I’ve heard it said that sex is not one of the most important parts of a marriage. This is probably said by people who don’t have sexually fulfilling unions, because I beg to differ: what distinguishes a romantic relationship from any other kind of relationship, if not sex? And, yes, while marriage may be in many ways an economic prospect, marrying for romantic love is the norm in 21st-century America. Presumed monogamy, too, is still a normative condition of modern marriage. Seems to me like sex might be kind of important.

Olivia Wilde’s latest directorial effort, The Invite, asks what marriage means once the sex is gone. The film opens with music professor, Joe (Seth Rogen), returning home at the end of the workday to find his stay-at-home wife, Angela (Wilde), bustling around their apartment. Angela reminds a confused Joe that she has invited their upstairs neighbors down for drinks and charcuterie; Joe replies that she absolutely did not tell him that she invited the neighbors over. Joe is tired, dealing with chronic back pain, and not in the mood to entertain surprise guests. And these are not just any surprise guests, it turns out. These are the upstairs neighbors who have been persistently bothering Joe and Angela with their obscenely loud sex noises in the wee hours of the night. If Angela insists on having the neighbors over, Joe insists that he’s going to confront them about their disruptive late-night activities. Angela, mortified, begs him not to.

The opening bickering economically paints a picture of the type of long-married couple Joe and Angela are. They live cozily with their accumulated resentments, and may not even like each other that much anymore, but they keep it together for their kid. The film doesn’t really get cooking until ex-fireman Hawk (Ed Norton) and sex therapist Pína (Penélope Cruz) arrive, and the comedy of manners begins in earnest. Joe and Angela’s impossibly cool and hot neighbors immediately pick up on the tension, but it seems to amuse them rather than make them uncomfortable. As the night wears on, Hawk and Pína’s true intentions come out. They agreed to come over to Joe and Angela’s apartment because they’re interested in a foursome. The upstairs neighbors practice group sex (hence the excessive volume of the fucking noises), and they want to extend an invitation.

Although this reveal doesn’t happen until more than halfway through the movie, the marketing for the film heavily emphasized the sexual nature of Hawk and Pína’s interest in Joe and Angela. The offer for group sex isn’t a plot twist so much as it’s an emotional catalyst. The Invite’s script, adapted by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones from a Spanish film by Cesc Gay, uses sex—the discussion of it, the promise of it, the fantasy of it—as a shorthand for all of Joe and Angela’s desires. The movie is about sex, obviously, but it’s also about how hard it can be to find the courage and the freedom to live how you want to live in the face of life’s inevitable pressures and disappointments. The Invite remains so entertainingly unpredictable not because the sexual hijinks get out of hand, but because the emotional stakes constantly shift beneath the viewer’s feet.

A four-person cast, a single setting, and a dialogue-heavy script might sound like fodder for a play rather than a film. But Wilde and cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra pull out all the stops to make The Invite feel cinematic. Wilde is almost annoyingly fond of complicated shot set ups involving reflections and mirrors, and she studiously blocks Joe and Angela so that they often appear visually separated even within the same frame. Claustrophobic close ups in intimate moments and small spaces increase the atmosphere of discomfort. While not every visual flourish adds something, enough of them add emotional and thematic emphasis that the scale tips to the positive. Brisk editing, by Anthony Boys and Yorgos Mavropsaridis, also keeps the film from feeling too much like a play. The focus darts around the apartment from angle to angle, room to room, no scene ever given more room to breathe than it absolutely needs.

All of the main players give equally strong performances, each masterful in their own way. It’s not surprising that Rogen does most of the comedic heavy lifting, but he’s working at the top of his game here. While no one would dispute Rogen’s status as a comedy icon, he still can feel somehow generally underrated as a comedic performer, as if the effortlessness with which he carries himself on screen obscures the precision of his instincts. The Invite undeniably showcases that precision, and I hope Rogen finally gets some flowers for it. As Angela, Wilde becomes brittleness personified. It’s hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure to watch her crack. Norton, for his part, reminded me why I had such a raging crush on him after watching The Illusionist too many times as a young teenager. Those twinkly eyes! Cruz is never less than believable as a woman so sensual it throws everyone she encounters into horny turmoil. One almost imagines that Pína became a sex therapist by default, like everyone around her was so compelled to talk about sex that she picked a career to accommodate.

As laudable as the performances are individually, the magic happens in their combination. This is the kind of movie ensemble acting awards are made for. Rogen, Wilde, Norton, and Cruz play off of each other organically, feeding off of each other’s energies. The chemistry between the four cast members, sexual and otherwise, feels right-on from scene to scene for the film’s entire time.

The Invite finds much humor in the clash between convention and deviation, repression and freedom, monogamy and free love. The thing that’s stuck with me about the film, though, is its refusal to take equal opportunity shots. While Hawk and Pína have their flaws, they’re never exposed as hypocrites ripe for ridicule. This is an earnestly sex-positive film that, in its final flipping of the script, affirms good sex and sexual liberation as a foundational part of a fulfilling adult life. Maybe group sex isn’t your path (or Joe and Angela’s), but Wilde’s film invites viewers to ask what is. Even if, or perhaps especially if, you’re old and married.

Chandler Levack is one of my favorite voices working in Canadian cinema right now (actually, cinema in general, but she is specifically keeping CanCon great). I had the pleasure of talking with her about the balance of the personal and the artistic, the tonal value of a good sex scene, online cultural criticism at its peak, and Mile End Kicks’ iconic “Chekov’s herpes”.

To read our original review of Mile End Kicks from TIFF 2025, click here.

VERONICA: I love your story structure so much, but I also know you are sometimes working in the mode of personal experience and autofiction. How do you find balance in editorializing something that you’ve experienced?

CHANDLER: God, I don’t know. I feel like with Mile End Kicks, it was the second screenplay I ever wrote. I think I love Save the Cat and three-act story structure. As dorky as some of those beats are, I do think they are the fundamentals of what to expect from a movie. So I guess I do think about those plot points, but then I’m always just extrapolating what happened to me onto it. So it’s a lot of remembering stuff and then seeing where it fits into the narrative.

VERONICA: It sounds like you’re able to kind of work backwards almost.

CHANDLER: I guess so, yeah. I guess it’s more organic. Like the first time I ever had a panic attack was in a Blockbuster break room and they wouldn’t let my mom come in and I did have to talk through the door [referencing a scene in I Like Movies]. So I thought about that, but I wasn’t like, “Oo, that’s a good break into Act 3”, you know? It’s funny I haven’t written a screenplay in like five years so I don’t even remember [starts laughing] how to do it. But it was also just watching a lot of movies for Mile End Kicks and asking, “What are the hallmarks of a good romcom?” Like ill-timed confessions of feelings where one person confesses too early and the other isn’t ready to hear it. Or I love when someone is telling off the wrong guy. It was a lot of just breaking down the plot of Bridget Jones Diary or Reality Bites and being like, “OK, how can I transpose these beats that are very satisfying when I see them into what actually happened to me or what didn’t happen to me but felt like it could’ve happened.”

VERONICA: What I love about I Like Movies and Mile End Kicks is that I feel like they’re about the creative process, but specifically the part of the creative process in your early 20s where the idea of creating and of yourself as an artist is so exciting, but the actual process of creating can be so much less fun than just being twenty-two and running around. Do you think of that kind of fucking around phase as part of the creative process?

CHANDLER: I think Annie Baker said — this is completely me misremembering this — that all the times that you fuck up and do the jobs you hate and all the things that you resent become the material you get to have to write about. If nothing ever happens to you and you never make mistakes, like people who just went to film school, were the darlings of their film school, got a short into Sundance, made a feature — they don’t have anything to write about. I think it’s the same for actors, like if you just only grew up on set and only know being on a movie how can you really draw on anything to create a character?

VERONICA: That’s such a weird thought, like you’re basing this performance on the last time you were pretending.

CHANDLER: Yeah. It is weird, I guess, making stuff that’s so close to the bone and then people are like, “Oh this is a one-to-one documentary of who you are.” And I’m like, “No, it’s still a movie and it’s heavily fictionalized.” But it’s not at the same time, it’s also deeply personal. It’s weird to spend three or four months debating what’s real and what’s not.

VERONICA: It’s weird, I find especially in anything that’s autofictional, people really want to find the exact truth of something. But sometimes I’m like, “Does it matter? I’m not offering this information to you in court.”

CHANDLER: Yes! And I think they only do that kind of litigation to women. Nobody’s doing that to Mike Mills or Noah Baumbach, they’re just giving those guys a huge pat on the back and saying, “Thank you for being vulnerable and honest!”

VERONICA: I want to talk about the sex in the movie, because I really like it. Did you have a goal for how you wanted it to come across? I find it to be realistic — or well-observed is the word I’d like to use — but it still tonally matches the film.

CHANDLER: I was scared, because other than Lawrence [in I Like Movies] masturbating to Spartacus and being walked in on by his mom, there isn’t really any kind of sex in that movie. We didn’t have an intimacy coordinator for that scene, we just kind of shot it. So [Mile End Kicks] was a little bit terrifying. There’s four sex scenes, at least two of which are quite graphic. I worked with an intimacy coordinator, Mo Matton, and we just very carefully blocked the scenes without any touching, almost like a dance or something. We watched a lot of sex scenes from Girls. With a cinematographer or production designer or producers you always have tonal references, but no one ever talks about the tonal references for sex scenes. And I thought the blocking of those sex scenes in Girls is so exquisite and realistic and natural but also privileges the character’s point of view. […] I think the best sex scenes can be a really strong illustration of what a character wants or power dynamics or what characters think about each other. It’s funny that people just see them as gratification when they’re really like … scene. A lot of the sex I was having in my early 20s was not embodied. It was entirely based in like, “Oh well, if we have sex I can calm down.” I didn’t feel chill about the relationship unless we had sex. Even when it was clearly with people who were not interested or we had already broken up, I just needed that validation. It is weird. I just felt really insecure. […] I think I unfortunately have the sexuality where I like like one person a decade, it’s really hard for me to have casual sex and I find this hookup culture really alienating. I was interested in examining this character kind of through her sexuality. Of all the problems she has, that’s certainly one of them — she certainly doesn’t have a fulfilling sex life.

VERONICA: Did you always know it was going to end the way it did? With the herpes kiss?

CHANDLER: Yeah. It’s Chekov’s herpes. I find it beautiful because it’s kind of what true love is. We have to absorb each other’s metaphorical herpes. I think it’s kind of beautiful that the best kiss of your life could possibly give you an STD. […] It was funny, though, I remember when we were in the edit stage, like almost at the final cut, all of a sudden one of the financiers was getting really nervous about it. They were like, “We need to cut this out.” And I was like, “But that’s the whole movie!” And they were like, “No, it’s gross.” Why didn’t you say this at any other point? Like, now we have to VFX out a herpes sore? I don’t wanna do that! And this moment is what makes it special from every other climactic kiss in any other romcom. I like that it was subverting the expectation of the genre.

VERONICA: The production and costume design is so good. What did you do to make it seem genuinely like 2011?

CHANDLER: Thanks! I worked with two really brilliant people, my costume designer Courtney Mitchell did I Like Movies and she’s just an extreme genius and managed an American Apparel in Montreal in 2011. So I think she was excited because it was her adolescence, too. We found a lot of old pictures of us on Facebook and dug through the archives and party photography at that time and old American Apparel magazines and VICE articles… She just would reach out to everyone she knew in Montreal. She’d go to landfills that had old clothing. She found an archive of vintage American Apparel from this, like, Qubecois tailor. […] All the details had to be so specific. And some of the details were written into the script, like the TOMs and the owl necklace. And then my production designer Jess Hart is an extraordinary artist and did what people in Montreal do which is go to thrift shops. […] A lot of the locations I’d written into the script were the real places where I’d experienced a lot of this stuff, so it was fun to shoot it where it actually happened and then recreate some stuff and then find some new locations that felt like they would have existed in 2011. […] When I was about to make the movie a lot of people would say to me, “Oh there’s so many screens, how are you going to make that interesting?” But it was actually so emotional. Every time you see [Grace, played by Barbie Ferriera] like, drafting an email on old Gmail or having her iTunes playlist named “If I Ever Had Sex”, I hadn’t seen that stuff in so long. All of that stuff is really powerful. I think our relationship to old technology is very emotional. […] I think culture has accelerated so much, especially when we’re talking about analog media. The idea of having an EP launch and getting your fans through traditional press has absolutely no relevance now. But that sort of taste-making power of being a music critic and the little foothold you have in the culture is, like — It feels like a career where now I may as well have been a candlestick maker.

VERONICA: What do you miss and not miss about 2011?

CHANDLER: I miss meeting people in real life, organically, like at shows. I’m sure all those places exist but post-pandemic we’re maybe more reluctant to just spend time in the real world.

VERONICA: And you have to fight to find it, which I find really depressing.

CHANDLER: Yeah, I mean that was such a time of like, “Oh, do you want to go to this poetry reading by the train tracks?” And you’re really curious about the world and your experiences and going outside yourself. Now everyone would rather line up for an hour for a matcha latte. And I also just miss writing about art. It was so fun to write about things that I really loved and interview people that I admired and have these foundational conversations. A lot of those interviews that I did informed my sense of art and creativity in a way that I’m still thinking about. It was a really cool experience to have at such a young age.

HIGH FEMME RAPID FIRE:

HF: What’s your biggest time suck online?
CL: Everything. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. Any videos where someone is, like, eating the best hamburgers.

HF: Favorite curse word?
CL: Um. There’s a baby nearby. [softly] Probably fuck.

HF: Favorite perverted thing?
CL: John Waters.

HF: A sex discourse you wish you could ban?
CL: What does that mean?

HF: Favorite book from childhood?
CL: Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block.

HF: Song of the summer? .
CL: “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody” by Weyes Blood.

HF: Do you call it a journal or a diary?
CL: Journal, but I’m not really a journal or diary person. I have a weirdly obsessive memory.

HF: Person dead or alive that you would ask to dinner with the sole purpose of getting to throw a drink in their face?
CL: Hitler???

HF: Ideal nap length?
CL: Oh, man. If I go to take a nap I’m out for four hours, usually.

HF: Best time to write?
CL: Before you look at your phone, if possible.

HF: Worst place to edit writing?
CL: I wrote and edited a lot of articles in the A&W across from my old Toronto apartment. I can kind of edit anywhere.

HF: Any opinion about any movie ever?
CL: I’ll just say what my grandmother said about The Seven Samurai. Make sure this is in a Maltese accent. [in a Maltese accent] There are seven samurai, and they all have a story to tell.

It was about ten minutes into Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey that it hit me: “Oh, this is really doing The Odyssey.” I had a similar realization a few years ago watching Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. That film’s another adaptation that, beautiful visuals aside, is really doing Pinocchio. That little wooden boy gets swallowed up by a whale and you, the audience, are tasked with wrestling with just what the hell that’d be like (which I didn’t particularly care to, unfortunately).

Now, should I have expected the movie billed with the same title as Homer’s epic poem to be anything other than a visualized version of that epic poem? Probably not. But, it didn’t help that a handful of riffy, “treat the source material as a jumping off point rather than something to slavishly recreate” adaptations from the past few years, including one of Nolan’s own, have all succeeded by either drastically rejiggering their source material’s structures or just out and out cherry picking the elements they wanted to keep and discarding the ones they didn’t. All of this is to say that the stumblings I had with the film may well be my stumblings. If you’re the type of person who’s always been dying to see a bunch of armored up dudes tangle with the cyclops Polyphemus or see what Odysseus (Matt Damon) getting strapped to the ship’s mast to listen in on that banging Siren song might have looked like; well, 2026’s The Odyssey has all of that for you and more. Plus, it has it all executed on the enormous, singular scale Nolan’s the undisputed belt-holder of working on (this is the first film shot entirely with IMAX cameras, a feat that required a bunch of complicated innovation on IMAX’s side).

Maybe I’m being a little unfair asserting that the guy effectively just trained a camera over every page of an Odyssey translation before calling it a day. Nolan’s Odyssey does make a number of substantial changes to the text, rendering the thing his own. It is, however, still the story of Odysseus getting lost after winning the Trojan War, giving even Nolan’s tinkerings a very familiar feel. While the poem is nonlinear, the film’s timeline includes the insertion of threads from The Ilyiad and The Anaeid and a removal of a number of gods and other major figures. Those changes result in a film that jumps back and forth between a disoriented, older Odysseus living out his quasi-imprisonment with Calypso (Charlize Theron) and the voyage that cost him both years of isolation and every last member of his crew, before ultimately getting him back to Ithaca to kick a lot of suitor ass.

Beyond those timeline shifts and Iliad and Aeneid borrowings, it’s the Trojan Horse sacking of Troy, in particular, that’s the film’s biggest reworking from the poem. Genuinely large spoilers here for anyone looking to avoid them—Nolan posits that act of subterfuge—which ended the Trojan War and is most thoroughly detailed in The Aeneid—as more than just cunning strategy. As with the atomic bomb in Oppenheimer, Odysseus’ little wartime innovation—i.e. violating Zeus’ Law (which we used to respect, dammit) and perverting a religious offering made in good faith—Odysseus broke something fundamental in his world.

That Oppenheimer essentially dedicated his life after the Trinity Test to trying to force the atomic genie back into the bottle is where Odysseus and Oppy fundamentally diverge. Turning back the clock, where we can, certainly appears to be Nolan’s big current preoccupation; it’s in how he’s showcasing his characters working to do so that he’s making his biggest shifts, film to film. Shades of that interest are also writ through the goofball/great Tenet, in its “the future is so fucked due to mistakes made in the present that the future is sending the means to prevent itself from coming to pass by shipping the tools for its prevention backwards in time” central device. The guy’s clearly worried about what we’ve done and the bill for our actions coming due.

While I loved the ruminations on those worries in Oppenheimer and Tenet, The Odyssey, for me, doesn’t land its riff on them quite as effectively. Oppenheimer succeeds because the film is driving toward the creation of the bomb, then examining the regret Oppenheimer had over being the guy with his foot on the gas of that process. The Odyssey reveals the specifics of Odysseus’ sin so late into its runtime that the events leading up to that revelation don’t get the added thematic heft of the revelation. The film jumps around in time, there are these awful little run-ins with giants and Poseidon’s one-eyed kid and so on, yes, but each little episodic beat plays like just another beat until you learn that they’ve all been loaded up with this “wow, maybe we shouldn’t have Trojan Horsed Troy after all, look what doing so brought us” guilt the whole time.

But, I’ll stop beating the “Oppenheimer rocks/The Odyssey is okay” drum for a second to say some nice things about it. First, The Odyssey is undeniably beautiful looking. Damon, Hathaway, and Leguizamo all turn in standout performances, the Göransson score’s a blast, Damon plucking his little bowstring to signal that whatever he’s hunting ought to know that, dammit, he’s coming, and the practical treatment of this difficult-to-imagine epic of wine dark seas and Circe’s shaping dudes into pigs in her witch’s cabin and so on does make for a lot of engaging stuff.

As for the film as a deepening of Nolan’s “perpetual sense of guilt over feeling obligated to craft these ‘great works’ while his family awaits his return” canon, I do think this is the most thoroughly imagined, rich entry to date. Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and her son Telamachus (Tom Holland) have arcs that are far more robust than Inception’s Mal (Marion Cotillard) and Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and their faceless kids or Oppenheimer’s Kitty (Emily Blunt) and Oppy and their always-crying children. Odysseus and Penelope sailing off into exile together after he does finally return is the sweetest vision of a husband and wife Nolan’s put on screen to date. Yes, The Odyssey’s one great big journey story with these “what hath we wrought by violating Zeus’ law?” and “I do love my wife” threads to it—it’s just that their braiding, unfortunately, ends up as a little more of a tangle than I’d hoped.

