articulate something even deeper 

than confessional balladry. 

Queer Black artists have been present 

since the birth of rock’n’roll, and Tumor is 

following in the lineage of Sister Rosetta 

Tharpe and Little Richard. Without getting 

heavy-handed, the video for “Heaven 

Surrounds Us Like a Hood” makes this 

point. It cuts from Tumor playing guitar 

while sitting on a rotating statue of an 

apple core to images of two child stans 

dancing in a bedroom plastered with 

Tumor posters. At its end, one of the kids 

takes a bite from an apple. While LGBTQ 

people are being regularly demonized as 

corrupters of youth, the video, like Oliver 

Sim’s “Fruit,” understands and shows the 

necessity of passing down the gift of our 

knowledge. 

Tumor’s music notably became far more 

accessible after signing to Warp Records 

for 2018’s Safe in the Hands of Love, but 

they’ve still always kept an eye on the 

future, even while their first album was 

entirely based upon samples. Comparisons 

have been drawn from Dean Blunt and 

James Ferraro to Bowie and Prince, but 

few of Tumor’s songs actually sound like 

anyone else’s. The power ballad 

“Kerosene!” from Heaven to a Tortured 

Mind, Tumor’s answer to “Purple Rain,” is 

a distinct exception, but it borrowed its 

melody from the unlikely source of Uriah 

Heep’s “Weep in Silence.” 

Praise a Lord… was recorded with a 

shifting group of musicians, yet it 

reflects the same discipline as live shows 

with Tumor’s tight touring band. Seven 

bassists, including Tumor themself, 

perform on the album, but they share a 

consistent sound: thick, distorted, often 

occupying a rhythm guitar’s space. It’s 

the rhythm section that drives most 

songs, and a track like “God Is a Circle,” 

without adopting the motoric beat, still 

races ahead with the same compulsive 

forward motion. Tumor’s recent music 

has utilized thick, layered production, 

with subtle bits of noise hidden in the 

mix, and it repays loud, close listening. 

But no matter how much their songs add 

on top, the groove remains: “Meteora 

Blues,” for instance, takes a lunge into 

heavy metal, with lead guitar used for 

additional texture. 

Tumor’s origins in vaporwave — making 

music based on loops on a laptop — are 

also still faintly perceptible in Praise a 

Lord. Now that they can afford to pay to 

clear samples, “Operator” lifts from Faith 

No More’s “Be Aggressive,” and on the 

album’s most experimental song, the 

instrumental “Praised by the Trial of Fire,” 

Tumor again returns to those roots. The 

track filters and processes horns, guitar, 

and drums into an approximation of a 

warped, skipping record. The source 

material becomes unrecognizable, as 

though burnt by the title’s fire, and the 

drums refuse to stick to a steady beat. A 

brief melody does emerge, but the song 

never puts much emphasis on it. 

Praise the Lord… also retains the motif of 

religious imagery that is a constant in 

Tumor’s music and videos: take song 

titles like “Psalm,” “Gospel for a New 

Century,” “Face of a Demon,” or this 

album’s very name (following 

Experiencing the Deposit of Faith and 

Heaven to a Tortured Mind.) Their second 

album, Serpent Music, which was 

originally going to be called God Fearing, 

alludes to the Garden of Eden. At the 

same time, their specific use of these 

references suggests a skepticism about 

Christianity and an interest in “occult” 

spirituality. They’ve played devilish 

figures in the videos for “Lifetime,” where 

they struggle within a pentagram made of 

rope, and “Gospel for a New Century.” (Lil 

Nas X’s “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” 

video suggests Tumor’s influence.) 

Similarly, the video for “Kerosene!” 

continues rock’s time-honored tradition 

of Aleister Crowley references, with a 

flying golf ball exploding over a “Love Is 

the Law” banner during Greatti’s guitar 

solo. 

Praise a Lord… engages with all of these 

concerns in a thorough manner, 

examining Tumor’s ideas about religion in 

their full complexity. On “Meteora Blues” 

they sing, “I’ll always pray to an empty sky 

/ stare straight into the morning star.” 

“Heaven Surrounds Us Like a Hood,” 

meanwhile, uses a sample of a boy 

saying “I love the color blue because it’s in 

the sky and that’s what God is.” These 

references bleed the spiritual, carnal, and 

romantic into each other, laying out the 

37

impossibility of separating them — song 

after song describes God and a lover in the 

same breath. Tumor’s flirtations with the 

occult reveal the power of desire to break 

down black-and-white morality; see, for 

instance, “In Spite of War,” which relates a 

difficult relationship in which Tumor 

yearns after a lover who is compared to 

both angels and devils. It’s clear, then, that 

the increasing polish of Tumor’s music 

hasn’t eliminated its experimentation, but 

has instead only made it more subtle. 

