Director:Celine Song Writer:Celine Song Stars: Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, Pedro Pascal
Synopsis:A young, ambitious New York City matchmaker finds herself torn between the perfect match and her imperfect ex.
Celine Song’s masterful, heartbreaking debut feature, Past Lives, didn’t have a tagline because it didn’t need one to sell itself. The romantic drama about two once-intertwined souls who reconnect after losing touch for decades was as straightforward as they come, yet what made it one of 2023’s strongest films was the meticulous manner in which it handled its reasonably basic narrative. Intelligent, wistful, and endlessly painful in the ways that make you long for the feelings it stirs within you regardless of the accompanying ache, it’s a film that is wholly in touch with the sort of emotions only art can inspire. At least, that’s what you believe until you meet someone who causes similar, deep sensations so deep that they feel right, wrong, and entirely foreign, all at the same time. Past Lives is a terrifying movie because of how recognizable it is: It imagines a reality that you’ve probably lived, even if you didn’t realize it at the time.
Song’s sophomore effort, Materialists (in theaters on June 13 from A24), has a tagline – “Some people just want more” – but it similarly doesn’t require one, though the reasons are different this time. For one, it’s a modern romantic dramedy being released during a time when filmgoing audiences seem starved for thoughtful fare of the sort; Anyone But You and Babygirl were mere starters, just hearty enough to whet one’s appetite without spoiling dinner. But it also could have been released on its own promise, given the fact(s) that its director is hot off the heels of a hit that garnered two Oscar nominations (Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay, Song’s own), and that its stars, with no shade to the likes of Greta Lee, John Magaro, and Teo Yoo, are among Hollywood’s brightest in terms of marketability and feasibly-photoshopped physical features.
The lead here, Dakota Johnson, plays Lucy, a Manhattan-based matchmaker who is responsible for nine marriages but is referred to by her pals as “the eternal bachelorette;” a notable nepo baby, Johnson has paved a path independent of her parents’ dating back to the Fifty Shades franchise in the early 2010s and including everything from A Bigger Splash and Suspiria to Madame freaking Web. Opposite our favorite neighborhood (clairvoyant) spider-woman is Chris Evans as John, a struggling actor who works catering jobs to make rent and lives with a tandem of shitty roommates; you might remember Evans from his time as Captain America. Rounding out Materialists’ dynamic trio is Pedro Pascal, playing this romance’s resident macho millionaire, Harry; Pascal has starred or appeared in everything short of a NEON movie (though I’m sure it’s coming) and makes his Marvel foray next month as Reed “Mister Fantastic” Richards in The Fantastic Four: First Steps. This film, the one starring all three and in which not one dons a latex-based costume, has next to no reporting on its budget, but one has to assume that 75-percent of that imaginary number went straight into their pockets.
Dakota Johnson and Celine Song in Celine Song’s “Materialists” | Credit: Atsushi Nishijima
Jokes aside, it’s safe to say that Materialists, cute catchphrase and all, needed no introduction. Yet what I hope people are willing to do is consider its excellence beyond its inherent external sheen, with glimmers bouncing off of its top-billed stars’ trophy cases and Song’s unofficial first-look deal with the studio behind its domestic release. For while Materialists is certainly a showier (and shinier) production than Past Lives ever was – even after the critical acclaim and awards nominations – it remains just as incisive an examination of the human heart as its filmographic predecessor. The apartments here, for the most part, are much larger and nicer than anyone’s homes in Past Lives, as are the clothes, the car services, the date nights, and the accessories, scrupulously selected to tie every perfect outfit together. But its core tenant is the same blend of smart, earnest, humanistic, and, above all, authentic that made Past Lives such a phenomenon for an unknown director whose claim to fame was that her first film’s love triangle was loosely autobiographical.
We still lack (and clamor for) the details regarding what went down during Song and Challengers/Queer scribe Justin Kuritzkes’ courtship, but as long as they keep writing such devourable screenplays that chart the maps for such luscious, delectable films, who’s to say they owe us anything? What Materialists argues at first, on the other hand, is that we owe ourselves everything when it comes to love; that we should play the field until we find the perfect partner, the one who dots every “i” and crosses every “t.” Lucy’s job is to help the singles of New York find the ideal match – it is called matchmaking, after all – but her approach is comprehensive and considers every variable. A number of cleverly-edited montages (kudos to Keith Fraase, Song’s editor on Past Lives and a frequent collaborator of Terrence Malick’s) are peppered throughout the film and show us precisely what Lucy has to keep in mind when setting up dates for prospective paramours. “Nothing over 20 BMI,” one client notes sternly. “I get along a lot better with girls in their 20s,” another offers, pushing 50 himself. “I deserve someone who fulfills all of my criteria,” says the customer with a list of musts longer than the restaurant menu she and Lucy are sitting in. It’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it.
And Lucy is incredibly good at it. She finds a way to twist an anxious bride’s words from “I’m marrying him to make my sister jealous” to “I’m marrying him because he makes me feel valued.” She also pitches marriage as a business deal, a has-to-end-sometime search for a “grave buddy.” As for Lucy’s love life, she’s happy on her own, for now. Her apartment is well-kept, as is her routine. Until she is approached by a handsome private equity tycoon (Pascal’s Harry) at the aforementioned success story’s wedding. Harry is the groom’s brother, and with his equally-rich sibling matched off, he happens to be next on the ring-shopping block. Naturally, as this is a movie starring movie stars, he takes a liking to Lucy, and though she initially balks at the proposition, she entertains a drink and a dance in hopes that she can win his business by night’s end. Only the evening doesn’t conclude on Harry’s arm, but in John’s car. Yes, Evans’ ruggedly-sexy Broadway dreamster snagged a busboy gig at Harry’s brother’s nuptials, and goes so far as to deliver Lucy’s drink of choice before she can have Harry fetch it for her – “Coke and beer,” she says, marking the first time anyone has ever ordered such a combination. She and John have a history, you see, a complicated one that fizzled due to conflicting dreams and financial insecurity, not due to a lack of love for one another.
“I don’t want to hate you for being poor,” Lucy tells John in a flashback, “But it’s very hard.” It’s a cutting barb to hear from a partner, but Song isn’t afraid to shy away from writing and depicting exchanges that couples have perhaps always wanted to share and never felt comfortable enough to commit to. “I’m trying so hard to make you happy,” John replies, with Lucy delivering a final blow in response. “I know. And it’s almost enough to make me happy.” These are the sorts of concerns that Harry doesn’t arouse, and if there were any real concerns, his $12 million penthouse would dispel them in perpetuity. Much of Materialists is made up of conversations between a woman and a man in which one seems to be pitching themselves to the other, as though a relationship is a business proposition. And for Lucy, that makes sense: She views everything through the lens of mathematics and sensible decision making, which leads her down the Harry road even if the John road is more familiar and enticing, despite its plethora of potholes and construction-related delays. This serves Song’s “will they/won’t they” framework quite well on a basic level, with the practical dialogue she has her characters engage in only aiding the concoction, like decorative frosting atop an already decadent wedding cake.
Dakota Johnson in Celine Song’s “Materialists” | Credit: Atsushi Nishijima
There are layers to the cake, too, like Harry’s own insecurities – including one particular reveal that is too good to spoil and too hilarious to bother explaining – John’s emotional baggage, and Lucy’s self-deprecative streak. That the film is never too keen to hitch its wagon to one thread alone allows for plenty of back-and-forth between Lucy’s connection with both men, as well as a side plot featuring Zoë Winters’ Sophie (Lucy’s most demanding and hopeless case) that initially feels out of place but finds a footing of its own and ends up factoring intimately in with the ongoings of our main characters’ journeys, both together and individually. It’s Johnson’s movie for the most part, with her wealth of lines and significance to the film’s principal dramatic arc(s) making certain that she is never off-screen for very long, if at all. The whole picture basically boils down to being a chapter in Lucy’s exploration of personal growth, and Pascal’s Harry plays a significant part, putting on the charm offensive and looking devilishly grand while doing so. But Evans is the true standout, providing yet another slab of evidence that the Marvel portion of his career was a loss for us all. His John has all the makings of a classic romantic dramedy character – the flailing ex who still loves our lead because of her flaws, not in spite of them – and Evans’ knack for embodying deep emotion in every line and shift in body language will only make you wish he’d squirmed out of Disney’s clutches sooner.
Of course, it’s a credit to Song’s raw filmmaking abilities that got each of these three stars attached, and a more extravagant hat-tip should be directed her way due to how successful the writer-director is in ensuring that none of them are ever backed into one of the film’s many potential corners, no matter who’s commanding the frame at any given point. Lucy runs the show; Harry has his moments, but also has his millions, and the two are often inextricable; John is somehow the most complex and most relatable character, but only because Song allows him to be both at the same time. A lesser filmmaker would have made Evans play the bumbling boy bestie whose employment is constantly on the fritz and whose rent is perpetually six months behind; in the early 2000s, he probably would have been gay or rejected. Both the occupational and financial concerns are true of John here, but he’s also an emotional figure worth investing in for the long haul, and not just because he gets the movie’s most indelible line down the home stretch.
It’s clear that Song has a love for the genre in which she’s now crafted to undeniable triumphs, and while Past Lives is this critic’s preferred entry, there’s something thrilling about watching the burgeoning auteur level up in a mainstream way that doesn’t involve superheroes or Mattel. And when you think about it, the only thing differentiating the “accessibility,” for lack of a better word, of Song’s debut effort from her sophomore is the inclusion of subtitles. That’s a conversation for another day – though it’s not one we should still have to have – because it’s worth reiterating that Materialists exists on its own merits, not those set by the success of the movie its director made two years prior. Far too often do we compare one’s past work (or lives) to their new offerings in hopes that a hole might be worth poking through when we should instead be appreciating the fact that a filmmaker has done more than one thing in their careers, no matter how long they’ve been working. In Song’s case, the career is but two features in, and Materialists serves as an indication that her well of stories worth telling shan’t run dry anytime soon. And thank goodness for that: In terms of films by Celine Song, love stories or not, some people just want more.
This week on Women InSession, we discuss the compelling career of Michael Fassbender to this point, which includes some all-time performances of his era and some wondrous headscratchers as well! His work in Shame and Hunger is undeniable, as well as his role as Magneto in the X-Men films. However, some choices in the late 2010s started to make us wonder if should change agents. We discuss all of that and more about the great Fassbender.
On that note, check out this week’s show and let us know what you think in the comment section. Thanks for listening and for supporting the InSession Film Podcast!
Synopsis:Three French journalists travel to Cambodia in 1978 after receiving an invitation from the Khmer Rouge regime, embarking on a perilous adventure
“Where is the line?”
This is a line uttered by one of the main characters in Meeting With Pol Pot, and is a deeply important question for all leaders to be forced to answer, especially when making grand proclamations about bettering society. There are many of us, including this reviewer, whose knowledge of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge is limited to footnotes and lines in punk rock songs from the early 1980s. So, putting “Holiday in Cambodia” aside, you will likely assume correctly that a film that elucidates some of the deeply troubling history in that country is the definition of a tough watch.
And yet, despite the director (and co-writer), Rithy Panh, literally living through these events and being the only surviving member of his immediate family, the film uses differing styles that create distance and never dives into the true brutality, at least in visual form. The decision to use both puppetry and an overlay of actual film footage is a smart, if unexpected decision. It would be easy to go for shock value that only narrative film could accomplish, but there needs to be respect for the actual, real human beings that suffered. So, Panh uses screens and animated carved miniatures. This accomplishes a few things. First, it symbolizes the levels of “truth” that characters must wade through. But more importantly, it also shows the lengths that governments will go to in order to design their own truth. Words matter. There is a line. But leaders will stop at nothing to dodge around it.
The film follows outsiders, three French journalists, who were invited to speak with Pol Pot in 1978, near the end of the Khmer Rouge, which ruled Cambodia during that time. Lisa Delbo (Irène Jacob) heads this group, joined by Alain Cariou (Grégoire Colin), and photographer Paul Thomas (Cyril Gueï). The film does a tremendous job of distinguishing these three, instead of making them all cookie-cutter reporters. Alain has a relationship with Pol Pot through letter writing while Paul is definitely the most radical of the group. Lisa occupies a middle ground, until she begins to see the truth of the crumbling of Democratic Kampuchea.
The pace is deliberate and, like life, the truth slowly opens up to both the audience and the journalists. Jacob, a deeply talented actress who is mostly known for her early career work, is given an opportunity to dominate the screen, sometimes in a wordless manner, and the film is better for it. Watching her process the unimaginable horrors that are occurring to the Cambodian people, as well as her own personal losses is truly a sight to behold. Panh astutely allows these scenes to breathe and holds the camera tight on her expressive face. And still, the film is balanced. There are also moments for Alain and Paul, as well as the Cambodian people actually affected by these horrors.
Despite said horrors, Meeting With Pol Pot also takes the time to show the beauty of the landscape. Cinematographer Aymerick Pilarski, aided by the script, takes us on a visual tour of 1978 Cambodia. It is easy for Westerners to make assumptions about this part of the world, without appreciating its people and its grandeur. Although some terrible things happen amidst these vistas, the story hinges on not just the unraveling of a mystery, but also on the importance of human lives in the face of lines being crossed by the minute.
