For as much light as The Actor is bathed in, it’s equally shrouded in darkness. Duke Johnson’s solo directorial debut is a film of bleary sun and swallowing night and almost nothing in-between. It wouldn’t make sense to depict the in-between. That would be realistic, and The Actor is anything but real. 

Jubilant strings swell over vintage opening credits as we peer at the peaks of skyscrapers in a still, top-of-the-cityscape shot not too dissimilar from the angle we get on Saffron City in the original Super Smash Bros. The twinkling black-and-white image has a glowy 1950s TV-hour charm, the text surrounded by mid-century atomic sparkle logos (see: poster). It transitions neatly into the doomy film noir scene we open on––the inciting incident. 

In a motel room, mid-womanizing, our pitiable protagonist (a terrific André Holland) gets his comeuppance: a chair to the face. As it so happens, this particular woman was married and her husband didn’t take kindly to the idea of another man. The camera cuts out like a light until we’re suddenly in first-person, blinded by bright, canary-yellow beams, seeing through the eyes of our confused lead, Paul Cole. He can’t remember who he is but knows that home is New York City.

The simpleton townies tell him he’s an actor who works in a traveling troupe that has already left town, before telling him he better follow if he doesn’t want any more trouble (they have strong feelings about adultery). But, as we’ll soon realize, the people talking to Paul in this town are the same people talking to Paul in the next town, only playing different characters. They seem to be the troupe in question. This is Johnson’s first mind trick, one he used via Tom Noonan(s) in Anomalisa.

That stop-motion animation is Johnson’s only prior feature-directing credit to date, and he shared it with Charlie Kaufman. It was written by Kaufman, and we’ve yet to find a filmmaker who can operate with Kaufman’s mental and visual acuity while holding a complex story together, even if (by one golden thread) that you have to squint to see. With his history as an animation filmmaker, Johnson was integral in bringing Kaufman’s vision to life. But Anomalisa had that rare Kaufman brilliance, that existential grandeur, that gnawing sense of mystery––hidden elements that magnetize even when you have no clue what’s going on.

Much like Paul, we often don’t know what’s happening, or who is who, or why, or where. But eventually the sheer exhaustion of never knowing begins to evaporate. Paul meets the beautiful Edna (a quirky, charming Gemma Chan) in Jefforts, Ohio, finds love, and decides not to return to New York altogether. What does he care? He can’t even remember what’s there. But everything changes when he’s assaulted by random flashes of memory. Now he’s in a pickle: will he leave Edna to go home and rediscover his life? Or settle down in small-town Jefforts with his new love and try to forget his past? Or… something in-between? 

There’s an ever-flooding sense of surreality throughout the film, bolstered by gorgeous miniature sets, dreamy transitions, and an empyrean score (thanks to composer Richard Reed Parry and ex-indie-music-darling Owen Pallett, who’s credited for the arrangements) overflowing with harps and angelic choirs. The music acts like clouds of sound carrying us from set to set in the pitch black of Johnson’s phantasmagorical, stage-like transitions.

When Paul goes from one building (or town) to another, Johnson doesn’t cut away, but he doesn’t depict it happening either. Johnson instead dons a Dogville-esque approach, spotlighting Paul (and whoever is with him) as if on a stage while cutting the light on everything else, leaving Paul in a vacuous, eternal dark that he walks through aimlessly, the lights eventually coming up around him in a new location. It’s one of the many magic transitions Johnson executes with Tarsem-tier bravado. 

That’s thanks in large part to the innovative editing from Garrett Elkins, who can string seemingly un-stringable sequences together, and the deft camerawork from DP Joe Passarelli, whose cinematography is among the year’s best so far. He uses light like a master painter, creating hardlined prisms that cut across rooms like lasers, gauzy atmospheric glows that define the film’s mood, and shadows that reveal an inner world more than they hide the outer. The ethereal hallation of the imagery is delightfully profuse, the colors delicate and emotional.

In an unexplained, reality-splitting moment, Paul watches his date with Edna on TV (a Kaufman move, per Synecdoche). In another Kaufman-inspired move (Kaufman was an executive producer on the project, so his influence tracks on multiple levels), Johnson writes doting meta-conversations about living, acting, and discerning what’s real versus what’s scripted, prompting viewers to wonder how aware the troupe members are of their own identity as such or if they’re aware of it at all. Or something else entirely. 

Is the troupe part of the story or merely a tool of Johnson’s outside the story? Is Paul actually on a stage at any point, or is that Johson’s preferred style of production design? Or, in the other direction, is Paul ever off the stage? Ever in the real world? Is this all just one long production on the same huge stage? Is Paul acting for us or does he truly not remember who he is? As the opening lines of the film inform us, Paul’s world is “a world in which everyone knows their lines and the only real thing is home.” But… what is home? And what makes it real?