A few months ago, I shared a meal with Steven Spielberg. Now, he does not know we shared it. I was at Rao’s in LA, which has since closed, and he happened to be there celebrating a friend’s birthday. We were just seated near each other, but I’m still counting it, and I couldn’t help dwelling on how much the guy means to me. It almost feels silly to recount his resume, as synonymous with American filmmaking as it is — Jaws, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan. My guy made The GD Fabelmans (that David Lynch/John Ford scene!), he’s shaped theatre-going experiences for going on six decades now, and, as I can personally attest to from our* dinner, he’s a total sweetheart (e.g. at one point, he took a photo with the manager, who was kind of hovering around his table all night waiting to ask him for it). So, of course I found a lot to love in his latest, Disclosure Day.

On its face, the film’s an out and out retread of a number of his pet themes. It’s his fifth alien movie between E.T., Close Encounters, War of the Worlds, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, it’s got a big train set piece a la The Last Crusade, and there are shadowy government functionaries beholden to no one in particular a la Minority Report… And yet, there’s this urgent, “only connect” thread braided through it that very much makes it a movie of this particular moment (albeit one told by a guy who also still profoundly believes in the power of local news, which, we love you Steven, but come on.).

The film opens with a gleefully bracing beat—a wrestler literally stomps on the audience’s POV, before Spielberg expands outward to introduce us to the nervy Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor). Kellner’s girlfriend, Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson), is being held captive by the above-mentioned government functionaries, who will only release her in exchange for the stash of secrets in Kellner’s backpack. Kellner, a security specialist at the shadowy private/public technology company Wardex, has gone rogue, and he’s taken Wardex’s most prized classified materials with him—evidence, it turns out, of Wardex and the US government’s joint efforts to conceal decades’ worth of knowledge, experimentation on, and extraction of technology from aliens. Which are very much real. And have very much been trying to get the fact of their existence out to humanity.

Then comes the other half of the film’s central pair—and really the biggest reason to recommend the film as a whole—Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt). She’s a Kansas City-based meteorologist who’s always had a sort of bug about feeling in the wrong place, ready to move at the drop of a hat to find exactly where she’s supposed to be. It turns out that the reason for that bug comes from a long-suppressed childhood experience with the aliens Wardex is doing everything it can to conceal. Both she and Kellner were chosen to share the message of the aliens’ existence.

In order to facilitate delivering that extraterrestrial revelation, Kellner was given the gift of an extreme capability with math—the “language of the universe”—while Fairchild was given a sort of extreme capacity to connect with people. Spielberg and his long-time DP, Janusz Kamiński, pull off the visualization of Fairchild’s particular strange power so, so wonderfully. In these (very cool) unbroken shots, we see characters speak first to Fairchild, who, as the camera glides behind, transitions from having Emily Blunt’s face to having the face of their loved one. It’s this seamless little clarification of exactly how Fairchild’s going to actually overcome people’s skepticism. She will speak to each and every one she has to in the most visceral, base tongue they have—literally becoming the people they love—and she’ll convince them that what she’s saying is real.

Now, is Disclosure Day full of goofball choices that maybe make what works best about it also clunk? Sure. The aliens, to me, frankly, look stupid. Kellner’s “math ability” is much more difficult to visualize excitingly than Fairchild’s speaking Korean out of nowhere or briefly becoming a Wardex agent’s kid, which makes him more of a functionary of a character than her, creating a bit of a plot imbalance. Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), the head of Wardex’s motivation for torturing aliens and pursuing Kellner and Fairchild stems, as far as I can tell, from the belief that “government secrets should stay secret.” Which, sure, but that does feel a little thin given the extremes he and his underlings go to. And on the flipside, does the aliens’ plan make any sense at all? Relying on Kellner and Fairchild, one of whom has access to a broadcasting station and the other of whom is just so, so good at numbers, to get their message out is, I’d argue, not the greatest plan, but it is what it is. The plan does track a bit better if you extrapolate from the footage Kellner and Fairchild ultimately disclose that all the archival recordings of the aliens landing on Earth were just previous attempts to do what they’re effectively, finally, managing to do with Kellner and Fairchild, but that argument isn’t really advanced by the film, so, you’ll have to be a pretty generous viewer to grant it that (and I understand if you won’t, but come on—maybe the aliens are just getting a little kooky with their plans now that they’ve been swinging and missing for seventy years, what do we know?). And do the digital animal avatars the aliens adopt to put Kellner and Fairchild at ease look so bizarre as to be distracting? They do!

But, is Disclosure Day ultimately a fun pulpy summer spectacle with a great late-period John Williams score that’s essentially about everyone getting brought together by a major news event despite our differences? It is. And, for me, it’s very much a well-meant pro-connection sci-fi spectacle that pulls off what it sets out to pull off. Hell yeah to my Rao’s dinner date*.

Maddie’s Secret pivots on a simple, passively tantalizing, nearly made-for-TV movie premise: Maddie (John Early) is a young woman with an idyllic life in Los Angeles who dreams of sharing her love of cooking with the world. But when she gets he chance as an on-camera contributor at the mostly soulless digital food content site Gourmaybe, she finds her blissful life on shaky ground as insecurity returns Maddie to her previously long-dormant struggle with bulimia.

Maddie’s Secret is antithetical to much of what is being created in the independent film scene currently. It’s devastatingly earnest, unafraid of (maybe even excited by?) finding itself silly, and deeply intentional in its relationship to the art which inspired it. In short, it’s vastly more principled, thoughtfully political, and artistically enjoyable than most of its current counterparts, all without letting itself be anything but funny and sincere above all else.

Veronica spoke with writer, director, and star John Early about earnestness in the era of performing on your phone, the current dearth of intention in art, and what Maddie allows us experience more freely.

VERONICA: This movie is, to me, a meditation on giving yourself over to sensation and earnestness in a time of anhedonia. How did you decide to select the specific experiences of consumption that you touched on — both Maddie’s eating disorder but also food and streaming content — to tell this story?

JOHN: The way I arrived at things is all quite mysterious. I’ve tried to kind of assemble some sort of narrative that makes sense of it but I can’t really say. I think you’ve asked a more interesting question than that rote answer would give justice to. I feel like what you’re saying is so profound, like I chose food content — again, unconsciously — because embedded in food content are these two poles. One is the totally miserable media ecosystem and flattening quality of influencer culture, and then on the other side there’s this very beautiful, pure thing, which is food itself. Like food is beautiful and something that nourishes people and comforts people. Food feeds the hungry, it feeds the sick, it can be turned into an exquisite art form. So I think those poles being kind of linked is the point of the movie. Like Maddie is trying to wrest food and her relationship with food from the clutches of a sick culture, and from her early traumas with it. I was trying to bring some vividness, some color, some expressiveness to a very gray, phone-based subject matter, you know? I wanted some Technicolor, cinematic, old-school emotion injected into what I actually find to be, like — this thing that rules my life, the phone. And it’s awful and it makes me feel like shit.

VERONICA: It’s funny you say that because I feel like now the way we all move through the world, even Maddie — who is this raw, heart-on-sleeve woman who just wants to be out in the world and love people — being an entity on our phones is a feature of her life. I don’t think now, as grim as it is, we can detach from [the phone]. I think there’s an interesting question in Maddie’s Secret about if there’s a way to be an earnest influencer or short-form comedian or capsule review writer or what have you. I don’t know, but I wonder if you have thoughts on it.

JOHN: I don’t know, I mean, certainly all the promotion I have to do for this movie is done on my own phone. Like, it’s how I’ve sold tickets to the screening in an effort to make the money back for the movie, you know? I don’t know what I would do without social media in this context. But, you know, when this is over I’m going to go to the woods for two weeks. I don’t know if it’s possible to fully leave it. But I wanted to tell the story — I think the essential story is someone who is pure of heart being corrupted by today’s culture.

VERONICA: In a way, that story has such roots in a non-phone, non-social media, old-school form of storytelling. There’s almost a pulp novel, Lifetime movie texture at times. I’m thinking of the dialogue especially, and how striking it was to me on my second watch. What was your process to getting the sound and pattern of dialogue that you eventually achieved?

JOHN: The big thing was Showgirls. [… The beginning of the movie has a lot of these sort of Joe Eszterhas-y, almost three-word lines. Like the back-and-forth between Maddie and Jake when we first meet Jake where she’s like, “Have you eaten anything yet?” And he’s like, “I had some candy and some chips.” [Maddie says,] “That’s not food!” [Jake says,] “Then why did I eat it?” [Maddie says,] “You’ll eat anything.” […] That like [said rhythmically] da-da-da-da-da, blunt, crude, direct patter is very Showgirls to me, and I wanted it to sound like that. I mean, to be clear, when I say that it’s not like there was some alternative version of this movie that I’m capable of writing that’s, like, dense and literary. I’m not that. Even writing a three-word line, or “I had some candy and some chips”, that was impossible. That was like drawing blood for me. In other words this is the only way as of yet in my life as a filmmaker and as an artist that I know how to write. But I realized very quickly that that was the virtue of the movie. It wasn’t hiding behind pretension or vibe. I have a lot of rage toward the vibeyness of music and film and TV and visual art in the last ten years. Eveything is vibe and no one is trying to create potent, direct… This is such a brazen thing to say, “No one is trying to do that!” I’m sure lots of people are and they’re either not being seen or just not getting to me. But I really wanted to make something that wasn’t trying to be smart and was instead just hulking and crude and big-hearted and not afraid to be dumb and sincere. So that really shaped the dialogue itself. And then what also shaped the dialogue was these little earworms from food culture. You know, “grilled halloumi with a yuzu kosho crisp”, there’s this food world that I’m so immersed in as a millennial who loves chili crisp. In the grand scheme of things, I just discovered chili crisp. I don’t know chili crisp because I’ve, say, traveled to China or come from a Chinese family or spent time in a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant. I know about chili crisp because of Instagram. These things are pushed at me all the time and I eat em’ up, figuratively and literally. That was fun to me, to populate this old style of movie with these very contemporary things.

VERONICA: It just dawned on me when you said that — I’m the same, I spend so much time before bed looking at my phone and being like, “Why don’t I cook like this?” — and I feel like because you have to eat the influencing of it can break through more than being like, “I’m not going to buy this garbage pair of horrible fast fashion underwear.”

JOHN: Veronica? No one has said this yet, and I’ve never even thought about it, but you have to eat. You have to eat. There are obviously industries built on these lies. Like, no one needs make-up, and it’s a billions and billions of dollar industry and they have to build this gigantic psyop that’s been going on for hundreds and hundreds of years to make people think they need to buy makeup. But food you actually need to survive. It’s kind of shocking. And that’s why there’s something so insidious when your food taste feels influenced by advertising or an algorithm instead of just very simply trying to get through your day.

VERONICA: This is like a really big spiritual question so it’s okay if there’s not a clear answer, but how long has Maddie been around? Did she come to be with this specific story or was she here for you before?

JOHN: She’s always been there. There’s always been that voice, like I’ve always loved to do [switches into Maddie’s voice] this voice. I have, I would say, four voices that I reach into my back pocket for, not even as an artist but just to make my friends laugh or myself laugh or to express some part of me. I think the Maddie voice — this is not conscious — has always been there to kind of roast myself? My own kind of Christian charity, my own kind of virtuousness that has become totally perverted in the age of social media when everything is political. I don’t know, that voice and that girl is always there as an outlet for my own naivete, my own open-heartedness, my own optimism, my own sense of hope. And I guess sometimes I use it comedically to kind of soften the bluntness and the intensity of wanting and yearning. What was so amazing about this movie was that by becoming the girl — instead of irony-poisoned, Internet-addled John Early who can snap into a voice as a way to dilute the intensity of my true feelings — there was no hiding. Even though there’s a wig, there’s breasts, I was tucking, I was corseted. It’s so artificial in some ways and yet it’s like the most vulnerable thing I’ve ever done. I feel totally exposed by this movie. I feel like I read myself to filth, I feel like I’ve completely bared my soul in this movie in this strange way. I can’t explain it, but I’ve woken up in the middle of the night going, “I need to call Magnolia and ask them to pull the release.” […] That’s when you know you’re making something not necessarily good but has maybe some sort of potential artistically. You have to feel at constant risk of embarrassing yourself.

HIGH FEMME RAPID FIRE WITH MADDIE RALPH, FICTIONAL PROTAGONIST OF MADDIE’S SECRET:

HF: What’s your biggest time suck online?
MR: Old videos of Julia Child.

HF: Favorite curse word?
MR: I’m not comfortable answering that question, I’m going to have to pass.

HF: Favorite perverted thing?
MR: I’m not comfortable answering.

HF: A sex discourse you wish you could ban?
MR: I’m going to plead the fifth.

HF: Favorite book from childhood?
MR: Blueberries for Sal.

HF: Song of the summer?
MR: “Girl, Put Your Records On”.

HF: Do you call it a journal or a diary?
MR: Diary.

HF: Person dead or alive that you would ask to dinner with the sole purpose of getting to throw a drink in their face?
MR: Putin.
[John, as an aside: “She’s not totally radicalized yet. In a later movie I’d love for her to learn about society, but right now I think she has mainstream liberal politics.”]

HF: Ideal nap length?
MR: Thirty minutes.

HF: Best time to write?
MR: Every morning.

HF: Worst place to edit writing?
MR: At a coffee shop.

HF: Any opinion on any movie ever?
MR: I love the movie Sabrina, both the original and the remake.

You can find our original review from TIFF here.

Maddie’s Secret opens on June 19 in New York and June 26 in Los Angeles.

It’s quickly revealed that the client is someone Aaron knew when he was just Alex — before his Aaron Eagle persona existed. Hank Grant (Reed Birney) was Aaron’s middle school teacher, and he has come to confess that he has been in love with Aaron since he taught him in middle school.

Blue Film is non-judgmental in a neutral sense. In a culture that has a tendency to rush that which is sexually repulsive into a drawer and slam it shut, Blue Film instead sits in contemplation of the lived experience of the taboo, or even immoral, desire.

Blue Film is blue like crass, blue like melancholy. It’s a remarkable chamber piece and a remarkable meditation on sex, taboo, and the possible transcendence (or nothingness) of pursuing sexual desire.

I spoke with Blue Film director Eliot Tuttle about his remarkable feature debut.

VERONICA: I’m going to start with a technical question. I’d love to hear about your process developing the color composition and camera composition in this film.

ELLIOTT: I loved using the different formats of camera. I loved this camcorder aesthetic, the format really creates this sense of intimacy and familiarity and danger. It’s used a lot for family videos but is also used for something like a snuff film. […] So [the camcorder] felt really important to implement at different moments of the film. I love the medium because there’s something so beautiful about being able to look into an actor’s eyes in extreme close-up and not feel self-conscious at all, because they can’t look back at you. This felt like a perfect story for film, because it’s already engaging with such personal and taboo subject matter. I loved the idea that people could watch this, have their own relationship with the screen, and not be worried about anyone looking at them or the actors looking at them. The color of the film was a very deliberate, long process of refining. I didn’t want this to be a film that was afraid of color in any way. A lot of my favorite filmmakers — Aki Kaurismäki and Bergman, in particular — use this really bold, expressive color as a way to express the totality of emotion. Yes, we made this film for very little money, but I never wanted the visual of the film to be an afterthought, because there has to be a reason that it’s on screen.

VERONICA: The moment I’m thinking of specifically for both color and design is the moment where they’re roleplaying. It begins in a camcorder, but when Aaron stands up we see that he’s left their [sexual] scene, because the camera has returned to digital. I feel like this kind of language is something that you can only get through cinematic presentation. The cinematic language of this movie allows for very lived-in performances, and there’s less signaling required [of the performers] for these power dynamic shifts because you’re allowing the camera to speak as well. Can you speak to the balance between getting the performance you desire while also letting the cinematic form do some of the lifting for you?

ELLIOTT: [Blue Film’s leads] Reed [Birney] and Kieron [Moore] are the part of the film I’m most proud of. They’re so good in the film and they’re such natural talents. They really made my job pretty easy. I think I was always looking for ways to guide the viewer. I’m always looking for ways to not explain things with a word. Like these people are always talking so much during the movie, it’s such a discursive, wordy film, so at every moment I could it was important to have the visual world of the film, the actual assembly of the film, kind of represent an eagerness to engage with the subject matter, too. I didn’t want this to just be that they’re talking about this lightning rod subject matter. I wanted it to be so that if you took away all the words, this would still feel like a dangerous film. I wanted to engage with the subject matter in more than just the words, I wanted to do it with the visual language as well.

VERONICA: Speaking to that lightning rod topic, what I really appreciate about Blue Film is that it has good faith in its audience, and it isn’t compromising. How did you maintain that sense of trust in your audience and in this film being received as it needed to be received?

ELLIOTT: I think I worried that if I made any creative decision out of fear then the movie wouldn’t be good. We all wanted to make this movie as good as we could possibly make it and tell the story as well as we could possibly tell it. I was conscious of learning to trust my gut instincts. I was always worried that the film was going to be bad. And also, all filmmakers should trust their audience! If people are paying for a ticket, they probably want to engage with it in good faith. You have to trust your audience. You make it to connect with an audience. It was never a question of “How do I make sure this isn’t read the wrong way by the wrong people?” because someone out there will always read something wrong. It’s impossible to make any creative decision from that place of worry.

VERONICA: This film is as close to a two-hander that I think you could get. Was one of the characters easier to understand or get into than the other when your were writing or directing? Did you see Aaron or Hank more clearly, or did you see them as mutually created?

ELLIOTT: I really like that question. They were both easier and more difficult for different reasons. The Hank character was almost easier in the way it was not a very personal character. He felt so created. But he was also harder because I did a lot of research and wanted to be as thoughtful as I could when writing it. The character of Aaron felt more difficult in the sense he felt a lot more personal to me, and it felt difficult to translate him into a character. But in the same way that also made it easier. I guess to answer your question it’s both and neither and … and they do kind of just exist together. The way the film is written they have a sort of positive feedback loop inside of this echo chamber. They are constantly pulling new things out of each other. It’s not until the end that their arcs kind of disentangle.

VERONICA: What did you feel like was at the heart of Blue Film’s grappling with sex as performance and sex as spiritual?

ELLIOTT: When I was writing the film I was never explicitly trying to write about sex as performance because these characters do feel like extrapolations of themselves. I think the character of Aaron is very real to him. His work really, really informs the way he lives his life. […] I didn’t want to make sex this conceptual thing, I wanted it to be the driving force behind their arcs. The sex is how they both live.

HIGH FEMME’S RAPID-FIRE QUESTIONS:

HF: What’s your biggest time suck online?
ET: Instagram.

HF: Favorite curse word?
ET: Fuck.

HF: Favorite perverted thing (it can be art, an object, a person, a sex act)?
ET: I’m reading this book right now [holds up Catherine Breillat’s I Only Believe in Myself: Conversation with Murielle Joudet].

HF: A sex discourse you wish you could ban?
ET: Sex scenes in movies being unnecessary. It’s not true, they’re necessary.

HF: Favorite childhood book?
ET: I will say the Catcher in the Rye.

HF: Song of the spring?
ET: “Crank” by Slayyyter

HF: Do you call it a journal or a diary?
ET: Journal, but I’ve never kept one, really.

HF: Person dead or alive that you would ask to dinner with the sole purpose of getting to throw a drink in their face?
ET: Roy Cohn.

HF: Ideal nap length?
ET: One hour. I try to take a nap every day.

HF: Best time to write?
ET: Afternoon.

HF: Worst place to edit writing?
ET: In my apartment.

HF: Any opinion on any movie ever?
ET: Salò is the best film ever made

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Sophy Romvari’s feature debut, Blue Heron, is going to be hard to beat as one of my favorite films of the year. A partially autofictional film, Blue Heron is about family, childhood, memory, loss, and the desire to understand (and perhaps even wish to change) that which is unchangeable. It’s also one of the most intentionally directed films I have seen in a long time. Everything is purposeful, thoughtful, and considered; Romvari’s reverence for the mediums she interacts with (not just cinema, but photography, and perhaps even the very practice of visual documentation itself) is infused in every moment.

I was delighted to talk to Romvari about memory, archive, and just a few of the numerous skillful, deliberate, finely-tuned choices that make Blue Heron so remarkable.

