Putting aside the nostalgia that many kids of the 1980s have for the adventures of Prince Adam, there’s not a whole lot to be gained culturally from hauling out He-Man-flavored Member Berries for mass consumption in 2026. The tragedy of Masters of the Universe, directed by Travis Knight and written Chris Butler, Aaron Nee, and Dave Callaham, is that it locates the one fertile angle that would make a movie about a blond, buff, sword-wielding barbarian interesting in 2026, only to bury its heartening Barbie-style deconstruction under every terrible action-comedy instinct plaguing modern blockbuster filmmaking.

The film starts with a flashback to a young Adam (Artie Wilkinson-Hunt), prince of the verdant, far-away world of Eternia, playing with his friends, making them laugh, and being kind to everyone around him. His father, King Randor (James Purefoy), attempts to beat an (un)healthy respect for the sword into him, to no real avail, which becomes a problem when Skeletor (Jared Leto) and his minions show up to stage a coup and steal the royal family’s Sword of Power.

Adam is thrown into a portal with the sword, losing it during the trip, and is subsequently raised on Earth. He eventually grows up into a handsome HR rep (now played by Nicholas Galitzine), an indefatigable promoter of conflict resolution through words. When he finally manages to track down the Sword of Power, Adam is whisked back to Eternia by his childhood friend Teela (Camila Mendes), only to find Eternia’s mightiest heroes living under abject tyranny. The only thing standing between Skeletor and total domination is whether Adam can balance the gentle emotions that are core to who he is with the violence necessary to save the world.

That’s the overarching tale being told by the film, and it’s a great angle. But the devil is in the details. Not since the dark days of early-2000s comic-book and video-game adaptations has a film been so embarrassed to be itself, and tried to appeal to the audience more likely to laugh at it instead of with it. There isn’t a single character interaction so vital that the filmmakers don’t choose to insert an awkward, stuttery, sub-Marvel-quality quip. Every silly character name is clowned on, and not one Office-beaten cliché about workplaces goes untouched.

Masters of the Universe’s fight scenes, in particular, are bombastic, hard-hitting, even appropriately dramatic at times. But every time the film gains momentum, cheap attempts at comedy cripple those moments at the knees. Of course, despite being a film laser-targeted to the fortysomethings who were actually kids when He-Man held cultural sway—y’know, the ones who got really, really mad, and for the worst possible reasons, about ND Stevenson’s fantastic She-Ra revival—Masters of the Universe is, ostensibly, a kids’ movie, and kids will likely be okay with silly jokes killing the Frank Frazetta-lite aura of the film at its best.

That would be easier to accept if the film picked a lane and stuck to it. Is Adam a bumbling soy boy whose willingness to want to de-escalate tensions with his enemies is going to get himself or others killed? Or is he a dangerous barbarian who can ruin a whole room of Skeletor’s baddies without splitting a single blond end of his perfect hair? The scenes where Adam is the former are too dedicated to cringe-y slapstick to land as a serious option, and the film is all too eager to show him as the latter, connective narrative tissue be damned.

Similarly, Leto’s Skeletor is stuck in a strange limbo between the Shakespearean-tinged genocidal threat of Frank Langella’s 1987 live-action take on the character and Alan Oppenheimer’s mustache-twirling Saturday-morning caricature. And Brie’s Evil-Lyn vacillates between pure gothic camp and witchy, dommy-mommy, bloodthirsty ambition. The consistent inability to thread the needle between comedy and drama permeates every single element of this Masters of the Universe, usually winding up landing on comedy by default.

Early on, Adam describes Eternia as the heart of the galaxy and Castle Grayskull as the heart of the heart. Masters of the Universe has a beating heart—thoughtfully recontextualizing He-Man as a different presentation of masculinity—and it’s bolstered by a cartoon-perfect representation of the original cartoon’s menagerie of characters and their powers. But the poorly executed, jingling-key cheap elements piled up around that heart are enough to clog it until it explodes.

The post ‘Masters of the Universe’ Review: He-Man Gets a Pandering ‘Barbie’-Style Deconstruction appeared first on Slant Magazine.

“Jinsei is a swan. You can go anywhere. You can do whatever you like,” muses the guilt-ridden Hiroshi (Shohei Uno) to his wayward, blue-haired stepson (Ace Cool) in writer-director Suzuki Ryuya’s animated feature Jinsei (which translates to “life” in Japanese). Hiroshi’s words of wisdom are as good a summation as any of this scrappy film, which blurs the borders of irony and sincerity beyond distinction. This brooding, disaffected character study is a singularly odd, messy, and haunting portrait of detachment.

Employing a squiggly, semi-manga digital art style redolent of Flash animation, Jinsei starts in the mid-1990s with an Up-like montage showing the protagonist’s family, birth, early childhood, and the traumatic loss of his biological parents in an accident—all framed in match cuts from the perspective of the family car. The film then proceeds through a chronological series of chapters named after different monikers—insults, nicknames, stage names, and more—that the main character goes by in different periods of his life. His true name is never spoken.

Rendered selectively mute by his trauma, our protagonist is brought up by the earnest but impotent Hiroshi and cruelly bullied by schoolmates, until a schoolyard fight leads to a tender, homoerotic friendship with fair-haired transfer student, Kin (Tanaka Taketo). Kin introduces his new friend to his obsession: the world of pop-idol boy bands. It’s one of the first and only experiences to make him speak out loud, when he lets out an awestruck “cool.”

As the 2010s arrive and his father’s wealthy estranged family and Hiroshi fight over custody of him, our hero and Kin chase dreams of idoldom, with the film exploring the two boys’ bond and the hidden costs of fame as they toil their way up the youth showbiz ladder. Everyone agrees, including the sinister record mogul (Tsuda Kanji) who recruits the boys into a band, that the protagonist has something special, an intangible aura of greatness, as he performs floppy dance moves with fewer animation frames than the average South Park character.

