InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 20

IN REVIEW ONLINE
FEATURES
IN THE STYLE AND IN
THE STORYTELLING
An Interview With Ashley
McKenzie — 1
BOUNDARIES ARE
PERMEABLE
Thoughts On Japan
Society’s Shinji Sōmai
Retrospective — 6
KICKING THE CANON
DOWN WITH LOVE — 11
OUT OF THE BLUE — 13
FILM REVIEWS
FAST X — 15
THE COW WHO SANG A
SONG INTO THE FUTURE — 16
MASTER GARDENER — 16
WHITE MEN CAN’T JUMP — 18
THE NIGHT OF THE 12TH — 18
MOON GARDEN — 19
SANCTUARY — 19
WHITE BUILDING — 20
LOVE TO LOVE YOU DONNA
SUMMER — 21
THE THIEF COLLECTOR — 21
DARK NATURE — 22
OUTPOST — 23
May 19, 2023
Volume 1, Issue 20

IN THE STYLE AND
IN THE STORYTELLING
An Interview With
Ashley McKenzie
One of the highlights of the 2022 Berlinale’s Encounters sidebar was Ashley McKenzie’s Queens of
the Qing Dynasty. Following the Canadian filmmaker’s first feature, Werewolf, Queens tracks the
friendship between Star (Sarah Walker), a young neurodiverse woman entering adulthood, and An
(Ziyin Zheng), a hospital volunteer who’s assigned to monitor her after a suicide attempt. Working
in tandem with Walker and Zheng’s extraordinary performances, McKenzie creates a rhythm that
is both regulated and disorienting, and one which keenly reflects Star’s state of mind. We caught
up with McKenzie earlier this month following the film’s New York release.
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Let's start at the beginning of [Queens of the Qing Dynasty].
The whole movie is tackling a lot of difficult subject matter,
but it often feels like a very tender film, whereas those first
few minutes feel much harsher — obviously because of what
is happening, but also just in the way that the film is visually
introducing you to Star. It's very striking, but it also feels like
a risk. Why did that feel like the place the film needed to
start?
I'm trying to think back to the beginning, and if there was a very
specific moment when I felt like the film needed to enter in that
way. I mean, I think my overall feeling is that I wanted to show
that Star is an at-risk person, and that the stakes are kind of
high and it is life or death. And I think I needed to show that at
the beginning because, in a lot of ways, her attitude toward the
barriers and challenges she's facing in her life, in this particular
moment, and this crossroads and aging out of foster care, can
be fairly optimistic at times, and can tend to focus on the
positive of what's immediately in front of her and things like
that. So sometimes, I think if we're really in her world, we can
forget that dangerous things and bad things have happened.
And having that vulnerability come out — to me, her ingesting
poison is a cry for help. And starting the film that way I think
brings people in on that note, but then also leaves the question
open of whether the institutional model of care is going to be
able to actually address that, or if something else can. So I think
that's the main thing: wanting to lay things pretty bare. And I
think that's true with having like this little glimpse of her in the
shower as well. Just feeling that vulnerability.
The film has two lead characters, and one of the actors has
a script credit. I know you developed that character with
them, and I know Star is also based on a real person. So
what was the casting process like for that role?
I will note that my work with Ziyin on the script was more of a
consulting process, not like a co-writing process. I decided to
rewrite the script as I had written it for them as a person, and I
wanted to explore their personal experiences and let them bring
experiences that I felt I didn't have an understanding of in as
specific a way as I needed to tell that story. So that was why I
involved Ziyin as a script consultant.
And then we moved into doing an audition process to see how it
would all come together on camera. But in some ways, I kind of
approached things initially similarly with the character of Star
because she's loosely based on a friend of mine. Years before
even writing the script, I met her in the casting process of my
last feature, Werewolf. And I just thought she was a really
creative person, I really liked pictures that I saw that she would
take with her phone and post online. And I just thought she had a
really interesting eye and way of observing things. So I had
connected with her and tried to figure out if we could make a
film together, like a short film, or a documentary, where we
would've been co-authoring things. But anytime I tried to
introduce the idea of a project, it seemed like it made our
friendship stressful. So I just decided that I wasn't going to try to
collaborate with her on an art thing, that we would just be really
good friends, and we continue to be great friends. And that's just
worked best for both of us.
So I was intimidated by having to cast an actor because I could
hear Star’s voice in my head in such a clear way, and it was tied
in many ways to the cadence in which my friend speaks. But I
just did a traditional casting process, which in my community
doesn't mean that I got a casting agent and stuff like that; it
means that I just reached out to people in the theater
community. I mean, I did audition some professional actors that
had film experience and did a few tapes. I was also just keeping
my eyes open anywhere in my community.
But it was a call that we put out to the youth in the theater
community that ended up leading to finding Sarah Walker. And
she was the second person that came into the audition, and she
had only read the audition scene. When she played it, right off
the top she was really in the register and tone of how I heard
Star in my mind as I was writing. So there was just something
that clicked right away. Everything else about her as a person on
paper seemed completely unlike Star, so I was a little bit unsure.
I was like, was that just like a lucky audition? So I kept doing
more additions for a couple months. And I kept calling Sarah
Walker back to do a few more auditions, and eventually settled
on casting her. And once we were on set, she just dialed in the
character to such a perfectly precise degree that I really never
imagined I could get without casting, say, someone like my
friend — or even then, I don't even know if that could have
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materialized in the way that I imagined. But Sarah really brought
it to life in a way that was so exciting to me.
It's rare to see a film in which the dialogue and the visual
style are both so specific, and also work so well together.
How did you develop those two elements of the film?
I think it probably has to do with, you know, a couple of things.
One thing I suppose is I'm usually compelled to tell a story
because of things, people, events, or locations that I encounter
in my real life, like very specific things. And, you know, I'm not
sitting down to write, thinking, “I want to write a character who's
aging out of foster care,” or “I want to write a character who's
moving from Shanghai to Canada.” I never start in that place. And
I could see if I was starting writing there, how I could maybe
start to lean on some clichés, or maybe I just wouldn't go deep
enough to get the nuances in there.
I usually am starting on the ground, mixed into the textures of it
all, whether it's meeting a specific person who wears their
clothes this way or speaks this way or sings this particular way
or, you know, has an interest in Queens of ancient China. I'm very
much a detail person, and it's those textures that kind of excite
me. And usually that's the stuff I start to work with, and then I
build out from there. So, I don't know, I think it's almost like I'm
starting more on the granular level. And then it's more just trying
to figure out if I can build it out to be something that is a story
worth telling. And that's maybe when I know that it's gonna be my
next film, when enough textures and details and things have
coalesced into something and are there to warrant a story that's
worth putting on the screen. I think that some sort of bottom-up
approach is an important part of my process.
And then the other thing that really defines the characters or the
dialogue, style, these sorts of things, is just me trying to stay
true to my instincts as much as possible. And because you could
define the way I'm making films as being in isolation — you know,
I'm not totally isolated, but I am on an island far removed from a
traditional film industry, [working] with a super small team, and
[I] end up having to wear a lot of hats and do a lot of roles
myself. So in doing that, I spend a lot of time working alone, or
working with a few close collaborators where there's not a lot of
having to filter my ideas through other people, or
justify my ideas to other people, and have them potentially
watered down or questioned.
Of course, in the collaboration process, we're all trying to find the
best way to tell the story, and things do shift. And there are really
amazing collaborators on this film that took it to places I never
could have on my own. But I think the scale on which I'm
working, I think the the degree of removal of where I choose to
live my life and where I choose to make my films, ends up
leading to being really instinctual, really intuitive, and really
working the material in ways [where] I kind of just commit to
things that feel right, even if they might not be conventional. If I
was in a different setting, I could imagine that I might really
doubt myself. But I think I do try to honor those impulses, and I
think it does lead to a different cumulative effect on the style.
And the dialogue is also a bit more of my personality, and my
love of being silly and playing with language and little things like
that [which] came out in this film that didn't really surface in
some of my other work.