VERONICA: I’d love to talk first and foremost about the different modes of documentation referenced in Blue Heron. There’s a dense mix of still photos, tape recordings, iPhone camera videos, Zoom calls. What do you consider Blue Heron’s relationship with documentation and memory to be?

SOPHY: I have a very strong connection to media and memory both in my life and in my work. I have always been drawn towards showing characters or myself reflecting on media and having those things be almost supplementary to memory. So much of my memories are muddled between memory and reflection through media; looking through old photographs, looking at videos, and those sort of supplanting themselves as memory. It’s hard to know where they start and where they end — the memory versus having the memory refreshed because you’re seeing a documentation of something. I think I have a high level of experience with that because my dad was such an avid documenter, archivist. He basically was documenting my entire childhood from a very artistic lens and perspective because that’s where he chose to put his artistic practice. I have this pretty extensive archive of my life, and so very naturally it made its way into my work… The photography, the concept of home video footage. I think it’s the way I’ve been able to piece things together throughout my life, and so I’ve always been inserting those things into my work as a mode for characters to uncover things from their past. I think there’s been a long history of this in film, you know, archives within film, media within film, and I’m also really a screens within screens kind of filmmaker. I don’t shy away from iPhones and laptops, I incorporate those kinds of communications because I find them to be very realistic to the way we communicate in the contemporary world.

VERONICA: Did you feel there was one mode of documentation that was more personally connective in the way it evoked memory than others? I wonder if you feel a difference in the amount of intention in the way in which we now archive and document.

SOPHY: I do think about that a lot. I made a short film called Still Processing which is a short documentary that interrogates what the difference is between the still image and the moving image and how it affects our memories. I think the still image, the photograph, evokes a very different emotional response than a video does. Because the video gives this aliveness even if it’s something from a long time ago. It tricks you into feeling like something is present. The photographic image has a much more morbid sense to it, I feel. It’ll be interesting to see how we reflect on this period of time in terms of nostalgia, and how documentation will evolve with technology. Especially with there now being a sense of distrust with the way that photographs are taken because of AI and even manipulation. There’s now a sense of technological intervention that didn’t necessarily impact us with the nostalgia we’re trying to depict in this film. I think a lot of younger people who watch the film do have a sense of nostalgia even if they didn’t grow up with the same media, because there’s this desire to have had access to something which was less mediated through social media and these different forms of perfectionism.

VERONICA: There is something, I feel, about the way it used to take more effort to create with and on film, but simultaneously you had less of a guarantee in the quality of the content — to speak to your thought on modern perfectionism — and so these older modes can feel more authentic (even if it isn’t necessarily true) and can impart a sense of seriousness.

SOPHY: Totally, and I think that’s even true from the 2010s to now. We joke about it but we used to be much less curated even in early social media iterations. Uploading photos to Facebook albums was the last sort of uncurated, very sloppy documentation. Now people are afraid to even post photos on the grid because it’s too permanent, or something. There’s a sort of vulnerability that comes with posting now that didn’t used to be there. Especially for teenagers, I can’t even imagine the sense of self-curation and image obsession of how you’re being perceived. These are things we didn’t necessarily grow up with and it plays a big role in how media is consumed, as well.

VERONICA: Absolutely. I’m going to pivot a little bit because I’d love to talk about the part that nature plays in your film. There’s so much time spent outside in this film. I feel like you have such control over your frame and your camera. I’m curious about the experience of interacting with something as variable as the outdoors. Was there any specific intention with how you wanted to capture those scenes? Were there any challenges you weren’t expecting?

SOPHY: It’s a very unique location and geography, Vancouver Island, where we shot most of the outdoor sequences. During preproduction for the film we went to Vancouver Island, myself, my cinematographer Maya [Bankovic], producer Ryan [Bobkin], and our focus-puller Chris Merrell. We spent two days location scouting, but also camera testing. We brought the camera that we intended to shoot on. We went to the mountain where the film opens, we went to the beach, we went to all of these outdoor locations to capture footage and see what kind of textures and aesthetics we could get with the lenses we were trying out. It really helped with the planning of the overall aesthetic of the film, because it was such a vivid location and such a touchpoint for the rest of the film and how it feels — the blues, the greens are so incredibly specific and lifelike. We ended up actually using some of the footage that we shot during the camera test in the film, like some of the B-roll footage of the beach itself because it was such a beautiful sunny day. And Vancouver Island, because it’s not as populated as, say, Vancouver, there’s more of an opportunity to shoot these landscapes without other people being around, which was such a privilege. These landscapes are so integral to the language of the film and the feeling of isolation and the feeling of past, somehow. I always think of Vancouver Island as a little bit behind the times. It’s like because of the distance of Vancouver Island from Vancouver there’s a bit of a sheltered nature to the island.

VERONICA: It’s so interesting what you’re saying about the remote nature of the island, because I was thinking last night that there is this sense of a familial unit forming partially because of the fact there’s very few people around them. There are these references sometimes to the fact that Sasha’s family is beginning to self-isolate, but simultaneously sometimes they’re out in places where there could be other people and there aren’t people. There’s a lot in this movie that is unspoken, there’s a lot of silence and observation, and yet you have this feeling of a familial unit and a growing understanding of where the fractures are and where the connections are. How did you go about collaborating with your performers to create that energy, especially when so much of it has to come from physical proximity and observation as opposed to speaking to the connection or the fractures within it?

SOPHY: That’s a great question. To speak to the locations not having other people, that was quite intentional. I wanted these moments to feel curated in the sense that these are intentional memories that we’re being given access to. It didn’t make sense to me to have someone walking through the background of a shot. That felt, to me, antithetical to the concept of memory, and it felt like something… If you’re looking at the film as a depiction of the film that Sasha makes later in her life, you can think of it as memory or as part of her own work. Why would she put extras in the back of these shots? It made sense to me not to have incidental moments, like everything is so precise. To speak to atmosphere and performances, so much of that was about creating a lot of natural chemistry between the performers by having them spend a lot of time together and building trust between them. Most of the work I did with the kids was about building their relationships. Especially with the two young boys, all the prep I did with them was sending them off to have playdates and to get to know each other. I didn’t incorporate Edik [Beddoes], who plays Jeremy, into the family unit until much later because I wanted him to feel a little bit distant. But then he did spend time with the actors who played the mother and father so he built a relationship with them but was a bit more distant from the siblings. So much of it is just a natural sense of familiarity and trying to create atmosphere through how the set was run, and having it be a really safe and natural environment for this family to inhabit.

VERONICA: I feel that this movie is so well-observed. I have a pet peeve regarding some films short-cutting or fudging how children behave in a way that’s inaccurate or is an adult idea of how children behave. What I love so much about your film is that it’s an accurate observation of how children exist in the world. Was there a process for finding that with your performers? Were you tailoring the work to them?

SOPHY: Some of the moments were quite literally pulled from home video footage, to be honest. The moment when the little boys are playing with the paper boats in the sink was something that I did see in a home video clip. One of the boys actually knew how to make the boats, so instead of scripting that moment I said, “Can you teach him [the other boy] how to make the boat?” So we set them up with some of the tools and then we just documented that. […] And then the scene in the darkroom that takes place downstairs was shot in real time. We actually had an active darkroom with a real photochemical process, and then we had a photographer come in — who shoots all in black-and-white stills — and teach the kids how to develop photographs. We documented that whole process, [because] I essentially wanted them to have that experience of that wonder of seeing a photograph come to life in front of their eyes. So I was leaving room for things to be documented as if in a documentary, but curating them within a fictional landscape. I wanted to make it as real as possible with them so they could just bring themselves to the story and the film.

VERONICA: I’d love to talk about your utilization of color in this movie, because it’s spectacular. I was so struck by the shot of Sasha standing between the purple robe and flowers when she’s leaning against the door. Moments like that look almost like a painting to me. How did you go about envisioning and executing this specific palette?

SOPHY: So much of that was a collaboration with my production designer and my costume designer. Victoria [Furuya], who did the production design, is a very talented Ikebana artist, she works with flowers and does experimental flower installations, so she’s really focused on color, texture, and evoking something through natural materials. There’s quite a bit of floral in the film that came from her specific crossover in her work experience. She was also really focused on material accuracy like what plastics were common, what colors were the most popular, how we can incorporate things that are clearly thrifted and hand-me-downs and from periods past. Especially with the costume design, Maria [Katarina’s] approach was to ask, “How would this family dress given their economic position, their immigrant status, the period of time, the fact that they lived in the Pacific Northwest?” These greens and teals are very specific to that geographical location at that time and at the time leading up to it. The production designer and costume designer were very collaborative in terms of palette. And it makes a big difference because it creates this very cohesive world, and you’re not being taken out of it by something that’s like screaming at you.

VERONICA: When I first saw your film at TIFF, I remember you saying you were reading Cassavettes on Cassavettes while directing your film. Were there any other artistic touchstones of any medium that you found yourself returning to while shooting this?

SOPHY: Probably the most common would be photography. I think Maya, our cinematographer, has such a naturalistic eye towards capturing human faces, and that was really important to this film because we were really inspired by my dad’s photography. Considering how to film a human face without it feeling intrusive but still feeling intimate was a big part of our process. We achieved that, I think, through having the camera at a distance and shooting on this long lens so you have the intimacy without forcing the camera within proximity to the actor. We could create this sense of closeness without having to be physically close to the actor. I think that does give quite an intimate sense of a person. We also were focusing on things like hands and other gestures that are not facial.

*

Blue Heron is now playing in select theaters. To find out if it’s screening near you, check out the link here. Sophy Romvari’s short films, including Still Processing, are currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.

You can read Veronica Phillips’ original review of Blue Heron here

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friends of high femme’s favorite films:

Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee:

“Who would have guessed that a sprawling, kinetic, epic musical about Shakers would skyrocket to the top of my favorite films of 2025? It’s quite simply the kind of movie that makes me want to leap and scream for the love of film. Which is actually pretty Shaker-y of me.” — Sarah Gorr, film and culture critic

Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams:

“One of the great films about losing a partner. It captures the tragedy of hoping that they’ll return from the abyss perfectly. Joel Edgerton gives one of the best performances I’ve ever seen.” — Logan Kenny, director

James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ash

“I’m in the tank for these movies, to be sure, but we all should be. Does it top the amazing technical leaps forward of the first two films? Not really, but how could it. The narrative doesn’t have quite the punch of The Way of Water — but again, neither do most films. What Avatar: Fire and Ash does do, more than either of its predecessors, is draw connections. This is a film released by the Walt Disney Company that shows the vast interconnections between the struggles for indigenous, gender, climate, animal, and disability justice. It explicitly argues for revolutionary violence while giving grace to those who want peace. While James Cameron has been working on this story for decades, the parallels to genocidal violence in Gaza and Sudan and the ethnic cleansing operations by ICE in the US are very clear, and Cameron doesn’t shy away from them. The violence against children and pregnant mothers we see on our news feeds every day is actually represented in popular cinema, and those children and pregnant women are given the chance to fight back, too. The arcs given to the Spider and Quaritch characters reexamine and complicate the not-great white savior and race-swap fantasy themes of the original film. This film destroys most of the binaries established in the first one, suggesting that what divides us isn’t race or gender or species or culture, but compassion. Avatar: Fire and Ash isn’t just a film about how we must respect and protect the natural world, but one that reminds us we are the natural world, and infinitely more powerful when we work together with its other constituent parts. Sure, it’s not subtle, but given how poorly we as a culture have internalized the messages of films like this, perhaps it should be less subtle still.” — Jake Serwin, co-host of “Pod Casty For Me”

David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds:

“At times deeply funny, at times so sincere as to be hard to look at, at times so over-cranked and conspiracy-brained it’d make Q-Anon believers ask for a little restraint; for me, David Cronenberg’s bereavement thriller The Shrouds was the most singular moviegoing experience I had last year. While a handful of mini-trends marked the biggest releases—e.g. parents facing down the horror of losing their kids, expensive “what hath our political moment wrought?”-type reckonings, “movies about movie making,” and so on—Cronenberg delivered this chilly, oddball dark comedy about the hell that is losing a decades-long partner, not only for the hole their death leaves in the day-to-day life a couple shares together, but also, specifically, for what it means to lose the physical body of the person you love. While Hollywood is zigging, Cronenberg, now over eighty years old and twenty plus films into his career, is still zagging as hard as ever. Made in the wake of his own loss—his wife of 43 years, Caroline Zeifman, died in 2017—The Shrouds literalizes his response to her death in the sort of “can’t believe it” way that, really, only a person in Cronenberg’s shoes might think to. In interviews, he expressed wanting to climb into his wife’s coffin as it was being lowered into the ground—a sentiment Croneberg’s stand-in Karsh (Vincent Kassel) also expresses when he loses his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger). A wealthy entrepreneur, Becca’s death spurs Karsh to explore opportunities in the death industry, leading him to develop the “shrouds”: ominous, high-tech burial garments that allow the bereaved to watch, via tombstone-mounted video screen, their loved one’s body as it decays in the ground. And while the last act is marked by the emergence of all sorts of international intrigue and (frankly, kind of silly) AI avatar-centric subplots, it’s the focus on just how isolating losing the person you were genuinely well-matched to and in love with that makes the film work. While your mileage may vary, I found the whole thing incredibly moving and sharp.” — Skyler Hanrath, co-host of “Treks and the City”, Features Contributor to The Onion

Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein’s Final Destination Bloodlines:

“When that lil booger got turned into spaghetti-o by the piano? Everybody cheered!” — Liz Watson, Walt Disney Animation Studios

Annapurna Sriram’s Fucktoys:

“My favorite film of 2025 is one that hasn’t gotten distribution yet, which is both deeply unfair and a testament to how unique and bold Fucktoys is within the current film industry landscape. Directed, written by, and starring Annapurna Sriram, Fucktoys follows a sex worker who believes herself to be cursed and has to raise $1k to pay for the curse-breaking ritual. What transpires is a campy, transgressive, heartbreaking road trip that never feels derivative of its filmic ancestors, but rather immediately establishes itself as a member of the Camp Greats canon in its own right. Don’t miss Fucktoys if it ever screens near you; it’s proof that “the kinds of films they don’t make anymore” are still being made, they’re just not being supported and pushed by studios.” — Fabiola Liano, writer and director

Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love:

“I’ve repeatedly seen Lynne Ramsay’s latest described as a movie about postpartum depression; and while that’s not entirely inaccurate, since PPD doesn’t always manifest as sadness, I don’t think it quite captures how fucking angry this film is. Grace (Jennifer Lawrence at the top of her game) rages against the confines of her postpartum life, lashing out at her partner Jackson (Robert Pattinson, perfectly understated) and engaging in increasingly self-destructive behaviors. The film’s perspective sticks closely to Grace’s, plunging us into her psychosis in such a way as to make it feel like a perfectly natural response to her circumstances. And that’s the movie’s magic trick. Ramsay forces us to ask what woman in her right mind doesn’t want to burn it all down after the first year of motherhood. Die My Love is a confrontational and potentially alienating film; but to me, fresh out of the first-year trenches, it felt, shockingly, like a comfort.” — Leah Carlson-Downie, film critic

Michael Shannon’s Eric LaRue:

“2025 was a superb year for my niche of interest: movies directed by actors, better known in my column as Diractors. I saw no shortage of examples — with not all being great — but bad Diractors are as amusing to me as a Diractor being a hidden gem. This is the exact case of Michael Shannon’s chilling Eric LaRue, which came out in the spring with zero fanfare after a lonely Tribeca premiere. Adapted from the play of the same name, and written in response to Columbine, the film focuses on Janice (the great Judy Greer) who is the mother of a high school shooter preparing to visit her son in jail, but not before dealing with the local parents who see her as just as guilty as her son. Janice’s husband, Ron (Alexander Skarsgård), has turned to religion to bring answers to why their son would commit this act of violence. Shannon balances the tone of the movie extremely well, letting Skarsgård be the butt of the joke in contrast with Greer’s performance of sympathetic mom stuck in a state of shock. The film’s dry humor saves the movie from being a complete misery. Shannon’s work reminds me of the masterful The Sweet Here After, another great example of a movie without violence but with deeply felt tragedy peeling a community apart. Shannon is one of 2025’s great Diractors and it excites me to see what he’s interested in doing next.” — Jack Draper, host of the “Exiting Through the 2010s” podcast and writer of Boston Hassle’s Diractors column

Harry Lighton’s Pillion:

“I am both a lover and picky consumer of BDSM films. BDSM is such a ripe space for allegory about romance, surrender, intimacy, and communication, and yet so many film abuse or misunderstand its capacity. Pillion is not that film. I couldn’t sleep the night after I watched it, so overcome to make order of and articulate the sensations Pillion evoked in me: raw-edged desire, raw-edged pain, a sense of belonging, a sense of extreme closeness and extreme distance in tandem. I like it so much, and in such a complex, deeply felt way, that it’s past articulation. What Pillion does is not allegorical (and even more important, not a cloying attempt at “good representation” of kink, barf), but a microcosmic sensorial hit of what subversive sexuality can do — what it gifts us, what it takes from us, how it lets us understand ourselves.” — Veronica Phillips, writer, founder of High Femme

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners:

“Ryan Coogler continues to prove he understands how to tell human stories, even inside loud, violent worlds. The relationship between Smoke and Annie is soft and intimate—an intentional contrast to the chaos surrounding them. Wunmi Mosaku’s performance as Annie deserves way more attention than it’s gotten. Her portrayal of love, loss, and quiet endurance feels deeply feminine without being fragile. Annie isn’t defined by absence but defined by survival, and that’s what makes her unforgettable.” — Mattie Bieberly, culture critic

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another:

“A quite psychopathic thing to do, but I saw One Battle After Another in a theatre four times and was levitating after every screening. Both the funniest movie I saw all year and the deepest gut-punch. It captured the absurdity and complications of our exact moment despite being in development for twenty years. Almost three hours long, but propels forward at every moment. To see something like this made at the SCALE that it was made is something we should all appreciate, especially in a world where swings like this are few and far between. Despite the daily horrors of an unhinged government, it was nice to be reminded that white supremacists are, at heart, boring, gross, and impotent nerds who deserve to be ridiculed at every moment of their waking lives.” — Timothy Simons, actor

Severin’s Saga Erotica: The Emmanuelle Collection

“There’s an admirable perversity to Severin’s four-film, 11-disc box set dedicated to the Euro fuck-flicks of the Emmanuelle series, though not in terms of sexual content. No, the gleeful perversity found here is that this monolith contains over 15 hours of special features, critical commentary tracks, 4K restorations, soundtrack CDs, artwork, and a 128-page book dedicated to mining the sexual exploits and meanings within softerotica’s most marquee name. The quality of the actual films is rather variable; however, what makes this box a masterpiece is in how it gathers some of the finest minds in modern film criticism—Kier-La Janisse, Dr. Alexendra Heller-Nicholas, Elizabeth Purchell, Elissa Rose, Gillian Wallace Horvat, Dr. Jennifer Moorman, and (my favorite film writer working today) Dr. Veronica Fitzpatrick, et al.—to use the Emmanuelle saga as a prism through which they comment upon sexuality, bodies, feminism, culture, misogyny, and lifestyle porn/porn lifestyle. A stunning achievement that’s not just archival, but primarily cultural and critical as well. A best-of of our best film minds.” — Travis Woods, writer and professional obsessive

Shinji Sōmai’s Love Hotel rerelease:

“Forty years after its initial release, this sensuous and sad pinku masterpiece has been given a gorgeous 4K remaster, theatrical run, and stunning blu-ray. In it, a sex worker and a trick descend into a carnal, psychosexual inferno of violence, trauma, and ecstasy over the course of a single evening. Years later, a chance encounter with one another sends both their lives reeling into a search for intimacy and understanding. A beautiful, brutal odyssey of physical and psychological connection.” — Travis Woods, writer and professional obsessive

Neo Sora’s Happyend:

