Going into the film quite blind, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Cronin embraces the radical tradition of slow cinema, demanding that his audiences give themselves over to long takes, non-professional actors, and general mundanity. A meditation on the quietest corners of grief, The Birds Tell Me All There Is To Know observes two individuals in a small upstate New York town: Paul, a widower whose memory is deteriorating and Sam, a woman in her early twenties mourning her father’s recent death.

Much of what these characters lived through before the camera started rolling is left unsaid. Shot entirely on Hi8 tape, the film trades the smoothed, 4K gleam of modern cinema cameras for something much more intimate. There is a gorgeous, tactile quality to this underused format, and the blurry, almost out-of-focus image serves a distinct purpose: our characters see the world in the same confused, unstable, and not-quite-right manner that the format presents. Don’t we all?

Cronin constructs truly striking images within the limitations of his lens, taking the time to frame essentially every scene as both natural and painterly. In one instance, Sam and her friend James (whom she clearly has feelings for) talk on a bench next to a river. As the sun begins to set, their conversation takes a backseat to the golden-hour imagery on display. Cronin uses ambient nature to make our characters’ problems not less real, but more universal — a reminder that human tragedy is just a small piece of a much larger, indifferent ecosystem. People die and people are born; the sun still sets and the birds still fly.

It is in the quiet, awkward, unbearably relatable spaces of life that the film achieves its true power. When Cronin’s careful, lingering camerawork subjects us to an unedited, extended sequence of Paul washing dishes or making a simple sandwich of deli meat–Swiss cheese, and mustard on rye–we are pushed into a feeling of temporal stasis.. Hovering on the precipice of boredom, Cronin’s editing never loses its momentum. He finds the perfect places to cut a scene or extend it, allowing the audience’s own thoughts and emotions to bleed into the frame as time and space fall away.

In between these moments of quiet reflection, Cronin infuses the film with a mumblecore-adjacent dialogue style, frantically improvising lines and directing his performers with a detached, naturalistic sensibility. This cranks up the realism of the film, allowing the audience to more easily fall into its world. At one point, a conversation between James and Sam devolves into an argument over whether she is an “iPad Baby” for not wanting to watch The Master, which she derides as a four-hour movie just about men looking at each other. This scene earned a lot of uncomfortable laughs from the Spectacle crowd, all of whom have surely lived through the exact same conversation.

That being said, Cronin refuses to let us simply dwell in rural repose. He punctures the serenity of his film with constant intrusions of machinery, like the dull, relentless drone of a lawnmower or the sudden, sharp pierce of a ringing phone. These deliberate interruptions act as reminders that modern life rarely allows us to sit undisturbed with our grief, our memories, or our quietest thoughts. However, in a film that hinges on the audience’s willingness to sit and reflect, the juxtaposition of serene landscapes and brutal technology occasionally comes off as unsatisfying rather than profound. Perhaps there is growth to be found in that discomfort, but the film’s two-hour runtime (quite short for slow cinema) does not really leave enough space to fully explore it.

Even still, The Birds Tell Me All There Is To Know reminds us exactly why we make movies in the first place. Cronin’s work stands out among a sea of sterile releases as it makes good on the promise of cinema as a universal language built not on overwhelming spectacle, but on shared connection. By taking incredibly personal memories and inviting us to sit, pause, and just exist in their world, the film translates emotions too complex for words. It reminds us to seek meaning in the mundane and helps us feel a little less alone in the messiness of life. Sitting in that one-room Brooklyn movie house, I was gifted a respite from the world. My problems were neither forgotten nor solved, but I found a new perspective. Maybe I should look to the skies; the birds seem to know what they are doing.

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Beyond their low-resolution visual approaches, the stories leave significant room for the viewer to fill in the blanks. In Praise of Love works backwards from the first to second sections, following Edgar, an artist trying to develop an undefined project and Berthe, the granddaughter of French Resistance fighters whose story is being purchased by an American film production company, known as “Spielberg Associates, Inc.” The narrative is told in elliptical snippets that give strong impressions but make it difficult to put together the full picture. Dry Leaf’s plot is simpler but similarly vague: a father, Irakli, tracks down his missing daughter, Lisa, following her path as she photographs different village soccer fields around the country of Georgia. Both of these narrative structures allow the directors to hone in on their near-static images. Here the noise and hypersensitivity of the medium generates movement in the frame. Human vision is entrusted with low visual data and allowed to read into lines and traces of light. Dry Leaf incorporates the guesswork fundamental to perception into the text—lines and circles are the fundamental elements of football, Irakli explains, drawing two shapes on a chalkboard that fail to be captured faithfully by the camera. As he wanders the countryside, the bare lines of the goalposts establish themselves as motifs that demonstrate how lost he is among the distinct yet visually identical fields his daughter could have visited. In Praise of Love also forces the viewer to interpret limited visual information in the black-and-white section, in which characters are cast in shadow, and night scenes are illuminated only by city lights pushed to their absolute limits on overexposed film. When the movie shifts back in time and into color, the light inputs are taken to the opposite extreme and maximized to conjure the feeling of an unforgettable memory.

Tracing the lines drawn by these two movies conjures resemblances to two of the most famous John Ford pictures, The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The plot structure of Dry Leaf is effectively a pared-down version of Ethan Edwards’ search for his “niece”/implied daughter, complete with an invisible companion, who Irakli converses with throughout the film, in the Jeffrey Hunter role. Visually, the grand Vistavision vistas of Ford’s West are replaced by similarly colorful, yet impressionistic landscapes of the Georgian countryside. In Praise of Love adopts the extended flashback structure of Liberty Valance, similarly to help elucidate the typically Western passage of fact into legend for the Resistance fighters. Godard even makes a point of referencing the famous line directly: “When fact becomes legend, print the legend.” While Ford’s stark black-and-white imagery is mimicked in the first portion, the beyond bright colors of the final third couldn’t be more different. As with many films of the past seven decades, including recent hits like One Battle After Another and The Irishman, the critical structure and emotional weight of Ford’s masterworks are fruitful ground for loose adaptation. What sets these two apart from the countless other riffs is the progression they make through Ford. Each of the Ford films is exemplary of his greatest hallmark: communicating what’s unspoken. Along these lines, Godard and Koberidze embrace the unseen, or unresolved in their images. The viewer’s mind must extrapolate from what’s presented onscreen to form a mental picture of the action. Where Ford laces Brechtian distancing through the structures of his films and in the space between words and images, these two filmmakers leave space for interpretation within the visual data of the images themselves. In the negative space generated by these techniques, there is an opening to explore darker sides of the human experience. In The Searchers and Dry Leaf, there is a gap in understanding between the father figures and the young women they are tracking, enhanced by Koberidze by creating visual ambiguity between the soccer fields and the daughter’s photos. The emotional reconciliation between Irakli and Lisa runs parallel to the visual reconciliation of these landscapes. In Liberty Valance and In Praise of Love, the void is found in the self-destructive tendencies of the agents of history—concentrated in Tom Doniphon in the former film and spread generationally across the resistance fighters and their descendants in the latter. Godard also reflects this experience visually by rendering Edgar’s indelible memories of Berthe’s defiance in surreal DV imagery.

Even as they represent innovations in film form (one being, typical of Godard, 25 years or so ahead of its time), In Praise of Love and Dry Leaf each undercut linear notions of progress in visual art. One such notion is the idea of fidelity growth over time, from sharper lenses to more fine grain film stock to ever increasing digital pixel counts. In the opposite direction, nostalgia for older, “purer” formats has created a new form of celluloid fetishism. Both Godard and Koberidze work counter to each tendency, one juxtaposing formats and subverting our associations with them, the other using a completely obsolete and unfashionable format. Godard’s use of color DV to evoke the past is particularly pointed: the formal choice complements his critique of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, in which black-and-white suggests images of the past rather than the past itself. Both pixel count obsession and format fetishism are rooted in a commodified idea of cinema, that more is better—an idea that is turned on its head by centering a movie on something missing. In Dry Leaf, formal ambition is linked directly to modesty in scale. Case in point: the father is accompanied by an invisible character in a story that is otherwise absent of supernatural elements—a choice with the added benefit of cutting down the total personnel from four to three for the countryside portion of the movie. By letting go of attachment to format prejudice, both films unlock for us new ways of seeing the world.

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FIGHT NIGHT

9:00 PM on Friday, August 21st at Ornithology Jazz Club

Feel each right hook to the liver during this screening of 8mm boxing reels with live improvised jazz accompaniment from Lincoln Barron and Guests! With musical duos going head to head each round, no matter who’s standing when the bell rings, you’ll have seen a great fight.

Ticket includes admission to Ornithology Jazz Club.

Buy tickets here!

Just the other day, he posted an AI generated video of him walking through a crowd of fans, flanked by two bodyguards. “Here I am, leaving for the first day’s shooting of my all AI film” the caption read. In a reposted LA Times article recapping his lecture at some AI conference, he extolled a ChatGPT generated script about a formerly anti-pornography debt collector who falls for a cam girl that was written to mimic his style. If what we’re watching is an example of ayahuasca-induced ego death, then his excitement goes to show how much the drug can humble a person. Otherwise, it turns out that Schrader has a much lower opinion of his own work than one would expect. In the article, his praise broached the familiar beats of wanting to cut out the middle men, i.e. the extras, storyboarders, lighters, gaffers, and eventually the actors themselves, but he weirdly seemed enthralled by the possibility of cutting himself out of the equation too.

First Reformed (2017), Schrader’s late masterpiece, arrived too early to be about generative AI, but it is about something similar. In the movie, Ethan Hawke as Reverend Ernst Toller plays a terminally-ill man ministering to a small and antiquated church. It’s the auxiliary of a larger organization that’s not trashy enough to be a megachurch and is blander for it. One of the few remaining attendees of Toller’s church is a pregnant young woman who one Sunday asks for help with her marital problems. When Toller visits her home, he finds that her husband, an environmental activist, is suffering from depression. He’s struggling to reconcile bringing a child into a warming earth and an increasingly apathetic society. Toller’s attempts to reach him, which he finds exhilarating, ultimately fail and the husband ends up killing himself. Sometime after his suicide, his wife discovers a bomb vest hidden in their garage and allows Toller to take it off the premises. All appears well for a while but as Toller’s death approaches, the more alluring this eco-terrorism business becomes. Here is a possible escape from the drudgery of what remains of his life and in a way that puts the power back into his own hands.

First Reformed is at times a shot-for-shot remake of Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light (1963) where nuclear anxiety takes the place of environmental dread. But Schrader still manages to circle back to his Bressonian influences with the added plot of extremism, that like petty thievery in Pickpocket (1959), compensates for the vigor that has been wrung out of contemporary life.

I thought about this movie a lot when I was working as a faith reporter covering Black churches in the south a little while ago. The churches I reported on were mainly in poor and rural areas, which means they’re in places becoming prime real estate for datacenters powering generative AI. A reverend I talked to who’s organizing in Alabama told me how these datacenters come as big as Walmart Supercenters, use a daily amount of water equivalent to many Olympic sized swimming pools, and tank the quality of life in pretty much every single way. Air quality indexes skyrocket wherever they pop up, and electricity costs rise substantially, which especially hurts low income communities. This has and continues to be made possible through coercive tactics. It’s not that these communities do or don’t consent to these datacenters, it’s that they don’t have the representational power for anything they say to make a difference. For the most part, consent is nowhere to be found in the ways we’re conditioned to talk about AI as well. What we want to happen is irrelevant because AI is going to happen. And according to the pundits, it’s an inevitable reality that we must learn to live with, even if a good amount of us don’t want to.

