InRO Weekly

IN REVIEW ONLINE 

FEATURES 

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 

MONSTER — 1 

ONLY THE RIVER FLOWS — 2 

MARGUERITE’S THEOREM — 3 

THE POT-AU-FEU — 4 

A PRINCE — 6 

VINCENT MUST DIE — 7 

LEGUA — 8 

OMEN — 10 

KICKING THE CANON 

JANET. — 11 

THE TERRORIZERS — 13 

FILM REVIEWS 

THE LITTLE MERMAID — 16 

YOU HURT MY FEELINGS — 17 

REALITY — 19 

WILL-O-THE-WISP — 21 

THE POTEMKINISTS — 21 

KANDAHAR — 22 

ABOUT MY FATHER — 24 

STAY AWAKE — 25 

UNCLENCHING 

THE FISTS — 25 

ROBOTS — 27 

INFLUENCER — 29 

WHITE BALLS ON WALLS — 30 

ALBUM REVIEWS 

Kesha — 32 

Aespa — 33 

Jonas Brothers — 34 

May 26, 2023 

Volume 1, Issue 21

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2023 

MONSTER 

Hirokazu Kore-eda 

With his latest film, Monster, Hirokazu Kore-eda has outdone 

himself. Rather than make one bad film, as he usually does, the 

Japanese director has made the equivalent of three, each one 

worse and more wrongheaded than the last. The first of the 

film’s three parts opens promisingly enough, centered on a single 

mother, Saori (Ando Sakura), who finds out that her son, Minato 

(Kurokawa Soya), is apparently being verbally and physically 

abused by his schoolteacher, Mr. Hori (Nagayama Eita). Short 

scenes advance the narrative at a brisk clip, following Saori’s 

attempts to seek restitution from the school, while deliberately 

obscuring the motivations of every other character. Indeed, the 

response to Saori’s efforts by the school principal and the other 

schoolteachers is so inexplicable, so extreme in its bureaucratic 

politesse, that it would not have been inconceivable for them to 

be revealed as aliens à la Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Before We Vanish 

(2017). 

The screenplay by Yuji Sakamoto does not have anything quite so 

high-concept in mind. For better and worse, neither the second 

nor the third sections, which retell the same events from the 

perspectives of Mr. Hori and Minato respectively, go anywhere 

near sci-fi territory. What they do include are a series of 

revelations that gradually drain any sort of mystery from the 

story, functioning not unlike the hoary network narratives of a 

previous era, such as Paul Haggis’ monumentally misguided 

Crash (2004). While Kore-eda’s ostensible aim is to add emotional 

depth to the story by “humanizing” initially antagonistic figures, 

Monster effectively does the opposite, turning all and sundry into 

mere plot mechanisms, gears around which the script’s 

increasingly nonsensical pile-up of complications may turn. The 

emotionless behavior of the school’s principal (Tanaka Yuko), for 

example, is first explained by the fact that she is still grieving the 

recent death of her grandchild. Later, we learn that her husband 

was responsible, having accidentally run the child over in a 

driveway. Still later, we learn that she was the one responsible 

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FESTIVAL COVERAGE 

and chose to let her husband take the rap to save face. Similarly, 

one scene in the final act reveals what we previously assumed is 

the film's non-diegetic score to be a product of said principal 

encouraging Minato to blow his feelings away by playing an 

instrument in the school’s music room. 

This pattern of misdirection and revelation is indicative of 

Monster as a whole, but it emerges in full force in the film’s final 

act, with a reveal that everything we’ve seen thus far is explained 

by Minato’s incipient same-sex attraction to another student, and 

his socially-fueled repression of the very same. Some critics 

have remarked that Monster marks a kind of departure for 

Kore-eda, as it involves subjects such as child abuse, which 

considerably darken the palette of his typically gentle, 

family-centered dramas. Monster proves, though, that Kore-eda’s 

so-called “humanism” is fully compatible with exploitation. For if 

the film contains horror, it’s in the way that it uses 

homosexuality as a mere plot twist. — LAWRENCE GARCIA 

ONLY THE RIVER FLOWS 

Wei Shujun 

Although his name may be unfamiliar to some, Chinese director 

Wei Shujun has already made several feature films, including 

2021’s Ripples of Life, which also debuted at Cannes. But Wei 

seems poised for a significant breakout with Only the River Flows. 

This knotty, complex police drama combines elements from 

genre masters like Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Bong Joon-ho, 

but nevertheless displays a highly 

individualistic sensibility. The story 

centers on a highly regarded police 

detective, Ma Zhe (Zhu Yilong), in the 

rural town of Banpo. He’s been tasked 

with solving the murder of an elderly 

woman (Cao Yang). But what at first 

appears to be an open-and-shut case 

soon reveals unexpected layers of 

social dysfunction. 

to show just how burdened Ma’s task force is with oversight from 

the CCP, and the oppressive need for a neat conclusion and the 

positive PR that would come with it. When Ma voices that he 

thinks the cops have maybe rushed to judgment, he is told, in no 

uncertain terms by his boss (Hou Tianlai), to sign off on the 

paperwork and move on, because “our superiors are watching.” 

One notices something quite remarkable about Only the River 

Flows right off the bat. The first Chinese feature in many years to 

be shot on celluloid, the film looks very much like an actual 

artifact of the mid-’90s. Exhibiting the same muted palette and 

soft lens one sees in early Hou Hsiao-hsien or Jia Zhang-ke 

films, River exhibits a physicality that feels genuinely oppressive. 

When one considers that Wei has Ma’s team set their offices up 

in an abandoned movie palace, it’s evident this director isn’t only 

interested in the investigative mindset, but also its imbrication 

with filmmaking — the way cinema and police work are two 

complementary technologies for managing the populace. 

Once it becomes apparent that the wrong man may have been 

arrested for the old woman’s murder, Ma is forced to battle 

against his own instincts which, he discovers, are tied to 

common social prejudices. Is the old woman’s ward, referred to 

as “the madman” (Kang Chunlei), under suspicion because of his 

cognitive impairments? Is Xu Liang (Wang Jianyu), the 

hairdresser, actually guilty, or is he confessing because he 

knows his queer sexuality ensures he’ll be framed? These ethical 

crises only intensify when Ma and his pregnant wife (Chloe 

This is a fairly standard noir set-up: 

that one case that the genius 

detective couldn’t solve. However, by 

setting the action in 1995, Wei is able 

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CANNES 2023 

Maayan) learn that their unborn son has a high risk of birth 

defects, which would mark him as another unwanted “other” in a 

society of rampant xenophobia. 

To his credit, Wei offers no easy solutions to these problems — 

nor to the crime itself. Not unlike Bong’s Memories of Murder or 

Dominik Moll’s recent French film The Night of the 12th, Only the 

River Flows examines crime not as a rift in the social fabric, but 

as the logical outcome of oppression so complete that it tends to 

elude notice. It’s no secret that Chinese cinema has suffered 

artistically under Xi Jinping’s regime, even as it has reaped 

truckloads of money. Only the River Flows provides a very 

welcome sign of life. — MICHAEL SICINSKI 

MARGUERITE’S THEOREM 

Anna Novion 

Advanced mathematics on film is often treated as a gateway to 

mental illness (Pi) or espionage (The Imitation Game) or in some 

instances both (A Beautiful Mind); rarely is it foregrounded to the 

extent that it is in Anna Novion’s Marguerite’s Theorem, the 

reasons for which are obvious in hindsight. There is questionable 

cinematic value in watching someone excitedly scribble long, 

inscrutable formulae on a chalkboard, there’s little incentive for 

genuinely brilliant characters to stop and explain 

what they’re doing for the benefit of the audience, and, even if 

they did, it all runs the risk of turning into, well, school. Inferring 

successes and setbacks, then, relies almost entirely upon 

contextual clues, such as elevated breathing and a quickening of 

pace as a proof is written out, or murmuring from the peanut 

gallery followed by a furrowed brow of the person standing in 

front of the class to signal something is amiss. One can be 

watching someone triumphantly prove a theorem that’s eluded 

mathematicians for centuries, or having years worth of work 

invalidated, in the blink of an eye — and in both instances, the 

viewer must patiently wait to be told which is which. 

The Marguerite of this film’s title is a 25-year-old PhD candidate 

at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris played by Swiss actress 

Ella Rumpf (Raw). The only woman in her discipline at ENS — the 

film opens with the character being interviewed for a newsletter 

which allows us to quickly get up to speed on someone who 

concertedly refuses to reveal more of herself — Marguerite is in 

the final year of her studies, having dedicated years to making 

incremental progress in solving Goldbach's conjecture, a theorem 

from the 1700’s that still remains unproven. We learn that math is 

her entire life (when pressed on her hobbies, the best she can 

muster is taking walks to clear her head and playing Yahtzee 

with her mother) and that she is weeks away from presenting her 

thesis, the culmination of her studies, 

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paving the way to publication and advancement in her field. But 

while presenting her work for peer review, a previously 

undetected yet catastrophic error is discovered in Marguerite’s 

work, invalidating her theorem and forcing her to consider 

abandoning it entirely and devising an entirely new thesis in a 

matter of months. Like much of the film, this moment of 

complete and total professional devastation plays against quiet 

disbelief from learned observers and Rumpf’s steely outer 

resolve. 

But on the inside, Marguerite is spiraling out. She questions her 

talents and even her life’s pursuit, all exacerbated by her 

longtime faculty advisor, Professor Werner (Jean-Pierre 

Darroussin), who drops her to focus on Lucas (Julien Frison), a 

hotshot transfer from Oxford. Confronted by failure and an 

uncertain future, Marguerite impulsively drops out of ENS and 

contemplates a life outside of math only to find that a head full 

of numbers can be both a blessing and a curse. She’s quickly 

bounced from a data collection job after demonstrating a 

greater understanding of surveys than her impatient supervisor. 

However, she also displays a real aptitude for mahjong, besting 

seasoned gamblers in illicit backroom games seemingly seconds 

after sitting down at the table, ensuring she’ll always have rent 

money. It’s while playing mahjong that an epiphany has her 

reconsidering her flawed theorem. With the spark of inspiration 

returning to her, she rededicates herself to proving not only her 

own thesis, but potentially unlocking Goldbach's conjecture itself. 

Novion rests much of her film’s success on the shoulders of 

Rumpf, playing a character who’s told, point blank, that she’s “too 

cold and too closed.” Marguerite has a nasty tendency of 

alienating Lucas before he can get too close to her — the side 

effect of a fraught relationship with her absentee father — which 

leads to her repeatedly crawling back to him, brusquely 

imploring him to resume their work together in what 

increasingly becomes a flimsy pretext to obscure her feelings. 

This is a prickly yet bloodless character study of a solitary 

woman prone to irritability, rudeness, and obsession: the further 

she goes into her work, the more it takes over the her small, 

shared apartment, her scrawlings covering every surface, post-it 

note, pane of glass, and even working their way around a roll of 

toilet paper. It's not so much a question of whether Marguerite 

can have it all as it is will she allow herself to accept happiness 

— a somewhat banal character arc, but one mitigated by a 

welcomingly prickly performance by the film's lead actress. 

For all the attention paid to theorems and formulae, Marguerite’s 

Theorem does little to obscure how conventional and almost trite 

the film can be. Marguerite’s adventures at the mahjong table 

play like something out of Rain Man or The Hangover, complete 

with complex equations superimposed over Rumpf’s face as she 

takes down game after game. There’s also no getting around the 

fact that Rumpf is one of the most glamorous young actresses in 

the world (she even briefly appeared on Succession as a 

Contessa) and that costuming her in glasses and frumpy 

sweaters does not begin to explain her almost nonexistent social 

life. Theoretically, the film resembles a sports movie in which 

Marguerite must — metaphorically — pick herself up off the mat, 

build her confidence back up, and step back into the ring; in its 

approach, however, it always keeps the viewer at arm’s length. 

Marguerite frequently finds inspiration in the everyday, her face 

lighting up as something dawns on her, causing her to rush off 

and resume her work. Yet throughout, we are little more than her 

dispassionate observers, at a loss over what it all means, taking 

our cues from imperceptible changes in her face as to whether a 

development is positive or negative. It all feels a bit like auditing 

a graduate course where you spend the entire time praying that 

nobody calls on you. — ANDREW DIGNAN 

THE POT-AU-FEU 

Trần Anh Hùng 

Trần Anh Hùng’s The Pot-au-Feu charts a romance between 

gourmet chef Dodin Bouffant (Benoit Magimel) and his cook, 

Eugenie (Juliette Binoche), in late 18th-century France. Their 

relationship as creative collaborators and lovers sidesteps the 

typical pitfalls of complicated entanglement or fraught power 

dynamics, Hùng instead taking a more interesting view on the 

relationship in refusing to establish a firm dichotomy between 

admiration for a person and admiration for their work. Rather 

than focusing on any conversational back-and-forth or intense 

physical desire, The Pot-au-Feu is interested in understanding 

this romance as it flows through their work. As such, a large part 

of the film revels in the striking, meticulous demonstration of 

preparing delicious food. The billowing steam of stews, the 

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CANNES 2023 

crunch of fresh vegetables, the succulence of various meats, 

and the delicacy of assorted desserts — these are all depicted 

with a romantic, sometimes even carnal eye; you might even say 

that to watch this film on an empty stomach would invite 

genuine agony. 

The Pot-au-Feu, however, is not a celebration of pure decadence. 

