InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 16

IN REVIEW ONLINE 

FEATURES 

RE-INTERROGATING 

THE BODY 

An Interview With Lucien 

Castaing-Taylor & Véréna 

Paravel — 1 

KICKING THE CANON 

TOTAL RECALL — 7 

YOUTH OF THE BEAST — 9 

DEAD RINGERS — 11 

FILM REVIEWS 

BEAU IS AFRAID — 13 

EVIL DEAD RISE — 15 

TRENQUE LAUQUEN — 17 

THE COVENANT — 17 

CHEVALIER — 18 

OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN — 19 

GHOSTED — 19 

PLAN 75 — 20 

CARMEN — 21 

DRY GROUND BURNING — 23 

THE POPE’S EXORCIST — 23 

SOMEWHERE IN QUEENS — 24 

CHERRY — 26 

TO CATCH A KILLER — 26 

JUDY BLUME FOREVER — 28 

THE REAL THING — 29 

ALBUM REVIEWS 

IVE — 30 

Zelooperz — 31 

April 21, 2023 

Volume 1, Issue 16

Re-Interrogating the Body 

An Interview With Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel 

Anthropologist-filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and 

Véréna Paravel’s work dissolves the space between their camera and their subject. Previous films 

Leviathan and Caniba both treat their respective subjects — the marine landscapes of commercial fishing, the domestic world of an 

infamous cannibal — with startling intimacy, but the proximity of their filmmaking finds new extremes with De Humani Corporis 

Fabrica, an observational exploration of eight Parisian hospitals. This new film unfolds across subterranean infirmary tunnels, 

operating tables, and inside patients’ bodies; it was assembled over the course of six years, and presents an unflinching document of 

state-of-the-art surgical procedures, directing our gaze to otherwise unseeable sights of the human interior. 

In the spirit of Stan Brakhage’s monumental autopsy documentation The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes, De Humani probes the 

experience of looking at otherwise imperceptible depths of the human body. The film facilitates an encounter between spectators 

and the most disavowed corners of their biology. There’s no shortage of haunting corporeal images, visions of the body at its most 

frail and vulnerable — and yet the film asks us to reckon with what it means to be repelled by the sight of our own biology. At the crux 

of De Humani’s ambitious feat (both formally and thematically) is the groundwork for a new relationship with our own bodies, beyond 

fear and abjection. I spoke with Castaing-Taylor and Paravel about bodily anxiety and the political imperative of looking at the body in 

De Humani; Alice Diop’s reaction to the film; David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future; the work of Walter Benjamin; and plenty more. 

As I understand it, the idea for your last movie, Caniba, began with you researching Japanese Pink films and then reorienting 

your focus towards Issei Sagawa when you realized he appeared in a Hisayasu Satō film. Did De Humani have a similar 

trajectory of shifting focus, or was the central concept solidified from the beginning of your research? 

LCT: We read an interview that we apparently gave to a French newspaper called Libération — a New York Times-y thing for France — I 

think in 2011 that said we were already working on this project, which is hard to believe. I think it was just in the idea stage. There 

1

were lots of original ideas. One of them was Walter Benjamin’s 

concept of the Optical Unconscious, where he basically 

compared the way cinema allows us to perceive the world to the 

way a surgeon making an incision in the body can perceive the 

body. I never really believed in that metaphor, even though it’s 

very trendy in critical theory/academic circles. But I wanted to 

put it to the test… what would happen if we literalized that 

metaphor? What does it mean to study surgery with an empirical 

visual proximity and intensity that’s never really been done before? 

That was one conceptual start. 

We started filming in university-affiliated hospitals in Boston. But 

it was impossible to make this film in the US because the 

doctors no longer have any rights over the imagery they need to 

undertake these surgeries. Though the medical staff was super 

open, the hospital administrations were really closed-off. It 

would’ve been different if we were coming in from some major 

cable network and could’ve given them millions of dollars, but 

that wasn’t an option. Then we met François Crémieux, who was 

the head of some hospitals in Paris. He does many things. He’s 

not really a filmmaker himself, but he did make three films with 

Chris Marker: The Balkan Trilogy. He runs a 

medical-philosophy-anthropology cinema club in Paris. 

[Verena Paravel puffs a vape cloud into the webcam.] 

LCT: You just blew smoke in his face. 

VP: Sorry. 

LCT: Anyway, [Crémieux]’s very interested in bringing 

non-medical perspectives. Unlike in the US, he gave us carte 

blanche to film anything in the [French] hospitals he was then 

director of. 

VP: My memory of the project’s genesis is when I was reading 

The Boston Globe, which is very strange because I would never 

read The Boston Globe. There was a story about how, during 

medical training, you’re given a cadaver at the beginning of the 

semester. Then, you work on this cadaver during your whole 

semester: doing dissection, learning anatomy, learning surgery. 

One student was given a cadaver at the beginning of the year 

and, when she unveiled the face, it was her aunt. She fainted and 

everything. I remember being horrified by the story and, at the 

same time, with my weird humor, I found it hilarious. I told 

Lucien, “Can you imagine the violence of unveiling and seeing it’s 

your family member who’d given their body to science?” We 

looked at each other and started to think about what it means to 

give your body to science and what’s being done with your body. 

Harvard is a place with so many cadavers because of the 

prestige. People in this country have the ability to say not only 

“I’m going to give my body to science,” but also specify where 

you want your body to go. Harvard has a ridiculous amount of 

bodies, whereas the rest of medical schools have a serious lack 

of bodies to train students. That was the beginning of our 

discussion, and we both said at the exact same time: “We should 

make a film about that.” 

LCT: There’s this expression, “If you can’t get into Harvard when 

you’re alive, you can get in when you’re dead.” But you don’t know 

that they can also sell your body to other medical schools. 

VP: That was the entrance into the hospital world. Then, we soon 

realized [filming] in America was too complicated because of 

the culture of suing for no reason, for every reason, and every 

opportunity. François Crémieux was the key: the miraculous 

magic formula to get into the hospital. Once you get in there, it’s 

an immense resource of ideas because the hospital itself is a 

society in miniature. It’s a microcosm where you feel what’s 

going on in society: the violence, the conflicts, religious belief, 

social-cultural behavior. Everything is there because the whole 

world is coming to the hospital without any filter. Everybody is 

there. It’s not that we are equal in front of disease, but we all end 

up in hospitals at some point. We all die. We all have a body that 

is more or less made of the same organs. That’s an amazing 

vantage point. 

LCT: Until working in the French public hospitals, the original 

conceptual idea we had is indicated by the title. De Humani 

Corporis Fabrica, that’s the title of the founding tome of Western 

anatomy by a Flemish physician named Andreas Vesalius. There 

were seven books in that work. His sense of anatomy was very 

revolutionary but it’s now completely outdated. The idea is that 

we’d make a film with seven parts, films, or movements. Each 

would use a different, contemporary cutting-edge medical 

scoping technology that’s come into being the last 10-15 years. 

2

Each would be filmed only by that imaging device in seven 

different countries. The idea was a much more global approach 

to the ways medical imagery allows us to perceive the body in a 

way that had never been possible before in history. But also, in 

the ways doctors themselves perceive their bodies when they’re 

objectifying them, when they’re subjectifiying them, when they’re 

mutilating them, when they’re trying to heal them. But it’s a kind 

of vision that the rest of the world, aside from these surgeons, 

have no access to. The idea was to open up that vision to 

humanity at large. 

When we got to Paris, we let go of the idea of having seven 

different countries, seven different surgical inventions, seven 

different scoping technologies because it was absurdly 

unprecedented to be afforded carte blanche. To have complete, 

unrestricted access was such an opportunity that we didn’t want 

to be constrained by the conceptual framework we initially had. 

I’m curious about the approach you took to shooting the 

surgeries. Did your logistical setup of the camera and its 

apparatus vary dramatically from operation-to-operation or 

was it consistent throughout? 

LCT: The original idea was: we wouldn’t film ourselves. We’d only 

record sound and all the imagery in the film would come from 

the medical cameras: laparoscopic and celioscopic cameras 

that were inside the bodies which the doctors were looking at. So 

that footage would be synced up with the sound mostly outside 

the body or on the bodies with contact microphones. We’re both 

very impetuous and we’re both very ocular centric creatures. So 

quite soon, in order to allow ourselves to focus, we also started 

filming outside the body. Initially, we used a conventional 

camera. But the imagery that gave us wasn’t very exciting and 

looked like things we’d seen before. Then we experimented and, 

with an amazing engineer in Zurich, fabricated a lipstick camera: 

a camera that, as closely as possible, resembles the same optics 

and aesthetics as the camera the doctors use. That camera was 

breaking down the whole time and we had to find a way to touch 

the lens without it burning our hands. But it basically stayed the 

same throughout. 

Of course, the film is nothing. It’s two hours or something out of 

350 hours. Each time we filmed a surgical procedure, and we 

filmed hundreds of them, the kind of imagery that the doctors 

themselves were using changes according to the operation they 

3

were performing, according to the hospital, according to their 

resources, etc. 

When I saw the movie with an audience last September, I 

was struck by very audible exclamations from other people 

in the theater. Was that visceral, almost spectacle-like 

reception something you anticipated? 

VP: We never really have an audience in mind. We were just 

worried about being extremely precise. We were expecting the 

audience to be maybe a bit touched or overwhelmed at some 

points. I think we knew somehow it’s a film that would be lived 

and experienced very subjectively. What I’m saying is super 

banal because it’s the case for every film. But in this case, it’s a 

little different because, as we said earlier, everybody has a body 

and everyone has a very particular relationship with their body. 

It’s not the same if somebody’s had a prostatectomy. Or if 

somebody’s had breast cancer. Or somebody had a parent who 

died or who had dementia… They will experience the film 

completely differently. We knew this was something we could not 

control. When you write a book, you cannot control how the book 

is going to be read. This is the case with every film you make. 

And this one in particular, we knew that. We did try to be careful 

with that because there are many things we didn’t put into the 

film because we thought maybe it was just too hard. 

LCT: We had to censor ourselves a lot. It doesn’t seem like it 

when you see the film because it’s so overwhelming for many 

people. But there was so much we took out even though it was 

extremely beautiful and incredibly moving or displayed an ethic 

of care we thought was really important. It would just be 

unwatchable for most viewers. The body is super weird because 

it’s the thing we’re closest to in our lives. Your body is the only 

thing in the world that you yourself experience from the inside 

as well as the outside. It is the most permanent and present 

thing in our lives. And yet it is shrouded in taboo, with anxiety 

and alienation. Despite its centrality in our lives — all we do is 

stare at each other’s bodies and inspect our own — we have 

difficulties transgressing membrane and skin and looking inside 

the body. 

We weren’t naïve in thinking that wouldn’t generate anxiety, but 

we thought it’s important not to turn away our gaze but to 

engage with the most important subject in our lives: bodies. We 

spend our whole lives pretending we don’t know we’re going to 

die. It’s the only thing we know. And we just repress that 

knowledge as much as we can. By visualizing the body, we see 

our fragility, our resilience. And of course, its fragility is going to 

be deeply anxiety-inducing. 

VP: Or the contrary. Yesterday, Alice Diop was visiting our class. 

She saw the film, and she said she was so scared. We had the 

film projected for her, and she was like, “No stay with me! Stay 

with me!” At some point I needed to leave, and when I came 

back, she was completely transfixed. When the film ended, she 

said “I think it healed me.” For her, it was completely therapeutic. 

She’s not afraid anymore. 

For me, the movie got me to dissect the aversion I felt to 

some of the images of the inside of the body and to confront 

what it means to look at flesh and feel repulsion to your own 

biology. Which was a really unique encounter. I was also 

wondering if any of the patients saw the footage of their own 

operations? 

LCT: Thing is, we filmed hundreds of patients and hundreds of 

medical personnel of different stripes. There were all these 

screenings in Paris in December and January, like 20 or 30, and 

they were invited to many of them. So, we were present for some 

of those but not all. The person who had the first operation in the 

film — the brain surgery for hydrocephalus [treated with] an 

endoscopic third ventriculostomy — studied his medical 

procedure at length in the final cut. That’s also true for some 

others. But there’s no way of knowing what percentage of 

doctors or patients have seen the film. There were some doctors 

and medical staff who came and saw rough cuts towards the 

end; we wanted to make sure they found it accurate and not a 

misrepresentation. But most people only saw the final film. 

What’s the division of labor between the two of you? Are 

there specific roles that you individually assume? 

LCT: One of us would hold the lipstick camera and the other 

would hold the sound. In past films, like Caniba or Leviathan, 

there was no division of labor. With Leviathan, the filming 

conditions were difficult so one of us would have to hold onto 

4

the other to make sure they didn’t fall overboard. But even in that 

case, whoever was the least exhausted would hold the camera. 