Oddly enough, a lot of fervor for AI is present in faith communities as well. Some of the faith leaders I talked to either professed to using generative AI themselves or referred to other leaders that are using it. Much of their reasoning lay in how Black churches get very little funding and need assistance with administrative and community-related tasks. A few were genuinely excited about the possibilities that AI opens up. A pastor I didn’t get the chance to speak with who refers to himself as “That Tech Pastor”, has even gone so far as to build the ChatGPT equivalent for clergy members. The excitement on behalf of faith leaders is not too far from artists’ like Paul Schrader’s excitement at their approaching obsolescence. It appears a metaphorical act of self-immolation like that of Ethan Hawke’s character in First Reformed. Assuming that these acts of self-immolation are attempts by the dying to have some agency over their deaths, what does it tell us that some of our most spiritual practitioners – artists and faith leaders – have admitted defeat?

In many ways, the answers to this question seem besides the point amidst the stated concerns of generative AI’s environmental impacts. And talking about AI in any tone that’s not extremely vindictive always seems to be legitimizing just how ridiculous a concept it is. Again alluding to Hawke in First Reformed, it comes off as sermonizing with a bomb hidden underneath our cassocks. However, it’s precisely this resignation that’s also being taken advantage of. It's no revelation that generative AI is cheap, but solely ascribing the fervor to this would be giving the technology too little credit. Its adoption is also helping divest our commitment to things that are not considered important, things like clean air and drinkable water for Black communities and jobs that pay a livable wage in the film industry. It would be naive to think that anything else is off of the chopping block.

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Nicky (John Cassavetes) is on the run from the mob. He and business partner Ed Lipsky stole from big boss Resnick, and Lipsky’s corpse turned up riddled with bullets a couple days prior. Nicky knows he’s next on the chopping block, so he spends his time wallowing in terror and self-pity on the floor of a cheap Philly hotel room. Mikey, (Peter Falk) one of Nicky’s oldest friends and a fellow member of Resnick’s gang, is the only guy who’s willing to help him out. Once he barges through the door, Mikey treats his troubled friend the way a father treats his sick child, forcing him to take medicine by taking a pill himself. As it turns out, Mikey’s the one orchestrating the hit, guiding the gunman, Kinney, to Nicky’s destination.

Nicky’s keenly aware of his impending doom, and never fully trusts Mikey because of it. He constantly questions Mikey’s allegiances, no matter how many near-tenable assurances Mikey gives him. Nicky threatens his friend with a pistol and forces the two to swap clothes in case anyone saw the two together before. After some coaxing, Mikey convinces Nicky to lollygag around Philly, but Nicky refuses to follow Mikey’s lead. Instead, he goes on a greatest hits tour of scumbaggery, picking fights with anyone he looks at, more interested in the prospect of getting beaten up or laid than the guy who dropped all his plans to be there for a friend. None of Mikey’s lies are good enough for him, which introduces us to the real tragedy at play. This paranoid bravado blinds Nicky from realizing that Mikey’s trying to find a reason to save his life. Nicky’s too busy playing it cool, even with the one guy he can really count on, to give him even the slightest reason to mess with Kinney’s plans. With Nicky’s death looming in the background, the tension ultimately comes from the hair-strings holding their fraught friendship together.

It’s all very Cassavetes, which makes it no shock that he greatly inspired May and worked closely with her when fleshing the script out, much like Cassavetes did with Falk and Gazzara on Husbands, though not to the same extent. May’s rare foray into drama is deeply rooted in her connections to the burgeoning New Hollywood scene and some of its most contemporarily recognizable stars. Falk and Cassavetes’s friendship is so famous that film professor Amelie Hastie wrote a chapter for Issue 4 of Celebrity Studies about it. They frequently butted heads while working together on Husbands, their first official collaboration, but quickly realized that they get the best out of one another. After Husbands, they worked together on a few Columbo episodes and the film widely considered Cassavetes’s directorial magnum opus, A Woman Under the Influence.

That fruitful, tumultuous working relationship is palpable in every scene these two share. There’s a tangibility to their relationship that can only be forged by years of laughing, bickering, drunken tirades, and paranoid fits. Cassavetes masterfully toes the line between slimy enough to hate and magnetic (or pathetic) enough to see why someone would go to such lengths to keep him alive. Falk plays an endlessly endearing, lived-in Mikey, a weatherbeaten scumbag in his own right whose care for his old friend is always muddied by what we know he’s actually there to do.

Mikey’s insecurities are just as central to his relationship with Nicky as Nicky’s seeming ignorance of those insecurities. You see it in the way Falk’s face contorts any time Cassavetes intentionally or unintentionally one-ups or embarrasses the guy. Nicky doesn’t mean to make Mikey feel small, most of the time at least, but the needle stings regardless of its aim.

The resentment and jealousy curled up in Mikey’s guts finally explode out when he’s rejected by a prostitute Nicky sees regularly, and more importantly to Mikey, for free. Nicky responds by breaking the watch Mikey gave him, the one artifact connecting Mikey to his dead father, an act that ultimately seals Nicky’s fate. The male psyche is a puerile beast at its core, and May expresses this blow-up as the playground fight it is. She lets Falk express Mikey’s inadequacies and trauma in a way many couldn’t actually commit to, picking at old scabs that won’t heal because he doesn’t want them healed. Mikey admits that he knows Nicky calls him ‘The Echo’ when he’s not around due to his propensity for repeating himself. Every past and future dialogue choice is tinged by that one line, as Mikey’s insecurities manifest over and over again, repeating himself even when he doesn’t have to. May gets at that universal insecurity you get when a friend notices or pokes fun at something you don’t notice about yourself, which makes you constantly notice that tic as a flaw that needs to be changed. Sometimes, that instinct is correct, which makes any smaller instance, like Nicky prodding at Mikey’s self-repetition, feel like the deep betrayal it is to Mikey. When he walks off, Mikey isn’t giving himself an excuse to be somewhere else when Nicky dies, he’s done trying to remember why he gave this guy so many chances to begin with.

May still finds the time to flex her comedic chops through the tragedy. The name Mikey and Nicky is a wink and nod to her longtime comedic collaborator and friend Mike Nichols, best known for directing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate. Nichols and May were the progenitors of modern improv comedy, opening the door for groups like SNL and UCB to follow. One of the funniest jokes in the movie is also its most crushing. During his first and only face-to-face conversation with his wife Annie at the very end of the movie, Mikey asks her if he repeats himself a lot. She responds: “What?” And he’s forced to repeat himself yet again. Throughout the next five minutes of Falk’s perfectly meek monologue, we learn that his wife knows next to nothing about him besides his relationship with Nicky, a relationship she helps him end for good.

Nicky’s real fatal flaw was taking Mikey for granted one too many times. He was convinced that Mikey would take him back, no matter how hard they bickered, so sure of himself that you can tell he initially believed that Mikey wasn’t home. Once Nicky realizes the game’s up, his bravado quickly devolves into the groveling desperation we only got a real glimpse of during his paranoid ramblings at the beginning of the movie. Nicky can’t even realize what Mikey’s done for him in his final moments, too caught up in the one time his pal didn’t help him out that he can’t fathom thinking about all the times he tried to. Mikey’s no saint either, he’s an abusive, philandering, entitled piece of work who ignores everyone around him for a guy who derides him behind his back. Despite these flaws, it’s much easier to sympathize with the guy trying to get his old friend back, even though that person might not exist anymore.

When I saw the 50th anniversary of Mikey and Nicky at Film at Lincoln Center, I planned on watching the movie with a couple friends. Both plans fell through due to poor timing, which certainly altered (and likely enhanced) my experience with it. Regardless of the twinge of disappointment I got when I realized I was gonna see a movie about male relationships without any of my guys around, that was the best way to experience it. Forced to consider the times when I’ve been a shitty friend or been there way too long for a shitty friend. Forced to type that paragraph about how you miss a friend you’ve drifted away from just to delete it and ask how they’re doing.

There’s something about this movie that makes people want to talk and write about it. Maybe it’s because that’s easier than telling our friends how we actually feel.

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Beyond his legendary screen career, De Niro — alongside producing partners Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff — attempted to chart a path toward media moguldom in 2002 by launching the Tribeca Film Festival. It was a noble, urgent triage mission meant to economically and culturally revitalize a Lower Manhattan neighborhood that had been quite literally obliterated by the September 11 attacks. The inaugural festival opened with About a Boy, a Hugh Grant comedy, and featured a slate of classic New York films curated by Martin Scorsese. It even hosted a high-profile charity screening of Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones that directly benefited local families affected by the attacks. Mixing mainstream studio fare with independent surprises, the event was a massive triumph, rapidly cementing itself as a vital fixture of both the New York cultural landscape and the international festival circuit.

However, Tribeca’s fast, early expansion relied heavily on De Niro’s personal celebrity and a singular, localized pitch: healing post-9/11 Manhattan. Critics noted as early as 2016 that once Lower Manhattan had completely paved over its physical and economic scars, the festival struggled to define its identity beyond that original emergency mandate. Constantly trapped in the shadow of the Cannes Film Festival, which takes place just weeks prior, Tribeca repeatedly failed to articulate its permanent creative necessity.

Now celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary, the Tribeca Festival (which pointedly dropped “Film” from its moniker in 2020) appears to have completely surrendered its soul to corporate sycophancy. Its landmark edition grabbed headlines almost exclusively for the wrong reasons, dominated by two massive controversies. First, the festival sparked widespread outrage and calls for an industry boycott by admitting Dreams of Violets — a fully AI-generated, live-action feature film with no traditional cast or crew — into its main competition. Second, the festival was forced to publicly condemn the “offensive and unacceptable” behavior of two red-carpet guests who mocked Palestinian victims of sexual violence. Why they were invited in the first place is anyone’s guess. While a handful of stellar documentaries and indie comedies populated the margins, the festival’s artistic output largely landed with a thud.

This creative decline has been building for years, traceable back to a pivotal structural shift in 2019. That was the year James Murdoch (having recently exited Fox Corp following Disney’s $71 billion acquisition of 21st Century Fox) purchased a controlling stake in Tribeca’s parent company, Tribeca Enterprises, through his investment firm Lupa Systems. Murdoch’s mandate was overtly expansionist and tech-forward. In the official acquisition announcement, Jane Rosenthal openly celebrated the “valuable expertise” their new corporate partners brought as they looked to “scale and strategically grow Tribeca.” Murdoch, whose similarities to Succession’s Kendall Roy are too many to count, also had something to prove.

The moment venture capital took the wheel, the festival’s already decaying identity fractured. By 2021, the event added a dedicated gaming category (much to frequent guest Fran Lebowitz’s public dismay) and acquired such artistic powerhouses as the branded-content production outfit m ss ng p eces, which yes, is what it’s called. Once-ignored sideshows like Tribeca X — a marketplace and competition specifically designed for commercial advertisements and branded corporate content — were aggressively expanded into marquee features of the festival.