But Jinsei, like life, is often defined by violent swerves and unpredictable outcomes. As the timeline of events approaches the real-world present, Suzuki audaciously burns down the film’s dramatic scaffolding, reconfiguring the story into a series of increasingly disjointed, genre-defying, and surreal vignettes. And as traumas and triumphs seem to fall into his lap—and he variously assumes the roles of hermit, celebrity, husband, and demigod—our impassive lead continues to lash out in acts of jarring violence that derail his life, and in sync with the film resetting the board in a new time and place. The older the protagonist gets, the faster time passes and the more confusing, colorful, and angular the world seems to become, en route to a quietly apocalyptic, watercolor-tinged finale reminiscent of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.

While the alienating collapse of conventional plot structure and increasingly haphazard later episodes may be at least partly the result of an amateur filmmaker rushing toward a self-imposed deadline, it’s also reflective of Jinsei’s central theme. From the simple grayscale textures to the flat, symmetrical compositions (Suzuki favors rigid, single-subject profile shots), the film constructs a certain ironic distance from its earnest, evocatively scored theatrics. Its glassy-eyed protagonist likewise remains ambiguously torn between emotion and detachment, tumbling seemingly without even noticing into depths of degradation and heights of greatness in an absurd and senseless world, a man in fragments forever haunted by his stolen childhood.

The storytelling is similarly fragmentary. Key plot details, such as the backstory of the main character’s father, are implied through bits of dialogue and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it montage shots. Suzuki’s existential vision may tend toward the solipsistic, with its emphasis on the protagonist’s extreme suffering, specialness, and nihilistic apathy, but that unfiltered angst splattered on the screen combines with a subtle eye for psychological detail. Deeply felt and personal in its bittersweet ruminations on loneliness, pain, and destiny, Jinsei is an idiosyncratic and impressive debut by a fiercely independent artist eager to take on the world.

The post ‘Jinsei’ Review: Suzuki Ryuya’s Singularly Odd, Messy, and Haunting Portrait of Detachment appeared first on Slant Magazine.

In the nearly wordless prologue of Milagros Mumenthaler’s The Currents, the camera captures Argentinian stylist Lina (Isabel Aimé González-Sola) from a distance as she leaps from a bridge in Geneva into the freezing water below. In the next shot, Lina unassumingly walks back into her hotel lobby while drying herself off under a space blanket. It’s as if the incident’s most troubling development was the bag of waterlogged clothing that she carries.

The sequence offers an early indication that Mumenthaler’s interest lies in psychological ambiguity rather than easy answers to her protagonist’s behavior. The Currents is a beguiling character study of a successful wife, mother, and businesswoman who struggles to escape an ambient sense of disillusionment, which occasionally solidifies into outright disassociation. Family, friends, and colleagues note something is ever so slightly off in Lina’s behavior and disposition, though no one can pinpoint just what her ailment might be.

Mumenthaler, with the aid of a formidable Gonazález-Sola, masterfully builds the film around portraying Lina’s subjective experience. Their combined efforts in the film ultimately provide something more interesting than diagnosing the character’s condition. The Currents replicates for the viewer the very feeling of being in the miasma that envelops Lina herself.

I spoke with Mumenthaler just before Film at Lincoln Center’s opening night showing of The Currents. Our conversation covered what images sparked the process of writing the film, how her script explored Lina’s subjectivity, and why unlocking physicality was so crucial to understanding the character’s psychology.

Lina is 34 in the film. Is there something specific about this time in life that lends itself to an existential crisis?

I didn’t pick an exact age [for the character], but it was more about looking at an accomplished woman in several respects and his question of what happens when you reach success when you’re young. She’s a mother, she has a husband, she’s in a stable relationship, she’s had professional success, and so the question becomes: What more? What comes next? It’s about living in a society where success is almost kind of demanded at an earlier age.

Your films often start with images that compel you to write. What were those for The Currents?

The first image, the seed of the film, was of a woman walking by the river in Geneva and plunging herself into the freezing [waters]. Here you already have three important elements: character, action, and water. These brought up a lot of things to think about, and [inspired me] to start looking for answers and bring in different interests of one’s own into the story.

After this, several sequences of images presented themselves, and that becomes a question of how to introduce them, transform them, and see how they fit into the narrative. These very elemental images are always the ones that make it into the edit. They have a certain power to them; they demand more. Perhaps, if you think of [showing] a tailor, you might see the feet first, and then you’ll see the body, and then you’ll see the face of the person. It becomes about finding a way of how these elements are to be presented in the narrative.

You mentioned finding answers, but the film is so much about dwelling in ambiguity. Were there questions you were trying to solve?

This first sequence brings a lot of questions to the fore, but these questions don’t necessarily have to be concrete. Sure, you can say, “Does she have a daughter?” Yes. “Does she live in Geneva?” No. The question isn’t about answering these questions. With the script itself, I worked from Lena’s subjectivity. She’s not going to Buenos Aires and immediately going to a psychiatrist or neurologist and saying, “What is it that concretely is wrong?” It becomes a matter of accompanying her on this journey that she takes in different directions, only being able to perceive as she goes along to accompany her through this journey. And really, how concrete of a diagnosis can you have for someone in this state? Sure, a lot of people aren’t happy in life or have childhood traumas, but not everybody jumps into a river.

Everything from the camera position to the sound design of the film is so masterfully calibrated to plunge the viewer into Lina’s subjectivity. How were you determining the best way to convey what’s going on inside her head in each scene?

From the beginning, when you think about her on this walk, you already have a kind of suspended time. As you walk with her, you’re brought into this subjective state of mind. That allows a certain freedom to think [about] different scenes or certain atmospheres—the colors, for example. From the writing perspective, that meant different images would come to me, and it was always a matter of writing from how she’s perceiving the world right then.

There’s also the fact that this script was written over a long period of time, so that allowed me to be able to incorporate different things that I’d encounter in the streets. For instance, take that corsetry shop: Although it was a recreation, I drew inspiration from a real corsetry shop in Buenos Aires—one run by a woman who always dressed entirely in monochrome. It’s as if certain inspirations just strike you out of the blue. You find yourself thinking a bit about Lina and that sense of nostalgia that she harbors for trades that, perhaps, are on the verge of vanishing. So, the thought arises: “Well, this is a story I want to tell.” I took that memory of that woman and her corsetry shop and wove it into the narrative.