Another thing that struck me stylistically is the way you
visually express point of view. Going back to that first scene
— Star’s point of view is set up very clearly in the way she
looks at the medical staff. How did you think about shooting
the points of view of these types of characters who we don’t
often see in films?
I think a big thing… specifically with point of view, but also just
the basic mechanics of film grammar, is that I like to shoot the
characters in single shots when I can, because I just want them
to be interfacing with one another. To me, that's so much of what
the film is about, and the way I like to move through the world is
really connecting with people. And I don't want an
over-the-shoulder shot where you see a bit of the other person
or have that sort of dirty frame, they call it, I think. So in just the
building blocks of the film, there are a lot of medium close-ups
that are moving back and forth, and that to me was really in
single shots, and there's very few two shots in the film. That felt
right for two characters that are coming from very different
places, but trying to not interfere with what energy is moving
between the two of them.
And when it comes to point of view, I think I'm thinking more
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subjectively, and that makes me think more of sounds in some
ways. That's where I was trying to sort of tease out a bit more of
an internal landscape or process, I guess. But I do also focus on
props and details a fair bit, too. And so that's a little difference in
terms of point of view — that is definitely more of an authorial
point of view. And that's something I've always done in my work
as a way to focus on things that I think can be graphical
elements that can become part of the story [and] can help me
tell the story. I think that's there as well.
It's become almost a cliché that modern directors make
period pieces because they're afraid to engage with what's
going on now, and that's not at all the case with your film,
which really embraces technology and social media as well
as things like the fluidity of social identity. Did it feel
intimidating to do that or was it more natural?
I would say it probably feels more natural to me. I mean, I am
aware of this feeling that I'm in this, again, island mentality or
landscape, and that maybe what is timely here is not timely in
other places — often things land here a bit later. So that is one
thing that comes into my mind, and in some ways the film is
trying to explore that… in contemporary times, especially in
social media and information sharing and that culture that
exists. You know, when I unplug from that and I'm just on the
ground in my community, I can feel like they're very different
worlds happening almost in different times. So that is something
that isn't a discomfort, but I think was an interesting thing to be
aware of while I was making the film.
And yeah, in terms of, say, working with certain visual elements
that are very much of our time, I think as long as I'm doing it in a
way, whether it's like texting or a logo or social media platform,
as long as I'm doing it in a way that feels honest to me and I can
find a way to do it that feels cinematic and aesthetically
interesting, then I don't feel deterred to tell that story. I think it's
interesting. And maybe it would entail more research if I was
trying to tell a story at a time that wasn't what I'm steeped in. It
is exciting, that there is a challenge in it. Do we have time to
really reflect on things? Things do feel like they're shifting daily.
But yeah, I think with this film, I felt like I was in my own world
with the two characters, writing, and they were like my best
friends for years. And then I was editing the film for a long time
during Covid, and I just felt like I was in my own bubble with Star
and An. And that felt like a happy place for me to be.
It's interesting that you say that you feel like the community
that you're in is sometimes kind of behind other places,
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ecause I feel like the film is, if anything, ahead of where I
see things culturally, even being in a huge city.
Oh, I like that, and hopefully, yeah, the film can have that effect.
That's great for me to hear because the film is trying to look at
things from a different perspective, I guess, and sort of question
some of these notions that we have about ourselves, or that we
have of other people. And hopefully in the filmmaking, and in the
style, and in the storytelling, it does turn some of those things on
their head.
I know you were in New York this weekend, and we're talking
right now even though the movie premiered over a year ago.
I know that's not uncommon for films going through the
festival ecosystem, but how does it feel to not only sit with
the completed film, but sit with audience reactions for that
long?
It's definitely on my mind, I think probably because I'm feeling
like I'm coming to the end of my marathon race — my legs are a
bit rubbery. And yeah, I've questioned: what's the best way to
release a film? And it can be nice to have it all happen in a more
condensed timeline so that all the energy
is moving it toward this bigger release.
But then, I don't know; I would say with
both Werewolf and Queens I've had a bit
more of this traditional platform sort of
a release — done the festival circuit and
then done some theatrical runs. And
there's been something nice about the
slow burn sort of process, too, because
it doesn't just come and go in a blip. It
does allow the film to remain in
consciousness and in conversation for
a period of time, which I think is actually
quite nice. And so much of what the film
is trying to do and what I wanted to do is
to open communication and to find how
we can move through little idiosyncrasies
and bumps and discomforts and continue
to have a conversation as people. So I
think there is something nice about
having this longer conversation that I’m
beginning to appreciate more as I kind of look back at the
different ways of sharing a film with the world.
And I think for me, again, because I'm someone who is very
curious about other humans and likes to meet other people —
and be outside my own little bubble of a life — when I do attend
screenings and do talkbacks and travel to different places, it
does allow me to meet people that I wouldn't meet otherwise.
And that's another thing I've come to realize: when I think, “I don't
know if I should keep traveling with the film,” but then I have
these connections or these conversations and I learn a lot and I
meet interesting people. And it's almost like, to me, it seems this
is meant to be, this is a very fortuitous way for me to have a
reason to talk to someone new. And that is what the film was
about and what I love, moving through life. So I have been
reminding myself, as I get tired, that each time I show the film
somewhere and go there with it, that it's giving me this really
cool opportunity to be able to start a conversation with someone
that I would have no basis on which to get to know them
otherwise. That's a fun part of being a filmmaker that I
appreciate. — INTERVIEW CONDUCTED BY JESSE CATHERINE
WEBBER
5

BOUNDARIES ARE PERMEABLE
Thoughts On Japan Society’s Shinji Sōmai Retrospective
A high-angle shot of a yakuza and his girlfriend continues following the woman overhead as she crosses a street to a school
swimming pool. The camera then passes over the pool’s fence and lands on portly bully Deguchi, who calls out from atop a diving
board, “I have an important announcement! You all suck!” The camera descends and tracks around the pool as Deguchi and his
cohorts continue to taunt their classmates, until the off-screen sound of motorcycle engines pulls attention to the neighboring school
courtyard, where a group of rebellious students circle an overmatched teacher on motor scooters. The bullies join in the fun, until
finally three of their victims confront Deguchi with the promise of revenge. Suddenly, the yakuza seen in the earlier shot enters
through the school gate and accosts Deguchi, just before a car pulls up [from behind him], and chief bully is yanked through the
window with a fishing net. The rest of the kids, and the camera, chase after the car as it speeds away, at which point one kid turns to
the others and asks, “Was… that a kidnapping?”
This is the opening scene of Shinji Sômai’s 1983 P.P. Rider, and it’s staged almost entirely in one take (save for a brief insert when
Deguchi is pulled into the car). It’s about the most concise introduction to Sômai’s cinema that one could ask for: the two elements
with which he’s most commonly associated — a focus on children and dazzling long takes — are both there, as are mixtures of
deadpan humor and an ever-present specter of violence, an alternately cruel and hapless adult presence, and even the motif of water
that runs through much of his work. More than anything, this rich, single-shot encapsulation of a distinctive milieu proves that the
filmmaker’s staggering formal dexterity works in perfect concert with a wide-open, minutely detailed film-world.
Massively influential in Japan, but still relatively unknown here, Sômai’s work has called out for broader appreciation for decades now,
ever since his untimely death in 2001, at the age of 53. Luckily, New York’s Japan Society has taken the first step with their
triumphant new series, Rites of Passage (which just ran from April 28 to May 13), the director’s first-ever North American
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Retrospective. Focusing primarily on Sômai’s prolific 1980s run,
the series reveals the filmmaker to be one of the most original
and accomplished filmmakers working anywhere in the world
during that time.