To be fair, Tribeca always maintained a forward-looking relationship with emerging technology. In the mid-2010s, as social media platforms matured into viable spaces for creative expression, Tribeca was among the first institutional gatekeepers to legitimize the medium. It programmed experimental Vine shorts as early as 2013 and introduced dedicated Snapchat strands by 2016. Its New Online Work (N.O.W.) section, established in 2014, served as a genuine launching pad for independent creators; its alumni include the Duplass brothers and the minds behind High Maintenance, a web series eventually bought and expanded by HBO. These early initiatives were not inherently cynical. They reflected a brief, optimistic cultural window — call it the dream of Obama’s America — where independent creativity and democratic platforms seemed to be converging to break the monopoly of traditional studio gatekeepers. For a moment, however fleeting, technology and art seemed to be marching toward something resembling an egalitarian future.

Then the floor fell out. Following the political upheavals of 2016, the promise of a democratic digital landscape disintegrated into an ecosystem of algorithmic gatekeeping and data extraction. When independent artists cannot afford to create – or their visibility is entirely decided by opaque, proprietary feeds – art simply dies unmade. This systemic erosion accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. When physical venues shuttered and humanity was forced indoors, the internet did not liberate the independent creator; it trapped them inside a surveillance economy. Massive tech conglomerates and corporate aggregators transformed our isolation into unprecedented leverage by harvesting audience data and cracking down on distribution, all while hollowing out the creators themselves. Tribeca’s submission to this new regime is not an isolated tragedy, but a microcosm of a broader rot: the financialization of culture by Big Tech.

Consider the parallel trajectory of A24. For a decade, the studio carefully positioned itself as a cool, fiercely protective sanctuary for auteur-driven indie cinema. Millions of (so-called) cinephiles bought their branded merchandise and trusted their logo, viewing A24 as a crucial bulwark against the soulless franchise factories of Disney and Warner Bros. Yet, beneath that curated boutique exterior lay an immense foundation of private equity. Recently, a massive funding round led by Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital valued the “indie” darling at a staggering $3.5 billion. The inevitable consequence of this financialization arrived just last week, when A24 announced a $75 million research partnership with Google DeepMind, inviting the tech titan directly into its production pipelines to co-develop artificial intelligence filmmaking tools.

Just as Tribeca justified admitting an actorless, crewless generative film into competition under the guise of elevating new forms of storytelling, A24 defended its Google alliance by claiming it merely wanted a “seat at the table” to shape how the technology evolves. It is impossible to take these corporate platitudes at face value. While cynicism is a cheap currency, believing an independent studio (such that it is…) can safely sleep with Google is pure delusion; they are willingly partnering with the very infrastructure designed to replace human labor. We may have loosened the grip of old Hollywood gatekeepers, but Big Tech is waiting in the wings to lock the chains even tighter.

There is an undeniable, bitter irony in seeing De Niro’s Lower Manhattan festival become the poster child for what happens when art is utterly consumed by finance. The neighborhood that once fostered bohemian radicals was systematically transformed into an exclusive, highly capitalized enclave of the ultra-wealthy. De Niro’s own public persona — once the definitive face of gritty, uncompromised New York toughness — has undergone an identical corporate sanitization. Perhaps this total financialization of art was always inevitable, though the continued, post-COVID prestige of the Sundance Film Festival, similarly founded by a legendary actor, suggests that alternative paths were possible.

In the climax of Martin Scorsese’s Casino, De Niro’s character, Sam “Ace” Rothstein, watches the gritty, mob-built Las Vegas he meticulously managed get systematically demolished. It is replaced by something glossier, safer, and entirely fake. Looking out at the neon corporate landscape, Ace laments that the town he loved has been reduced to nothing more than a sterile “theme park.” Twenty-five years after its conception, the Tribeca Festival is living out its own version of that corporate handover. At least we can all rest easy knowing that De Niro’s growing family is well cared for, cinema be damned.

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It disturbed me in a way I don’t usually feel coming out of a movie. I wasn’t terrified or thrilled. I was numbed. Only by walking for blocks with my friend was I was able to calm the instinctive urge I felt to reject it. Only then could I process what I saw.

In what is basically a monkey’s paw story, critics and proponents of the film agree that the overall structure is simple and the beats are predictable. One can feel the pages of the script turning with every new reveal of the wish’s curse-like power. The film is almost grotesque in its predictability; yet, Obsession fits comfortably into the trends of contemporary horror. The film illuminates our increasingly isolated desires that hide within the terrifying recesses of our home. It follows a route set by other cinematic horror giants, Talk to Me, Barbarian and Weapons, as well as earnest attempts at the horror of modern romance like Companion.

The story follows the naive Bear, short for Baron, who copes with life through painkillers and belief in a higher power called love. After practicing confessing his feelings to his coworker, he finds his cat Sandy dead from eating his oxycontin medication. He later makes a thoughtless wish that inexplicably comes true and is granted immense power that proves to be more than he can handle.

The style of the movie balances between equal parts horror and comedy. Not quite an homage, the story is extremely reminiscent of the paperback horror novels pf R.L. Stine. Scenes from Obsession either leave you hiding behind your popcorn or laughing out loud. Most of this relies on the performance of the lead actress Inde Navarrette, who embodies a living curse as a sycophantic companion, a needy child that can be turned on and off with the right words.

The allusions to artificial intelligence and AI companionship are fairly clear. Its not hard to see the similarities of the slick conventional cinematography in Obsession with national commercial campaigns trying to make doorbell cameras into virtual neighborhood watches (optimistic take) and voice activated assistant into part of everyday life. Rather than indulge the fantasy of a virtual sex slave, a la Ex Machina, Obsession asks what if you turned a human into a desperate chat bot who had all the mental functions of your grandma’s Facebook feed.

Obsession never indulges in the fantasy of a girlfriend. As soon as the wish takes place, Nikki is immediately incapable of expressing anything but obsessive fascination. Bear can tell this is wrong, despite the brief montage of their honeymoon phase, because he insistent on asking if she truly loves him. All of their conversations, post wish, are circular and feedback in on things Bear has said or desires for himself. Nikki fails to be a self-sustaining person, and Bear becomes her keeper, a role he both rejects and relishes. When she fails to be a good person, he doesn’t renege the curse but attempts to correct her or alter her feelings.

Early in his unbalanced relationship, Bear tries to correct the wish but ends up calling a hotline that suggests he kills himself. Its a scary yet chuckle worthy scene. He continues to try and augment the curse’s reality. Attempting to fine tune and update the algorithm of his cursed girlfriend just creates further disturbing realizations—horrifying moments of frozen smiling and sleep watching—that act as real life matrix glitches. Bear has created a synthetic Sims-1-like relationship where he has trapped himself in the pool and deleted the ladder.

What Bear wants doesn’t just affect him; it affects everyone around him. His choice to ask for someone to be obsessed with him rather than be obsessed himself mirrors the circlejerk of incel subs of yore, before manosphere and looksmaxing became the goal. The problem doesn’t lie in himself or his depression, but rather his preference to stay inactive, inert, even while holding all this power in his hands. There is a chilling scene where he can act with empathy, but once again prioritizes his own needs. Is loving him really so awful?

Obsession isn’t profound by any means, oftentimes hitting the point over the head with a hammer (or brick). But it is fun because of how creepy and unrelenting it is. Horror has been refined into the most current cinematic genre, a cultural product that is meant to be taken in sips and digested lazily with cinematic perusal. Oftentimes we treat our scary movies not just as popcorn flicks but deeply psychological in nature and as necessary as the news once was. If most contemporary horror is a digestif to an increasingly unpalatable world, then Obsession is a movie you choke on.

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Read more about the festival from Skirt Chasers Local below. Ticket links are at the bottom. See you this weekend!

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Pride is over. July is Gay Shame Month, and Skirt Chasers Local is hosting.

What are we supposed to do with the skeletons in our closets? You know them—the self-hating homosexuals, the loathsome creatures who bring it on themselves. The ones we’re embarrassed by, who give us a bad reputation?

In anticipation of Skirt Chasers Local Issue #3: Gay Shame Month, this film festival features a selection of films our team believes deserve attention and reverence, yet fit uncomfortably within “Pride” as the only acceptable flavor of expression.

Skirt Chasers Local is a lesbian and feminist arts and culture magazine based in Brooklyn and Queens. Issue Three is centered on opinions, stories, and reviews that don’t fit comfortably within the concept of “Pride.”

Section One at Roxy Cinema:
Classics of Gay Shame

These are foundational films in the “gay shame genre.” As homosexuality became acceptable to name in English-language films, these two works present the spectacle of homosexual shame, concealment, and repression (perhaps as an attempt to gain sympathy for homosexuals and their plight.)

Victim (1961, Basil Dearden) is cited as the first English-language film to use the term “homosexual.” It stars the closeted Dirk Bogarde as a successful barrister blackmailed with knowledge of a former gay relationship.

The Boys in the Band (1970, William Friedkin) follows a homosexual enclave gathering for a birthday party on the Upper East Side, which explodes into a cathartic, drunken spiral of finger-pointing and collective shame.

Section Two at Low Cinema:
Wildcards

Desperate Living (1977, John Waters) features the gay shame location Mortville, a shantytown dumping ground for social outcasts and perverts ruled by the evil, shame-inducing Queen Carlotta. After killing her husband, Peggy and Grizelda flee to Mortville, where they shack up with the deranged lesbian couple Mole McHenry and Muffy St. Jacques, the “most beautiful woman in Mortville.”

Dottie Gets Spanked (1993, Todd Haynes) was suggested for the festival by Todd Haynes. A shy young boy becomes fixated on an I Love Lucy-type television show called Dottie Gets Spanked. His love of the program signals an interest in the domestic sphere, causing him to be chastised by his father and ostracized by his peers. His fascination with the show becomes a form of early sexual acknowledgment and expression.

(Dottie Gets Spanked will be followed by a wildcard secret short film, which will be introduced on the night of its screening.)

Section Three at Millennium Film Workshop

This program features Fireworks, Lot in Sodom, and Damned If You Don’t. This trio of experimental short films centers “dissatisfied dreamers” (as Kenneth Anger describes the protagonist of Fireworks) who fear eternal damnation for expressing their sexual desires.

Fireworks (1947) portrays a sailor whose desires literally explode into a violent cascade. In Lot in Sodom (1933), Lot resists the temptations of homosexuality and sin in Sodom and Gomorrah. In Damned If You Don’t (1987), a Catholic nun grapples with her repressed desire for a young woman. These three films will be screened in succession.

Ticket Links:

July 16^th at Roxy Cinema: The Boys in the Band

July 17^th at Roxy Cinema: Victim

July 18^th at Low Cinema: Desperate Living

July 18^th at Low Cinema: Dottie Gets Spanked + Wildcard

July 19^th at Millennium Film Workshop: Experimental Shorts Program

Watching A Heart in Winter and Nelly and Mr. Arnaud, I was reminded of a Lucia Berlin story where in a moment of queasy tenderness a woman licks the blood from her teenage lover’s eyelids. While neither of these movies are as grody, they remain stories about people who “should not be in love” as Roger Ebert wrote. In A Heart in Winter, a reserved violin repairman, Stéphane (Daniel Auteuil), is pursued by his boss’s violinist girlfriend, Camille (Emmanuelle Béart). Whether Stéphane has engaged in a game of seduction or whether Camille has misinterpreted his gestures is ambiguous. When Camille tells Stéphane that she wants him, he responds by revealing his supposed inability for romantic love. This does not go down well with Camille who understandably feels duped. Many glasses of wine later, she publicly confronts Stéphane and humiliates him into realizing his cruelty.