It’s as though you perceive the city—its sounds, its atmosphere—in a particular way, and then suddenly you realize where your gaze has settled, and how a specific sound can lead your mind in one direction or another. A key example being this scene that happens at the lighthouse at the Palacio Barolo building in Buenos Aires. In the script itself, it’s a very small portion about Lina imagining different lives from this perspective [looking out over the city], but the scene itself transforms. It comes back to imagining the world from her state of mind.

How do you go about directing a performance like that? It sounds like there was a lot on the page if you were writing from her perception.

We worked a lot on the physical dimension, so I did sessions with a theater instructor that were very immersive. Through certain breathing exercises, you start to get a sense of one’s inner self. In this case, it was the sense of an inner storm, so it became a matter of transmitting the senses. For example, at Lina’s mother’s house, you get this cold feeling. That also allowed me to bring in certain elements like plastic or a certain coldness to the tiles, and to tell Isabel to modulate her voice. It’s smaller in this space to feel this coldness of her surroundings. It becomes a matter of questioning: “Well, how does one’s voice come out in this state of crisis? How does one move?”

You’ve expressed an uncertainty that we can ever know ourselves, and the film echoes that. How much of Lina did you and Isabel feel you needed to nail down and explain, and was there anything you felt you could leave as a mystery?

I wrote a lot about her childhood, what her grandparents were like, what her family was, what happened to her dad, why her mom was the way she was. It almost came from memory. You could know what happens in her head, when, why, and with who.

Isabel understood this, and she also didn’t ask for concrete answers, especially about why she would plunge into the river. Sure, there are elements that could bring this to the fore, but this situation is something that we understood [the audience] didn’t need to arrive at a definite answer about. On top of that, a lot of reading was shared from a French sociologist [David Le Breton] who wrote Disappearing from Oneself, and also from fiction that had to do with mother-daughter relationships. It wasn’t about finding concrete answers, and this is something that we were in agreement about, allowing us to think openly about the character.

Isabel also did something in the casting: She didn’t over-interpret. I appreciate this from actors, when they leave a little opening so that the two of us can follow it through.

I know you and Isabel have spent long periods of time away from Argentina. Was that experience of feeling a part of both worlds, and maybe not necessarily home in either, something that you brought to the character or film?

Not an influence on the film per se, but more on the casting. There’s also this latent element in the film that explores the question of belonging. Maybe if you have one foot in one world and in the other, that’s certainly on top of one’s mind because you’re not neither here nor there.

I loved the moments when Lina is enmeshed in technology, be it a VR headset or scrolling through her Instagram comments. How did these enter the film?

The Instagram thing really comes about because she’s somebody who has a job that’s very involved with social media, but it also speaks to a certain kind of superficiality that she navigates. You also have this distancing thing where you’re observing your life, and it becomes difficult to make sense of. The virtual reality thing has to do with cognitive therapy, but a kind of therapy that might solve immediate problems and not deeper-rooted issues. The fact that she picks this kind of therapy speaks a lot to the person Lina is, and that she might not be prepared to deal with these deeper issues about herself.

Are these moments a counterpoint to whenever she encounters art, be it a drum recital or a sculpture, and has these seemingly profound realizations?

The museum scene, like the lighthouse scene, is a projection, and it speaks to a certain nostalgia that comes to Lina about something she used to do. There’s a sense that things have fallen apart, and she had a different sensibility and an interest in art before that.

Translation assistance from Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer

The post Interview: Milagros Mumenthaler on ‘The Currents’ and Giving Shape to Subjectivity appeared first on Slant Magazine.

Of the many terribly interesting things touched on in Danny Boyle’s smart and skillful adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s 1993 debut novel, Trainspotting, it’s most tempting to contemplate facets that are only mildly developed. There is, for instance, the pointed, oddly chilling, and deeply funny monologue that Renton (Ewan McGregor), the closest thing that the audience is given to a hero here, delivers in opposition to his straight-arrow friend’s buoyant Scottish nationalism. As Renton barks at Tommy (Kevin McKidd), personal despondency is connected directly to lack of a unique cultural identity, which Renton is quick to see as a reflection of Scotland’s muddled ties to the United Kingdom.

The whole spiel doesn’t quite account for the astounding amount of heroin that Renton and his cronies pump into their corroded veins, attained through various burglaries and scams, but coupled with the dour, decrepit environs of Glasgow and Edinburgh—captured in all its hyperbolic wretchedness by DP Brian Tufano—the need for industrial-strength opiates becomes understandable. If for nothing else, Renton, Spud (Ewen Bremner), and Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) need some horse to account for their social ills, as they’re all unemployed, single, and are skilled solely at dispersing random facts about the decline of Sean Connery.

Save poor Tommy, they’re social degenerates on their best day and Trainspotting, adapted from Welsh’s novel by John Hodge, smartly doesn’t try to hunt too hard for redemption. As befits the novel, which is closer to a short-story collection, the film’s drama derives from fluctuations between living in a smack-induced fever dream and attempts at going cold turkey, finding pitch-black humor, horror, tragedy, and violence in a series of asides and digressions.

Many of these involve Begby (Robert Carlyle), a ferocious alcoholic who shuns his mates for spiking up, often right before he flies into an epic rage over some minor inconvenience. (This knowledge of how addicts of legal drugs mask their sicknesses by demonizing imbibers of illegal drugs is another fascinating strain that’s only marginally explored.) Other diversions include the great Kelly Macdonald as Renton’s underage girlfriend, a bravura detox sequence soundtracked to Underworld’s “Dark and Long,” a climactic change-of-scenery as Renton moves to London, and Peter Mullan as a heroin lifer nicknamed “Mother Superior.”

Even Walsh gets in on the action as a drug-dealer who supplies Renton with suppositories, leading to the film’s most fantastical, grotesque sequence: a headfirst submergence into a toilet bowl covered and filled with liquid shit. And this isn’t even considering the family members and significant others that wander in and out of the narrative with only momentary consequence, and among the virtues of Trainspotting is the seemingly effortless way it keeps this full, robust, and consistently surprising social circle in constant movement.