“The world of Happyend, Neo Sora’s sublime feature debut, is one of unavoidable political adversity; that is, a world just like our own. For today’s youth, to care about The State of Things is near compulsory. To disregard the exigency of our moment is to foredoom your generation, and those that follow, to a life of increasing immiseration at the hands of those in power. Fitting, then, that this is a coming-of-age film not simply content to show how we live now, but to ask the question, how must we live now? Set in a near-future Tokyo, Happyend follows a group of high school friends navigating all the attendant anxieties of adolescence alongside the 21st century’s intersecting crises — ecological disaster, jingoism, the overreach of the surveillance state. Though the film never shies from sociopolitical critique, Sora deftly balances these proceedings with a beautifully observed, compassionate, often melancholy ode to adolescent friendship, how it bends; where it must inevitably break as we grow into fuller, more actualized versions of ourselves. The tensions between pleasure-seeking and the call toward a greater political awakening become the fertile soil for profound, occasionally painful, personal evolution. There’s an uncommon tonal maturity to Happyend, how it takes seriously the concerns of its young protagonists while never curdling into self-seriousness. It recalls the nuanced work of the Japanese filmmaker Shinji Sōmai, whose exuberant Typhoon Club mines similar dramatic terrain. Formally, the film is replete with gorgeous wide compositions, reflection shots, and glowy interiors that recall late Taiwanese master Edward Yang. Where one of the year’s most venerated auteur projects (and near-certain awards behemoths) peddles in the notion that “the youth will save us all”, Happyend suggests something of deeper complexity and thorniness — that they must first define salvation for themselves.” — Aaron Casias, host of “Hit Factory” podcast

Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides:

“My favorite movie I saw last year was Caught by the Tides. Jia Zhangke wove together two thirds of this film from older footage captured earlier in his nearly three-decade career. Because Jia so consistently works with the same actors — his wife Zhao Tao and frequent collaborator Li Zhubin — he’s able to edit his own archive into a music video-like quasi-narrative spanning a quarter century of change. Not only do Zhao and Li visibly age as their characters connect and break apart over time, China itself experiences the convulsions of the 21^st century. The industrial north of the first third where aging relics of Maoism exist alongside excitement over a successful Olympic bid, no longer exists. Nor do the Yangtze-adjacent communities buried underwater by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, which provides the backdrop to the film’s second part. The final third brings us forward to a post-COVID present defined by frictionless technology — a shift that hits viscerally after we’ve time traveled in such a tactile way. True to the name, you can let Caught by the Tides wash over you, getting borne along by the current of history.” – Alison Herman, TV Critic at Variety

Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later:

“I came out of the theater one evening in June of 2025 after having just watched Danny Boyle’s, 28 Years Later, and opened Twitter (as one does) to find that, during the time I’d been in the theater watching the movie, we had officially gone to war with Iran. Something that’s been on my mind for months—more likely years—is the experience of Western Empire’s violence through mediated forms, the rhythms, modes, and aesthetics of the media environment within the Western Empire, and crucially, their effects on us as a tool for desensitization and enforced acquiescence to imperial systems of violence. With every day that passes and new (and familiar) horrors emerge, as circumstances of a barbaric world order run by gestapo regimes seem to only intensify, my panic around this desensitization as a mechanism for conjuring our continued acceptance and enforcing our captivity has intensified. I started thinking about what kinds of things (particularly in the realm of cultural production, where we spend so much of our attention, and do so much sense-making about our material realities) could interrupt the hold the Language of Empire has on us. Oddly enough, a franchise film, a Hollywood blockbuster, gave me an answer. 28 Years Later manages to operate with much of the formalism of epic poetry of the past—works of art that manipulate and expand current formal modes of communication and aesthetic to create new ones that wrest engagement from us and force us to register emotional, psychological, and corporeal response. I could go long on how 28 Years Later does this (I did), but suffice it to say, it is a surprising work utilizing the Language of Myth, a language so required right now when we’re living in the time of genocide and trained in a refusal to mourn.” — Carlee Gomes, film writer and co-host of the “Hit Factory” podcast

Mike Flanagan’s Life of Chuck:

“Dear Quentin, As we look back at the movies of 2025, I thought I’d draw your attention to one of my favorites, The Life of Chuck. It’s an original and entertaining story, propelled by mystery and told in a manner that gives the audience due credit to put the pieces together without spoon-feeding. I won’t belabor my recommendation with a protracted recounting, but suffice it to say it’s a film imbued with enough heartfelt detail to warrant more than one viewing. Without giving too much away, I want to tell you about one standout performance in The Life of Chuck. It’s the small, secondary role of the affable neighbor Gus, who, even in the face of possible global annihilation, tries to maintain an upbeat attitude as he kibitzes with his friend. Gus only appears in the one scene, but the actor’s deft performance steals the show in the opening act. While his portrayal reflects a shared sense of befuddled resignation among the other characters, it’s in Gus’s momentary, visceral flashes of fear, grief and vulnerability that your heart breaks for Gus and, by extension, the entire doomed populace. It’s truly a wonderful bit of acting by Matthew Lillard, who shines among the film’s worthy ensemble cast. You really should check it out, Quentin. Then maybe send Matt a note or an edible arrangement or something.” — Bill Phillips, filmmaker

Ari Aster’s Eddington:

“Through Ari Aster’s Freudian wry humor, Eddington skewers the neurosis of a castrated patriarchy in crisis and illustrates how impotence drives authoritarianism by showcasing a COVID-denying, mediocre sheriff who makes half-assed Machiavellian moves while ultimately being propped up by big tech and political insiders.” — Eamon Tracy, film writer

“I only really saw one movie from 2025 and it was Ari Aster’s Eddington and it was awesome. Not a day has gone by since I saw Eddington a week ago that I haven’t thought about Eddington. I am Eddington pilled.” — Molly Lambert, journalist and host of “HEIDIWORLD” and “JENNAWORLD”

Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme:

“Marty Supreme leverages Josh Safdie’s signature frantic energy, portraying a determined young man with an endless thirst for capital. Safdie’s use of glistening 80’s synth pop against its 50’s period works wonders (and is quite kismet since the Cold War reached its most dangerous heights during both decades).” — Eamon Tracy, film writer

Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling:

“Sound of Falling so instantly emerged as the most remarkable cinematic achievement of the year for me that, after watching it, I cleared my festival schedule the following day to see it again. Mascha Schilinski’s century-spanning German epic is a visual poem about time, memory, and gendered violence that unfolds across four generations of women connected to the same rural farmhouse. The film collapses these timelines by slipping in and out of different eras in German history to reveal the cyclical nature of their transgenerational trauma. What moved me most was how the film frames women as constantly watched through subtle rituals of looking and being looked at. Schilinski suggests the male gaze as a historical system that repeats itself across time, subtly reshaping women’s lives into a state of perpetual performance. The atmospheric cinematography reverberates this sense of looking by observing the single location and its inhabitants with voyeuristic patience, forcing the audience to feel implicated in the act of the gaze. This violence is often implied through lingering stares, invasive questions, or psychological pressures, making it feel even more pervasive. Scenes bleed into one another across time without warning, creating a sense that these women are in constant cosmic conversation with each other, even if they never meet. It’s a quiet epic, and it reminded me why I care so deeply about cinema and its ability to make the invisible visible, to feel the pulse of sociological conditions, and to confront audiences with the need to reckon with our role in these unspoken patterns.” —- Danny Jarabek, Editor-in-Chief of The Rolling Tape

Louise Weard’s Castration Movie Anthology ii: The Best of Both Worlds:

“A five hour document of what the world forces trans women to do. Backed into a corner, stripped of opportunities for community or family on the surface. Being forced underground, into cannibalizing ourselves. Recreating the same modes of torture used on us above because we’ve been shown nothing else. Being exploited for the amusement of one who pretends to have our best interests in mind. Until stripping ourselves of our own identity seems a better alternative. Trying again to fit into what society dictates is acceptable because it seems safer. But it’s just a circle.” — Jane Altoids, poet, most famous person in the world

Jon M. Chu’s Wicked: For Good:

“Was not expecting such elevated ruminations on the legitimacy of altruism in a blockbuster sequel. I started crying when they sang “For Good” and tried to hide it from my boyfriend until I realized he was crying too and then we cried together.” — Brooke Metayer, writer

Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements + Pavement, the band:

“In 2025, I got really into Pavement. I was watching a screener of the Alex Ross Perry film about the band, which is part-documentary, part-fiction, all goofy and 90s. I was charmed by the boys and the way people talked about their music. Listening to their first two albums felt like magic. It was a sound that felt familiar, like a recovered memory. Pavement made me feel like a kid again. There’s a kindness and warmth to the sound. A playfulness that doesn’t feel ugly. Intelligent in a casual way. It reminds me of a time when everything didn’t feel fucked beyond repair.” — Jourdain Searles, film critic and programmer

friends of high femme’s favorite television:

Jacob Tierney and Rachel Reid’s Heated Rivalry:

“When I think about the cultural highlight of 2025, I have a recency bias towards Heated Rivalry, a beautifully shot, thoughtfully scored, wonderfully acted, and incredibly sexy romantasy show about love in the closet. The show is such a fantasy that three teams in one major hockey league division are captained by gay men. And because it’s a fantasy, the conflicts are easily resolved and the stakes, primarily of their coming out, are low. Shane (Hudson Williams) comes out to his parents, and there is immediate acceptance. If Ilya (Connor Storrie) were to have come out to his father, it would have created an expansive conflict, but no worries, his father dies, and Ilya is free to go to the cottage. Still, I’ve watched Heated Rivalry three times now. It’s a comfort blanket that has low conflict but a highly rewatchable tension, thanks to a natural chemistry between its stars. Storrie and Williams have taken that chemistry on the press tour for the show as well, making not just the show, but these actors, ubiquitous in the current culture. They are at risk of overexposure, but ironically the one thing left unexposed, quite carefully, is their sexualities. Their real lives are now a more conflict-ridden fantasy than their show: if star hockey players Shane and Ilya come out within their world, everything will work out—it has to. If the overnight celebrities who play Ilya and Shane reveal their sexualities, no matter what they are, they run risk of pigeonholing their fledgling careers or disappointing the fans that connected to their seminal queer characters. So while Heated Rivalry has few stakes, I feel great trepidation for its stars.” — Philip Anderson, writer and flâneur

Chris Russo’s “What Are You Mad About?” segment on First Take

“In assessing what I regard as “the best of 2025”, I could tell the good folks at High Femme my favorite movies (they’re the same ones you liked) or shamelessly self-promote the ones I was involved in (Eephus, Castration Movie Anthology ii: Best of Both Worlds), I could tell you my favorite album (sorry lost the ability to stay current on music years ago), my favorite book (re-reading True Grit for the third time), my favorite streamer or podcast (I hate all of them), so I’m left with the dubious comforts of television. For my entry I will state that Chris “Mad Dog” Russo’s weekly segment on ESPN’s flagship morning show First Take, “What Are You Mad About?” is my favorite television of the year. For the uninitiated, towards the end of the second hour on Wednesdays, they let Mad Dog, a Godfather of NY sports talk radio, a man one time described as a “human Donald Duck” and someone I regard as a comfort character, rant about three things that annoyed him over the past week. Usually Chris gets in a fine lather about a coaching decision that cost him money on a game he was gambling on—usually punctuated by his catch phrase/exhortation to God himself, “strike me down!”— or holidays and family members that vex him, but my favorite “Mad About” segments are ones that venture outside of the world of losing money and sports, such as the best moment in television this year which occurred on August 27th, where Chris was furious about a recent visit to the Reagan Library in California and his discovery that any mention of Reagan’s first wife, the great actress Jane Wyman—star of All That Heaven Allows and The Lost Weekend—had been expurgated from the museum. This was the perfect confluence of all my interests in the unexpected and thrilling medium of daytime sports blather.” — Will Menaker, host of “Chapo Trap House” podcast

Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal, Season Two:

“As an autistic person, The Rehearsal’s handling of the condition (and Fielder’s refusal to acknowledge a potential diagnosis of it) was remarkably powerful. The comedic ambition is as seismic as ever, but few things affected me more in 2025.” — Logan Kenny, director

Tony Gilroy’s Andor, Season Two

“Tony Gilroy did something I wasn’t sure was possible. He made an incredible show that is a Star Wars prequel, based on a character who first appeared as an unremarkable supporting protagonist in ANOTHER prequel project. Not only did he deliver an extraordinary season of television in 2022 based on a Disney property, but he also made the second season even better. Anytime I talk about Andor, it’s almost pure hyperbole, and this blurb won’t be any different. As someone who deeply loves Star Wars but has been disillusioned by the amount of mediocre live-action glut we’ve gotten from the franchise since 2019, this show was everything to me in its short run. Not in a million years would I be able to predict that a Star Wars show could become one of the most politically rich shows of the last five years. Gilroy’s study of the history of rebellions/revolutions, paired with his staunch commitment to have that history the very foundation of the show, was truly exhilarating to witness. It’s paired with the best performances the Star Wars universe has ever produced and monologues so well written that you would jump out of your chair and punch the air in excitement.” — Clay Williams, film podcaster

FOX’s The Floor, Season 4:

“IDK what season of this Fox reality TV game show came out in 2025, all I know is that every other week or so I show up at my friend Alix’s house and join a room full of people shouting at a screen for a few hours. This ritual fulfills two of my basic needs: quality time with my friends and ruthless judgment of strangers on TV.” — Brooke Metayer, writer

R. Scott Gemmill’s The Pitt:

“Even though I spend most of my free time at the movie theater and write all about it on 11am Saturday there was one other thing that dominated my cultural diet in 2025: The Pitt. There’s simply no joy like tuning into a highly captivating TV show on a set day every week, then passionately discussing the episode with your friends after. At a time when so much of the cultural landscape seems to be tilting towards easily digestible content to watch while scrolling on your phone, I’m increasingly charmed by this show that challenges its viewer while it entertains. Can’t wait to see how season 2 unfolds.” — Ezgi at 11 AM Saturday, writer

friends of high femme’s favorite music:

Smashing Pumpkins’ 30th anniversary rerelease of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness:

“I spent a lot of 2025 listening to music that was new to me…but not necessarily new in 2025. However, The Smashing Pumpkins released the 30th anniversary edition of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness – and me, a formerly passive TMP fan, fell head over heels in love. There’s something about a remaster paired with grittier live versions that gets my heart going…Mellon Collie is easily one of the dreamiest albums of all time, packed with some of Billy Corgan’s best vocal and lyrical work. Cool kids just never had the time, man.” — Lauren Badillo Milici, Entertainment Writer

PinkPantheress’ Fancy That:

“It twinkles like a ringtone emitting from a hot pink Motorola Razr, with samples that intertwine like tartan on a knockoff Burberry bag. It’s idealized Cool Britannia for hot girls.” – Sydney Brasil, music critic

Jawdropped’s Just Fantasy:

“On heavy rotation for me all spring and summer, this EP bowled me over. I can’t get the lines, “You think you’re clever because you wanna die / I think I’m clever because I wanna live” out of my head. Jawdropped’s opening stints for Momma and Bully have me hopeful they won’t be flying under the radar for long.” — Sarah Gorr, film and culture critic

Addison Rae (again! two years in a row!):

“What makes Addison so great is how it seamlessly blends classic, avant-garde, and cult influences like late 90’s Madonna and Russ Meyer films with 2000’s sunny teen nostalgia. These loves and clear childhood memories of how adulthood was imagined by Rae create a wonderful coming of age album that is both glamorous and knowingly still trying to figure things out. The platonic ideal of a pop album.” — Fabiola Liano, writer and director

“From Pygmalion to The Princess Diaries, the world has always loved a makeover narrative. Except the audience has a viscerally different reaction, depending on who is doing the makeover. Henry Higgins transforming Eliza Doolittle, adorable meet-cute. Eliza making herself over? Gold-digger, social-climber, fake. People got real mad at Addison Rae -- the TikTok “dancer” turned alt pop starlet -- for not being authentic. Her music is too cool, she’s working with stylists and producers way above her perceived social capital, she’s manufactured. Okay, but pop stars are always manufactured? We delight in the Svengali doing a number on the ingenue. To find the princess within. But if the star is self-manufactured, that’s somehow going against the rules. It decenters men as the brains behind the operation. What if, and hear me out because I know it’s fucked up to even say, a woman had beauty and brains? What if she is the artist and the canvas at the same time? What if transformation is an essential part of not only pop stardom, but also life itself? The chuds stuck in their chrysalis will always call the butterfly a poser. Stream “Fame Is a Gun.” — Bethy Squires, writer

Rosalía’s LUX:

“Finally, some fucking food!” I say as I take my eucharist via Rosalía’s LUX, wherein she has transubstantiated her heartbreak into bread and wine. It’s no coincidence that Björk has given her the collab co-sign– this is this generation’s Homogenic. The London Symphony Orchestra’s lush sounds blend so beautifully with the stark electronic production, creating a disparate harmony that gives shape to the fight between the sacred and the profane here. See the “La Perla” music video, where she pairs an ornate chastity belt with low-rise sweats, or the way that opera, flamenco, and electronic music come together across the album. The album cover features Rosalía in a white nun’s habit, and the record is inspired by female saints and cloistresses. Nunsploitation is never out of fashion; there’s something incredibly romantic about giving yourself over to something divine. In fact, this entire record can be an exercise in giving oneself over. Rosalía doesn’t just sing in her native Spanish on this album, she sings in 13 different languages total (note: there was absolutely NO A.I. used on the record). I don’t understand Japanese or Arabic, but when she uses them both on the album I swear I get what she’s expressing. I was trying to think of if there are any skippable points here, but the entire thing flows like an opera. It’s less individual songs than it is different movements that tell a complete story. And look, I gotta point this out: any album that opens with a track called “Sexo, Violencia y Llantas” is gonna hook me. That translates to “sex, violence, and tires.” I know a Crash (1996) reference when I see one.” — Soraya Sebghati, singer of Night Talks and film critic

Doja Cat’s Vie:

“When the genie’s wish voice booms, “If it’s a man she wants, it’s a man she’ll get!” and one feels the spiritual monkey paw curl at the start of “AAAHH MEN!” I’m at risk of beginning to do donuts in the middle of the freeway.” — Veronica Phillips, writer, founder of High Femme

Sabrina Carpenter:

“Why Sabrina? In a media landscape that’s still overwhelmingly male-centered, she didn’t ask for space—she took it. From her cheeky concert outfits to her bold, provocative music videos, Sabrina leaned fully into femininity without apologizing for it, including her on-point song lyrics as well.” — Mattie Bieberly, culture critic

Mac Miller’s Balloonerism

“Mac’s posthumous releases are the most careful and complete of any artist of my lifetime. As I get closer to 26, the age he died, I get more existential about the work he’ll never get to make. I cherish every reminder of what he was able to do in his time here.” — Logan Kenny, director

Ninjajirachi’s I Love My Computer:

“Ninjajirachi plays with themes of loneliness and disconnect, amplified by the hyperconnectivity of our chronically online world. She uses songs like “Fuck My Computer” to explore the modern obsession with online connectivity through a quasi-romantic lens and “Infohazard” to examine the casual trauma of accidentally clicking on a gore video as a child.” — Eamon Tracy, film writer

Ethel Cain’s Willoughby Tucker, I Will Always Love You:

“Last summer’s Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You is comparatively softer than both Preacher’s Daughter and Perverts. Limning the story of Ethel Cain’s fictionalized teenage years, WTIALY manages a synthesis of young Anhedönia’s creative prowess in a way that singles her out as a seminal artist. This album lives in the body, moves through it of its own accord. What is blindly compelling in WTIALY is Anhedönia’s ability to balance the particular against the universal. Ethel’s story, her feelings about her small world are certainly front and centre, but one need not be conversant in the lore to feel moved. Anhedönia’s strength has always been an understanding of place and time, of our embeddedness in a cruel world. Where Lana Del Rey proffers vignettes that seem to exist on a rarefied plane, annexed from real-world consequences, Ethel’s world is drenched in the world’s blood. Anhedönia paints earthly pictures, crafts worlds you can smell, and therefore worlds that transfix. Ethel’s world is political because the personal is the political, is the universal. This is not to say this album is full of sweeping axioms or pithy realizations about human existence. Quite the opposite, actually. This is to say that Anhedönia has wielded a preternaturally keen understanding of how music moves in the body to craft a timeless story. “Janie,” a bleeding track about losing a love to another, fells me every time I hear it, “Nettles” drives me to daydreaming, and “Waco, Texas” wracks me with longing. “I’ve heard it before / From someone who sleeps,” her voice rings on “Tempest” with a humid sort of hopelessness. They’re words so particular to Ethel’s story, but feel as though pried from my soul. Lonely as a weathervane creaking atop a decomposing barn, WTIALY doesn’t leave one feeling lighter for reflecting sadness back to oneself, for being seen; rather, one feels lonelier than ever before because one knows how this story ends.” — Alisha Mughal, writer

friends of high femme’s favorite literature:

Sara Hashem’s Scorched Throne books:

“I would usually contribute a new TV show or film to a list like this. Historically speaking, it’s usually what ends up making the biggest impact on me throughout the year. However, this year, I found myself utterly enchanted by debut author Sara Hashem’s Scorched Throne fantasy duology. It’s rare that an author gets the mix of high fantasy and romance so right, but when someone does, it feels like finding water in a vast desert after weeks of searching. Hashem’s Egyptian-inspired fantasy series is an epic enemies to lovers that takes the concept very seriously. I won’t give away too much, but Sylvia and Arin’s heavy contradictions make you want more. More of their interactions. More of their secrets. And more of their growing connection. Additionally, the author also layered and textured the world building and overall side characters well. Sara Hashem has quickly become one of favorite new authors in the genre.” — Mariana Delgado, founder of Screen Speck

Alisha Mughal’s It Can’t Rain All the Time: The Crow:

“Alisha Mughal’s book debut is the ultimate example of what she has done best as a film critic throughout her career. Weaving the memoiristic with the extremely well-read and well-researched analytic, Alisha offers a piece of cultural analysis on The Crow that is deeply felt both as a writer and as a human. I read it in a day.” —Veronica Phillips, writer, founder of High Femme

Greg Grandin’s America America:

“Everyone needs to read America America by Greg Grandin. He utilizes an elegant Marxist analysis while retelling the story of the Americas and how the empirical conquest by Western civilization through plundering and brutalism has only become more naked and cruel.” — Eamon Tracy, film writer

Emily St. James’ Woodworking:

“Describes adolescence (and second adolescence) with so much intimacy and specificity. The most three-dimensional protagonists I’ve met in the last 12 months. Loved every page.” – Logan Kenny, director

Olga Tokarzcuk’s House of Day, House of Night, newly translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

“This is a tiny bit of a cheat because only the translation of this book is new. House of Day, House of Night is a beautiful gem of a novel, meandering through the myths, histories and dreams of a rural Polish town. A beautiful man who drinks too much shares his body with a bird. A monk writes the story of a female saint who grew a beard, secretly wishing for his own transition. Poisonous mushroom recipes are shared, dreams are catalogued and investigated. Everything is fluid here: gender, borders, history, truth.” —- Kayte Terry, critic, artist, and host of “Tender Subject” podcast

Xuanlin Tham’s Revolutionary Desires: The Political Power of the Sex Scene:

“Recently, the sex scene in cinema has been reduced to a social media football, kicked back and forth between two different camps screaming into the digital void: those who find them unnecessary, and those enraged by those who find them unnecessary. Lost in that dreaded discourse is any actual focus upon the meaning, content, arousal, enjoyment, artistry, and unhinged delirium of seeing our deepest impulses represented on screen in our entertainment and our art. Xuanlin Tham’s taut, compact book, Revolutionary Desires, remedies that with its vital and powerful look at the nature of desire, at our bodies as instruments of perception and sexual expression and discovery, and how so little of that is communicated in modern film (and why). A brilliant, nourishing read.” — Travis Woods, writer and professional obsessive

Freya India’s “Nobody Has a Personality Anymore”:

“I only read old books this year, so here is my favorite new essay from 2025. It is a cutting yet empathetic Substack piece about therapeutic culture and the blurry line between personality disorders and normal humanity.” — Brooke Metayer, writer

The Cut’s “Young People Are Helicopter-Parenting Themselves and Each Other”:

“Another really interesting article about the normalization of surveillance culture and the discomfort of freedom. Find my Friends is weird!” — Brooke Metayer, writer

friends of high femme’s favorite video games:

Kojima Productions’ Death Stranding 2: On the Beach:

“This has the most viscerally upsetting moment I’ve ever played in a video game, and continues for dozens of hours afterwards, forcing you to live with (and even mechanise) the grief. Probably my favourite final shot of any game I’ve played.” — Logan Kenny, director

global-game.com:

“An online game where you have to guess the mystery country every day in as few guesses as possible. I’ve been playing every day for a couple of months now and I know the name and precise location of nearly all of the world’s countries. East Timor? Easy. Botswana? Above South Africa. Suriname? Between Guyana and French Guiana.” – Brooke Metayer, writer

friends of high femme’s favorite podcasts:

“Podcasts like American Prestige, Radio War Nerd, Turbulence, Blowback, Chapo Trap House all take on various aspects of American empire, geopolitics, and culture buoyed by biting commentary and quick humor. Mary Wild and Hit Factory are some of the best film analysts putting out content today. Mary’s depth of psychoanalysis through a mix of Freud, Jung, and Lacan is always insightful.” — Eamon Tracy, film writer

Molly Lambert’s JENNAWORLD:

“Molly Lambert’s second foray into the defining moments of 1990s and 2000s sexual culture (a time where everything was simultaneously worse and better) is as incredibly compelling and inspiringly researched as her first. This time around, Lambert hones in on porn superstar Jenna Jameson as a launchpad for a portrait of the 1990s media landscape and a history of the porn industry. JENNAWORLD makes me feel like I know everything about every beautiful blonde woman in the sex industry in the 1990s, and thus know everything I would ever need to know.” — Veronica Phillips, writer, founder of High Femme

friends of high femme’s favorite art:

“Have you ever crawled on your hands and knees for art? I did — for Yuval Pudik’s The Hom(o)stead Act: Kaiserpanorama at NOON Projects in Chinatown. The work is modeled after the 19th century early-projection structure where participants could sit and peer through a small hole to watch moving pictures. Pudik understands this invention as inherently homoerotic: the gaze, the clandestine nature of peering through and activating an experience through a hole — and allows you inside of its womb to feel its true power. On the outside of Pudik’s Kaiserpanorama is a technical feat: almost entirely crafted out of cardboard is a work more than ten feet tall, almost exactly mimetic of the traditional structure. The moving pictures inside of the hole are a collage of videos spanning decades to encompass a real survey of pop culture. I recall squinting my right eye to peek with my left and watch an infomercial for a phone sex line, maybe sometime from the 1980s. Inside, however, is a queer wonderland bursting with ephemera from gay bars, Grindr screenshots, glitter, pictures of Divine and Tom of Finland, bottles of alcohol, matchbooks, the like. You can even slide inside with a friend, or a stranger, for a more intimate experience. I never wanted to leave.” — Amorette Muzingo, writer & Critical Bed Theorist

While I’m not a full citizen of Romancelandia, nor am I a gay man, I’m adjacent enough to both nations online that I heard excited murmurs about Heated Rivalry soon after it premiered in the U.S. on HBO Max. The Canadian show, based on a romance novel of the same name by Rachel Reid, quickly made waves for its sheer volume of sex scenes. It follows the years-long, intermittent illicit affair between rival professional hockey players Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) and Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams). Word in my corner of the internet was near ecstatic, from the praise of the electric chemistry between the leads to the pleased incredulity at the amount of sucking and fucking taking place on screen. (My personal favorite was podcaster Michael Hobbes posting on Bluesky that Heated Rivalry “is the first show I’ve seen where a sex scene fades to black then fades in again and they’re still going at it.”)

I asked my friend if she was going to watch “the gay hockey show,” since we’re both enemies-to-lovers trash and irredeemable enjoyers of male/male romance. I was skeptical that it was actually that good. I’m not a sports romance girlie, first of all, and I have been burned way too many times by BookTok declaring something “worth it” when it is, in fact, absolutely not. My friend started Heated Rivalry a couple of days later and reported back to me gleefully, “Omg this is just softcore porn.” Her review sold me instantly. If my friend says it, I believe it.

As far as I’m concerned, any adaptation of a romance novel should be softcore porn. Of course, the genre accommodates a spectrum of explicitness—while I personally find closed-door romances supremely boring, they do exist—but I think Williams said it best in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter. When asked what he knew of the story before the casting process, Williams admitted that he was a newcomer to the world of “hockey smut.” He then went further, saying, “I wasn’t even very familiar with how these women-catered romance genres, how fucking vulgar they are. … They get so nasty and descriptive. It’s beautiful, and I love it. But holy fuck, I just didn’t realize that was the level.” Welcome to the big, wide world of romance, babe. The fastest-growing section in your local bookstore is chock full of cock. (The sapphic options increase by the day, but for now romance remains mostly for connoisseurs of dick.)

In general, romances must focus on a love story, which disambiguates them from the larger, umbrella category of erotica. I would also add the caveat that romance is a pretty fetish-free zone, at least in terms of what the characters themselves profess to find sexy. But this is not to say that these books cannot have an enormous amount and variety of fucking in them. Romance, in its highest and purest form, treats sex scenes as analogous to the song and dance in musicals. Obviously, the sex scenes are a main attraction and defining feature of the genre. But also, when the feelings are just too much, when there’s no other way to say it, there’s the sex. Maybe it’s a slow burn romance that crescendos with a multi-chapter sex scene where the leads finally say, “I love you” and then blow each other’s backs out. It could be a “fucking first, love later” situation, but the fucking is so good that it must be true love. Perhaps an emotionally unavailable character’s vulnerability only slips out in bed.

One could criticize this approach, tying sex to love as grandly as it does, for implicitly reinforcing gendered stereotypes about how women enjoy sex and what they want out of it. But one could never make a persuasive argument that the sex scenes are not important in a romance novel. This formulation doesn’t allow for such a thing as a meaningless sex scene.

It’s been frustrating, then, to see the deprioritization of the sex scenes in recent adaptations of romance novels. Adapting a romance novel of the Harlequin variety for the screen would probably never have crossed anyone’s mind even ten years ago; but in the last several years, erotic romance has exploded in mainstream popularity. BookTok—currently one of the biggest forces in the publishing industry—is in no small part users recommending smut to one another. Blockbuster romantasy series fuel the overall growth of print book sales. Brick and mortar bookstores dedicated solely to romance titles have become the hottest new trend in boutique bookselling. If romance is making money for the publishers, you can bet your boots that Hollywood wants a piece of that pie.

But several problems have arisen as Hollywood has tried to get in on the romance bonanza. While it used to be conventional wisdom that “sex sells,” mainstream Hollywood productions have been thoroughly, systematically de-sexed in the last decade. Sex scenes don’t move the plot forward, remember? Except, in romance, they are the plot. An industry that has adopted an outright hostile attitude towards erotic content is not equipped to take on the romance genre in all of its softcore glory.

In addition to the general discomfort with sexually explicit material, Hollywood has also historically struggled to understand that women do, in fact, like having and watching sex. There is simply no mainstream cinematic tradition of sexually explicit material made to turn female viewers on. Surely we could cobble together a canon—and plenty have tried—of horny movies for women who desire men. But there’s not a category. There’s no shorthand. Romance, despite its limitations, is and always has been an entire mass-market genre of literature that exists expressly to turn women on. To me, that’s still, unfortunately, inherently radical, even if the contents of the books themselves may not always be.

Without exception, I pick up a romance novel because I want to be turned on by the sex scenes; but Hollywood execs find this thought too crazy to give credence. From Hallmark romances to sexless straight-to-streaming romcoms to Magic Mike XXL, Hollywood keeps underestimating how much sex women like to watch. So many films and shows about “female desire” insist that what (largely presumed straight) women want is anything but sex. We want to yearn. We want emotionally vulnerable men. We want relationships with balanced power dynamics. On the less progressive end of the spectrum, we want a man to protect us and take care of us financially. And on and on and on. All of these things are probably true to some degree—although I know plenty of women, myself included, who prefer their fictional men much less wholesome—but why must all of our romantic fantasies be so nonsexual?

Even films and television shows that profess to be for the horny ladies, like the aforementioned Magic Mike XXL, remain shockingly devoid of actual sex scenes. I love all the Magic Mike films, don’t get me wrong, but I want Big Dick Richie (Joe Manganiello) and Nancy’s (Andie MacDowell) spinoff sex tape. These dancers fuck! Throw me a gratuitous bone! It’s as if Hollywood can’t comprehend that explicitly shown sex scenes don’t ruin the fantasy for women, despite the existence of a few wildly popular case studies that prove the opposite. Instead of treating the massive successes of shows like True Blood or Outlander as a template, cultural commentators and Hollywood executives bend over backwards to figure out what, other than the sex, made these shows a hit with female viewers. (It was the sex, guys. At least Alexander Skarsgård knew it and ran with it.) So it’s no wonder, then, that adapting romance novels has proven nigh impossible for Hollywood to get right.

The Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy marks one of Hollywood’s earlier attempts to cash in on the popularity of more erotic entries into the romance genre. While no one involved with those films was able to make anything interesting out of the dismal source material, the movies did make money. The terrible quality of E.L. James’ books and their subsequent film adaptations, however, only helped to keep the perception of romance and the women who enjoy it as low as possible. The current mini-boom of “spicy” romance adaptations truly began in 2020 with the premiere of Netflix’s juggernaut hit Bridgerton.

The show’s first season debuted in December, shocking/delighting everyone and their mother with its many, many sex scenes. Since Bridgerton is adapted from a series of romance novels by Julia Quinn, perhaps the sexual content of the show shouldn’t have been such a stunner. Viewers who don’t read Avon titles, however, may have been expecting the “Regency romance” of Bridgerton to have more in common with Jane Austen than the bodice rippers your mom hid in her nightstand.

I have my issues with the first season of Bridgerton (its gross mishandling of issues of male consent chief among them), but at least season one was bracingly, unapologetically horny. Even if there were moments where the show seemed embarrassed of its roots, the general attitude was one of sheepishness rather than disavowal. Season-one Bridgerton would blush but still hand you its favorite smutty book if you told it that you liked romance novels. Season-two Bridgerton, however, would roll its eyes and tell you it doesn’t read “those kinds” of books.

It’s not just about the number of sex scenes—although the number is greatly reduced in season two. It’s the degree to which the series is about sex. Yes, Anthony Bridgerton’s (played by none other than People’s reigning Sexiest Man Alive Jonathan Bailey) plans to marry Edwina (Charithra Chandran) are spectacularly upended because of his lust for her sister Kate (Simone Ashley); but the series, notably, never explicitly puts it in those terms. Which is weird, because we spent all of season one watching Anthony getting down all over the place with his opera-singer paramour Siena (Sabrina Bartlett), so we know the man’s not a prude.

Take Anthony’s beloved “bane of my existence” monologue as an example of what I mean. In the scene, Kate confronts Anthony about ending his engagement with Edwina after doggedly chasing the match. Anthony says he cannot marry Edwina because it will bind him too closely to Kate, to whom he is distractingly, inappropriately attracted. “You are the bane of my existence. And the object of all my desires. Night and day I dream of you. And what I… do you even know all the ways a lady can be seduced? The things I could teach you.” Anthony stops short of describing what he imagines when he dreams of Kate.

Compare this to Simon (Regé-Jean Page) casually giving Daphne (Phoebe Dynevor) basic instructions for masturbation in season one, and you can see where season two’s shy new attitude towards sex comes in. “You are the bane of my existence and the object of all my desires” should be a moment of escalation. In another charged encounter in the previous episode, Anthony asks Kate if she wants him to stop telling her how mad she’s driving him. He wants to know, essentially, if she wants him to stop pursuing her. (This, apparently, was an addition to the script suggested by Bailey himself. It’s one of the few genuinely hot moments in the whole season.) She says she doesn’t want him to stop. But stop what exactly? Staring at her from across the room? Kate’s given her consent, and she’s basically admitted that the attraction is mutual. So why doesn’t Anthony let himself whisper some of his obviously filthy thoughts into Kate’s receptive ear?

As Bridgerton backed off of the sex, what seemed like a new, hornier era of romance adaptations began to wither on the vine. The less-sexy season two seemed just as, if not more, popular than the smuttier season one. Once again, Hollywood learned the wrong lesson about what, exactly, the legions of female romance readers enjoy about romance. Season three focused on the season’s main couple and their sexual tension even less and received the most lackluster audience response to date.

If Bridgerton took an older series and tried to update it for the current romance frenzy, Amazon Studios tried their hand at adapting a pair of newer novels that contributed to it. In 2023, Casey McQuiston’s hit gay romcom Red, White & Royal Blue got a much-anticipated movie version. The book, while hardly the most sex-forward romance, does feature a handful of descriptive, open-door sex scenes, which Matthew Lopez’s film keeps intact. Although the movie did receive some praise for including the sex scenes as part of the fantasy, the discourse mostly centered on representation. The film was primarily contextualized by other romcoms, specifically gay romcoms; commentators positively compared the number and frankness of the sex scenes to other mainstream gay romances. The sexual explicitness, as tame as it is compared to something like Heated Rivalry, got attributed to the film’s commitment to accurately representing gay men’s experiences of romance. The film performed well enough to warrant a forthcoming sequel, and it remains to be seen if the new film, which will not be based on an existing book, will commit to the same level of sex.

The following year, Amazon released The Idea of You, recycling one of RW&RB’s leads (Nicholas Galatzine) to try him out in a heterosexual romance. The Idea of You portrays an age-gap romance between a middle-aged mother (Anne Hathaway) and a 24-year-old pop star her teenaged daughter idolizes. The novel, which is supposedly based on the author’s Harry Styles fanfiction, contains many sexually explicit scenes, but its unhappy ending brands it as a romance outlier. The film, adapted by director Michael Showalter and Jennifer Westfeldt, makes a point of doing two things: toning down the sex and opening up the possibility of a happy ending for the central couple. The result is a standard romantic drama, elevated purely by Hathaway’s performance and an admirable refusal to make a joke out of the May-December set up. It’s refreshing to watch a mainstream film where a 40-year-old, albeit improbably glamorous, woman earnestly lives out a romantic fantasy. But why can’t the fantasy have more sex in it? I’m not sure anyone just watching the film would accurately guess how racy the book is.

These adaptations vary in quality and tone, but none of them quite capture the heady feeling of reading an excellent romance novel. They all miss the mark by shying away from accusations of being softcore porn by demurring to other, more established screen genres—the period piece and the primetime soap for Bridgerton, the romcom for RW&RB, and the Nicholas Sparks-esque romantic drama for The Idea of You. So you can imagine my giddy amazement when I tuned in for the first few episodes of Heated Rivalry to find that showrunner Jacob Tierney had completely nailed it.

I have not read any of Rachel Reid’s Game Changers novels, so I cannot speak to how closely the show sticks to the source material. I can say without hesitation, however, that Heated Rivalry expertly translates the thrill of reading a romance novel to the screen. Like a romance novel, the scope of the show stays incredibly narrow, focusing almost exclusively on Shane and Ilya. Scenes of the two of them alone and alone together dominate the show. Their world feels literally empty save for each other; Shane and Ilya are often the only characters in the frame, their bodies the only bodies in large, otherwise conspicuously unoccupied spaces. Supporting characters float in and out of episodes mainly to help Shane and Ilya realize that they can’t live without one another. Nothing really matters to the plot besides the feelings, sexual and otherwise, that these two characters develop for each other. Even the hockey is ultimately pretty inconsequential.