An internationally recognized and respected chef, Dodin’s feasts 

and methodology have managed to attract even European royalty 

to his fine-dining parties. While these gorgeously photographed 

feasts are prepared for their guests, Dodin dutifully serves as 

consummate host, passionately explaining his creative process 

and culinary ideals. Magimel is exceptional in the role. At one 

point, Dodin is described by someone as the “Napoleon of fine 

dining,” and bristles, and Magimel fully 

conveys why this character might be so dubbed: Dodin 

describes his convictions for the art of the feast with a confident 

intensity, criticizing others’ inability to understand haute cuisine 

as a cultural and artistic expression rather than just an 

opportunity to gorge in style. But it’s also clear why Dodin 

would object to this description; in his romance with Boniche’s 

Eugenie, we see the chef capture beauty and express deep 

affection for his lover through his cooking, as well as his struggle 

to prepare the meals precisely for her. Cooking is not dogma for 

Dodin — it’s communication. He has no desire to be 

dictatorial, but to more precisely articulate himself. Food is a 

conversation, a relationship being developed between cook and 

consumer, one that should not be overpowered by either parties’ 

indulgences. 

As an actor, Magimel communicates impeccably through 

gestures — a curl at the corner of his mouth, can speak volumes 

to how he’s assessing his peers, indicating whether his high 

standards have been met. There’s an intensity to his stare, but 

also curiosity, a sense of expectation, and of course a strong 

feeling of desire when directed at his co-star. It’s a performance 

of earnest wanting, replete with all the intimidation and 

flattering that might invoke. Binoche responds with a physical 

performance honed through process — much of the labor in the 

kitchen, preparing recipes and organizing complex feasts, lies 

5


with her, and we see her work and sweat it out with the wait 

staff, making sure that everything is on time and in order. At 

the same time, there’s an undercurrent of warm humanism to 

the performance, detectable when you see her on her breaks 

sharing generous portions of the prepared feasts with her 

staff. 

The differences between these two characters’ and their 

approach to their work are what distinguish this creative 

partnership and make their romance so intense; they 

compliment each other in form and function, the practical one 

and the idealist. They two struggle to define where their love for 

each other and their love of their profession begins and ends — 

but the question is essentially meaningless. Eugenie is her 

cooking, her process, her care; Dodin is his taste and his intense 

curiosity. If cooking in this film really is treated as a form of 

personal communication, then these two speak the same 

seductive language to each other throughout the film — 

dialoguing through carefully presented, beautifully realized, and 

laboriously prepared meals. 

Later, tragic events intrude upon this seduction — telegraphed in 

an early fainting — but these moments prove less intoxicating 

and more familiar in their presentation; interruptions in an 

admiringly modest film. Thankfully, Hùng mostly sticks to images 

of cooking and eating, the respective work and pleasure of these 

activities making up a majority of The Pot-au-Feu’s runtime; 

tragedy is but a course rather than the whole meal. It’s an 

approach that Dodin himself echoes when talking to his guests, 

clarifying the ideals of his creative expression: most importantly, 

that meals should always have lightness, should never be too 

decadent or heavy or overbearing. A feast properly prepared 

should be balanced, should make you contemplate its 

components and how they function as a collective whole. Hùng’s 

film respects this clarity that defines Dodin’s cuisine, and so 

largely allows its characters to luxuriate in its intimate and 

charming and sexy spaces. Dodin and Eugenie’s differences are 

explicated purely in how they work in the kitchen and in how 

they enjoy the fruits (and vegetables and meats and broths) of 

each other's labor. There’s no need for validation for their 

relationship beyond that, the work. There’s no need to drown the 

film in maudlin emotion or ponderous conversation. In observing 

how beautifully a peeled pear is presented, how thoroughly a 

duck is stuffed, and how early one must rise to produce a proper 

omelet, we are able to better understand the particulars and 

depth of how two lovers at the heart of The Pot-au-Feu feel about 

each other. — EMILIO DIAZ 

A PRINCE 

Pierre Creton 

Pierre Creton’s acclaimed 2017 documentary Va, Toto! was, 

among other things, an examination of the lives of elderly gay 

men in rural France, depicting their aging bodies as they work 

the land, and one another. Creton brings this subject matter into 

the fictional realm with A Prince, a film that combines narrative 

convolutions with a rare formal limpidity. In its awkward 

precision, A Prince is likely to remind some viewers of the early 

films of Alain Guiraudie, but Creton replaces that director’s 

bucolic surrealism with an almost Straubian directness. And 

while more conventional aspects of cinema, things like plot 

and characterization, remain opaque, Creton makes the 

themes and subtext of A Prince so blatant as to be almost 

inane. 

The film centers on a young man named Pierre-Joseph, a 

seemingly simple soul who, almost by accident, discovers a 

penchant for gardening. By devoting his life to horticulture, 

Pierre-Joseph finds not only a vocation, but a seemingly endless 

string of male lovers. In one of the film’s most unique and bizarre 

strategies, the main character roles are split, with one actor 

appearing on-screen while another articulates their thoughts in 

voiceover. For example, young Pierre-Joseph is vocalized by 

Grégory Gadebois, but physically manifested by Antoine Pirotte. 

That’s until the final third of the film, however, when in a single 

scene, young Pierre-Joseph is replaced by middle-aged 

Pierre-Joseph, played by the director himself. P-J’s journey 

eventually lands him in a three-man polycule with two elderly 

gardeners: Alberto (Vincent Barré on-screen, voice of Mathieu 

Amalric), his original botany teacher, and Adrien (Pierre Barray, 

mostly silent), who owns a nursery with his wife. 

Although the floral and sexual education of P-J represents the 

main dramatic thread of A Prince, there is another character 

who, although appearing only near the end, is discussed and 

alluded to throughout the film. This is Kutta (Chiman Dangi), an 

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CANNES 2023 

Indian child who was adopted and raised in France by Françoise 

Brown (Manon Schapp / Françoise Lebrun), a schoolteacher (and 

Alberto’s sister). In her interstitial musings, Ms. Brown discusses 

Kutta’s difficulty growing up as an immigrant, a problem that the 

film explicitly compares to the transplantation of non-native 

flora. That’s right: Creton lays his symbolic cards on the table, 

likening human beings to plants, and gardening to the exercise 

of control. 

A Prince, while often pleasurable, presents significant challenges 

for the viewer. At times it is difficult to even be sure who is 

speaking, since image and sound exist in separate realms. This 

means that certain aspects of these characters and even their 

basic narrative trajectories often remain opaque. This is 

frustrating, of course, but it’s fairly evident that this is Creton’s 

way of keeping the viewer at a distance. We are asked to admire 

these men, their efforts, and their often ample appendages, as 

we might a flourishing rhododendron. Surface, not interiority, is 

Creton’s bailiwick. It’s a theoretically compelling approach, but at 

times it’s hard not to feel like A Prince is all plant, no payoff. — 

MICHAEL SICINSKI 

VINCENT MUST DIE 

Karim Leklou 

Karim Leklou has a fascinating face, a seemingly unremarkable 

assemblage of features that acts like a blank slate; it's a 

Kuleshov-effect visage. Director Clément Cogitore put this 

phenomenon to great use in last year’s Sons of Ramses, an 

as-yet-undistributed sorta-thriller that cast Leklou as a fake 

medium who cons people out of money in exchange for 

pretending to communicate with their deceased loved ones. It’s 

remarkably easy to project onto Leklou; his doughy, slightly 

saggy features and hangdog eyes seem to invite pity and 

commiseration. He’s once again cast to excellent effect in 

Stéphan Castang’s Vincent Must Die, a pitch-black comedy that 

7


gradually transforms into an apocalyptic horror film about 

mankind's capacity for violence. 

True to the film’s title, Vincent awakes one day to find that 

random people wish to do him extreme bodily harm. An intern at 

his office drone job smashes a computer keyboard across his 

head. Another colleague stabs Vincent in the hand and wrist with 

a pin. Of course, the office’s HR rep not so subtly suggests that 

Vincent probably did something to antagonize his attackers and 

that he should simply work from home for his own safety. But it’s 

not just the people he is tangentially connected to; completely 

anonymous strangers try to attack him, too. Dejected from a 

date gone bad, Vincent slinks back to his apartment just in time 

for his neighbor’s kids — a pair of polite, friendly pre-teens — to 

suddenly attack. When he defends himself against the children, 

his neighbors gang up on him and threaten to call the police. 

This guy just can’t catch a break. 

Eventually, Vincent decides to leave the city and head for his 

family’s secluded farm. He learns a few things along the way 

when he meets an unhoused person outside of a fast-food place. 

Desperately hungry, the man exchanges information for some 

food. What’s happening to Vincent happened to him, too. The 

man tells Vincent to avoid eye contact at all costs, which seems 

to trigger potential assailants, and suggests getting a dog, as 

they can somehow sense when an attack is imminent. 

Furthermore, there’s a website with an active message board full 

of people experiencing this same phenomenon, each sharing 

their own stories about friends and family suddenly becoming 

bloodthirsty maniacs. Seeking refuge in the deserted farm 

house, Vincent tries to avoid people, but keeps being forced into 

conversations; an old childhood friend stops by to say hello, 

while a backed-up septic tank leads to a visit from an elderly 

neighbor. Both encounters lead to violence. It's harder to 

disappear from society than one might imagine. 

There’s a curious conservative undercurrent here (presumably 

unintended by the filmmakers) about the average white male 

being besieged by all sides: through no fault of his own, Vincent 

is driven from his home, disenfranchised, and literally forced to 

cower under threat of potential harm, and that the film would 

feel radically different with a person of color and/or a woman as 

the protagonist perhaps speaks to the malleability of its 

premise. Unintentional parallels to contemporary white male 

grievances aside, the film thankfully casts this subtext off once 

it expands in scope. What was once isolated to a few poor, 

unfortunate souls escalates into a much larger scaled event — 

call it a pseudo-apocalypse. Vincent eventually meets Margaux 

(Vimala Pons), a free-spirited waitress who believes his 

unbelievable story, and the duo strike up a kind of romance. 

Unfortunately, either one of them could attack the other at any 

moment, which proves a real roadblock to intimacy. Vincent's 

father eventually joins them, and what began as an oddball 

comedy of errors becomes full-on survival horror. 

Castang has a keen sense of building tension, aided 

immeasurably by Leklou's sad-sack performance. This 

unremarkable everyman becomes a free-floating metaphor for 

the incoherent, unexpected rage that permeates the world, a 

hostage to forces beyond control or even understanding. For 

thrillseekers, there are a couple of outstanding suspense 

sequences here, including a melee in a traffic jam that devolves 

into startling brutality. There are also a few parallels here to 

Ulrich Köhler's 2018 film In My Room, another quirky character 

study that takes an outlandish sci-fi conceit — in this case a 'last 

man on earth' scenario — and grounds it, with an attention to 

quotidian detail that infuses the proceedings with just enough 

realism. But where Köhler's film is opaque enough to invite 

different readings, Castang’s seems content in the end to simply 

ratchet up the thrills. Still, both suggest that there's still some life 

left in these tropes, which have otherwise been run into the 

ground after years of tired zombie apocalypse cheapies. — 

DANIEL GORMAN 

LEGUA 

João Miller Guerra & Filipa Reis 

It’s been five years since Djon Africa, the last feature from 

co-directors João Miller Guerra and Filipa Reis. That film — about 

a Cape Verdean man in Portugal who decides to return to his 

birthplace in search of the father who left him years ago — in 

certain respects, was a reversal of the trajectory taken by Miller 

Guerra and Reis’ new one. Légua is about the bonds of family, 

biological and chosen, and the steadfast refusal to leave one’s 

home behind, even when staying is no longer a viable option. At 

the heart of the film is the relationship between Ana (Carla 

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CANNES 2023 

Maciel), a wife and mother in her late 40s, and her much older 

friend, Emilia (Fátima Soares), the head housekeeper at a 

Portuguese manor house. The owners of the house never come 

around, but Emilia is almost fanatically devoted to keeping the 

place in perfect condition, should they ever deign to appear. This 

inflexibility becomes a problem once Emilia is diagnosed with 

advanced cancer, and Ana feels compelled to care for her friend 

during her protracted decline. 

The primary conflict in Légua has to do with Ana’s sense of duty. 

It’s implied that Emilia helped Ana at a particularly low point in 

her life, and she feels obligated to return the favor. This is 

complicated by the fact that Ana’s husband Vitor (Paolo Calatré) 

lives and works in France, and very much wants her to join him; 

she refuses, because she must care for Emilia. This creates 

tension not only in the marriage but in Ana’s relationship with her 

college-age daughter, Mónica (Vitória Nogueira de Silva), who, 

not without reason, feels her mother is choosing an outsider 

over her own family. 

In its early moments, Légua resembles Carla Simón’s Golden Bear 

winner Alcarràs, observing the activities of numerous people in a 

rural setting and allowing the specifics of their relationships to 

gradually become apparent. But where Simón’s film was about 

family standing together at all costs, Légua is about dissolution 

and loss. At the end of the first third of the film, we see a 

celebration for Ana’s birthday, a scene filled with family and 

friends. In time, though, Ana’s entire world is reduced to Emilia, 

someone who was an irascible character even at the best of 

times. Ana steals private moments — to lay out in the sun or 

listen to pop radio, for instance — but in the end everything 

comes back to the grueling, painful process of tending to a dying 

loved one, an experience the directors depict with great acuity. 