But that also had sound. In this case, we added a microphone to 

the camera, so we’d alternate without rhyme or reason. It was 

also exhausting; we’d get up and bike to the hospital an 

hour/hour-and-a-half every morning at 5 AM. Then we’d get back 

at midnight. Whoever was least exhausted would usually hold the 

camera and the other one would do the sound. 

Do you often find your two approaches and ideas are 

simpatico? Or do you find yourselves disagreeing about what 

the movie should be? 

LCT: There’s almost invariably antipatico. They’re not at all 

sympathetic. We fight like cats and dogs. 

VP: C'est complètement faux [translation: That’s completely 

wrong]. 

LCT: She’s already disagreeing with me. At the end of a day, one 

of us, especially during editing but even during filming, will feel 

one way and the other will feel the other. Then, when we meet 

again in the editing studio the following morning, I will have 

changed position and come to her point of view. And she will 

have come to mine. Then we’re like “fuck” because each of us 

thinks the opposite. So it’s a constant—sorry, it’s a big, stupid 

word—dialectic going back and forth between the two of us. We 

never come to any particular consensus. Every spectator makes 

up something different than every other spectator according to 

individuality, nationality, gender, race, class position: multiple 

different variables that are uncontrollable. Even us, we never 

have a singular intellectual perspective; the film still means 

different things to us. And what it means to each of us changes 

through time. We’re still learning about the film by interacting 

with audiences. 

VP: I agree… I almost agree, actually. You’re completely right 

about the fighting or dialectical process. Can you imagine 

agreeing with yourself and being alone? Since we edit 

[ourselves], it’s two brains rather than one. It’s like having a 

conversation. Somehow, we need the other to trust what we’re 

doing. But also, especially when we look at our footage, there is a 

common sensibility that is sometimes mind-blowing. Very often 

we’re having the same reaction at the same half-second, 

5

vibrating in front of the same images. There is a shared 

sensibility that is extremely important in our work and 

collaboration. 

LCT: Even if I don’t vibrate as much as you. 

You talked about how Benjamin’s metaphor of the Optical 

Unconscious was a starting point, and you talked about how 

you’ve never fully bought into it. I’m wondering how the 

process of making the movie and thinking back on making it 

have changed your understanding of Benjamin’s metaphor? 

LCT: It’s complicated… it would take ten pages. Even in ten years 

when [the movie] will be in the past, but especially now when it’s 

been out for only a couple months in France or almost a year in 

festivals. Though we haven’t been to many festivals because it’s 

absurd post-COVID in the climate crisis to travel to all these 

festivals. But it’s not as if now we’ve reached a certain particular 

understanding of either Benjamin or the body. When we started 

filming in Paris, not only did the seven-part structure go out the 

window but so did the interrogation of that metaphor, partially. 

Our understanding of the body and medicine was, and is, in 

constant flux. 

I still don’t think [Benjamin’s] metaphor holds that much water. 

He’s a terribly authoritarian writer who’s completely à la mode in 

American universities. To think there’s an optical unconscious 

equivalent to the instinctive/psychic unconscious that Freud was 

exploring… I don’t think that holds up. He thought painting could 

only represent the world from the outside; it was destined or 

doomed to have an exterior regard on the world, whereas film 

would blow the world asunder in the dynamite of a 16 th of a 

second, as he called it. Then, in the detritus of what it captured: 

a new vision of the world. It was still very teleological and very 

technofilic and romanticized the camera’s vision. The camera’s 

vision is as flawed and partial as human vision. In many ways, it’s 

not a superhuman vision as Vertov thought; it’s less than human 

vision. It’s a constant struggle to work with these audio-visual 

technologies, to give us a new perspective on reality and to 

perceive the world in ways our own eyes don’t. Or to augment 

that apprehension we have of the world. It’s not easy and it’s not 

as if there’s one methodology or technology you can pursue that 

would allow for that. 

VP: Wow… 

LCT: We should write on this at some point because, honestly, 

it’s a super interesting question. 

VP: As I was listening to you, I said, “This is exactly telepathic. 

When you were talking I thought, ‘we always refuse to write, but 

why?’” 

LCT: Because we can’t write. That’s why we use images and 

sound… You can write, but I can’t write. 

VP: I cannot… you can. 

LCT: I also think there’s a political imperative to look at the body, 

especially now. With COVID, it’s terrifying how little humanity 

seems to have learned from that pandemic. I was really 

optimistic during it that there’d be a radically different 

relationship to the environment, to the world, to the 

extra-human. But I do think we have been fragilized about our 

bodies, our mortality. Now is the time to contemplate our 

relationship to other species and to the natural world through 

the prism of our bodies. The hope is that people like Alice [Diop] 

who watch this film, which is very violent in many ways, will 

perceive an incredible kind of tenderness. Paradoxically, 

perhaps, they’re able to reconcile — as you were — with their 

bodies. 

It’s not disgusting, it’s not gory. People often compare it with 

Cronenberg’s film [Crimes of the Future]. It’s the opposite of 

Cronenberg’s film. But I still think there’s this prohibition about 

looking at one’s body that has to be interrogated. And if we’re 

going to have a healthy relationship to the rest of the world, 

other species (animal, plant, and mineral), that has to start 

with a capacity for reinterrogating our own relationship to our 

bodies. 

VP: I was talking about the hospital as a microcosm of society, 

but the body itself is. It’s a place of multiple cohabitation 

between viruses and bacteria. It’s also a place that cannot be 

sustainable if you want to push the metaphor of being alive. 

There’s no body that can survive without the care of other 

bodies. — INTERVIEW CONDUCTED BY RYAN AKLER-BISHOP 

6


TOTAL RECALL 

Paul Verhoeven 

"Reality is that which, when you 

stop believing in it, doesn't go away." 

- Philip K. Dick 

With his bionic biceps threatening to split his skin wide open in a 

fashion not dissimilar to the Hulk with his shirts and that endearing 

accent, sort of Russian but not quite, that he never shook, Arnold 

Schwarzenegger, an immigrant, was the paradigm of big dumb '80s 

American action movies, a hulky hero who could mow down droves of 

nondescript bad guys with a machine gun so big it's comical while 

tossing out lovably lame one-liners with a wry smile that lets you know 

he loves this. And the joy, the unfettered joy with which he 

serves those quips, often bad puns that don't sound so 

different from a Dad Joke, is the kind of acting 

you don't learn from the Actors Studio. 

7


In the '80s, after Sylvester Stallone — who, remember, got 

famous with an intimate, modest film playing a bum who refuses 

to give up on his dreams with aching vulnerability — made the 

move to machismo and bombast, moviegoers were given a 

choice: Team Arnold or Team Sly. It's not really a fair comparison, 

as Stallone is also a writer and director (and a good one, too, 

adroit at montage in ways that hark back to the great Russian 

filmmakers of the silent era) and was a respected actor before 

he transmogrified into the corporeal personification of 

testosterone; Arnold was a bodybuilder, the best ever, who 

became an actor to further engorge his ego (watch Pumping Iron 

and witness his narcissism and bloated sense of 

self-importance) and who found early success in the movies 

playing big meaty men. He soon developed an inimitable charm 

that made him one of American cinema's most enthralling 

presences, a Reagan-era John Wayne, but he was never 

considered a good actor. 

Well, Arnold's pretty good in Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall, a loose 

adaptation of a story by perpetually poor pill-popper Philip K. 

Dick. As Doug Quaid, a hulky nobody who becomes an 

interplanetary hero, or maybe has a schizoid embolism after a 

memory implantation operation gone awry, Arnold exudes that 

inimitable charm that made him a megastar. But it's here 

tinctured with a self-awareness (the embryonic stage of the kind 

of honest self-exploration that imbues his performance in the 

great Last Action Hero, still his best role) that, if you interpret the 

film — as Verhoeven does — as the fantasy of a Joe Schmo who 

dreams of being somebody important, is actually pretty sad. Go 

back to Pumping Iron — the seminal documentary purveying the 

world of bodybuilding — when Arnold, then 27 years old and 

already a legend and almost heavenly idol to his acolytes (see: 

the scene at the prison), openly indulged his egotism, literally 

saying he admires "powerful men," like dictators, and aspires for 

greatness — and not just greatness, but being the best at 

everything he does. In Total Recall, he plays an unexceptional guy 

who wants to be great, who finds his dreams literally in his 

dreams while he sits still, comatose, forever in his own mind. And 

the face he makes when he is hit in the balls — more than once! 

— is unmatched, all his facial muscles clenching like digits in a 

fist. 

Verhoeven is a consummate craftsman whose films couldn't 

have been made by anyone else, but he doesn't really have a 

distinct visual style, at least regarding compositions and 

movement and so on. His approach isn't showy, but the images 

are always coherent, as is the action, even when 

things get surreal or grotesque; the loving detail of 

the mutants evinces a bold humanism you don't find 

in many $100 million blockbusters. And, of course, 

Paul was the satirist par excellence of '90s 

Hollywood. Here, he eviscerates, with brutal care, 

capitalism (the craven villain, played slimily by Ronny 

Cox, who was similarly slimy in Robocop, charges 

exorbitant prices for air on Mars, the way America 

charges disturbingly high fees for basic necessities), 

imperialism, the police force, etc. He also butchers 

bodies. The somatic savagery — Arnold uses a man 

as a meat shield, as bullets batter the body and 

blood sprays from holes spurting all over his torso, 

for instance — is excellently excessive; it's 

Verhoeven's willingness to be so mean, his 

conviction obvious each time a bullet collides with 

flesh, that makes the whole thing so fun. He takes 

glee in it, thus, so do we. — GREG CWIK 

8


YOUTH OF THE BEAST 

Seun Suzuki 

Seijun Suzuki made his name with a string of Nikkatsu-produced genre flicks — The Naked Woman and the Gun (1957), Voice Without a 

Shadow (1958), Man With a Shotgun (1961) — but is probably best known to contemporary audiences for his yakuza films. A relatively 

inhibited take on American gangster noirs quickly evolved into a kaleidoscopic assault on the form that made him both beloved and 

infamous, with what’s now his most acclaimed work — 1967's eclectic, satirical yakuza classic Branded to Kill — initially landing as a 

critical and commercial failure, and leading to Suzuki's dismissal by Nikkatsu, for making "movies that make no sense and no money," 

according to the filmmaker. This then led Suzuki to successfully sue the production company, but the ordeal cost him a decade-long 

blacklisting. 

Though Suzuki’s freewheeling cinematic sensibilities can actually be traced all the way back to his debut film, 1956's Victory is Ours, 

the first genuine flashes of his trademark style appeared in the 1958 crime film Underworld Beauty. Not only was this the first of his 

films credited to Seijun Suzuki (as opposed to Seitaro Suzuki, his birth name), but it also featured an unorthodox visual creativity — 

cleverly obscured nudity; deep, mysterious shadows; creepy mannequin set design — which was nevertheless noticeably restrained 

by Nikkatsu's expectations of commercial viability. Take Aim at the Police Van (1960) and Detective Bureau 23: Go to Hell, Bastards! 

(1963) can be similarly described. But then came Youth of the Beast, which marked a true turning point for the filmmaker. 

One of four Suzuki films released in 1963, Youth of the Beast saw the auteur truly embrace his playful pop artistry for the 

first time — even Suzuki himself called it his "first truly original film." The plot is essentially a spin on Kurosawa's 

1961 samurai film Yojimbo, wherein a wandering ronin, Kuwabatake Sanjuro (Toshiro Mifune), infiltrates the 

organizations of two opposing crime bosses struggling for supremacy 

to bring peace to a small village. But unlike 

9


Kurosawa's classic, Suzuki's crime tale has no place for such 

noble aims. Joji "Jo" Mizuno (the famously chipmunk-cheeked Joe 

Shishido) is an ex-cop driven solely by revenge. Having been 

wrongfully convicted of embezzlement, the newly released Jo 

becomes singularly focused on avenging the murder of his loyal 

former partner, whose death was staged to look like a lover's 

suicide. 

Jo's pursuit of "justice" becomes a relentless, violent, and slyly 

comical odyssey through Kobe's criminal underworld. Although 

1966's Tokyo Drifter would mark Suzuki's first identifiably 

deconstructionist take on the genre, Youth of the Beast scans as 

similarly satirical. The film occupies a space between 

straightforward gangster film homage and Godardian 

pranksterism, amplifying genre tropes to near-absurd levels with 

increasingly 

convoluted 

violence, plot 

machinations, 

and set 

pieces — at one 

point, Jo disposes 

of his adversaries 

while hanging 

upside down from a chandelier — while occasionally pushing 

things into the realm of the avant-garde. For every blade 

violently shoved under a fingernail, there is a shot of radiant red 

flowers illuminating the otherwise black-and-white frames of the 

film's intro. And Suzuki's farcical tough-guy introduction for Jo — 

he beats up young delinquents before heading to a club to drink 

and beat up some more people — feels like a purposeful 

escalation of Breathless' Bogart-obsessed main character, Michel 

(Jean-Paul Belmondo). 