Boyle’s brilliant pacing and unwavering sense of motion within the frame is equally important to Hodge’s whip-smart script. For a film based on addiction to a drug that generally renders you immobile, the camera and every character seems in forever fluid motion.

Of course, Boyle’s generous, ingenious, and original take on such dark themes and subject matter was misinterpreted as glorification, most famously by presidential hopeful Bob Dole, who declared it unsuitable without even laying eyes on it. Had Dole screened the film, he would have certainly not found anything glorifying about Renton’s detox or the wrenching sequence in which a junkie’s infant’s vomit-encrusted corpse is discovered mid-binge.

Indeed, Boyle, now Oscar-anointed for the grossly overpraised Slumdog Millionaire, seemed to be fighting his own battle on screen, between depicting the abominable agony of addiction and invoking the rush and sublime release that sparks and sustains it. Each shot hits like a high, making it clear that Boyle’s addiction to the cinematic image, though not dangerous, is as similarly unremitting as Renton’s love affair with the spike.

The post Danny Boyle’s ‘Trainspotting’ at 30: Addiction As Symptom of a Nation’s Limbo State appeared first on Slant Magazine.

Siobhan McCarthy’s She’s the He gleefully toys with the tropes of the teen comedies of yore, while also lampooning transgender “panic” defenses. Following two teens, Alex (Nico Carney) and Ethan (Misha Osherovich), who pretend to be trans to dispel rumors that they’re gay and to get into the girls’ bathroom, McCarthy’s feature debut subverts the more toxic traits of the aforementioned comedies to its own ends. It’s as funny as it is sweet, and it manages the difficult task of both fashioning a coming-of-age tale that actually feels unique and celebrating its chosen genre by filtering it through a distinctly queer lens.

McCarthy’s shrewdest and most subversive move is their casting of trans and non-binary actors in many of the film’s roles. This not only adds an emotional complexity and richness to Ethan’s journey, as the once straight male character comes to realize they’re actually a trans lesbian, but also a sly knowingness in its presentation of Alex, the horny loudmouth who weaponizes transness to get closer to his crush, Sasha (Malia Pyles).

While it was homophobia that instigated Alex and Ethan’s desire to quash rumors of their being in a relationship, She’s the He is set in a world that’s far more accepting of queerness than those of its influences. Here, sexual fluidity is the norm rather than the exception, and while there’s a sense that it offers a kind of wish fulfillment, McCarthy’s film cleverly pokes fun at the traditional gender binary that typically dominates its milieu.

When Ethan tells Sasha that she doesn’t like makeup, the latter scolds her by saying, “Girls wear makeup and hate their legs. Boys wear baseball hats and don’t wash their ass.” It’s an amusing line that also speaks to the gender expectations that persist even in trans-positive spaces. McCarthy also takes a few amusing stabs at the straight jock bully stereotype, having muscular quarterback Jacob (Emmett Preciado) and his toadies cross-dress later on as they take Alex’s lead and, for more nefarious purposes, force their way into the girls’ locker room.

At times, the film may try a bit too hard to endear itself to us, frequently leaning into cutesy animated flourishes, such as when various words like “screech” and “clang” pop up on screen whenever the sounds are heard. But if its twee quirkiness is occasionally cranked up a bit high and its narrative flow a tad choppy, She’s the He often strikes the right balance between loony satire and heartfelt commentary, particularly in regard to Ethan’s coming of age and discovering of their queerness in a burgeoning romance with non-binary student Forest (Tatiana Ringsby).

Ethan’s relationship with Forest, and the former’s falling out with their unaccepting mother (Suzanne Cryer) and Alex, is ultimately what lends She’s the He its sneaky depth of feeling, especially as Ethan reckons with their identity and sexuality. But even in its darker moments, the film’s nuanced, affirming depiction of queerness tends toward the buoyant. It crams a lot into its breezy 82 minutes, but even when McCarthy’s ambitions exceed their grasp, the film’s charm and the charisma of the performances makes it easy to forgive the script’s limitations.

The post ‘She’s the He’ Review: A Delightfully Queer Subversion of the Old-School Teen Comedy appeared first on Slant Magazine.

Gen Z, the first audience whose primary gateway horrors were found in the dark expanses of the internet rather than the confines of the big screen, has been catered to in the last decade by such films as Slender Man and Five Nights at Freddy’s. Now things are about to get interesting as that generation comes of age and starts to tell its own stories. Curry Barker’s Obsession is presently setting box office records, single-handedly ushering in this changing of the guard. And stalking at its heels comes Backrooms, A24’s gilt-edged investment in horror’s next big thing: 20-year-old YouTube filmmaker and VFX wiz Kane Parsons.

Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the proprietor of a furniture store, is carrying some heavy emotional baggage thanks to a recent split from his wife. When not spending his time in unsatisfying counseling sessions with his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), he’s starring in mortifying local TV commercials in a futile effort to save his ailing business.

Clark’s humdrum existence is disturbed when an electrical problem leads to the discovery of an anomaly in the basement of his store, a wall he can pass through to access the titular backrooms—a labyrinthine, seemingly endless dimension that defies all laws of spacetime and physics. When Clark confides in Dr. Kline about his discovery, she disbelieves the existence of any such space, so he taps two amateur filmmakers, Bobby (Finn Bennett) and Kat (Lukita Maxwell), to document what he’s experiencing. But an ambush by one of the backrooms’ resident entities traps Clark inside, leading Dr. Kline to retrace his steps to locate her patient.

“The Backrooms” first emerged in 2019 as a 4chan post, with an image of an empty hobby store under renovation and a description by an anonymous user of an extradimensional liminal space that can only be accessed by “noclipping” (a term borrowed from video games that describes passing through solid objects) out of reality. Images of liminal spaces—those familiar yet empty or abandoned places that disquiet the observer—had become popular on paranormal message boards, but the anonymous post coalesced the aesthetic into an intriguing narrative that inspired the then-teenage Parsons to build it into a web series. Posted on his YouTube channel, Kane Pixels, starting in 2022, the Backrooms series became a viral sensation that grabbed the attention of James Wan, Atomic Monster, and, eventually, A24.