Sômai’s career began as an assistant director for Nikkatsu
Corporation in 1972, working at first as an assistant director on
the studio’s series of softcore Roman Pornos, and later under
director Kazuhiko Hasegawa on his films The Youth Killer (1976)
and The Man Who Stole the Sun (1979). Sômai made his debut as a
director in his own right with The Terrible Couple (1980), and
broke through commercially with the iconic (in Japan) yakuza
satire Sailor Suit and Machine Gun (1981). He would go on to create
a body of work that readers of Japan’s highly influential Kinema
Junpo magazine named the best of the 1980s in a poll. That may
seem like faint praise, given the “lost decade” tag that’s long
been attached to the country’s films of the ‘80s, after the
traditional studio system had largely collapsed and international
interest in Japanese cinema waned. But aside from the general
unfairness of that whole term — which ignores essential
contributions from emerging directors like Gakuryu Ishii,
Toshiharu Ikeda, Juzo Itami, and Nobuhiko Obayashi, among
others — Sômai’s neglect at the hands of the international
cinema establishment is also symptomatic of that
establishment’s tendency not to take seriously any work which
doesn’t seem to take itself too seriously. And Sômai’s certainly
don’t; his films are often deeply funny and highly entertaining,
with hardly a ponderous note among them. But that’s never
stifled the brazen, utterly singular personal expression of
Sômai’s filmmaking, even despite ostensibly working under the
auspices of a commercial studio system.
With time comes clarity, and now we have the privilege of
enjoying Sômai’s work on its own terms. The two earliest films in
Japan Society’s series, Sailor Suit and P.P. Rider, are also among
his greatest, both bravura formal achievements that highlight his
daring sensibilities of genre and tone. They start from irresistible
premises: in Sailor Suit, a teenage girl inherits her father’s
yakuza clan, while P.P. Rider follows the classmates of the
kidnapped bully, who resolve to save the bad seed… so that
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they can kill him themselves. The collision of
children with the world of the yakuza is the
perfect Sômai dichotomy: while his films
proceed with all the guilelessness and
possibility of youth,they do so in the shadow of
a violent, unstable world, one that acts as a
catalyst for the young characters’ awakening to
adulthood. But where these movies become
truly special is how this conflict is borne out in
their formal strategies: long, roving takes
simultaneously give the feeling of
unconstrained, almost childlike discovery (one
never knows what may lie in Sômai’s offscreen
space), while grounding things in a real
environment and geography, a sense of
concrete physical presence underlining the
director’s wildly imaginative fictions. It’s
magical realism in its purest form — shots so
often feel like magic tricks, precisely because
they refuse to leave reality behind.
Also key to the upside-down feeling of
Sômai-world is the constant flipping of power
dynamics between children and adults. An early
image in Sailor Suit shows an army of
black-clad yakuza bowing in deference to
teenage protagonist Izumi (Hiroko
Yakushimaru) outside her school’s playground;
as if that’s not enough, after she reluctantly
goes with them, we find out that the clan she
now leads is actually comprised of only four
buffoonish members — the rest were hired
actors. Immediately after the kidnapping in P.P. Rider, the
gangsters realize they have the wrong kid, and the lone adult
helping our heroes find him (Mr. Gombei, aka “Nobody”) is hardly
any more competent.
None of this is to say that Sômai romanticizes his young
protagonists — children are just as capable of violence and
cruelty as anyone else in his films — but it’s not hard to see
where the sympathies of his curious, skewed perspective lie.
Sailor Suit’s Izumi variously plays the role of boss, friend, mother,
and even potential romantic partner to her four lackeys, and
while she emerges as the most moral and dignified character in
the film, Sômai refuses to make her some sort of idealized
heroine. That the film’s suggestive title and poster image is a bit
misleading and taken from only a few brief seconds of time on
screen — during a sequence that suggests Izumi’s total
corruption by the larger forces of the world — serves as an
effective summary of Sômai’s relationship to his films’
commercial demands. Fortunately, in this case, the director was
able to have it both ways — Sailor Suit and Machine Gun was still a
major box office success in Japan, and even spawned two TV
series and a legacy sequel.
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A similar dynamic resurfaces in 1985’s Typhoon Club, a classic in
the Japanese youth genre that nearly shuts out the adults
entirely, focusing on a group of children waiting out a typhoon
overnight in their abandoned school. With parents out of the
picture, the children all gang up on their cynical, put-upon
teacher, onto whom they pour all their dissatisfaction with the
adult world. Over and over again, Sômai’s incredibly charged
images build out his world into mythic proportions, only to bring
his characters back down to earth with as little as a single hard
cut. At the film’s climax, one young character’s existential crisis
culminates in him giving up on humanity and throwing himself
out of a school window — smash cut to the exterior of the
school, where his legs poke straight up through the jetsam that
broke his fall. It’s the most Keatonesque image in a filmography
that frequently evokes the silent comedian’s athletic yet
underplayed slapstick, and a split-second crystallization of the
director’s fearless mashing of tones.
Typhoon Club, while slightly more aesthetically reserved than its
predecessors, similarly gives the impression of a heavily stylized
world that was set in motion long before the film began —
Sômai’s camera acting almost as an objective observer. Like the
other 1985 Sômai film that features in Japan Society’s series —
Love Hotel, a return to his Roman Porno roots — Typhoon Club
shows how Sômai used his signature long takes to astonishingly
varied ends. Both films feature scenes in which the director
simply locks the camera down and forces us to watch protracted
moments of attempted sexual assault, shots as intense and
sobering as some of his others are riotously entertaining. (On the
other end of the spectrum, a third [!] 1985 film from Sômai, Lost
Chapter of Snow: Passion [not screening in the retrospective],
opens with a highly mobile, soundstage-bound 14-minute [!!]
tracking shot that traverses space and time in charting the
tragic childhood of its orphan-girl protagonist.)
These scenes play into another of Sômai’s key themes: the
impossible position of women in Japanese society. The
confluence of subject and style evokes none less than Japan’s
greatest filmmaker, Kenji Mizoguchi, whose long takes also
afforded his female characters a certain grace denied to them
by the surrounding world. Many of Sômai’s more adult-centric
films revolve around this idea, from the study of masculine
patriarchy on the high seas in The Catch (1983) to Love Hotel’s
fraught, harshly transactional take on the pinku genre. Likewise,
the two latest films in this series, Luminous Woman (1987) and
Tokyo Heaven (1990), feature storylines centering on women — in
this case, women attempting to escape predatory showbiz
managers, which makes for an especially interesting subject in
light of Sômai’s penchant for casting idol singers in leading
roles.
Luminous Woman leans into the more Felliniesque elements of
Sômai’s mise-en-scene, specifically recalling La Strada in its tale
of a hulking wrestler and a mistreated young singer navigating a
surreal underworld. Tokyo Heaven, by contrast, has perhaps the
most confectionary pop sensibility of any of Sômai’s films
(despite being, along with Typhoon Club, one of his two entirely
independently-financed works). It remains one of his most
undervalued gems. The plot — an aspiring “campaign idol” is hit
by a car and killed while running from her lecherous manager,
only to return to Earth and take up residence with said
manager’s underling, who had been tasked with covering up her
death — would feel at home in a supernatural studio romance of
the ‘40s (Portrait of Jennie, A Matter of Life and Death, etc). And
while the narrative progresses more or less along the expected
lines, the movie is so packed with inventive staging, oddball
details, and unforgettable images that any trace of roteness falls
away, genre framework serving as a foundation for, rather than a
restriction on, the filmmaker’s imagination.
Recommending Sômai’s films in part due to their long takes is an
interesting proposition, as the idea of the long take itself has
become something of a point of controversy in cinephilic
discourse over the past decade. Countless recent acclaimed
films and filmmakers have adopted the method as little more
than proof of their own capability in marshaling talent and
resources, monuments to technical ambition that fulfill only the
most superficial understanding of what constitutes Great
Directing. While Sômai’s camera movements can often match
any of these for pure balleticism — it’s not hard to imagine why,
as his mentor Kazuhiko Hasegawa claimed, his films frequently
went well over budget — what stands out most is how
fundamentally generous they are toward his performers. The
intensely physical performances that Sômai gets from his actors
work in perfect concert with how the director goes about
capturing them; they’re constantly running, crawling, climbing,
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fighting, barreling their way through his turbulent worlds, and the
camera makes space for them at every turn. When Luminous
Woman’s wrestler wants to take in Tokyo for the first time, at the
start of the film, he simply climbs out the window and onto the
roof of the car he’s in, as it’s driving. In Tokyo Heaven, a man lives
above his girlfriend (who he summons upstairs by blowing his
trumpet), and the camera intricately tracks the movements up,
down, and around the building. To Sômai, the physical limitations
of the world always seem conquerable for his characters, and
that starts with how his camera approaches those same
obstacles.