Youth of the Beast’s gritty textures don't rival Tokyo Drifter's 

arresting production design. But Suzuki still provides his share of 

striking images, such as when Jo invades the office of crime 

boss Shinzuke Onodera (Kinzo Shin). The head honcho's office 

walls are illuminated by images of American and Japanese 

B-movie gangster melodramas — the kind of films that Suzuki 

was slowly but surely leaving behind. (Incidentally, Onodera, as 

well as his rival Tetsuo Nomoto (Akiji Kobayashi), are depicted as 

weaselly, bottom-line-obsessed businessmen, far removed from 

the honor codes often employed to romanticize Japanese 

organized crime.) This juxtaposition ultimately acknowledges the 

framework that the film — for all its clever subversions — 

operates within, obscuring the visceral violence that ensues by 

calling attention to its artificiality. 

This unsentimental, stylized approach would prove influential on 

filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, Park Chan-wook, John Woo, 

and Takashi Miike, 

whose genre efforts 

often echo Beast's 

elaborate brutality. 

Even Scorsese might 

have looked to 

Keiko's (Naomi 

Hoshi) agonizing 

junkie floor crawl for 

The Wolf of Wall 

Street's infamous 

Quaaludes scene. 

Suzuki's later, more 

surreal efforts 

overshadow the 

legacy of the first 

true Suzuki original, 

somewhat, and he 

remains tragically 

under-discussed as 

a talented dramatic 

filmmaker (1964's 

Gate of Flesh and 

1965's Story of a 

Prostitute rank 

amongst his best 

work). But it’s with 

Youth of the Beast 

that his anarchic 

vision truly snapped into focus, and at last converged with a 

searing poignancy, felt in its ending: after the antagonist finally 

dies a horrible, razor blade-related death, Jo succumbs to 

despair and has a vision of a grayscale graveyard, where 

flowers once again gleam with red-hot menace. — FRED 

BARRETT 

10

DEAD RINGERS 

It’s hard not to see the Dead Ringers miniseries as yet 

another domino tumbling on the remake assembly line 

that turns everything from The Parallax View to Fatal 

Attraction into half-hearted content, primed for 

couch-locked consumption. Credit where it's due, 

Cronenberg’s underrated 1988 thriller at least makes 

for an intriguing selection, given its restrained 

manner, disturbing gynecological sojourns, and the 

demanding dual performance of its lead-playing twin 

doctors stuck in a codependent spiral. Anyone 

looking to play it safe (though what Cronenberg 

remake really is?) could have chosen to adapt 

eXistenZ, whose twisty, mind-bending plot and 

science fiction trappings seem at least better suited for 

serialization than this icy, melodramatic chamber piece. 

That said, the assembled team here is pretty strong: 

there’s dual-lead Rachel Weisz, blending the composed 

vulnerability of Disobedience with the ravenous bite of The 

Favourite; the likes of Sean Durkin (Martha Marcy May Marlene) and 

Karyn Kusama (The Invitation) directing; and it’s all run by 

playwright/screenwriter Alice Birch, who penned the phenomenal 

Florence Pugh breakout, Lady Macbeth, and whose impressive 

television credits include Normal People and Succession. It’s all this 

squandered potential that makes the predictably tepid end result — a 

parade of extraneous themes, characters, and plot lines, scattered across six 

disjointed episodes — such a letdown. 

This fumbling effort highlights the unavoidable catch-22 of the 

movie-to-miniseries pipeline: a straightforward remake would be considered 

a futile exercise in imitation, but the full-scale remodel (as embarked on 

by Birch) remains awkwardly chained to its source material, leaving its 

myriad ambitions out of arm's reach. The original narrative of 

Beverly and Elliot Mantle's co-dependent self-destruction still 

grounds the project, but there are now hours of filler to dilute 

Cronenberg’s concentrated dose. Long sequences with the 

twins' parents, their sociopathic angel investors, 

their artist-in-residence housekeeper, the 

11

magazine writer working on an expose — it’s a cascade of false 

starts and half-thoughts trailing off before they ever get 

anywhere interesting. This undercooked quality is most 

pronounced with the reorientated focus on the politics of 

reproductive health. This shift, defined by the Mantle twins’ 

gender swap, might promise to be the series' greatest strength, a 

timely and clever inversion of some of the prickly, misogynistic 

undertones in the original brothers' psychology. But just like in 

the aforementioned threads, this too is presented in 

Twitter-bent one-liners and scattershot fragments that never 

have space to breathe. 

Accompanying the overstuffed scope of ideas is a similarly 

overstuffed stylization, presented in anamorphic widescreen to 

give ample room for the twins to share the frame. Where 

Cronenberg’s version avoided stressing its central gimmick, the 

miniseries embraces it with relish and abandon, collecting both 

Weiszs together in a shot as much as possible. Similarly absent 

is the restraint of the original’s visuals. Peter Suschitzky’s muted 

palette resembled a soap opera, lulling the viewer into an uneasy 

calm, only to blossom in spectacular moments like a bondage 

scene featuring rubber tubing and medical clamps shot in woozy 

blues, or the gloom of the operating theater pierced with the 

smoldering crimson of the Mantles’ surgical garb. Birch’s version 

nods at some of these ideas, but strikes a frustrating 

middle-ground of colorful, nicely framed banality that plays like 

microwaved leftovers. All this is goaded on by a snappy musical 

score and punctuated by an endless parade of tacky needle 

drops. If Cronenberg bemoaned the cost of featuring a single 

song in his film (“In The Still of the Night'' by The Five Satins), it’s 

tough to imagine what his reaction would be to this soundtrack, 

so stuffed with overused hits — “Sweet Dreams,” “Tainted Love,” 

and so forth — that it chugs along almost like a jukebox musical. 

There are some bright spots here and there. Weisz’s take on the 

twins may lack nuance — Jeremy Irons’ performance remains 

untouched — but it makes up for it in campy exuberance, which, 

accompanied by some devilishly funny writing and a strong 

supporting cast, helps keep things gliding along. Particular 

standouts include Jennifer Ehle’s razor-witted Rebecca Parker, 

the caustic investor the Mantles have to beg for funding for their 

birthing centers, and Ntare Guma Mbhaho Mwine as a writer 

digging into the Mantles, stealing every single scene he’s in with 

relaxed poise and finely tuned, simmering charm. Where the 

show really stumbles, however, is in building its emotional 

backbone. Weisz has no chemistry with Britne Oldford, who plays 

Beverly’s lover, an issue compounded by the fact that Beverely’s 

character has been restructured in such a way as to become an 

idealistic husk of what he once was. In the original, Beverly was 

the more empathetic of the two, but far less predictable, 

susceptible to addiction and psychological breakdown. Elliot was 

colder, crueler, and more playful, but defined by a calm 

demeanor and a rigid sense of control. Instead, Birch’s version 

sanctifies Beverly and transfers all flaws over to Elliot. Out of 

everything that frustrates in this Dead Ringers, its oversimplified, 

good twin/bad twin dichotomy is most destructive to the heart 

of the source material. 

By the time you’ve made it to the sixth and final episode, the 

incongruities in theme and tone and the sheer number of 

abandoned plot threads start to seem like insurmountable 

failings. The show races toward its ending with the sweaty 

energy of a series canceled halfway through, one desperately 

trying to cobble together a satisfying conclusion amidst its final 

throes. Following the trend set by every poorly thought-through 

deviation from the source material leading up to it thus far, Birch 

declines the original’s beautifully cutting closer in favor of a 

broader, tackier, and more predictable finale. The muddled 

nature of this desperate final bow stands in stark contrast to the 

quiet dignity of Cronenberg’s operatic ending, a move that seems 

to be at total odds with the warmer, more empathetic approach 

toward the Mantles that the series until this point exhibits. Maybe 

the most charitable reading here would be that the disjointed 

flow from one episode to the next suggests that each should be 

seen as improvisations on a theme — siblings, parents, class, 

motherhood — and yet, as poorly as these work as a whole, they 

seem even more wanting in isolation. The ultimate takeaway 

here is that, tempting as it may be, trying to xerox the dark 

alchemy of Cronenbergian narrative is certainly 

a fool’s errand. Cronenberg’s discordant themes, at once 

excessive and elegant, aren’t threaded together but instead 

violently fused; the final, imitative product that is this Dead 

Ringers mini-series is a fender-bender enervated by caution, 

whereas the real deal was an expressway collision, its potency 

crawling up your spine — glass, metal, and protruding flesh. — 

IGOR FISHMAN 

12

FILM REVIEWS 

BEAU IS AFRAID 

Ari Aster 

Joaquin Phoenix’s first scene in Beau Is Afraid takes place in his 

therapist’s office, setting the story in motion while also 

presenting a roadmap of sorts for everything that follows. 

Phoenix plays the titular Beau, a forty-something-year-old virgin 

with truly unfortunate levels of male pattern baldness and a 

prominent spare tire (the weight swing between this and his 

performance in Joker, only a few years ago, has to be 75 lbs, at 

minimum). In the aforementioned scene, Beau and his doctor are 

grappling with the prospect of traveling out of town to visit his 

domineering mother; posing questions that only agitate Beau 

further (“do you ever wish that she was dead?”) from behind a 

Cheshire Cat grin, the doctor (Stephen McKinley Henderson) 

sends Beau off with a prescription for a new anxiety medication, 

replete with terrifyingly commonplace side effects (“If you start 

to feel warm or have an elevated heart rate, that’s bad”). Given 

this framing, one could view everything that happens in this film 

thereafter as the result of an adverse reaction to Beau’s new pills, 

but that would be far too prosaic a read on director Ari Aster’s 

bugfuck odyssey. Instead, Beau Is Afraid aspires to do no 

less than dramatize an American Psychiatric Association 

textbook’s worth of phobias and stressors — large, small, and 

yet-to-be-classified. The film is something like the Terminator, 

only it’s in relentless pursuit of that elusive trigger that will send 

the viewer into a full-on panic attack. 

Living in an under-furnished, third-story apartment in the sort of 

urban hellscape only found in Fox News fever dreams, Beau steps 

over dead bodies lying in the road, outruns mentally ill vagrants, 

and absent-mindedly wanders past floor-to-ceiling vulgar graffiti 

and warnings about brown recluses in the building. And this is all 

to get back to an abode that looks like the kind of space single, 

middle-aged men rent out shortly before hanging themselves. It’s 

the type of place where residents are menaced by a nude serial 

killer (a news report helpfully clarifies that the suspect is 

circumcised), and the local citizenry proceed to congregate in 

zombie-like hordes in the middle of the street. And this is Beau’s 

safe space: the place he’s being guilted into leaving for a 

weekend visit with his emotional-terrorist, titan-of-industry 

mother, Mona (played by Patti Lupone in present-day scenes, and 

Zoe Lister-Jones in flashback). 

13

FILM REVIEWS 

For much of the film’s masterful first hour, we watch Beau 

attempting to navigate cascading inconveniences that conspire 

to derail his trip. The water in his apartment has been shut off; 

an irate neighbor keeps sliding passive-aggressive notes under 

his door in the middle of the night, asking Beau to turn down the 

music when no music is even being played; a slept-through alarm 

clock makes Beau late for the airport. Then someone steals 

Beau’s house keys right out of the lock — after he scampered 

back inside for only a few seconds to grab his dental floss, a 

fitting character note — leaving even the man’s inner sanctum 

vulnerable. It seems reasonable, then, that Mona will be forgiving 

of him delaying his trip by a few hours so that he can call a 

locksmith. She is not. The film continues on like this, building 

indignity on top of indignity, reaching a crescendo when Beau 

receives horrifying news from home, in the least comforting way 

imaginable, shortly before being run into by an RV while running 

naked through the streets (his distended and severely swollen 

testicals occasionally jostling into the frame). And that’s when, as 

the expression goes, things start to get weird. 

Beau Is Afraid is the eagerly anticipated follow-up from Ari Aster 

(Hereditary, Midsommar), who, after only three feature films, has 

emerged as the most breathlessly hyped name in A24’s stable of 

in-house directors. Up until now, a genre filmmaker specializing 

in tightly-controlled, large-canvas squirm-fests, Aster abandons 

overt horror here (although there’s no shortage of shocking 

violence and unsettling moments) and doubles down on his pet 

theme of the lasting harm parents inflict upon their children. 