The Actor is certainly indebted to some of modern cinema’s momentous mindfucks––Synecdoche, New York, Birdman, Beau Is Afraid, and I’m Thinking of Ending Things chief among them––but Johnson avoids the capital crime of imitation, delivering a fresh-yet-recognizable take on the microgenre. It’s a trip in its own right, even if it’s missing Kaufman’s trademark sense of existential grandeur.

It requires less headwork than a Kaufman film, which some will certainly appreciate. But at its most abstract, the winding story beats and hazy visuals house less mystery (and, toward the end, tend to drag). They seem more motivated by creating a unique atmosphere and style than unfolding an endlessly complicated origami story. And that’s fine. 

The movie looks amazing, it’s often intriguing, the style is evocative, and it should be distinct from Kaufman’s work. But in the ways that it’s similar, there’s less to be discovered––the ghost of revelation where it feels revelation could be. A relative newcomer to writing, directing, and producing features, perhaps it’s only a matter of time before Johnson finds the revelatory voice teetering on the edge of The Actor, waiting to dive in.

The Actor opens in theaters on Friday, March 14.

A film with a few solid laughs and crowd-pleasing moments, Death of a Unicorn never quite pushes the envelope as far as it could or should. Landing somewhere between a traditional horror comedy and a Succession-lite satire, Alex Scharfman’s debut feature is a reimagining of the unicorn maiden mythology that finds father-daughter duo Elliot (Paul Rudd) and Ridley (Jenna Ortega) in the middle of a peculiar situation. En route to visit Elliot’s mogul boss on a remote nature preserve, they unexpectedly run over a unicorn. Ridley experiences a hypnotic trip gazing into the eyes of the mythical creature, causing Elliot to beat it to a purple bloody pulp and stow it in the trunk.

Elliot is a fixer hoping to elevate himself to full power of attorney over the eccentric pharma billionaire Odell Leopold (Richard E. Grant). The patriarch of a wealthy family that embodies so many cliches, Odell lives with wife Belinda (Tea Leoni) and son Sheppard (Will Poulter), an aspiring thought-leader and disrupter without an original idea in his head. Ortega’s Ridley is naturally the smartest one in the room, the pure maiden (an angle that could have been further exploited for some bigger laughs) who combs through research from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s archives, discovering that things are about to get bloody.

Steve Park and Sunita Mani play doctors on call at the mansion who stand by to synthesize the unicorn’s horns into an injectable serum that mysteriously cures Odell, who was suffering from cancer. The film gets about as scientific as Jurassic Park as the family debates what to do next. Naturally, Sheppard calls his bros and tries selling an eight-ball of horn powder to the highest bidder.

While there are glimmers of the promise of satire and Poulter delivers comic gold, the script by Scharfman gives him too little to work with––it never quite commits to a track. Unicorn instead reverts to the least-interesting path of a straight horror comedy, with the kind of unicorn horn-impaling that you might expect. Comedies such as this are delicate balancing acts; despite the value add of Rudd playing a guy who is willing to become unlikable to set himself and his daughter up for a future, the affair is mostly predictably straightforward. Ortega again plays to type as a notch above the IQ of the rest of the ensemble, giving away what’s to come as she tries to give due warning.

While, individually, the actors give it their all, Death of a Unicorn never quite finds its collective footing or place, a watered-down compromise of a picture more than a confident piece of storytelling. This feels almost like a throwback to the old days at Miramax, where Harvey Weinstein test-screened every film to death with the goal of manufacturing a hit. Sometimes you get smart feedback; usually, when you try to predict what everyone might like, you end up with a film that’s lost the script. Death of a Unicorn isn’t quite that, but it does feel like a thematic and genre compromise that doesn’t do as much with its high concept as it could.

Death of a Unicorn premiered at SXSW 2025 and opens in theaters on March 28.

Falling somewhere between a horror film and dark comedy about wellness crazes, The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick is, like director Pete Ohs’ previous Jethica, a film that suggests watching a play within a movie. Both features are difficult to discuss without spoilers––they seem to operate on a wavelength beyond genre boxes.

It might help to know the creative process going in. Tick was made collaboratively by its main cast: as Ohs explained during the SXSW premiere, they isolated on location at a country home where they would write three scenes at a time, film and analyze said scenes, and then move forward. The result is a kind of mumblecore version of an Ingmar Bergman film that feels both loose and heavily controlled. But if you’re not on the film’s wavelength it may feel like a disjointed mess. Like the wellness cures offered by AJ (James Cusati-Moyer), the resident chef in the group, they require buy-in and faith. Framed by Baz Luhrmann’s quote that “a life lived in fear is a life half-lived,” it was simply this film’s title that was enough to get frequent Ohs collaborators on board.