At first, Shane and Ilya’s relationship is almost entirely sexual. They are aware of each other as professional rivals, both rising star players who could feasibly become legendary ones. When they meet, sparks fly, and they eventually, clandestinely give in to their sexual desires. They go for years sexting and hooking up a few times a season, when their teams play each other. The first two episodes of the show consist mainly of these hook up scenes, which establish Shane and Ilya’s connection.

The sex scenes manage to be unambiguous without veering into anything hardcore. Blowjobs, handjobs, and penetration happen just outside of the frame. There’s notably no full-frontal male nudity. Masturbation is shot from the back or with a thigh strategically propped up. Fittingly for an adaptation of text-based smut, part of what makes these scenes feel so explicit is the way the characters discuss sex. These boys are chatty in the bedroom. How Shane and Ilya ask each other for what they want makes the sex scenes seem more frank. While Williams and Storrie certainly bare a lot of skin, the visual emphasis in the sex scenes remains for the most part on the actors’ faces. These reaction shots keep us grounded in the particular experiences of the characters and help to foreground their emotions.

When talking to Vulture about the importance of getting the sex scenes in the show exactly right, Tierney explained, “Sex is their [Shane and Ilya’s] language, their way of communicating.” Tierney clearly understood, when adapting the source material, that the sex scenes are integral to the love story. At least until episode five, the majority of Shane and Ilya’s character development happens in the sex scenes. It matters what these characters do to each other in bed (and on the sofa) and how they do it. By the time Shane and Ilya finally admit that they might want more than just sex from each other, it’s already obvious to viewers that they’re in love because the sex scenes are just so good. Romance novel logic.

In an interview with David Mack for Slate, Reid and Tierney both spoke about why they think the show’s explicit sex has been key to its unexpected success. Reid stuck close to the Romancelandia party line, saying that it’s important to see “explicit sex that’s joyful and sweet and romantic and hot and fun” in a media landscape largely devoid of sex scenes that aren’t “horrific rape scenes.” Tierney put it in terms of “respect[ing] existing fans,” explaining how he followed his instinct to ignore executives’ notes about toning down the books’ sexual content to widen the show’s appeal. He expounded, “These books are porn! You think the audience is here despite that? They’re here for this. This is what they want.” God bless you, Jacob Tierney.

It remains to be seen if the Heated Rivalry phenomenon will finally move the needle on Hollywood’s reluctance to fully embrace romance novels on their own pornographic terms. As much attention as the female fans of Heated Rivalry have gotten (cue the fujoshi explainers), I’m still not sure that the show’s popularity will be taken as proof positive that what women like about romance novels is the sex. Tierney created the show knowing that the “secret fanbase” of women would be larger than any fanbase of queer men, but I think “secret” is the operative word here. Would a show squarely targeted at women who desire men still be this horny? This explicit? This sexy? Could a creator pitch a show with a female lead who enjoys sex as much as the male leads of Heated Rivalry without getting major pushback? Are there enough female actors willing to do explicit sex scenes in a post-Me-Too climate? I don’t know that we currently live in that world, but any Hollywood exec who can see the vision has millions of female romance readers shouting “Take my money!!” at their beck and call.

On a hazy and violently orange morning in January, I woke up to a blaring alert on my phone telling me to evacuate. Los Angeles was burning, larger and faster than anyone could have predicted. The city would ring in the new year with chaos, fear, and tears. As the fires gradually extinguished, another alert came through with a blip: David Lynch was dead.

Whatever sanity I’d been clinging to snapped. I wept as if my own father had died. The man who had cracked my head open like a melon in order to show me what art and cinema could really be, the man who showed me that you could make such transcendent things while operating from a place of love, support, and kindness, was gone. And on some level, the fires had killed him. The smoke, haze, and toxic air agitated his already fragile lungs until he left us. Imagining the man who loved LA like no one else dying while it burned, never living long enough to see it rise from the ashes, devastated me.

Eleven months later, I’m standing in a crowded living room at a Christmas party when a friend sends a text that reads simply, “ROB REINER.” The all caps, single name text has never been sent for a good reason, so I braced myself. My heart went to my throat as I prepared to hear that the director had died in his sleep. Instead I saw that his body had been found next to his wife’s, murdered in his home. I couldn’t stop thinking about a man whose movies brought so much joy, that live inside of me like part of my own heart, had died in such a violent, brutal, and evil way. He hadn’t “passed on.” He was stolen from us.

These deaths bookend a year that has been cruel, both to me and seemingly to everyone I know. I find myself holding each death, one in each hand, wondering how to move forward.

Reiner and Lynch represented the two halves of my cinematic identity. There is the half with a love of genre, an affection for the rules of storytellin and the way in which structured narrative film can create some of the most endlessly rewatchable, deeply meaningful movies of a person’s life. Reiner made the kind of movies you find young and then never, ever let go of.

Then there is the half of me that dives headfirst into the unknown where the “rules” of storytelling are thrown out the window and to sit there without the words to describe what I’ve seen is a gift. Lynch’s movies may polarize in their sometimes abstract and absurdist form, but if they find a way inside your heart, they’re there for good, baby.

Both directors’ seemingly intrinsic goodness as much as their meaningful bodies of work makes a cruel year feel crueler. David Lynch may have been the one to say, “Fix your hearts or die!” but it was the code Reiner lived by. Ever the outsider, Lynch stayed away from politics, but Reiner was happy to throw himself in the middle of them, notoriously fighting for Prop 8 in California and rousing support for gay rights on the national level. But both made work that understood however dark and terrible the world could be, there was always hope for it to be better. It could always be made beautiful.

And now in the waning days of 2025, their ethos is perhaps the only sentiment that could rescue me from a year that hit like a battering ram. Any ground that’s felt stable — my home, friendships, relationships, my career, my goals, my dreams — has dropped out from beneath me at some point this year. And as I’ve fallen, I’ve been horrified to see my loved ones falling with me as they’re beaten down by their own miseries of the year.

But in thinking about Reiner and Lynch, I wonder if that’s how either would describe such a phenomenon. Maybe I’m looking at it all too bleakly.

Are we all falling into an abyss together? Or is the only reason we’re still standing up because we’re there to hold each other as everything else falls apart?

I’m starting to think both directors would lean toward the latter. The Princess Bride and When Harry Met Sally are strange siblings to Wild at Heart, because they’re all movies that celebrate and venerate the power of love above all else. They shout that so little else in life truly matters when compared with the infinite joys of caring for, fighting for, and supporting the people you care most about in the entire world.

When Reiner and Lynch dive into darkness, even then there’s still some sort of light. In Inland Empire, a nightmarish fever dream of a film, critic Mark Fisher insists “it is the film itself that is mad, not the characters in it.” Lynch is there to give grace and space to those navigating Hollywood, however cruel it can be. In Twin Peaks: The Return, he not only births the line “Fix your hearts or die” but spends time to celebrate love once again (between Big Ed and Norma), to condemn violence, and to uphold only the sense of law and order that includes principle and virtue.

Reiner dealt with death head-on in Stand By Me, and with misery in, well, Misery. That both are Stephen King adaptations feels apt, as even the master of contemporary horror can’t hide his hopeful streak. Stand By Me comes to grips with loss in myriad ways: the loss of childhood innocence, the loss of a brother, the senseless loss of life itself. But it endures in the way it does because it doesn’t end with death, but with an acute awareness that life goes on while we carry the memory of those we love with us. Misery isn’t quite so sentimental, instead it laughs at the absurdity of pain, leaving us with a limping but healing Paul Sheldon (James Caan) who’s used his ordeal to fall in love with his craft again. Out of the misery is born strength and hope.

So to use the deaths of these artists as some kind of metaphor for a brutal year and then to lean into hopelessness feels both antithetical to their work and their legacies. In mourning them this way, I might actually be making a mockery of them and thinking about it this way might honestly be what I need to completely reframe 2025.

I’ve been butting up against my personal failures in a way that’s been difficult to hold, but to slip into hopelessness ignores the way I’ve never actually had to hold them alone. The community I’ve built in Los Angeles held it all with me, the same way I’ve been holding their own horrors with them. “If you’re truly wild at heart, you’ll fight for your dreams,” says the Good Witch in Wild at Heart, though it could be a line talking to the boys in Stand By Me as well. Either way, it’s the line I think I’ll let stick with me a while. I think Reiner and Lynch would like that.

High Femme had the chance to talk with Molly Lambert, creator of JENNAWORLD and HEIDIWORLD, about 1990s porn icon Jenna Jameson, the state of the adult industry (past, present, and future), and modern digital life. Her podcasts can be found on any major streaming platform.

VERONICA: What I like so much about your work is that it’s very thesis-driven, but also hinges on highly specific research. Do you have a strategy for balancing between research versus the point you’re hoping to make?

MOLLY: God, I mean, not really. I think I just get hyper fixated on things and then you just can’t stop, kinda. I think [JENNAWORLD] came about because I was always interested in the contract girl model for porn, which is sorta the porn studio system model, where they manufacture their own stars. And then the podcast ended up turning into a piece on the collapse of media in the twenty-first century. It’s really about the end of monoculture. There was this monoculture, and [Jenna Jameson] was really a big star in that time period, and now we don’t have big porn stars in the same way that we don’t have a monoculture anymore. […] Something I’ve learned from doing this show is that most people don’t know who Jenna Jameson is. The fact that she was so incredibly famous and now has fallen out of the cultural zeitgeist I thought was really interesting.

VERONICA: Do you have any guesses to why that is? I feel like if you knew even a handful of things about the 1990s and early 2000s you would know her name.

MOLLY: I just think culture moves in much faster cycles now. People get famous on social media and YouTube and then become unfamous really fast. The idea that someone like Jenna became so famous and stayed so famous for a period of like ten years is just unthinkable for anyone now. The cycles are so much faster for fame.

VERONICA: Do you remember when you personally became conscious of her?

MOLLY: I totally don’t. It must have been from seeing her on the E! Channel, probably? But she was such a cultural touchstone, and porn was such a punchline all the time for people, you know? […] She branded herself so well that she became shorthand for porn stars. […] It was good content, so to speak, to have her having these adversarial conversations about porn with people like Bill O’Reilly and Howard Stern and Jerry Springer. Although she reached a point in the mid early 2000s where that stopped working for her and the media apparatus started to turn on her and criticize her for not showing up to things and being out of it on local news shows. I think it demonstrated that no matter how big you can get, the machine can always decide to take you back down.

VERONICA: Do you think the media turning on her was part of a specific cultural shift, or was it the fact that we can only hold our attention on something or someone in the public eye for so long?

MOLLY: She just became so oversaturated that people were like, “Well, now we’re sick of you.” This happens a lot with stars, especially female stars. We’re seeing it right now with Sydney Sweeney, where once people start jumping off the bandwagon then jumping off the bandwagon becomes its own kind of cultural movement.

VERONICA: Do you remember a definitive moment that got you into researching the porn and sex industry?

MOLLY: I think I just always thought it was funny that there was an underground film industry in the Valley that was a shadow film industry. It was more low-budget and more blue-collar. Also the adult classifieds in the back of the LA Weekly. I just think when you’re young you’re like, “What is this whole hidden world of stuff that I’m probably not supposed to know about?” And then I went to the AVN Awards and some conventions, and you do see that everyone in the industry knows each other, and that it’s very small in some ways. It relates back to the way that LA is actually a very small town. […] There’s a mundane reality behind the fantasy image-making. There are people that are just grips and boom mic operators, and all the kind of “boring” stuff that goes into making something a larger than life fantasy. Which is really, I guess, just the film industry at large, but I always liked the porn industry’s scrappier underground version of that. They were making movies that were making so much money at a certain point, but people refused to respect it because they were sex movies.

VERONICA: A broader question: from Jenna Jameson’s time to now, what do you feel like has stuck in the adult industry and what do you think has changed? Do you think it’s shifted for better, for worse?

MOLLY: I think most people don’t even know that the industry collapsed, really, because they aren’t conscious of how the business worked. A big thing that spurred me to do this podcast was finding out about this time where the industry was collapsing into tech, and people in the adult industry were signalling the alarm that this was also going to happen to the rest of media. And then it did, but because that warning was coming from porn, people didn’t take it seriously and didn’t think it would affect them. […] I think [people in the porn industry] have always been ahead on media shifts, and I think people would do well to pay attention to them, even now, regarding what they have to say about content and ownership. I think a lot of people still think the porn industry is the 90s porn industry, and so when they talk about porn they’re thinking about huge-breasted blonde women of a certain era — of Jenna’s era — and really when the Internet came into play what you had was a lot of different kinds of people. Sasha Grey was the last major crossover porn star. Her and Asa Akira were part of an early 2000s wave of Internet porn stars who didn’t have to go through the traditional systems at all. Old-school porn stars had to start in stripping and then move into girl-girl softcore and then move into hardcore, but people like Sasha Grey were doing incredibly hardcore stuff right away. The whole order of operations ceased to exist. I think there are things that were good about the studio system — it felt more stable, you could work for one studio for a longer period of time — but there are things that are good about how things work now. Creators make the vast majority of profit on their own content, because they’re shooting their own content, producing their own content. Basically everyone who does porn now knows how to direct and edit and do sound, and you used to need a whole industry as an apparatus to do that. It’s like a lot of things about the Internet, there’s less of a barrier of entry but it’s also much harder to make a dent and get any kind of foothold. It’s also just become much more saturated, a lot more people make adult content now.

VERONICA: It’s interesting, when I read Jenna’s book, I was struck by the way that while she talks about working long hours and being tired, she also had a relatively metered experience with guardrails. I think now, people self-producing porn online have more of an obligation to constantly be working.

MOLLY: Yeah, I think that reflects the way our work culture has shifted with the Internet. Everybody works 9 to 9 now, there’s no time you can’t get an email about work. You’re always at work and you’re always not at work. I think Jenna also very much predicted the rise of the influencer, and it turns out that she lived next to the Kardashians at one point. I think the Kardashians were definitely looking to Jenna as someone to emulate as someone just getting their name out there, whatever it takes. […] This idea that it doesn’t matter what you get famous for, you just get famous, is kind of the goal of American life for many people now. Which I think reflects that it’s hard to make a living off of traditional jobs. I think a lot of people see this ability to commodify themselves as their only real chance to make money.

VERONICA: It can feel inevitable now that you have to be brandable even for “normal” work, whatever that would be.

MOLLY: Yeah I mean I always loved the movie Showgirls, which I think is a movie about sexual commodification in America and the hypocrisy around it. There’s that part in Showgirls where Cristal says to Nomi, “Sooner or later you’re gonna have to sell it.” Which I think is the message we all get as people in this society where there’s no social safety net. Your self is the one thing you can buy and sell.

VERONICA: Do you have a utopian vision for how we treat the adult industry and pornography?

MOLLY: I mean I think I thought during the Jenna era that things were just going to keep getting better. I was like, “People are going to take women seriously even if they get their tits out. We’re gonna have respect for that now.” But, obviously there was a huge backlash that started, mainly online, where it was like, “No, we’re not going to have that. We’re going to put women back in their place as an underclass.” I just think that even if we abolished capitalism, which we obviously should, there would be people who want to make pornographic movies because it’s an art form, and because sex is a huge part of the human experience. Sex has gone so out of mainstream movies and television because of this globalization where they don’t want to offend anyone internationally. The fact that people aren’t really trying to represent sexuality and sensuality in mainstream entertainment really puts it all on porn, and then people get mad that they think porn isn’t an accurate representation of human sexuality. But that’s because it’s this fantasy representation, and it’s always been meant to be this fantasy exaggerated world, kinda like wrestling. It’s a funhouse mirror of American culture. But I also think media literacy has gone so down that people can’t really tell the difference between screen images in real life in the same way people used to assume they could. […] There was a period where it was taboo and outre to put your face on the Internet, it was considered something that was just for freaks, really, or people who didn’t care what happened. […] The screen world isn’t real, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist. It’s a sort of dream world, in a way. […] So many people are expected to present themselves visually online for their jobs now, for all sorts of jobs that you wouldn’t have had to before, even in terms of Zoom meetings. We’re all expected to show up onscreen and be in charge of our screen image. I think porn stars have always been ahead on that as well, asking, How do you monetize your presence in the world if that’s what you’re expected to do? A lot of people who look down on porn or think porn is not good for people who do it are doing the exact same thing on Instagram. They’re showing pictures of their lives and saying “I’m living an aspirational life and you should look up to me for it.” I think bringing back the boundaries between this fantasy world and reality is important.

VERONICA: I think there’s a value to the fantasy that porn presents more than than there is us digitally marketing ourselves and claiming it’s “real”.

MOLLY: Yeah. I think people don’t think about it as an outlet for our fantasies. For women, a lot of it is about the fact that they feel degraded in their everyday life, and so porn can be an outlet for these feelings about power and control in either direction. It doesn’t necessarily mean you want to do the things you’re watching, it just means it’s a fantasy. I think with the Internet in general, there’s this very one-to-one experience now where everything everyone says online is 100% true, whereas when I was first online everyone was aware that we were all playing characters online, or exaggerated versions of ourselves. When people meet porn stars in real life they’re often like, “You’re different than the fantasy I had of you in my head”. Now that happens to lots of people, it’s happened to me in both directions. People meet me and go, “Oh my God, you’re short.” […] Some of the efforts to ban porn, which has become a big movement again in the right wing and among neoliberals who don’t know any better, comes from a belief that we need to get rid of fantasy and escapism, and everything needs to be happening in real life, as if that will get rid of people’s fantasies and “fix it”. I feel like any attempt to legislate people’s fantasy lives is going to fail, because you can’t go in people’s heads and tell them what to think about.

VERONICA: People are going to have fantasies and desires that are complex and contradictory and nuanced regardless of what we explore externally.

MOLLY: I think the more you repress it the crazier it gets. I think the American approach has always been to put it under a rock but constantly be looking under the rock. People in porn are always talking about the difference in European culture. People in European culture have topless beaches and places that aren’t sexualized, and so all nudity doesn’t become especially sexualized. Even with stuff like breast feeding, there’s such a culture of repression around sex and nudity and bodily autonomy that people think all nudity is sexual and that all bodily expression is pervert stuff.

VERONICA: I think sometimes making a space of repression and fear is a different way to obsess over and deify sexuality. Something about the obsession and policing is perverted, too.

MOLLY: Definitely. That’s who’s concerned about it, too. A lot of the reason people on the right want to ban porn or make it so hard to do that it becomes de facto illegal is because they’re afraid of what they might get into. A lot of it turns out to be that they’re afraid of people being attracted to trans people, and that’s their own fear that they’re projecting on everything. Obviously it’s complicated with trans performers because there’s this fetishization that happens. The representation and fetishization of anyone marginalized in porn is very complicated. But when things are complicated, there seems to be an urge to completely get rid of it. No one wants to deal with the complicated nature of real life, and so they want to reset back to this imaginary idea of an America where everybody is in a monogamous nuclear family. That’s not what was happening then, either! Sure people were getting married and having kids, but they also had secret lives. A lot of it comes down to these issues of self-control. That’s the other fear people have about porn. You see it now a lot with these fears of gooners, of porn addiction, this sensationalist stuff you hear about. Americans have no impulse control, there’s no effort to make people say no to things. There’s an expectation that you get everything you want all the time, and it’s crazy and it’s why they’re killing the planet. If somebody watches porn non-stop, they’re kind of just hurting themselves. I also think that’s overblown as a fear. People sometimes maybe go through a phase of watching too much porn, but I think it won’t ever replace the human experience. And if someone just wants to masturbate all day, who cares? They’re allowed to do that. To me, it’s really a reflection of this screen culture we have where people expect constant novelty all the time, and we have that in the place of a social safety net. I don’t think people watching porn all the time is really the issue, but I think people like ordering from Amazon and needing workers who are exploited to bring them stuff constantly. That to me is what’s really fucked up. […] People are always like, “What about the workers being exploited in porn?” And it’s like well they’re not necessarily being exploited, it depends on the conditions of the labor, how much they’re getting paid, whether they can speak up and say no to things. People who drive for Amazon can’t speak up and say no to things, they are being exploited. I wish people would take some of the concern-trolling they have for people who take off their clothes online and apply it to actual workers that are actually being exploited by these big companies. […] And you know there’s porn I don’t believe in. Porn is still very racist. People have tried to make the industry better in that way but it always seems to reset back to being racist, and… I don’t know, I just think now there’s a greater breadth of content than there’s ever been, so when people say it’s giving people unrealistic ideas, it’s like, there’s all kinds of things. You can watch amateur people have sex if you want to, you can not watch porn at all, but it’s all about bodily autonomy at the end of the day.