In Nelly and Mr. Arnaud, Emmanuel Béart as Nelly is this time desired by Michel Serrault’s Pierre Arnaud. Nelly is young, broke, and unhappily married, and Arnaud is old, rich, and divorced. They are reintroduced to each other by Nelly’s aunt, and during their conversation, Nelly reluctantly tells him about her money troubles. Arnaud offers to pay off all of her debts and what’s most confounding is that he does so with no strings attached. Nelly accepts the offer but still feeling indebted to Arnaud also accepts a job transcribing his memoirs. Passions flare up between the two yet not all of them are romantic. In fact, most of the movie consists of the two butting heads interrupted by the occasional moment of intimacy. An argument near the end of the movie sets them especially at odds, and after they reconcile as friends Arnaud makes the decision to embark on a tour of the world to avoid falling further for Nelly.

An El Pais article described the plot of Nelly and Mr. Arnaud as “sleazy”, and to be truthful, so is A Heart in Winter despite taking place amidst the French cultural elite. Taken as works of sociology, these two films portray the French as people who live life in all-caps and are supposedly exempt from the moral quandaries stopping the rest of us from doing so. But there’s a scene in Nelly and Mr. Arnaud after Nelly takes up the transcription job in which Arnaud assures her that he “won’t take advantage”, so who really knows. Sautet’s romances are nonetheless distinctive for how they defy our moral expectations. As opposed to a similarly sleazy movie like Alain Cavalier’s La Chamade, where a woman reunites with her rich husband after a failed affair, when Camille returns to Stéphane’s boss at the end of A Heart in Winter, we get the sense that she’d prefer not to.

Often, it’s the amorality of Sautet’s characters that rewards them and the judgment of others that beats them back into a lifeless conformity. The Cahiers du Cinéma crowd interpreted Sautet’s empathy towards middle class amorality as perverse and frankly didn’t think that he was mean enough to his characters. In Senses of Cinema, A. Jay Adler disputed that Sautet was uncritical by writing that if “the pursuit of wealth is an attempt to materially conquer the world” then the “Bourgeois comfort [of Sautet’s characters] is about shelter from the storm”. I’d argue that it’s somewhere in the middle. Sautet’s characters do have the recklessness of the affluent, but it’s a restrained kind of recklessness. We see this in a scene in Nelly and Mr. Arnaud, when while having dinner, both characters consider how they appear to other diners. “They must think I’m some kind of whore,” Nelly says. “Or rather, a gorgeous, courageous professional,” Arnaud responds.

The dismissiveness of publications like Cahiers du Cinéma prevented Sautet’s films from gaining legs in the US and even in France where he became an overlooked force. But in 2024, Sautet’s centenary incited reappraisals of his work and it’s quite an interesting time to be rewatching Sautet. Maybe it’s the result of a media apparatus more focused on starting than seeing things through, but modern audiences want to know everything. What’s more, is that amorality itself has become a testy subject to explore. Common courtesy calls for our characters to be decipherable but Sautet rejects that notion, opting to draw an almost opaque screen over the interior worlds of his characters. It’s ironic to think that decades after the leftist fervor that ostracized Sautet died down, his work finds itself reappraised at a time when his style is going out of vogue. While bringing a director into the present is usually warranted by their renewed or belated importance, except for a part of the 70s, Sautet never fit in anywhere. Like his characters, the circumstances were never quite right for him.

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In his essay On the Sufferings of the World, Arthur Schopenhauer claims that the only concept in the whole of the Old Testament for which he has any affinity is the notion of the fall: “There seems to be no better explanation for our existence than that it is the result of some false step, some sin for which we are paying the penalty.”

In his new book, Post-Catastrophe Film, Stephen Lee Naish draws a distinction among disaster movies. There are those which focus on prelapsarian life and those which focus on the postlapsarian. The former are represented by films like Godzilla (1954), Towering Inferno (1974), and San Andreas (2017). These films leverage enormous budgets, practical and virtual effects to symbolize the recklessness of transgressions that might otherwise seem mundane.

Godzilla reveals the awesome and destructive power of hydrogen bombs, which at that point in history, were liberally being tested and proliferated.Towering Inferno actualizes the fear that your building’s developer has cut corners on the electrical work. San Andreas centers on the hubris of building a nation’s greatest cities along a major fault line.

Naish notes that all these films follow a particular eschatology. Let’s explore this through a hyper-“localized” disaster film, Jaws — a film where the true antagonist is a cartel of beach hotels and tchotchke shops that don’t want to lose a summer season. First comes “the arrival of the thing” where the film’s nemesis is introduced (the first shark attack). Second, the central character witnesses an act of great destruction (a swimmer is consumed). Third, “a conference is held” between the relevant authorities to create a plan of action, oftentimes despite the protagonists’ antipathy for these institutions (a bounty on the shark’s head). Fourth, destruction becomes more widespread (more swimmers go down). Fifth, a unified coalition of all the disparate principles is formed to banish the threat once and for all (Quint, Hooper, and Police Chief Brody get in the boat and kill the damn thing). Oftentimes the symbolic beauty of this unity is embodied by the protagonist who is exceedingly brilliant or buff or just plain HANDSOME.

We love these films because they are ultimately democratic. They reveal our capacity to overcome divisions of gender and race and politics, and in doing so they create an avatar of a Divine Humanity, capable of destroying monsters, and putting out fires, and equalling the relentless power of nature if not surpassing it.

After establishing this distinction, Naish focuses on a different kind of disaster film. That of the Post-Catastrophe. The protagonist of the aforementioned genus relies on their expertise as a navy diver, or firefighter, or helicopter pilot as a source of power in crisis, or at least relies on the expertise of a committee. The post-catastrophe protagonist (Cillian Murphy in 28 Days Later or Viggo Mortensen in The Road, who was once a bike messenger or an accountant, is not the ideal candidate to face the challenges of their environment. This character relies on a clumsy and hard-earned survival instinct, which involves drinking urine or packing wounds with gunpowder to cauterize them. Their expertise does more to signal their estrangement from their surroundings than their familiarity, and even their moments of reprieve bear a taste of tragedy. They live as a cast of wandering Hamlets but with no clear avenue to vengeance.

In the Post-Catastrophe film, the cacophony of voices that deliberate a course of action (the bickering between the shark hunters) is replaced by the humming silence of a single individual or family, contemplating the overwhelming odds that they are up against. What they want most is to reclaim the world that they remember and to share that birthright with their children, but there is no repairing the addled mind of a zombie, no washing away the blighted land of a nuclear disaster. There is no returning to Eden.

Naish’s book explores the recurring motifs of this genre comprehensively, with chapters covering the symbolic content of AI, interplanetary colonization, and post-apocalyptic loneliness. Throughout all, he contends that the current media landscape has a way of projecting a degree of normalcy on contemporary events, particularly concerning changes to global weather patterns, while the planet is clearly on a horrible trajectory. It is in its focus on quotidian life that the Post-Catastrophe film reveals its virtue, showing how abnormal the norm can really be. Within the zombie genre, for instance, Naish observes that survivors effectively demonstrate two capacities. The capacity to yearn for a world which is damaged beyond repair, and also the capacity for modern individuals to learn and even relish a life in close harmony with nature: “Post-catastrophe narratives open the door to imagining new possibilities — alternative futures that challenge the inevitability of collapse and encourage us to reimagine how we might live differently before these grim narratives become our lived reality.”

There is a world where through compassion, unlikely friendship, and the respect of expertise, we overcome and avert disaster. There is another world where disaster, the relative acceptance of it, and the use of fantasy, not as an aspirational tool but as a means of momentary escape, is constitutive of day to day life. The distinction drawn in Stephen Lee Naish’s Post-Catastrophe Film invites the question, which of these worlds is yours?

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Marilyn Monroe’s centennial asks us to stop treating the “blonde bombshell” as a single, static emblem and instead to watch how she worked that emblem on screen. Across the comic films that made her a household name—Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How to Marry a Millionaire, Some Like It Hot—Monroe built a public self through gestures, pauses, and glances that function as technique. Paired with the darker, more interior films, such as Niagara, Don’t Bother to Knock, and The Misfits, those techniques reveal a performer who shaped, stretched and sometimes quietly unraveled her own star persona. Seen together, these works show persona as material, something to be crafted, tested, and reworked. The centennial invites us to rewatch with an eye for the small, decisive choices that made her image both durable and endlessly reinterpretable.

The “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” number in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is often reduced to costume and spectacle, yet watched closely, it reads as a choreography of attention. The set is a glittering tableau and the camera is a steady eye that invites consumption. Monroe’s work inside that frame is about modulation. She times a blink, lets a beat hang, and tilts her head in ways that puncture the tableau’s surface. These micro choices convert objectification into staged commentary: she performs desirability while managing its terms. The routine becomes less an instance of being looked at and more an argument about what it means to be looked at. Choreography and costume provide the visible scaffolding, but the decisive work is the interior rhythm she imposes. That rhythm, small, repeatable, and precise, turns spectacle into character and makes the number endlessly quotable in later pop culture because it is built from a clear gestural vocabulary that can be lifted and recontextualized.

Comedy, for Monroe, is not accidental charm, but craft. In How to Marry a Millionaire she negotiates space with co‑stars, calibrating looks and pauses so that desirability reads as practiced technique, rather than spontaneous trait. The film’s ensemble scenes are exercises in spatial timing—how she positions herself in relation to others, how her pauses invite the camera to linger, and how she uses costume and props as extensions of her body. These are deliberate choices, rehearsed and exact, that allow her screen self to hold its own within a crowded frame. Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot depends on Monroe’s ability to make broad farce feel intimate. Sugar Kane’s apparent naiveté emerges from calculated physical beats, such as a tilt of the head, a misdirected glance, or a mere beat of silence that summons upon the camera to complete the thought. When Wilder’s comedy asks for repetition and rhythm, Monroe supplies them with a consistency that reads as method. Her timing, those inhalations and half smiles, shapes audience sympathy and comedic cadence. Far from incidental, her comic work is a toolkit of staged techniques that create a persona both legible and elastic, capable of being read as innocent, knowing, or both at once.

What the comedies make visible is a performer who understands how to stage herself for the camera and the crowd, and that understanding helps explain why her image travels so easily into other media. The same clarity of gesture that makes Sugar Kane in Some Like It Hot or Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes instantly recognizable also makes their poses available to fashion spreads, album covers, and memes. A raised eyebrow, a sidelong glance, the particular way she holds a glass or leans against a doorway become shorthand for a certain kind of femininity. Pop culture can quote Marilyn so fluently because she built her screen persona from markers simple enough to imitate, yet layered enough to carry irony, desire, and self‑awareness simultaneously.

Those same skills can be turned toward rupture. Niagara weaponizes Technicolor and landscape to fix attention on Monroe’s body. The film’s framing turns her walk across the frame into a cinematic sign that both sells and confines. The long lateral movements and the way the camera watches her make her presence a spectacle of motion and menace. The film amplifies glamour even as it narrows the range of roles audiences expected of her, exposing the limits of the studio’s construction: the blonde as a visual commodity, beautiful and dangerous, readable in a single repeated motif. Yet even within that constraint, Monroe’s performance carries calculation. The walk is not simply offered to the camera but measured, almost overdetermined, as if she is showing us how the image is being built in real time.