There’s something upsetting for Beau to fret about even in the 

most innocuous of places — for example, the cozy suburban 

home he’s taken to convalesce at by a way-too-chipper Nathan 

Lane and Amy Ryan. But, invariably, the film works its way back 

to the codependency and sexual dysfunction instilled in him by 

his mother at a young age. Aster’s previous films were legitimate 

hits, and Beau Is Afraid carries itself with the swagger of an artist 

comfortable burning through whatever capital they’ve amassed 

in service of chasing an undiluted vision. That extends to the 

film’s elephantine runtime (just a hair under 180 minutes) and 

comparatively large budget, but also to its disquieting framing of 

motherhood, sexuality, the human body, and the music of Mariah 

Carey. It’s an expansive, occasionally turgid film that seems 

designed to test an audience’s patience, particularly during a 

longish digression where Phoenix, on the run, stumbles upon a 

roving theater troupe that’s set up camp in the woods. It’s a 

confounding detour smack dab in the middle of the film, blurring 

the line between performer and audience, reality and metaphor, 

live-action and animation. To what end it serves remains unclear 

other than that it’s of a piece with the film’s Kaufman-esque pop 

surrealism and the director’s “who are you to say no to me?” 

mandate. 

Maddeningly inscrutable by design, Beau Is Afraid — with its 

nightmarish Freudian imagery, “better living through 

pharmaceuticals” thematizing, and nods to both Judaism and 

Kafka — is all but begging to be solved (Internet explainers and 

crowd-sourced Reddit threads are due any minute now). 

Interpreting what it all means may not actually be worth the 

squeeze, but that’s almost incidental when put up against the 

film’s surface-level pleasures. There’s the precision of the 

filmmaking, with its emphasis on vertical compositions — the 

film is playing on IMAX screens in select markets for good reason 

— and building risible gags entirely through production design, 

set dressing, and throwaway props (e.g., an early scene finds 

Beau microwaving a TV dinner that boasts a flavor profile 

combination of Irish and Hawaiian cuisine). For the sort of 

person who can roll with it, there's a queasy yet intoxicating 

discomfort to the way the film takes pliers and a blowtorch to the 

viewers’ last nerve, eliciting waves of shame and purposeful 

befuddlement from every new scenario Beau stumbles into. And 

then there are the heavily-stylized, outsized performances. On 

one end of the spectrum, you have Phoenix, his Beau so 

paralyzed by fear, humiliation, and conflicting instruction that he 

all but slides into catatonia. On the other end, there’s Lupone’s 

character: a sucking wound of self-justification, pettiness, and 

the desire to manipulate an adult son she still treats like a child, 

earning the actress honorary status in the Jewish Mothers Hall of 

Fame. The film’s ambitions and demonstrable craft aren’t 

14

FILM REVIEWS 

redeeming in and of themselves, and certainly don’t absolve the 

film of its lumpiness, its narcissism, or some of its more juvenile 

tendencies, but the more off-putting qualities aren’t inherently 

disqualifying either. And there’s a bit of a perverse thrill in 

something this unaccommodating being unleashed on audiences 

probably expecting the latest iteration of “elevated horror.” In the 

end, Beau Is Afraid is something like a long therapy session: it’s 

expensive, self-indulgent, and should have probably remained 

private. But there’s also a morbid fascination in observing it, and, 

ultimately, the mother’s probably to blame. — ANDREW DIGNAN 

DIRECTOR: Ari Aster; CAST: Joaquin Phoenix, Nathan Lane, Amy 

Ryan, Parker Posey; DISTRIBUTOR: A24; IN THEATERS: April 21; 

RUNTIME: 2 hr. 59 min. 

EVIL DEAD RISE 

Lee Cronin 

The latest installment of the Evil Dead franchise, Evil Dead Rise, 

opens with a sequence that will be instantly recognizable to 

longtime fans of the series. Under the opening credits, an unseen 

force propels itself, at breakneck speed, through a foggy forest, 

across clearings and creeks, hurtling itself toward an 

unsuspecting victim. It’s really a bit of cheeky misdirection: the 

ominous, quickly moving presence is a small drone being piloted 

by an obnoxious frat boy type, tormenting a young woman who’s 

just trying to read by the lake. This smartly undercuts the tension 

before things start to get grizzly, about five minutes hence, while 

at the same time putting its own spin on one of the more familiar 

visual tropes of these films. It’s also just a little bit clever — a 

quality that’s otherwise in short supply in a film that, while 

suitably gory and proficiently made, lacks any real sense of 

invention or personality. 

That woods-set prologue notwithstanding — the film eventually 

circles back to how we even ended up there and who these 

anonymous victims are, and in a decidedly perfunctory manner — 

Evil Dead Rise differentiates itself from its predecessors by 

setting its deadite mayhem not in a cabin in the woods but rather 

in a dilapidated apartment complex in Los Angeles. It’s not quite 

putting Jason Voorhees in outer space, but for a franchise that 

leans so heavily on the isolation and vastness of the wilderness, 

moving the action to an urban center rife with 

modern amenities is an admirable upending of the formula. We’re 

introduced to touring guitar tech and absentee cool aunt, Beth 

(Lily Sullivan), who pops in to visit her older sister, tattoo artist 

Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland), and her three children on a dark and 

stormy evening. Beth has only just learned she’s pregnant, and, 

whether she’s willing to admit it or not, she’s looking to Ellie to tell 

her everything’s going to be okay. However, she finds in Ellie a 

woman at her wits’ end; she’s been abandoned by her husband 

and the father of her kids while frantically trying to find a new 

place for everyone to live as the building, which is falling down 

around them, has been scheduled for demolition in a few weeks. 

With Beth never being around to offer emotional support to Ellie, 

cracks have emerged in their relationship, which lends the visit a 

bit of an edge (Ellie even has the cruel habit of dismissing her 

little sister’s career by calling her a groupie). 

Speaking of cracks, a literal one opens up in the basement, 

triggered by an earthquake (it is Los Angeles, after all). 

Undaunted by the shaky foundation or the notion that venturing 

into unlit, subterranean chambers is how one-third of all horror 

films begin, Ellie’s eldest child and amateur DJ, Danny (Morgan 

Davies), climbs down into an abandoned bank vault where he 

finds a spooky yet familiar book (bound in human skin, penned in 

blood, featuring incantations and horrifying illustrations… you 

know the drill) and, even more germane to his interests, some old 

records. Against the wishes of younger sisters Bridget (Gabrielle 

Echols) and Kassie (Nell Fisher), Danny brings the book and the 

vinyl upstairs and plays the record on his turntable. Hoping he’s 

found an obscure beat he can sample, Danny instead is greeted 

by a hundred-year-old recording of a priest translating the “Book 

of the Dead,” and in the process unleashes an ancient, evil spirit 

into the apartment building, setting the stage for a long night of 

demonic possession and ultraviolence. 

Directed by Irish filmmaker Lee Cronin (The Hole in the Ground), 

Evil Dead Rise doesn’t so much resemble Sam Raimi’s seminal 

1981 film The Evil Dead or either of its two sequels as it does the 

dozens of disposable horror films produced under Raimi’s 

production shingle, Ghost House Pictures (which mostly churns 

out films in the 30 Days of Night, The Boogeyman, and The Grudge 

franchises). Gone is any sort of hand-tooled ingenuity or reckless 

disregard for the safety of the actors — the Raimi films, with 

their Three Stooges-inspired violence and a tendency to put star 

15

FILM REVIEWS 

Bruce Campbell through the wringer without the benefit of a 

stuntman, often had more in common with the Jackass movies 

than your typical horror film — replaced with photo-realistic 

gore, CGI effects, and a cobalt and gunmetal gray color palette. In 

other words, the film is slick-looking and hits its marks, and 

when a possessed character begins masticating a wine glass, 

shards of glass poking through their esophagus as they swallow, 

it’s genuinely disgusting. As it is when another character has a 

cheese grater raked across their calf, and yet again when 

someone has one of their eyeballs sucked out of their skull. Is it 

scary, though? Viewers' mileage will vary, but the more important 

question is whether any of this is especially fun. The answer, 

regrettably, is no. 

Evil Dead Rise is under no obligation to match the punch-drunk 

energy of the Raimi films — honestly, good luck even trying — but 

its absence does underscore just how generic and kind of joyless 

this all is. It’s yet another well-lit tour of an abattoir. The sisterly 

angst and anxiety over Beth becoming a mother are only 

introduced to give assorted possessed characters something to 

taunt the living over — although the latter does allow the film to 

replicate the Ripley and Newt dynamic with Beth and Kassie, 

complete with lifting chunks of James Horner’s iconic Aliens 

score for its action finale. Nor is there much inspiration in the 

high-rise setting: the earthquake knocks out the power and cell 

reception, and takes out the elevator and stairs so that the 

characters might as well be stranded in the middle of the woods 

for all that the change of venue matters (you’d think some of the 

tenants on the lower floors might try and investigate all the 

shotgun blasts). Instead, Evil Dead Rise mostly gets its kicks by 

sneaking Easter Eggs into the film, some of which are more 

thoughtful (a gardener’s truck in the parking garage is attributed 

to Dr. Fonda’s Tree Surgeon, a simultaneous nod to the 

prominence of chainsaws in the franchise, malicious trees, and 

even the actress Bridget Fonda who cameos in 1993’s Army of 

Darkness) than others (Sullivan randomly repeating one of 

Campbell’s catchphrases by telling a deadite “come get some” 

before blasting it with a shotgun). 

If there’s a saving grace to the film, it’s Sutherland’s performance. 

An Australian performer, like nearly everyone else in the cast 

(watching all the actors fighting a losing battle with their 

American accents is often more diverting than the story), the 

actress best known for TV’s Vikings does some of the best 

physical acting in recent memory. A tall, spindly beauty in a red 

Farrah Fawcett blowout, the actress — who’s the first to be taken 

by the evil spirit and is ostensibly the primary antagonist — 

spends the film alternating between ramrod rigidity and 

contorting her body in inhuman angles, at all times wearing a 

deranged perma-rictus (the actress spends much of the film 

staring into a peephole lens, the fisheye effect only further 

distorting her face). In a film where everyone and everything is 

so dreadfully grim, Sutherland, finding a middle ground between 

Mommie Dearest and Joker, comes the closest to capturing the 

anarchic spirit of the films in whose footsteps it follows. Why so 

serious, indeed? — ANDREW DIGNAN 

DIRECTOR: Lee Cronin; CAST: Lily Sullivan, Alyssa Sutherland, 

Morgan Davies; DISTRIBUTOR: Warner Bros. Pictures; IN 

THEATERS: April 21; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 37 min. 

16

FILM REVIEWS 

TRENQUE LAUQUEN 

Laura Citarella 

“Trenque Lauquen, Argentinean director Laura Citarella’s third 

feature, shares with that film not just its production outfit El 

Pampero Cine, but also two of the film’s leads, Laura Paredes 

and Elisa Carricajo. (Llinás also has a producer credit.) Granted, 

four hours is a ways off from fourteen, and instead of Llinás’ 

intentionally incomplete stories, Trenque Lauquen comprises 

elliptical fragments which do, finally, offer some semblance of 

unity. But it is characteristic of Citarella’s approach that many 

of the film’s chapters are told from the perspectives of different 

characters and vary wildly in tone. ” — LAWRENCE GARCIA 

[Published as part of InRO’s NYFF 2022 coverage.] 

DIRECTOR: Laura Citarella; CAST: Laura Paredes, Ezequiel 

Pierri, Rafael Spregelburd; DISTRIBUTOR: The Cinema Guild; IN 


GUY RITCHIE’S THE COVENANT 

Guy Ritchie 

Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant notably marks the first feature that 

has included the eponymous filmmaker’s name in the title itself, 

a rather curious development as the film is the least Guy 

Ritchie-esque movie in his entire filmography. Indeed, the final 

product plays more like the director’s attempt at aping the style 

of Peter Berg, a slab of right-wing militaristic propaganda that 

manages the miracle of making Lone Survivor look subtle in 

comparison. Perhaps an even more stunning discovery is that 

The Covenant is entirely a work of fiction, its far-flung story of 

the brotherhood’s bonds forged in the hells of combat so 

relentlessly cliched that it seemed all but a lock for 

based-on-a-true-story status. That makes the script, courtesy of 

Ritchie and co-writers Marn Davies and Ivan Atkinson, nearly 

impossible to forgive in both its mind-numbing predictability and 

— to be quite frank — outright stupidity. 

Jake Gyllenhaal, in pure paycheck mode, stars as John Kinley, a 

Sergeant Major of the American Army who, in the year 2018, is 

stationed in Afghanistan, where he and the various members of 

his troop are hunting down Taliban-deployed IEDs. The various 

soldiers under Kinley’s command are introduced with on-screen 

text, and in such quick succession that it is all but impossible to 

make heads-or-tails of who is who. Not that Ritchie is remotely 

interested in these men, as most aren’t even afforded a single 

character trait — although, in fairness, one of them does like to 

eat and talk about food. Entering this tight-knit group is Ahmed 

(Dar Salim), a no-nonsense Afghani interpreter with whom Kinley 

forms an eventual bond because they are both stubborn and, 

damn it, they have to respect that in one another. But a raid on 

an IED manufacturing plant soon leaves the entire troop dead, 

save for Kinley and Ahmed, who must travel by foot over 

treacherous terrain to reach base as they are relentlessly hunted 

by the Taliban. 