And yes, the meeting (or meetings) with Pol Pot do happen, but the film certainly takes its time getting to it. This may be a feature, as opposed to a bug, as we feel the exact same kind of frustration that the journalists feel. They are controlled by the whim of a leader, just as we are by the script and direction keeping us at bay. But, to the film’s credit, when those meetings do occur, they are well worth the wait. I will not ruin the powerful impact of those conversations, but even if the audience finds the pace difficult, it is rewarded by the climax of the film.
There are no easy answers. Not to why terrible things happen. Not for what is the correct form of government. But once again, there are lines. If living in 2025 has taught us anything, it is that those lines can be crossed if we allow it to happen. In the modern world, we are no more immune to this disgusting behavior of leaders than the people of Cambodia were from the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s.
On this episode, JD and Brendan discuss the debut film from Andrew DeYoung in Friendship, starring Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd! It’s incredibly funny and ironic, given this film’s title, how this episode unfolded denoting the shared brains between the two hosts. It was not planned at all, but sometimes that’s what makes friendships remarkable. The latest from A24 might not be for everyone given its extreme awkwardness and uncomfortable comedy. However, is there more to Friendship beyond its gimmick? That’s what we discuss in depth here.
Review: Friendship (4:00) Director: Danny Philippou, Michael Philippou Writer: Danny Philippou, Bill Hinzman Stars: Billy Barratt, Sora Wong, Sally Hawkins
Director:Len Wiseman Writers: Shay Hatten, Derek Kolstad Stars: Ana de Armas, Keanu Reeves, Ian McShane
Synopsis: An assassin trained in the traditions of the Ruska Roma organization sets out to seek revenge after her father’s death.
While watching From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, a spinoff from the world ofJohn Wick, it’s hard not to think the filmmakers missed a huge opportunity to blast the energetic guitar riffs and commanding vocals of Pat Benatar’s hard rock anthem, “Heartbreaker.” Not only is Ana de Armas a heartbreaker in the film, but she’s also—quite literally—a finger-breaker, toe-breaker, leg-breaker, skull-breaker, rib-breaker, eye-socket-breaker, and, most likely, a breaker of several other internal organs.
However, that’s beside the point. While Ballerina never quite lives up to the exploits of the original John Wick films, it features up-tempo, aggressive, and high-energy action sequences from star Ana de Armas—most notably a jaw-dropping, flamethrower fight scene that’s sure to go down in action movie history. The film moves at a breakneck pace, embracing familiar action tropes while cleverly subverting a few along the way.
Ana de Armas as Eve in Ballerina. Photo Credit: Murray Close
The story follows a classic revenge thriller format. We’re introduced to de Armas’s character, Eve Macarro, as a child (Victoria Comte), playing with her father, Javier (The Guilty’s David Castañeda), in the yard of a waterfront mansion. Javier remarks that young Eve looks just like her older sister—someone she cannot remember. (Strangely, there’s no mention of a mother.)
As the story unfolds, the mansion is raided by a nefarious crew. Javier valiantly fights them off while hiding his daughter in a secret passageway within the crumbling walls of the estate. The attack is led by the film’s main antagonist, “The Chancellor” (Picnic at Hanging Rock’sGabriel Byrne), who gives Javier a cruel ultimatum: kill himself to save his daughter’s life, or keep fighting and seal her fate.
Gabriel Byrne as The Chancellor and Ana de Armas as Eve in Ballerina. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Lionsgate
Somehow, Eve survives and is taken in by a friend of Javier’s—Winston Scott (Ian McShane), the enigmatic owner of John Wick’s favorite refuge, the Continental Hotel. He arranges an interview for her with the head of a Russian organization known as the Ruska Roma, a secretive group that trains assassins under the guise of ballet instruction. The Director (Anjelica Huston) offers Eve a place in the program, teaching her to become the assassin who will avenge her father someday.
Ballerina was directed by Len Wiseman, who was a head-scratching choice to put at the helm. For one, Wiseman is obsessed with style over substance as proved by the Underworld series—something the John Wick franchise seems to be on the surface, but is actually a commentary or stylized satire on our obsession with violence, with its highly stylized and exaggerated reflection of our need for bloodthirsty catharsis, like a cinematic rage room that can be therapeutic.
Ballerina lacks that quality in the beginning, but finally, slowly but surely, finds its way there. The script by Shay Hatten, who you loved for his work on John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum and John Wick: Chapter 4, but who committed cinematic crimes against humanity with Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire and Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver, is obsessed with a vain attempt to force a puzzle piece into Chad Stahelski’s world-building that feels like a cheap imitation.
Ana de Armas as Eve in Ballerina. Photo Credit: Larry D. Horricks
However, as the story progresses, you become immersed in a character’s obsession with control that is enthralling, especially in the glorious carnage of the third act. Sure, there are some beats where Byrne’s villain is so over-the-top and stereotypical that he becomes one-note (including a howlingly bad scene where he orders an attack). Plus, the introduction of Norman Reedus’s mystery character feels like a cheap attempt to humanize the titular character.
Still, the action and comic relief are so entertaining in Ballerina, paired with de Armas’s commanding turn, that you can forgive most missteps or flaws. I’ve come to understand this as the “Wick Effect,” or the halo effect of violence, leaving us both thrilled and satisfied. The story follows a standard setup, but the brutal carnage is bloody poetry in motion, an action-packed pirouette that will surely leave fans of the franchise satisfied, along with the promise that future installments can build and improve upon this foundation.
You can watch Ballerina only in theaters June 6th!
Six months have passed since this year’s iteration of Sundance kicked off the 2025 festival calendar, and though Cannes is only a few weeks behind cinephiles (and souls aplenty have still yet to enjoy a proper night’s sleep), it’s Tribeca time. For New Yorkers and those making the trip to the East Coast, the arrival of the Tribeca Festival means roughly two weeks of trekking across, over, and between a few blocks in and around Lower Manhattan to catch a few of the too-many-documentaries about, starring, and produced by varyingly-famous musicians… as well as a nice selection of independent gems that the Big Apple’s premiere of the live-action How To Train Your Dragon might have distracted prospective audiences from. It reads as though I’m being harsh – and I am – but this is simply the reality of the festival circuit. There will be great films, good ones, movies that work for some yet not others, and a solid heap of stuff that makes us wonder whether or not this whole staring at a screen in the dark for one-to-three hours is really worth it after all.
Yet however cognizant I am of my severity in this context, I’m far more aware of the fact than any film festival program is an embarrassment of riches for the folks who love sitting in jet-black screening rooms for hours at a time, myself and thousands of others included. And, in a way, the Tribeca Film Festival’s programming team has the dauntingest duty of all: Catering to audiences who are interested in a vast array of topics that spread far beyond the works of Hong Sang-soo, the late/great Jean-Luc Godard, and other members of the New York Film Festival Faithful™. Tribeca, which was co-founded by Robert De Niro in 2002, is known for its bevy of musical documentaries, yes, but also its bold inclusion of visual albums, its partiality to broad international and non-fiction offerings, the prioritization of smaller independent pictures that get the short-shrift at larger fests, and a retrospective section that includes traditional crowd-pleasing fare. In 2024, de Niro and Martin Scorsese took part in a 50th anniversary screening of the duo’s first collaboration, Mean Streets; this year’s choices include American Psycho, Best in Show, Casino, and Requiem for a Dream.
Those are certainly worth your time and money – time spent watching Christian Bale take an axe to Jared Leto’s torso on a big-screen is unequivocally time well spent – but we’d be remiss not to direct you toward a small selection of new films, new names, and new viewpoints on display from June 4 to 15. For your sake, we’ve avoided listing any duds here, though that’s also because there are precious few. The don’t-misses are what really count. And yes, some of them are music documentaries.
An Eye For An Eye (dir. Tanaz Eshaghian and Farzad Jafari) | World Premiere, Documentary Competition
“A Man came to the Messenger of Allah, and said: ‘This man killed my brother…’ The Prophet said: ‘Pardon him.’ But the man refused. The Prophet said: ‘Take the blood money.’ But the man refused. The Prophet said: ‘Then go and kill him, for you are just like him.’ So the man pardoned the criminal.”
What happens when the one on trial is your mother and the dead man in question is your father? Tanaz Eshaghian and Farzad Jafari’s profound, unsettlingly thrilling documentary An Eye for an Eye examines exactly that by blending two genre staples, the courtroom chronicles and the domestic family drama, that theoretically coexist in more harmony on paper than they do here. Yet the impossible choice facing two sons – whose mother, Tahereh killed their father in an act of self-defense and, having served her sentence for the crime, faces execution unless she can pay the aforementioned blood money her abuser’s family expects as retribution – fits tragically with the events unfolding in front of a judge tasked with upholding Sharia law. At times impossible to empathize yet never not resonant, Eshaghian and Jafari’s film doesn’t deserve the modern “true crime” label because it hardly fetishizes the idea of its central case for the value of entertainment and mass intrigue. Instead, it asks if the cost of a life, of multiple lives, can ever (or should ever) be properly calculated, especially when the person under scrutiny, as Tahereh’s son Mohsen says, “ruined her own life to set us free.”
An Eye for an Eye premieres on June 6 and additionally screens on June 7, 8, and 9.
Bird in Hand (dir. Melody C. Roscher) | World Premiere, U.S. Narrative Competition
In 2024, James Le Gros gave one of the year’s more understated, underrated supporting performances as an obtuse and creepy dad in India Donaldson’s excellent debut, Good One. His daughter in the film, Lily Collias, stole the show with a breakout turn that immediately garnered awards consideration and a should-be vault to the top of every casting director’s “next big thing” lists. One hopes that the same will be true for the new neighbor of a vaguely creepy, obtuse, and fairly racist Le Gros in Melody C. Roscher’s debut, Bird in Hand, Alisha Wainwright. Though the latter (playing the titular Bird) has a more seasoned CV than Collias – Wainwright starred in 2023’s There’s Something Wrong With The Children and 2021’s Palmer, regrettably opposite Justin Timberlake – it’s only just, and the evidence she offers in Roscher’s film should make a strong case for similar treatment to Collias. Wainwright is grounded yet flighty all at once as a bride-to-be on the hunt for a perfect venue and some other, unspoilable stuff, and her faulty relationship with mom (Christine Lahti) is one that breathes life into the film, which would otherwise be too standard for its status as a potentially-hidden gem.
Bird in Hand premieres on June 6 and additionally screens on June 7, 8, and 11.
Esta Isla (dir. Lorraine Jones Molina and Cristian Carretero) | World Premiere, U.S. Narrative Competition
Economic insecurity comes for us all in one way or another. (At least, that’s what they’ve tried to tell me over at Capital One… I won’t answer their calls.) In Lorraine Jones Molina and Cristian Carretero’s Puerto Rican offering, Esta Isla (“This Island”), a broad-ish idea looms: What if you could flee those monetary worries with the help of a stupefyingly-rich local gal who also happens to be itching to escape her troubled home life? It’s a good plan, but one that comes with complications for Bebo (Zion Ortiz) and Lola (Fabiola Brown), two lovers who fret the realities of modern life on their commercialized island and ditch said tribulations for the mountains lingering off in the distance, only for Bebo’s brother Charlie Xavier Morales) to saddle the paramours with his illegal doings, threatening to eff it all up. I love tales of young couples on the run (see: Badlands, Pierrot le fou, Wild at Heart, etc.), and I really dug this iteration on a genre that threatens to get old, yet rarely does. My bet is that you will, too.
Esta Isla premieres on June 7 and additionally screens on June 8 and 14.
I Was Born This Way (dir. Daniel Junge and Sam Pollard) | World Premiere, Spotlight Documentary
Early on in Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man, a downstairs neighbor named Ollie tells Sebastian Stan’s Guy that “all unhappiness in life comes from not accepting what is.” You know who told him that? “LADY GAGA,” he triumphantly announces before anyone can answer the question. It’s a bit tougher for Guy, whose face is disfigured by tumors due to an aggressive form of neurofibromatosis, to take that advice at… well, face value. But in I Was Born This Way, co-directors Daniel Junge and Sam Pollard’s portrait of the gay gospel trailblazer Archbishop Carl Bean, filmmakers and subject unite in an at-times too sentimental but wholly inventive portrait of what it means to be true to who you are. Including interviews with Gaga, whose own hit “Born This Way” was inspired by Bean’s breakout disco anthem that shares its title with the documentary, as well as executive producers Questlove and Billy Porter, I Was Born This Way takes multiple forms – docudrama in some flashbacks, animated musical in others – en route to detailing Bean’s path from up-and-coming singer to founding the Minority AIDS Project, as well as the first LGBTQ+ church for people of color, the Unity Fellowship Church. It’s more basic than it is truly groundbreaking, making for a far cry from Pollard’s excellent 2020 doc, MLK/FBI, but its subject and constant stylistic swings more than make up for what it lacks in terms of revelatory storytelling.