Although sadly absent from Japan Society’s series, Sômai’s
greatest film may be 1993’s Moving; it was the director’s only film
to play at Cannes (Out of Competition), and thus probably the
closest he came to an international breakthrough. A relatively
simple tale of a preteen girl dealing with the implications of her
parents’ divorce, it concentrates Sômai’s instinctive empathy
into its most emotionally precise and devastating form, while
retaining an effortless formal fluidity. Like many of Sômai’s
movies, watching it is partially an experience of wondering how
such an obviously great film with such wide appeal could still fly
so far under the radar — and, wouldn’t you know it, restorations
of Typhoon Club and P.P. Rider from this series have already been
picked up for wider repertory releases in the near future.
Moving ends with another mobile long take of unbridled joy, after
Renko has emerged on the other side of the movie’s painful
coming-of-age process. And here we are given another
single-shot Sômai microcosm — one which articulates that
though the world may be a difficult and unforgiving place, its
boundaries are permeable, set by those without the capacity to
imagine anything different. Transcendence can just be a matter
of breaking those boundaries, and Sômai’s cinema did so with a
regularity and purpose that few other filmmakers can have
matched. — BRAD HANFORD

KICKING THE CANON
DOWN WITH LOVE
Peyton Reed
“The place? New York City. The time? Now: 1962. And there’s no time or place like it.”
Down With Love, Peyton Reed’s 2003 technicolor pastiche of the 1960s battle-of-the-sexes rom-com, begins with the above winking
acknowledgement, which makes clear two things: its own artificiality and a recognition that, while there are ways in which the world
has changed since 1962, there are just as many ways that it’s stayed exactly the same. Half-Pillow Talk, half-Sex and the Single Girl,
Down With Love stars Renee Zellweger and Ewan McGregor as Doris Day/Rock Hudson analogs, re-animating the chaste heroine and
debonair charmer types the pair so often traded in. Zellweger plays the unwillingly sexless Barbara Novak, a feminist writer whose
philosophy of spurning love and marriage for casual sex as a means of female empowerment lands her as the only woman in New
York who can’t practice what she preaches, while McGregor plays the “ladies’ man, man’s man, man about town” Catcher Block, a
charming playboy journalist seeking to ruin Novak and end the gender wars once and for all.
Setting up a convoluted game of seduction, resistance, and subterfuge, Down With Love draws out a thoroughly modern neurosis in its
period trappings, directing attention to the artifice inherent in every facet of its existence and the overlapping pretenses the
characters find themselves upholding. While the film itself maintains a tight hold on its own ideas, even in the blur of Reed’s dynamic
direction and breakneck pacing, its characters are lost in their own heterosexual anxieties. Every word, every date, every shenanigan
is a strategic maneuver, with the emotional dynamics of heterosexuality acting as both the prize of the game and the board on which
the game is played. The four leads — including Sarah Paulson as Vikki, Barbara’s editor, and David Hyde Pierce as Peter, Catcher’s
boss and best friend — represent a range of responses to the game of love, but at their core, all are characterized by anxiety — the
fear of surrendering to “love” (read: marriage), of not finding anyone to surrender to, and crucially, of losing whatever power they can
eke out in such a system. Down With Love takes the position that for all the light-hearted fun and antics of its inspirations, the
11

KICKING THE CANON
OUT OF THE BLUE
Dennis Hopper
Kansas-born actor and director Dennis Hopper had an incredibly
illustrious but volatile career after debuting in Nicholas Ray’s
Rebel Without a Cause. Hopper worked with star James Dean for
a second time on Giant, and these two encounters had a massive
influence on his acting style and artistic expression. Over the
course of five decades, Hopper shaped his oeuvre around
playing characters who, in many ways, reflect darker, more
exaggerated elements of his own life: the rambling, alcoholic
father in Rumble Fish; the violent and sadistic gangster of Blue
Velvet; the sleazy, wild B-movie director of The Blackout. Hopper
was known to give erratic performances that very much
reflected his unpredictable life, which was plagued by addiction
and controversy.
Most commonly, Hopper is remembered for his work with Peter
Fonda on the 1969 counterculture classic Easy Rider, a film that
sees both men ride across America in search of freedom. A
combination of influences informs Easy Rider: the hazy,
drug-fueled malaise of the ‘60s and the popularity of French New
Wave aesthetics in cinema at that time, from jump cuts to
handheld cameras. Easy Rider’s success as an independent film
helped to form what would become known as New Hollywood — a
period during which studios would allot large budgets to young
directors, along with nearly full creative control, including such
names as George Lucas, Miloš Forman, and of course Hopper.
This opportunity of unbridled freedom allowed Hopper to make
The Last Movie, a metafictional acid Western that virtually ended
his career and sent him into Hollywood exile.
During the following decade, Hopper worked mostly in world
cinema, with a starring role in Wim Wender’s beautiful and
elliptical The American Friend, and a turn as a rebellious
bushranger in Philippe Mora’s Mad Dog Morgan — Hopper directed
no films himself during those years. It wasn’t until he started
acting in a Canadian drama — originally titled No Looking Back,
but now known as Out of the Blue — that he would be able to take
control behind the camera once again. At one point, the film was
almost scrapped due to the removal of its original director,
Leonard Yakir; but instead of letting the production fail, Hopper
took the reins, in the process morphing the script from a lighter
drama about the reformation of a rebellious teen to a darker,
social-realist film. The film’s title was taken from Neil Young’s
melancholic rock ballad “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue),” a track
that accompanies the film’s images like a haunting specter.
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KICKING THE CANON
Out of the Blue is a work boiling over with youthful rage, all
harnessed by its kinetic lead character, Cebe (Linda Manz), a
15-year-old punk who idolizes Elvis Presley and is constantly
lashing out at the institutional systems that have failed her.
Hopper conducts the film entirely through Cebe’s perspective,
even basing many of its narrative elements around Manz herself
(Out of the Blue was her second film, after Days of Heaven a few
years prior). We follow Cebe as she navigates a precarious period
of adolescence, growing up in a broken home, with only punk
music to guide her. Aside from visits to prison to see her
alcoholic father, Don (Hopper), with her mother, Kathy (Sharon
Farrell) — who constantly battles to raise her troubled daughter
as a single parent — Cebe mostly wanders through the first half
of Out of the Blue in a kind of listless haze. Then, after a
whirlwind of events that escalate feelings of alienation, Cebe
hitchhikes to the chaotic streets of inner city Vancouver.
Cebe only finds true solace in one scene — at a Pointed Sticks
show that she attends whilst roaming Vancouver. She’s
surrounded by a sea of punks who feel just as lost as she does,
and through this collectivity — the crowd’s buzz of energy and
communal spirit clearly articulated — she experiences a moment
of warmth. It’s a brief snapshot in time where nothing else
matters, where the freedom and joys Hopper captured in Easy
Rider return to a new generation of rebels. This respite serves to
alleviate the heaviness of the film’s darker moments; an
outstretched hand amidst Out of the Blues’ many miseries. It’s a
moving, remarkable scene — plenty of directors have attempted
to capture punk aesthetics on screen, but few have ever
demonstrated an understanding of the vitality and community of
a punk show like Hopper does here.
About halfway through Out of the Blue, the film suddenly shifts
gears into something even more harrowing — right around when
Cebe’s father, Don, is released from prison. What had been a
youthful reflection on cultural malaise spins out into a bleak
social drama about addiction and abuse, with Hopper’s portrayal
as Don — a failing father whose alcoholic rage overflows into
violence — acting as a heightened reflection of the director’s
own substance abuse problems, which haunted him until his
eventual turn to sobriety in the mid-’80s. To be clear, Out of the
Blue is very much Linda Manz’s film — she commands each scene
with great force — but it’s Hopper’s fragmented performance, as
a man for whom a loveable appearance only masks a sociopathic
nature, that fuels things during a distressing final act.