It’s at the halfway point in the film that Kinley becomes injured to 

the point of catatonia, with Ahmed dragging — and, with the 

eventual aid of a wagon, wheeling — Kinley’s lifeless body over 50 

miles to safety, an impossible feat that the film devotes less than 

fifteen minutes to detailing, opting for a series of montages (set 

to a bombastic and ultimately oppressive score courtesy of 

Christopher Benstead) that robs the movie of anything 

resembling tension while also completely neutering Ahmed’s 

Herculean task. Cut ahead seven weeks, and Kinley discovers 

from the safety of his home in California that Ahmed is #1 Most 

Wanted on the Taliban’s kill list, a fact that has forced the 

interpreter, along with his wife and newborn baby, into hiding. 

The remainder of The Covenant focuses on Kinley’s attempts to 

locate Ahmed and his family and secure their safe passage to 

America, with Sergeant Major ultimately traveling to Afghanistan 

once more in the name of brotherhood, because, of course. 

The film’s first hour is certainly no great shakes, but it feels like a 

downright masterpiece in comparison to the dire second half, 

which mostly consists of Gyllenhaal delivering a lot of 

long-winded monologues about the importance of paying back 

debts while doing his best to look as tough as possible, which 

amounts to a dedicated monotone delivery and a catalog of 

dead-eyed stares. Much like Ritchie’s last feature, 

Mission:Impossible-wannabe Operation Fortune, The Covenant is 

completely devoid of any of the stylistic tics that once marked 

the director’s work. Some might view this as a sign of 

maturation, but such an argument is DOA when the alternative is 

just some shaky cam and a palette of browns and grays that 

17

FILM REVIEWS 

have been bleached and color-corrected within an inch of their 

life. Oh wait, Ritchie does this one thing where the camera slowly 

zooms in on someone when they are speaking, then it slowly — or 

sometimes even quickly — zooms out again within the same 

shot. Spielberg, take notes. Jokes aside, the director utilizes this 

move to the point of unintentional comedy, repeated ad nauseam 

across the film’s runtime. 

Faring no better is Gyllenhaal, who delivers what might be the 

worst performance of his career, an approximation of machismo 

that feels forced by half. Salim at least brings some much-need 

gravitas to a sorely under-written role, but there is no depth to be 

found in the characterization, simply archetypes that exist in 

service of some good old-fashioned, “America, fuck yeah!” But 

wait, maybe there is actually more to this movie. After all, 

on-screen text at the film’s end states that Afghani interpreters 

who were abandoned upon the U.S.’s withdrawal from the country 

in 2021 are still being hunted by members of the Taliban, who see 

them as traitors. Perhaps Ritchie is attempting to shed light upon 

a horrifying consequence of American imperialism and the 

military-industrial complex, using and disposing of those 

individuals whose lives the U.S. was supposedly there to protect. 

Scratch that: the end credits also include lots of photos of 

nameless — and in most cases, faceless — American soldiers 

posing with who we are to assume are Afghani interpreters. 

There are even a few smiles here and there. That this all scans 

just as profoundly hollow and borderline insulting as everything 

else that preceded it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. 

Indeed, there is nary one to be found in this particular Covenant, 

Guy Ritchie’s or otherwise. — STEVEN WARNER 

DIRECTOR: Guy Ritchie; CAST: Jake Gyllenhaal, Dar Salim, 

Alexander Ludwig, Antony Starr; DISTRIBUTOR: United Artists; IN 


CHEVALIER 

Stephen Williams 

In July 2020, The New York Times published an article by 

composer and music composition professor Marcos Balter that 

criticized the notion of calling Joseph Bologne “Black Mozart.” A 

versatile genius and all-time classical music great in his own 

right, Bologne could do better than be reduced in comparison to 

an “arbitrary white standard.” Director Stephen Williams’ latest 

outing, Chevalier, opens with a concert scene written to 

essentially argue that very thing. Bologne, embodied dutifully by 

Kelvin Harrison Jr., saunters onstage after Mozart concludes a 

song, asking to join him in a duet. He promptly steals the show, 

to the crowd’s amazement and Mozart’s consternation. As biopics 

go, Chevalier isn’t particularly revolutionary stuff, but there’s a 

sincerity in its desire to function as a character study and a 

celebration that pushes it past flatly generic territory. 

Bologne is the son of a wealthy, white French planter and an 

enslaved Black woman. His father dumps him in an academy at a 

young age, demanding his son pursue excellence while 

abandoning him and the disgrace that he represented. By the 

time Harrison Jr. steps into Bologne’s shoes, he’s already a 

burgeoning virtuoso and friend of Marie Antoinette (Lucy 

Boynton), his sophistication a shield and his arrogance 

notorious. When he sets his sights on the vacant conductor 

position at the Paris Opera, he taps Marie-Josephine de 

Montalembert (Samara Weaving) to sing in the lead role. 

Meanwhile, revolution is brewing in France, and Bologne learns 

that, while his gifts may elevate him, they aren’t enough to earn 

him equal treatment. 

Chevalier is fittingly operatic in style, its Paris setting elaborately 

curated, the exteriors sun-drenched, interiors candlelit. The 

soundtrack kicks in on cue, and the penchant for rotational slow 

pans creates an atmosphere that, while never feeling prestige, 

has an occasional woozy elegance. And everyone seems to be 

having fun in their roles, the period characters always 

immaculately dressed, trading barbs Bridgerton-style. But at the 

end of the day, Chevalier really is a star vehicle. Bologne is the 

only character the script cares to fully realize, and Harrison Jr. 

reliably commands in the role. Whether Bologne is poised, 

pensive, or pained, Harrison Jr. is diligent in his performance, his 

18

FILM REVIEWS 

motions deliberate, the range in his voice a weapon. It’s a 

tightrope act that could almost be confused for clunky, with how 

overt the performative intent can feel, yet it works, both because 

Harrison Jr. can be charismatic as hell and because his 

approach rings true to this title character: a talented man 

embroiled in internal scrutiny in an effort to exist in a world that 

reviles him. Bologne is a difficult genius, blessed to be singular, 

cursed to be solitary. 

Throughout all of this, the specter of the French Revolution 

hovers. Characters remark that France is changing — proles are 

talking about democracy, women are talking about equality, 

Black Parisians are publicly visible. Chevalier ties Bologne’s 

struggles and ultimate self-actualization with the Revolution’s 

radical, liberating promise. It’s certainly not the strongest 

subtextual incorporation, perhaps because these threads don’t 

significantly connect until it’s time for his climactic middle finger 

to the established order that wronged him. Because of this, the 

ending reeks of Hollywood-ified great man theory veneration, the 

sort that takes viewers out of the film and reminds them that 

they’re watching a par-for-the-course, crowd-pleasing biopic. 

Then the credits roll, and we learn that once Napoleon took 

power, most of Bologne’s works and records were turned to ash. 

That’s when Chevalier’s raison d’être becomes clear: crafting a 

reliably rousing tale about a long-forgotten figure deserving of a 

myth to enshrine his legend. — TRAVIS DESHONG 

DIRECTOR: Stephen Williams; CAST: Kelvin Harrison Jr., Samara 

Weaving, Lucy Boynton; DISTRIBUTOR: Searchlight Pictures; IN 


GHOSTED 

Dexter Fletcher 

Dexter Fletcher’s Ghosted is a high-concept romantic action 

comedy with movie stars and a decent budget that, were this 

2005, would presumably have the potential to be both a hit and a 

tabloid item, in the vein of something similar to Mr. and Mrs. 

Smith (minus the whole meta matrimony stuff, of course). Now, 

these movies still get made despite social media claims to the 

contrary, but they’re nearly always relegated to streaming and, 

just as often, complete garbage. Fletcher’s film, then, isn’t really a 

throwback to the summer movies of the 2000s so much as Apple 

TV+’s foray into an emergent genre best described as “Netflix 

drivel.” 

Reuniting two of the stars of Netflix and the Russo brothers’ The 

Gray Man, Ghosted sets up a contentious meet-cute between Cole 

(Chris Evans) and Sadie (Ana De Armas), quaintly orchestrated in 

the farmer’s market where Cole sells his family’s wares. The pair 

spend a whole day together, culminating in a sex scene that 

reminds why comparing a film to music videos used to be 

pejorative. But afterward, Sadie vanishes, leaving all of Cole’s 

many text messages unread. As Cole’s hip younger sister explains 

— for audiences unacquainted with the modern parlance of the 

film’s title — she has ghosted him. Her reasons are made clear 

once Cole stalks her to London and is promptly kidnapped by 

supervillains: Sadie is an über-competent CIA assassin. She 

saves her one-night stand from his demise, and Cole is 

subsequently dragged into a half-baked bit of international 

espionage. 

OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN 

Rebecca Zlotowski 

“Other People’s Children is told entirely without the expected, more dramatic (louder) moments. Music cues rise or cut in earlier 

than expected, a whole scene can fade to black, or a conversation won’t be audible until it’s in the aftermath of conflict. This 

strategy gives the characters privacy, and lends more weight to the subtleties of performing reflection rather than action.” — 

SARAH WILLIAMS [Published as part of InRO’s Sundance 2023 coverage.] 

DIRECTOR: Rebecca Zlotowski; CAST: Virginie Efira, Roschdy Zem, Chiara Mastroianni; DISTRIBUTOR: Music Box Films; IN 


19

FILM REVIEWS 

Theoretically, this isn’t an awful setup. After all, horny men falling 

into spy hijinks is a Hitchcock staple. Even the undesirability of 

the two leads shouldn’t be much of a problem: yes, Cole behaves 

like a needy, desperate creep and Sadie kills dozens of men 

without a second thought, but a good rom-com can make easy 

work of overlooking the most tragic character flaws. The magic 

of the genre is often in how sexual tension and charm overcome 

the irrationality of a potential relationship and its circumstances. 

Evidently, the filmmaker and his leads are simply not up to that 

task. Fletcher directs with a listlessness befitting 

cinematographer Salvatore Totino’s flat images, composing his 

shots without creativity or even seemingly any attempt at style. 

Evans and De Armas, in return, meet the director and the 

material at that level — these are objectively sexy people who 

have proven charming in the past, but it’s impossible to find 

chemistry in their sleepy performances. Evans’ work here, which 

consists of half-assed charming smiles and tossed-off quips, 

makes the case that if Marvel hasn’t outright destroyed cinema, it 

has at least drained the actor of his remaining personality and 

energy. De Armas, meanwhile, never seems comfortable in her 

role, even as she plays her third spy character in the past three 

years. She’s as lackluster with the film’s dialogue as she is with 

its action scenes, a far, far cry from her movie-stealing 

performance in No Time to Die. And were it not for the film’s third 

parties loudly and constantly pointing it out, the sexual tension 

supposedly bubbling beneath their bickering would go completely 

unnoticed. 

On the other hand, half of the time Ghosted doesn’t even seem 

interested in the rom or com of the romantic comedy it’s failing 

to sell, and instead gets too wrapped up in its lame spy thriller 

MacGuffin hunt. In fact, there’s far more action in the film than 

there is sex or kissing, and it’s all somehow even less exciting 

than the romance, as many of these setpieces are just blurs of 

CGI and stunt doubles set to a series of needle drops 

indistinguishable from the playlist at a middle school dance. One 

extended car chase sequence is set to “My Sharona,” while, for 

some reason, the climactic shootout makes use of the egregious 

“Uptown Funk.” But the worst offender is a brawl on an airplane 

set to Jet’s “Are You Gonna Be My Girl?” Interesting, because 

Pitchfork once reviewed a Jet album with nothing except a video 

of a chimp pissing in its own mouth. Ghosted inspires roughly the 

same enthusiasm. — CHRIS MELLO 

DIRECTOR: Dexter Fletcher; CAST: Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, 

Adrien Brody, Mike Moh; DISTRIBUTOR: Apple TV+; STREAMING: 

April 21; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 56 min. 

PLAN 75 

Chie Hayakawa 

As its title would have it, Plan 75 has a broad purview over the 

implementation and implications of its alternate, near-future. In 

this future, set in Japan, citizens 75 years and above are not only 

permitted, but actively encouraged to opt for euthenasia as a 

20

FILM REVIEWS 

way of alleviating the nation’s aging problem. The state-funded 

euthanasia program, curtly titled “Plan 75,” is neat, sumptuous, 

and deeply professional: for the price of free, and even with a 

thousand US dollars as monetary incentive, participants enjoy a 

few tele-counseling sessions (capped at fifteen minutes each), a 

couple of warm “deluxe” meals, and, on D-Day itself, the dignity of 

performing one last service to their country by donning a small 

gas mask at one of the designated centers and slipping slowly 

into quiet, untroubled sleep. But despite its sociological 

dimensions, Chie Hayawaka’s debut is a deeply personal study of 

those affected by the program, whether as provider, patient, or 

loved one. Plan 75 marks its relevance with a masterful and 

well-calibrated narrative of the individuals who live and persist 

within, and often despite, the workings of dystopia. 