I Was Born This Way premieres on June 5 and additionally screens on June 6 and 14.
Inside (dir. Charles Williams) | North American Premiere, Spotlight Narrative
Imagine if Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley’s approach to Sing Sing was turning the theater-prison drama into a psychological thriller, one that still keeps the concept of mentorship at its heart, and you’d be almost too close for comfort to Charles Williams’ Inside, a debut that feels like the perfect next step for a director who won the Palme D’or for his short film, All These Creatures, in 2018. Brutal, moving, and contemplative, Inside unfolds primarily in an Australian prison, where Warren Murfett (Guy Pearce) is tasked with keeping the young Mel Blight (17-year-old Vincent Miller, performing far beyond his years) out of trouble. It proves especially difficult, not just because Mel is a ticking time bomb personified, but because of Mark Shephard (Cosmo Jarvis, outstanding), a prisoner whose life sentence gives him more than enough time to take up a vested, peculiar interest in the newcomer. If there was ever the need post-Brutalist to be reminded that Guy Pearce is one of the best actors working today, Inside is it, and somehow Williams still manages to showcase each of his actors, many of them nonprofessional and incarcerated. The writer-director spent four years interviewing inmates in Australia, where the film takes place, and depicts his setting and its dwellers with an authentic, confident touch, one that is constantly threatening to boil over yet persists at a perilous simmer.
Inside premieres on June 7 and additionally screens on June 8, 12, and 13.
Paradise Records (dir. Logic) | World Premiere, Spotlight Narrative
I’m a big Logic guy. Sue me. He’s a fast-talker (er, rapper), one who litters his tracks with pop culture callbacks and bold ideas that only feel bold when read, not after you’ve listened to him wax poetically on why “Spider-Man should be Black.” (One has to assume he’s a big fan of Into and Across the Spider-Verse, both masterpieces.) And while his filmmaking debut Paradise Records, the tale of a record store owner whose jig is about to be up as foreclosure looms, is hardly an animated Marvel about webslinging and skipping school in favor of educational means in an alternate dimension, Logic’s movie maintains its crowdpleasing vibe for just long enough that by the time its wildest twists enter the foreground, you’ve completely invested your own heart and energy into whether or not this music mart can stay afloat. You know, especially once the guns (and lyrical barbs) come out.
Paradise Records premieres on June 6 and additionally screens on June 7, 13, and 15.
Widow Champion (dir. Zippy Kimundu) | World Premiere, Viewpoints
These days, a good deal of documentaries tend to take the easy way out by offering up a slew of facts and figures in their prologues in order to immediately inform the audience of the film’s stakes. They don’t trust that viewers will pick up on details as they go; they don’t have faith that ticketholders and streaming savants will pay a lick of attention. It’s not a bad strategy, but it’s refreshing to see Zippy Kimundu do the bare minimum of handholding in her sophomore feature, Widow Champion, while maintaining the comprehensive edge that follow-docs must have in order to maintain accountability. Kimundu’s 2023 co-directorial effort, Our Land, Our Freedom, took eight years to make and catalogued over 300 hours of interviews in its effort to pin down the history of Kenya’s fight against colonialist control. And though it would have been impossible for Kimundu to speak with each of the eight million widows currently living amongst Kenya’s population of 53 million people, the picture’s aim to chart the titular Widow Champion Rodah Nafula’s goal to help repair the broken hearts of her fellow matriarchs – not to mention the struggle that is helping these women maintain the deeds to their husbands’ land that are being taken from them in the male’s absences – results in a triumphant and uniquely human character study that is as much a machine of empathy as it is one of justice.
Widow Champion premieres on June 9 and additionally screens on June 10, 12, and 15.
A cross between Julia Ducornau’s Raw and the misbegotten George MacKay-Lily-Rose Depp vehicle Wolf (2021), David Verbeek’s most audacious (and, likely, expensive) film to date centers on an unlikely makeshift family that seem as though, by the conclusion of The Wolf, the Fox and the Leopard, will regret ever considering adoption. This wolf, played by a startling Jessica Reynolds (Outlander, Kneecap), takes on the canine’s mannerisms and behaviors more than she ever aesthetically resembles the furry creature, but her actions are enough for two climate-focused doomsday preppers (Marie Jung’s Fox and Nicholas Pinnock’s Leopard, as it were) to take her in and raise her as a human. Bad idea! But not necessarily for a movie, one where the writer-director Verbeek seeks to probe the idea made colloquially famous by Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park: Being too focused on whether one could do something dangerous and deceitful rather than considering if they should. Pinnock is excellent and existential, continuing his run of memorable film performances (get my guy off of the small screen, dammit!), but it’s Reynolds’ feral energy that runs wild and serves the film’s core tenant well. That being, whether or not it’s better to integrate one’s self into an unfamiliar society, or to escape the evils of an alternative route by returning to menacing roots. My principal nitpick is wishing the title had used an Oxford comma.
The Wolf, the Fox and the Leopard premieres on June 7 and additionally screens on June 8, 10, and 14.
Director:Carlos Sedes Writers:Ramón Campos, Gema R. Neira, Jon de la Cuesta, Ricardo Jornet, David Orea, Javier Chacártegui Stars: Carmen Machi, Ivana Baquero, Tristán Ulloa
Synopsis: A murder mystery about a young widow who is the prime suspect in her husband’s stabbing death.
One has to wonder how A Widow’s Game (La viuda negra), based on the true story of a gruesome murder that shocked a nation, ends up so tepid in its approach to the classic crime film genre. There are very few surprises in the experience, and it barely explores the motivations or psychology behind why someone would murder a loved one. The entire narrative remains shallow, never diving deep enough to understand—or even depict—how manipulative predators truly operate.
Netflix’sA Widow’s Game feels like little more than a Saturday night Lifetime movie, barely elevated by its otherwise respectable cast.
The story takes place in Valencia, Spain, where a driven and well-known female police detective, Eva (Aida’s Carmen Machi), begins investigating the murder of Antonio Navarro Cerdán (Álex Gadea)—an engineer who was brutally stabbed in the garage of his apartment complex in Patraix—on a hot August day. The crime scene is handled with little flair, going through several standard tropes: pointing out the blood, referencing a struggle, and emphasizing the sheer violence of it all.
Of course, you get one guess what happens next: the victim’s wife, Maje (Pan’s Labyrinth’s Ivana Baquero), arrives in tears, demanding to see her husband, whom she claims she hasn’t been able to reach. The woman flooding those doe-eyes with crocodile tears has good reason to put on a show. We soon learn she was unhappy in her marriage, resentful of the “boring” monogamous married lifestyle, the long hours she worked as a nurse, and going to bed at a regular hour beside her husband, rather than with whatever random man she preferred to shack up with on any given night.
Directed by Carlos Sedes (Velvet), A Widow’s Game’s true story is less suspenseful and intriguing than a Dateline murder mystery. This is curious since the script is attributed to six—I said it—six scribes (Ramón Campos, Gema R. Neira, Jon de la Cuesta, Ricardo Jornet, David Orea, Javier Chacártegui), which makes you wonder if all the rewrites watered down the product, taking away any personality of the story and verve of the crime.
The structure should have been creative, examining the crime through several different lenses, but the transitions are muddled and offer little intrigue or suspense. Without going too deep to understand the characters, predictability remains king, leaving out a fascinating part of a genre staple, or even capturing the tragedy and humanity of the actual crime.
Even an actor like Tristán Ulloa (Netflix’sWarrior Nun) can’t breathe life into a character who should evoke disgust, horror, and pity, but instead comes across as flat and forgettable. The fine cast, including Machi and Baquero, seems stuck in their shells, with Machi’s turn understandable, but the latter is a cliche instead of a three-dimensional human, pure evil or not.
A Widow’s Game’s final product is formulaic and utterly predictable. The first act establishes Maje’s character, who is hardly three-dimensional. In the second act, she begins to plot heinous acts. The third act focuses on how the police catch the killers. The story isn’t just lazy and uninspired—it fails to let the audience truly know the victim, the affected family, or even the killer(s) beyond their one-note motivations.
If the filmmakers do not care about such a story, especially a real-life tragedy, then why should we?
You can stream A Widow’s Game (La viuda negra) exclusively on Netflix!
On this episode, JD and Brendan discuss the new film from the Philippou brothers in Bring Her Back! While we liked the Philippou’s first feature Talk to Me enough, this one left a lot more to be desired. It’s competently made, but for the many reasons we discuss, it doesn’t have the depth to justify the film’s grisly imagery.
Review: Bring Her Back (4:00) Director: Danny Philippou, Michael Philippou Writer: Danny Philippou, Bill Hinzman Stars: Billy Barratt, Sora Wong, Sally Hawkins
Synopsis:In 1997, when the Asian financial crisis hit Korea, Gukbo, the number one Soju company, is on the brink of bankruptcy. In the high-stakes market of M&A, In-beom, a young, ambitious associate at global investment firm Solquin, heads back home to take Gukbo as his first target. Hiding his greediness, In-beom approaches Jong-rok, an executive loyal to Gukbo, as an innocent consultant aiming to rehabilitate Gukbo.
Some interesting ideas are at play in Choi Yun-Jin’s Big Deal, which tracks the fall of the number one Soju company in South Korea, but few actively lead anywhere. The movie, which sets itself up as a corporate drama about an up-and-coming associate gaming the system to his advantage, seems like it will be a cautionary tale on the dangers of unfettered power, as the ones who are on top will always be invincible, while the people who are trying to climb to reach those heights will be the first ones out of the equation.
That alone makes for a riveting first half, as the audience is introduced to In-beom (Lee Je-hoon), as he explains to his boss, Gordon (Byron Mann), why Gukbo, the Soju brand, is ripe for the taking. We know something that Jong-rok (Yoo Hae-jin, who also recently starred in Yadang: The Snitch) doesn’t know when he eventually meets In-beom and posits himself as a consultant looking to help the company avoid bankruptcy, when he actively wants to cause it. When Gukbo eventually goes bankrupt, this is where the movie should theoretically spice itself up as it reaches toward a heavy courtroom drama that’s full of twists and turns.
Yet, writer/director Choi Yun-Jin never gives us a compelling reason to care about anyone on screen, or the plot that keeps overcomplexifying itself as alliances are made, broken, and made again. Who should we trust, or latch onto, when one joins a specific side, and joins another, to then rejoin their initial side as the movie progresses? It’s clear everyone is in this for themselves, but Yun-Jin never clearly defines the narrative paths that either In-beom or Jong-rok take, no matter how hilariously over-the-top or stultifyingly dramatic it gets.
Near the film’s midsection, a pivotal dramatic turn occurs that sours In-beom’s actions to the point where he feels deep remorse for what he’s doing. It’s a fairly dark scene that, in all respects, is treated with as much care as possible, yet is quickly brushed over when, a few sequences later, a hilarious development arises at a trial where Gukbo attempts to keep hold of their assets. That massive turn never gets mentioned again, and the characters don’t necessarily evolve in response to that narrative development.
I’d love to go into details, but it’s one scene closely linked to a character’s arc that’s best left for you to discover. Some will sit with it and think it further develops In-beom’s change of heart, but Yun-Jin muddles the waters further by confoundingly making him switch alliances every couple of scenes. As impassioned as Je-hoon and Hae-jin may be in their respective roles, their sense of alchemy isn’t well-defined, and, as a result, makes the audience uninterested in the matter-of-fact proceedings that occur, even if Yun-Jin has an arresting sense of style.
The movie also features plenty of scenes in the English language, which would add some texture if the characters didn’t say the F-word every 0.5 seconds. It’s a nitpick, sure, but The Wolf of Wall Street (a movie Yun-Jin desperately wants to cite), this is not. It doesn’t contain the free-flowing dialogue that allow characters to frequently swear, as in Martin Scorsese’s film. In fact, they seem to hamper the walking-and-talking nature of Yun-Jin’s movie, and don’t at all sound as integral to the conversations as they were in The Wolf of Wall Street, ultimately creating a frequently jumbled experience that’s far more interesting when it focuses on the character relationships than attempting to recreate an aesthetic that does not, in any way, serve this production.
When Big Deal ultimately ends with the most abrupt and unearned coda, essentially relegating its final scene to a mid-credits tag, one gets the sense that this story, which sounded tantalizing on paper, is not that significant of a…big deal. If it were, I’d absolutely tell you this is a deal none of you can refuse. However, this isn’t the case, and, as visually impressive as the film may be, this deal has little to no value for anyone who decides to acquire part of their time in front of a screen…
Synopsis: The lives of two strangers are changed forever when they cross paths on the surfing adventure of a lifetime, discovering love, downshifting and four charismatic horses.
Like a László Kovács-shot from the New American Wave, The Road to Patagonia is a documentary that feels like a Wim Wenders fever dream, but also retains its unique identity as one man’s quest toward identity, exploration, and self-reflection.
The documentary is directed by Matty Hannon, who is also its central subject as he travels from Alaska to Patagonia. However, instead of focusing on the final destination, the film truly embodies the saying, “the journey is the treasure,” by allowing us to enjoy Hannon’s travels—like Gulliver’s before him—rather than eagerly anticipating his ultimate conquest at his last stop.