Camile (Callie Hernandez) invites old college friend Yvonne (Zoë Chao) to her upstate house to stay in the wake of a personal tragedy, a detox and an escape from the city. Greeted by Camile’s realtor Issac (Jeremy O. Harris) and his partner AJ, they encounter all kinds of supernatural forces in an old home that features holes in the floor ostensibly to spread out the heat, but really serve as voyeuristic portals.

The ultimate DIY filmmaker, Ohs shot and edited this picture as he had with Jethica, a kind of deconstructed Thelma & Louise with supernatural and Shakespearean undertones. As one might imagine, The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick operates with a similar approach, ratcheting up the tension in creepily effective passages proving it might only be a matter of time before Blumhouse comes calling.

Restraint is the order of the day: Ohs’ film grapples with themes of motherhood, friendship, health, wellness, and fantasy, creating a hypnotic biological narrative that is difficult to describe without spoiling details. The aforementioned tick tips the film into a light body horror category as it continues to get worse for Yvonne, who plots her escape but is ultimately captive to the quasi-family into which she’s been indoctrinated. The film veers into the spiritual territory of Being John Malkovich as the group thinks about life cycles and the next generation.

Your mileage may vary when approaching The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick, but it is a film that quite effectively melds joy, beauty, and horror elements that defy characterization. Yet it somehow sticks the landing with a sharp tone and an ensemble that has come together to make a film almost by workshop. In that way, this is a movie about the making of a movie, and independent film is largely a family affair as well. The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick is the creative process that flows from that initial idea, an obvious metaphor that doesn’t dawn on the viewer until one gleans more about its process.

The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick premiered at SXSW 2025.

A return to form for Jay Duplass, who’s also making his solo-directing debut, The Baltimorons is a charming throwback to the low-budget indies he directed with his brother Mark. Written and starring burly stand-up comedian Michael Strassner, the Baltimore-set film follows the mis-adventures of an unlikely romantic duo: Strassner’s Cliff, a stand-up comedian six months sober, and his older workaholic dentist Didi (Liz Larsen). Cliff is bantering with his fiancée Brittany (Olivia Luccardi) when he falls and chips a tooth, sending him frantically searching for a dentist who will take him on Christmas Eve. Didi is the only one who takes his call, agreeing to meet him in her empty office for surgery.

Cliff is a silly teddy bear who aims to please even when he frequently oversteps the line into offending. He’s generously curious, often living life to acquire new material for stand-up. Like the personal lives of some filmmakers who often seem to be gathering material more than enjoying existence, Cliff always appears to be testing the waters. In this case, he’s perhaps playing a long game of “yes and” improv. The Baltimorons follows a similar structure, amping up both the embarrassment and sincerity.

Gathering new material isn’t exactly a bad thing, except for the fact he’s promised fiancée Brittany no more stand-up and, of course, no drinking. Yet, after the oral surgery, there’s plenty of material for a routine when Cliff’s car is towed to an impound lot and Didi agrees to drive him. Stalling his family dinner, Cliff takes it as a sign when Brittany gives him a free pass to get something to eat on his own once it starts getting late. He and Didi ultimately spend the day and night together when they try to find a restaurant with an open table in a hot neighborhood.

The film itself does not overstay its welcome, building sympathy for our lead character while fully using winter in Baltimore to create a portrait of characters down on their luck but ultimately happier together. Didi, divorced and newly a grandmother, doesn’t want her time wasted but is ultimately terrified at the prospect of spending the holidays alone and slowly becoming irrelevant to her daughter. When she brings Cliff to crash a holiday party, he performs masterfully on his feet in front of her ex-husband, the crabber Conway (Brian Mendes), and his more emotionally available new wife Patty (Mary Catherine Garrison). Despite the obvious pain of being present in the same room with family she’s distant from, the others can clearly see how Cliff and Didi make a compatible pairing.

Like The Puffy Chair and Cyrus, The Baltimorons is a charming and endearing throwback to mumblecore’s heyday, as well as the influential, gritty character studies of the 1970s. Even with his flaws, Cliff is ultimately a tender man who wants to do right by Brittany and Didi, at times trying too hard to be perfect. Inspired by Strassner’s own struggles, The Baltimorons holds awkwardness in a kind of perfect harmony. While the film may embrace a low-budget, drab-naturalistic aesthetic, it’s far from dull. Duplass, Strassner, and Larsen brilliantly execute one of the year’s finest romantic comedies.

The Baltimorons premiered at SXSW 2025.

We’ve had Looney Tunes for nearly a century. Leon Schlesinger produced their first short Sinkin’ in the Bathtub alongside animators Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising in 1930. Almost 100 years later, the only Looney Tunes feature films (outside of theatrically released compilations) have been two Space Jams, 2003’s Looney Tunes: Back in Action, the tragically unreleased Coyote vs. Acme, and now the latest offering: The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie.