The big-screen version of Backrooms is an impressive handmade rendering of what Parsons was once only able to create by himself with such tools as Blender and Adobe After Effects. The film is a triumph of atmosphere and imagination, especially for production designer Danny Lee Vermette, who brings Parsons’s original visions to life as physical sets. Indeed, Backrooms utterly transfixes as Ejiofor and Reinsve’s characters wander through 30,000 square feet of pale-egg-yolk-colored halls and heave themselves through impossibly small doors, diving through ever-deepening layers of a surreally banal alternate reality.

These art installation-like formal elements are thematically weighted in and of themselves because they play with the sociological underpinnings that gave rise to liminal horror in the first place. Parson and Vermette draw from images of forsaken and dying temples of consumerism (i.e., malls, department stores, and furniture emporiums) that dot the United States, reminders of a supposed golden era of middle-class abundance that might as well be the ruins of an ancient alien society to those born between 1997 and 2012.

Will Soodik’s screenplay is lean and efficient but doesn’t skimp on character interiority. One of the film’s most compelling strains is how it traces a line between Clark’s psychological state and the backrooms themselves, casting them simultaneously as an anonymous, unsympathetic no-place and a mindscape. At the same time, it stumbles over exposition that feels like an unexpected pile of illogically stacked furniture.

One of the defining characteristics of Zoomer horror, with its roots in online fiction and creepypastas, is its complicated and expansive lore. Longtime fans of Parsons’s web series find pleasure in learning these byzantine timelines and complexities and committing their every contour to memory. A clunky third-act lore dump may dispel the film’s hypnotic ambiguity, but the breadcrumbs are there to satiate those familiar with Parson’s previous work and stimulate newcomers, provided they can stomach how silly it all gets.

Backrooms is undeniable, both as a future load-bearing pillar of the internet-born horror movement that’s now breaking ground and for being built on a concept that feels truly new. Horror reinvents itself every decade or so, and what it does better than any other genre is reflect back at us the collective nightmares of the world we live in. But what’s especially unnerving about this film’s particular journey through the looking glass is that it doesn’t take us very far at all. It points us back to our distorted selves and the hollow world we’ve built, replicated and twisted ad infinitum into a fluorescent-lit purgatory whose very familiarity is its horror.

The post ‘Backrooms’ Review: Kane Parsons Brings His Viral Meme to Eerily Tactile Cinematic Life appeared first on Slant Magazine.

Over 80 years after D-Day, the Allied landing in Normandy remains the largest seaborne invasion in history. Pressure wants you to know that there’s more to this turning point in World War II than meets the eye. More specifically, the way Anthony Maras’s film sees it, behind every grand military achievement lies routine workplace drama.

Pressure’s gambit is to treat the behind-the-scenes planning of D-Day not only as equally important to the attack but also just as interesting. The biggest decision in the film comes not from whether to invade but when, specifically factoring in how weather conditions would influence the ability of ships to approach the French coastline. This small, underappreciated component of war planning makes meteorologist Captain James Stagg (Andrew Scott) as pivotal to turning the war’s tide as Allied General Dwight Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser).

But Scott’s wonky weatherman hardly receives a hero’s welcome when Fraser’s supreme commander summons him away from his highly pregnant wife (Tamsin Topolski) to join the Allied Headquarters at Southwick House. Stagg joins a brain trust that resembles Lincoln’s “team of rivals” model, which Eisenhower convenes to consider all angles of an attack. Yet he’s hardly treated like an equal among a group whose conventional wisdom has begun to calcify into stagnation, most notably around the date of D-Day’s launch: June 5.

Hinging the concept of Pressure around aligning calendars places a ceiling on the suspense the film can generate. Maras and co-writer David Haig, the author of the stage play on which the film is based, must recreate the pleasures of a ticking time-bomb thriller for an audience that knows exactly when the detonation will occur. The onus thus lies with Scott’s performance to make how the explosion happens as interesting as when it does. As the irascible but innovative Stagg, the actor skillfully generates sparks through his character’s internecine skirmishes.

When this newcomer drops into the planning deliberations on the precipice of the invasion, he encounters a team whose remove from the frontlines of devastation has dulled their sense of urgency. Eisenhower’s most trusted consultant in meteorology, Irving P. Krick (Chris Messina), is content to model the landing date off historical precedent and general vibes. For an empiricist like Stagg, who insists on incorporating real-time data signals to model weather systems in the volatile skies of Northern Europe, business as usual won’t do.

What follows amounts to something like the Moneyball of war movies, with a disruptive force seeking to modernize operations running into consistent confrontation with a rigid old guard that rests on its laurels. To convince Eisenhower to rethink D-Day’s mission strategy, Stagg must contend with Krick’s bravado—conveyed by Messina in a hammily scene-stealing turn—and Field Marshal Bernard “Monty” Montgomery’s (Damian Lewis) intense brooding. A little help from the one woman with any substantial speaking role at the base, Lt. Kay Sommersby (Kerry Condon), also goes a long way in his coalition-building effort.

Pressure functions best when Maras reflects his protagonist’s nature: straightforward, unflashy, and mission-driven. The film, unfortunately, betrays the nature of Stagg’s triumph in its closing stretch by recreating the D-Day invasion. Granted, most sequences of filmed combat in war movies since Saving Private Ryan have been unable to capture the visceral intensity of how Steven Spielberg depicted the storming of Omaha Beach, but Pressure especially suffers from doing so, as evidenced by one particular sequence marred by unimaginative aesthetics.