Don’t Bother to Knock pushes the studio blonde into psychological claustrophobia. In cramped motel interiors Monroe’s Nell registers volatility through small, unsettling idiosyncrasies: a laugh that curdles into silence, a hand that lingers too long, a voice that falters at the edge of a sentence. These are not mere symptoms of instability, but choices that expose the brittle architecture of the blonde persona when placed under pressure. The film forces us to see how performance can fracture into something dangerous and unpredictable. Where the comedies rely on rhythm and repetition to produce a stable, marketable image, this film shows what happens when those rhythms are interrupted and the same tools of timing and gaze are used to unsettle, rather than reassure. The screen identity that once promised pleasure now carries the possibility of harm, and Monroe’s work makes that shift feel like a logical extension of the image rather than a break from it.

The Misfits, filmed at the end of Monroe’s life, reframes persona as something worn and elegiac. Huston’s camera lingers on pauses and faltering notes, and the residues of performance, those hesitations, repeated inflections, and a voice that sometimes fails, become expressive material. In the Nevada desert, among characters who are themselves adrift, Marilyn’s movements read as the history of a public self that has been performed too often to remain seamless. The persona here is not triumphant, but weathered, and the comic tools she once used to command attention are now traces of labor. A smile arrives a fraction too late, a line is delivered with a catch in the throat, and those imperfections feel less like mistakes than like the visible cost of having been looked at for so long. They are not failures to be pitied, but evidence of an artist who can turn the mechanics of image into a language of vulnerability.

If we accept persona as practice, then Monroe’s afterlife in popular culture is not a separate phenomenon but the continuation of the same work. Her image, those calibrated looks, the breathy inflection, the white dress caught by an updraft in The Seven Year Itch, has been endlessly sampled, quoted and reworked because it is, at base, a readable repertoire. Pop art flattened her into an icon and made her a subject for repetition; fashion borrows her silhouettes and gestures to sell new iterations of glamour; advertising and music videos imitate her poses to signal a particular kind of desirability. Even the internet’s rapid remix culture treats Monroe the way she treated performance, as material to be staged, recontextualized and made to mean something new. A single publicity still can be a costume, a meme, a protest image or an emblem depending on how it is framed. That malleability is the reason she remains culturally useful. Her persona was never a closed set of traits, but a suite of theatrical devices that others can adopt, invert, or weaponize.

This is also why debates about agency and exploitation around Monroe’s image persist. The same repeatable gestures that made her legible to audiences made her legible to marketers, and the studio’s machinery amplified those moves into a commodity. Read closely, the beats themselves often contain a subversive logic: a blink that undercuts a line, a pause that invites the viewer to supply meaning, a smile that reads as both invitation and irony. These small acts of modulation are where Monroe’s agency can be found, not in the myth of total control, but in the way she used limited resources to make performance do more than the studio intended. Her screen persona is both a product of a system and a record of her negotiations with that system.

At 100, Marilyn’s endurance is less about nostalgia than about method. The centennial invites us to rewatch, not to mythologize, but to attend to the small, decisive choices—the blink, the pause, the tilt—that made Marilyn Monroe an actor whose image continues to shape how we stage gender, fame, and self. Her legacy is not a single look frozen in time, but a lexicon of moves that can be amplified, inverted, and allowed to fray. In that repertoire lies the reason she remains, a century on, a figure we keep returning to, not because she is a relic, but because she taught us how performance itself can be a way of thinking about who we are and how we are seen.

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American actor Jon Hamm is a lot of things. An Emmy winner, a former teacher, and an (allegedly) violent hazer back in college, Hamm has worn many hats across his 55 years on earth. But perhaps the thing he is most known for—the trait which defines him in the popular consensus and delights audiences worldwide—is simple: Hamm is damn hot. His perfect hairline and chiseled chin hearken back to a classical ideal of male handsomeness, and he’s made a career leaning into it. In his initial comedic turn on a brief 30 Rock arc, Hamm plays a person so hot that he never needs to wait in line, making it clear he was a self-aware star willing to be made fun of. In Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, the latest comedy from director David Wain (Wet Hot American Summer, They Came Together) and co-writer Ken Marino (Party Down, The Other Two), Wain and Marino take full advantage of that willingness.

Hamm plays himself—or rather, the idea of himself—as small-town girl Gail Daughtry (Zoey Deutch) comes to LA with one mission: to sleep with Don Draper. After her fiancé (and high-school sweetheart) uses his pass to “do the deed” with Jennifer Aniston (who is in town to promote a terrible book and, within seconds, agrees to have sex with the first man who asks) Gail leaves the Midwest town she’s known her whole life in order to find fame, and fuck it, in the City of Angels.

While this set-up could lead to a mundane rom-com, fans of Wain’s previous work know that his approach to comedy is one of pure absurdity: no two scenes ever play out the way you think, and there is not a second of dead air. Wain does not make comedies set in the real world, but rather a heightened, wacky, and highly stylized version of it. From the openly hostile narrator who doubles as the town’s mailman (Fred Melamed) to the characters so clichéd the film essentially winks at you (Gail’s best friend, for example, is a witty gay man named Otto, going to LA for a hair convention, naturally) Gail Daughtry is not a “smart” comedy, but rather a parody of that entire concept, and of the self-serious high esteem with which Hollywood holds itself.

Wain’s LA reminds us of the late ‘90s and early 2000s, with crazed tour guides on every block and a cult-like worship of CAA, the alleged center of the entertainment universe. Thankfully, there are no jokes about IP or mergers, TikToks or Gen-Z: Wain’s LA is frozen in time, and the movie is much better for it. Freed from any obligation to be current, it gets to be gleefully itself, carving out a tone which is both wholly unique and a welcome throwback to Wain’s earlier works.

Wain and Marino’s script never makes the easy joke, and although the film has an abundance of cameos, it never veers into “inside baseball” territory. The highlight is easily John Slattery, who first appears in what seems like a cameo—playing a version of himself who hasn’t been hired in a decade and spends his days waiting for Jon Hamm to text him back—before slowly becoming the film’s unlikely backbone. Soon he joins Gail’s gang of adventurers (a group suspiciously similar to Dorothy Gale’s friends in The Wizard of Oz) and transforms into an unlikely action hero, after our motley crew must fight an army of goons intent on stealing Gail’s suitcase, which, due to a mix-up at the airport, contains plans to end the world (obviously!). Slattery plays all of it completely straight, and slots perfectly into Wain’s already established tone.

Despite its brisk 90-minute runtime, Gail Daughtry can occasionally feel front-loaded, and the back half becomes a bit of a slog, for no number of gags or zaniness can make a “fish out of water” story feel entirely fresh. There’s a sense that Wain did this intentionally, allowing the algorithmic, almost rehearsed nature of the film to comment on the modern state of Hollywood. When Hamm finally appears, he is initially suave and intelligent, asking the group to pitch him a new film before he considers sleeping with Gail. Soon, though, the curtain is pulled back, and Hamm becomes a dumb, loveable, and unproductive oaf. A one-to-one metaphor for Hollywood it is not, but there’s more weight to the film than a first glance may suggest.

Ultimately, Gail Daughtry often feels like an excuse for Wain and co. to have fun and drag us along for it. With this being his first film to be released in theaters in over a decade, and his former comedy group The State now more famous than ever, it is hard to find any fault in that. Not every movie needs to reinvent the wheel, and Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass does a fantastic job at just being itself. In a comedy landscape that increasingly feels shattered and inauthentic, broken by the confines of modern streaming, there’s genuine relief in a film that wants audiences to show up, check their brain at the door, and have a good time in a dimly lit room. I can think of much worse ways to spend an evening.

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The movie asks existential questions and the characters seem unhappy, but watching the film is strictly pleasurable. Hellman described the script he hired Rudy Wurlitzer to rewrite as “a cross-country race between two cars,” and Wurlitzer later said that everyone in “Two-Lane Blacktop” exists “at the edge of a ledge.” Over the course of the film, the main characters travel east from Los Angeles and spend roughly 45 minutes of the movie’s runtime in New Mexico. New Mexico is where the cross-country race starts; because of that, it is where the character GTO (Warren Oates) first speaks to The Driver (James Taylor), The Mechanic (Dennis Wilson), and The Girl (Laurie Bird), a relationship with conversations and gestures I have repeated with friends for decades.

Rudy Wurlitzer wrote two of my favorite screenplays. He was unhappy with the movie Sam Peckinpah made out of “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” which Monte Hellman was interested in directing. But because “Two-Lane Blacktop,” Wurlitzer’s previous screenplay, and Hellman’s previous film, had not been a financial success for Universal, Hellman, in Wurlitzer’s words, “was forced to bow out.”

The opening sequence of Peckinpah’s final preview cut of “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” is as good as movies get: an unhappy reunion of now-distant former pals, where one understands, although everyone else hates him for it, that he is now a different man than he was when he was friends with each of them.

“Feels like times have changed,” Pat says to Billy, who likes things as they were.

“In the writer’s version,” wrote Wurlitzer, “Billy and Garrett never met until the final scene, when Garrett killed him. The director wanted their relationship in front, so that everyone would know they were old buddies.”

I love “Pat Garrett” and “Two-Lane Blacktop” in part because of Wurlitzer’s contributions as an actor in each film. In “Pat Garrett,” he plays O’Folliard, a hired hand alongside Billy at a paycheck ranching job who is shot by a posse assisting Pat. In “Two-Lane Blacktop,” Wurlitzer’s character, credited as Hot Rod Driver, owns a Ford hot rod. James Taylor’s character bullies Hot Rod Driver into a race outside of Santa Fe.

In both cases, Wurlitzer plays a sucker: prideful, rash, ill-tempered (”I ain’t in this for my health, hateful,” O’Folliard tells Billy), doomed to failure. His death throes in “Pat Garrett” are the funniest antics in a graceful film full of warmth and humor. His dressing-down by a romantic interest (Jaclyn Hellman) after he loses the race to The Driver in “Two-Lane Blacktop” is embarrassing enough that it elicits one of the only moments in the film when The Driver exhibits sympathy for someone.

“Pat Garrett” is set in New Mexico but was filmed mostly in the Mexican state of Durango. But New Mexico is unmistakably itself in “Two-Lane Blacktop.” The Girl asks for bus fare among tourists in front of the Palace of the Governors, constructed in 1610. Wurlitzer is halfway through a green chile cheeseburger outside of Bert’s Burger Bowl, on North Guadalupe, when The Driver disparages Hot Rod Driver’s Ford as “home grown.”

The exterior of La Fonda, a hotel just off the Santa Fe Plaza, appears at night in “Two-Lane Blacktop,” but The Driver, The Mechanic, and The Girl seem to eat and sleep in other places: a motel along Cerrillos Road, bars along Canyon Road and West Palace Street. Robert Montgomery shot parts of “Ride the Pink Horse” (1947) at La Fonda, which was designed by Isaac Rapp, famous for his “Santa Fe style,” with interiors designed by Mary Colter. Colter was the architect for the Fred Harvey Company’s Harvey Houses, restaurants—and later hotels—along Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway routes that efficiently served passengers better food than they usually got at stopovers.

On the heels of “See America First,” an early twentieth-century marketing campaign that encouraged wealthy Americans to tour the American West instead of Europe, the Fred Harvey Company moved into tourism. Some of the Indian Detours—one to three-day motor cruises that allowed Santa Fe Railway passengers to visit pueblos and archaeological sites around northern New Mexico—left from La Fonda. Bert’s Burger Bowl closed in 2015.