Like a modern-day Bodhi (Patrick Swayze in the stunning Point Break), Hannon follows his own philosophy. He harmonizes with the wind and the ocean. He captures moments as he finds himself stuck in his tent surrounded by a pack of wolves, or during his encounters with bears and moose. The documentary has no dull moments; it’s one adventure after another, showcasing 16 years of Hannon’s vibrant, adventurous life and captivating viewers with the honesty and sincerity of his narration and the up-close and personal videos he has been recording of himself throughout the years.
The documentary takes a profound turn when Hannon is joined by his girlfriend Heather Hillier, and, as viewers, we witness their blossoming love story. Hillier’s presence as Hannon’s companion shifts the mood of the film from a lone traveler’s conquest to a loving couple on the road, traversing mountains, oceans, and deserts, discovering lost civilizations and rare animal breeds. As they cut the roads together on their motorcycles, taken by the beauty of the landscape, they decide to slow down.
The film paints a somewhat naive, nostalgic view of the world. Admittedly, no one asked Hannon to write a thesis in anthropology, but the weakest point of a rather well-structured and constructed narrative is when Hannon veers into identifying the dichotomies of the world as black and white, east and west, etc. But when it’s all about the surf, the mountains, the dusty bumpy road, and a nomad lifestyle of two people who fell in love together in the most unlikely of circumstances, that’s where the documentary finds its strength.
One of the highlights of the documentary is the stunning cinematography by Hannon and Hillier. All the footage is shot by both of them, highlighting their artistry as well as their deep personal connection to the subject. It’s impressive, though, how poetic and ethereal their imagery is, shooting through a dreamlike, angelic filter that gives a fairytale aspect to Hannon’s journey. It takes many elements from Robby Müller’s style, as well as the visual simplicity of footage documentary filmmaking.
Some people are not born to settle in one place. They have restless souls that take them like tumbleweeds in the wind across continents, vales, and mountains. Hannon is one of those wanderers across the rugged earth. But instead of glorifying his White man conquest where his freedom to roam around countries and continents hassle-free and smoothly is of course, unproblematic and fun, he lays out his life as it is. He doesn’t sugarcoat or sand the rough surface. He doesn’t make a hero of himself, but stretches it as far as possible, with all the little idiosyncrasies involved. Even as the documentary staggers a little too long, in this case, the runtime is fully forgivable, for this stunning exploration of man, love, and nature is worth the wait.
The Road to Patagonia is on the Icon film channel, and will be in UK cinemas from 27 June.
Directors:David Joseph Craig, Brian Crano Writers:David Joseph Craig, Brian Crano Stars: Nick Kroll, Andrew Rannells, Amanda Seyfried
Synopsis:Stranded in rural Italy without transportation or language skills, an American couple on the verge of adopting tries to reconnect during a disastrous vacation, as their fears and relationship problems threaten to boil over.
It’s very hard to communicate with a person who doesn’t share a common language. As much as Americans believe English is ubiquitous, there are many people out there that don’t understand a single syllable of it. Most English speakers also have more trouble with language than they admit even if it’s a language they recognize. A spoken language is never an academic exercise and a person who has spoken that language their entire life wouldn’t be likely to speak as basically as what you would learn in a classroom. A lot can be misinterpreted. That is one of the central conceits of I Don’t Understand You.
When Dom (Nick Kroll) and Cole (Andrew Rannells) get to Italy to celebrate their anniversary and try to avoid the anxiety that comes with their hopes about adopting a child, they run afoul of many of these sticky situations including within the horror piece of the film. The script, written by David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano, is very funny in this situation of increasing misunderstanding when it comes to a simple accident. The escalation is anxiety inducing and the body count becomes funnier as Dom and Cole assume it has to be the last death every time.
Though, when coupled with the other plot, the one where Dom and Cole are about to become parents, there is a dissonance. It’s tough to say what’s exactly wrong, but there is a pervasive feeling that there is something off. The script is funny throughout, but the sincere story of adoption and the couple’s anxieties around parenthood is a little too much of a swing in the other direction for the zaniness of accidental murder to land.
It also takes far too long to get to the gory bits. The lead up being this utterly charming gay couple and their struggles with adoption makes you want to just watch their relationship and maybe have more heart to hearts about parenting. The completely funny and valid section where the two of them accidentally kill some people feels too separate. It almost feels as if that section of the film is some kind of anxiety dream. Like the two of them somehow share a subconscious for several hours and then snap out of it during the drive back to their hotel. It’s a tough transition to unpack and it feels very obtuse.
What never feels false, though, is the chemistry between Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells. These two feel so very comfortable with each other and their banter is hysterical. Kroll brings his “guy who thinks he knows everything” persona and Rannells brings his lightning delivery and wit. They have an effervescent style and you almost want just a road trip movie with the two of them as a couple because their car scenes are so enjoyable.
It’s hard not to like I Don’t Understand You. It’s just also hard to be clutching your heart at something sweet and touching, then covering your mouth with the shock of arterial spray. There’s no clear demarcation or strong tonal shift. It just sort of happens in the moment. It may be that the time anticipating the murder and the blood is more anxiety producing than the actual murder and blood, but it’s hard to say. You really just have to give the film a shot and know that you might choke up due to a sweet couple adopting a baby and choke down bile at some gruesome makeup a few minutes later.
This week on the InSession Film Podcast, we discuss the best performances of the decade so far! We also talk some box office and the trailers for Frankenstein, Superman and Happy Gilmore 2.
– Box Office (4:24) We begin the show this week by diving back into the box office as Thunderbolts* is set to lose about $100 million, which is unfortunate given that it’s Marvel’s best is quite some time. But it’s also concerning given Bob Iger’s comments a few weeks about about quality over quantity. One has to wonder if this changes things for Disney.
– Trailer Talk (19:07) As noted above, we wanted to give our thoughts on the new trailers for Frankenstein, Superman, Happy Gilmore 2 and Wake Up Dead Man. We especially had a lot to say about Frankenstein and how Guillermo del Toro seems to be making a classic del Toro movie. Superman and Happy Gilmore 2 also look promising, but we have some reservations that keep us from fully embracing those movies at this point.
– Performances of the Decade So Far (53:24) In a few weeks we will be discussing the best movies of the decade so far, but first up we talk about the great performances we’ve seen in the 2020s to this point. There has been no shortage of phenomenal performances in the last few years. Narrowing this down to just five (or even ten, as you’ll hear in honorable mentions) was extremely challenging, but that’s also part of the fun. Deciphering the five performances for our lists makes them resonate even more loudly. With that said, what would be your Top 5 performances of the decade so far?
If you want to help support us, there are several ways you can help us and we’d absolutely appreciate it. Every penny goes directly back into supporting the show and we are truly honored and grateful. Thanks for your support and for listening to the InSession Film Podcast!
It’s a cold January day when the Oscar nominations are released and, as I sit there taking it all in, I am very much thinking of Oscars past and present. Thinking back to personal favorites over the years like Karen Black in Five Easy Pieces, Jennifer Tilly in Bullets Over Broadway, or Richard Jaeckel in Sometimes A Great Notion to name a few, I begin to realize that something the Academy is lacking in the last decade plus are child actors being nominated, a tradition that has been around in the industry practically since the beginning of the Academy Awards themselves with Jackie Cooper being nominated for Best Actor in 1931 for Skippy (A record for the youngest actor ever nominated in Lead Actor, as he was 9 years old at the time).
The last time a child actor was nominated was the record holder for youngest ever Lead Actress nominee Quvenzhane Wallis for 2012’s Beasts of the Southern Wild (a performance that Justin and I agree upon and absolutely love). If we’re being 100% honest, Quvenzhane should not have been the most recent with Jacob Tremblay being in 2015’s Room, not only should he have been in Lead Actor he should’ve easily won, but I digress. While I was thinking of all of this I remembered another favorite performance of mine, one that would’ve easily gotten my vote for Best Supporting Actor of 1979, Justin Henry. Nominated for Kramer vs. Kramer, Justin, to this day still holds the record of being the youngest actor of all time in any category to be nominated for a competitive Oscar at the tender age of 8. As I thought about Justin, I realized I had a one degree separation from him as we share a mutual friend, the producer Emily the Criminal, The Land, Take Shelter & Compliance – Tyler Davidson. An idea hit me and I texted Tyler- “Hey man, you’re friends with Justin Henry still, right? Any way you can send him my e-mail address? I’d love to write a piece on him and interview him for the website!” Tyler connected us and the next thing I knew, Justin sent me his phone number and we set a date to sit down to talk, talk about all things life, record breaking/holding Oscar stats, his current feelings on the state of the Academy, his films and so much more.
My name is Joey Gentile and this is my conversation with Academy Award Nominee Justin Henry.
JG: I’m so happy we were able to make this work, first and foremost thank you to Tyler (Davidson).
JH: Yes! Thank you, Tyler!
JG: Anytime I start an interview I like to throw out a fun ice breaker with this question. If you were to look at your resume, is there a character from stage or screen that if a producer came up to you and said “we have an unlimited budget, pick a character you want to revisit with a sequel project” who would it be and why?
JH: WOW! That is a great question! (Beat and a chuckle) Ya know, I would have to say Mike from Sixteen Candles. I’ve always wanted to see where Mike’s life went and what we could do differently and do next with that character. Actually too, a lot of the folks in that movie would be interesting to see sort of what happens to them as they go through life now, but definitely Mike.
JG: Tyler, did you get that? Mike! Let’s make it happen. I’ll write.
(Both laugh)
JG: Diving right in, you’re plucked from obscurity as a child and you’re in a movie like Kramer vs. Kramer and then all of a sudden you’re an Academy Award nominated actor at the age of 8. At that age do you even really understand what that means or the impact of what your life would be after?
JH: I didn’t understand and I don’t really think anyone in our circle did either, not my family for sure. By the time the Oscars happened ya know, Kramer was a juggernaut. We traveled literally all around the world promoting it, it was doing incredibly well at the box office, so everything at that point was kind of out the window. Then at the ceremony it won all these awards, I was nominated and it just sort of added on to what was already a pretty surreal, crazy time in our lives. But yeah, looking at it now as an adult I think the Academy Award nomination and the movie is pretty special.
JG: Absolutely, and you know there’s such a distinct and historic moment that you possibly very much will have as long as the Academy Awards last as the youngest person ever nominated for a competitive Oscar. The record was challenged back in 2012 when Quvenzhane Wallis was up for Best Actress for Beast’s of the Southern Wild, but she had turned 9 by the time that happened.
JH: Oh, she’s so good.
JG: She’s my personal pick to win that year.
JH: She’s so good in that movie, incredible performance, incredible movie, it’s just incredible all around.
JG: Couldn’t agree more, but you also have a distinct milestone with a retired Golden Globe category as you were one of the last actors nominated in it called “New Actor of the Year”. So since Globes come first in an awards season let’s go there. Now I’m gonna cut right to the chase here, there’s a book called Inside Oscar that claims two things about you from that night, the first one being- when you lost that award you had a complete meltdown. Do you recall that?
JH: I’ve heard the story but I don’t remember it and I heard it from Ricky Schroeder of all people but yeah I don’t remember.
JG: I mean just being honest, I’m 33 and if I lost any category I’d have a meltdown so valid if you did.
(Both laugh)
JG: The Globes throw a tie in Supporting Actor to Melvyn Douglas for Being There and Robert DuVall for Apocalypse Now, now the second thing according to Inside Oscar was that there seems to have been some tension from Melvyn Douglas to you with the idea of him having to compete against a child, hence why he didn’t show up to the Academy Awards ceremony. Apparently he found it to be “insulting”. When you hear stuff like that, even now, what’s your reaction?
JH: I don’t think that’s true at all because I saw Melvyn Douglas multiple times around when the Oscars were coming out and he was very, very nice to me. He literally sat me down at a point (and if I recall he was in a wheelchair by then) and he literally said to me “look, I think this award will go to me because I’m old and I’m getting on in age and I’ve been doing this a long time” and as a kid I remember going “yeah, awesome. I get it”. So as a person he was really great and those accounts, hearing that, definitely not 100% accurate. He was always very nice to me and yeah, not true.
JG: There ya go, folks! From a first hand account, Inside Oscar got it wrong!
(Both laugh)
JG: So being so young, being taken all over the world on the promotional tour for the film, even though you realize that it’s all make believe I’m sure I can just see the likes of Meryl Streep and Jane Alexander protecting you during this time in an art meets life styled scenario, no?
JH: Oh, absolutely. We had a great sense of community and family throughout the whole movie and that transcended right into the PR for awards season. A lot of the family protection too came from Stanley Jaffe and Dustin, and of course Stanley Jaffe just recently passed so I would like to thank him because without him you and I wouldn’t be able to have this conversation today.
JG: Absolutely, rest in peace good sir.
JH: But yes; between Meryl, Jane, Dustin, Stanley, really everyone involved in the process, they all made sure to protect me during that time. My own family even did their best and we didn’t know a single thing about the industry as we were from suburbia New England and we all just sort of looked out for each other.