RAPID FIRE QUESTIONS:

HF: What’s your biggest time suck online?

ML: TikTok. I was gonna say Wikipedia, but that was a lie. It’s TikTok.

HF: Favorite curse word?

ML: Probably fuck.

HF: Favorite perverted thing (it can be art, an object, a person, a sex act, whatever)?

ML: I like when people have a weird one. Sploshing, or something.

HF: What’s a sex discourse you wish you could ban?

ML: Everybody’s really concerned about choke sex, and I feel like it’s a little overblown. I feel like the discourse on porn is a little too focused on men.

HF: Do you call it a journal or a diary?

ML: I don’t call it either because I’ve never kept one.

HF: Favorite book from childhood?

ML: I was really into Benjamin Franklin’s diary, for some reason.

HF: Song of the spring?

ML: I’m really into listening to CDs that I bought for a dollar. So I’ve been driving around listening to Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love

HF: Person dead or alive that you would ask to dinner with the sole purpose of getting to throw a drink in their face?

ML: Ronald Reagan.

HF: Ideal nap length?

M: Twenty minutes. You can’t do better than that, any longer and you swim out too deep.

HF: Best time to write?

M: I used to be a real nighttime person but now it’s middle of the day.

HF: Worst place to edit writing?

ML: A Starbucks.

HF: Any opinion on any movie ever?

M: No!

OK, no, I’ll give a real answer. I don’t go to the theater that much. M. Night Shymalan’s Trap was awesome.

The Mastermind, Kelly Reichardt’s ninth feature, plays a bit like a Coen brothers movie on cough syrup (complimentary). There’s a hazy, considered quality to its look and pacing that, while almost par-for-the-course in her work, very much distinguishes it from your bog-standard “dumb guy with a scheme” crime movie. The film centers on James Blaine “J.B.” Mooney (Josh O’Connor), the dope of a dad to two curly-haired moppets (brothers Sterling and Jasper Thompson) and the husband to Terri (Alana Haim), the Mooney’s steady, frustrated breadwinner. While the Mooneys are, on their face, a sort of prototypical tight-knit American family, they’re very much a prototypical tight-knit American family in the vein Reichardt’s so good at drawing.

Across her previous films, Reichardt’s made a cottage industry of crafting her scraggly, hyper-specific little nuclear families. Sometimes they’re found, sometimes they’re biological, sometimes they’re with animals; but each she sets against varied social winds that knock them on their asses, and has us watch as they try (and, often, fail) to squirm their way back to standing. In Meek’s Cutoff and First Cow, the winds are the dangers of recklessly trying to make new lives far from home in the hostile west, in Night Moves, they’re eco-activism going dangerously awry, in Showing Up, they’re the tiny slights and inconveniences of life in an arts community, and in The Mastermind, they’re the Vietnam War and being too dumb to know not to try to pull off an art heist when you’re just no good at pulling off an art heist.

J.B.’s a funny type of loser. An art-school dropout and unemployed cabinet maker in Massachusetts in 1970, he’s very much feeling the weight of his failures when we meet him. He lies to his mother about some upcoming work to get her to loan him money, he badmouths a friend who’s doing better than him at similar work, and on and on. When he hatches a scheme to turn his rotten financial prospects around—he’s going to rip off four Arthur Dove paintings from the Framingham Museum, where he and his family are regulars—he does so with a kind of matter-of-fact, “well, why wouldn’t I?” frankness that’s borderline refreshing. For all the tough-guy criminals dreaming up their next big score in your Den(s) of Thieves, there’s a genuine novelty to seeing a softboi humanities washout trying his hand at brazen theft. It being the 1970s, J.B.’s plan is pretty straightforward—he’ll drive getaway while two accomplices take the paintings off the walls, load them into canvas bags, and rush past the museum’s sleepy security guards. There isn’t any surveillance to worry about, nobody’s going to trace their phones—so long as they make it out and keep their mouths shut, they’ll get off scott free.

Of course, they blow it almost immediately. J.B., it turns out, is a Dove-head going way back to his heady school days, where at least one of the paintings he stole used to reside, decorating the wall of his thesis adviser’s office. Whether or not that particular connection could be the one to pull his whole scheme down around him never proves to be an issue, as it happens. The cops never even have a chance to connect him to the crime by digging into any of the pieces’ histories directly. Rather, when one of his accomplices in the heist (Javion Allen), gets caught robbing a bank, he immediately gives J.B.’s name up. And when his other accomplice (Eli Gelb) dimes him out to a gaggle of local crooks who rip the paintings off yet again, he lights out of town for good. And while what follows manages to be a further downshift still—the “criminal on the run” of it all, for me, was a touch less engaging than the “criminal getting in over his head” movie that set it up—O’Connor’s a game, companionable enough presence to make even J.B.’s shittiest behavior watchable.

He stops by his friend Fred (John Magaro)’s place, looking to hide out for a while, only to ultimately get turned away by Fred’s partner (Gabby Hoffman), who sees right through him. He turns down Fred’s offer to get him out of the country, as he’s not interested in being classed among the draft dodgers he’d be living with in Canada. Ever the arrogant incompetent, he ultimately lands himself in the back of a paddy wagon not for the art heist, nor even for his second heist (he violently steals a purse in a late turn, confirming just how low he really is), but for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He gets rounded up as a part of an antiwar protest he stumbles into. It’s a Reichardt-y joke on an arrogant character—the kind of guy who took a beat to see what one of his stolen paintings would look like on his wall in place of actually turning it into cash—and a fittingly ugly little twist-of-the-knife to send the guy out on.

What’s built like a cannon ball launcher, frightening when it gets too big, haunting when it comes too small, and at risk of railing, plundering, and ploughing? Not a monster, nor a weapon… It’s a penis.

As a genre that plumbs the body for both visual gore and allegorical material, horror movies are uniquely positioned to penetrate our phallic censorship and wield these swords with narrative and symbolic power. It’s time horror movies give the people what they want: release the demon dicks.

Or, release more of them. Some horror films have already made lasting penile impressions. Meir Zarchi’s 1978 rape revenge film I Spit on Your Grave includes not just male full-frontal nudity, but particularly satisfying male full-frontal mutilation when the victim-turned-hunter Jennifer (Camille Keaton) cuts off her assaulter’s, Johnny’s (Eron Tabor), dick off. Speaking of mutilation, Lars von Trier’s Antichrist not only proudly displays William Dafoe’s penis — so famously huge that he had to get a body double to avoid narrative confusion — but it also includes the visual of it ejaculating blood. The movies join the ranks of horror penises: In Midsommar, Christian’s dong, which is the real-life penis of actor Jack Reynor who advocated for male nudity in the movie, flails about naked and afraid; In Possessor, Christopher Abbott’s character Colin is seen inspecting his flaccid penis atop a trimmed bush; Tetsuo: The Iron Man features a penis replaced by a large metal drill that spins when erect; Under the Skin’s penis strides forward, confidently erect and attached to Paul Brannigan.

Frank Henenlotter’s black comedy horror movie Bad Biology takes erectile dysfunction to its campy extreme. Batz (Anthony Sneed) has an impotent penis that he feeds drugs to make hard, but his plan misfires when the member grows a — ahem — head of its own. Addicted to drugs, terrifyingly enlarging, and shooting sperm that makes women cum for hours, the penis becomes the central villain, detaching from its host in search of pleasure. The monster cock is both a comedic beast as well as a literal manifestation of the emphasis placed on the performance of masculinity, especially sexually.

More recent entries to the genre have jumped on the Johnson reveal, too. In Together Dave Franco’s penis gets stuck in Alison Brie’s vagina in a grotesque vision of codependence. Danny Boyle’s latest, 28 Years Later, features an alpha zombie’s massive schlong bouncing in the wind. The alpha cock, which became its own protagonist in post-movie discussions, acts as a surging reminder of the ways zombies have evolved. In the sequel to 28 Days Later, director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland evolve the infected from mere brain dead zombies to strong and strategic zombies. The alpha organizes and leads a horde of the infected and, in a moment of humanity in the movie, can also get others pregnant. It’s a rare depiction of a monster procreating from a male perspective when so many characterizations of monster creation surround the language of women. Creatures lay eggs, for instance, and gestate à la Alien or parasitically implant eggs in others like in Cuckoo. Sometimes, women are the ones birthing the monsters themselves as in Rosemary’s Baby, It’s Alive, I Don’t Want to Be Born, and The Brood. Boyle’s well endowed zombie is not just for show but a potent reminder of a virile masculinity.

Not all horror penises need be visually grotesque, such as the case in this year’sThe Ugly Stepsister, Emilie Blichfeldt’s body horror spin on a Cinderella story. The ugly step sister in question, Elvira (Lea Myren), is a teen girl with fantasies of falling in love with a prince. The first penis seen in the film is through the perspective of her naive, rose-colored eyes of love and lust when her nemesis — her beautiful step sister Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Naess) — is spotted having sex with her secret lover. When his love rocket is shown in its full, erect glory it is through hazy, neon hues and soundtracked to drums and horses gruffing. It’s a stark contrast to the second time we see a penis, when Elivra’s mom is giving a young man a handjob. Despite knowing she is being watched by her daughter, Elivra’s mother proceeds with the sex act, determined to obtain money and social influence through the interaction. By then, Elvira’s fantasy that the prince is a true romantic, not a sleaze ball, are all but bust. The second shaft of Ugly Stepsister — crucially from a man that hit on her first before getting with her mom — is a reminder that a man isn’t going to save her. They’re all downright pricks.

The revealed willy in horror can be utilized far beyond a silly gimmick — they’re used in movies as metaphors for masculinity, symbols of grief, revenge, gender, and the advancement of terror. Perhaps that’s why the girls, gays, and theys were clammoring for Guillermo del Toro to reveal Jacob Elordi’s dick as the creature in Frankenstein. Sadly, there is no Frank in this Stein. But if there were, I’d wager the creature cock would be sewn together from a hodgepodge of other dicks and balls. It would’ve been glorious.

The original 1992 iteration of “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” hinged on the thematic bread and butter of many horror and thriller films throughout the 1980s and ’90s: an outside threat to the quintessential nuclear family successfully infiltrates the home through a normally safe avenue and tears domestic bliss apart from within. In “Poltergeist,” the spirits connect with the family’s children through the living room television; in “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” the invasion comes in the form of a much-needed, very pretty, very put-together nanny. Like “Fatal Attraction,” “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” is, at its core, about a malevolent being in the form of a beautiful yuppy woman fracturing the family home.

In “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” Mrs. Mott (who falsely names herself “Peyton” as an alibi) is out for revenge. Claire Bartel, loving and content wife and young mother, was the first woman to accuse Peyton’s husband of sexually assaulting her at his gynecological practice. Dr. Mott’s subsequent suicide causes Peyton to have a miscarriage. Peyton sees Claire as having everything that she has lost — a home, a husband, two healthy children and the general trappings of an upper-middle-class lifestyle. Peyton is determined to steal everything she lost back from Claire, and begins by infiltrating the Bartel family home under the guise of being a model babysitter.

The film, like many thrillers and horrors, is a reactionary one, basing its fear factor on the fragmenting of the nuclear, heterosexual family and tropes of “stranger danger.” It’s a story of sexual assault, women as enablers and yuppie-on-yuppie crime. It’s also, notably, not a very good movie.

Regardless of the original film’s quality, last week Hulu released its reboot of “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” a remake that is being touted as a “reimagining” of the 1992 original. The current horror/thriller reboot trend is near-constant and regularly produces subpar films, in no small part because of the genre’s reactionary nature. A culturally topical theme from decades ago will likely fail to resonate now, and so instead has to be clumsily “updated” or “elevated.”

In the newer iteration of “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” the Peyton equivalent, now named Polly, meets the beautiful part-time lawyer, part-time passable mom Caitlyn at a meeting regarding Polly’s tenant rights. Polly’s beef with Caitlyn runs deeper than the original “Cradle’s” storyline. Polly’s hatred for Caityln was sparked by a mutually traumatic childhood event that Caitlyn is not aware of, and that Polly has made Caitlyn the antagonist of for decades.

In the original “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” the unraveling of Peyton’s lies has to do entirely with Claire’s discovery of Peyton’s ties to the sexually abusive Dr. Mott — a revelation that is obviously and immediately disturbing. In the new “Hand,” Caitlyn’s “discoveries” regarding Polly’s character are that she is impoverished, she is a lesbian and she is a recovering alcoholic. Ideally this goes without saying, but it feels important to note that none of these traits on their own determine someone as having poor moral character. One of Polly’s fellow Alcoholics Anonymous members confesses to Caitlyn that she pretended to be a reference for Polly in order to help her get the nannying job. This is a gesture I personally perceive as a commonplace and minor deceit that is sometimes necessary for survival in modern America, but Caitlyn sees this as definitive evidence of genuine nefariousness. These “failings” on Polly’s part — a fudged phone call, a Fourth of July firework brought into the house, a past with addiction — are the evidence Caitlyn builds her case upon, long before she finds out anything conclusively disturbing about Polly.

The fact that Caitlyn ends up being correct — Polly is secretly messing with the dose on Caitlyn’s psychiatric medication and angling to steal her husband, children and home — doesn’t make the new film’s case any better. On the one hand, Caitlyn makes assumptions based on intense classism. And on the other hand (which is actually the same hand), she is proven correct narratively, with the movie ultimately validating Caitlyn’s suspicions.

When talking about representation in “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle”–verse, it’s near impossible not to touch on Ernie Hudson’s character, Solomon, in the original film. Solomon is a Black man with intellectual disabilities who is hired to help with odd jobs on the Bartels’ property around the same time that Peyton arrives. Claire is suspicious of Solomon where she is not of Peyton, but is proven wrong when Solomon saves her baby at the end of the film. Showing Solomon huddled up in the corner of the attic, clutching the baby, is clearly imagery attempting to invoke “To Kill a Mockingbird’s” Boo Radley. The message we are meant to receive about presumptions based on identity aspects is given with all the subtlety of a club to the head.

In the original iteration of “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” the big moral lesson is a ham-fisted, patronizing, liberal one: We are wrong to be inherently suspicious of Black men and/or of people with intellectual disabilities — technically true (hopefully obviously so), but executed with little grace in the film. In the new iteration, the suggestion is one that is inherently reactionary and ideologically conservative: We are right to be suspicious of a poor person and/or of someone who suffers from addiction.

This “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” remake gets rid of the Solomon character entirely, gives the mother figure a job and a more ambivalent relationship to her role in the home, creates some vaguely queer but poorly articulated tension between nanny and mother, and calls it a day. These updates are slapdash and haphazard, vague signifiers of modern womanhood without any intention. This lack of intention is the issue with horror reboots in general: There is no meaningful political, cultural or artistic purpose to what is changed and what is kept, no consideration to what reheating a decades-old film may telegraph politically and culturally in the present day.

The issue with many of these reboots is that these films just aren’t reboot-able, at least not in a way that’s worthwhile. And yet, the remake mill persists ceaselessly. A “Basic Instinct” remake is in the works, and is being described by its creators as “anti-woke.” (Was the original “Basic Instinct” woke?) The 1983 cult classic “Sleepaway Camp” is a film infamous for its transphobic “twist” ending that has now been reclaimed by some in the transgender community with a nuanced and cultural renegotiation of the film that hinges upon understanding the era in which it was made. “Sleepaway Camp” also has an incoming remake, spearheaded by “Saturday Night Live” cast member Kenan Thompson. Their only options will be to (likely clumsily) reckon with the trans aspects of the film or be rid of them entirely — neither outcome is the best option, because the best option is leaving the original “Sleepaway Camp” be.

I think before anyone is permitted to remake another culturally nuanced cult classic, they have to, at the very least, be able to answer why, exactly, they are doing it. The promise by Thompson’s co-creator, Johnny Ryan Jr., that they are “adding some insane new twists and going crazy with the merch, too” for the “Sleepaway Camp” reboot does not inspire confidence. Instead of these “reimaginings” that are barely hidden attempts to reheat intellectual properties for streamers and sell a few Camp Arawak T-shirts, it might be nice to watch a horror film that is actually just freshly imagined, an idea entirely of its own.

Cycle 37, episode 8. Only six girls remain in the running to become America’s Next Top Model, all with Peter Pan pixie cuts and bleached eyebrows, thanks to their model makeovers back in Episode 3.

A Chainsmokers song plays over an overexposed montage of a neoclassical mansion next to a golf course. Due to budget cuts, this season takes place in Jacksonville, Florida.

A fight is ensuing in the kitchen of the model house. The premise: Who stole Contestant #2’s last strawberry kiwi Celsius drink? Blame has fallen on Contestant #5.

Producers have been mining for a touching story from Contestant #5 for weeks. Hoping, praying for a dead relative, drug addiction—they’d even settle for a dead pet at this point, as long as she accidentally killed it herself. But all they could get was a confession that in 6th grade, she made a fake email account posing as Nick Jonas and used it to find out what the other people in her class thought about her.

Fuck it, they’ll make something up.

“Breathing all this fresh air is hard for me because my step sis–I mean step mother–never let me leave the attic–I mean basement…” Contestant #5 forces out. She has had no more than 15 seconds of screen time up until this point. She’s probably going home this week.

Suddenly, sirens echo through the long hallways lined with a series of Tyra Banks’ self-portraits she painted when she was nine.

This week’s Tyra Mail has arrived.

The girls gather in the foyer and read the message on the flat screen TV in unison:

“Time to find out who is first-degree fierce…”

They trail off. A hissing sound is coming from the vents. Before they can finish reading, the girls lose consciousness, collapsing onto the shiny marble floors.

When they finally awake, they are on a deserted island, blood on their hands, surrounded by nothing but the lifeless body of Tyra Banks.

After a few minutes of planning their lives as fugitives, she springs to life.

“Lesson learned. In this industry, you can’t trust anyone … Not even yourself,” Tyra pronounces. “Thanks to our sponsors, for this week’s photoshoot challenge, you will be posing with the all-new 2025 Nissan Altima. But you’ll be doing it…nude.”

Due to more budget cuts, they now have to complete a high-fashion photoshoot while simultaneously filming the infamous CoverGirl commercial.

Contestant #2 climbs on top of a steel gray Nissan. “All new CoverGirl outlast lash blast double last mascara is easy breezy peasy beautiful indisputable flawless…”

A quiet rumble at first. Then it grows into a treacherous quake. Cameras, lighting equipment and Nissans go flying in every direction.

She has summoned the ancient Roman God of Increasing Shareholder Value.

“YOU HAVE APPEASED THE ANCIENT ROMAN GOD OF INCREASING SHAREHOLDER VALUE.

YOU HAVE FINALLY TAPPED INTO THE TARGET DEMOGRAPHIC OF 11 TO 37-YEAR-OLD SINGLE WOMEN WHO LIVE IN THE AMERICAN MIDWEST WITH AN AVERAGE HOUSEHOLD INCOME OF $60,000 A YEAR.

BECAUSE OF YOUR UNATTAINABLE YET SOMEHOW STILL ATTAINABLE BEAUTY AND GIRL-NEXT-DOOR CHARM, THEY WILL CONTINUE BUYING COVERGIRL LASH BLAST MASCARA FOR ALL OF ETERNITY.

AND THEY WILL CONTINUE LOOKING IN THE MIRROR AND CRITICIZING FEATURES THEY SHARE WITH THEIR DAUGHTER IN FRONT OF THEIR DAUGHTER, ENSURING THAT SHE BUYS COVERGIRL LASH BLAST MASCARA FOR ALL OF ETERNITY TOO.