Directed by Peter Browngardt, this is a charming affair. Modeled after sci-fi B-movies of the 1950s and starring Looney Tunes legends Porky Pig and Daffy Duck (both voiced by Eric Bauza), The Day the Earth Blew Up starts with a UFO landing. The spacecraft takes off on the roof of Porky and Daffy’s broken-down house (bequeathed to them by surrogate father Farmer Jim) just before crashing. It goes on to infect a local scientist (Fred Tatasciore) with a zombifying goo not long after. Soon enough, the goo is in the mix at the gum factory, where Porky and Daffy have taken jobs in a last-ditch effort to save their beloved home from being demolished.

As the entire town––and quickly the entire world!––becomes gum-zombies, matters are further complicated when Porky becomes smitten with factory co-worker Petunia Pig (Candi Milo), fracturing his lifelong friendship with Daffy. Meanwhile, The Invader (Peter MacNicol, doing great voice work here) cackles from his spaceship as his apparent plan for world domination takes shape. The funniest bits in the film come from The Invader’s reactions to ineptitude.

It all moves at a breakneck pace, pausing only for well-timed needle drops (R.E.M. and Bryan Adams are stand-outs) and brief, welcome flashbacks. There’s an extended sequence in the middle of the picture, wherein Porky and Petunia are fighting the zombies before a Daffy mistake forces them to run away, that is breathless and impressive. Browngardt has a deep love for these characters (he’s currently the executive producer and creative director behind Max’s Looney Tunes Cartoons) and does well to develop (and resolve) real conflict in the narrative. For all of the slapstick, meta-commentary, and bathroom humor, there are stakes to the plot and an investment in what happens to our friends Porky and Daffy. It certainly helps that many viewers will have grown up with an inherent fondness for these characters, if through nothing else but cultural osmosis.

While obviously geared towards children of all ages, there is an edge to this film that’s also present in the aforementioned Looney Tunes Cartoons (and frankly existent in most of the Looney Tunes oeuvre) that makes everything a little scary and more exciting than expected. And while the ending loses a bit of its punch and moves almost too fast for its own good, it’s no matter––The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie is an enjoyable exercise in updated nostalgia. Its success begs the question: why do we not have ten Looney Tunes theatrically released feature films by now? Let’s hope this is the first of many.

The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie opens in theaters on Friday, March 14.

A big swing and nearly a miss, Chad Hartigan’s The Threesome is not without its charms even as it can overstay its welcome. A rom-com that offers a more serious tone for characters either in a state of arrested development or a new kind of adulthood that defies labels, it has much in common with Hartigan’s previous films, which live and breathe as hangout movies. His latest, written by Ethan Ogilby, starts to wane as characters continue bantering over the predicament they find themselves in time and again, leading to an awkward balancing act.

The fatal flaw is that lead Connor (Jonah Hauer-King) is too generic––a recording engineer living in Little Rock, Arkansas who appears to be an all-around good guy made for flirty banter. He’s always had a thing for hip waitress Olivia (the always-spirited Zoey Deutch). Olivia is either a free spirit or someone without a trajectory; it’s easy to see why Connor has a crush on her. One evening at the restaurant they pick up Jenny (Ruby Cruz), a stranger at the bar, and head back to Connor’s place. After the threesome takes place, Connor and Jenny exchange numbers in an awkward parting of ways moments before he asks Olivia out on a real date.

Olivia comes with her own baggage––their first date involves babysitting the rambunctious kids of Olivia’s sister––but eventually they fall hard in a montage of hanging out, going for long walks, and, of course, “Netflix and chill.” Soon they realize Olivia is pregnant and, as they deliberate the next steps, the other shoe drops: Jenny is also pregnant.

Connor is soon forced into making a good impression on Jenny’s religious family while also keeping his commitment to Olivia, who––a liberal in Little Rock conflicted about keeping her child––is full of her own contradictions with hilariously little filter, loudly telling it like it is in public. Meanwhile, Jenny is deeply religious and takes the pregnancy as a sign. She’s also a paradox, a sexually curious grad student who knows she’s not meant to be with Connor but desperately needs him to be present for her parents.

While Hartigan keeps the affair restrained and grounded with some flashes of humor, the momentum starts to drag: Connor is the least-flawed (and, by extension, least-interesting) leg of the triangle. Far more restrained than, say, a Will Gluck-directed studio rom-com, Hartigan’s picture could use a little more energy without resorting to tropes like Connor’s gay best friend (Jaboukie Young-White) who is brought in for comic relief and well-timed advice.

While uneven in character development, The Threesome is a rare rom-com that tackles serious issues around access to abortion care and what modern dating looks like, even in a politically divided city in a deep red state. While there’s a lot to admire and some big laughs courtesy of Deutch, the film will wear down audiences a bit, feeling both redundant and, as many romantic comedies do, ultimately predictable. 