In a rather unexpected manner, Légua doesn’t end so much as it 

peters out — something that could well be another thematic 

expression of the complicated timeframe of end-of-life care, the 

way illness produces its own disconnected affective bubble. But 

what is clear at the film’s conclusion is that all those who 

counted on Emilia — her employers as well as her own family — 

have completely forgotten about her. Ana refuses to follow suit, 

making Légua an admirably knotty depiction of the ethics of 

care, the refusal to let a fellow human being die alone. — 

MICHAEL SICINSKI 

LEGUA 

João Miller Guerra & Filipa Reis 

9 

2


OMEN 

Baloji 

Belgian-Congolese rapper Baloji’s feature directorial debut, 

Omen, is a promising if not confident fable. Koffi (Mark Zinga) 

and Alice (Lucie Debay) return home to the former’s birth 

country, from which he was sent away for a Rorschach-esque 

blot on his face and the resulting allegations of sorcery, to ask 

for their marriage to be blessed. Koffi’s isolation for his alleged 

sorcery is entwined with his outsider status after returning from 

Europe. The sweat stains on his shirts and uneasy memories of 

language isolate him just as much as the mystical rumors about 

him do: a stranger to his own family, tactfully demonstrated as 

they watch with unease as he coos at his baby nephew, unaware 

of their distrust. Alice is particularly uneasy during this 

homecoming; she doesn't know whether to be apprehensive, and 

has no context for how her fiancé is treated and feared. The 

couple had thought Alice’s pregnancy would make their 

impending marriage easier to explain, but it only complicates 

how Koffi has to justify his life outside of home (an unnamed 

city, mostly filmed in, but not stated as, Kinshasa) — even when 

“home” found it easier with him gone. 

Omen is hyper-sensory, opting for spectacle over document 

wherever possible. True to tradition, the masks and costumes 

are bright and beautifully crafted, though they evoke more Mardi 

Gras influence than cultural accuracy. Thick clouds of colorful 

smoke, shades of fuchsia and magenta, ceremonially engulf the 

characters; smoke whirling to 

the tune of a soundtrack that’s 

more standalone mixtape than 

complementary score. These 

flashy visuals make returning 

home for Koffi feel otherworldly, 

where something as mundane as 

a nosebleed can be construed as 

the ritualistic spilling of blood. 

Such visual excess is particularly 

present when young magician 

Paco, (Marcel Otete Kabaya) and 

his pink dress-clad gang, 

crosses paths with Koffi. Paco 

received the same leveled 

accusations growing up as Koffi did, but learned to monetize the 

circumstance and live with his ostracism. Encounters with 

others treated the same way as him, including his sister 

independent-minded Tshala, only serve to complicate the Koffi’s 

relationship to home, as he finds out how these others have 

learned to exist in balance. 

Where Baloji’s film begins to falter is in its structure. The 

respective, sorcery-specific storylines of Koffi, Paco, Tshala, and 

Mujila (Koffi’s mother) are loosely woven, and the film straddles 

an awkward line between anthology film and multi-lead, 

Magnolia-esque odyssey, without ever firmly amounting to either 

(though it’s somewhat billed as the latter). Omen’s meandering, 

multi-threaded structure sets Koffi as our primary lead — and 

something of an audience surrogate — at the expense of 

exploring how the women are treated for their similar 

instantiations of witchcraft. Among the recent wave of African 

magical realism arriving to the Croisette, Omen is on shakier 

ground than such breakouts as I Am Not a Witch or Neptune Frost, 

simply by failing to meaningfully explore all four leads and 

rendering some as footnotes. As family members of our 

alienated protagonist, and as women who — in their world — are 

trapped within the world of superstition due to their status as 

accused, Tshala and Mujila have a fascinating relation to the 

religion that surrounds them, a promising conceit which the 

film’s short runtime sadly only teases. Omen’s lasting impression 

is but a taste of the sprawling family omnibus of faith and 

isolation that the film could have been. — SARAH WILLIAMS 

10


JANET. 

Janet Jackson 

In 1972, struggling to follow up his generation-defining and career-redefining What’s Going On, Marvin Gaye had writer's block. The 

ambitious concept album detailing the social strifes of the Vietnam era was hailed as groundbreaking and had become Motown’s 

biggest record to date. Following its success, Gaye renegotiated his contract with the label, winning more creative control and a 

million dollar record deal — making him the highest-earning Black artist at the time. With this newfound freedom, Gaye switched 

gears from the socially conscious songwriting of What’s Going On and dove headfirst into the erotic. 1973’s Let’s Get It On pushed the 

11


limit on sexual themes in popular music and served as a 

blueprint for quiet storm and slow jam R&B. In 1993, when asked 

by author David Ritz which artists have had the biggest influence 

on her musically, Janet Jackson broke into a grin. “Aside from 

my brothers… Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder… and jazz.” Marvin’s 

moves during this period offer the closest prototype to the kind 

of moves Janet made between her fourth album, Rhythm Nation, 

and her fifth, janet., which celebrates its 30th anniversary this 

month. 

On the heels of two number-one records, Janet was at a 

crossroads in her career. Her breakthrough album, 1987’s Control, 

saw her declaring herself in charge of her life and destiny. 

Terminating all business arrangements with her family, Janet 

teamed up with producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, then 

little-known Prince associates, to reinvent herself on her own 

terms. The result was a critical and commercial success. Control 

made Janet a teen sensation, and its bubbly and mechanical 

synth soundscape helped pioneer the new jack swing genre. 

Rather than making a Control Part 2, Janet and her collaborators 

reached for a more ambitious project, 1989’s Janet Jackson’s 

Rhythm Nation 1814, which served as her political awakening. 

Exploring racism, poverty, substance abuse, and romance, 

Rhythm Nation catapulted Janet into superstardom and 

fashioned her into a role model for young people — the kind of 

upstanding and informed young Americans that parents and 

teachers could be proud of. (Rhythm Nation is to this day the only 

album in Billboard Hot 100 history to have seven commercial 

singles peak within the top five positions.) In the four years 

between Rhythm Nation and her follow-up, Janet found herself at 

the center of an industry-wide bidding war. She eventually 

signed a $40 million contract with Virgin, making her the highest 

paid music act in the world. Public scrutiny quickly followed, with 

critics casting doubt on everything from her singing voice to her 

reliance on Jam and Lewis. Her next record would need to be a 

statement on par with Control — a reinvention of her image and 

music. 

Come 1993, and janet. did all that and more. Elvis. Diana. 

Madonna. Prince. The artists able to operate on a first-name 

basis exist in another world of fame and influence. By naming 

the album “janet period,” Janet further shed the weight of her 

family name and made the leap from mere superstar to 

full-blown pop icon. If Rhythm Nation was her political 

awakening, janet. was her sexual awakening, and it doesn’t take 

a close listen to see that this is the direction she was heading for 

a while. From Control’s abstinence anthem “Let’s Wait Awhile” to 

Rhythm Nation’s first-time slow jam “Someday Is Tonight,” Janet 

had been inching toward this moment. janet. set her free to 

explore the kind of sex she wanted to have. And the record’s 

musical texture was made to match: positively warm and lush, 

compared to the icy new jack swing that dominated her two 

previous albums. It’s also more sonically diverse, blending 

elements of R&B, rock, opera, house, funk, jazz, pop, and — 

significantly — hip hop. Chuck D appears on "New Agenda,” at a 

time when rap features were rare for pop albums, assisting 

Janet on one of her most joyful and effective political tracks. 

Also of particular note is the use of sampling on janet., with Jam 

and Lewis flipping cuts from James Brown, the Supremes, Kool & 

the Gang, and more. 

Just as there’s no singular sound to the album, there’s no 

singular type of sex: on “If,” her sex is alternative and fierce; on 

“That’s The Way Love Goes,” it’s romantic; and on “Any Time, Any 

Place,” it’s casually sensual. The tracklist reflects an artist willing 

to try anything in the studio and the bedroom. Sexually 

adventurous in her music and videos, while soft and reserved in 

her interviews, Janet was also able to maintain a certain 

innocence as she ventured into eroticism, setting her apart from 

peers like Madonna (ever the provocateur) and carving a path for 

future pop divas like Britney and Beyoncé who would follow in 

her footsteps — the legacy is undeniable. From her tightly 

choreographed narrative music videos to her use of the album 

format as a storytelling vessel for her celebrity, and from her 

fusing of genres to pioneering the kind of “good girl gone bad” 

career turn that has become cliché and almost perfunctory 

among today’s major stars, Janet laid the blueprint for a good 

deal of what we consider pop stardom. It was on janet. that much 

of this truly started to click, showing the world her versatility and 

establishing her cultural longevity. These days, more than ever, 

the concept of “eras” is core to a pop star’s story arc. Janet’s 

self-titled era was as defining and successful as they come 

— transforming her career, and the landscape of pop in the 

process. If you ever needed an excuse to dive deep into Janet’s 

discography, there’s no better time than now. — NICK SEIP 

12


THE TERRORIZERS 

Edward Yang 

Ever since its explosion into the Hollywood mainstream, and that of its globalized imitators, in the 21st century, hyperlink cinema has 

become one of the most bloviated genres, with some of its resident auteurs amassing a broad range of stories across various 

socio-political strata by tethering them together with the tenuous thread of “humanity” — a superficial exploration that has 

successfully wooed the pompous, self-important Oscar voters by tugging at their heartstrings. Depth is naturally compromised for 

overstuffed spectacles laced with frequent invocations of “human nature,” the mere presence of which is enough to sweep aside all 

the amorphousness associated with the term, itself a coinage of the 21st century superseding the modest network narrative, 

presumably because the overarching Theme of such a film subsumes all its constituents. The term hyperlink is disconnected from its 

postmodern allusions and sociopolitical implications, but its simultaneous vagueness echoes the hollowness of shameless Hollywood 

and those who follow. 

13


It isn’t surprising that Edward Yang’s The Terrorizers doesn’t 

figure in these discussions of hyperlink cinema, as its glaring 

lack of distribution (though currently available on MUBI) and its 

title not being A Brighter Summer Day or Yi Yi relegate it to the 

status of a dry run, although the film is being gradually revived 

as something ambitious in its own right. Yang seldom provides 

us the comfort of a grand theme with his elliptical and 

ambiguous narrative, where, contrary to most interlocking 

narratives, connections emerge as a source of suspicion that 

splinter rather than suture relationships. Character motivations 

are deliberately obscured, and the narrative momentum is 

thwarted by sharp, disjunctive edits. Sociological causes are not 

explicitly mentioned, and narrative threads spawn more 

narrative threads, denying any possibility of closure. However, 

looking at The Terrorizers through these antiquated lenses fails 

to confront the paralysis and unknowability at the center of its 

narrative, an unknowability wrought by a rapidly globalizing 

world and its multi-layered illusions. 

The film is loosely structured around the lives of four different 

characters in Taipei: an impassive doctor, Li, concerned about 

his professional advancement; his writer-wife Chou, struggling 

with inspiration for her latest fiction; a photographer living with 

his girlfriend and off the income from his rich father; and a 

Eurasian girl nicknamed “the white chick,” who poses as a 

prostitute to blackmail her clients with the help of her pimp. 

Yang establishes their linkages in various disquieting opening 

sequences, in which he employs long shots to frame the 

characters in their compartmentalized spaces. The steady drone 

of the city is disrupted by a police siren, and this piques the 

residents of the neighborhood, especially the photographer. 

These scenes are intercut with those of the doctor-wife couple 

and their palpable alienation from each other, before the camera 

turns its attention to a shootout involving the white chick and 

the police. 

The photographer snaps photos of the police as gunshots are 

heard in the background. Even as his inferiors jolt at the sounds, 

the police chief, Gu, calmly instructs the photographer to stop. 

This attitude of composure toward the ensuing violence is 

reflected in Yang’s filming of the sequence itself — the awkward, 

unhurried violence meriting the same treatment as the 

dissolving marriage of the couple. The juxtaposition of these 

different strands, along with their meticulous compositions, long 

shots, and unexpected edits, imbues the sequences with a sense 

of foreboding as the disaffected characters struggle to assert 

their identities within the labyrinthine cages of their city. 

If the term wasn’t bloated to mean something else, one could say 

that Yang puts the hyper in hyperlink cinema, in that his 

characters mediate their linkages with others through fiction. 

The white chick has managed to escape from the police, albeit 

with a broken leg, and her departure is captured by the 

photographer. Obsessed with his photograph and the mysterious 

glance of his art object, he enshrines her image in the form of a 

large portrait fragmented by several photographs on paper held 

together by tape. The fragments fluttering in the wind have 

become a metaphor for the film itself; fiction incapable of just 

being fiction and reality incapable of just being reality, both 

perturbing each other and dissolving any supposed boundaries 

erected by convention. The photographer converts the 

apartment to a dark room, fastidiously isolating his photos from 

even the slightest disturbances of the external world, leaving 

behind the illusion of “pure” fiction. 

The white chick, on the other hand, is grounded by her mother. 

Stuck at home, she prank calls random numbers, one of whom is 

Chou, which, surprisingly, provides the spark for Chou to churn 

out a lurid melodrama from her existing marital situation and the 

excuse to depart from it. While the photographer and Chou deal 

directly with fictions, Li does so indirectly, especially since his 

fiction of stability and advancement are considered hallmarks of 

reality. It’s almost unbelievable how blind Li is to Chou’s artistic 

and domestic struggles, consoling her with vacuous statements 

on how writing should not be so deadly (an ironic statement that 

returns with redoubled mystery in the film’s morbid ending), but 

his obsession with stability pushes him down the path of 

non-interference, almost as if hoping the marriage would fix 

itself. (He’s more pointed at work, sabotaging his colleague to 

improve his chances of promotion.) After the prank call, however, 

his illusions begin to crumble as he scrambles to re-establish 

this stability. 

Considering that all of the characters attempt to reconfigure 

their lives through fictions, it’s ironic that the characters who 

deal most overtly with fiction (Chou, who writes it, and the 

14


photographer’s girlfriend, who buries her nose in it) insist on its 

difference from reality, even trivializing it as a mere diversion. 