JG: It actually feels really nice to hear that considering when it comes to child stars you usually see/hear the more tragic stories of those who don’t actually look out for you.
JH: Oh, absolutely and I am very fortunate and thankful that never happened with me.
JG: Yes, however something did happen to you and I’d like to get your feelings on it.
JH: Oh?
JG: So many people have said that “you know you have made it when you are parodied on Saturday Night Live.” But are you aware that you were parodied on Family Guy with the mint chocolate chip ice cream scene? And how do you feel about that?
JH: Oh I have friends who write on that show, so it’s a huge surreal moment to see your work from when you were eight years old be a part of the pop culture zeitgeist all these years later. I was even a question on Jeopardy once and I really embrace all of it and I’m not really sure how to state it as a whole but I am grateful that in ways with these nods on shows that the impact of my work still resonates. So in the end my belief is to really just love it, it’s an honor.
JG: So, transitioning from the promo to the pop culture zeitgeist moments to then the big night- the 52nd Academy Awards, the 1979 Oscars on February 25th, 1980. What do you remember of that night?
JH: Hate to say it, but I don’t really remember much of it, you know? And I’ve always wondered if my mind blocked it out, but I do remember sitting down, I remember the little speech I prepared and had written down, I had folded it into my little tuxedo pocket. My whole family was there, my mom, my sister, my grandmother up in the stands, my dad. Meryl’s family was there; it had almost sort of like a wedding feel to it. I do remember feeling very nervous when they started calling the awards. I do remember feeling very relieved when I didn’t get called to win, I was a kid and not having to speak on a stage with glaring lights in front of thousands of people, I mean I definitely remember feeling relief. At that time I had never spoken in front of that many people and honestly thinking back to it I still have not spoken in front of that many people. So for me, it was really more about being there to experience it rather than gaining the accolade of winning. Now what I do remember is that after the ceremony we had to get right back to New York very quickly so I remember running through LAX to catch a flight back to NYC the same night.
JG: So I have a theory regarding films that do really well, whether it’s this past year with Anora literally winning every single nomination except Supporting Actor or even your film, in fact yeah, your film as the example. It wins 5 of the 9 awards it’s up for, winning all the above the line awards it’s up for- Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actress, Writing. There is no doubt in my mind when a movie does that well and then loses one of the above the line awards that the person(s) who lost was second, so Justin I gotta say- there is no doubt in my mind you were easily the runner-up here in your category. (But also as a fan, I wish the Academy would release the tallies after a certain amount of time has passed, but we all know that is never going to happen.)
JH: I hope I wasn’t that close to winning because the talent that year in the category was exceptional. I mean Fred Forrest, wow. (I did a movie with Freddy called Andersonville for TNT. It was a 2 part mini-series on the civil war) But I think there were so many great performances that year that I really don’t care how I did in the voting. Looking back on it now, what a gift and an experience. So whether Freddy, Melvyn, Mickey I mean these guys were legends and I’m literally the new kid on the block. I think it would’ve meant more had I backed it up pretty soon after but I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to do a follow up right away, I wanted to go ride mini bikes and dirt bikes and be an eight year old kid.
JG: Perfect segway into my next question there, sir. Taraji P. Henson famously said in 2016 that after her 2008 Supporting Actress nomination for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button that she received zero offers and struggled still to get work despite having achieved such a career moment. Then I’ve heard other actors like my late dear friend Karen Black (rest in peace) who said that after her nomination in 1970 for Five Easy Pieces she got flooded with offers-
JH: Karen was absolutely awesome, I did a movie called Martin’s Day with her in 1985. She was so much fun.
JG: I miss her so much, I always tell people about the amazing voice mails she would leave, but anyway-
JH: I didn’t mean to sidetrack.
JG: For Karen Black, I’ve got all the time.
JH: There truly was no one like her.
JG: Absolutely not a single person like her, when I first moved to LA she took me under her wing. She became my LA mother and I learned so much about the industry from her. She deserved so much better. (Beat) But anyway, you mentioned that you wanted to kick around a ball instead of work after your nomination, but were you on the Karen Black spectrum of the offers or the Taraji P. side of the offers?
JH: I had so many offers, the Karen Black side of the spectrum, so many to be honest that it was absurd if I had said yes that I could even find room in a schedule to do them. Some of them too were so unbelievably bad. So we (Justin and his parents) put it out to the managers and agents quickly that I wanted to have a break and we were not going to pursue anything for quite some time and for some reason it took the industry a while to realize we were serious and it pissed many people off when it came to the higher ups.
JG: I find that fascinating to be honest and know that I mean this next question with zero disrespect but you essentially found yourself in a position that many would kill for, that type of success and job offer after job offer, looking back now- do you feel you squandered what could have been?
JH: Wow! That is a great question, shit! Looking back on it all I feel like I made the right choices at the right time. I didn’t become a child star tragic tale, I got to have a childhood and experience the highest of highs and lowest of lows and I wouldn’t go back to change it at all, so no I don’t feel that I squandered anything.
JG: No regrets.
JH: Absolutely, none.
JG: How about anything you really wanted over the years that you didn’t get?
JH: First thing that comes to mind that I wanted really bad and read for too was Good Will Hunting and then a film called School Ties. Both of those I do look back on and go “goddamn”.
JG: Is it true you were offered the role of Billy Loomis in Scream? I did some really deep digging on you and found your name in a casting binder for possible actors for that film.
JH: No not that part, I was up for the role that went to Jamie Kennedy, Randy. And being 100% honest with you I did not understand that movie when I read it at all, I remember thinking “this might be one of the dumbest movies I’ve ever read” and I passed on it.
JG: Wow! The way you truly live with no regrets, I love it.
JH: It really is the only way to stay true in the business. We love the show, hate the business.
JG: Absolutely. – You’re coming up on the 50th anniversary of Kramer vs. Kramer in the next few years and (how do I put this?). Okay, when I interviewed Janet Suzman for the 50th anniversary of Nicholas & Alexandra she goes “50 years have gone by in such a flash, but now the only difference is I feel ancient”. She was in her 30’s when she made that but you were a mere child when you made Kramer, so are you in the boat of you feeling “ancient” knowing the film is going to be 50 or do you look back and realize the film history you were apart of still goes strong till this day and you can only appreciate it even more now in your 50’s yourself?
JH: I think it’s fucking awesome. I’m 53 ( I think, wait, how old am I?) LAUGHS* I was born in 71, so yeah I’m 54- but it’s awesome. To be a part of such a pop cultural zeitgeisty moment at such a young age that is still impacting people, it’s amazing. I’ve never been a big age person, I’m a healthy guy, I’ve got 3 wonderful kids and when I think more of this question in real time what comes to mind is knowing when my kids were the same age as I was when it all happened, as a parent I cannot fully fathom putting them through all that and I wouldn’t put them through that, for the record. Even though it worked out well for me, I was definitely you know, 1 of 100. It could’ve gone 100 different ways and I’m lucky, I’m extremely fortunate. You know, I look at the films I’ve done and I wonder why something like Tiger Town didn’t resonate with people like Kramer did. Roy Scheider? The dude was AMAZING and I bring that up because while people tell me how much they love one film they also tell me how much they didn’t like the other as mentioned above.
JG: Your film resume isn’t huge by any stretch, but you are the prime example of quality over quantity on your co-stars- Roy (Scheider), Karen (Black), Molly (Ringwald) I mean it goes on and on.
JH: It’s been an amazing career and I hope that, you know, at some point there’s a great project that comes along that I can be a part of and make an impactful contribution to again. I look at what Tyler (Davidson) is doing and I love what he’s doing with them. They’re edgy, they’re genuinely good, I love that. We need more of what he’s doing.
JG: (Like I’m speaking directly to Tyler) TYLER MARIE DAVIDSON (note: not his actual middle name)- you heard the man. I’ll write, you’ll produce, Justin will star. GET THIS SH*T TOGETHER!
(Both laugh)
JH: The movie industry is in a really tough spot right now, TV is making some good stuff but that’s extremely disposable. We need to have films that are going to make an impact, films that truly will stand the test of time and as of late we haven’t really had that. We’ve had films that are “the moment” but nothing that is long lasting. I’m hoping it comes from somewhere because I’m not seeing it right now, it’s a problem that we’ve had for awhile. It’s the problem I’ve had with the projects that have come my way too, ya know? They’re just not something I want to be a part of and then I’m correct in my assumption when I read the scripts, they just become a moment in time and not a long lasting thing. Do I want to make a blockbuster movie? I’m not sure. Do I want to be able to walk down the street and have people point at me? No, been there done that and I’ll tell ya what, Joey- it’s not fun, especially when one is 8 or 10 or 15. So I find myself doing other things. (Beat) – I love the process of making movies, I love the movie zeitgeist, I just cannot stand the business of studio operations and I find myself in this interesting conundrum.
JG: I truly appreciate you being as frank as possible with this interview, it’s a very refreshing take.
JH: Of course. And it’s not even just my enduring love of filmmaking but even the Academy as a whole.
JG: Great segway there. As you know you get many benefits of being a nominee and or winner, including the chance to go multiple times. When I asked Janet Suzman the last time she went she said the year she was nominated in 1971. What about you? When’s the last time you went?
JH: I believe I was there the year The King’s Speech won, so 2010 was when I went last. I have been extremely active within the Academy, voting, screenings, events, all that stuff. But I have stepped away from a lot of that too. I just feel the Academy has kind of lost its way. It’s trying to be all things to all people and in doing that it’s really sort of, I think, making a mockery of itself. And you can directly quote me on that too.
JG: Heard that. – So the voting part was a part of my next question because I don’t know if you’re aware but from the information I was able to find, it was your nomination that caused the Academy to change its rules when it came to a guarantee to be invited in as a voting member. Apparently there was some outrage with the idea that an 8 year old child could vote for “the best”, so a few years after your nomination it was changed that you could get a nomination and be eligible but you weren’t guaranteed a spot like “the old days”.
JH: They don’t do automatic membership anymore?
JG: Nope. An example of this was Quvenzhane Wallis. Her nomination in 2012 happened but she didn’t become a voting member until 2020 I believe.
JH: Wow. I had no clue, that’s nuts.
JG: I’m shocked but also not because if you look at the Academy the entire decade of the 70’s you had yourself, Quinn Cummings, Linda Blair, Marielle Hemingway, Tatumn O’Neill- I mean so many child actors nominated, then it wasn’t until Anna Paquin in 1993 when she won Supporting Actress that another child was nominated after you and Marielle. It’s like the Academy did a complete 180 with children.
JH: That’s actually fascinating and I never really noticed that. Wild.- You know as voting member I always had to remember that making a movie is hard and then making a good movie is even more difficult and as a member of the acting branch you vote for actors in the nominations process but you still have to pay attention to the movie as a whole and when I would vote I would look to see how did the actors serve the scene, how did the editing, how did the music, directing etc. If it stood out to me, that’s what I would vote on. It was always about the craft, never about the buzz, never about what I was “being told” to vote for from the studios, precursors, none of that. All of that are just shiny gold objects that lead to “the” ultimate shiny gold object. It’s about the craft first and foremost and that’s also why I was such a huge fan of the docs, shorts, live action and animation. Those are where I loved to give my time and most effort to, getting those out there to the world.
JG: I love that and couldn’t agree more. It’s always performance and never politics for me. I would be a “terrible” Academy member though. (Laughs)- the example I always give is that if I’m rooting for you to win, you won’t. Let’s take the Best Actress category- from 1960 onward I’ve only agreed with the Academy 6 times on who they’ve given it to, most recent being Olivia Colman in 2018.
JH: Wow.
JG: Yup, the ultimate curse. My buddy Ryan McQuade who is a film critic and I laugh every year cause he’s like “oh you want Pamela Anderson to win everything this year?. Yup, crossing her off”. Trust me when I say I’m self aware of my curse on actors.
JH: It’s what touches you the most and that’s what’s so special about the way you and I and people like us watch movies. It’s what is the most significant and that’s what’s important. And therein lies a big issue I’ve had with the Academy and them losing their way. It’s now more than ever a popularity contest, when they need to be a leader. It never should be about what’s popular but I also know where to give them credit and that credit came from this year with Anora just stunning folks. It felt like people are finally taking part in finding out great movies that aren’t super popular and that’s where the decline in the Academy started was kneeling to popularity. When they expanded Best Picture to 10 nominees that really bothered me, I have to say, because it dilutes the base. Yes, these movies are great and they deserve recognition for being great but it’s an exclusive party and if you invite everybody then what’s the point in going? So that was a part of my issues with the Academy. I am rooting for them though to get it back together, it’s about the craft, making movies and the love of the movies. There needs to be less digital influence, less people from all these websites having access and essentially lobbying voters, I mean I have witnessed this in person. I saw what it was like when it was an industry only to let in bloggers who feel important, craft and nothing more.
JG: Again, your honesty is refreshing in a world and industry where everyone needs to be “politically correct” in the sense of not calling it where it needs to be called. I have said forever that it’s the art and only the art that counts, nothing else.