Belying the courtesy of many a consult between management 

and prospective candidates is a clinical valuation of life and 

purpose. The bulk of applicants who sign themselves up for 

euthanasia are retired, live alone, and do not have or see their 

children much, and so are discharged by and large from purpose. 

This statistic makes up the starting point of Plan 75, but it does 

not consign the film itself to clinicality. If anything, the stoic, 

weathered faces of the elderly serve as ciphers for… it’s anyone’s 

guess — distress, resignation, humiliation, and perhaps a 

smattering of pride may color their cheeks as they make the final 

arrangements, either in solitude or with friends. Michi (Chieko 

Baisho), a septuagenarian recently laid off from her job as a hotel 

cleaner, contemplates doing so only after her landlord evicts her 

and she cannot find alternate accommodation. Hiromo (Hayato 

Isomura), a young Plan 75 bureaucrat, encounters his estranged 

uncle filing an application to die. Their pathways barely intersect, 

but underscoring them both is a pathos that shirks histrionics for 

quiet honesty. 

This honesty is further bolstered by Hayakawa’s decision not to 

mount an overly theoretical examination of Plan 75’s macabre 

cultural consensus. Such an examination could work elsewhere, 

perhaps, but implanting it here would likely risk caricaturing the 

motivations and lived experiences of its characters. Instead, the 

film shores up their humanity against the detached gaze of 

social engineering stretched to its utilitarian conclusion, even 

depicting the travails of Maria (Stefanie Arianne), a Filipino 

caretaker who signs up to dispose the bodies and possessions of 

the dead as a means to support herself and her ailing young 

daughter. Amidst these otherwise unformed portraits of a moral 

epidemic come two sobering realizations: that collective 

loneliness easily cascades into conformity, and that this 

conformity is closer to home than expected. Inspired in part by 

the real-life massacre of nineteen care-home residents in 2016 

and the comments made by Yūsuke Narita — an economist and 

Yale University professor — on the prospect of mass suicide, Plan 

75 may proffer too few satisfying resolutions for some and too 

casual a fictionalization of contemporary demographic 

projections for others, but its humanist renderings of an 

otherwise apathetic world are accomplished and deeply moving. 

— MORRIS YANG 

DIRECTOR: Chie Hayakawa; CAST: Chieko Baishô, Hayato 

Isomura, Stefanie Arianne; DISTRIBUTOR: KimStim; IN 


CARMEN 

Benjamin Millepied 

A beguiling amalgam of classic opera sensibility, modern dance 

performance, and Badlands-esque, lovers-on-the-run romantic 

tragedy, Benjamin Millepied’s Carmen is a deeply idiosyncratic 

and electrifying film that nonetheless struggles to locate a 

governing artistic cogency. Very loosely inspired by Georges 

Bizet’s seminal opera, Millepied’s film takes more spiritual than 

material inspiration from that work, recalculating its narrative to 

befit our present age. In an intoxicating opening sequence, a 

woman dances on an empty stage set in the middle of a barren 

and dusty Mexican desert. A car penetrates the scene, two 

gun-toting men hopping out to demand the whereabouts of a 

she. The woman defiantly finishes her dance, and is promptly 

shot in the head. Nearby, Carmen (Melissa Barrera) hears the 

gunshots, understands her mother is dead, and continues on her 

trek to and across the U.S. border. Meanwhile, Aidan (Paul 

Mescal), a marine who seems to be struggling to adjust to 

non-deployment, heads out into the dark to commence his first 

evening of volunteer border patrol duty. When a gung-ho buddy 

reveals his motivations to be purely homicidal, Aidan intervenes, 

saving Carmen’s life and tethering the two as marked fugitives. 

And so, off they go, headed to Los Angeles, where Carmen hopes 

to find freedom and a connection to her past. 

21

FILM REVIEWS 

impressive technical work at minimum, and suggests Millepied 

understands how to use the visual medium to both enhance and 

coalesce with the art of dance. As a whole, however, coherence is 

somewhat wanting. Take one of the film’s final such numbers, 

which finds Aidan in an underground, bare-knuckle brawl in a 

desperate bid to earn money. Britell’s score here moves into 

decidedly more propulsive territory, with Aidan engaging in 

bloody, brutal melee and a circle of observers dancing in a kind 

of modified krump style, all while The D.O.C. (as the evening’s de 

facto emcee) gravelly raps, “Beat his ass, get him / Kill his ass, kill 

him.” It’s a thrilling sequence in its own right, but one that feels 

somewhat inorganic, not in any kind of artistic or aesthetic 

conversation with the film’s earlier dance numbers. Still, modern 

cinema would be a better place were more directors to take risks 

the way Millepied does — though an even bolder film would have 

dispensed with dialogue entirely — and the director ends his film 

with its most moving moment yet. Mescal at last joins Barrera in 

dance, his limitations conjuring the profound, flawed humanity at 

the root of Carmen, earning its tragedy and signing the film off in 

an absolute place of grace. — LUKE GORHAM 

DIRECTOR: Benjamin Millepied; CAST: Melissa Barrera, Paul 

Mescal, Elsa Pataky, Rossy de Palma; DISTRIBUTOR: Sony 

Pictures Classics; IN THEATERS: April 21; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 56 min. 

DRY GROUND BURNING 

Joanna Pimenta & Adirley Queirós 

“The social and political environment Queirós and Pimenta are 

depicting certainly demands this wide-ranging 

experimentation. Indeed, I have never seen a film quite like Dry 

Ground Burning. At the same time, it often feels like multiple 

films in competition, different filmic approaches stitched 

together and, to some extent, rejecting the graft. This refusal 

to form a whole, the inability to ‘get the picture as one would in 

a more expository documentary, is absolutely endemic to Dry 

Ground Burning and its fundamental project. This means that, 

to an extent, usual criteria don’t apply here.” — MICHAEL 

SICINSKI [Published as part of InRO’s TIFF 2022 coverage.] 

DIRECTOR: Joana Pimenta & Adirley Queirós; CAST: —; 

DISTRIBUTOR: Grasshopper Film; IN THEATERS: April 14; 

RUNTIME: 2 hr. 33 min. 

THE POPE’S EXORCIST 

Julius Avery 

Director Julius Avery’s The Pope’s Exorcist announces its 

particular tenor right from the opening scene, as Father Gabriele 

Amorth (Russell Crowe) arrives by moped to the site of a possible 

demonic possession, his black robe billowing in the breeze, and 

ends with the brutal shooting of a pig, its blood and brains 

splattered across the faces of the unfortunate witnesses. 

Marketing material for The Pope’s Exorcist have made the movie 

look deadly serious, a slight sheen of prestige to be found in the 

presence of Academy Award-winner Crowe. Yet the final product 

is anything but, a tale of dastardly demonic derring-do with 

tongue planted firmly in cheek. That this is “based on true 

events” is par for the course for these types of films, but Father 

Gabriele Amorth was indeed a real person, and the official 

exorcist of the Diocese of Rome from 1986 until his retirement in 

2000. The Pope’s Exorcist is even adapted from two separate 

memoirs detailing Amorth’s experiences in the demonic 

23

FILM REVIEWS 

possession game, and one has to wonder how he would react to a 

movie that features him repeatedly taking swigs from a flask and 

washing his sweaty pits with holy water — pious as he is, he does 

at least say a Hail Mary before that last transgression. So yes, this 

priest is a bit of a rapscallion, bellowing “Cuckoo!” while walking 

around Vatican City and chasing after large groups of nuns, all in 

the name of a laugh. But there’s nothing funny about evil, and 

Amorth is appalled when a new group of senior advisors within 

the Church try to tell him how to do his job. The heartless 

bureaucrats are slashing jobs while refuting the existence of evil, 

a curious detail to include in a film set in 1987, although one 

would be hard-pressed to determine the exact era, so 

unconcerned is the end product in such trifling details. (But hey, 

The Pope’s Exorcist is woke to the evils of corporate capitalism!) 

The Pope himself (Franco Nero), however, is on Amorth’s side, and 

there are certainly worse people to have in your corner. 

Meanwhile, in an abbey in the countryside of Spain, an American 

family consisting of mom Julie (Alex Essoe) and kids Amy (Laurel 

Marsden) and Henry (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney) have arrived to 

commence construction on a new home and start a new life after 

the car crash death of their beloved patriarch a year earlier. 

Henry was present for the event, and was so traumatized by what 

he saw that he hasn’t spoken a word since; this tracks when the 

film abruptly flashes back to that fateful night for a single shot 

from Henry’s POV that consists of the father with a piece of rebar 

impaled through his skull. Again, nice touch. Turns out, this abbey 

has a storied history of evil, and it isn’t long before the 

construction crew has inadvertently awakened a long-dormant 

demonic entity that immediately possesses the young and 

emotionally prone Henry. Cut to the young boy honking boobs and 

smashing heads though porcelain sinks, all while repeating the 

word “fuck” more times than Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. (Bonus 

points for a film concerning exorcisms that is actually rated-R 

and leans heavily into that lane.) Amorth is soon called to the 

manor, and discovers that this possession may be the real deal, 

especially after the demon discusses long-buried secrets and 

sins from the Father’s past. He teams up with a local priest by the 

name of Esquibel (Daniel Zovatto), because dude could use the 

help, especially when it’s discovered that somehowboth this 

demon and the property are linked to the Church itself, ultimately 

exposing its attempt to cover-up its role in the Spanish 

Inquisition(!). No wonder Amorth is so sweaty. 

The degree to which The Pope’s Exorcist attempts to be both 

reverent and critical of the Catholic Church is as compellingly 

ridiculous as everything else on display, a story of how individual 

goodness can triumph over systemic rot. But lest you think the 

movie sounds more serious or profound than it actually is, Avery 

is not the least bit interested in anything resembling depth or 

authenticity, and thank God for that. Every facet of the 

production is consistent in its intentional key of borderline camp, 

from Crowe’s voracious scenery-chewing to the cheap-looking 

production design to the SyFy Channel-level visual effects. 

There’s simply no denying the certain charm of watching an 

obvious rubber doll with the voice of Ralph Ineson refer to a 

priest as a “panty sniffer.” And then there’s the film’s climactic 

showdown, which sees Father Esquibel throw a cross to Amorth 

but with the holy relic meant to mimic a gun. Avery somehow 

even manages to sneak some gratuitous female nudity into the 

proceedings, because of course he does, and also leaves the 

door open for 199 — yes, 199! — possible sequels, with Amorth 

commenting that a replacement will be needed somewhere down 

the road. The Pope’s Exorcist is exactly what this stale subgenre 

needed — a blast of gory, goofy fun in a desert of dire solemnity. 

Personally, this critic will take ten more entries minimum, so long 

as they include even more scenes of the Pope projectilevomiting 

blood into people’s faces. Thank God, thank the devil, 

thank the demons — this movie is good. — STEVEN WARNER 

DIRECTOR: Julius Avery; CAST: Russell Crowe, Daniel Zovatto, 

Alex Essoe, Franco Nero; DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures; IN 


SOMEWHERE IN QUEENS 

Ray Romano 

After Jerry Seinfeld and his "What's the deal?" color commentary 

on the silliness of the quotidian struck gold in Seinfeld, 

comedians started to habitually appear in comedies and sitcoms, 

popping up like dandelions, most of it harmless. But rarely was 

anyone or anything as incisively irreverent or eccentric or 

intelligent as what Seinfeld and Larry David did. Everybody Loves 

Raymond, starring Ray Romano as a version of himself but in 

Long Island instead of Queens, is one of these unremarkable 

shows that, nonetheless, makes for pleasurable background 

viewing, a pleasant concatenation of a decade’s 

24

FILM REVIEWS 

worth of episodes seeping into each other, auto-playing, the 

show's regularities — Ray screwing up; his mother barging in 

bellowing purported wisdom; his Lurch of a brother maundering 

through the door, filling the frame, and mumbling morosely; the 

perplexed look of Ray's wife Debra's face as she witnesses the 

wake of Ray's idiocy, and the way her voice raises slightly with a 

loving frustration, jokes eliciting canned laughter and 

punctuating the drone of familiar voices enmeshed into genial 

vagueness — like tiny oscillations mingling in a white noise 

machine outside your therapist's office door. 

Raymond keeps to the tradition of classic family dysfunction like 

The Honeymooners and All in the Family, minus the indelible 

characters and sharp insight on a plethora of cultural and human 

complexities; its humor is pedestrian and broad, yet there's also 

nothing to outright dislike. It's simply not daring enough. 

Following in those footsteps, Somewhere in Queens, which 

Romano co-wrote, directed, and in which he stars, is likewise 

wholly unremarkable, a true case of writing what you know, 

playing it safe (or, perhaps, he’s an auteur?). But that's also kind 

of fine because it's at least the kind of endearing comedy we 

used to get before everything was marketed to pre-teens. 