Part of this might be rooted in the aspect of fiction hijacking its 

themes from reality and autobiography — an admission that their 

constructed world is ultimately derivative. Yang, however, bears 

none of these illusions, as he shows reality and fiction to exist in 

an indistinguishable blur. The film revels in mirrors and 

reflections, along with frequent long shots of cars and roads 

sandwiched between buildings. The city imposes its 

consciousness on its unsuspecting denizens, and this 

consciousness follows an unfathomable logic that is accepted as 

“reality.” Even when characters look outside their windows, 

Yang’s observant camera captures their reflections on glass 

surfaces, their attempts at reconfiguration not moving beyond 

the towering skyscrapers of the city. Light itself appears to 

emanate from a nearby building, trapped by the towering walls 

and glassy sheen of the city, inspiring Fredric Jameson’s apt 

pronouncement of the multiplicities it illuminates as 

“postmodern.” 

Reality in The Terrorizers is mediated through a series of socially 

accepted fictions, which in turn transform reality itself. Chou, a 

woman who couldn’t even gaze properly at her husband without 

being obstructed by walls and meticulously arranged objects in 

the living room, required a prank phone call as pretext to 

separate from him. The marriage was dead a long time ago — it’s 

impossible to understand how they came to be wed in the first 

place — but alienation doesn’t appear to be sufficient grounds 

for separation as an affair, however apocryphal, does. Chou uses 

fiction to move on to the next stage of her life — her first story of 

her high-school love affair propelling her toward marriage, and 

her next ending her marriage — only to return to the nostalgic 

comforts of her first affair. She might have come full circle, but 

her fiction takes a life of its own in Li’s hands, his psyche 

completely shaken by the fiction that lends a duality to the 

ending, which Yang deliberately leaves unresolved. 

The contemporaneousness of such a film makes it appear 

universal, especially in its piercing observations of 

(post?)modern alienation. But this universality does arise out of 

specificity, even though Yang doesn’t leave any obvious markers 

of Taiwanese culture, barring the language. As Jonathan 

Rosenbaum noted, Taiwan’s colonial history obliquely hovers over 

Yang’s films, despite their modern settings. The absence of the 

historical in some senses, brings it more to the fore, as Taiwan’s 

rapid industrialization and Westernization point toward an 

abstract future that refuses to engage with the past (unless 

there’s a threat of violence from its colonizer). Yang has 

expressed his doubts about globalization in Taiwan and wrote 

the following for New Left Review: “Under authoritarian rule, you 

can go 

underground 

with a feeling of 

purpose. But 

now everything 

looks fair, yet 

there’s no real 

participation in 

the system.” In a 

posthistorical 

world, 

his words 

continue to 

haunt the 

cluelessness of 

his characters. 

— ANAND 

SUDHA 

15

FILM REVIEWS 

THE LITTLE MERMAID 

Rob Marshall 

Typically, calling a film a faithful adaptation of its source 

material can constitute praise. It’s a signal of approval, a fan’s 

casual imprimatur. It’s a definitive blessing that this new entry 

has retained enough of the source’s initial look, feel, and spirit so 

as to be worthy of its name and justify its existence. Calling the 

Halle Bailey-led The Little Mermaid a faithful adaptation is true on 

its face, but to say fidelity is a film’s chief creative merit is to 

unwittingly reveal a lot about how movies are made, viewed, and 

judged these days. The thing about Disney’s live-action 

adaptations is that too often they are remakes marketed as 

reimaginings. Promotional attention goes to the revamped cast, 

plot diversions, and computer-generated spectacle, the gaudy 

elements forming the shell of the Trojan Horse that carries 

what’s ultimately a reenactment of released material. Without 

any nostalgic connection to the original property, The Little 

Mermaid is a peculiarly ambivalent experience, all its elevating 

touches counterbalanced by its new flaws. 

This new live-action version of The Little Mermaid pads out the 

animated original’s runtime by more than 50 minutes. The extra 

story that amounts to feels partially in service of a narrative 

ambition, but it also smacks of Disney's insistence on marketing 

its remakes as “reimaginings.” Stretching the story means more 

content, more gags, more dance numbers, more photorealistic 

crabs and fish that flirt with the uncanny valley, more memeable 

parcels ready to be plucked and circulated as reaction gifs and 

first-look film account posts. Still, this “new” content does offer 

something new, which is noticeable especially in comparison to 

the retread of story beats often adhered to so slavishly 

elsewhere. It goes beyond freeze-frame, Spot the Difference 

discrepancies, or how the imitative editing can conjure such a 

déjà vu effect that watching the initial descent into Atlantica or 

experiencing the crescendo of “Under the Sea” can feel like 

retracing old footsteps. When matters just move along as they’re 

supposed to, as they were always going to, that predictability 

numbs. We’re left to sit back in our seats, happy to be on a 

guided tour, wondering how Disney’s technicians will “bring to 

life” that thing we know is coming because we already know all 

the loops on the ride. To their credit, the technicians do their jobs 

well here. But no matter how immersive the effects or colorful 

the sets are, any wonder or amusement conjured never really 

lingers once a scene transitions. 

Something essential is lost in the transition from fully animated 

fantasy to the realm of live-action. Unbounded by reality’s 

constraints, animated works can possess an elasticity, a 

dynamism, a larger-than-life ridiculousness that paradoxically is 

uniquely suited for capturing new expressions of deeply human 

preoccupations and desires. Put another way, animated 

characters with their exaggerated faces and proportions can 

16

FILM REVIEWS 

communicate feelings in ways we humans simply cannot. On 

paper, much of the casting in this version is well thought-out, yet 

in execution the results are often less than the sum of their 

parts. Javier Bardem is a stiffer, blander King Triton, lacking his 

namesake’s imperious grandiosity and balance of harshness and 

tenderness. Melissa McCarthy is entertaining as Ursula, but never 

quite nails the character’s expressive range, Ursula’s devious 

charisma in no small part due to the many terrifying looks she 

can pull off with her eyes, brows, and lips. The voice work from 

the likes of Daveed Diggs, Jacob Tremblay, and Awkwafina is 

competent across the board, but it’s almost a disservice to inject 

those voices into lifelike renderings incapable of fully emoting 

and matching the performances. 

At the center of it all is Ariel, portrayed by Halle Bailey in what 

could prove to be a star-making turn. Bailey has the charm and 

poise to be instantly believable as the heroine, as well as a voice 

that could end up giving Jodi Benson’s exceptional work a run for 

its money in the collective filmgoing memory. Jonah Hauer-King 

is a pleasant surprise as Ariel’s beloved, Eric, benefitting from 

this version’s expanded characterization and feeling more like a 

person as opposed to a conventionally attractive prize Ariel sets 

out to win. A healthy chunk of the new runtime details their 

budding romance, fleshing out a section of the original film that 

is poorly paced, and this version explores further parallels 

between the two, which works to convince of their chemistry. 

Ariel — defined by her idealism, rebellious spirit, and cultural 

curiosity — discovers a true companion who similarly yearns for 

liberation beyond the borders of their xenophobic empire. But in 

the end, these added dimensions only serve to fill in some gaps, 

as come time for the climax, it’s back to the formula. 

Sans the cynicism about the film industry and the direction of 

our cultural appetites, The Little Mermaid is bright and innocuous 

enough to make the kids happy, as well as those who enjoy 

resurrecting the feelings they had as kids. It’s not too tough of a 

bar to clear, and the fact that this is where the bar’s been set 

might be the most lasting takeaway for viewers after the credits 

roll. — TRAVIS DESHONG 

DIRECTOR: Rob Marshall; CAST: Halle Bailey, Jonah Hauer-King, 

Melissa McCarthy; DISTRIBUTOR: Disney; IN THEATERS: May 24; 

RUNTIME: 2 hr. 15 min. 

YOU HURT MY FEELINGS 

Nicole Holofcener 

Even within the world of American independent filmmaking, 

there’s something endearingly out-of-step about the films of 

Nicole Holofcener. Warm and chatty when angst and calling card 

flash are largely the coin of the realm; unapologetically 

homogeneous and wryly observant of class and privilege from 

the inside looking out when diversity and outsider voices are 

being prioritized; proudly influenced by the films of Woody Allen, 

when most filmmakers would rather pretend he never existed. 

There was a time, not so long ago, when seemingly most of what 

came out of Sundance reflected something like that description, 

but presently it feels like Holofcener has a lane almost all to 

herself. True to form, her new film, You Hurt My Feelings, is about 

the anxieties and insecurities of upper middle-class, 

middle-aged New Yorkers who, for all their professional success, 

find their sense of personal worth and emotional well-being 

hanging by a thread. The setting may be insular, the characters 

self-absorbed, but in its observations of relationships and the 

fickle nature of happiness, Holofcener’s latest feels universal. 

Specifically, the idea that the world runs on little white lies and 

the elision of painful truths whenever feasible. 

“In its observations of 

relationships and the fickle 

nature of happiness, 

Holofcener’s latest feels 

universal. 

Reuniting with her Enough Said director, Julia Louis-Dreyfus 

stars as Beth, a creative writing professor and author who’s 

attempting to follow up a critically acclaimed memoir with her 

first novel. Her unerringly supportive husband, Don (Tobias 

Menzies of The Crown), is a therapist who’s begun to ponder 

whether he might be happier if he went ahead and got plastic 

surgery to fix his crow’s feet. Beth’s sister, Sarah (Michaela 

Watkins), is an interior decorator who muses that the world is 

ending and spends her days shopping for “cashmere-lined walls” 

and garish light fixtures to appease indecisive yuppies. Both Beth 

and Sarah volunteer at a local church overseeing a clothing 

17

FILM REVIEWS 

drive for the homeless as a sort of do-gooder contrition for how 

much the universe has lined up behind them (a recurring theme 

in Holofcener’s work, having previously been the subject of 

Please Give). While out running errands, the two women stumble 

upon Don and Beth’s husband, Mark (Succession actor Arian 

Moayed), shopping for designer socks and eavesdrop on their 

private conversation, learning Don’s most shameful secret, which 

shakes Beth to her very core: all this time, he’s only been 

pretending to like her new book. 

As sins go, it’s decidedly venial, and one could argue even 

compassionate at its core. Yet the implications are deeply 

wounding to Beth, eroding confidence in herself as well as trust 

in her husband. Sneaking away to avoid a confrontation, Beth 

wanders home in a daze, silently nursing her bruised ego — the 

film is a masterclass in conveying uncomfortable body language 

and physical distance between its characters, saying everything 

we need to know about where things stand simply in the way 

people resituate themselves on a couch — while the film goes on 

to explore the myriad small ways people hold their tongues or tell 

pleasant half-truths to spare themselves awkwardness or the 

feelings of someone else. Through a series of comedic 

exchanges that take us from Mark’s flailing acting career to Don’s 

practice — real life couple David Cross and Amber Tamblyn are 

cast as a contentious couple who have an unorthodox proposal 

to redress their frustration with years of therapy — to the home 

of Beth’s mother (Jeannie Berlin, an inspired choice to play the 

woman who birthed Louis-Dreyfus and Watkins), You Hurt My 

Feelings interrogates the entire notion of being unsparingly 

candid in your day-to-day life and whether supporting someone’s 

choices, even when you disagree with them, is ultimately a sign 

of love or merely self-preservation. 

Having honed her craft over decades in some of TV’s squirmiest 

comedies, there is no one better suited for this material than 

Louis-Dreyfus. In her scenes with Don, Beth gets to 

passive-aggressively seeth, registering a thousand needle pricks 

everytime he gives her a now transparently dishonest 

compliment about her book. It’s the rare film where vocalizing an 

affirmation is treated as a blistering verbal assault. 

Louis-Dreyfus and Menzies have a wonderfully unforced 

chemistry with one another, particularly in the film’s earlier 

scenes; fully at ease in their banter and domestic routines, like 

their tendency to share food off of one another’s plates, much to 

the disgust of their post-grad son, Eliot (Owen Teague). They 

bounce their fears off of one another — in addition to worrying 

18

FILM REVIEWS 

that he’s starting to look old, Don questions whether he’s even a 

good therapist — picking each other up when they’re down. But, 

as he rightly points out, Beth doesn’t actually know whether he’s 

exceptional at his job yet, she falls into the practiced habit of 

telling him he is anyway. And is Don’s compartmentalization of 

his own personal feelings to champion Beth’s work really any 

different than her own blind encouragement of Eliot’s nascent 

writing career, merely assuming he’s talented in his own right 

based on scant evidence (a point the film is, perhaps, a little too 

emphatic in making)? 

Holofcener treats all of this as a neurotic comedy of manners, 

taking a magnifying glass to every strained interaction or 

perceived slight and luxuriating in the discomfort. No complaint 

mumbled under someone’s breath goes unnoticed, no small 

demonstration of vulnerability too mortifying or beyond 

detection. Beth’s repeatedly reminded that her memoir of verbal 

abuse at the hands of her domineering father didn’t sell 

especially well, leading her to flippantly grumble (to her own 

mother, no less) that it might have sold more units if she was 

physically abused as well. She frequents book shops where she 

pulls copies of her memoir off the shelves and places them 

prominently on the bestseller table, a would-be covert mission 

the film makes a point of showing has been observed by the 

store’s amused employees (there’s also a fantastic running gag 

where Beth observes effusive praise for a new author 

emblazoned on a book jacket, only to contrast it with the more 

measured blurbs on her own work). You Hurt My Feelings allows 

us to see these people at their lowest and most self-centered, 

while still maintaining their basic decency and compassion for 

one another; it’s uncomfortable precisely because these 

characters are so likable and their foibles so recognizable. The 

filmmaking itself isn’t quite as elegant, functional and perhaps 

allowing for too many subplots to build around its central theme, 

but observations on human weakness and the virtues of 

insincerity are all smartly rendered. It’s as if the film were a cozy 

sweater in a slightly unflattering color — although one might be 

inclined to keep the second part to themselves. — ANDREW 

DIGNAN 

REALITY 

Tina Satter 

Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning — these whistleblowers, 

through their defiance, would define the creeping American 

military industrial and security complex in the years after 9/11. 