Hopper’s films frequently see everything end — abruptly — in
chaos and fire. The intergenerational conflict, whether it’s
between ‘60s hippies and old conservatives, or aging hippies and
young punks, becomes too much for society to handle, to the
point where it can only lead to destruction. Out of the Blue
captures this dissolution of counterculture, in a country growing
ever more fractured and individualistic, in a brutal, yet poetic,
way. Raging Bull is often cited as the final nail in the coffin for
New Hollywood, but even despite being a Canadian film, Out of
the Blue actually serves as a much more profound death knell: a
pessimistic, realistic anticipation of a coming future. Or, as Neil
Young sings it, Out of the Blue suggests that “it’s better to burn
out than to fade away.” — OLIVER PARKER
Cebe’s link to a certain punk ethos is obvious after just the first
five minutes of Out of the Blue, when she starts chanting, “disco
sucks, kill all hippies.” Through Cebe, viewers can see Hopper
reflecting on his own past and the disdain that the younger
generation feels for his era. She signifies a new youth, a new era
of counterculture that does not understand or care about the
“glory days” that Hopper would have known, one that sees
through the lies they were told and recognizes the promises that
never came true. This new generation has seen their lives
neglected by their families and institutional systems alike; now,
they turn to something more aggressive and socially disruptive.
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FILM REVIEWS
FAST X
Louis Leterrier
What else is possibly left to say about the Fast & Furiouses?
Fans excitedly devour each new installment with an oxymoronic
combination of total earnestness and eye-rolling ironic
detachment, laughing heartily at every invocation of “family”
even while claiming to be moved. Every reality-defying action gag
or nonsensical plot twist draws applause specifically because it’s
hitting their pleasure centers dead on. It’s no fun to have to deny
the cinematic joy that these movies are allegedly mainlining, but
that doesn’t change the fact that, even by the standards of this
endless franchise, Fast X is possibly the worst entry yet. Whether
or not one thought F9’s journey into space represented some kind
of shark-jump, this is the first one to
not seriously up the fantastical or logistical ante, even while it
sinks deeper and deeper into insisting that you care about
these people who longer have any real character dimensions
to speak of.
Anyways, let’s reorient a bit. At the end of Fast Five, Dom (Vin
Diesel, you remember) and the gang stole a giant bank vault
filled with drug cartel cash and dragged it through the streets of
Rio. Now, the son of the cartel boss, Dante (Jason Momoa), is out
for revenge, and for some reason that means stealing the private
mercenary army of Cypher (Charlize Theron), the baddie from
Fate of the Furious, and framing the crew for attempting to
detonate what’s described as a 20-kiloton neutron bomb at the
Vatican (don’t worry, it explodes harmlessly in a river, somehow
not wiping out the entire city of Rome). Now, they’re being
chased by Aimes (Alan Ritchson), the head of “The Agency,” while
getting a little help from Tess (Brie Larson), the daughter of Kurt
Russell’s supposedly gone super–spy, Mr. Nobody (part of this
cinematic world since part seven).
Sure, fine — obligatory convoluted setup complete. But what
follows is truly, depressingly perfunctory: endless exposition
followed by the hollowest of allegedly comic scenes, characters
with absolutely nothing to do but constantly beat their chests at
each other for no reason, constant ADR-ed dialogue “spoken” by
the backs of people’s heads, and lots and lots of crushed cars. At
one point, a group of our pals wonder aloud, “How are we going to
get [insert tech gibberish] in London?” despite having done
exactly that in multiple previous movies, and then they just
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FILM REVIEWS
wander into a random scene involving a Pete Davidson cameo, a
pissing contest between two of the characters, and someone
eating a “special muffin.” To top it off, all of that is entirely
forgotten, and they don’t get what they came for.
It’s obviously a fool’s errand to ding the Fast & Furious movies for
being too silly or too underwritten. The problem is that
underwritten stupidity would be just fine if there was anything
the least bit thrilling otherwise going on. The action sequences in
Fast X are sub-Marvel levels of generic — just a mess of cruddy
CGI, pointless cutting, and undercranked shots of caravans of
cars driving in a straight line. There’s absolutely nothing
compelling to be found, just endless franchise-established visual
motifs of the laziest quality. Worse, the hand-to-hand combat
sequences saddle really talented and overqualified performers
like Michelle Rodriguez and Theron with the worst kind of
poorly-covered, second-unit dogshit. It’s frankly embarrassing.
Director Louis Leterrier — a second choice after exasperated
franchise maestro Justin Lin ankled the project a week into
shooting… wonder why? — is usually a sturdy if not particularly
gifted craftsman of action, but it’s clear that these films aren’t
actually so much directed as they are assembled. In fact, this
latest entry seems to be cobbled together entirely out of spare
parts, perhaps the first instance of something that could have
realistically been generated entirely by AI. Fast X marks a
depressing nadir for the monolithic franchise. — MATT LYNCH
DIRECTOR: Louis Leterrier; CAST: Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez,
Jason Momoa, John Cena; DISTRIBUTOR: Universal Pictures; IN
THEATERS: May 19; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 21 min.
THE COW WHO SANG A SONG INTO THE
FUTURE
Francisca Alegría
In most movies, nature is portrayed as a still image, a landscape
painting shown twenty-four times per second whose every detail
is within God’s design. Francisca Alegría’s debut feature, The Cow
Who Sang a Song into the Future, captures, rather than its
“majesty,” some of its genuine strangeness. Water ripples here
aren’t beautiful and musical like in Disney’s Fantasia, where they
are left by fairies skimming the water; instead, they are almost
violent: reflections of an ongoing or still lingering turbulence.
And so here, when a whole river of fish suddenly die, even though
some are seen washed up amongst a couple of cans and bottles,
the event doesn’t seem entirely man-made, but likewise an
extension of nature’s chaotic, inexplicable transformations. When
this actually occurred in the same part of Southern Chile that The
Cow Who Sang is set in, there was no explanation why — “No one
understands anything,” one mystically-inclined character states.
Given this context, it isn’t so inconceivable when, from death, a
woman returns.
Magdalena (Mia Maestro) isn’t able to talk, though she seems to
possess both a childlike incognizance and a sharp lucidity. As she
drifts back to her family, she doesn’t cause the kind of dramatic
change that, say, Terence Stamp’s mysterious visitor does in Pier
Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema, even though she should have a more
direct and personal effect on them. Her husband (Alfredo Castro)
tries to grab hold of her, while her daughter
MASTER GARDENER
Paul Schrader
“The curious thing about every new Schrader film is the anticipation of its violent and momentary deluge, though he nowhere near
resembles an action director. He’s obsessed with circumstantial bloodshed, which achieves a religiosity that is otherwise thought
impossible in his extremely secular filmic worlds. He spares judgment on whether or not these acts constitute the much-desired
redemption, urging us to look backward in a film whose preceding two acts played as ancillary on first blush.” — PATRICK PREZIOSI
[Published as part of InRO’s Venice International Film Festival 2022 coverage.]
DIRECTOR: Paul Schrader; CAST: Joel Edgerton, Sigourney Weaver, Quintessa Swindell; DISTRIBUTOR: Magnolia Pictures; IN
THEATERS: May 19; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 47 min.
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FILM REVIEWS
Cecilia (Leonor Varela), who saw her commit suicide, pushes her
away; the slow collapse of the family continues onward.
Magdalena finds a much deeper connection with her transgender
granddaughter (Enzo Ferrada), whose gender identity Cecilia
rejects as a mere transition through a phase. At first, Magdalena
only borrows her granddaughter’s clothes after her own have
been soiled by water and mud, but later they meet in person and
she manages to manipulate the electronics of a phone to talk to
her. Both are caught in between identities: Magdalena in a
strange, supernatural borderland, and her granddaughter in the
early stages of transition, her hair in that frustrating, awkward
stage of just starting to grow out. Adding to this sense of
impermanent space is the fact that we never even learn her
chosen name, though it’s highly unlikely that she wouldn’t have
one at this point. (Upsettingly, she is credited only as “Tomás.”)