JH: Exactly. In the digital age too I feel that the Academy has done a good job navigating the rise of digital media and digital movie making. That directly is something I take a big part in and am deeply involved with. I had the first ever digital film festival (more on that in my writer’s notes below). I worked for a company that was the precursor to YouTube and I specialize in digital video distribution and now work with a company that makes most of the systems that make broadcast possible. So it’ll be great to see how the Academy embraces that and pulls it into the craft of storytelling.
JG: Amazing. Kudos to you, sir. So two more questions and we will wrap up here. When I found out I would be interviewing you I hit my socials and asked if anyone had any questions for you that they were dying to know, so this comes from Andrew Carden of Boston. “Do you still stay in contact with Dustin or Meryl?”
JH: I can get in touch with them pretty easily, but we’re not like buddies by any means. Last time I spoke to Meryl was about 8 or 9 years ago and probably about the same with Dustin.
JG: Final question. What is one thing no one knows about you, Justin Henry? Something you’ve never said about yourself in an interview before.
JH: Dustin Hoffman gave me my very first drum set, much to my parents dismay, but I credit Dustin for the love of music I carry now into my adult life because of those drums.
JG: I absolutely love that. Justin, I cannot thank you enough for taking the time to sit with me today. To our mutual friend, Tyler Davidson for bringing us together.
JH: Oh man, I love Tyler. We’re both big Phish heads.
JG: Ha! Yeah, he told me that. It was a big connecting point for you too. You know, with your love of music I’m surprised you haven’t been to Cleveland? Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, ya know?
JH: Dude! I know! I’ve never been but I need to get there.
JG: If you come out here (I’m sure we’ll stay in touch and obviously because of Tyler) the first round is on me after the Rock Hall.
JH: And next time you’re in LA, let me know. First one on me.
JG: Deal.
WRITERS NOTES:
My time with Justin was absolutely wonderful. Sitting down with someone so self aware of the history making record he still holds in movie history while still being so humble and just a guy you truly wanna have a beer and shoot the shit is so cool to me. Yes, obviously I’m a fan of his work, of movies, of the art of filmmaking but if there is anyone I could recommend just sitting down and talking too, it’s Justin.
I was very fortunate to continue talking with him for almost a half an hour past the end of the interview to get to know him more as a person. We talked about mutual friends, he was genuinely curious about my career as a writer, my upcoming film, what I was doing when I worked for The Viper Room in my early 20’s in Los Angeles and just as me in general as a person.
Some things I want to mention that didn’t make the final edit here of the interview.
-The festival he was speaking about was the Slamdunk Film Festival that ran from 1998-2003. Was founded after a film he was a part of The Junior Defenders didn’t make the initial cut into Sundance.
– This is a man who truly LOVES the art of filmmaking and I sat with his comments for awhile post interview on his thoughts on the state of the Academy and I find it to be so valid, his love of the art and what he champions in the Academy does seem to be fading away to please a popularity contest and I think if you as a reader ever have the chance to sit down with him and talk more you would hear the passion he holds for movies.
– I would like to acknowledge that right before this interview took place that Stanley Jaffe had died and then during the editing process Robert Benton had passed as well. I found myself in the position of texting my well wishes to Justin regarding Benton and turns out I was the one who broke the news to him. Rest in peace to both of these masters of their crafts.
– All the photos (except for the final photo at the Oscars) you see here were given directly from Justin himself.
Justin, I cannot thank you enough again. Looking forward to that drink in not only LA but Cleveland!
Director: Bi Gan Writers: Bi Gan Stars: Jackson Yee, Shu Qi, Mark Chao
Synopsis: A woman’s consciousness falls into an eternal time zone during a surgical procedure. Trapped in many dreams, she finds the corpse of an android and tries to wake him up by telling endless stories.
With only two feature-length projects to his name, Bi Gan has become one of the most followed and anticipated filmmakers among cinephiles working today. He has a distinctive approach to storytelling. Ambition is at the forefront of his work, with each narrative and stylistic choice diverging boldly from convention. Poetry and magical realism intertwine, as his focus on atmosphere and sensory details adds an unpredictable nature to his projects. You never know what you are going to get from Bi Gan, and his latest work, Resurrection (screened in competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize), has him heading toward a completely different direction–one that is unexpected yet ultimately magical in every aspect of the film.
Both an ode to cinema and a plea to continue dreaming, Bi Gan presents his most audacious and crafty story to date, featuring sci-fi elements and fantasy quandaries set against five distinct canvases that evoke various styles and techniques from cinematic history. It is a thing of beauty, and also a confusing foray into the unknown. But through the bewilderment, there is a poignancy and wonder, something that few filmmakers can handle properly, which makes Bi Gan a special kind of director. The first fifteen to twenty minutes or so are dedicated to explaining the Blade Runner-like premise to the audience, set in a dystopian future. This is a time when people have found a way to live longer if they don’t dream.
It is illegal now to do so, but some still dream and venture into their imagination, called “fantasmers”–living shorter yet more vibrant, joyous lives by dreaming. They enter these dream states, each resembling an era of cinematic history. However, there are some repercussions to these entries into the plains. It alters reality, causing time jumps and changes, which is why the “big others”, having the ability to tell reality from dreams, are sent to hunt down the fantasmers. Hence, the Blade Runner similarities; instead of replicants and blade runners, you have fantasmers and the big others. One of these fantasmers is played by Jackson Yee, running amongst the supernatural, and he’s being chased by Miss Shu (Shu Qi), the chosen big other for his case.
The sequence is shot, and references many classics from the silent era and its masters–F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu and Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari are amongst the few easily recognizable ones. You immediately sense the cinematic fervor and passion of Bi Gan, which he will throughout Resurrection provide a film class’ worth of nods and honors, ranging from the beginning of the medium with the Lumière brothers to the present day with Wong Kar-Wai and other acclaimed contemporary Asian filmmakers. After this segment, the fantasmer is caught by the significant other; he is bound to die because of his crimes. But before he dies, Miss Shu grants him one last journey through the dream states, where he has a chance to mend old wounds and undo some of his biggest regrets.
These last moments of mercy are presented in thirty-minute segments, almost like independent shorts, where he plays a different person in a period distant from his own. Vampires, knocked-out teeth, war interrogators, mirror shops, and street scammers drift across the screen. These surreal images fragment into memories and imagined realities—creations born from the mind of a dreamer, much like Bi Gan himself. That’s the film’s crux overall: the existentialism and philosophical elements contained in dreams and during our respective creative processes. Dreams tantalize us; nightmares invoke dread. Both conjure something difficult to explain, or even recall in its entirety. They live on the edge of perception, fleeting and fragile, yet capable of altering our emotions and thoughts in ways that linger before vanishing.
A study demonstrated that the isolation and loneliness caused by the pandemic led to people having more bizarre and vivid dreams. Since the original film that Bi Gan was going to write was completely different, this phenomenon inspired the Chinese filmmaker to craft his latest, which feels like lucid, vivid retellings from REM-sleep hallucinations, in the best way possible. Bi Gan traverses this liminal terrain, where memory, dreams, nightmares, and existence dissolve into one another, causing Resurrection to feel like a man trying to recount his own life through cinema — the medium’s history seen through the eyes of a slowly fading vision. And every single move, whether coherent or disorganized, is done with that in mind, departing from his past forms and structures to paint an ambitious canvas where, in each chapter, there is a new technique applied.
In an era when a great majority of directors with the gift of making films lack originality, Bi Gan inspires us to venture into the unknown. He wants us to be creative and distinct, contemplative and artistic, in everything we do. There are more philosophical elements in Resurrection that I might explore in more detail with further viewings. But what Bi Gan provides is what contemporary cinema lacks: originality, boldness, and the panache to be equally audacious and awe-inspiring. And it is not just him, but a great majority of the films playing at this year’s Cannes Film Festival also invoked that for me–Masha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling, Oliver Laxe’s Sirat, Julia Ducournau’s Alpha, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, amongst others. This is a plunge into memory and myth, where we are invited to surrender to the dream logic and venture into imaginative worlds crafted with admiration for the seventh art.
Synopsis: An intimate exploration of family, memories, and the reconciliatory power of art.
Joachim Trier and longtime collaborator Eskil Vogt have consistently made films that connect with audiences in a very tangible way. Everyone has seemed to resonate with the stories they have made so far, particularly his previous piece of work, the 2021 Cannes Film Festival standout: The Worst Person in the World, which had everyone who has felt lost and misguided, whether in love or their career, drying out their eyes by the time the end credits roll. It was a simple project on paper, utilizing concepts and molds regularly seen in cinema, like rom-coms and coming-of-age stories, but with a clear understanding of the “why” of the emotions we feel during the time of our lives, where we don’t know where we are headed.
You felt seen, no matter the age, sex, or ethnicity–it was capturing a draining sensation that most, if not all, have felt, even more so after the pandemic, where lost souls become even more astray. The other Trier films also contained this sensibility, striking a chord deeply. And even though I still prefer Oslo, August 31st to the aforementioned fim, a part of me is still attached to The Worst Person in the World and its open arms. The film catapulted Trier, Vogt, and its lead, the fascinating Renate Reinsve, to the top of the crop in the international market. This is why his follow-up is highly anticipated; everyone wants to see how this trio will break our hearts again.
Initially, after having seen his latest, Sentimental Value (screened in competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prix), I didn’t feel that same level of connection. The rest of my colleagues connected with it far more strongly. Everybody talked about it and was blown away by how much Trier, Vogt, and Renate had challenged themselves to complicate the scenarios and raise the emotional stakes while still maintaining a humanistic, beating heart. However, a few days after resting on it, and while writing this review, I have found a path to its heart and was quite moved, even if I still have a couple of restraints in the narrative that feel too cinematic and dramatic, which depart from Trier and Vogt’s more grounded storytelling.
Sentimental Value begins with a narrator telling us the story of the Borg family home, located in the heart of Oslo, Norway. The voice describes some events that have occurred there, both joyful and sad, but mostly the latter, in the form of two tragedies that have tainted the house, haunting those who step inside it. The house might be beautiful and fancy in design, yet it has a ghostly feeling within its rooms and walls. And after the death of their mother, sisters Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) must go back to face the ghosts of the past that caused them pain. Nora is a stage actress who is rapidly climbing the ladder of success and acclaim due to her recent performances. (Her situation is much like Reinsve’s, whose roles in The Worst Person in the World and A Different Man have placed her as one of the top European actresses to watch.)
Nora is introduced to us during a time of sheer anxiety, right before going on stage and after the passing of her mother, which means that an unwanted family reunion is about to take place. On the stage, her worries go away; the play suppresses her anguish because she hides behind the mask of her character. But those are just a few mere hours. Once the curtains close, it all comes back again. The sisters both have some strains from their childhood that they would like to surpass. The former still has plenty of resentment, but the latter is more forgiving, even if some of the painful reverberations are still felt to this day.
Nevertheless, Nora and Agnes are reunited with their father, acclaimed veteran director Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), who has not been a part of their lives since he divorced their mother when they were little. Although Nora does not want anything to do with him, he arrives with a proposition. Gustav wants Nora to play the lead role in his first film in fifteen years, which he believes is his best one to date. He wrote the role specifically for Nora, but even so, she is baffled by the offer and refuses to work with him. Gustav does not want to drop the project, as it serves as a form of reconciliation and lucidity from his past. This is why he casts the American star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) instead. That isn’t the only detail that stresses Nora.
Gustav insists on filming in the family’s grief-soaked home. He even asks Rachel to dye her hair the same color as Nora’s and do the role in a Norwegian accent, even if she can’t pull it off. These demands lead Nora to believe that the film is about their family, or her in particular, with Rachel playing a younger version of herself. Reality and fiction begin to intertwine; art and life muddle with each other to concoct a volatile yet necessary potion for the fractured family. Is Gustav using art to heal his and his daughters’ wounds from their childhood? Sentimental Value looks back at the history of the Borg family–way back to when Gustav was a child, to now, where his daughters are all grown up–and their respective senses of abandonment and lack of nurture. And it is all primarily developed inside the house that is being cleared out.
The house has trinkets and objects that might not be of value to those who inhabit it next. Still, for Nora and Agnes, these items have, as the film’s title entails, sentimental value–the worth being made by how impactful the memory attached to it is. They hold onto these items, maintaining their grievances and nostalgia at the forefront. And by doing so, never letting them go, they cannot grow. They remain the same wounded people with emotional baggage. Trier and Vogt explore the true meaning behind the term sentimental value in a more complex and specific scenario that those of his other features, with a deeper venture into a meta commentary that connects their work, as if they were parallel universes–different version of the characters yet all tethered in sadness and potential healing.
Julie, Nora, Anders, Aksel, Philip, and even the Reeds in Louder Than Bombs are all connected spiritually and emotionally in this web that Trier and Vogt have concocted throughout their delicate collaborations. These are characters that have connected with us plenty, and each time, there is a feeling that Trier and Vogt are tapping into more personal places in their minds, hearts, and souls for their pictures. They have grown together, known each other since they were bachelors, and now they are husbands, and Trier even became a father. And in each film, you see these parts of their lives being portrayed on screen–the worries, doubts, joys, and pain that come with each role in life. The characters they pour these emotions of theirs into are lost souls meant to be healed and saved by love.