We know their stories, which have been abundantly documented, 

disseminated, filmed. But there’s less chance you’ve heard of 

Reality Winner, whose own leak has now been adapted by 

first-time filmmaker Tina Satter (following a stage play she 

directed based on this saga). The events of Reality all unfolded in 

2017, in the aftermath of the United States’ controversial 2016 

presidential election. From her office in rural Georgia, Reality 

Winner — a “cryptologic linguist” working, under contract, for the 

NSA — stumbled across a classified document which revealed 

evidence of Russian interference in the contested election at a 

time when the U.S. government was vehemently denying these 

reports. This document, which Reality leaked to The Intercept, 

DIRECTOR: Nicole Holofcener; CAST: Julia Louis-Drefus, Tobias 

Menzies, Michaela Watkins; DISTRIBUTOR: A24; IN THEATERS: 

May 25; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 33 min. 

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FILM REVIEWS 

would be traced back to only a handful of individuals who had 

both the necessary clearance and who had “opened” the film. The 

interrogation of Reality herself, then — which represents the 

meat of this film — was undertaken in an effort to prove her guilt. 

Satter’s film is a chamber piece, almost entirely unfolding within 

Reality’s home (and front yard), where she is interrogated, cat 

and mouse style, by an ever-increasing host of FBI agents, who 

seem almost to coagulate around her. The film is also a piece of 

archival work, using audio of the actual interrogation overlaid 

onto the performance of Sydney Sweeney (who plays Reality) — at 

least initially. Throughout the film, this audio will occasionally 

resurface, merging back into the proceedings and establishing a 

strangely affecting tension between the “real” interrogation and 

the scenes that play out in front of us on screen. These moments 

are like jolts, dissonances that remind us of the stakes and bring 

us — quite literally — back to Reality/reality, before soon enough 

tearing us away from it again. Crucially, the entire script is lifted 

verbatim from the interrogation transcript itself, offering another 

powerful dose of the authentic. 

Sweeney is magnetic in the role. You can feel the gulp of her 

rising panic and her efforts to tamp it down. Satter spends a lot 

of time in a medium close-up, where each tense blink, fluttered 

breath, and anxiously bitten lip is registered and documented. 

Since the the film began life as a play — where the stage is 

necessarily “wide” — Satter here indulges in the corporeal 

benefits of what cinema can bring to this story: proximity, 

closeness, intimacy. This is not “filmed theater,” but is instead its 

own cinematic entity. It’s only later that you realize how much 

time you’ve spent looking — closely — at faces and bodies; it’s 

impossible to escape them. Satter keeps the film’s lighting even, 

so that nothing is accented, nothing shadowed or submerged 

except, of course, the intangible warp and weft of the power 

relations that structure the entire ordeal. The mise-en-scène is 

unsettlingly “banal”: AR-15 in pink decal; Pikachu bedspread; 

domestic desiderata. 

Indeed, the “banality of evil” is an oft-used and frequently 

misapplied term, rarely fitting the context into which it’s dropped. 

It has a certain stretchiness. With Reality, Satter draws very close 

to a particular aesthetics of malignant banality, 

honing in on the blandly precise figurations of the security state. 

Blocking, set design, and above all, bodies — the bodies of FBI 

agents and policemen, of whom there are so many seen in the 

film — which become fleshy monoliths of state power. They are 

not fearful so much as ordinary, and this is how their horror 

properly arrives. Stretched-tight polo shirts, oakleys wrapped 

around sweating heads, visible crotch prints from too-tight khaki 

trousers — the men who slowly, unstoppably, close in around 

Reality seem more like lumps of dull meat than shadowy agents 

of the state (a long way from the elfin youthfulness of Mulder and 

Scully). Satter fills Reality’s small, tidy home almost-to-bursting 

with all this shuffling physicality — pressing against her without 

coming into actual physical contact. There’s a feeling of 

suffocation. They know more than her. They are the arbiters of 

reality. The effect recalls Alexei German’s very vaudevillian 

Khrustalyov, my Car! (1998) and My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1984), both 

of which unfold, densely, within packed-tight apartments. Here, 

however, the humor is vacuumed out, and that same corporeality 

and blocking is wielded to more oppressive ends. Reality feels 

lifted from the lifeworld of Haneke’s Funny Games (1997), where 

domestic space is inverted, its boundaries penetrated, and its 

signification — of comfort and safety — disrupted. 

The primary “handlers” who deal with Reality — you can pun 

easily on the name and its relationship to “truthiness” — play a 

grim game of empathy: talking about bench presses (she lifts), 

dogs, the weather, the neighborhood. They smile and appear 

agreeable, but they are not, obviously, agreeable. Small gestures 

are loaded with implications of authority and power structures. 

The veil of false friendliness quickly snaps back into a visible 

band of control. For much of Reality, we’re suspended in a space 

without the crutch of dramatic irony; we don’t know, can only 

intuit, Reality’s innocence, or her guilt. This approach is 

refreshing — and makes us complicit. It also, cleverly, reproduces 

the information blackout that Reality herself experienced. Only 

the state knows what it does, and we are left to fumble in the 

darkness. 

Still, Reality might overreach. In the final third, Satter introduces 

certain editorial flourishes and effects. When Reality utters the 

content of the redacted documents, her body is “redacted” from 

the film with an editorial snap — it’s clever, but a bit too TV. 

These breakages will date the film quickly, and represent its 

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least interesting elements, dismantling a little of the carefully 

naturalistic camerawork and blocking that had held until this 

point. The same goes for scenes in which we see Reality in her 

office, removing the printed documents and pausing by a 

postbox (presumably after dispatching them). It’s here that the 

film begins to feel more didactic and uninterestingly 

“documentarian.” Whenever we’re present at the interrogation, 

Reality vibrates with a magnetic tension — between Sweeney’s 

darting eyes and the hard-now-soft smiles of her interlocutors, 

the sound of distant shuffling and knocking as a legion of FBI 

officers sift through her apartment. This is the world, the 

moment, that matters, and it’s here that one wonders how much 

more affecting Reality might have been if it didn’t lean on these 

fragments from outside and instead kept us locked within the 

context of the interrogation itself. Escapology without an exit. — 

OWEN VINCE 

DIRECTOR: Tina Satter; CAST: Sydney Sweeney, Josh Hamilton, 

Marchánt Davis; DISTRIBUTOR: HBO; STREAMING: May 29; 

RUNTIME: 1 hr. 23 min. 

WILL-O’-THE-WISP 

João Pedro Rodrigues 

“Indeed, sensual absurdity is a fitting phrase word for a film 

whose primary sex scene, between the White Alfredo and his 

mentor Black firefighter Afonso, features exceptionally 

fake-looking penises; it’s not as if Rodrigues is afraid of 

showing nudity, even displaying a slideshow of penises that 

each correspond to a forest in Portugal. But the limits of 

showing reality are openly challenged by Will-o’-the-Wisp, a 

film where firefighters are never actually seen in front of a 

blaze, where a supposedly disastrous simulation is a 

lighthearted form of hazing, where futuristic clothing is 

beautifully tacky, and firefighters seem to have amassed 

considerable power in the intervening decades.” — RYAN SWEN 

DIRECTOR: João Pedro Rodrigues; CAST: Mauro Costa, André 

Cabral, Joel Branco; DISTRIBUTOR: Strand Releasing; IN 

THEATERS: May 26; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 7 min. 

THE POTEMKINISTS 

Radu Jude 

Radu Jude’s new short, The Potemkinists, finds the director in 

typically didactic form, which is one of his greatest virtues — why 

not say what you mean, especially when it comes to politics? At 

the present moment, film holds perhaps the least cultural impact 

it has ever had, and short films even less, so there’s little hope for 

ideas buried under the propriety of subtext. In The Potemkinists, 

two Romanian characters — a sculptor and a bureaucrat from 

the ministry of culture — lay out their ideas in a vapid Socratic 

dialogue, debating what to make of a particularly meaningless 

statue that could be either a hammer, a flag, a flame, or a wing (it 

doesn’t really matter, since India has already built a bigger one). 

To make it the tallest statue in Europe and restore some of the 

country’s former Soviet glory, the sculptor suggests adding a 

tribute to the Potemkinists, those sailors who rose up on the 

eponymous Russian battleship, mostly because he loves 

Eisenstein’s film and its depiction of the event. The clarity and 

purpose of Battleship Potemkin create a stark contrast when 

intercut with these scenes of liberal yammering. 

The bureaucrat pushes back against this idea because it might 

be seen, by the people she represents and seems to assume very 

little of, as a eulogy to communists. But the sculptor insists it has 

nothing to do with ideology. (When he apologizes for bad 

language, it’s unclear if he’s referring to “fucking” or “socialist.”) 

Even though he’s borrowing imagery from a film he calls 

propaganda — the dead sailor laying on a hook — it’s okay 

because the real Potemkinists ended up fleeing to their native 

Romania, where they were taken in as refugees; he manages to 

twist it into some bizarre allusion to the refugee crisis and the 

charitable spirit of Europeans. His view of history is like that of 

any history nerd or liberal politician: it’s fragmented into amusing 

little facts that can never coalesce into concrete reality, 

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which allows them to be rearranged into whatever shape is 

desirable. The sculptor just wants to enjoy Eisenstein’s explicitly 

communist movie guilt-free without feeling ideologically impure, 

a desire hardly limited to liberals. (Many leftist cinephile types 

desperately try to convince themselves that right-wing artists 

like Zack Snyder are actually, secretly, woke.) 

But what Jude is hitting upon is a particularly European 

relationship to history. America has the ability to reduce its 

complexities into symbols, it being allegedly a nation built on 

ideas and consequently subsumable into myth. But Europe is so 

densely populated with histories both distant and close that the 

only way to obscure it is to complicate it further, to make it 

entirely relativistic so that one could argue, as the sculptor does, 

that the Potemkinists were idealists and not communists. His 

final compromise — the liberal’s medium — with the bureaucrat is 

to position his tribute to the Potemkinists alongside one to the 

victims of a Stalinist prison camp that was built nearby. 

The duo’s best justification for this gibberish collage is that “the 

twentieth century was a jumble anyway,” and thus there’s no 

point trying to interpret it or anything else. “You brute of a 

century,” the sculptor says, quoting Osip Mandelstam, a Russian 

poet who was sent to a labor camp, “who could look into the 

centers of your eyes?” But it seems easy enough to do with a 

theistic reverence for anti-ideology that no longer seeks to 

justify the past or the status quo, settling for passive acceptance 

through abstraction. The tragedy of The Potemkinists is hence 

thus: when the sculptor and bureaucrat look into those eyes, they 

don’t see the grandeur and cruelty of history, but a postmodern 

banality. — ESMÉ HOLDEN 

DIRECTOR: Radu Jude; CAST: Alexandru Dabija, Cristina 

Draghici; DISTRIBUTOR: MUBI; STREAMING: May 25; RUNTIME: 

18 min. 

KANDAHAR 

Ric Roman Waugh 

In a famous 1960 piece for Cahiers du Cinema, titled “In Defense 

of Violence,” Michel Mourlet bluntly states: "Charlton Heston is an 

axiom. He constitutes a tragedy in himself, his presence in any 

film being enough to instill beauty. The pent-up violence 

expressed by the sombre phosphorescence of his eyes... the 

stupendous strength of his torso — this is what he has been 

given, and what not even the worst of directors can debase.” 

Gerard Butler might be our modern Heston, all “stupendous 

strength,” only gone to seed. Critic Soraya Roberts praises 

Butler's “faithful portrayal of a rumpled-but-honorable 

masculinity” in a recent essay for The New York Times Magazine. 

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky once remarked in print that Butler looked 

like he “had eaten Rusell Crowe,” a far cry from the buff, 

perfectly-sculpted action heroes of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Butler is 

the beefy, taciturn face of the modern mid-budget action movie, 

a genre largely displaced by superhero spectacle on the one 

hand and lo-fi, but wildly inventive, DTV features on the other. 

He's the last gasp of a dying breed, in other words, and how much 

one enjoys the new action-thriller Kandahar probably depends on 

how much one enjoys Butler himself. 

Essentially playing a variation on his Has Fallen character, Mike 

Bannon (although every Butler performance could be called a 

variation), here Butler is a CIA asset named Tom Harris. 

Introduced in the middle of a covert mission, Harris and his 

partner are infiltrating a secret Iranian nuclear base under the 

guise of Internet technicians upgrading some infrastructure. 

After the successful completion of the job, Harris kicks back with 

a cold beer while some military brass back in the States hack 

into the base's reactor and detonate it. Satisfied with his work, 

Harris plans to return home to his soon-to-be-ex-wife and 

teenage daughter, who's about to graduate high school. But 

Harris' handler, played by Travis Fimmel, coerces him into one 

more job. Harris is to cross over into Afghanistan and meet 

Mohammad (Navid Negahban), a translator who is from the area 

but has been living in the US for several years. Mohammad, or Mo, 

has his own reasons for returning to his war-ravaged homeland, 

and is using this mission with Harris for his own purposes. 

Meanwhile, a British journalist receives a dossier of leaked 

information incriminating the United States in the attack on Iran. 