Praise the Lord… suggests that a reliable 

groove is the best starting place to ponder 

some of life’s biggest questions. — STEVE 

ERICKSON 

LABEL: Warp Records; RELEASE DATE: 

March 17 

CIRCLE 

Onew 

Circle is the first full album by Onew, 

member of K-pop boy group SHINee, who 

debuted as a soloist in 2019 with the 

ballad-heavy Voice EP, and returned last 

spring with the vibrant synthpop of second 

mini-album Dice. After finding his footing 

in freshman and sophomore projects, 

Circle is an opportunity for Onew to settle 

more deeply into a signature sound, as 

well as take on the challenge of crafting a 

full-length album statement for the first 

time. (The latter is a particularly notable 

task in the world of K-pop, where 

mini-albums are the standard and 

tracklists are sometimes thrown together 

without much thought for cohesion.) The 

end result is a project that brings together 

dance-pop and ballads to create a 

sensitive pop album quietly brimming with 

life. 

The record opens with title track “O 

(Circle),” a pensive tune just slightly 

untethered from reality that puts the 

voice of SHINee’s main vocalist front and 

center. With lyrics courtesy of Kim Eana, 

Onew muses about how life goes on, yet 

some things never seem to change: “The 

eternal cycle around the sun, the wind, the 

clouds, the rain, the sea / All the greetings 

and farewells have been the same.” 

There’s a choir, but it somehow works, 

upping the sense of scale without 

sounding too corny or spiritual. The 

overall vibe is of an existential 

coffeeshop — inviting and gently 

atmospheric, but where the barista might 

ask, “How much are you willing to pay?” 

“O” begins the album with a feeling of 

discovering how much you don’t know. 

The B-sides, in terms of tone and tempo, 

follow behind in a wave that moves from 

gentle acoustic to distinctly upbeat 

tracks, before finally settling back into 

the mellow sonic space where the title 

track began. “Cough” is a classic 

singer-songwriter-esque midtempo track 

that blooms into a tender chorus; “Rain 

on Me” is a hushed, pleading ballad; 

“Caramel” is lightly jazzy, with a touch of 

mouth trumpet. From there, Circle takes 

off into a surprising groove: it’s a funny 

choice to open the record as if it’s on 

course to deliver an all-ballad affair, and 

then slyly bury the bops right at the point 

when listeners stop expecting them. The 

crisp, funky production of “Anywhere” and 

“Paradise” combines with Onew’s 

weightless vocals to fashion dancy cuts 

with distinct character, and “No 

Parachute” fittingly pairs the project’s 

lightest, simplest hook with lyrics about 

trying to escape everyday anxieties. The 

ALBUM REVIEWS 

album then closes with the warm hug of 

“Walk with You” and the standard-ending 

piano ballad “Always.” The immediate 

impression is of a satisfying journey’s 

gentle end, yet the open question of the 

title track leaves you wanting to listen 

just one more time pretty much as soon 

as the end arrives. 

Circle is yet another jewel in the crown of 

excellent SHINee solo projects, and it 

entirely lives up to the expectations of a 

K-pop mainstay’s first full-length outing. 

The music reflects on the styles Onew 

has previously visited, experiments with 

yet more new ones, and, while doing so, 

moves just the right amount forward: a 

comeback without opting for reinvention, 

a progression rather than a departure. 

Most importantly for a record of such 

origins, Circle stands on its own as a 

well-crafted and well-performed work 

with a strong point of view about the 

emotional potential of pop music. In the 

pre-chorus of its title track, Onew sings 

about “the joys of an unhurried sunrise” — 

a fitting sentiment to open an album that 

so understands patience and the 

importance of subtle, unique color. — 

KAYLA BEARDSLEE 

LABEL: SM Entertainment; RELEASE 

DATE: March 6 

38

Photo Credits: 

Cover - Jonnie Chambers; Page 1 - SXSW; Page 4 - Still by Kristen (K2) Correll; Page 5 - Theo 

Montoya; Page 6 - SXSW; Page 7 - Paper Street Pictures & Last Resort Ideas; Page 9 - Chris 

Kasick, Jared Washburn; Page 10 - Grégoire Graesslin; Page 10 - Rock N Roll Documentary 

Productions Inc.; Page 12 - Another Body; Page 14, 15- SXSW; Page 16 - AP; Page 17 - Towne Post 

Network; Page 18 - Capital Records; Page 19 - Warner Bros.; Page 21 - Niu Vision Media; Page 22 - 

20th Century Studios/Clair Fogler; Page 23, 24 - Netflix; Page 25 - Music Box Films; Page 27 - 

Aaron Epstein/RGB; Page 29 - Netflix; Page 30 - Coproduction Office; Page 31 - Cinedigm; Page 32 

- IFC Films; Page 33 - Fantasia Fest; Page 34 - Brianna Cappozi; Page 35 - Columbia Records; Page 

36 - Jordan Hemingway; Page 38 - SM Entertainment; Back Cover - Jessica Miglion/Warner Bros.

InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 11

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