The Threesome premiered at 2025 SXSW.

Directed by Rodney Ascher, best known for his horror-focused documentaries Room 237 and The Nightmare, Ghost Boy approaches its subject Martin Pistorius from, at times, the same perspective of his last feature A Glitch in the Matrix: locked in an infinite loop that suggests a simulation of life. In 1988, at age twelve, Pistorius became mysteriously ill with a sore throat. His condition rapidly deteriorated, leaving him unable to walk and feed himself. His family, initially supportive as they started slumber parties with him, became overwhelmed. A seemingly normal childhood in South Africa was upended overnight and he was ultimately sent to the Alfa and Omega Special Care Centre where he was abandoned, neglected, and abused by staff.

Like A Glitch in the Matrix and Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Ghost Boy explores existential questions about the nature of living when one is a ghost or spectator, unable to communicate despite feeling the need to scream. Like Bauby, however, Pistorius ultimately learns to communicate and, in 2011, went on to publish his best-selling book from which this film takes its title.

With an intimate, innovative structure, the bulk of Ghost Boy is dedicated to a long interview with Pistorius in which he interacts with the filmmaker through a computer-generated voice as he types. Speaking about his early childhood, the illness that wrecked his body, and the burden of his condition on his loving family and their ultimate decision to place him in a care facility, he recounts the feeling of death and floating through life. In his state he remains fully aware, even if unable to properly communicate at first––initially he loses part of his memory, which he pieces together from family scrapbooks and home movies. 

Life in the care home is cruel, staff treating their residents as subhuman. It’s only until a kind nurse, Virna, starts working at Alfa and Omega that Martin is given the tools to come out of his prison. Martin describes springing to life as Virna provides aromatherapy messages and simply talks to the residents, fostering a kind of human connection that the other practitioners did not provide. (As a teen, he was forced to watch kids’ shows, including an endless loop of Barney & Friends.) It is ultimately Virna that saves Martin as a new form of diagnosis emerges alongside new communication tools, exhibited when he’s taken in for an exam and proves he can identify symbols.

Through its recreations designed by David Offner and Jeanine Ringer, as well as extensive interviews with Martin, Ghost Boy probes philosophical questions about the nature of observing life without the tools to communicate. Ascher is a unique choice to direct the film; he does so with great sensitivity and attention to detail as Martin recounts the feeling of having all the time in the world before regaining the ability to communicate.

In the care home, Martin is alienated but observant, taking in the secrets of the staff and growing interested in what most teenage boys want: affection and intimacy from the opposite sex. Despite his limitations, he does get to experience that in spades, describing his sex ed via a computer tablet and the first time he went out on a limb and felt the most human of emotions: heartbreak.

Ghost Boy world premiered at the SXSW 2025.

In You Burn Me, the Argentinian littérateur-filmmaker Matías Piñeiro uses his vintage Bolex camera like the iOS Notes app. Shooting over the course of a few years, his method involved “collecting” images here and there amidst teaching jobs on two continents, and in real locations referenced in the texts he’s adapting, as well as places imitating them. Whilst his work has always contended with classical literary texts’ relevance in the present day, his latest meditates more urgently on film form, specifically how the 16mm-shot and co-op-made ’60s avant-garde canon can be modernized. Like Sappho’s Ancient Greek poetry––his other principal concern here––his rushes need to be represented as countless, gleaming fragments, with a sprawling file database subbing for the poet’s parchment. 

All of which is to say there’s a productive tension when Piñeiro attempts to fashion his literary sources into cinema: never just acted-out physically or maintained through voice-over, the focus is always on using native cinematic grammar (images, découpage) to imitate the sensual and semantic aspects of language. Looking at Sappho’s evocative phrasing (most likely written in the fifth century BC, and here translated by Anne Carson), the three syllables making up “you burn me” have clearly left Piñeiro pondering a cinematic analogue for their clipped eloquence. 

Although Piñeiro’s Shakespeare films of the 2010s (e.g. Viola and Hermia & Helena) were dense and allusive themselves, he achieves greater structural complexity in You Burn Me by using the Italian anti-fascist author Cesare Pavese’s mythological works as a framing device to access Sappho’s sparer writings. Anglophone cinephiles may recognize Pavese as a primary source for Straub-Huillet, and in their spirit, Piñeiro sets to find a rigorous cinematic language for his 1947 text Dialogues With Leucò, specifically the chapter “Sea Foam,” an imagined interaction between Sappho and the mountain nymph Britomartis, both of whom apocryphally committed suicide by drowning. When Pavese also committed suicide in 1950, in a hotel in his home city of Turin, he left his final words on a copy of this very book. 