Ending in the register of a standard-issue, guns-blazing war movie undercuts the film’s biggest selling point: its ability to grasp both the mythological and mundane elements present in each scene. With plenty of help from Volker Bertelmann’s dramatic score bellowing throughout, the weight of World War II and the tragic consequences of blowing this invasion are never out of mind. Yet Stagg’s dilemma is one all too familiar to knowledge workers, albeit in far lower-stakes scenarios, as they scramble to put together an impossible deliverable for a demanding boss while uncooperative colleagues decry any deviation from orthodoxy.

The post ‘Pressure’ Review: Anthony Maras’s D-Day Thriller Turns War Into a Workplace Drama appeared first on Slant Magazine.

Kamal Aljafari, a specialist in archival documentaries, describes the creation of With Hasan in Gaza as the accidental discovery of a time capsule. This travelogue’s footage was recorded on miniDV tapes during a visit by the filmmaker to the Gaza Strip in 2001, only to sit unused for nearly 25 years before being digitized and edited into a feature.

The result is both a document of a precise historical moment and testament to the continuity of Palestinian memory and struggle. Imprisoned by Israel at age 17, during the First Intifada, for alleged involvement in a militant group, Aljafari traveled to Gaza at age 28 to try and track down a fellow inmate whose fate was unknown to him. To do so, he enlisted the services of Hasan Alboubou, a local guide whose fate is unknown to him now. This was during the early days of the Second Intifada, shortly after the collapse of the peace process, over three decades since Israel’s occupation of Gaza, several years before Israeli withdrawal and the seizure of absolute power by Hamas, and over two decades before the currently ongoing war would raze much of the strip to rubble, killing as many as one in every twenty Palestinians living there.

With Hasan in Gaza is politically striking, then, for its familiarity. In a world before smartphone photography and a Palestine where Hamas is relegated to the shadows, the stories and visuals of Israeli occupation and assault are largely the same as the extreme images that have shocked the world today. The Star of David is carved into mangled buildings as a symbol of dominance. Checkpoints and militarized settlements are glimpsed from a distance, metallic structures cutting through the sunkissed desert land, strategically placed to restrict Palestinian movement.

The guns, tanks, and hostile voices of the barely glimpsed Israeli “other” cut through the air in the hot, still day and through skirmishes with invisible militants at night (the two sides are distinguished by the pitch of their weapons fire). Their menacing omnipresence, always just off screen, inspires fear and defiance in equal measure among the occupied people.

And it’s those people, beside the land, whom the young Aljafari is eager to engage with the camera as active participants in their own story, capturing a rugged beauty and a persistence of life behind the frontlines of occupation and ethnoreligious war. Touring Gaza’s streets and buildings, Aljafari and Hasan come across an array of citizens making the most of their circumstances. Men and boys sell fresh fish for shekels in a seaside market. A young farmer tends gently to his horse and goats. Middle-aged men, unable to find employment in an economy reliant on Israeli work permits, laugh while playing cards in a saloon.

Subjects react differently to the then-novel camera’s presence. Children at play, seemingly oblivious to the strife around them, are delighted by the chance to be filmed; they demand it, and briefly glory in wielding the camcorder for themselves. Wives in hijabs invite Aljafari’s camera in a different way: to capture the damage to residential buildings by the mortar shells that have displaced their families. (In a striking image, the wives have recovered the shells and shrapnel that struck their houses, presenting them to the camera with the hope of exposing the Israeli army’s ruthlessness.) A younger man in a crimson-yellow jumpsuit, wandering alone through the rubble of a destroyed house near settlement borders, pleads not to be filmed as he fears losing his Israeli work visa, and Hasan reassures him that “no Israeli will see this.”

The active role of the camera here calls to mind the many cameras wielded by the people of Gaza to tell their own stories in the Rashid Masharawi-curated From Ground Zero, a more vibrant, populist, and contemporary account of Palestinian suffering and endurance in Gaza. Aljafari’s loose assemblage takes on a ghostlier tone, the washed-out colors and blurry textures of his restored minicassette footage creating a myopic, shimmering lost present preserved in digital amber. Meandering footage that might otherwise be mundane attains spectral power from the non-presence of things Aljafari’s camera doesn’t or can’t show: the direct violence and death of the conflict, the land of Israel-Palestine beyond Gaza, the weight of past decades of struggle and displacement, the unknown or grimly known fates of the people and places depicted.

Connecting the film to that larger flow of history are two forms of present-day editorial intervention, and both are used sparingly. The first is the score, a series of haunting electronic wails composed by frequent Derek Jarman collaborator Simon-Fisher Turner, combined with mournful Arabic ballads expressing Palestinian nationalist sentiment: the desire to “go back in time,” reunite with lost comrades, reclaim lost land. The second is a series of intertitles written in Aljafari’s voice, recalling both fond memories of his family and bitter memories of his personal and family’s displacement and abuse by the Israeli state, which the onetime prisoner accuses of making all of Gaza and Palestinian life “a prison.”

Like the documentary itself, these intertitles focus on presenting an archive of people and events that can feel prosaic and placid on the surface, yet the sorrow and rage beneath that surface is nearly beyond expression. With Hasan in Gaza’s sights and sounds from the occupied road aren’t always riveting viewing moment to moment, but they leave a crushing emptiness in their wake. Beyond personal memento, the film’s value as a memory record of a people under siege is greater than its interest in aesthetic excitement.

The post ‘With Hasan in Gaza’ Review: A Sorrowful Testament to Palestinian Memory and Struggle appeared first on Slant Magazine.

For his first narrative after a run of smart, propulsive documentaries, among them 2022’s Oscar-winning Navalny, Daniel Roher delivers a propulsive modern noir that might not be especially smart but has an appealing cleverness and lightness of touch. Written by Roher and Robert Ramsey, Tuner’s hook is in its high-concept story design, which is centered on Nikki (Leo Woodall), a New York piano tuner whose boss, Harry (Dustin Hoffman), is also his best friend, surrogate father figure, and unwitting reason for Nikki’s turn to crime.

Nikki, a onetime piano prodigy with perfect pitch, never pursued a music career because of his hyperacusis, a hearing disorder that makes him hyper-sensitive to noise, forcing him to wear earplugs or headphones most of the time. While Nikki’s condition leaves him vulnerable to threats involving his ears, as the gangsters he eventually falls in with discover, it hasn’t robbed him of the hearing that turns out to be just as useful for cracking safes as it is for tuning pianos.