This immediately leads to Farzad (Bahador Foladi), an Iranian 

Revolutionary Guard officer, kidnapping the journalist, 

interrogating her, and learning Harris' identity. With his cover 

now blown, Harris' new mission is aborted, and he and Mo are 

ordered to seek extraction at an old, abandoned US military 

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base. The only catch is that it's 400 miles away, and Harris and 

Mo will have to traverse a huge expanse of dangerous country to 

get there. Further complicating matters is a determined 

Pakistani agent named Kahil (Ali Fazal), who has been tasked by 

his commanding officers with capturing Harris. Kahil is in bed 

with a local Taliban warlord who he calls in for reinforcements, 

while all parties involved are on the lookout for various Isis sects 

still operating in the area. 

This is an awful lot of setup to get through, but director Ric 

Roman Waugh — now on his third collaboration with Butler — 

handles the various threads with relative ease. It takes about 45 

minutes to establish all of these moving pieces, but eventually 

Kandahar turns into a pretty straightforward chase film. Iranian, 

Pakistani, Taliban, and Isis forces all have their own motives for 

capturing Harris, and each character is given some real 

personality. Kabul in particular makes an impression as a man 

with Westernized tastes who wants to leave the region and live 

somewhere in Europe — he’s an opportunist, not a true believer. 

Indeed, the filmmakers seem determined to portray the Middle 

East with at least the rare modicum of nuance, allowing for 

differences in the region to be carefully delineated and 

respecting various characters’ need to pray at specific times. For 

his part, Harris is well aware of the destruction that the US and 

its allies have wrought on the region, as well as the damage 

inflicted by our abrupt, disorganized departure in 2021. Given 

everything going on, Waugh has to toe a tricky line here, 

constantly vacillating between a reasonably serious political 

thriller and a straightforward action movie. And in an odd bit of 

happenstance, Harris and Mo's relationship mirrors the plot of 

the recent Guy Ritchie film, The Covenant, but there's also quite a 

bit of Ridley Scott's underrated Body of Lies in Kandahar's DNA. 

Still, the film really only comes alive during its infrequent but 

well-constructed shootouts and chases. A showdown on a 

crowded street is expertly staged by Waugh and mononymous 

cinematographer MacGregor. And the real showstopper is a 

nighttime sequence that finds Harris and Mo on the run from a 

helicopter. Waugh and MacGregor alternate between two 

different types of night-vision goggles — one pair, worn by Harris, 

renders in blown-out whites and dark grays; the other, from the 

vantage point of the helicopter, features a more familiar fuzzy, 

digital green. The difference in hues allows Waugh to cut freely 

while still maintaining a precise geography, each character's POV 

instantly recognizable even in the dead of night; it's thrilling 

stuff, perfectly realized and choreographed. That the film 

ultimately ends up exactly where you think it will is perhaps a 

knock against it, as are some fuzzy ideas about international 

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politics (it’s unclear if the filmmakers realize that the act of 

sabotage that opens the film is a very serious war crime). Which 

is to say, however sensitive the film is to its Muslim characters, 

this is still an American action movie that seeks to find thrills in 

our military interventions. How much you ultimately mind any of 

this probably depends on how much you like seeing Butler kick 

some ass. You know who you are. — DANIEL GORMAN 

DIRECTOR: Ric Roman Waugh; CAST: Gerard Butler, Navid 

Negahban, Travis Fimmel, Ali Fazal; DISTRIBUTOR: Open Road 

Films; IN THEATERS: May 26; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 0 min. 

ABOUT MY FATHER 

Laura Terruso 

Sadly, new romantic comedy About My Father is not a companion 

piece to Pedro Almodóvar’s magnificent All About My Mother, but 

instead an attempted star vehicle for rising stand-up comedian 

Sebastian Maniscalco, who makes a lot of jokes about being 

Italian that so inspire fits of wheezing laughter in the lucrative 

middle-aged white male demographic. Maniscalco himself 

co-wrote the script, inspired by the cantankerous but heartfelt 

relationship he shares with his own father, an Italian immigrant 

whose love of both the Old World and his family apparently makes 

him an easy target for jokes that would have seemed stale in 

1976. Any Italian stereotype you can imagine is trotted out here, 

and even some that seems entirely fabricated, such as how 

Italian men are known for their “resting bitch face.” Are they? Is 

this a thing people say? Based solely on the evidence presented 

on screen, Maniscalco seems to believe that Italian men are the 

most persecuted people on the planet — in this, the year of our 

Lord 2023. About My Father, then, operates as his plea for 

tolerance, even as the film only serves to reinforce outdated 

stereotypes in the grossest way possible, all while posing as yet 

another tired Meet the Parents retread. 

Maniscalco plays a man named Sebastian Maniscalco — but he’s 

not playing himself, so already what are we even doing? This 

Sebastian is a hotel manager in Chicago who is dating WASP-y 

artist Ellie (Leslie Bibb), who seems to paint the same picture of 

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a sort of vagina over and over, and thus is successful. Sebastian 

is ready to propose, but his Sicilian father, Salvo (Robert De Niro), 

won’t give up the family ring until he meets the future in-laws, 

Bill (David Rasche) and Tigger (Kim Cattrall). As luck would have 

it, everyone is invited to a Fourth of July holiday weekend at the 

couple’s summer home, which is located in the kind of Cape 

Cod-y place where rich people gather and watch Fox News. 

Sebastian is worried that his father will embarrass him, because 

Salvo has a strong work ethic and values every dollar earned, 

plus he occasionally speaks in Italian, which, mamma mia! The 

rest of About My Father follows in this fashion, setting viewers up 

for all sorts of wacky comedic set pieces, such as a volatile 

tennis match between family members, the murder of a peacock 

(don’t ask), and a bout of inadvertent public nudity. Yet each one 

is executed in the most shrug-worthy way possible, as if the 

scenario itself was all that was necessary and not the jokes that 

should be located within them. Laura Terruso’s lifeless direction 

certainly doesn’t help matters, and neither does that fact that so 

much of About My Father consists of terribly written dialogue 

exchanges set in nondescript rooms, none more so than when it 

comes to Sebastian and Salvo, who spend the majority of the film 

having the same conversation over and over, always in the same 

clothes, but supposedly on different days — this is the level of 

lazy we’re talking about. 

And then there’s the fact that Sebastian is a terrible person, 

constantly putting down his father, at one point flat out stating, 

“I’m done with you, time to move on with my life.” About My Father 

certainly doesn’t provide pleasant company for what is ostensibly 

a comedy, though it does have the audacity to strive for tears in 

the home stretch, as father and son reconnect. Salvo is indeed 

stubborn, but aside from that aforementioned bird murder, 

nothing he does warrants the drama queen responses Sebastian 

is so prone to deliver. The movie is also weirdly fixated on New 

Age mysticism and the mocking of such, which again, is beyond 

tired in 2023. To call these “Dad jokes” is an insult to fathers 

everywhere, who are worthy of more than an overly spray-tanned 

comedian who somehow convinced a major Hollywood studio to 

film his therapy sessions. It would at least help if Maniscalco 

possessed something in the way of screen presence or charisma, 

but his performance is stiff and mannered, like a robot trying to 

impersonate a human prone to wild emotional vacillations. De 

Niro, the consummate 

professional, rarely phones anything in, and he indeed leans in to 

this underwhelming material, but he also looks severely pained 

for the majority of the film’s mercifully short runtime — totally 

understandable. If Maniscalco is truly under the impression that 

the final product he delivered here is a loving tribute to his 

father, then he’s in serious need of an influx of self-awareness, 

and perhaps a swift kick to the head by Pops himself. Unless the 

man is an escaped war criminal, he certainly didn’t deserve About 

My Father. No one does. — STEVEN WARNER 

DIRECTOR: Laura Terruso; CAST: Robert De Niro, Sebastian 

Maniscalco, Leslie Bibb, Anders Holm; DISTRIBUTOR: Lionsgate; 

IN THEATERS: May 26; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 29 min. 

STAY AWAKE 

Jamie Sisley 

Jamie Sisley’s directorial debut, Stay Awake, is an addiction story 

that situates its two primary characters outside the epicenter of 

the addiction — in its wake and at the periphery. Tremors of 

turmoil sweep through the family of three: a single mother and 

her two coming-of-age sons, the youngest, Ethan (Wyatt Oleff), 

UNCLENCHING THE FISTS 

Kira Kovalenko 

“Unclenching the Fists assuredly portrays the subjectivity of 

personal experience without resorting to the easy satisfaction 

of unraveling it. That the cast, especially Aguzarova and 

Karaev, appear muted in their performances, speaks not to a 

lack of ambition; but in capturing Adadza’s childlike precarity 

alongside her father’s physical and vocal frailty, Kovalenko 

amplifies the airless menace coursing through her sweltering 

drama, relentless in its openness to interpretation. The scars 

potentially run deep in Adadza’s family, and it would take more 

than the unclenching of fists — if and when that happens — to 

heal and be free.” — MORRIS YANG 

DIRECTOR: Kira Kovalenko; CAST: Milana Aguzarova, Alik 

Karaev, Soslan Khugaev; DISTRIBUTOR: MUBI; STREAMING: 


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and older brother, Derek (Steffan Fin Argus). Together, they wait 

for a lasting respite from their trauma — whether by slow 

decline or something more disruptive — a tension that fuels the 

film’s emotional conflict. Ethan has depressive tendencies, and 

he’s been accepted on full scholarship to Brown, far away from 

his family’s rural Virginia town. Derek, meanwhile, determinedly 

(toxically?) positive, has put his acting ambitions on hold to be 

there for their mother, Michelle (Chrissy Metz), as she fractures 

their futures in a spiral of prescription pill blackouts — being 

found, brought to the hospital, and discharged the next day, only 

to act as if nothing happened at all. 

Michelle rarely apologizes to the boys for their labor the morning 

after a hospital stay. We see in her the same tendency that Derek 

has adopted: the use of denial for survival. Ethan, on the other 

hand, is repelled by the passivity he sees in his mother and 

brother; he repeatedly bleats blame on their mother for her 

condition, and presses Derek to acknowledge the reality of their 

situation so that he doesn’t continue trending down his path of 

becoming “a pathetic person, a loser.” These emotional beats 

reverberate throughout the film — this now, then that again — in 

concentric cycles that are subtly developed enough and display 

sufficient insight to be in favor of its existence, though it must 

be noted that its visual style and rhythm offer little to 

complement its structure with its form. 

Sisley sporadically shifts between the independent lives of 

Michelle, Derek, and Ethan in the spaces at the edge of their 

family life, which is invariably brought to the brink of calamity 

every time the boys have to bring their mom to the hospital. The 

ambition of this structure is admirable in creating nuanced 

characters complex enough to differentiate this film’s various 

narrative threads, which bears many similarities to addiction 

films like Beautiful Boy, but unlike, say, Short Cuts or any number 

of Robert Altman films, Sisley fails to leverage rhythm to imbue 

these character digressions into a coherent emotional logic that 

might lend more depth. 

That doesn’t mean there isn’t an attempt. Intermittently, we learn 

many details of the family and their lives: Ethan has a crush on a 

male classmate who has pursued his ex-girlfriend after their 

breakup; Derek is stuck in place at a bowling alley, dating high 

school seniors and yearning to return to acting, if not in films, 

then to the same success he enjoyed as a regional commercial 

actor; Michelle continues to seek closure after being left by her 

husband and the father of the boys, and to become the mother 

she has failed to be time and again. But while it's easy to 

recognize how all of these character details could be used to 

shade complexity into the film, the effect instead feels like a 

family portrait drawn in highlighter yellows, pinks, and oranges, 

pushing the viewer, mechanistically, toward feeling. The irony of 

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Derek’s ambition to act in commercials is that it feels almost as 

if Argus is playing a character in a commercial for life insurance, 

with lingering shots seeming to shout, “Look! He’s crying.” The 

film’s pieces are carefully measured and laid out, but the 

forcefulness with which they are employed makes it difficult for 

the viewer to reconcile the onslaught of emotion. 

Sisley is more successful elsewhere. Stay Awake boasts a number 

of beautiful images, including a striking one of the two boys 

standing in front of what appears to be a massive salt dome. And 

the film is at its most affecting in moments of painful honesty, 

where the viewer is made privy to the promise of what could 

have been: some of the film’s most poignant moments take the 

form of match cuts of the boys waiting for their mother, day 

suddenly turned to night, or Derek processing his emotions with 

Styrofoam cup puppets, or a scene in which the sound of 

Michelle’s heart subtly bleeds into the film’s score. These 

moments feel less effortful, and as a result, less manufactured to 

coerce feeling; they flow more freely. There’s something to be 

said about Stay Awake’s climax, too: it’s one of the film’s few 

scenes that finally gets past the texture-less veneer to reveal the 

mutilated underbelly of the family’s draining, painful 

circumstances. But for too much of the film, we are left 

wondering about the emotional truth that exists between the 

family’s repeating tremors. Sisley shows us plenty, but ultimately 

very little is done to portray the emotional collateral of addiction 

in a way that couldn’t be conveyed in an anti-drug PSA. — CONOR 

TRUAX 

DIRECTOR: Jamie Sisley; CAST: Chrissy Metz, Wyatt Oleff, Fin 

Argus; DISTRIBUTOR: Mar Vista Entertainment; IN THEATERS: 


ROBOTS 

Casper Christensen & Anthony Hines 

Body doubles and deception have always been the fertile staples 

of romantic comedy — look no further than Shakespeare, who 

imbued such courtly antics with lively flourish to inspire the 

critical reflexivity and popular recognition that has come to 

define the Western (and thus modern) literary scene. The 

proliferation of mistaken identities in Much Ado About Nothing, 

some four centuries past, has endured past the script and stage 

to manifest on-screen as a medium for high and low culture 

alike to elucidate political aims, exorcize personal grudges, or 

even just provide a good gag. Remember 1994’s Dumb and 

Dumber? While Peter Farrelly’s deranged buddy comedy provided 

the archetypal character study of a ridiculous yet endlessly 

compelling tale of friendship and the desperation to get laid, its 

conceit lay squarely in Jim Carrey; more precisely, his 

physiognomic flexibility to squint, grimace, snarl, and cackle his 

way through rural America. 