With the director’s repertory mainstay Agustina Muñoz playing an unseen filmmaker musing in voice-over on a potential adaptation of “Sea Foam,” we see its component parts slowly congealing with her commentary overlaid. Piñeiro regulars Gabriela Saidón and María Villar will incarnate Sappho and Britomartis respectively in present times, yet in the sea-swashed Mediterranean climes not unlike their characters several millennia ago; more elusively, María Inês Gonçalves plays a biology student in another romantic panic, as we accompany her gazing at classical artifacts in a museum, which provide further authentic visualization of Sappho’s world. All of editor Gerard Borràs’ quick-cutting and inter-threaded density mimics the associations that fly into our head when reading, and the more intricate scholarly work if we choose to study and properly parse these texts, with translations between Spanish, Italian, the Aeolian dialect of Ancient Greek, and good old English necessary for full meaning to emerge.

Some of Piñeiro’s dialectical connections can be more comprehensible to him than us, and while he has the self-motivated independence and literary acumen of his major influence Hong Sangsoo, the South Korean director’s own DIY opuses have more universal resonance, and it is easier to reach their emotional wavelength. Still, You Burn Me cements Piñeiro as having one of the most far-reaching imaginations in current experimental film, beckoning us to follow even if he’s many intellectual steps ahead.

You Burn Me is now in limited release.

Over half a century later, what new information can be gleaned from the nights of August 9 and 10, 1969? Tom O’Neill and Dan Piepenbring’s riveting (if convoluted) book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties––released in June 2019, between the Cannes premiere and theatrical release of Quentin Tarantino’s cathartic rewrite of that history––argues that while all the evidence of the murders has been gleaned, there’s a complex and knotty web of conspiracies for the motivations, some more plausible than others. To pare down the 528-page book to its most overarching theory, it postulates Manson may have been allowed (and perhaps even directed) by the CIA to concoct a reign of terror in accordance with secret government programs created to squash left-wing movements demanding progress for the country. Culling the most vital elements of the book into an easily digestible 96-minute Netflix documentary, Errol Morris’ CHAOS: The Manson Murders is an absorbing, albeit succinct adaptation of various theories that likely will never see a burden of tangible proof.

Rather than take on a mini-series format that O’Neill’s book, at first glance, might deserve, Morris understands that the process of adaptation, particularly for non-fiction, is often one of excision. The director smartly discards much table-setting––primarily O’Neill’s lengthy, exhaustive account of the two decades it took to come to fruition and the specific details of his investigative dead-ends and struggles. This concision results in a rapidly paced journey through the rise of Manson and the crimes he and his cult carried out, splicing in theories relayed by O’Neill and others as they fit into the chronology. Showcasing materials in ways a book cannot, Morris features archival footage of Manson interviews from prison as well videos of his cult members both on trial and from interviews years later, Manson’s own musical recordings in his short-lived pursuit of stardom, and new interviews with those mentioned in the book. The swift onslaught of various materials detailing the ever-expanding face sheet of subjects makes for an engaging watch coherently conveyed by Morris, even as one wonders if the world really needs to see a step-by-step account of the nights of the murders yet again (complete with accompanying stabbing noises).

Those already familiar with the story will find the most compelling sections focus on O’Neill’s new theories. Rather than explore any specific thread in too great detail, Morris offers up the basic ideas in digestible fashion for a mass audience to do their own digging as they desire, but he effectively argues against various questionable aspects that were widely accepted as fact in prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s 1974 book Helter Skelter. While on probation for years before the murders, why was Mason never arrested for multiple crimes? When Manson and his followers visited Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, were they part of LSD mind-control experiments tested by CIA agents? Did Manson pick the Cielo Drive location solely because he mistakenly believed record producer Terry Melcher, who rejected his music, still lived there? Was Manson so paranoid about his followers turning on him that he sent them out to commit “bad crimes” and intentionally get caught? Is there a deeper reason why the police waited months to pin crimes on the Manson family? While there’s no concrete proof to be found in the book or film, both convince enough that these aren’t just crackpot theories and there’s more to the story than originally reported.

As Project MKUltra and LSD mind control are touched upon in some of the documentary’s most compelling passages, we of course get a brief glimpse of Morris’ previous series Wormwood, confirming he’s indeed the right choice for this documentary. Yet for a filmmaker so familiar with this particular form of the true-crime documentary, Morris’ personality ends up getting a bit lost throughout CHAOS, giving the sense he’s crafted a ready-made feature for easy consumption and borrowed at least a few of the tropes dissected in Charlie Shackleton’s recent Zodiac Killer Project. For example: with already so much material being thrown at the viewer, the addition of a puppet Manson feels a bit on-the-nose. Sections where Morris gives the sense of conspiratorial surveillance from multiple sides work better, employing an occasional split-screen showing more than one angle during the same interview.