Somewhere in Queens’ writing can, architecturally and verbally, be 

sloppy, and the supporting characters aren't all that colorful, but 

there's also a genuine sensitivity to familial turmoil and 

characters of a certain age reconciling their anxieties. Romano 

plays Leo Russo, the kind of guy who asks the videographer at a 

wedding to cut him out of the video, a real middle-class mook. 

Dominick (Tony Lo Bianco), the Russo family patriarch, owns and 

operates the construction company that, naturally, employs the 

rest of the family. Leo, the less-loved son, reports to his 

self-important brother, Frank (Sebastian Manisalco). Leo is 

profoundly petrified that his wife, Angela (Laurie Metcalf), 

difficult though she may be, will realize that he's a schmuck and 

leave. Metcalf always proves reliably wonderful, elevating 

everything she's in, from early TV appearances on Roseanne to 

the lunatic mother of a lunatic son in Scream 2 to even a woman 

with a dilapidated sense of reality who lives in a ramshackle 

house in Nowhere, USA and who tells an amnesia-stricken Tony 

Shaloub that they married and then proceeds to demean him in 

her Emmy-nominated episode of Monk. Here, Angela is a cancer 

survivor, and her abrasive pugnaciousness makes her tough to 

love, but Leo loves her nonetheless. Their son Matthew (Jacob 

Ward), also known as "Sticks" thanks to his lanky legs, is shy, 

what you might call awkward, but he’s also a freak on the 

basketball court. And lest we forget, ‘70s character actor Lo 

Bianco pops up, which is worth a ticket in itself. Admittedly, in all 

this there’s an inchoate confusion to the glut of performances, 

from Metcalf's stylized histrionics to the minimalism of Romano’s 

work, but it doesn’t irk too much. Movies can be messy. 

Romano took a while to learn how to act. The early seasons of 

Raymond are stifled by his staid, at times almost somnolent 

25

FILM REVIEWS 

CHERRY 

Sophie Galibert 

“There’s also a certain level of formal stylization at play here, as 

Galibert and cinematographer Damien Steck infuse the largely 

naturalistic milieu with subtle long takes and an expansive frame 

that allows the performers to fully perform. There are virtually no 

closeups or choppy shot-reverse-shot cutting here; instead, 

scenes play out almost in real-time, with conversations allowed 

to ebb and flow and detour. Other flourishes likewise resonate: 

Cherry’s visit to her dance troupe involves an actual performance 

of their entire elaborate routine, while recurring transitional 

scenes show Cherry roller skating blissfully to and fro her various 

destinations — it would be an obvious stretch to call these 

Ozu-ian pillow shots, but they do almost function in the same 

way. ” — DANIEL GORMAN [Published as part of InRO’s Tribeca 2022 

coverage.] 

DIRECTOR: Sophie Galibert; CAST: Alex Trewhitt, Hannah Alline, 

Dan Schultz; DISTRIBUTOR: Entertainment Squad; IN THEATERS 

& STREAMING: April 21; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 16 min. 

presence; but like Jerry on Seinfeld, the show needs a straight 

man around whom the tumult and ridiculousness of the other, 

odder characters can wrap like wobbly whorls. Romano is 

significantly better in the later seasons, and here, perhaps 

enlivened and inspired by Metcalf's stellar work in a tough role, is 

actually quite good, subtly woebegone and tender. And in a scene 

where he asks the girl who just broke his son's heart if she can 

wait three more weeks, just until the basketball season is over, to 

end things, Romano finds a kind of vulnerability, a 

do-anything-for-your-kids earnestness that lands. Likely, this 

represents his best performance outside of The Irishman, in 

which the Queens-bred funnyman plays the modest but 

important role of a mob lawyer, underplaying the role but with a 

spark of life in his step, laced with the pride and pleasure he 

takes in his work. 

Unfortunately, Romano proves a much better actor than director, 

shooting scenes with a mundanity that makes it tough to analyze 

because no particular shots are to any degree memorable. There 

are movies that are a thrill to write about — good films, maybe 

even (gasp!) great ones, bad ones for sure — but the mediocre 

ones, the ones that fail to leave an impression, those tend to be 

the worst. Somewhere in Queens is one of those films. There are 

no major qualms to document, and the viewing experience is 

likely to be better than the reflection period for most viewers. It’s 

a fine enough feature to take your parents to so that they can 

reminisce about the golden days of the Raymond '90s, but there 

simply isn’t enough here to expect anyone to remember much of 

this past the day after. — GREG CWIK 

DIRECTOR: Ray Romano; CAST: Ray Romano, Laurie Metcalf, 

Sebastian Maniscalco; DISTRIBUTOR: Lionsgate / Roadside 

Attactions; IN THEATERS: April 21; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 47 min. 

TO CATCH A KILLER 

Damián David Szifron 

Arriving just 70 seconds into the film, the inciting incident of 

Damián David Szifron’s To Catch a Killer might break some kind of 

informal record for expediency. It’s New Year’s Eve in Baltimore 

(with Montreal none-too-convincingly filling in for Charm City), 

and revelers congregate and take selfies at sprawling rooftop 

parties against the backdrop of fireworks. Without warning, one 

of them collapses to the ground, the whiz of a far off gunshot 

muffled by the pumping club music. The same thing happens 

again at a balcony hot tub party a few blocks away. Then again at 

a nearby outdoor skating rink. A spree killer armed with a high 

powered rifle in an elevated location is indiscriminately opening 

fire on people, and by the time the shooting is over, 29 are dead, 

with the suspect having rigged his perch with explosives and 

escaping amidst the chaos. Into the fray rushes beat cop Eleanor 

(Shailene Woodley), who runs up a dozen flights of stairs without 

an oxygen mask, collapsing at the smoldering, smoke-filled crime 

scene, putting herself and her fellow officers in danger, although 

not before silently signaling to Special Agent Lammark (Ben 

Mendelsohn) to test the apartment’s toilet for trace evidence. 

Impulsive and inexperienced — Woodley reads as even younger 

than her actual age of 31 here — Eleanor is of dubious 

qualifications to play a central role in the investigation that’s to 

follow, but Lammark admires her instincts. She’s got spunk, and 

he loves spunk. 

The random nature of the victims and staggering body count 

calls to mind the Route 91 Festival massacre, and the Las Vegas 

26

FILM REVIEWS 

mass shooting is indeed name-checked here, as are Covid 

lockdowns and political extremist groups like the Three 

Percenters. All of which is to say, the film is attempting to set its 

story amidst our current and endless national debate about gun 

violence and a polarized population where angry white men are 

isolated and radicalized. The staging of the shooting is arguably 

in poor taste — the film is attempting to be released in a week 

that doesn’t coincide with a high-profile mass shooting, a near 

impossible task — but all the same, it’s brutally effective in 

conveying the pervasive fear of being gunned down in a public 

place. To Catch a Killer moves between a series of locations 

bustling with humanity, allowing just enough time to scan the 

frame in anticipation of whose head might explode in a red mist 

— Szifron repeats this motif a few times throughout the film, 

even in scenes where there is no immediate violence, creating an 

unnerving Pavlovian effect. The sequence then concludes with 

an evocative shot where forensics teams located around the city 

trace the trajectory of the shooter using green lasers, all pointing 

toward the same high-rise window just as it explodes with 

comic-book villain flourish. 

The investigation is led by Lammark, a sour, paranoid G-man who 

speaks in rah-rah platitudes — the film attempts to 

humanize the character by giving him a doting husband, which it 

cynically treats as a “gotcha” twist. Stymied by the mayor’s office 

which refuses to lock down the city out of fear of losing a multibillion-dollar 

development deal, and penned in by his D.C. bosses 

who second-guess his methods, Lammark finds himself on a 

short leash and unsure of who he can even trust; that is, until he 

overhears Eleanor describing the killer in language better suited 

for a Tumblr post than a bullpen — “Evil is cutting off a bird’s 

wing just to see what happens; this guy’s swatting mosquitoes'' — 

and takes a shine to her. Highlighting her mental illness, history 

of insubordination, and substance abuse as assets for this case, 

Lammark elevates Eleanor to his small investigative team 

(alongside Babylon’s Jovan Adepo), hoping she’ll be able to 

recognize the scent of another disenfranchised loner before he 

strikes again. It’s a laughable conceit, attempting to recreate the 

Will Graham-Jack Crawford dynamic of Manhunter, only if 

Graham’s prior experience was limited to rousting drunks and 

making coffee. The film frequently has to contort itself simply to 

justify laying the case at the feet of a shaky greenhorn instead 

of, say, an experienced criminal profiler (Woodley, for her part, 

comes across every bit as lost as one would expect, never quite 

tapping into an alleged reservoir of dysfunction and unique 

insight). In the end, the case is broken wide open not by 

27

FILM REVIEWS 

depression as an investigative superpower, but by crossreferencing 

bank records… ya know, boring old police work. 

Ostensibly a dry procedural, the manhunt for a suspect 

converges with a lament for the state of American culture. The 

investigation reveals the way military-grade weapons meant for 

decommissioning trickle down to specialty gun dealerships, and 

the killings themselves only further open up existing fissures 

along racial and political lines; the film goes off on a tangent that 

concludes with a violent shootout in a pharmacy with white 

nationalists that, while thrilling in the moment, is a narrative 

dead-end. Szifron, an Argentine director (whose previous film, 

2014’s Wild Tales, also opened with a shocking act of mass 

violence, although it was played for black comedy there), 

attempts to bring an outsider’s perspective to the material, and 

clearly has more on his mind than just cheap thrills. You can feel 

the film fumbling around for some sort of an explanation for this 

decidedly American phenomenon, but it loses its nerve 

somewhere along the way, abandoning any kind of stinging 

indictment for a wan variation on “hurt people hurt people.” For 

all of its superficial nods to racial profiling and conservative 

news personalities riling up their viewership, the film ultimately 

comes down to a showdown at a farmhouse between the good 

guys and a chatty, only-in-the-movies criminal mastermind who’s 

at all times several steps ahead of his pursuers. No one expects 

a film like this to solve a problem as insidious and culturally 

ingrained as gun violence, but it's still an especially abrupt and 

disappointing reversion to the same old bullshit. It’s all as generic 

as its title implies. — ANDREW DIGNAN 

DIRECTOR: Damián David Szifron; CAST: Shailene Woodley, Ben 

Mendelsohn, Jovan Adepo; DISTRIBUTOR: Vertical; IN 


JUDY BLUME FOREVER 

Davina Pardo & Leah Wolchok 

Since the late 1960s, readers of a certain age have been 

discovering and devouring Judy Blume’s books. Are You There 

God? It’s Me, Margaret, Blume’s breakout middle-grade novel, has 

taken up regular space on library and bookstore shelves since its 

release. That book, and many of the author’s others, has 

operated as the introduction to taboo topics for many young 

women (and men, if they’re being honest) — masturbation and 

sex, religion, divorce, and death, to name a few. This reviewer 

had a particular fondness for Starring Sally J. Freedman as 

Herself, a book in which Sally, a precocious 10-year-old Jewish 

girl, believes Adolf Hitler has moved into a neighboring Miami 

Beach apartment. And I wasn’t alone; as many celebrities, 

writers, and friends of Blume detail in Leach Wolchok and Davina 

Pardo’s new documentary Judy Blume Forever, her impact on the 

lives of children and adults over the last 50-plus years is almost 

unparalleled in the literary world. 

Like Blume’s books, which packed these heavy topics into 

bite-sized, digestible pieces for young adults and children, 

Wolchok and Pardo’s film boasts a child-like quality. Throughout 

Judy Blume Forever, scenes of Blume reading selections of her 

writing are juxtaposed with talking heads from celebrities and 

fans, as well as Blume’s recounting of the real-life experiences 

that influenced much of her work. She reads about Sally J. 

Freedman fearing for her father’s death while describing her own 

father passing away when she was still young; her adult novel 

Wifey, about a woman in an unhappy marriage, was released just 

as Blume was divorcing her first husband. 

Unlike the titular author’s books, however, Judy Blume Forever 

feels overly saccharine and artificial. Sure, her work has had a 

massive impact on these people’s lives, but the unending praise 

begins to tiptoe into sanctification and feels almost scripted by 

the end. The filmmakers also dedicate a large portion of Judy 

Blume Forever to the author reading correspondence from her 

readers, all of which she has kept throughout her career. This 

section proves to be the film’s most affecting thread, but it 

likewise can’t escape the sentimental shadow cast across the 

entire project. The only real conflict in the film comes when 

Blume discusses book banning, and the challenges she faced 

during the years of Reagan and the Moral Majority. The end of the 

film briefly juxtaposes that censorship to today’s political 

climate, but it ultimately foregoes depth and shies away from 

actually confronting or addressing the insidious motivations 

behind the attempted restrictions. 