You’d be hard-pressed to name a comedy this enamored by star 

presence — and not stardom — today, especially as IPs get 

generic and the next generation of DALL·E and ChatGPT 

developers take us one step closer to movie singularity: the day 

when a generation of screenwriters and acting students put 

down their placards and pick up their phones to proofread plot 

points instead. Stardom has enveloped streaming platforms and 

proliferated their capital, and where stardom can’t be had, the 

gag is next in line. Not in the conventional sense, as in Chaplin 

and Keaton with their innumerable burlesque portraits or Ernie 

Bushmiller’s delightful strip Nancy, but as a device attuned to 

modern attention spans and then further eroding them. “What if 

this, but that?” becomes the resounding TL;DR for the latest 

one-trick pony, and while it’s certainly a bit reductive to 

disparage all the equines in the room, the few unicorns that do 

exist are usually stampeded by mass content creation. 

All of which is to say that Robots, the directorial effort of Anthony 

Hines and Casper Christensen (brainchild of Danish sitcom 

Clown), proves to be a cheap-thrill disappointment inspiring the 

occasional chuckle and little more. Think: what if a rom-com, but 

with two couples, one of whom are rogue robotic clones of the 

other? Charlie (Jack Whitehall), a spoiled and good-for-nothing 

fuckboy who exclusively dates to hook up, crosses paths with 

Elaine (Shailene Woodley), an equally conniving gold-digger who 

pays her rent by bedding rich guys. Unbeknownst to either, the 

other has a robot double whom they each use to achieve their 

own nefarious ends: Charlie’s, C2, goes through the hassle of 

wooing Elaine so that he can get straight down to the action, 

while Elaine’s, E2, is purposed precisely for the action, and little 

more. While Charlie lounges with pizza and videogames, sending 

his productive facsimile to work for his rich papa, Elaine has 

mastered an itinerary of loaning out hers to the unsuspecting 

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FILM REVIEWS 

men she headhunts. One’s a toxic sorta-incel; the other’s a vapid 

hypocrite. 

The road to a blissfully unaware life of double deception is, 

however, blocked by two things. In this world, where credible and 

anatomically accurate robots are a thing, they’re illegal for 

personal use (an unexpectedly smart regulatory move!), so 

openly working two jobs at once is not an option. But having been 

modified explicitly for personal use, they’re proving not so 

credible after all; after the duo unwittingly coordinate a 

one-night stand between their silicone copies and fail to 

“emotionally deprogram” them, C2 and E2 fall in love, run away, 

and dump a steaming problem into the laps of their progenitors 

who are convinced they’ve been framed and impersonated, and 

are now wanted by the police. The entirety of Robots, then, is a 

similar cross-country run for the U.S.-Mexico border, where the 

robots are rumored to have gone. In Mexico, where doubles are 

legal, they have become both a respite for our antagonists who 

wish to live human lives and not slave over others, as well as a 

political scourge for… guess it, illegal immigrant humanoids 

whom American companies and corporations employ en masse 

at virtually zero operating cost. 

Based on Robert Sheckley’s short story “The Robot Who Looked 

Like Me,” Robots squanders even its potential to back up its 

sociopolitical premise beyond mainstream Twitter analytics. Its 

script would not be out-of-place in a folio of algorithmic 

prompts, and its character motivations are scant if even 

existent. Charlie and Elaine don’t quite learn from their moral 

follies, and their robots’ own awakenings are reduced point-blank 

to the behaviorist assumptions of computer programming. Quite 

literally so: after five hours of numbing robot sex, C2 and E2 

climax and, just like that, find love. There’s no reason why any of 

this matters beyond seeing our two real millennials err and 

bounce back, almost as cathartic reflection of our ideally more 

palatable selves coping with the perils and pleasures of artificial 

postmodernity. Perhaps it’s a little harsh to rag on a perfectly 

serviceable streaming flick, the kind that kids may vibe to (sans 

the sex part). But a counterpoint to this is the film’s context of 

production: with a budget of $21 million (which is not Russo-level, 

but tons more than what many better films receive) and a 

distribution from NEON, you’d expect something more compelling 

to come out of a comedy of errors. Instead, what remains past its 

93 minutes are some vague, laugh-out-loud sequences which 

exemplify the vapid supremacy of the gag today: all comedy and 

no errors, cheapened for bot-friendly consumption. — MORRIS 

YANG 

DIRECTOR: Casper Christensen & Anthony Hines; CAST: Shailene 

Woodley, Jack Whitehall, Chelsea Edmundson; DISTRIBUTOR: 

NEON; IN THEATERS & STREAMING: May 19; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 33 

min. 

28

FILM REVIEWS 

INFLUENCER 

Kurtis David Harder 

From Gwyneth Paltrow selling her vagina-scented candle that 

retails for a cool $70 to the Kardashians’ variety of extremely 

lucrative deals, influencer culture has taken over the Internet. 

The nature of influencer marketing isn’t new, however; popular 

figures have been brand “faces” for years — after all, when 

Regina George wears army pants and flip-flops, you’d better wear 

army pants and flip-flops. But as the always-online generation 

comes of age, more and more people are making their income by 

posting selfies on Instagram and dancing on TikTok. While there’s 

nothing inherently wrong with monetizing your own image, 

there’s a certain amount of self-centeredness that comes with it, 

a need to establish and communicate a unique identity that 

would have followers believe you are “special.” So when an 

influencer expresses exhaustion or implies they have it worse 

than others because of their followers’ expectations, it’s more 

than a little hard to muster much sympathy. 

Madison, the central character in Kurtis David Harder’s Influencer, 

is one of these people. To the online eye, she is solo backpacking 

around the world, currently located in Thailand where she’s 

meeting locals and getting the full experience of the foreign 

country. In reality, she’s barely leaving her resort and hasn’t 

talked to anyone. One night, she visits a local bar and gets hit on 

by a fellow traveler, before CW (Cassandra Naud) intervenes and 

rescues her from the slimy interaction. Later, Madison’s suite 

gets broken into and her passport stolen, and she befriends CW 

as she waits for new identification so that she can go home. But 

predictably, CW isn’t who she seems, and eventually she takes 

Madison on a surprise getaway to a deserted island where she 

promptly leaves her for dead. Through the use of some advanced 

tech, CW then begins to impersonate Madison online so that none 

of her followers know she’s gone, before moving on to her next 

target. Much to CW’s chagrin, Madison’s boyfriend, Ryan (Rory J. 

Saper), shows up to investigate the situation, and predictable 

chaos ensues from there. 

It’s precisely this predictability that is most unfortunate about 

Influencer, as the film attempts to live up to its thriller status but 

ends up spoon-feeding the audience and telegraphing every 

“twist.” It’s hard to overlook the plot conveniences — CW burns 

Madison’s belongings except her diary, which Ryan finds and uses 

to confirm his suspicions, for example, or cell service being 

spotty in exactly the right locations. The film then culminates in 

an underwater knife fight, the premise of which seems fun, but 

it’s so poorly choreographed and shot in such a haphazard way 

29

FILM REVIEWS 

that any intended dramatic effect or kinetic pleasure is lost. And 

to make matters worse, it never becomes clear if Harder is 

attempting to critique influencer culture or those who demonize 

it, which results in a disjointed film that isn’t successful in either 

regard. If the point was to show how Instagram and the like have 

ruined our society — they have, to be clear — Harder is much 

more of a Cady Heron than a Janis Ian — confused and oblivious. 

— EMILY DUGRANRUT 

DIRECTOR: Kurtis David Harder; CAST: Emily Tennant, Cassandra 

Naud, Sara Canning; DISTRIBUTOR: Shudder; STREAMING: May 

26; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 32 min. 

WHITE BALLS ON WALLS 

Sarah Vos 

At the outset of White Balls on Walls, it’s so decreed: the Stedelijk 

Museum Amsterdam will remove the massive welcome at their 

entrance that reads “MEET THE ICONS OF MODERN ART.” Over the 

course of this Sarah Vos’ documentary, the filmmaker follows the 

creative team at the Stedelijk as they try to determine the 

answers to two questions: Who even are the icons of modern art? 

And who are we to say? 

On its surface, White Balls on Walls is a film about the balancing 

act undertaken by museum director Rein Wolfs and his staff as 

they attempt to challenge long-paraded, Eurocentric colonial art 

aesthetics in favor of a more diverse and nuanced perspective. 

Their starting point: a museum with no work by BIPOC artists on 

display, and a collection where male artists outnumber female 

artists nine to one. Wolf’s team labors over seemingly small-scale 

matters, like changing the title of a painting called The 

Prostitutes to The Sex Workers, while confronting larger and 

longer-term institutional ramifications, such as the issue of 

quotas. The team is all in agreement that there needs to be some 

change. Or rather, that’s at least what they say. Many of them 

admit to knowing this all along, although nothing actually 

materialized until Amsterdam’s deputy mayor initiated a new 

policy that would cut Stedelijk's funding if it didn’t develop and 

implement a plan to bolster its representation. 

The tension of White Balls on Walls is surprisingly palpable for a 

documentary with a fairly rote, linear narrative and nonchalant 

rhythm. At one juncture, Wolfs reveals that the Stedelijk had 

hired Vincent Van Velsen, a new photography curator who had, 

only two years before, publicly eviscerated the Stedelijk and 

refused public contact with members of its creative team. At the 

end of the film, the Stedelijk showcases the works of early 

German expressionists like Nolde and Kirchener in juxtaposition 

with the art of earlier Congolese and Papua New Guinean 

cultures, whom the Germans engaged with as voyeurs. 

Sometimes, however, White Balls on Walls feels emotionally 

overwrought, given its setting — it was shot during the height of 

the pandemic — and focus on diversity and inclusion. In the first 

scene, for example, a montage of paintings are overlaid with a 

creeping score reminiscent of those in B-horror films, complete 

with an Yves Klein jump scare. Fortunately, these moments of 

atonal provocation are few and far between in a film that does its 

best to reserve judgment and, in the space for observation 

created by this reservation, allows the viewer to react 

themselves to the questions the film asks instead of wholly 

capitulating to the director’s subjective lens. 

Yet it's also that very subjectivity that ultimately makes White 

Balls on Walls a fascinating film; after all, the conversations 

among museum staff are not exactly revelatory. In an 

institutional context with a persistent history so steeped in racial 

bias and colonialism, the Stedelijk team is really just getting on 

each other’s shoulders to pick the low-hanging fruit. What’s more 

interesting is Vos’ behind-the-scenes showcase of the museum, 

which serves as a case study in social performance. A primary 

point of investigation in the film is how to balance deliberate 

inclusion with meritocracy, both in the interest of those losing 

hierarchical social capital and for those gaining it. One can’t help 

but wonder to what extent the team’s deliberation is guided not 

by the question itself, but by the presence of a camera in the 

room. Not just the camera, but the director — a white Dutch 

woman — behind it, who in one instance trains her lens on and 

around Dr. Charl Landvreugd, a Black man and the head of the 

Research & Curatorial Practice at Stedelijk, as if he were the 

Empire State Building in a New York-set film. Here, the viewer 

can’t help feeling like a voyeur, a self-congratulatory citizen 

sitting alongside museum staff, passively holier-than-thou. 

One of the film’s more interesting characters is a security guard, 

who guides the camera through the labyrinth-like hallways of the 

30

FILM REVIEWS 

museum’s underbelly to unveil a former Muslim prayer spot — a 

desolate corner where you are more likely to be kicked by a 

passerby than pray in silence — and then a present one (a room 

re-carpeted and painted for silent worship). The room is still 

isolated and hidden, but it’s there. In a later scene, the guard 

shows the camera the old gender-specific bathroom signs 

(they’ve been switched out in favor of gender-neutral 

bathrooms), and he flatly expresses his confusion over the 

change. What’s so interesting about the guard isn’t his 

perspective, which borders on non-existence; it’s his apathy 

toward the camera. He shows the viewer around as if he were 

giving a tour to a random guest, which distinguishes his 

appearance in a flourish of cutting honesty, because for so much 

of the film we watch the Stedelijk’s creative team go back and 

forth in voices that do not sound like their own. 

For instance, rarely do we see the Stedelijk team express 

disagreement or tension, both being inevitable symptoms of 

transition or change. During another high point in the film, one 

female staff member mentions a previous effort to increase the 

diversity of the museum’s curatorial team (shown at the 

beginning of the film). This change is soon forgotten by museum 

staff and viewer alike, until Vos makes her first intervention on 

screen, à la 

Jean Rouch, to 

ask the 

question: what 

happened to 

that? Of course, 

we aren’t given 

an answer — it 

would turn too 

many heads. 

(Ironically, the 

notion of this 

change is the 

only proposition 

in the film that 

would 

substantially 

affect the lives 

of the mostly 

white decisionmakers 

running the cultural institution.) The film ends with Wolfs 

greeting the supervisory board laughingly, noting loudly, with a 

big limousine smile, that they are all gray old white men. 