In an era where QAnon and other conspiracy theories are fodder for the very worst of humanity, there could be the fear that CHAOS is another account of the ramblings of a madman hoping others will latch onto his government conspiracies. However, O’Neill’s decades of digging into events that transpired half a century ago show the work needed to piece together even the semblance of an argument, refuting not only Manson-related history widely accepted as fact but those dashing off conspiratorial social-media posts. Leaving the last words for Manson himself, Manson has commendably wrapped the many tendrils of O’Neill’s sprawling theories into one condensed, palatable package.

CHAOS: The Manson Murders arrives on Netflix on Friday, March 7.

If a James Bond or Mission: Impossible film excised all its action scenes––save a stray explosion or gunshot––while employing a script with a pop John le Carré sensibility, it might resemble something like Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag. A hyper-slick, suave spy thriller, it’s mainly relegated to dinner tables and office rooms as stages for rapid-fire, gleefully barbed verbal sparring scripted by David Koepp, returning to the genre after Ethan Hunt’s first outing. Primarily focusing on a trio of couples working in British intelligence, Koepp’s script poses the question: it is possible to have a healthy relationship when there’s no such thing as separating work from life, particularly when your job description is one of a professional liar?

Although the budget allows a dash of globe-trotting requisite for its genre, most of the week-long story takes place in London. We’re introduced to George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender), a top agent with OCD-level attention to cleanliness and detail not far removed from the actor’s recent Fincher outing. He’s tasked with finding the rat in his top-secret intelligence agency, the suspects now narrowed down to five colleagues: Freddie Smalls (Tom Burke), a weathered agent past his prime; Freddie’s younger girlfriend Clarissa (Marisa Abela); the agency’s resident therapist, Dr. Zoe Vaughan (Naomie Harris); and her significant other, the newly promoted Colonel James Stokes (Regé-Jean Page). The fifth is his wife, Kathryn St. Jean (Cate Blanchett), a woman he adores so much he’d kill for her.

Setting up this tangled web of suspicion and paranoia, Soderbergh and Koepp have a field day with a riveting, extended introductory dinner scene where each couple gathers at George and Kathryn’s home, full of barbed, cutting accusations in which nothing professional or personal is off the table. It’s quickly apparent Black Bag is more concerned with the mechanics of relationships than the standard, world-saving lore of the spy genre. There’s a playful, heightened quality to the dialogue––claims of infidelity, jealousy, and betrayal are doled out––yet such assertions are delivered and received with an air of nonchalance. It’s all in the name of a game where one wrong word can have deathly consequences. Capturing this with a gauzy sheen, light sources appearing from the most unexpected of places––an effect strangely cozy as it is disorienting––Peter Andrews is once again in fine form.

As in most spy thrillers worth their salt, Soderbergh is less concerned about detailing the MacGuffin (in this case, Severus, a malware that has the ability to destabilize a nuclear facility with mass casualties) and more preoccupied with George’s commitment to Kathryn while secretly attempting to track her every move. In a workplace where a committed relationship can be a professional weakness and easy target for the enemy to exploit, Black Bag evolves into a story about the lengths one will go to protect the one they love. Rather than anything so schmaltzy as that may sound, there’s an exacting, sharp precision to the caustic turns where clues of potential betrayal are uncovered, in which a misplaced movie stub means one’s entire life could shatter.

The film draws its title from the phrase an agent uses when they can’t reveal anything about a mission or their motives. Transferring this cop-out to the foundation of marriage––which, at its healthiest, means no secret should ever be concealed––makes for a compelling juxtaposition: one is on the edge of their seat, perpetually wondering if Kathryn is staying loyal to both her job and George or if she truly has ulterior, treasonous motives. While the immaculately costumed cast (including a winking Bond cameo) is clearly taking great pleasure in playing the game, there is the sense they are pawns in Soderbergh’s brisk chess match, here to entertain without a great deal of depth. Nevertheless, Black Bag moves with such a briskness it hardly matters in the moment.

A friend recently remarked how Soderbergh’s career since a very short-lived, self-imposed “retirement” has mainly been the experiment of an A-level director punching below their weight, selecting projects––many of them formal-flexing genre exercies––that are entertaining in the moment but lack a certain ambition or staying power. The insular, ouroboros arc of Black Bag won’t prove any detractors wrong per se, but seeing how Soderbergh and Koepp can expertly stack the deck to always be one step before the viewer is an exhilarating thrill to behold. Not since his Ocean’s days has the director had as much amusement at pulling the rug out from underneath his audience. If Amazon’s all-but-certain exploitation of James Bond and Tom Cruise’s potential goodbye to Mission: Impossible has one feeling bleak about the spy thriller, Black Bag is proof it’s very much alive and kicking.

Black Bag opens in theaters on Friday, March 14.