That all these ideas about transformation, death, nature, and
more don’t come together in a coherent structure of meaning is
actually to the film’s credit: it takes seriously the liminality it
portrays. When the animals sing of death, predicting their own —
and perhaps a wider geological — collapse, their lips move but
never quite sync up. What makes the film’s texture so engaging
and enveloping is that the constant threat of coherence, which
could so undo the complexity of Alegría’s approach, never arrives.
Until it does. The Cow Who Sang’s ending underlines the
connection between grandmother and granddaughter in a way
that retains some mystery, but which delivers far too strong a
resolution, a tidy reconciliation that reveals Cecilia as the movie’s
true center. Approaching transness through this magical realist
lens has much more to do with how strange and
incomprehensible it seems to Cecilia than the lived experience of
the character who is actually going through it. This might very
well be honest to Algería’s perspective, as someone who isn’t
trans, but she would have done well to expand this vision in a
way more fully befitting the film’s numerous merits by, for
example, casting a transgender actress, which would have
afforded space for other perspectives. In the presence of these
limiting factors, however, The Cow Who Sang ultimately resolves
as a less curious film than most of its runtime suggests. — ESME
HOLDEN
DIRECTOR: Francisca Alegría; CAST: Mía Maestro, Enzo Ferrada
Rosati, Leonor Varela; DISTRIBUTOR: Kino Lorber; IN
THEATERS: May 19; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 33 min.
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FILM REVIEWS
This was also the era of Michael Jordan, with basketball gaining a
ferocious mainstream popularity that had rarely been seen
prior. While there is no denying that sports are often naively
viewed as the great equalizer when it comes to racial politics —
talent is talent, full stop — there was something borderline
insidious about the way that basketball had been co-opted by
middle- and upper- class white America and portrayed more as a
status symbol than a celebration of both the sport and the talent
that it housed. Love of the game was lost to a sea of dollar signs,
and White Men Can’t Jump attacked this particularly thorny
subject matter head on, presenting two protagonists whose
passion for basketball oozed out of every pore, yet who were also
smart enough to leverage that joy for a few dollars, the allegory
practically writing itself.
WHITE MEN CAN’T JUMP
Calmatic
In theory, a modern-day update of 1992’s White Men Can’t Jump
isn’t exactly heretical as far as remakes are concerned. Aside
from the admittedly memorable title, it’s hard to determine if
there exists any individual outside of middle age who looks back
at the original with fondness… or who remembers it, period. That
movie is nothing if not a product of its time, but its specificity is
also what situates it as something more than just an outdated
relic. The framework of the plot was basic: the story of two
hoops-loving hustlers with nothing in common — Woody
Harrelson and Wesley Snipes — who banded together to make a
few bucks. Yet the original arrived at a unique point in both the
history of the sport itself and of American race relations,
between fans and players alike.
Pick-up games at courts across America had existed for
decades, but it was only around this time that they gained
legitimacy within the sport, as corporate-sponsored tournaments
popped up across the country with alarming speed.
Writer-director Ron Shelton — a former minor league baseball
player whose admiration for seemingly every sport that ever
existed is on display in everything from Bull Durham to Tin Cup —
also was clever in creating two lead characters who brandished
words like weapons, their racially motivated put-downs and
comebacks presented like a no-holds-barred poetry slam. In the
ultimate irony, it was the embrace of these stereotypes that not
only allowed some form of communication between the two polar
opposites, but forced them to recognize the humanity that bound
them together.
THE NIGHT OF THE 12TH
Dominik Moll
“The main problem with Night of the 12th is that Moll and
Marchand (adapting a book by Paula Guéna) seem to think their
audience is as incompetent as the police… Night of the 12th’s
concern with the obsessive psychology of damaged cops recalls
David Fincher’s Zodiac. But [that film] understood the power of
subtext. The Night of the 12th insists on signposting its every
move, to such a degree that Moll doesn’t seem to really need the
viewer at all.” — MICHAEL SICINSKI [Part of InRO’s Cannes Film
Festival 2022 coverage.]
DIRECTOR: Dominik Moll; CAST: Bastien Bouillon, Bouli Lanners,
Anouk Grinberg; DISTRIBUTOR: Film Movement; STREAMING:
May 19; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 55 min.
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FILM REVIEWS
2023’s White Men Can’t Jump, meanwhile, has nothing to say
about… well, anything. Director Calmatic and writer Kenya Barris
— he of Black-ish fame — have no interest in probing the state of
basketball in the 21 st century or the role that race plays both on
and off the court. Class struggle gets namechecked a few times,
but not in service of any kind of substantive discourse or to any
meaningful degree of specificity. (Hell, even the original was
smart enough to make similar subject matter a key thematic
sticking point!) What you have here is simply a stalled star
vehicle for a rapper, Jack Harlow, who takes on the Harrelson
role and exhibits all the screen charisma of a doused fire.
Logically, it makes sense to hire a performer like Harlow, as rap
isn’t a giant leap from slam poetry and is, in fact, another
cultural coordinate that has been co-opted by upper-class white
America. And yet Barris delivers nothing in the way of incisive or
even clever dialogue for his characters. In truth, whenever
race-specific insults are hurled between Harlow and Sinqua Walls
— tasked with filling Snipes’ Nikes — it’s almost immediately
followed by an apology, as if everyone involved was so afraid to
get their hands dirty that nothing much at all happens.
Indeed, the proceedings as a whole feel neutered, the obvious
result of a concerted effort to appeal to as many people as
possible, complexity and challenging rhetoric excised in the
name of streaming views. Everything from plot points to
character arcs feel inorganic, the script simply jerking its
participants around until they reach a bogus happy ending that
the original steadfastly avoided. The female roles are especially
problematic here, with Barris in desperate need of a lesson on
how being supportive and having agency are not mutually
exclusive.
Given the complete lack of witty dialogue or characters worth
rooting for, all that remains is the basketball action, and Calmatic
is equally inept in this department. Without fail, he opts for a
static wide shot when what is necessary is a tight close-up or
mobile camera, and vice versa — it’s tough to point to a single
shot that scans like a correct decision. If anything, the on-court
action looks and feels like homework, something included only
because the plot and title necessitated it, not to, you know,
celebrate impressive athleticism or love of the game. 2023’s
White Men Can’t Jump is nothing but the worst kind of
IP-generated greed, an exercise in brand recognition completely
devoid of soul or skill. To quote Harlow: you can pass on this
bitch like Stockton. — STEVEN WARNER
DIRECTOR: Calmatic; CAST: Jack Harlow, Sinqua Walls, Teyana
Taylor, Laura Harrier, Vince Staples; DISTRIBUTOR: Hulu;
STREAMING: May 19; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 41 min.
MOON GARDEN
Ryan Stevens Harris
The marketing for Ryan Stevens Harris' debut feature film Moon
Garden has been very careful to center the hand-crafted nature
of the endeavor — photographed with expired 35mm film, using
antique lenses, and filmed entirely on practical sets built in the
director's garage, Moon Garden wants to be a kind of analog
fetish item. It's a shame, then, that much of it is thunderingly
literal, a nightmare dreamscape cribbed almost entirely from
Guillermo del Toro, Labyrinth, Tarsem’s The Fall, and Neil Gaiman.
It's a movie almost completely made up of parts from other
movies, existing in some gray area where archetypes slide into
cliché. Thankfully, Harris has a wonderful performer at his
disposal — his daughter, Haven Lee Harris, a delicate,
soft-spoken four-year-old.