Nikki spends his days driving the repair van across the Tri-State area to fix pianos in the homes of the rich while Harry, well past retirement, yammers away and naps. Nikki is the exasperatedly uptight but doting son figure, while Harry is all clumsy and cheerful moxie. Their chemistry is largely a credit to Hoffman, whose lightly irascible yet twinkly performance is a delightful reminder of what he can do when truly zeroing in on a character.

Roher finds a smart balance in the early parts of Tuner, spending enough time with Nikki and Harry that they become fully realized characters rather than just cogs for the drama to follow, but not so much that the story is weighed down with backstory. Without any flashbacks or exposition dumps, it’s understood that Harry and his wife Marla (Tovah Feldshuh) are now Nikki’s found family. Their bond is tight enough that when the couple is hit by a massive bill after Harry goes into the hospital, Nikki jumps without hesitation to help.

Accidentally stumbling on three thieves trying to rob a mansion where he happens to be working late on a piano, Nikki helps them crack the safe. His decision is made largely without hesitation. By that point, Roher’s film has seeded in enough scenes of Nikki and Harry’s wealthy clients’ arrogant disregard that it isn’t difficult for the lead thief Uri (Fauda’s Lior Raz) to convince Nikki that snatching a few baubles is no great moral dilemma.

Though Tuner has many elements of a crime story, it seems almost more piqued by what’s usually the throwaway part of any noir: the girlfriend. Nikki falls fast for aspiring concert pianist Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu), who seems to match him in wiry, watchful energy and painstaking perfectionism. Both are tight-lipped professionals who prefer to let their work speak for them, giving the vulnerability of their opening up greater impact. The slowly burgeoning romance, which seems to give Nikki and Ruthie permission to drop their respective guard, is tracked with as much drama and care as the increasingly dangerous heists he secretly embarks on.

There’s an almost Soderberghian exactitude to the clockwork way that the story’s character beats and plot elements weave together. But though the script relies on a few too-handy conveniences (including an eye-roller about an item that Nikki steals that directly impacts Ruthie) to make the conclusion click, Roher’s three-dimensional characters ensure that the film’s precisely crafted final moments feel emotionally satisfying rather than mechanical.

The post ‘Tuner’ Review: A Funny, Heartfelt Romance About a Piano Tuner Turned Safe Cracker appeared first on Slant Magazine.

An online film critic said upon the release of 2000’s Mission to Mars—probably the film that demonstrates the single largest gap in perception between mainstream American audiences and French cinephiles—that there’s no better test case for the auteurist model than Brian De Palma. No matter how seemingly diverse his films are (or how seemingly tied they are to the work of Alfred Hitchcock), they’re immediately identifiable as “a film by Brian De Palma.” But too often his films are looked at as simple, stylistically flossy, self-referential exercises using thriller genre tropes. This is unfortunate, because it leaves no room for De Palma’s reckless early films, including 1970’s Hi, Mom!

Conceived as a sequel of sorts to 1968’s Greetings (in fact, Hi, Mom! was originally set to be titled Son of Greetings), the stunningly complex Hi, Mom! is likewise a film with three major threads, only all are devoted to the character of Jon Rubin (played by an appealing, floppy-topped Robert De Niro in a performance many consider to be a direct harbinger of his Travis Bickle role in Taxi Driver). Jon, a Vietnam vet, drifts through the film like a skuzzy butterfly, moving from one underground social environment to the next: first the world of pornographic filmmaking, next becoming an actor in a performance art-cum-social crusaders’ college theater troupe, finally landing on domestic terrorism. His enlightenment-barbarism is held against a distorted paradigm of flowering courtship rituals with Judy (Jennifer Salt), the girl with whom he initially wants to make his Candid Camera pornographic film.

De Palma biographer-enthusiast Laurent Bouzereau notes in The De Palma Cut that the film received rave reviews from adventurous critics, but suffered a financial failure that led De Palma to also consider it an artistic failure. But one has to take into consideration that the director’s greatest directorial strategy—one that incidentally informs Hi, Mom! more than it does practically any other De Palma film—is his attempt to make us aware of our role as an audience, and also our connection with what he as a director is attempting to accomplish through a heady mix of artifice, contradiction, and a hectic emotional pitch.

De Palma’s films are nothing if not structural, representational works of art. They’re filled with winking moments that distance the audience from the diagetic details of his scenarios through their flamboyant technique (the slow-mo zoom on Nancy Allen’s open-book face as she discovers Angie Dickenson in the elevator in Dressed to Kill, the downright Brechtian finale to Body Double) even as other equally showboating moments are galvanizing narrative K.O. punches (John Travolta feverishly discovers his erased tapes in Blow Out, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos comes to the water’s surface in Femme Fatale).

If, indeed, De Palma’s own auto-critique of Hi, Mom! in relation to his own personal canon was informed by what wags sarcastically refer to as the “Hitchcock connection”—derisively calling to mind images of De Palma fixed on the belly of the Master of Suspense like a lamprey or via an umbilical cord—and that this early counter-cultural comedy somehow falls short on the required tally of Hitch riffs, it would be a shame. Hi, Mom! might have been only the third feature film by the director, but practically every trait that would come to signify the art of De Palma is at play in the film, many of them, natch, in direct conflict with another.

The most Hitchcockian riff that De Palma ever examined is the capacity for the human psyche to harbor intense, complicated divergence. But whereas Hitchcock often resolved this tension by placing it in the context of a relatively well adjusted, normalized society (i.e., the long-winded psychological rationale that closes Psycho), De Palma complicates the archetype through his insistence on highlighting the equally labyrinthine tangle of contradictions behind social normalcy, knots that seem to cause individual maladaptive dysfunction.

An early broadcast from NIT—that’s National Intelligent Television, the front used by the anarchist theater clan—sees the crew of black students taking to the streets with the intention of exposing the internal hypocrisies of the average WASP. Obviously baiting people to their breaking points, the students reveal the sham of social grace, as their targets are stripped of their reliable defense (their politeness and tacitly segregated racial congregations).