This is not to say that the efforts at the Stedelijk were 

insubstantial. We watch as their Nolde-Kirchener exhibition 

sparks discussion and outrage in Dutch media. Making a 

definitive judgment would be too reductive of a conclusion for a 

film that subtly depicts a museum and culture in flux, as well as 

the performance of mostly white decision-makers on a stage 

directed (implicitly or not) by a white woman, as if to say: “Look 

at us, we’re diverse now.” Here, the expression of diversity comes 

before its embodiment, and its result is a curatorial output and 

institutional consistency that underwhelm. And so, despite 

over-indexed scenes and the occasional manipulative tactic, 

White Balls on Walls excels at leaving the viewer with a question 

that extends far beyond the film’s end: are we working 

collectively to paint a more colorful future, or is everything we 

are doing just motivated by money and the aesthetic 

performance of meaningful change? — CONOR TRUAX 

DIRECTOR: Sarah Vos; CAST: —; DISTRIBUTOR: Icarus Films; IN 

THEATERS: May 26; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 30 min. 

31

ALBUM REVIEWS 

GAG ORDER 

Kesha 

The Kesha of today is and isn’t the same 

as the Ke$ha of 2010, whose debut album 

Animal featured six Billboard-topping 

singles, including “TiK ToK,” then the 

highest-selling digital single in history. At 

that point, she was one of a number of 

artists messing around at the intersection 

of pop rap and the newly 

commercially viable brand of 

EDM Skrillex and deadmau5 

had made a name off. 

Primarily backed by Kelly 

Clarkson-hitmaker Dr. Luke 

(plus some assists from the 

legendary Max Martin), Ke$ha 

stood out as one of the few 

stars of that industry boom 

with a definable persona, even 

if it was seemingly crafted in 

response to the success of 

Lady Gaga. Less gay and 

drawing on an American strain 

of trashiness akin to the 

then-popular Jersey Shore (or 

earlier-on collaborator 3OH!3, 

from which much of her 

aesthetic was borrowed), Ke$ha found an 

audience that at one point likely rivaled 

Gaga’s, her purposefully stupid youth 

anthems and electropop celebrations of 

repercussion-free debauchery providing a 

better summation of the cultural attitudes 

of that moment than much else. 

But, of course, the culture has since 

shifted (though 3OH!3’s influence still 

looms large), and concurrently, Kesha has 

been ensnared in a very public, still 

ongoing legal battle with Dr. Luke, whom 

she’s accused of physical and sexual 

assault, as well as controlling her career 

and personhood to a frightening, 

tyrannical degree. While she’s still stuck 

in her contract with Luke’s Kemosabe 

Records, parent label Sony has since 

parted ways with the founder/producer, 

and Kesha has resumed making music 

for the company. Ditching the “$” and 

Diddy aspirations in favor of sychedelics 

and the supernatural (as explored on a 

podcast and Discovery+ program), this 

new Kesha is a bit more introspective and 

spiritual, yet still decidedly a Top 

40-minded act, even when she employs 

the likes of Rick Rubin and Hudson 

Mohawke for latest album, Gag Order. 

Admittedly, it's hard to be too critical of 

the music on Gag Order, Kesha’s fifth 

studio LP and the first where she (sort of) 

explicitly addresses the traumatic fallout 

and cursed success she shared with 

Luke. But with some exceptions, like the 

frank and explicit B-Side “Fine Line” 

(elevated to the album’s proper 

centerpiece) and the unapologetically 

grim “Too Far Gone,” the songs on Gag 

Order are overly generic, obviously keen 

on charting despite the artist expressing 

disinterest in all of that elsewhere on the 

album. 

Executive produced by Rubin, and with an 

eclectic crew of collaborators that 

includes the aforementioned HudMo, plus 

Mary Lattimore and Kurt Vile 

(relegated to a strange outro 

cover of “I Wanna Be 

Sedated” on track “The 

Drama”), Gag Order seemed 

poised to be a reinvention for 

an artist in need of a new 

angle, but it’s held back by 

the designs of the corporate 

music industry, its most 

bracing moments undercut 

by underwhelming new-agey 

EDM reworks and overly 

glossy vocals. There simply 

isn’t much of a cause for 

celebration here because 

there isn’t much of anything 

to dig into. Still, there’s at 

least enough of a shift to lend hope that 

Gag Order might be the start of something 

more interesting and free for Kesha, an 

artist who always had good instincts and 

existed in an aesthetic space somewhere 

near the trendy hyperpop material of 

now, but who hasn’t really figured out 

how to break away from the constraints 

of corporate production. — M.G. 

MAILLOUX 

LABEL: RCA Records; RELEASE DATE: 

May 19 

32

ALBUM REVIEWS 

MY WORLD 

Aespa 

The members of Aespa, the newest group 

from legendary K-pop company SM 

Entertainment, work two jobs: one as 

regular idols and performers, and another 

as characters in a sci-fi/fantasy universe 

of SM’s creation where the narrative 

advances with every comeback. SM has 

put a lot of work into creating new 

terminology to describe Aespa’s world (the 

Kwangya, which is just Korean for 

“wilderness”), incorporating intricate plot 

references into their lyrics and shooting 

expensive, Marvel-esque lore videos, but 

not quite as much work into making the 

music stand on its own. That doesn’t mean 

the songs are all outright bad (besides the 

lazy, self-satisfied “Next Level,” although 

that’s looking more and more like an early 

misstep). However, it’s hard to take lines 

like “I want to protect / First encountering 

Rekall / I will hug you so that you can feel / 

without Synk Dive” seriously — and for the 

most part, the electronic intensity of 

Aespa’s music does demand to be taken 

seriously — they’re not tricks, Hybe, they’re 

illusions! — so there’s a disconnect 

between the crunchy, gritty 

instrumentation of songs like “Girls” and 

“Aenergy” and such goofy moments as 

Karina earnestly rapping “I’m going 

Kwangya로, game in!” In short, SM has 

seemed to care a lot more about showing 

off the SMCU (yes, it’s really called that) 

than letting the talented members of 

Aespa shine in songs. 

Unless you’re a terminally online stan, 

Aespa’s releases are best consumed by 

ignoring everything going on in the 

Kwangya. Musically, their 2020 debut 

“Black Mamba” underwhelmed as a 

polished but uninspired Blackpink 

imitation, but their third single, “Savage,” 

is perhaps the most genuine K-pop take 

on hyperpop to date, and made for a 

much more interesting mission 

statement. Last year’s “Girls,” similarly, 

upped the urgency by mixing metal 

guitars, synth sirens, and crashing 

percussion to actually sound like the boss 

battle it narrated. 

Aespa’s newest title track “Spicy,” from 

their newly-released third mini album, My 

World, has a brash electronic 

instrumental in line with their previous 

work — but, in a new move for the group, 

it’s also a hell of a lot of fun. In the last 

episode, Aespa defeated the villain Black 

Mamba and traveled from the Kwangya to 

the real world, or whatever — what 

matters is that they’ve dropped the lingo 

for the time being and showed up on their 

California set ready to have a hot girl 

summer. “Spicy” is underlaid by a 

grinding synth that most K-pop groups 

wouldn’t dare touch, but though the 

pre-chorus clangs and shouts, the four 

girls perform with a lighthearted wink 

(“Tell me what you see / When you look at 

me / Cause I am a 10 out of 10 honestly”), 

and the second half of the chorus 

explodes into joyous pop melody. For an 

instrumental this filthy, their music has 

never possessed this much levity, and 

playful pop with an Aespa edge is an 

easier sell than any of their previous 

efforts. 

Most of the other songs on My World are 

more conventional pop, not just 

compared to “Spicy,” but also to previous, 

unpredictable deep cuts from the group. 

Some of that may have to do with SM’s 

founder Lee Soo Man — who was the 

driving force behind Aespa’s complicated 

concept — cutting ties with the company 

in a blaze of childish feuding earlier this 

year, the fallout of which led to this 

comeback being downgraded from a 

planned full album to an EP (and an 

environmentalist title track that was 

likely horribly embarrassing being 

scrapped). “Salty and Sweet,” which is 

delightfully wacky, is the only B-side that 

matches the hyperpop edge of their first 

mini album, from 2021. Otherwise, the 

songs here skew vocal- and 

melody-heavy, which is overdue for the 

group. The trap-pop percussion of “I’m 

Unhappy” and power ballad instrumental 

of “Til We Meet Again” are generic, but the 

performances are well-done; “Thirsty” is a 

smooth, harmony-laden R&B song that 

became an immediate fan favorite for 

actually letting the members groove; and 

opening track and pre-release single 

“Welcome to My World” is flat-out grand, 

with booming percussion and dramatic 

strings that are tempered by a eerie 

beauty. (Of all the songs on the album, 

this one most reflects the group’s new 

style.) For listeners most interested in 

hearing the group push the envelope, My 

World won’t top Aespa’s first EP, Savage, 

but it does manage to be their most 

accessible album, without sacrificing 

quality, while the singles still produce the 

strong statements expected from a group 

this popular. Aespa has never needed 

their gimmicks in order to thrive, and My 

World at last delivers conclusive proof of 

this. — KAYLA BEARDSLEE 

LABEL: SM Entertainment; RELEASE 

DATE: May 8 

33

THE ALBUM 

Jonas Brothers 

With The Album, the Jonas Brothers have 

given listeners their second full-length 

release since they reunited in 2019, no 

matter that it was a move seemingly no 

one asked for, even particularly engaged 

fans — the nostalgia machine works 

particularly well for the group. 

Nonetheless, it’s a move that was made, 

and what has resulted is a boring, and 

often bizarre, grasp at relevancy from a 

group that has aged out of the genre it 

insists on trying to retain space within. 

When the Jo Bros initially split, there was 

immense speculation as to the cause. 

Theories about growing rifts, decisions to 

cash out, and desires to make more 

“grown-up” music were all floated about. In 

the subsequent years, the primary 

narrative that developed was that each of 

the brothers wanted to make their 

ownadult music, each stepping out of the 

others’ shadows. As evidenced by their 

respective solo careers and side projects, 

this never really happened. Joe’s side 

project DNCE 

failed to leave the 

radio Disney 

sphere of pop 

music, while Nick 

made the terribly 

unsavvy and 

career-antagonizi 

ng move of writing 

pop/R&B music 

about being a 

happily married 

man. While both 

brothers found 

some slight radio 

success with these endeavors, the reality 

was that they could only manage a lavish 

lifestyle touring the college nostalgia 

circuit for so long. With the trio finally 

reuniting in 2019, it seemed like the 

promise of more mature music was just 

around the corner. This too, has yet to 

occur, and The Album is the most 

egregious defiance of that goal since 

their breakup began. 

It’s tough to ocate a single decision on 

The Album that makes sense. From the 

moment the first notes hit, it’s apparent 

what the record is going to be. 

Overproduced vocals and a 

fake-sounding piano plunking usher in 

opener “Miracle,” and the rest goes on a 

downward spiral. Each brother has a 

textured, at least somewhat interesting 

voice, and they are all here entirely 

stripped of every effect in the production 

process. The filters are so heavy that 

many of the lyrics are unintelligible, 

evoking AI-generated sounds rather than 

the rich, shoegaze-y hue to which the 

record seems to be aspiring. Every song 

following “Miracle” wiggles its way into 

ALBUM REVIEWS 

this exact same sonic space, with 

attempts at evoking country, indie pop, 

and Americana (going so far as to title the 

track… “Americana”) flattening into the 

same generic sound. And few of them 

crack two-and–a-half minutes, opting for 

short bursts of genre cosplay; clearly 

intended as an attempt to make the 

listener want more, The Album’s design 

feels instead as if one were blindly 

clicking 30-second samples on an mp3 

download site. 

There’s no denying that this latest effort 

falls under the umbrella of nostalgia, but 

it never feels intentional enough to be of 

interest. The Album has no clear starting 

or ending point — either conceptually or 

sonically — and if your preferred music 

player is set to restart an album or 

playlist when it reaches its end, it will be 

a test for listeners to see if they notice 

when the approximately 30-minute album 

culminates. On one hand, this may be 

appropriate for a band desperately trying 

to root themselves in the viral TikTok 

sphere; on the other, it feels more 

soulless than ever. It reflects a 

particularly cynical approach to 

music-making, an observation 

underscored by the fact that the Jonas 

Brothers’ upcoming tour will reportedly 

find them playing every one of their 

Disney- and reunion-era albums from 

start to finish each night. That degree of 

nostalgia-baiting might seem like an 

unabashed cash-grab, but the most 

disappointing Jonas Brothers’ truth in 

2023 is that it certainly still has more 

heart than The Album. — ANDREW BOSMA 

LABEL: Republic Records; RELEASE 

DATE: May 12 

34

Photo Credits: 

Cover - Giles Keyte/Disney; Page 1, 2 - Cannes Film Festival; Page 3 - Michaël Crotto/TS 

Productions; Page 5 - Carole Bethuel/2023 Curiosa Films/Gaumont/France 2 Cinema.jpg; Page 7 - 

Quinzaine des Cinéastes; Page 9 - Quinzaine des Cinéastes; Page 10 - Cannes Film Festival; Page 

11 - Virgin Records; Page 13 - Letterboxd; Page 15 - Central Motion Pictures; Page 16 - Disney; 

Page 18 - A24; Page 19 - HBO; Page 21 - MUBI; Page 23 - Hopper Stone, SMPSP/Open Road 

Films/Briarcliff Entertainment; Page 24 - Dan Anderson/Lionsgate; Page 26 - Alejandro Meija; 

Page 28 - NEON; Page 29 - Shudder; Page 31 - Icarus Films; Page 32 - RCA Records; Page 34 - 

Republic Records; Back Cover - Strand Releasing

InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 21

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InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 21

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