SANCTUARY
Zachary Wigon
“By featuring the intrusion of reality into performance early in
the film, Wigon and screenwriter Micah Bloomberg
(Homecoming) prime the viewer for a similar meta twist to
recur… Such a twist might allow the viewer to feel smarter
than the film, but its take on performance is subtler, and
Wigon never pulls the rug out from under us as sharply as he
does initially… As the plot progresses and the couple dole out
revelations, we wonder if each is the truth or a calculated
move — the answer is most often both.” — JESSE CATHERINE
WEBBER [Published as part of InRO’s TIFF 2022 coverage.]
DIRECTOR: Zachary Wigon; CAST: Margaret Qualley,
Christopher Abbott; DISTRIBUTOR: NEON; IN THEATERS: May
19; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 36 min.
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FILM REVIEWS
WHITE BUILDING
Kavich Neang
“At only 90 minutes long, White Building could use a little more
room to really let its ideas and milieu breathe. It has a fairly
standard three-act structure [and] feels rushed… Still, despite
some quibbles, this is a strong fiction feature debut… A direct
descendant of neo-realism, White Building understands the
plight of an increasingly modern world that is constantly
leaving its most vulnerable denizens behind. Neang is no Jia,
not yet, nor a Tsai Ming-liang, but there remains a lot of talent
on display here.” — DANIEL GORMAN [Published as part of InRO’s
New Directors/New Films 2022 coverage.]
DIRECTOR: Kavich Neang; CAST: Piseth Chhun, Sithan Hout,
Sokha Uk, Sovann Tho; DISTRIBUTOR: KimStim; IN
THEATERS: May 19; RUNTIME: May 19
Here, she plays Emma, an imaginative young girl forced to listen
to her parents (Brionne Davis and Augie Duke) argue all day. As
the film begins, her mother is waking her up in the middle of the
night and packing her into the car to escape. The father catches
them, and another argument ensues. Dad isn’t abusive, just a
workaholic, and mom appears to be mentally unstable. Fed up,
Emma flees from their yelling, but trips and falls down a flight of
stairs. As her corporeal body slips into a coma while being
transported to the hospital, her subconscious awakes in a
symbolic underworld of dank tunnels, industrial warehouses, and
treacherous monsters. Emma must find her way back to her
parents by traversing a series of scary or otherwise
psychologically loaded encounters, while periodically catching
snippets of her parent’s voices via an old radio that she is
carrying. It’s a skeletal narrative framework on which to hang
what Harris really seems to care about: namely, elaborate
production design and lots of handmade bric-a-brac.
Working with cinematographer Wolfgang Meyer and production
design consultant Delarey Wagener, Harris has expanded his own
2017 short Every Dream is a Child with Teeth into a much larger
production, which was reportedly shot piecemeal over three
years. Whatever the film’s flaws, the effort is all up on screen.
Harris has a nice eye for worn-down, grubby spaces, and a real
knack for creepy character design. One stranger that Emma
encounters uses a giant sledgehammer to reconstruct a
smashed pipe organ in reverse, each swing of the tool putting
broken chunks back together. Elsewhere, a disgusting bathroom
gives the “worst toilet in Scotland” scene from Trainspotting a run
for its money, while a sequence that finds Emma encountering
images of her future adult self could have been
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pulled from a mid-2000s pop-punk music video. At one point,
Emma’s beloved stuffed rhino becomes a giant papier-mâché
marionette that she climbs inside and pilots like a mech.
But the real showstopper is a haunting humanoid husk that
tracks Emma throughout her comatose dreamscape, feeding off
of her tears. Referred to in the credits only as “Teeth,” the
creature has a featureless face and a gaping black maw where
its mouth should be. The monster places a pair of plastic,
wind-up chattering teeth into this void, while it drifts around
hunting for its prey. It’s a remarkable design, suggestive and
creepy and viscerally unpleasant, even as the film avoids any
overt violence. Its cursed aura haunts the proceedings, and while
Emma’s final confrontation with the beast delivers fairly
boilerplate platitudes about facing one’s fears, Harris gets a lot of
mileage out of his simple, lo-fi setup — miniatures, stop-motion
animation, stuttering frame-rates, and trick photography do a lot
of impressive heavy lifting. Still, while it seems churlish to be so
harsh on what is obviously a labor of love, one can’t help but wish
Harris was more influenced by the actual weirdness of a
Jodorowsky project or the Czech New Wave instead of a pale
imitator like Terry Gilliam. On the other hand, there’s a lot of
undeniable talent on display here. Someone give Harris some
money and a proper soundstage, and let the man cook. — DANIEL
GORMAN
DIRECTOR: Ryan Stevens Harris; CAST: Augie Duke, Brionne
Davis, Haven Lee Harris, Morgana Ignis; DISTRIBUTOR:
Oscilloscope Laboratories; IN THEATERS: May 19; RUNTIME: 1 hr.
33 min.
THE THIEF COLLECTOR
Allison Otto
With the flood of murder podcasts and documentaries seemingly
never-ending, true crime as a genre is in need of a serious
makeover. While such subcategories certainly have their place in
the genre and the mass appeal remains undeniable, the
popularity of shows like Dahmer and My Favorite Murder has
dominated the landscape for over a decade, and serial killer
portraiture represents nearly 40 percent of published true crime
material. What space is left for the non-homicidal baddies?
Amidst the sensationalist bedlam, there have certainly been
popular tales of espionage, cult crazies, and hoaxes that have
landed with some lasting power, but for the most part, these
have been mostly swept under the blood-stained rug of our
collective short-term memory. Allison Otto’s The Thief Collector,
then, is a most refreshing documentary that gives true crime the
America’s Next Top Model moment it needs.
In 1985, Willem de Kooning’s Woman-Ochre was, quite literally,
ripped from the walls of the University of Arizona’s art museum.
Authorities, including the FBI’s art crime team, spent decades
attempting to track down the painting, expecting it to show up in
underground markets. When no such back-alley transactions
occurred, they essentially gave up, and the university wrote off
the loss. But in 2017, when Ron Roseman was organizing the
estate of his aunt and uncle, Rita and Jerry Alter, he called in a
local auction house to review some of the eccentric artwork and
artifacts the couple had accrued across their half-century of
travels. When a customer offered them $200,000 for a work they
LOVE TO LOVE YOU, DONNA SUMMER
Brooklyn Sudano & Roger Ross Williams
“For all the subsequent slander of “Disco Sucks,” it never truly went away, but instead transformed and spun off into genres like new
wave, house, hip hop, and EDM. So while Love to Love You, Donna Summer fails to portray the full impact of its star and make such
massive connections explicit, it does manage to paint a nuanced and personal portrait of one of the most important pop talents of
all time. Sometimes the voice within the voice presents as only a whisper, but that doesn’t make it any less beautiful to hear.” — NICK
SEIP [Published as part of InRO’s Berlinale 2023 coverage.]
DIRECTOR: Brooklyn Sudano & Roger Ross Williams; CAST: —; DISTRIBUTOR: HBO; STREAMING: May 20; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 45 min.
21

FILM REVIEWS
all thought was, well, quite ugly, suspicions arose. Some calls
were made, and the painting was confirmed to be the missing de
Kooning, now valued at $160 million. Mystery solved — well, sort
of.
Art heists aren’t all that uncommon; in fact, just this week a man
was charged in the theft of Judy Garland’s ruby slippers from The
Wizard of Oz. This one seems straightforward enough — the
Alters visited the museum, distracted the guards, cut the
painting from its frame, and made off with it, hanging it in their
home to admire for years to follow. Thankfully, the Alters are
much more interesting than that. You see, Jerry and Rita had
quite a number of near-priceless artifacts in their home. Before
calling in experts, Roseman had donated several pieces to a local
thrift store. The store investigated these items and ended up
selling them for more than $100,000 — a pretty hefty haul for a
store that makes its mint selling used bowls for $1.99. So how do
two school teachers become international art thieves? We may
have never known, had Jerry not decided to self-publish a book
before his death. The collection of semi-autobiographical short
DARK NATURE
Berkeley Brady
“[Dark Nature] finally kicks into high gear during its last act,
after almost an hour of hemming and hawing… Dropping all
the excess narrative baggage, the film really comes alive once
it simplifies its concept and gets down to pure genre brass
tacks… It’s overly familiar, but well-executed all the same. It
amounts to a passable-enough exercise, somewhat salvaged
in its late-going and mostly notable for its low-budget
ambition and focus on female solidarity. But, to put it bluntly,
Brady the director needs a better writer.” — DANIEL GORMAN
[Published as part of InRO’s Fantasia Festival 2022 coverage.]