This sequence is obviously the comedic setup for the “Be Black, Baby” performance art nightmare that practically rapes the definition of social façades and the lengths people will go to preserve them. But it’s also a reflection of Jon’s demented internal logic (to the extent that a cipherous figure can be said to have logic); in De Palma’s world he is portrayed as a man whose utter alienation from normalcy stems, appropriately enough, from the total absence of it.

As Chaka Khan purrs in “Tearin’ It Up,” “I’m going to make you wish there were two of you.” Many schisms in De Palma’s movies are tethered to sexual frustrations and confusions—basically anything having to do with sex that doesn’t involve supine boudoir humping. The Fury can be taken as an apocalyptic satire of sex education films, charting the development of one boy and one girl as they go through a sort of psychic puberty. The attempts of adults to contain their increasingly virile state (psychic abstinence) leads to the ultimate sexual-murderous release.

Hi, Mom! doesn’t so directly address the connection between sex and violence, but the film’s last act, in which Jon plants a bomb that demolishes the building he and a pregnant Judy share in domestic tranquility, is a sly joke. Being that Jon and Judy met under the pretense of sexual intent, at least according to him, the fact that Judy is pregnant indicates a newfound absence of sexual conquests, and every tryst between the two now carries the promise of further consequences. Jon’s destruction of everything that represents familial domesticity, like Amy Irving’s “removal” of John Cassavetes, clears the way for further sexual adventures.

Like the shot in To Die For of Nicole Kidman as a kid looking back and forth between a video camera and the monitor feed in an effort to see her own face on television, Jon Rubin’s relationship to pornography in the film’s first segment is complicated by his desire to straddle the gulf between watching and being watched. (The Rube Goldberg device he invents to film himself making love to Judy in the building across the way, which predictably fails, accentuates the comically Sisyphesian difficulty of bridging the gap between the two.) In its take on the relationship people have with their own image-making games, Hi, Mom! occasionally comes off as the work of a film student who spent his summer session on Marshall McLuhan blitzed out of his mind on acid. The concepts are all there, but they’ve been kneaded into a bizarrely funny burlesque of the “medium is the message” worst-case scenario.

With the “Be Black, Baby” sequence, De Palma manages to do with racial tension what he no doubt hoped to pull off with sexual ambiguity in filming Cruising (a project he lost to William Friedkin before turning out the thematically similar Dressed to Kill). Aided by a deliberate dissection of a very real social stress point, it is one of the most thrilling left turns ever filmed. The theme of voyeurism, which up to this point had been treated as a blue joke, becomes a hellish shattering of the seemingly secure fourth wall, both for the on-screen audience of upper-crust whites who attend the show, submitting themselves to humiliation, beatings, and broomstick rape, as well as the actual film’s viewers, who are basically cast adrift into an 8mm calamity without even the comfort of a recognizable character. For our trouble, De Palma throws us a bone by having the brutalized upper-class twits exclaim, amazingly, their gratitude for being shown how they’re directly responsible for all of society’s racial ills.

There are, of course, basketsful of further stylistic and structural tactics that construct Hi, Mom! If the descriptions of the film’s collage of ideas and subplots all sounds rather daunting and busy, it probably is that and more so. If the film has a failing, it would be in its unbridled, undisciplined ambition. Early in Jon’s would-be career as a pornographer, he pitches his idea to his decidedly uninterested producer (Allen Garfield) to blur the lines between fiction and verité by filming four real windows, four real storylines. This not only predicts De Palma’s fascination with split-screen effects (he actually had already experimented with this device in Dionysus in ‘69), but also his fascination with the difference between private emotions and public “performance” (take note of the fact that the “reality” he’s filming across the courtyard is filled with sexual fantasy role-playing, or “fiction”). Hi, Mom! is an overachieving film that deserves better than mere footnote status in De Palma’s already far too marginalized career.

Image/Sound

Brian De Palma’s Hi, Mom! was shot on a variety of film stocks, and Radiance’s 4K transfer looks consistently clear and detailed. Location shots in dusky New York City streets boast deep black levels and subtle color separation, while the blown-out black-and-white of the “Be Black, Baby” segment has a clarity never before seen on home video. Throughout the film, grain is evenly distributed and the image is sharp enough to reveal the subtlest of nuances, in everything from costumes to faces. The mono soundtrack is dominated by dialogue, which is always clear in the mix, even when the occasional music cue or burst of street noise is heard.

Extras

The most significant extra on Radiance’s release is the debut 2K release of Dionysus ‘69, Brian De Palma’s taping of a black-box stage production of Richard Schechner’s play (itself a radical reworking of Euripides’s The Bacchae). Even working with the visual limitations of filmed theater, De Palma demonstrates some of his trademarks, such as presenting the play in split-screen to compound the play’s own fourth-wall-breaking structure.

Radiance also includes a new commentary with critic Travis Woods, who leans too often on fannish superlatives but does occasionally offer an interesting factoid, such as the note that the film’s opening shot is an elaborate parody of a local New York commercial about ratty landlords. In a new interview, critic Ellen E. Jones posits Hi, Mom! as De Palma’s creative breakthrough for introducing or solidifying many of his visual and thematic tropes. In an archival interview, co-writer Charles Hirsch offers his memories of making the film on minimal resources, goading location permissions and equipment on good faith or as little money as possible.

Also of note is Son of Greetings, a making-of documentary shot during production by Peter Davis. A booklet essay by critic Matt Zoller Seitz places the film within the context of similarly countercultural satires of the period such as M*A*S*H and also unpacks the film’s subtly dense array of filmic effects that both deepen and shatter the sense of voyeuristic immersion.

Overall

Brian De Palma’s acidic satire of mass commodification from 1970 is his first triumph, and it receives a stellar release from Radiance Films.

The post Review: Brian De Palma’s Black Comedy ‘Hi, Mom!’ on Radiance Films 4K UHD Blu-ray appeared first on Slant Magazine.