Blume is such an aggressively endearing presence that it makes 

the work of critiquing the film, which is so deeply rooted in her 

experience and personality, an unenviable task. There’s just 

28

FILM REVIEWS 

something undeniably and overwhelmingly charming about an 

85-year-old woman shouting, “Let’s raise our hands if we 

masturbate, everybody!” But at the same time, Blume is an 

85-year-old woman, one who has lived a lot of life and isn’t 

without controversy or thornier elements (recent comments 

about supporting J.K. Rowling, for example). Judy Blume Forever, 

made with the full cooperation from Blume, wasn’t ever going to 

be the place for such critiques, but one can’t help but feel 

disappointed that a film tackling such a bold figure makes the 

timid decision to go the hagiographic route.. — EMILY 

DUGRANRUT 

DIRECTOR: Davina Pardo & Leah Wolchok; CAST: —; 

DISTRIBUTOR: Amazon Studios; IN THEATERS & STREAMING: 

April 21; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 37 min. 

THE REAL THING 

Kōji Fukada 

“Fukada makes good on such an abject, confused ennui with 

his penchant for antiseptic, digital imagery, a severe flatness 

rebuffing any and all conventional beauty. The nearly fatal 

meet-cute is brought forth in snatches of static frames, the 

parallel editing almost abstract in how it intriguingly saps any 

latent excitement from the straightforward fact that a train is 

barreling toward our two characters.” — PATRICK PREZIOSI 

DIRECTOR: Kōji Fukada; CAST: Win Morisaki, Kaho Tsuchimura, 

Kei Ishibashi, Shôhei Uno; DISTRIBUTOR: Film Movement & 

MUBI; STREAMING: April 17; RUNTIME: 3 hr. 52 min. 

29

ALBUM REVIEWS 

I’VE IVE 

Ive 

It’s a glorious time to be a fan of girl 

groups. UK trio FLO is paying homage to 

TLC and Aaliyah, and they’re poised to have 

a massive year; Japan’s XG and SG5 both 

have unusually Western pop ambitions; 

new and interesting Thai-pop groups are 

appearing every day. But when it comes to 

the unique joy of watching a group perfect 

the vibrant potential of pop music, no one 

is flourishing quite like the fourth-gen 

K-pop girls. (G)I-DLE, Fromis_9, Itzy, Aespa, 

STAYC, Pixy, Tri.be, Purple Kiss, Billlie, 

Kep1er, Viviz, Le Sserafim, NewJeans, CSR, 

TripleS, Fifty Fifty, and more — there’s a 

group for every sound and mood, from 

electronic badassery to nostalgic love 

ballads to chic synthpop to playful 

witchery. It’s almost overwhelming how 

much great pop music is emanating from 

the talented ladies of K-pop, and being 

generated by the diverse creative visions 

behind them. 

current K-pop wave of “reject loud 

experimentation, embrace tradition” and 

reached almost unprecedented success 

by doing so. 

To dig into the whole sonics of it, IVE’s 

efforts so far have been what you might 

call okay-to-good: “Eleven” was 

unassuming, and “After Like” felt a bit 

rushed and overly derivative after two 

years of relentless disco K-pop. But then 

there was “Love Dive,” which features 

some of the most impeccable sound 

design and slow-burn brilliance to come 

out of pop music this decade. And 

notably, all of IVE’s singles sound like 

them, even with only half a dozen tracks 

to their name — they sing about your 

standard teenage crushes, but with a 

winking confidence that implies they 

have positioned those feelings right 

where they want them. 

I’ve IVE is the group’s first full album and, 

as their first comeback longer than two 

tracks, almost doubles the size of their 

discography. (Yes, the title is an 

unfortunate crime against grammar.) 

Although it’s IVE’s first foray into crafting 

an extended set of B-sides, the biggest 

story here is still the two singles. At first 

glance, the whispered, bitchy anti-drop of 

prerelease single “Kitsch” feels at odds 

with the group’s sound. But a closer listen 

uncovers percussion bubbles boasting 

the same precision as the verses of “Love 

Dive,” and the lyrics about looking 

envy-worthy on Instagram fit right into 

their established rich-girl aesthetic — it 

doesn’t matter whether it’s a bug or 

In the next few weeks, InRO will be 

covering new releases from three of the 

biggest K-pop rookie groups currently 

working. First up is IVE, a six-member girl 

group who hit it big with their debut in late 

2021 and have only reached higher heights 

since. Their first three singles — “Eleven,” 

“Love Dive,” and “After Like” — were all 

pleasant, accessible, and vocal-forward, 

with production playing a supporting role 

to melody and the members’ guiding 

charisma. These massively popular tracks 

quickly established IVE’s mission 

statement as something like “Just make 

some good freaking pop music,” and 

together with NewJeans, they’ve led the 

30

ALBUM REVIEWS 

feature that “nineteen’s kitsch” is a 

hilariously obvious rewrite of a demo 

about being a nineties bitch. 

But where “Kitsch” is a breezy introduction 

to the era, “I Am” is a triumph. The group’s 

previous singles were distinctly fun, but 

this latest one is grand. The melodies 

challenge the vocalists in new ways, 

making each determined, sky-high launch 

into the chorus feel earned (“Life is a 

beautiful galaxy”), and the production 

sparkles with powerful synths and even a 

glittering electric guitar in the final 

chorus. On a technical level, “I Am” is not 

the group’s most interesting track (the 

pre-chorus and chorus are just the same 

melody repeated), but it’s maybe more 

impressive how the girls make it so that it 

doesn't matter, generating a stronger 

emotional pull here than on any of their 

previous releases. Importantly, both 

singles make obvious what was previously 

mere subtext: IVE’s music is about 

watching their own star being born. 

I’ve IVE stands at 11 tracks total, and the 

B-sides range from interesting to 

serviceable. A few stand out as new 

territory for the group: namely, the 

anthemic chants and minor-key strings of 

“Blue Blood” (title reinforcing their 

branding), the genuinely cute Disney 

Channel pop of “Not Your Girl,” and the 

clanging piano chords of “Hypnosis,” which 

could have soundtracked a rap song as 

easily as it does IVE’s light vocals. (After 

playing it straight for a year and a half, 

they have the right to be a bit obnoxious 

for two minutes.) Elsewhere, “Lips” takes 

another prominent piano line in an entirely 

different direction, with the same breezy 

mood as “Kitsch,” but with a less nuanced 

arrangement. (It’s still enjoyable, but you 

can tell that the singles on this album 

were made to hold up to much more 

concerted scrutiny than the rest.) And 

then there’s “Shine With Me,” which is a 

standard album-closing power ballad, not 

much worth any further commentary 

beyond that qualification. 

The rest of the tracks — “Heroine,” “Mine,” 

“Next Page,” and “Cherish” — all occupy a 

very similar sonic space: first, start with 

some tasteful percussion, throw in a 

gentle synth, and then choose a simple 

titular hook to pull things together. 

“Mine,” for its part, at least does a 

particularly good job at the classic 

“mid-tempo pulsing synth” sound, but 

“Heroine” has nothing to say that the 

other songs don’t already, and could have 

easily been cut. They’re all perfectly 

pleasant enough, though very much 

B-sides, with no capacity to take on a 

starring role. And although everything 

sounds like IVE’s style of “make good pop 

music with a young, chic twist,” the divide 

between the big event songs and the ones 

always intended to be tracklist filler is too 

apparent not to be observed. 

For all its ups and downs, IVE’s latest 

comeback is the group’s first attempt at 

an album statement of any significant 

length, which is a considerable milestone 

for any rookie group. The results roughly 

meet the expectations set by their 

previous work, with a clear focus 

dedicated to perfecting the handful of 

songs that will actually linger in the 

public’s memory, while the rest are 

handled with similar polish but less 

underlying ambition. There’s nothing 

particularly novel about the music of it 

all, but the project does boast great 

singles and solid enough deep cuts to 

keep dedicated fans hanging around: in 

other words, the classic pop album 

dynamic for a group who have dedicated 

themselves to the craft of classic pop 

music. — KAYLA BEARDSLEE 

LABEL: Starship Entertainment; 

RELEASE DATE: April 10 

MICROPHONE FIEND 

Zelooperz 

At first, it wasn’t necessarily clear how 

seriously one should take Zelooperz, his 

defining traits being “Internet rap 

oddball” and “Danny Brown protege.” 

Discovered in the lead-up to his 

much-hyped 2014 album Old, Brown 

plucked the then 20-year-old rapper out 

of obscurity and gifted him the hook on 

“Kush Coma,” a standout A$AP 

Rocky-featuring track. A member of 

Brown’s loosely organized Bruiser Brigade 

from then on and up to current day (at 

this point, the collective has evolved into 

a genuine label), these two Detroit-based 

rappers have been tethered to each other 

in more ways than one ever since, with 

Zelooperz’s signature squawky vocals and 

taste for esoteric production (both 

knowingly silly and devotedly 

avant-garde) echoing the preferred 

aesthetics of his mentor. Debut album 

Bothic fell victim to dismissive critical 

comparisons of this nature, unfavorably 

casting it against the still-celebrated Old, 

and ultimately looking past its qualities in 

anticipation of Brown’s fourth album, 

which would arrive a few months later. 

Zelooperz seems unbothered by this 

narrative, or at least hasn’t allowed it to 

31

slow him down, with the rapper/painter 

(now 30) only building momentum in the 

seven years between Bothic’s release and 

now, dropping eight records along the 

way. 

A new one, Microphone Fiend, which landed 

at the start of April, puts Zelooperz at an 

impressive nine albums since 2016, a 

rather remarkable pace for any musician, 

even in the hyper-fast streaming era. It's 

also remarkable that his output remains 

solid and dynamic, Microphone Fiend 

offering no particular drop in quality from 

the horror-tinged Gremlin, nor the more 

freewheeling Dyno-Mite (on which he and 

Danny reconvene to trade verses over the 

Crash Bandicoot music) — both highlights 

of this recent rapid-fire release schedule. 

On the other hand, Microphone Fiend isn’t 

so much better or so much more 

distinctive than those other projects (pop 

R&B concept album Get WeT.Radio could 

at least claim the latter), all of them 

decent enough, often amusing, but 

generally a few songs short of being 

wholly great. Album opener “Climate 

Change” kicks things off by sampling 

Little Richard’s 1988 Grammy presenter 

gig (“And the best new artist is… Me!”), as 

if to signal Zelooperz frustrations with 

the continued lack of industry respect, 

before launching into a jaunty, rolling 

Chuck Inglish beat worthy of Chance the 

Rapper. His vocal affectations end up 

landing somewhere near Chano’s as well, 

ALBUM REVIEWS 

while still often bringing DB to mind, 

operating on a gradient that runs from a 

yelp to a bark. 

To his credit, Zelooperz never appears 

constrained by these seemingly narrow 

parameters, challenging his delivery to 

adapt to a range of production 

possibilities (“Demon n Deities” taking 

this to a near experimental extreme), 

though really it’s mostly the more 

aggressive, hard-hitting beats (“Bustin 

Jieber,” “Can’t Fill Your Tank”) that 

provoke his strongest performances, as 

has often been the case in the past. At 

times a charming, elusive figure, at other 

times a bit too taken with juvenalia and 

“weird humor,” Zelooperz continues to 

define his world with Microphone 

Fiend without necessarily 

making huge progress. Still, one 

gets the sense that this record, 

like the rest, could be a piece of 

a bigger picture. The last few 

years have found Zelooperz 

collaborating fruitfully outside 

and underneath the Bruiser 

Brigade umbrella, finding worthy 

peers like Earl Sweatshirt, 

BbyMutha, Pink Siifu, Fly Anakin, 

etc. — inspiring artists with 

interesting approaches to the 

genre. This, in tandem with the 

consistent quality of his 

projects, is reason enough to 

continue to believe Zelooperz is 

carving out a notable space in 

hip hop right now. — M.G. 

MAILLOUX 

LABEL: Bruiser Brigade; 

RELEASE DATE: March 28 

32

Photo Credits: 

Cover - Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures; Page 1 - Eliot Lepinay/Grasshopper Film; Page 3, 5 - 

Grasshopper Film; Page 7,8 - Columbia/TriStar Pictures.; Page 9 -Nikkatsu/Japan Foundation; 

Page 10 - Nikkatsu/Criterion Collection; Page 11 - Niko Tavernise/Prime Video; Page 13 - Takasi 

Seida; Page 14 - A24; Page 16 - Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures; Page 18 - Christopher 

Raphael/Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures; Page 20 - Apple TV+; Page 21 - KimStim; Page 22 - Ben 

King/Goalpost Pictures/Sony Pictures Classics; Page 23 - Jonathan Hession/CTMG Inc; Page 25 - 

Mary Cybulski/Credit of Roadside Attractions; Page 27 - Vertical Entertainment; Page 29 - Prime 

Video; Page 30 - Starship Entertainment; Page 32 - Bruiser Brigade; Back Cover - Larry 

Horricks/20th Century Studios

InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 16

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?