In the case of Sentimental Value, Nora and Gustav have been bottling everything until there is no room for more, which gives way to tears, anxiety attacks, and constant pondering of their decisions, past and present. But the two don’t seem to realize how alike they are. The two have experienced similar things that have shaped them into who they are. That does not excuse Gustav’s actions, leaving behind a family to follow his dreams and live a life full of acclaim and lavishness. However, he has changed. Skarsgård easily lends Gustav the look of a man who has been previously troubled and is now searching for forgiveness, as it might be his last chance to resonate with those he left behind. And Gustav tries to do that with cinema, the only way he knows how to express himself.
Words don’t come out easily for Gustav (and even Skarsgård as an actor does his best work when he’s kept restrained, without many lines of dialogue, because his facial expressions reveal more). But when Gustav writes these thoughts down, he finds a way into his heart previously untapped and unchecked, yet now evidently bleeding. This reminds me of a video I saw from an interview of Orson Welles, where he’s asked if he has any regrets. Welles replies: “Well, I suppose that I fell in love with movies… I have done less in my life than I would have if I hadn’t.” Bold words from a man whose films shaped cinema itself (CitizenKane, The Third Man, The Magnificent Ambersons), which is quite shocking.
Although Gustav’s reasons for abandoning his family, can’t be, and it will be irresponsible to say so, simplified as “for the sake of art” and “the love of cinema”, the aspect of looking back, now old and many films in, just consumes Welles and Gustav, and adds a rather contemplative look at a age of directors, who spent their lives sacrificing everything to be behind the directors chair. Welles also mentions that he can’t change the condition of that love with cinema, but that he’d be better off without it. And somehow, that is how Gustav feels deep inside. That element of the film is very inspiring and relatable, as I have found myself to be more expressive when writing about something I am fond of rather than talking about it. But it is the part of the film that didn’t convince me entirely at the beginning.
There is something about the film-within-a-film aspect from Trier and Vogt that, for me, feels too easy an emotional connection, when previously the two had found ways to move the viewer through trickier, more humanistic dramatic underpinnings. Unfortunately, the character of Rachel Kemp is a misstep. The character disrupts the film’s otherwise grounded emotional tone. It derails it further from it, nearly to a degree where it becomes unreachable, the distance becoming lengthy. Then again, using cinema as a healing tool is not only a recurring theme that directors, mostly veteran ones, have utilized – more so to reflect on a career, a life, and a legacy of wonders – but also what we cinephiles and theatergoers utilize the medium for.
We see films to escape, to heal our wounds, to express our emotions, to feel a connection, to wander off into another place, time, and memory. It is catharsis, reaching the unreachable. Sentimental Value is about this and much more, and days after seeing the film, I have found myself thinking about this part of the film and my relationship with cinema. Trier and Vogt may continue to earn accolades. Still, the real “sentimental value” of their work lies in its ability to mirror our interior lives—our regrets, our reconciliations, and our longing to be understood. It reflects our unspoken thoughts and feelings, reminders that healing, like cinema, is rarely perfect, but always human. That is the enduring power of Trier and Vogt’s work—storytelling not just as expression, but as transformation.
Director:Jonathan Entwistle Writers:Rob Lieber, Robert Mark Kamen Stars: Jackie Chan, Ben Wang, Joshua Jackson
Synopsis: After kung fu prodigy Li Fong relocates to New York City, he attracts unwanted attention from a local karate champion and embarks on a journey to enter the ultimate karate competition with the help of Mr. Han and Daniel LaRusso.
While watching the gluttonous nostalgia fest that is Karate Kid: Legends, I kept waiting for Rob Garrison’s Tommy to appear in the end credits, cackling maniacally as he declared it was finally time to get this franchise into a body bag.
The latest entry is heavy on exposition, light on creativity, and too worried about imitating the original story—focusing so much on legacy characters that it forgets to establish any meaningful emotional connection. Karate Kid: Legends plays like the CliffNotes version of how to write a sixth installment in a franchise—hoping that shiny packaging and familiar faces will be a convincing enough disguise to take your money and run.
The story follows Li Fong (American Born Chinese’s Ben Wang), who is being mentored “not” to fight at a dojo by Mr. Han (Jackie Chan). The setting should look familiar to fans of the franchise, as the film includes a cleanup clip from The Karate Kid: Part II. For some reason, we now have to know the backstory of a once-forgotten shack on a dirty lake—one that has since been upgraded into a pristine, money-making operation.
Han now trains hundreds of students as the shifu of a wuguan, but Fong’s mother (The Joy Luck Club’s Ming-Na Wen) won’t allow him to participate. (It makes you wonder why she even lets him hang out there in the first place—but I digress.) Her resistance is rooted in shared trauma: both she and Li are haunted by the memory of losing a loved one to violence, a theme the film touches on only vaguely and without much finesse. Li’s mother is a doctor, and she accepts a position in New York City, prompting a move that leaves Mr. Han behind. Once in the city, Li meets the two inevitable characters of any mainstream coming-of-age story: a girl and her possessive, angry ex-boyfriend.
Li is smitten with Mia (Somewhere in Queens’s Sadie Stanley), who works at her father Victor’s (Doctor Odyssey‘s Joshua Jackson) pizza shop. Naturally, her ex, Conor (Ms. Marvel‘s Aramis Knight), is a well-known kung fu champion trained at a dojo run by O’Shea (Tim Rozon)—a loan shark Victor borrowed money from to open his restaurant, who also happens to be Connor’s sensei.
The script was written by Rob Lieber, a writer for television’s The Goldbergs and a handful of forgettable family comedies that you’ve hopefully blocked from memory. The narrative leaps the script takes to connect all these coincidences are so forced and yawn-inducing, they ought to come with a warning for neck strain from excessive eye-rolling.
I have no doubt that Lieber and director Jonathan Entwistle had their hearts in the right place. However, the final product feels like a handful of flimsy Disney Channel episodes lazily strung together. Having Li train Jackson’s Victor cleverly flips the script a bit, but soon the studio can’t help itself—rushing to bridge the franchise’s worlds, from Chan’s 2010 installment to the return of Ralph Macchio.
The result is a glorified Cobra Kai cameo that feels like two completely different films mashed together—lacking depth, honesty, and any semblance of normal human interaction. When Victor hears Li tell him the story about the loss of a loved one, and in the matter it happens, he replies with a canned response that is so robotic, I wondered if the character needed to be recharged. There is and attempt to explore the trauma Li has suffered, which should have been the soul of the story, using Karate to overcome the scars and survivors grief.
Instead, we get Li competing in some bizarre Five Boroughs tournament that feels like it was yanked from a defunct Mortal Kombat knockoff. Nothing appears sanctioned, yet somehow it’s acceptable for a bunch of underage kids to beat the hell out of each other on a skyscraper—for $50,000? And Li’s elders are just fine with this? He gets smashed in the head, knocked out cold, and his physician mother just wants him to compete instead of being checked by trained medical personnel?
Sure, it’s a movie, but Karate Kid: Legends feels like a watered-down, generic retread of a franchise running on fumes. The concept is simple, yet the execution stumbles, bogged down by clunky exposition, lame humor, and over-explained action beats. (Do we really need a slow-motion replay and graphics for every single point?) At this point, I’ll spring for the body bag—can Hilary Swank make a cameo to pull up the zipper and put this franchise out of its misery?
You can watch Karate Kid: Legends (2025) only in theaters May 30th!
Clint Eastwood turns 95 this week. An almost unfathomable milestone for a career that feels as elemental as the Hollywood sign itself, and as raw and unforgiving as a high-noon standoff. To attempt to chart Eastwood’s seven decades in cinema is to review a landscape of shifting American identity, and a relentless, career-long wrestling match with American masculinity.
Such a panoramic career, one that encompasses not only genre-defining Westerns and iconic crime thrillers but also unexpected diversions like the musical, Paint Your Wagon (1969), sensitive dramas such as The Bridges of Madison County (1995), and acclaimed directorial achievements in which his on-screen persona is either absent or secondary, like Mystic River (2003) or the paired historical statements of Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006). A lengthy and diverse career like his defies exhaustive analysis in a single essay. To do justice to its sweep would require an entire book (or more!).
Our approach, therefore, is necessarily selective, focusing on a curated collection of landmark films. These are not merely personal favorites; they stand as crucial signposts, embodying distinct eras in Eastwood’s evolution while offering the most potent lens through which to examine his profound and enduring engagement with that central theme of American manhood. Other pictures, like the revisionist Western. The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), certainly echo these concerns and mark important career junctures, but the films we will explore serve as the clearest crucibles for our specific thematic fire.
Through these carefully chosen examples, we see how Eastwood – star, auteur, enigma – hasn’t just mirrored ideals of manhood, but actively forged, interrogated, and sometimes shattered them. From sun-baked mesas to rain-slicked city streets, his silhouette casts a long, often troubling, shadow over what it meant, and means, to be a man in a transformative American century.
Era 1: Forging the Frontier Myth – The Stoic Individualist (c. 1964-1971)
(Focus Film: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly)
The squint. The poncho. The cheroot. The name on everyone’s lips, though rarely spoken by the man himself: Blondie. When Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly exploded onto screens in 1966, it wasn’t just a film, it was a cultural detonation. Ennio Morricone’s unforgettable score became the anthem for a new kind of Western, and Clint Eastwood, with his minimalist cool, became its face. This was where the Eastwood persona – laconic, lethal, morally ambiguous – was seared into the global cinematic consciousness, launching a new, potent vision of American masculinity onto the world stage.
Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns weren’t just horse operas; they were audacious, operatic revisions of a fading Hollywood dream. As American-made Westerns lost their footing, these Italian born epics, shot through with a cynical verve, offered a radical alternative. Critics and scholars would later fill volumes dissecting Leone’s revolutionary style and Eastwood’s symbiotic role within it, but the immediate impact was visceral: the Western landscape suddenly became alien, dangerous, and thrillingly unpredictable.
At the heart of this new frontier was the anti-hero. American cinema had certainly flirted with morally grey protagonists before – Bogart’s world-weary PIs or Brando’s brooding rebels come to mind. Even in Westerns, complex figures were emerging to challenge the polished hero stereotype: think of those in Anthony Mann’s psychological dramas, John Ford’s The Searchers, and not least, Paul Newman as the memorably cynical Hud Bannon.
Eastwood’s ‘Man with No Name’ was a different creature altogether. His compass, if he had one, spun wildly, usually settling on self-interest. Eastwood’s genius was his stillness, his ability to command the frame with an almost Zen-like economy of expression. This wasn’t the garrulous hero of yore; this was a man who understood that in a brutal world, silence, punctuated by sudden, decisive violence, was the ultimate currency. This, then, was the new masculine cool.
The Dollars Trilogy made Eastwood a global phenomenon. He became, as some would say, the inheritor of John Wayne’s crown, but this new king of American masculinity ruled a starkly different kind of kingdom: cynical, solitary, and forged in an international crucible. The stoic, self-reliant figure he etched here would become the granite foundation of a career spent exploring, and often subverting, that very image.
Era 2: Urban Justice & Assertive Masculinity: The Actor Takes Control (c. 1971-1980s)
(Focus Films: Dirty Harry; Play Misty for Me)
“Do I feel lucky?” The question, delivered with a .44 Magnum’s cold authority, echoed far beyond the crime-ridden streets of Don Siegel’s 1971 San Francisco. Dirty Harry was more than a hit; it was a cultural flashpoint. Inspector Harry Callahan, Eastwood’s new avatar, strode into a landscape of societal anxiety, a figure worlds away from the taciturn Blondie, yet forged from the same steel. Callahan’s violence wasn’t for gold; it was a political statement, a brutal answer to what the film presented as a city unraveling under the perceived excesses of counter culture.
Siegel’s San Francisco is a battleground where liberal pieties have failed, crying out for Callahan’s brand of “common sense” justice. It’s a vision whose confrontational politics would resonate with a Nixonian “silent majority” and, startlingly, prefigure the culture war talking points of decades to come. But the film’s power, and its enduring controversy, lies in its uncomfortable embrace of its flawed hero. Callahan is bigoted, insubordinate, and his methods are a civil libertarian’s nightmare. Yet the film dares you to root for him, a provocative stance that forces a confrontation with the audience’s own hunger for order, however ruthlessly imposed. This was masculinity as a blunt instrument, contemptuous of bureaucracy, unleashed to cleanse the streets.
This raw, confrontational cinema was pure New Hollywood in its audacity, even as its politics leaned right. And at its nucleus was Eastwood, now a bona fide superstar. Dirty Harry didn’t just cement another iconic persona; it was produced by his own Malpaso Company, a clear signal of his intent to sculpt his own destiny. He was no longer just the Man with No Name; he was rapidly becoming the Man in Charge, a pivotal move towards the actor-auteur status that would define his later career.