After my arrival in Albuquerque, I taught for a few years at a community college in Winslow, Arizona. From outside the modest cluster of school buildings that students commuted to from the Hopi Reservation, the Navajo Nation, or nearby Holbrook or Snowflake, I would often stand in the twilight of early spring or late summer and watch semi-trailer trucks travel along Interstate 40. From that particular vantage point, at that particular distance, the tires of the eighteen-wheelers were obscured by a gentle crest in the landscape, and the cabs and trailers of the trucks always seemed to glide over the surface of the Painted Desert. I could hear their engines, but they hummed, comfortingly, like air conditioner condensers.

There is a photograph of Laurie Bird standing by the side of the road along New Mexico State Road 104, outside of Tucumcari, taken during a two-day shoot at the Ute Service Station that Michael Goodwin describes in a 1970 “Rolling Stone” article about “Two-Lane Blacktop.” Goodwin places Joni Mitchell, who was dating Taylor at the time, at the hotel in Tucumcari where everyone stayed, and I like to think Mitchell enjoyed the playfulness of the hand-painted exterior walls of the gas station, a local interpretation of indigenous art. Hired Native non-professionals sit and talk beside the bright red Coca-Cola cooler, although the movie does not subtitle what they say.

Gathered around the gas pumps, The Driver and GTO agree to race for pink slips, just after The Driver awkwardly opines to The Girl about cicadas.

The Girl isn’t interested. “We’ve got a better life, haven’t we?” she tells him.

In the distance, behind the actors and across the road, is a billboard for Pearl beer. Pearl was bottled in San Antonio, Texas, where I grew up. My grandfather worked there.

I’ve eaten at the Blake’s Lotaburger on South 1st Street in Tucumcari, just a few blocks from I-40, and the impression of travel along the freeway from any exit immediately off of it isn’t speed but repetition, closer to the accumulating thunderheads of summer afternoons or evening winds over the high plains, than the immediacy and uncertainty of asphalt and metal from inside a car.

It is raining when the modified Chevy and the stock GTO cross over into Oklahoma, and the sky isn’t as blue as it is in New Mexico for the rest of the film. The sky and the light are what I always notice. Whenever I watch “Two-Lane Blacktop,” I think of Warren Oates, Laurie Bird, and Dennis Wilson on the ground in Tucumcari and Santa Fe. I think of the highways I travel between places, of changes in regional rainfall patterns, and, as Hellman did, of the documentary records of narrative films. The lesson of the Interstate Highway System is that what today seems permanent was once brand-new, not monolithic but a simple exercise in legislation and time. Many of the filming locations in “Two-Lane Blacktop” are gone, but what endures is what accumulates at the edges, the work of men and women who paid attention to what was around them.

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Riley’s second film hitches a ride with the Velvet Gang (a trio played by Keke Palmer, Naomi Ackie, and Taylour Paige, each charming in their own unique way), a group of “boosters” who shoplift clothes from a monopolistic fashion chain and sell them at a discount price to the streets of Oakland. The group’s mini-heists provide loads of fun and racks of clothing, but never a sense of stability. The three stylish Robin Hoods always find themselves on the run, whether it be from the wrath of fashion mogul Christie Smith (played by a cartoonishly evil Demi Moore seeking revenge) or the inescapable ball of outstanding debt and rent barreling their way. However, the tide turns when a mysterious teleportation device and “situational accelerator” from China falls into their hands. This thingamajig grants them the opportunity to punch higher up and give more back to the community than they initially thought possible. As a self-proclaimed communist, Riley’s art not only reflects his politics but is constructed by them; formally free as they are unswayed by the capitalistic demands of the market. In an arid desert of derivative studio slop like Michael and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters is a refreshing oasis.

In some miraculous way, I Love Boosters manages to be even more outlandish and maximalist than Sorry to Bother You. It is nothing but a joy to watch a filmmaker so unbound by convention – it feels less like watching a filmmaker direct and more like someone playing with their endless collection of toys and ideas in a sandbox. A striking evolution from Riley’s first feature to his second is the abundance of visual comedy and physical slapstick humor akin to Buster Keaton’s films. There is an elaborate sequence that begins as a visual reference to Keaton jumping through the woman’s stomach in Sherlock Jr, which evokes a similar level of awe and wonder that audiences may have felt in 1924 watching Sherlock Jr.

The film also contains a hilarious running gag involving Lakeith Stanfield’s character, The Pinky Ring Guy. When Corvette (Keke Palmer) first catches a glimpse of The Pinky Ring Guy, she hears that he is a master of two things: cunnilingus and seductive eye contact. The audience thereupon gets a firsthand experience (unfortunately only) of the latter. Whenever Corvette is locked in his gaze, the screen itself begins to pulsate, as if the camera lens too were sweating from his smolder. Under this trance, the edges of the frame begin to loosen, and the background falls out of focus. The utter nonsense spewing out of The Pinky Ring Guy’s mouth is irrelevant when he is just so beautiful. Boots Riley understands, as did Lynne Ramsay with Die, My Love, that Stanfield is one of the hottest actors working today.

Every time Stanfield is on screen, he is also accompanied by a musical motif from the film’s eccentric score composed by the Tune-Yards. Their unique, colorful score could not have been a better companion to Boots Riley’s film. The score accentuates jokes and heightens emotional beats while also playfully weaving together with the film’s sound design. There is a cartoonish dissonance to its sound that recalls Johnny Greenwood’s scoring of One Battle After Another, adding immense texture and personality to the film. That’s only a taste of the flavors in I Love Boosters. Sprinkle in some quirky set design, a healthy dose of stop motion animation, and the greatest use of a Texas switch since Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and the result is not only one of the most imaginative films in recent years, but also one of the funniest.

The constant barrage of creativity and playfulness is reminiscent of Louis Malle’s chaotic Zazie Dans Le Metro. It is creativity almost to the point of incoherence. Riley’s excitement and eagerness to throw in idea after idea is entertaining, but as a result, the film can feel scattershot and sacrifice cohesion. Furthermore, the film can spread itself thin with its high volume of characters. The three leads generate palpable chemistry, while the rest of the supporting cast – Poppy Liu, Will Poulter, Eiza Gonzalez, and an unrecognizable Don Cheadle – all add as much color and vibrancy to the film as the costumes do. However, for as memorable and endearing as each character is, no one receives the deeper characterization they quite deserve. Most of the characters feel more like accessories to an outfit rather than another layer of clothing. Ultimately, it’s difficult to hold such grievances against a film that is just so damn fun and original. It’s hard to be mad at the layout of a candy shop when there’s just so much candy. Like the clothing stores that the Velvet Gang robs, the film is cluttered but offers an endless selection of items to enjoy.

While some will allege that cinema is in a perpetual state of dying, films like I Love Boosters provide a rejuvenating reminder that the art form is alive, thriving, and has much left to offer. However, as exciting and entertaining as Boots Riley’s hyperstylized filmmaking is, it also serves as a vehicle for delivering sharp political commentary to wider audiences. Inside this Trojan horse is a call to action: As the Warner Bros and Paramount merger proceeds, the film industry is at risk of devolving into a monopoly similar to Christie Smith’s fashion empire: a monopoly that silences unique, original voices that speak to power. I Love Boosters provides a heartening reminder that it is the filmmakers and audiences that hold the power, not the Christie Smiths, but only through organizing and solidarity can we exercise that strength.

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Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman, 8/26

Fight, Zatoichi, Fight (1964)

Runtime Watched: 684 minut

The eighth entry into the Zatoichi franchise is something of a mixed bag. Technically proficient but narratively unassuming, I had a difficult time ranking it.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. At first glance, you might think this is a Lone Wolf and Cub film, with Zatoichi escorting a baby to his father when the mother is killed after she is mistaken for our cane sword wielding protagonist. It’s something of a classic setup in the franchise: a person dies in front of Zatoichi, gives him a mission, he must fulfill it because of his good nature. The plot doesn’t really stand out and all the characters we’re introduced to fall flat.

I must include how I love the fact that we’re at a point now that Zato’s exploits are known so far and wide that we don’t need an explanation from the bad guys why they are after him and we don’t need to know who they are, we just accept it.

The film is an excellent portrayal of the blind swordsman’s soft, tender side. Plot aside, there’s a tender scene where he’s walking past a field and there’s a woman who is also with a baby. She’s singing a song about walking with your child when you pass a cripple (ironically, she doesn’t realize Zatoichi is nearby). After a little while of listening, he begins to sing along. It’s clearly a song he knows, whether he learned it before or after he was blinded we don’t know, but it’s a tender moment all the same. It feels like a twist of fate that he’s become the cripple they’re singing about. Even when he’s mowing down the baddies. During one fight, he’s ambushed while changing the baby’s diaper. In another fight, the baby is asleep and he’s constantly shushing the henchman’s death cries after slicing into them.

Its camerawork is really beautiful at times. The cinematographer, Chishi Makiura, is no stranger to the Zatoichi franchise (and would also go on to work on Lone Wolf and Cub, not to mention many other chanbara flicks). He does a fantastic job of peppering in these gorgeous, mostly transitional shots. It’s a lot of wide, faraway shots framed by natural elements that are subtle but do a lot of work to add splashes of color and create interesting visuals. The framing is also solid throughout the film. Camera movement is sporadically very dynamic. There’s nothing crazy that takes you out of the film and the tilts, dolly shots, and pans are just infrequent enough to act as food punctuation marks without dominating the visual language of the film.

While Fight, Zatoichi, Fight is a good entry into the series, it isn’t notable. I enjoyed watching it but was definitely ready for it to be over. It gets a lot of great reviews and has a solid rating, soI’m ready to chalk my feelings up to a personal discrepancy, but I’d be interested in what anyone else who’s seen this thinks

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In Justin Tipping’s Him (2025), the body rules everything. The film follows Cameron “Cam” Cade (Tyriq Withers), a promising college football player whose untimely injury grants him the opportunity to train privately with his idol, the aging football legend Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans). What ensues is a grueling, often tragic week that challenges Cam’s physical and moral limits. After all the (dust and blood) settles, what remains is a fable that refuses to go more than skin deep, ignoring the politics of the body that are intertwined with its central themes.

Him’s characters navigate a visually vibrant world. The lush greens, blues, and reds that color the training scenes are unique from the rest of the film, making these sequences feel like an entirely different world. In outdoor scenes, the screen is composed of bright clouds and a desert-like terrain; the result is the visual manifestation of Cam’s dreams, idyllic but invaded by ominous elements. Several times, the audience is literally placed inside Cam’s body, entering his bloodstream and seeing the impact of head trauma; each of these sequences furthers the development of a distinct cinematic language. The film’s music is far less dynamic. The score never elevates beyond the background music of a promotional video for an NFL team’s Instagram page. Audibly, there is nothing to guide the audience through the ebbs and flows of Cam’s mental and physical state.

Him’s storytelling issues can be traced to incoherent politics regarding the physical exploitation of Black athletes. The film touches upon a variety of topics concerning the bodies of Black male athletes. Cam is forced to endure repeated head trauma and is expected to fatally injure other athletes. He is subjected to nonconsensual injections and coerced into taking illicit substances. In the finale, he is meant to be “sold” to powerful, white team owners. Further, Isaiah’s white wife, Elsie (Julia Fox), has sexual relationships with both male leads, hinting at potential racial fetishization. Him does not spend enough time developing any of these topics. Race is mentioned in jokes, but the film does not compel the audience to think critically about how Blackness influences Cam’s experiences. The film features numerous instances of violence and death, but a lack of explanation or dramatic resolution reduces these events to redundant excuses to inflict more cruelty on Cam’s body. There is also a lack of exploration of bodily desire. Throughout the film, Cam and Isaiah are forced into close proximity, expose their naked bodies to each other, and blur the sexual boundaries of their relationship by sharing a sexual partner. Yet, there is never an indication that the men can use their bodies—sexually or otherwise— in any fashion that deviates from the hyper-masculine expectations placed upon male athletes.