DIRECTOR: Berkeley Brady; CAST: Hannah Emily Anderson,
Madison Walsh, Roseanne Supernault; DISTRIBUTOR:
Filmoption International; IN THEATERS / STREAMING: May 19 /
May 23; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 25 min.
22

FILM REVIEWS
stories includes one account of a pair of jewel thieves. Another
details a man killing his handyman and burying the body in the
septic tank (the Alters didn’t allow people to flush their toilets
and didn’t have their septic system pumped for more than 40
years, which even the plumber found more than a little
suspicious). With both Jerry and Rita gone, there’s no way to
confirm the authenticity of these stories, but there’s no denying
that the coincidences line up.
These stories form the backbone of The Thief Collector, in which
Otto carefully parcels out each new tidbit of information in
dramatic fashion. Interviews with family members, former
students, FBI Agents, and a number of other tangentially involved
parties are all interwoven to slowly reveal each detail of the
Alters’ twisty story. But a fantastical tale deserves a fantastical
retelling, and Otto delivers that in the form of reenactments from
Glenn Howerton and Sarah Minnich, playing the shady couple.
These scenes, though not constituting a major portion of the
film, set its tone and lend The Thief Collector an appealing
whimsicality, in contrast to the direness of so many real-life
accounts of barbarous villainy. While such an approach could
have easily fallen into cheap Drunk History-style shenanigans, the
combination of Otto’s execution and Howerton and Minnich’s
presence brings a waggishness to the proceedings, and imbues
genuine personality into two real-life characters who clearly had
a lot of it. The Thief Collector is just what true crime needs to
push its way out of the morgue, and Otto may just be the Tyra
Banks the genre is looking for. — EMILY DUGRANRUT
DIRECTOR: Allison Otto; CAST: Glenn Howerton, Sarah Minnich,
Scott Takeda; DISTRIBUTOR: FilmRise; IN THEATERS &
STREAMING: May 19; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 33 min.
OUTPOST
Joe Lo Truglio
There’s always at least a modicum of interest stirred up when
well-known actors take a turn in the director’s chair. More often
than not, these efforts find performers maxing out in the general
realm of workmanlike competency, too surrounded by talent and
favors to fall to hackish levels, but also rarely approaching
anything of real note — for every Clint Eastwood, there are scores
of Tom Hanks, Denzel Washingtons, George Clooneys, and Jodie
Fosters taking uninspired spins around the directorial block.
Even those who successfully make a full-time transition — the
Ron Howards and Jon Favreaus of the world — typically settle
into churning out author-ambivalent studio fare. Hardly
quantifiable, it’s still fair to assume these high-profile
23

FILM REVIEWS
multi-hyphenates’ forays into maestro mode suffer to some
degree due to established personas, their comfortable positions
within public perception stealthily discouraging anything that
might disrupt that enviable stability. With the way the Hollywood
machine works, in many ways it’s far easier for a periphery
player like pre-Sicario Taylor Sheridan, absent much of a cultural
footprint, to make that leap; whether you’re on board with his
particular brand of hyper-masculine myth-making and libertarian
propaganda, there’s no denying that his idiosyncratic voice has
become its own kind of cottage industry and birthed a full-blown
(and surprising, in this the age of IP worship) franchise with the
Yellowstone universe. It’s tough to imagine superstars taking that
risk.
“There’s a whole lot of
derivation of other works
here … but very little to
suggest a fully-formed vision
from Truglio.
All of which is to say, there’s undeniable intrigue baked into
Outpost, the directorial debut of funnyman Joe Lo Truglio. An
alum of The State who was probably most known to viewers as
“oh, that guy!” in a number of aughts-era David Wain and Apatow
stable comedies before landing in the cultural consciousness
proper as ultimate sycophantic beta Charles Boyle on Brooklyn
Nine-Nine, Truglio somewhat surprisingly forgoes comedy in
favor of old-school horror with his first feature. Outpost follows
Kate (Beth Dover, Truglio’s wife), a woman who has just suffered
a violent assault and who relocates to the hopefully healing
isolation of the northern Idaho wilderness, taking a position as a
fire lookout. Her only physical companions here are a trio of men:
her boss Earl (Ato Essandoh), who harbors his own demons
regarding guilt over a past fire; Ranger Dan (Dallas Roberts), who
is characterized as little more than a skeevy lech; and Reggie
(Dylan Baker), a crotchety widower who is protective of the
mountain and oddly fixated on getting Kate to drink some of his
homemade tea. As viewers can quickly deduce, this situation
offers not just the potential for peaceful recuperation, but also
plenty of trauma triggers.
It’s a nice setup for what could be a lot of campy fun, with the
setting’s isolation and cast of creepy dudes offering something
of an inverse tip of the cap to Neil LaBute’s absolutely bugnuts
The Wicker Man remake. The problem is that a consistent tone is
never established. On one hand, Outpost locates Kate within a
vast expanse and near-complete solitude, only to see her PTSD
render her claustrophobic nonetheless, which is a potentially
interesting conceit to explore. But then we have the fact that
Kate just keeps dropping her most essential shit — her keys in
the outhouse toilet, so now she can’t leave the mountain; her
phone off the side of the fire tower, so now she can’t call for help
— which seems like it would have to be a joke, except it’s never
clearly emphasized as such. Likewise, the vague fickleness of a
character like Reggie, which allows Kate’s paranoia and distrust
to ebb and flow in extreme ways, is in contrast to the overt
shadiness of Ranger Dan, who is shown zooming in on pictures of
Kate’s butt that he surreptitiously snapped; the essential
question of Kate’s sanity leaks tension under such broad
characterizations and circumstances.
Also enervating to the film’s psycho-thriller aims is Truglio’s
limited bag of tricks. Kate consistently has flashbacks to her
assault, which mostly result in the present with her seeing
images of creepy crawlers wriggling through spilled animal
viscera; these scenes, plus a bevy of phantasm-driven jump
scares, constitute the entirety of the film’s fairly lazy horror
inflections. And then we arrive at the film’s climax, which
predictably finds Kate going full “Here’s Johnny!” mode, before
Truglio hits viewers with an on-the-nose cover of Nick Lowe’s
“The Beast in Me” to accompany the end credits. It’s one final
moment of whiplash in a film that isn't confident enough or
competent enough to establish a lane, let alone stay in it. There’s
a whole lot of derivation of other works here — which, combined
with the film’s intermittent winking at them, probably helps
explain its inability to fully commit to either its hammier
elements or its straightforward survivalist horror — but very little
to suggest a fully-formed vision from Truglio. The intent is
admirable, but the performer might benefit from a controlled
burn before he tries his hand at directing again. — LUKE GORHAM
DIRECTOR: Joe Lo Truglio; CAST: Beth Dover, Dylan Baker, Dallas
Roberts; DISTRIBUTOR: Gravitas Ventures; IN THEATERS &
STREAMING: May 19; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 24 min.
24

Photo Credits:
Cover - Peter Mountain/Universal Pictures; Page 1 - Calvin Thomas; Page 4 - Factory 25; Page 5
- Factory 25; Page 6 - Kitty Film; Page 7, 8 - Kadokawa Corp; Page 10 - Shochiku Co., Ltd.; Page
11, 12 - Merrick Morton/20th Century Fox; Page 13, 14 - Discovery Productions; Page 15 - Peter
Mountain/Universal Pictures; Page 17 - Inti Briones; Page 18 - Parrish Lewis/20th Century
Pictures; Page 20 - Oscilloscope Laboratories; Page 22 - FilmRise; Page 23 - Gravitas Ventures;
Back Cover - Inti Briones