And 1971 wasn’t just the year of Harry Callahan’s furious street justice; it was the year Clint Eastwood, with audacious quiet, first stepped behind the camera. Play Misty for Me, his directorial debut, is far more than a curious footnote; it’s a surprisingly taut and unsettling psychological thriller that immediately telegraphed ambitions beyond the confines of action stardom. Here, Eastwood the actor immerses himself in the cool jazz hues of Carmel, playing Dave Garver, a charismatic late-night DJ whose smooth baritone and freewheeling lifestyle are a world away from the violent frontiers he usually patrolled. Yet, even in this seemingly more relaxed milieu, Eastwood the director begins to probe a certain kind of contemporary male identity, one whose casual confidence perhaps masks a deeper unpreparedness for the darker currents of human connection.
What remains striking about Play Misty for Me is its unnerving prescience, an early tremor of the ‘stalker thriller’ subgenre that would become a cinematic staple decades later. Jessica Walter’s Evelyn Draper, the devoted fan whose initial phone-in request spirals into a terrifying fixation, is not merely a spurned lover but a figure of escalating, unpindownable menace. The film charts this descent with a chilling patience, suggesting Eastwood, even as a freshman director, possessed an instinct for the primal fear that arises when intimacy sours into obsession, and control is wrested away. For an Eastwood protagonist, it’s a novel form of vulnerability; not the threat of a bullet, but the insidious creep of psychological warfare, where the domestic space becomes a battleground.
As a director, Eastwood already sketches the outlines of the efficient, atmospheric style that would become his signature. The breezy Carmel coastline, a sun-dappled idyll, is artfully juxtaposed with the claustrophobia of Evelyn’s obsession, the scenic beauty offering a stark counterpoint to the film’s increasingly dark heart. While bearing some hallmarks of its era’s studio thrillers, there’s a raw, discomfiting edge to the central conflict, particularly in Walter’s ferociously committed performance, that still has the power to disturb. It’s a deliberately uncomfortable journey, suggesting an early authorial interest in pushing audience boundaries, albeit through the shadowy corridors of desire rather than the explicit politics of Callahan’s San Francisco.
Thematically, Play Misty for Me offers a fascinating counter-narrative to the assertive, often righteous masculinity Eastwood was simultaneously embodying elsewhere. Dave Garver, for all his laid-back charm and professional cool, is a man whose lifestyle renders him unexpectedly vulnerable. There’s a subtle, almost cautionary exploration here of the consequences that can follow when casual connections ignite something far more volatile, a theme of male misjudgment meeting female pathology that the film navigates with a tense focus. It’s also a compelling early glimpse into Eastwood’s career-long fascination with obsession, the fragility of sanity, and the often-perilous dance of human relationships, themes that would echo in more complex, varied forms in his later directorial work.
While it may not possess the overt genre revisionism of Unforgiven or the stark iconic power of his gun-wielding figures, Play Misty for Me stands as a crucial, surprisingly assured debut. It’s Eastwood taking the directorial reins with confidence, proving his mettle in a new arena, and demonstrating an immediate grasp of suspense mechanics. More than that, it reveals an artist already keen to explore the psychological landscapes beneath the action, adding a vital, more introspective layer to that pivotal year of 1971 and signaling the multifaceted career that was to come. The one-two punch of Dirty Harry and this accomplished first film as director truly announced Eastwood as a defining force, shaping his narratives on both sides of the camera.
Era 3: Deconstructing the Hero, Interrogating American Manhood (c. Late 1980s-Mid 2000s)
(Focus Films: Unforgiven; Million Dollar Baby)
Then came Unforgiven. If Dirty Harry codified the Eastwood persona, this 1992 masterwork saw him hold that very image up to the harshest light, then shatter it. Here was Eastwood, the Western icon, returning to the genre not to polish the myth, but to bury it with full, brutal honors. This wasn’t just a great film; it was a reckoning. The moment Eastwood, the accomplished director, fully merged with Eastwood, the screen legend, to create something profound. The Oscars for Best Picture and Director weren’t just accolades; they were an industry acknowledging an artist who had transcended his origins.
William Munny, the retired pig farmer and former killer, is the ghost of Blondie, stripped of all romance. The weight of regret hangs heavier than any gun belt. His quietness isn’t cool detachment; it’s the weariness of a soul that knows the true cost of violence. When Munny is drawn back into that world, the violence is clumsy, ugly, and devoid of glory. Unforgiven is an elegy for the Western, a meditation on the brutal reality underpinning the frontier legend, and perhaps a reflection of a post-Cold War America forced to confront the consequences of its own violent mythologies. Gene Hackman’s Little Bill Daggett, a man who perverts justice with sadistic glee, provides the perfect corrupt counterpoint to Munny’s tortured path.
The critical acclaim for Unforgiven opened a new chapter. Eastwood was now a revered American auteur. He followed it with films that continued to explore the complexities of character and morality, none more devastatingly than Million Dollar Baby (2004).
Here, as grizzled trainer Frankie Dunn, Eastwood again inhabited an aging figure confronting his own limitations. The film’s boxing narrative echoes Rocky but veers into far darker, quintessentially Eastwoodian territory in its final act. Frankie’s initial reluctance to train Maggie Fitzgerald, his gruff exterior, sets the stage for a relationship that slowly thaws his hardened masculinity, revealing a profound, paternal vulnerability. His understated performance, where a flicker of tenderness speaks volumes, is a testament to his mastery. And again, the film’s tragic core, its refusal of easy sentiment, resonated in an America grappling with its own sense of identity, earning Eastwood another pair of Oscars and cementing his status as a filmmaker unafraid of life’s hardest questions.
Era 4: The Anachronistic Man – American Chronicles and Enduring Legacies (c. Mid 2000s-Present)
(Focus Film: Gran Torino)
By 2008, Clint Eastwood was an institution, yet Gran Torino proved he could still ignite a cultural firestorm. As Walt Kowalski, a widowed Korean War vet rattling around his changing Detroit neighborhood, Eastwood presented one of his most potent late-career characters: the American man as an anachronism. Walt is a walking monument to a bygone era, his beloved Ford Gran Torino a gleaming relic of a time when America made things, and men, it seemed to Walt, were made differently. His casual bigotry, his growling contempt for the perceived decay of his world – from his “pampered” grandchildren to the Hmong family who move in next door – is Eastwood holding up a mirror to a raw, uncomfortable part of the American psyche.
The film’s narrative charts Walt’s grudging path to redemption, as he forms an unlikely bond with Thao, the Hmong teenager he initially despises. This mentorship echoes themes from Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby, yet for all its effectiveness, Gran Torino treads somewhat familiar ground, perhaps sidestepping a deeper dive into the socio-economic despair that shaped Walt’s bitterness. But what remains undeniable is the sheer force of Eastwood on screen. At 78, he is utterly compelling as Walt, physically imposing, a man whose self-reliance is etched into every line on his face. He is the silent strength, the ingrained competence that defined his characters for decades. Walt Kowalski became another indelible Eastwood figure, a man wrestling with his own obsolescence and finding one last, defiant act of meaning, connecting powerfully with audiences worldwide.
Clint Eastwood at 95: the career itself feels like a sprawling American epic. More than just an actor who endured or a director who achieved acclaim, Eastwood has been a constant, often challenging, presence in our collective imagination, his silhouette synonymous with a certain kind of American man. Yet, as we’ve seen, that “certain kind” has never been static. From the mythic frontiersman to the urban vigilante, from the haunted killer confronting his past to the aging lion roaring against the dying of the light, his films have provided a running commentary on American masculinity, its power, its pathologies, its pain, and its potential for unexpected grace.
The journey through these eras, marked by films like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Dirty Harry, Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby, and Gran Torino, reveals an artist unafraid to engage with, and ultimately deconstruct, the very archetypes that made him a star. Through Malpaso, his singular vision found its way to the screen. His directorial style, lean and direct, mirrored the men he often portrayed: no fuss, all impact.
It must also be noted that Eastwood’s own distinct, often conservative and libertarian inflected worldview has undeniably shaped his cinematic output and public persona. This perspective, sometimes lauded, occasionally divisive, can be felt in the rugged individualism and uncompromising outlook of many of his characters.
His legacy, then, isn’t just in the iconography or the awards. It’s in the conversations his films demand, the uncomfortable truths they often tell about violence, justice, and the often-fraught quest for individual integrity. Clint Eastwood hasn’t just made movies; he’s held an unflinching gaze on the American soul, and in doing so, has crafted a body of work as vital and volatile as the nation itself.
This week on Women InSession, we discuss the legendary costume designer William Travilla and his iconic work with the great Marilyn Monroe! In fact, in terms of American iconography, is there a more famous image than that of Monroe over the grate with her dress flying up in the air as she tries to keep it down? If not, it’s obviously very much in the conversation. So we wanted to talk about this pairing and what it means for the legacy of cinema.
Panel: Kristin Battestella, Zita Short, Amy Thomasson, Jaylan Salah
On that note, check out this week’s show and let us know what you think in the comment section. Thanks for listening and for supporting the InSession Film Podcast!
Fully in the summertime, Criterion follows up one full month of releases with another month of them. While two films from the same year come out with re-editions, five more are new entrants. A nearly forgotten screwball comedy, an underrated ‘70s thriller, a watershed musical film, a documentary on a jazz legend, and one of Canada’s finest films ever made all come out this month. Most are from the most recognizable names in Hollywood, while others are getting their special showcase for the first time.
Midnight (1939)
Claudette Colbert plays an American showgirl who comes to Paris with nothing but an evening gown she wears and crashes the party by playing a wealthy Hungarian baroness. Her new scheme as a homewrecker is quickly caught by a nobleman (John Barrymore) and a cab driver (Don Ameche) who have both fallen for her. Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett wrote this witty comedy that cuts through the couture and observes the social hierarchy in their own rules being rigged by an outsider.
Sorcerer (1977)
William Friedkin’s remake of The Wages of Feardoesn’t stray too far from the original story but has its originality, making it stand out. In an isolated Latin American village, four people from different backgrounds (Roy Scheider, Bruno Cremer, Francisco Rabal, and Amidou) drive two trucks of highly explosive nitroglycerin through the jungle to extinguish a fire. It’s as intense as the original film, and Friedkin cuts away from the sociopolitical themes in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s version for a straightforward thriller. At the time, production problems, rising costs, and release during the Star Wars phenomenon were seen as negatives against the film, but Sorcerer has been reappraised as a gem of the era.
The Wiz (1978)
Before Wicked, this film was the first to give another perspective on the classic story The Wizard of Oz. Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Richard Pryor, and Lena Horne star in the complete retelling set in Harlem and a teacher who is transported to a NYC-like version of Emerald City. It’s the same story put to an R&B soundtrack produced by Quincy Jones, scripted by Joel Schumacher, and directed by Sidney Lumet. Like Sorcerer, The Wiz was not well received upon release, but has also since been looked at again as a cult classic and a cultural moment for African Americans.
Brazil (1985)
The first of two re-editions is Terry Gilliam’s dystopian, autocratic world through the eyes of a bureaucrat (Jonathan Pryce) who dreams of something better than this broken-down world. However, it is only just a dream as the world, a satire of Margaret Thatcher’s consumerist ideology, that makes things so bleak and so phony that people can see it yet cannot escape the Orwellian world taking place. Robert De Niro, Michael Palin, Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins, and Kim Greist also star in Gilliam’s masterpiece, which remains one of the most visually striking films ever made forty years after its release.
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)
The second re-edition is Paul Schrader’s biographical story about Japanese author Yukio Mishima and the events leading up to his shocking death. Following Mishima’s life while cutting with excerpts from some of his most famous works, we see him grow from a sickly boy to an adult whose obsession with masculinity and Japanese traditionalism leads Mishima to try a far-fetched idea he brazenly believed could happen. It is both beautiful and horrifying to see the ideas of a man whose words would turn into a crazed ideology for an era that had been nuked out of existence.
Thelonious Monk Straight, No Chaser (1988)
This documentary on a jazz legend recreates the live performances and closeness to Monk’s unique playing style that made him a force in music. Director Charlotte Zwerin, who had collaborated with David and Albert Maysles on Salesman and Gimme Shelter two decades earlier, worked on her own in unspooling the improvisational Monk as he put together some of the most unique pieces of music ever played. It also shines a light on Monk’s demons that plagued him and how they affected the pianist for the remainder of his life.
Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993)
Instead of a single traditional narrative, director Francois Girard constructs vignettes around the life of the renowned Canadian pianist. Scenes of Gould’s life, interviews with friends, and archive footage that deconstruct Gould’s genius as an artist and his eccentricities that made him one of a kind and a legend. Colm Feore stars as Gould, who would leave live performance behind for a recording studio he would play from for the rest of his life, but is an illumination of a 20th-century virtuoso.
On this episode of Chasing the Gold, JD (filling in for Shadan) is joined by ISF writing Hector A. Gonzalez to discuss all the films he saw at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, including It Was Just An Accident, Sentimental Value, Sound of Falling, Die, My Life, Eddington and more!
Check out this week’s show and let us know what you think in the comment section. Thanks for listening and for supporting the InSession Film Podcast!