Wayans’ performance adds intensity to a film that lacks thematic precision. His facial expressions, the stiffness of his neck, and the heaviness of his movements emphasize his discomfort with aging and the loss of masculine traits it causes. When Wayans stands eye to eye with Withers, his exaggerated stance reveals the insecurity his character feels over the state of his body. Wayans is dynamic, managing to incorporate his famous comedic timing in a way that never fully abandons the threatening nature of his character. In such an embodied performance, it is a shame that Wayans is not given stronger material. Withers does not showcase the same variety in his performance, but his stilted acting works well for a character that struggles to grasp the world around him. Withers’ lack of expressiveness, however, is incongruous with the intensity necessary to make the finale massacre scene believable.

Him places itself in an optimal position to explore the exploitation of Black athletes’ bodies in the fickle, profit-driven ecosystem of professional sports. While the film achieves moments of visual greatness, it never critically expands upon any of the themes it introduces. Without a coherent narrative or political stance, the bodies of Black athletes are degraded to vessels for garish displays of violence. In a better film, characters would be given the space to examine the uses of their body, explore methods to maintain their physical autonomy, and act upon nonnormative bodily desires. Him invites its audience to reduce Black men onscreen to their bodies, and in doing so, creates a film that lacks the guts needed to achieve greatness.

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It’s impossible to imagine Blue Film without its two exceptional lead performances. Veteran stage and character actor Reed Birney completes a difficult tightrope act, balancing an unsettling tenderness with enough humanity that the audience might just consider feeling bad for Hank. Birney’s dense performance conveys decades’ worth of guilt and shame, expressing both an uncertainty and subsequent acceptance that he will never be able to escape his past. Not many could stand their own next to Birney’s performance, but Kieron Moore, in his film debut, announces himself to be a more than worthy counterpart as Aaron Eagle. In one of the best and most layered performances of the year, Moore embodies a commanding physicality that shields behind it a deep insecurity. Through the many intimate close-ups, Moore captures every nuance in his character’s emotions just within his face. Even during scenes of anger and frustration, Moore’s vulnerable eyes bleed like gaping wounds, providing a glimpse into the character’s traumatic past and painful desire just to be normal. For both Hank and Aaron, their lives are defined by sex but also alienated by it.

There is no doubt that the up-and-coming director and writer Elliot Tuttle’s talent is on par with that of his two leading men. In his eloquent script, every conversation feels like an emotional tug-of-war, each line of dialogue slicing a little cut into the characters and bleeding them out, as if they didn’t feel human enough. Every moment is unnerving, but at the same time, it’s so refreshing to see something so bold.

An innovative visual tool Tuttle plays with is the incorporation of stylized digital footage. The film opens on a livestream of Aaron Eagle, and throughout the rest of the film Tuttle flips back and forth between two modes of viewership: an occasional grainy camcorder video and high-resolution footage that makes up the majority of the film. Blue Film shifts to the camcorder during scenes of sexual roleplay and whenever Aaron embodies his on-camera persona. This visualizes the internal turmoil of both characters, as they reckon with the disconnect between who they present to the world and who they really are. Behind all the perversion and taboos in the film, it’s in exploring this central conflict where the film finds its humanity. Though its ugly subject matter may be difficult to stomach, at the film’s heart there’s no shortage of sensitivity or a willingness to listen, something so many people lack today; it’s a reminder that even the most flawed and rotten humans are still humans with something to say.

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Parents Guide? no. Perverts Guide.

I have been a member on IMDB since 2000. IMDB has added many features since this time, but only one of them that I've come to understand as one of the last bastion of perverts worldwide. I'm talking of course about the PARENTS GUIDE. On each film on IMDB, anyone can add to the parents guide. The parents guide (PG) can be more useful than ratings, reviews, critic reviews, or even IMDB keywords. It boils the film down into a collection of what you actually see. A film’s IMDB keywords can contain a bunch of stuff about people having sex, its film’s title can be about sex, and its trailer makes you think you're going to see a raunchy sex comedy; the parents guide never lies like this. "Parents Guide: Nudity: No Nudity." No amount of marketing lies gets into the parents guide. It is the last honest part of IMDB that is plagued by perverts because you are allowed, encouraged and celebrated for detailing out exactly what happens in a scene.

Over the years I've read some hilarious PG entries. Here is one entry I saw for the film Élisa (1995)

This movie contains a scene in which Vanessa Paradis' hairy vagina and breasts are shown. When she pulls the white dress she is wearing over her head, Vanessa's well-shaped boobs are immediately visible. The thick brown pubic hair around Vanessa's vagina is then clearly visible when she removes her white panties. In all, Vanessa's hairy triangle and big pert tits are shown for a couple of seconds before she lays flat on her stomach.

Shortly after I read and shared this PG entry with fellow IMDB enthusiasts, it was deleted from the parents guide. I guess even PG gets too spicy for IMDB, or maybe they didnt like 'hairy triangle' and 'well-shaped boobs'.

In all kinds of films you will find PG describing the labia screentime. The sideboobs. Some films have entries that swing all the way to the other side, describing if a film has kissing or not. Don't sleep on the parent's guide on IMDB. It can be useful to cut through biases, marketing, and people with terrible opinions.

I've come to appreciate perverts over the years. Because of their honesty. PERVERTS ARE HONEST. Because their brains are in their penises.

Who amongst us hasn’t passed out after vigorous exercise during some lesbian movie that no one remembers? He’s not bothering anyone! He’s taking a nap! He paid for his ticket! Such an honest review too, “wankable. but got bored and took a nap”.

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A cross between a martial arts film and a quintessential British coming-of-age comedy, Polite Society is an excellent exercise in inception. Relying on codes that we associate with our most familiar, beloved films—quirky quips exchanged between cheeky schoolgirls, sharp-cutting sound effects, and a gang of children having to convince non-understanding adults of evil—it nestles itself into your cultural memory. While it isn’t a predictable film, Polite Society does cue you into the general direction it will be going by following the delineated codes of childhood cinema. For example, if a woman’s make-up is making her look terrifying, then she’s probably a villain. (No spoilers, of course). It’s self-conscious. For chrissakes it’s about a woman who wants to be a stunt double. Polite Society is in on its own joke. So don’t worry—t’s made by cinephiles I swear.

Nida Manzoor’s debut feature film is about fighting with your sister. Lena is having an identity crisis: she’s dropped out of art-school and agreed to a partially arranged marriage. For her younger sister Ria, this is a terrible turn of events orchestrated by an evil mother-and-son duo. Yet, Lena seems to want the marriage - she brushes her hair, waits for her fiancé at the door, and even starts to wear cardigans. Lena’s confused, deluded, and scared but it’s okay—Ria can fix it. Lena is an artist and simply won’t be herself if she doesn’t pursue art. All Ria has to do is stop the marriage and force Lena to paint. Luckily, Ria can do it because she’s going to be the next greatest British stuntwoman (after Eunice Huthart of course). Priya Kansara and Ritu Arya’s performances as Ria and Lena are wonderful. Kansara’s Ria is stubborn and annoying. Like clockwork, she ‘sizes up’ a tunnel, drives at full speed towards it, and then looks astonished when the top floor of her double decker bus has been mauled. Kansara’s determined stare, with her hair begrudgingly scraped back into a low ponytail, is enough to indicate that she’s not interested in patience or reason. (Incidentally, I got in trouble for telling my baby sister that she looked like Mozart with that same hairstyle).

Arya’s Lena is also stubborn and annoying. She halts before the tunnel and painstakingly measures her bus, her passengers, the tunnel, the road, and everything in sight before sitting paralyzed in case something has shrunk. She’s overly manicured whether it be to look like a fashionable, effortless art school student or a suitable daughter in law. Neither knows more than the other and they know even less together. Younger sisters are the greatest because they always believe you can do more than you think you can. I’d like to see what my sister thought of it. I’ve been begging her to watch it for some time, and it’s on her list. I wonder how important Lena’s character will be for her or if she’ll uncover significances that I only got faint whiffs of. Maybe she can write a companion piece.

I was reading an Anthony Bourdain essay recently, and in it he was explaining that mob stories are so easily made into a comedy because it’s a long-established rule that being hit over the head is one of the funniest slapstick gags known to film. Like the best martial arts films, the fight sequences in Polite Society are random and unexplained and teetering on comedic. They’re colorful, edited with whip-smart precision and full of sound-effects. Cinematic fights for the sheer, dopamine inducing thrill of it. I would recommend this film if only for the fight sequences. Admittedly, the plot is baffling. It tells a convoluted tale of womb harvesting, doppelgängers, and creepier still—mama’s boys. Any small moments of narrative incoherence, creative liberty, or the odd irritating joke, is part of the film’s gleeful imperfection. And anyways, I subscribe to the view that horror films are satisfying because they let out an underlying rage in society. Wholeheartedly. Polite Society is satisfying because yes, sometimes you get so mad at your sister that you wish you could have a fight so intense it breaks down doors and ceilings. Your sister knows you better than anyone else. It gets suffocating.

Manzoor follows the tradition of British teenage girl movies with St-Trinian’s style plotting, Angus, Thongs, And Perfect Snogging style humor and Bend It Like Beckham-esque social consciousness. Like most women my age, Gurinder Chadha’s films were bible. Bend It Like Beckham was screened in my PSCHE class to teach us about racial diversity in Britain (what that has to say about British society is a different essay), and Angus, Thongs, And Perfect Snogging—well it was important in learning how to understand boys. Although a unique film, Polite Society covers the familiar themes of women attempting to assert their place in the world around them whilst coming to terms with their friends, family, and culture; yet, it does all of these in an unassuming manner. There’s never any mention that it’s odd that there’s only two men with speaking roles in the film, or that the cast is largely non-white. The only topic that gets addressed head-on is the commodification of women’s bodies—but this is in such a fantastical manner that it’s not really asking to be taken as a searing commentary on the nuances and brutalism of the patriarchy in modern Britain. It just naturally is. Which goes to show you can challenge the status quo without having to routinely remind your viewer that you’re doing so.

Of course, my perspective is a limited one. Although I went to school in North London, I’m from a white, upper-middle class family. I can only walk you so far. But what I can say is that I really loved this film because I saw my relationship to my sister within it, and because it’s a kick-ass film aimed at entertainment and fun without sacrificing unique, cinematic storytelling. I hope more films get made like this—plane rides for one would be all the better for it. And if you happen to be on a British Airways flight sometime soon, do yourself a favor. Watch Polite Society. It’s in their “British Classics” section.

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Ella Sinskey is someone who really gets that. She started Ditchers Eddy in 2024 as a way for her and her friends to showcase their work. 2 countries, 8 venues, and 18 iterations later, Ditcher’s Eddy is one of NYC’s premier underground film festivals.

In this interview, Ella and I talk about how she started her own film festival, how you can get people to show up to your film screenings, and the challenges that come with scaling an enterprise.