YOU HAVE PERFECTLY BALANCED HIGH FASHION WITH COMMERCIAL LOOKS. YOU ARE THE CHOSEN ONE.”

A thunderous sound followed by a blinding light, and Contestant #2 disappears.

CUT TO: Judging panel.

The girls file into a glossy white sound stage. Contestant #1 and Contestant #5 step forward, a poreless Tyra Banks stands before them. Only one photo in her hand. The photo of the girl who is still in the running to become America’s Next Top Model.

An image of Contestant #1 straddling a sedan is revealed.

There’s no time to waste. I pull out my phone. “Where is [insert Contestant #5 name] ANTM now?” I type.

To feel “with it” in a sea of hyperfashionable androgynous Tokyoites, X sports their new oversized pair of “X-Girl”-brand cargo pants that can unzip below the knees to transform into jorts. X-Girl is a hero of 90s American alt fashion and streetwear, now based in Japan. Donning the cargos, X feels as cool and effortless as Kim Gordon, X-Girl’s founder, and as hip as the Japanese Gen Zers who resemble nonbinary hyperpop sensation Dorian Electra. Without the pants, X is another boring American who doesn’t know how to dress.

X is mommy’s little asphyxiated princess. Pretty and deranged in pink. Rosy tulle and glossy Mary Janes. Quietly compliant, rebellion suppressed more and more by the hour. “What beautiful, long hair,” the church ladies and passersby alike coo, sometimes stroking X’s dark locks. Their mother’s eyes shine brightly at these reactions. “Look at how thick it is too!” their mother chirps. “She has so much hair, I have to brush it all the time.” X remembers the way the strange women beam at them, making them feel like a daughter who’s worth it.

In their mid-20s, X decides to chop their hair off into a bob right at the chin. They reject the flowy, black locks. They eventually dye the bob every pastel color in the pastel rainbow, and some neon too, channeling Natalie Portman with the pink wig in Closer. Or Milla Jovovich from The Fifth Element. It was a COVID coping mechanism and an addictive hobby.

Back in the states, X feels like they’re cosplaying “Teenager at the Americana” when they put on the X-Girl pants. It doesn’t feel right given their age demographic in this more gender-conforming and less fashion-forward country. But that may just be in their head. In Los Angeles, where everyone’s trying to make it, they need to show a little leg. Wear a short skirt that hugs their ass. Show skin. Maybe even wear ultra, ultra low-rise Y2K jeans.

At recess, X cherishes their most prized possession: their one and only Nike shirt that they wear far too often. It’s frayed and comfortable. But, more importantly, they want to be noticed and liked by the pretty tomboy with the freckles. They want to be the pretty tomboy with the freckles. Being nine is hard. Being nine with one Nike shirt, when you want to be an edgy tomboy, sucks. Freckles only wears Nike and rejects dresses, skirts, and other “girl clothes” — she’s definitely the coolest kid on the playground.

Now, at the function, X subconsciously ensures they’re femme enough. Sometimes they’ll almost reach high femme, but on the gothier side. Other times, they’ll add an androgynous element. They paint their lips cherry red and accentuate their figure and long, wavy hair. They feel confident and that confidence comes alive. They’re not afraid to say hi to a stranger. To ask someone what kind of poetry or music they write. To talk about their own creative endeavors. To bother someone about hitting their vape pen. They wonder if they’re performing, but they realize they’re actually completely themself. For the moment.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You opens with an opening. The ceiling of Linda’s (Rose Byrne) apartment caves in, creating a giant hole which sends Linda and her daughter to stay indefinitely at a crappy hotel. Linda is really tired. She works as a therapist and is the mother of a child with a debilitating eating disorder. She is handling the kid and the hole on her own as her husband travels for work.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is solely about Linda, which is a paradoxical premise, because nothing in Linda’s life is about her.

The film places (too) much emphasis on the visual of the ceiling hole. Sometimes the camera climbs into the hole, revealing firefly flashes of light and distant echoes of Linda talking with her child. There’s memories in there, maybe, or emotions that Linda cannot let herself feel. Sometimes Linda examines the hole and something sorta freaky happens. This storyline is the least interesting aspect of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. The moments in the film that are representative or metaphorical are far less effective than the gritty and exhausting material reality the film portrays.

What I like about If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is its commitment to the truly shitty. Linda’s hotel is shitty, with its sassy front desk clerk and its thin walls. The food Linda has to coax her daughter to eat is shitty; greasy pizza stripped of cheese and wet-looking breakfast plates. The offices where Linda works are shitty, a row of shoddy white doors in a shoddy white hallway. Empathy for Linda is built easily from seeing her circumstances. I would also be freaking the fuck out if I were her.

Linda spends her days listening to people complain or cry, and then walks down the hall to complain or cry to her own therapist. Her daughter’s condition requires intense treatment that keeps her out of school and keeps nurses dogging Linda for her failure to get her kid’s weight up. While her husband gets to watch baseball games during his hours off, Linda is sprinting between full-time life commitments. Linda is sometimes able to drum up enough of a good mood to sing along with her daughter in the car, but she inevitably ends every night by drinking a bottle of wine and smoking cigarettes, locked outside her motel room.

But this movie is not about the failings of the modern mental healthcare system, or about the impossible standards of good motherhood. This movie is really, really just about Linda. We follow her through every moment of her day, mostly in close-up. We never see her daughter in full, only in disjointed body parts (and even those visuals are rare). Her husband is a disembodied voice over the phone. When her patients talk at her, the camera points at Linda; her body slumped, her eyes heavy, her hair falling out of its high bun.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You understands with radical (though not pleasant) acceptance that there is not much else to do or say about these things that are affecting Linda’s life. Screaming them into the void is changing very little. The systems in place to help her are not necessarily making things worse, but they’re also not really helping. There is no option to stay the course, but staying the course sucks really hard.

Byrne’s performance is expert. She plays a woman who is no longer a raw nerve but a flickering light which sparks into occasional sobbing, screaming flashes before dimming exhaustedly back down. She plays Linda as driven weakly by something unknown; both primal and uninspired. Linda screams at her husband for not doing enough and speaks openly with her therapist about her exhaustion toward her daughter’s need for care, even mournfully daydreaming at one point about an aborted fetus that she maybe should have kept instead. But none of these painful outpourings receive much reaction from the world around her.

The more I’ve sat with If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, the more it’s ultimately moved me. Nothing Linda confesses to in the film about motherhood or marriage or the general grate of living is special or new. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You knows we’ve already confessed to all of the shitty, hard motherhood stuff and womanhood stuff in various artistic iterations, personal conversations, and journal entries. There are therapist’s offices to scream about your neuroses and your past abortions and your high-maintenance kid, but you will likely not get a reaction out of your therapist (and probably not your friends and husband, either).

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is refreshing in its presentation of a woman on the brink, because it simultaneously acknowledges that it’s become a mundanity to be a woman on the brink or to present a story of a woman on the brink. Everyone is drowning right now. Everyone has some terrible feelings about being a parent or a wife or a person. It’s unspecial, but all-consuming. It’s banal and it’s potent. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You doesn’t offer a solution as much as it does a conspiratorial shrug; an “I know, right?” as you try to scream loud enough to startle something loose in yourself or your life.

The greatest service The Testament of Ann Lee does for its protagonist is to represent her as neither true deity or religious fanatic. Ann Lee’s (Amanda Seyfried) most intense prophecy is childlike in its simplicity, and easy to scorn. After years of sex with her husband that she feels is impure, and the ensuant devastating loss of child after child, Ann Lee has a vision of Adam and Eve being cast out of Eden, and of herself as the second coming of Christ. The answer to a true connection with God, she realizes, is to refuse fornication of any kind.

It would be easy to belittle her revelation as a direct response to her own trauma. How convenient, after all she has suffered, that God has told her to refrain from sex and conception. But The Testament of Ann Lee, much like the Shakers themselves, takes Ann seriously. Instead of investigating the reality of her visions, The Testament of Ann Lee is more interested in Ann Lee’s very real power to seduce other like-minded people toward her.

The Testament of Ann Lee takes the heady, radical acceptance that the Shakers encourage (at the first meeting Ann Lee attends, a man confesses to lusting for his young sister, and a woman weeps for him, holding his pain as he convulses) and pairs it with the desire for salvation to make sense of Ann Lee’s mystic appeal. Seyfried plays Ann Lee in equal parts earnest, open, tortured, and driven. Her followers, in turn, feel real and textured in their sometimes reverent, sometimes conflicted experience.

People pay attention to her, both as a prophet or as a threat. You feel drawn into the group’s steady animal panting, their rhythmic and devotional dancing. There’s some undeniable, universal baseline pull toward a place where you can scream and sob with no repercussions.

Our narrator, Ann Lee’s devout follower Mary (Tomasin McKenzie), says at one point that the Shaker religion believes the religious spirit is an internal one. That Ann Lee struggles with notions of the internal are unsurprising. That which comes out of Ann Lee’s body (when not in her control) is gory, painful, and loaded with grief. Children conceived from sex with her sadistic husband are born with animal brutality and gallons of blood. But what emerges from Ann Lee when she is in control — the breath she pushes out, the thumping and writhing she twists forth from herself, her singing and ritualistic dancing — is beautiful, sturdy, trustworthy; meditative for her and compelling for both us and her followers.

Ann Lee’s most exciting set pieces are the days-long Shaker rituals that Ann Lee first attends and eventually leads. A heaving, percussive, occasionally electric-guitar backed (!) score thrums through swaths of people seized up in religious fervor. Some move to their own accord in ritualistic gestures, others interlock in complex patterns and movements. It’s a dance-based iteration of the personal made collective and the collective made personal.

Ann Lee’s runtime moves mostly swiftly. Unfortunately, the final act of the film suffers from what many biographical retellings do, choosing accuracy and a more complete scope of Ann Lee’s life instead of a more sturdy, satisfying story structure. Much like Ann’s prophecies, the exact truth is less relevant (and maybe less compelling) than the broader implications of the story.

At the Q&A I attended, director Mona Fastvold described Ann Lee as an early feminist. While there’s a well-documented tendency toward gender equality in the Shaker movement historically (as well as racial equality — the Shakers were one of the few collectives to welcome black convents and leaders and disavow slavery), I’m hesitant to read a life dedicated in devotion to total restraint and prayer as the most inherently feminist route. (Maybe I’m personally defensive because I find some spiritual pleasure in light hedonism.)

It feels like once a day online I read someone half-jokingly wish for a life of quiet scavenging without a job, or a society devoid of men. Suggesting Ann Lee was the original American feminist feels as impossible to me as these sentiments. But there’s a seed of truth in these daydreamy, overextended idealizations. I’d be no good as a Shaker, but there’s some sort of essential, spiritual wisdom — maybe about the collective, maybe about the relief of unburdening shame, maybe about giving up some of our endless indulgences and comforts — that holds weight. The Testament of Ann Lee is worth the watch to let that spiritual potential wriggle more freely within you than usual. The Shakers would not judge you.

John Early’s feature directorial debut, Maddie’s Secret, is a John Waters melodrama, if those Waters’ serrated edges were draped in soft gauze. Maddie (John Early) speaks with gentle breathiness, and primly tucks away the wisps of blonde hair that fall out of her claw clip. She’s kind, inspired, and earnest. Her life is simple and beautiful. She jogs to work — Maddie’s a dishwasher for a digital content kitchen called Gourmaybe — and pauses to whiff jasmine. Her social circle includes Deena (Kate Berlant, a regular coconspirator of Early’s — would it be insane to extend the Waters metaphor to say perhaps these are modern Dreamlanders? Earlylanders?), a lesbian with a barbed wire tattoo along her bicep and a (mostly) harmless puppy dog crush on Maddie; and Jake (Eric Rahill), Maddie’s handsome, tender, Dad-bodied husband. Cooking brings Maddie genuine passion. Dishwashing is good enough for her, for now. She likes her life.

The world around Maddie is not as tender-hearted as her. Her relationship with her mother, Beverlee (Kristen Johnson) is cruel and competitive. Maddie’s slimeball boss, Zach (Connor O’Malley), is comically piggish and success-hungry. (There’s an argument to be made that O’Malley possibly has created a niche in doing his own form of hypermasculine drag). He fingers Maddie’s hot, bitchy Gourmaybe coworker, Emily (Claudia O’Doherty) with the same two fingers he later jams directly into Maddie’s bubbling sauce. Everything around Maddie — even food, sex, and daughterhood — are transactions. Zach represents the cynical foil to Maddie’s loving sincerity, but he’s also the keyholder to what Maddie presumes is her dream: becoming a recipe developer for Gourmaybe.

As Maddie skirts closer to the success she thinks she wants (not just recipe development, but being the first vegetarian consultant on the hit television show The Boar — the satirical points are not coy), a once-quieted bulimic eating disorder rears up again. Maddie suffers. But crucially, she does not harden. Maddie’s Secret includes loving, detailed sex scenes, sweaty, panting dance sessions, and cooking and eating that is chew-and-crunch heavy in its Foley effects. It’s sensual (though not always pleasurably so) in every sense of the word. All of it is ceaselessly watchable, because Maddie is of the body. In a time where we are encouraged to streamline, tighten up, and become brandable, sleek experiences; Maddie is fully in herself. Maddie’s titular secret may be that she has bulimia (each time someone catches her over a toilet, it's a soap opera caricature of the event — bloodshot eyes, face powdered ghost white, a sheen of sweat), but she is not avoidant of her existence. She is not looking to escape herself.

Maddie’s movements between traditionally women-centric spaces — a kitchen (and, in our most modern iteration of a woman's world, the facade of a kitchen designed to pump out short-form video content), a suburban home, a dance workout studio, an eating disorder facility — are presented as chapters, not unlike Waters’ Female Trouble. The dated white nighty Maddie wears (a stark contrast to the scallop-trim tees and trendy, pastel athleisure she wears to work) while she throws herself around an impossibly bright kitchen at night screams of Polyester’s housewife, Francine Fishpaw. Divine and Waters are fingerprinted all over Maddie’s Secret. Like Waters’ work, Maddie’s Secret pokes fun without being brutal. It can be so hard to keep your heart open in the face of a world that rewards taut, easy readability. It’s especially hard for women. Sometimes maybe all we can grasp is an opportunity to laugh. Early’s performance as Maddie is silly, but it is not cruel. He plays Maddie as earnest, emotional, rich in interior, with loving camp but no ham. In the same way that Early’s viral beat-by-beat recreation of Nomi’s dance audition in Showgirls comes from a seeming place of obsessive fascination and affection for the hyperfemininity of the film, Early equally has no desire to mock Maddie, but instead embody her with dignity. I sense that he loves her.

If Waters’ creativity is a bread knife, designed to shove through an especially socially repressed crust with sharp force in order to reveal a warm and loving center, then Early’s work is the smoothing motions of a butter knife. It could be nice to make this retentive and intense place a little better, a little softer, a little more delicious than it currently is.

Maddie’s actual secret is, maybe, open and unselfconscious love for the world, even when if letting that love burst forth and endure looks totally fucking ridiculous. As the credits rolled on Maddie’s Secret, the kindly older woman next to me turned and said, “Well, that actress, she was very good.” Yes, she really was.

We know pretty quickly that Grace (Barbie Ferreria) is done with Ontario. She flips off the Toronto skyline from her seat on the bus. She’s headed to Montréal for the summer. She’s twenty-something, she’s a music critic, and she’s ready to write a book, learn French, and have “actual” sex. We know all of this from the yellow, college-ruled lines of her 2011 notes app headlined “GOALS FOR SUMMER IN MTL”.

Mile End Kicks is an indie sleaze period piece. Set in 2011, Grace goes to parties in tights, miniskirts, and red wedge Toms. She’s broke but can (sorta) make her cheap rent with parental support, stashed cash, and the money she’s owed from a stint at an indie music mag. Because pure music criticism isn’t enough to live on, Grace also writes culture pieces, op-eds, and sex toy reviews. It’s all very much of the time. Writer-director Chandler Levack stylizes Grace’s life to look right out of peak 2014 Tumblr. In loft party scenes, characters are illuminated by the blinding spotlight of flash photography, like images from a Boiler Room set. A break for a cigarette is bathed in Valencia-IG filter yellow, all summer night warmth. Grace’s roommate is the beautiful Franco-Canadian Madeleine (played by Red Rooms’ Juliette Gariépy), who works as a “hot girl DJ” back when that actually meant something. Grace’s hopes for having “actual sex” are denied or accepted with the casual, artistic, sex positivity of the era. The sex sucks or the boys are cagey, but even the guy who Madeleine warns Grace is, “the worst man in Montreal” is not yet manosphere-and-podcast-pilled.

In a true womanhood canon event, the worst man in Montréal happens to be of the most interest to Grace. Chevy (Stanley Simons) — lead singer of the tragically-named indie band Bone Patrol — is cocky and obnoxious and callous. He claims his musical influences are people like Ariel Pink (evidenced by their shared taste in big-ass sunglasses) and Charles Manson. His only real values are that art should be hard and matters of the dick should be unserious. But if Grace showed him to me on a heavily-filtered Instagram, I would admit that I got it. His onstage persona is easy and gender fucky: loose-fitting old-timey nursing uniforms, trenchcoats with only y-fronts underneath, smeared red lipstick. His plush mouth and his choppy, run-through hair give an aura of Hedwig’s toxic paramour, Tommy Gnosis (Michael Pitt) in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, itself a cornerstone of alt life in this era. Simons plays Chevy as mostly mumbling and looking for someone better to talk to, so when his big eyes finally give Grace more than a millisecond of attention, we tip forward with her.

The experiences that Grace works through are painfully of her age. She is reaching the first time in her life where the world may actually, maybe, give you what you desire; hot guys in bands are open to talking to you, you have a little tiny bit of money, you go to parties that are actually fun. You can go to that city where all your idols are making art. You can get that indie book deal (to write about Alanis Morrisette’s Jagged Little Pill, no less!) The feeling is heady and insane.

It’s also all, unfortunately, only the first step. Her book doesn’t get magically written. Her time spent tripping after and over Bone Patrol’s lead singer all summer doesn’t magically come back. Her other (probably better) sexual option is the cute guitarist for Bone Patrol named Archie (played by Devon Bostick, who originally perked up alt-girl attentions in 2010 as the mean grungy older brother Rodrick in The Diary Of a Wimpy Kid movies, if you know you know). But he both has a crush on Grace and refuses to fuck her for “personal reasons”. The emails she sends about a payment owed to her for four grand doesn’t get answered. The icky stuff she went through a year ago isn’t actually all healed up just because she asserts that it is. Ferreria plays Grace as a raw nerve, a hot mess, a horny girl, a competent writer, a socially-awkward newbie. She’s not too weird — she fits in fine with the alt crowd after a bit of social lubricant — but her big eyes give up a little too much and her lip wobbles with hurt tears more than a couple of times.

Levack lets what she loves fingerprint themselves all over her movies. Her feature debut, I Love Movies, follows high school senior Lawrence (played by Isaiah Leitmann, who plays newly-out-of-the-closet Bone Patrol bassist Jesse in Mile End Kicks) a kid who adores films, is antisocially confident in his belief that he can “make it”, but never actually does any of the work. In a way, Grace picks up where Lawrence left off (though Levack wrote Mile End Kicks before I Like Movies), but with only small improvements behaviorally. Both of Levack’s films present youthful flopping: selfishness, carelessness, opportunities squandered, time mismanaged. It’s painful to watch. You know these people, or you were these people, or you are these people.

But it’s not all terrible, either. Mile End Kicks also feels like summertime, beer breath, the relief of finding a friend in a new city, the headrush of an adult crush. The film ends on a note so satisfying and delicious that it gives me a restless leg and a wet-mouthed need to hook up. Life sucks and you fuck it up and it’s awesome, all at once. Let’s make love like how I daydreamed about it on Tumblr in 2011.