This interview was edited for brevity and clarity.

Oliver Little What was that like, going to NYU Tisch? There's a lot of creativity swelling all over the place, did that have any sort of influence on Ditchers Eddy?

Ella Sinskey When I was applying to school, NYU was this place [where] they tell you that you’re the next generation of gifted filmmakers and you guys are gonna change the world. That’s why you pay $70,000, so that everyone could tell you how special you are. But the work, I don’t know. I would never let my kids go there is the moral of the story.

After graduating, I had this movie that I didn’t know what to do with. My friend was going to have the screening at Anthology, he’s like “I love this film. I wanna screen.” It doesn’t really fit in. I’m the only woman filmmaker in the screening of I think it’s eight filmmakers. In a weird way, I felt blessed to be there, but also my film is a lot different. It was surreal, the juxtaposition between these male loneliness films and then my film. I love these guys, but what the hell?

I just felt really weird after that. I was like, I don’t know if I even like my movie, I don’t even know where this belongs. Am I ever going to show this again? So the first Ditchers Eddy was me putting together all my friend’s films and my film to showcase it because I felt really left out.

We had our first screening at Kaleidoscope and it was 120 people and super lit. My friend helped me sew like floor pillows because we didn’t have seating, and my other friend Luke Vu, who’s a recurring figure in these events, he’s a chef who did a bunch of food. It was just so fun. It was just me and my friends watching movies that all my friends made.

OL How’d you get 120 people to that?

ES I’ll share my secrets. Here’s the formula: you have to assume that every single filmmaker is gonna invite at least two people, and then their friends are gonna be like, “what are you doing on Friday night?” Then they’re gonna be like, “I’m going to the screening.” And then their friends are like, “I don’t wanna be left out.” So their friends are like, “we’ll all just go to the screening.” Maybe they don’t care about the screening, but they want to be with their friends.

You basically create a very curated list of people that have many different friends and then they all do that [work] for you. People want to be around their friends. That’s more powerful than any media that you’re gonna be showing. It’s more about people wanting to be together. Especially when they’re working all day, when they’re tired, when they’re sad, they just wanna be around their friends.

OL Do you feel like a lot of people come nowadays who are just finding out about it through pure word of mouth?

ES Yeah, it’s definitely gotten kinda weird because I now hear about what other people think and they already have an opinion about what it is.

It was just me kinda like lugging shit around the city, getting drunk after, and like then having to clean my whole house ‘cause my house is a mess. It started getting bigger and now people have heard about it, which is really awesome. There’s so many times when I’ve wanted to quit so badly.

OL Why?

ES I really want everyone to have a good time to a point where I drive myself to hell. I’ll just be like, what if someone doesn’t get a seat and then they have to stand the whole time and they hate everything and they’re really tired.

Then I devolve into freaking the fuck out. It’s hospitality, and you want everyone to feel welcome and to feel calm and ready and reflective and inspired. So you’re creating that space and when you create, you have to make sure that everything is perfect for that.

It puts me on edge every time. Especially with how big it gets, because every screening we have between—except in Berlin, the Berlin ones are around like 40 people—but the other ones have always been around like 110 to this last one, like 230.It’s managing a lot of expectations and a lot of moving parts and that’s like the main thing. It’s literally like a restaurant.

OL Are you able to relax at all? Because I know I was feeling the energy in the room, which is palpable before and after but completely silent during [the screening], because everyone’s so engrossed. Are you able to get in on that or are you just too thinking about everything else going on?

ES I’ve had some times where I’ve been able to sit and watch the films. I have to admit there are some things that I see that almost bring me to tears. There’s this feeling of wow, I’m so grateful that people make things, and it’s so important that it makes me almost cry every time.

This thing has led me to believe that film exists like any other medium of art, like you don’t have to make it to enjoy it. I’ve talked to Kentucker of NoBudge about this, a lot of people think “oh, I’m gonna be a director one day and I’m gonna get famous”. You can be a working director and you can make a film. Maybe it’s not gonna be like 2001 Space Odyssey, maybe you’ll only have this amount of money but like you can see that thing come to life. You can make people realize that you don’t have to be a filmmaker to make a movie.

It can be on any scale, but like when do you get to go see it in person? You get to see your favorite band in person, but when are you gonna see your best friend’s short in a physical place? Treating film screenings more like a gallery opening or a punk show, so these short films are not just going to get lost on the internet. There is a place in this physical world to watch it, so let’s all hang out and watch what you made!

OL What’s going through your head when you’re trying to find a venue to show these [films]?

ES The whole thing is we don’t show in movie theaters.

OL What was the driving decision behind that?

ES The driving decision was I don’t fuck with movie theaters. I actually really fuck with movie theaters now; I’ve gotten a lot better, but you just get up after the movie and where do you go? Why is everyone leaving? I don’t want everyone to leave. And then you’re stuck in Manhattan and everyone wants to go to a bar, but what bar are you going to go to? It’s gonna be packed. How are you gonna talk to anyone? You’re just overwhelmed.

I want a space where we can all hang out for a second and talk about what just happened or catch up and talk about whatever. I don’t give a fuck what you talk about, but make that space more than just a movie theater.

OL So you just skip the middleman and you host it at a bar itself?

ES Yeah. A bar or a house.

OL I’ve only been to the last one, which was at an extremely professional looking venue, Public Records

ES The last few times, these are the complaints we got: sounds like shit; the screen a sheet; why is it crinkled?

The most uncomfortable screening we did was with St. Bimbo, another screening series run by Erin Neitzel.1 We’re friends, and she really helped out a lot with Ditchers Eddy at the beginning. We had this screening in my old studio because we were moving, and it was like July on the hottest fucking day of the year and people had already bought tickets.

This is why I freak out. People bought tickets. It’s like 95 degrees and we’re all sitting in a hot studio, no AC, just sweating. We have fans, but the fans are blowing out the sound and people’s parents are there. It’s just like your worst nightmare, trying to convince everyone everything’s okay and everyone’s watching films and just dying.

But there’s something nice about being slightly uncomfortable when you’re watching something, especially in a DIY context. It’s more important that you get to be there with the people that make the films.

OL It makes sense that by putting these events on you personally get so much out of it, because you’re giving other people an opportunity to show their work to their friends and families. It’s like the gratification they’re getting out of it is also the gratification you’re getting out of it.

ES I just remember feeling so down on myself about my work and why it even mattered that I was like, “I really don’t want anyone to feel like this”. That’s what pushes me to do it. What makes me the most happy is when people leave saying “I wanna make a movie” or “I wanna express myself in a certain way”.

What matters is that people feel like they have agency, because agency can bleed into every aspect of your life. If you feel like you can make a change or you can do something [for yourself], then you can do something for someone else because you have power to influence other people and also help other people. That’s very important. If you think that you don’t have any say in anything, you’re just gonna curl up and die.

OL Have you guys been charging for admission since the beginning?

ES Oh yeah, we’ve always charged for admissions. It’s so expensive to put on DIY events. Honestly, let me air this shit out. Let me air the fucking monetary side out.

Okay, venues charge a venue fee or a deposit. The Hancock charges $1000 dollars from 4 to 11 PM. A thousand freaking dollars. That’s a lot of money, a lot of money I don’t have. I have to put a $500 dollar deposit when I want to book this venue. That’s $500 of my money that I’m not gonna see for three months until I post the ticket link, and then maybe I can get the $500 back when I post it. When people are wondering where their money goes and why they’re paying between—Kaleidoscope was $10 and then Public Records was $36 for the full day—it varies based on venue pricing, on the venue’s capacity, also the kind of infrastructure that we have to provide. With Public Records, they use a platform called Dice and Dice charges like $6.50 in fees, which is fucking crazy. So a $15 ticket turns into a $22 ticket. I don’t fuck with that.

I think that’s the stupidest shit I’ve ever heard in my life. But working with bigger places, you have to charge more because they’re working with these fees and with these ticketing services that charge so much money it’s fucking crazy. What else? Ubers, renting things–I don’t own a projector–asking for favors, sound systems. When people think that $15 to like $20 is a lot, I’m just trying to break even.

OL I’ve been so scared to charge for anything and, with Gabe, Noah, and I, it’s been a constant discussion.

ES It really sucks to charge because I’ve been in places where I’m like, why do I have to pay money for this? But the thing is with New York City, now as someone who organizes more events, I understand why you have to charge money. Not only is it venue time, renting equipment, paying artists, it’s also, as the organizer, you’re putting in so much time. I don’t compensate myself for that time at this point, at all. I hope to one day, but right now I just do it because I want to see it happen. It’s cool and fun, but ticket sales will not cover the kind of infrastructure you need to run this kind of thing.

That’s why people charge submission fees, and we don’t charge submission fees because it’s insanely expensive to do events here and I don’t pay anybody that works these events. I would love to post a full breakdown of where this money goes, but when people get upset about paying $15 for a ticket, they have to see the back end.

OL It’s tough. There’s a specific reason why we’ve targeted almost exclusively venues that let us screen for free. We can’t ask people for money to come to our events—

ES Okay, hear me out, hear me out. I’ve started to feel less bad about charging people money because, ultimately, people make the choice to go. If they wanna pay $15, they’re gonna pay $15. I felt so bad, ‘cause like I was like, “Oh, $15, that’s so much money.” But then I was like, “Ehhh, $15... that’s okay.” Metrograph charges $18. I think it’s just that we expect things to be free because the internet is “subscription based”, free, whatever, but physical space in New York is fucking expensive. To take up any space, to get on the subway, to buy dinner, anything. Physical things are money, and in order for something to exist in this current system, you have to make money.

I’ve been really fighting against that idea, but at the same time I’m sitting here, I can’t buy a projector. I can’t buy a sound system. I’m asking for favors from every single person I know. I’m asking for cars. Every single time this thing happens, it’s a favor that someone is giving me and that’s the only way this thing can exist: through favors. If I didn’t have this infrastructure of favors, it would have to be more expensive.

OL What do you think the future of Ditchers Eddy looks like?

ES Do I have to spill the secrets right now?

OL No. But also, yes.

ES We’ve partnered with Amazon—

OL Hahaha, that’s it! End the interview, we’re done!

ES I have $4 billion now—

OL The subscription package is rolling out—

ES Basically, the future of Ditchers Eddy is that we just keep doing what we’re doing until it finds itself. But we have a really cool year lined up.

We have a three day camping film festival. There’s this space that my friend offered me. I think it’s a hundred acres? I’m trying to program a three day film festival where we all camp out.

Ultimately, the future is supporting filmmakers. I just love so many people and I believe in so many people. There are people that I’m constantly surprised by and you wanna see what they make next.

OL Alright, are there any closing remarks? Anything you wanna shout out?

ES Okay. I wanna shout out the team, Abyn Reabe and Malka Fleischman. They’ve been on the Ditchers Eddy team since April of 2025 and they are the most awesome people I know and the most hardworking people I know.

I wanna shout out Saint Bimbo for being the OG screening series in my head. I think that there’s this undercurrent that we need more from this life, from this physical life that will inspire so many other collectives or movements.

And I think people like shouldn’t shy away from their earnesty because everyone wants to feel loved and accepted. And I think that’s a beautiful thing at the end of the day. Who knows?

OL Nice little Hallmark ending.

ES It is a Hallmark ending. Everyone should feel loved and accepted. Oh yeah, also come to the Ditchers Eddy Camping Festival, Woodstock ‘69.

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