“The world is a vampire” –– Billy Corgan, 1995

Before jumping directly into the action, Paul W.S. Anderson’s In the Lost Lands opens with a framing device we’ll return to only at film’s end. The George R. R. Martin adaptation otherwise gives no context whatsoever, and when the plot elements finally reveal themselves it’s near-fablelike, with a powerful Queen despondent that she hasn’t been able to experience the true mysteries of the world. She requests that the witch Grey Alys (played, of course, by Milla Jovovich) grant her powers to transform into a werewolf. Until then the movie is a set of seemingly unstructured action sequences with no narrative information to grasp and nothing to connect to. Things seem to happen purely mechanically––at one point, portions of a fight scene take place telepathically between two characters. But far from being confusing, the effect is entirely thrilling. 

This is important, too, because after years of many others delivering generic, overly digestible streaming slop, Paul W.S. Anderson––a director once relentlessly mocked for nearly two decades––now seems to be among the three or four people on the planet who know how to direct an action scene. There is a still plot, even plotting––as Grey Alys goes off on her mission with Dave Bautista’s Boyce, we’re littered with bits and pieces of palace intrigue on the other end, not unlike the director’s own Three Musketeers. But as in that film, it’s just the enclosure around action and adventure: not exactly window dressing or means to an end, but a rigid, constraining world in which these adventurers seek freedom and reprieve.

The external characters are just as trapped, our Queen (Amara Okereke) not having been born royal by blood but being raised from birth to serve as wife to an infirm, elderly King. But this is still just that––an enclosure, the world as a trap. And while silly dialogue abounds in Constantin Werner’s script, there are also wonderful performances by Jovovich and especially Bautista to sell story and, just as crucially, visual style itself. Anderson never really uses his imagery for world-building in the way of, say, Denis Villeneuve or Ridley Scott.

Instead it’s always a bit expressionistic, landscapes becoming suggestive not of the external world but the internal feeling of our leads and emotional tenor of the movie itself. Light, color, and shadow tell this story and what we will be feeling. Lost Lands even hops between genres just to land the right timbre: it’s variously a Western, horror, and sci-fi epic––whichever genre fits the tonality that Anderson seeks to convey.

Sets are dazzling (particularly the Queen’s throne room) and it’s philosophically compelling––not Lost Lands‘ positioning of organized religion as a tool of social control, which now borders on cliché, but in positioning the real mysteries of the universe to be found in the occult. The joy is all in its inspired, sensuous imagery, fantastical and dreamlike. The action scene as poetry, endless poetry in and for a hopeless world.

In the Lost Lands opens on Friday, March 7.

Three decades on from Brian De Palma’s gleefully unhinged psychological thriller Raising Cain, John Lithgow has once again found a cinematic role to showcase his panache for exuding deranged evil. New Zealand director James Ashcroft’s The Rule of Jenny Pen, following up his Sundance-selected Coming Home in the Dark, finds Lithgow as Dave Crealy, a nursing-home resident who delights in unleashing a torrent of psychological and physical torment against cohabitants of the facility, most notably newly arrived Stefan Mortensen (Geoffrey Rush). While loogies are hawked and bags of piss thrown about in the film’s more absurdly mounted sequences, Ashcroft is digging into the underbelly of such facilities as caretakers ignore genuine feelings for the geriatric in order to maintain the status quo of keeping people temporarily happy and sedated. While the result is a half-entertaining showcase for Lithgow, a satisfying point to this interminable deprivation never manages to emerge.

Adapting Owen Marshall’s short story, Ashcroft and co-writer Eli Kent waste little time getting to the film’s solitary locale after the opening scene finds Judge Stefan Mortensen suffering a stroke on the bench. Whisked away to a retirement home which the now partially paralyzed Mortensen is led to believe is a temporary situation until he recovers, all is not right from the get-go. There’s a dark, foreboding mood stagnating through quiet rooms and halls. A fellow resident gets lit on fire after a mishap involving his cigarettes and alcohol. Was it a freak accident, or was a curse put upon? All starts to become more clear when we’re introduced to the freakishly smiling Dave, who barks at any caretaker attempting to pry from his hands Jenny Pen, a therapy doll he was encouraged to get in order to deal with dementia. When he sets sights on Stefan as the next target of his wicked games––using Jenny Pen as his mouthpiece and slyly concealed from those in charge––a battle of geriatric abuse commences.

With actors so accomplished as Lithgow and Rush going tit-for-tat and provided leeway to ham up the vitriol and stretch their prowess for physicality, The Rule of Jenny Pen isn’t without merits. Rush is clearly delighting to embody a curmudgeonly demeanor, spewing barbs at everyone (from caretakers to fellow residents) that comes in his path, while Lithgow’s exaggerated evil lifts the film out of its stupor. As Stefan’s roommate Tony, George Henare offers a more grounded, impressive turn in the ensemble. Yet by the umpteenth act of vile attacks, the charade of hijinks begins to sour into an interminable endurance test. As Ashcroft employs longer takes in close-ups, showing the men being bathed in all their misery––including an unnecessarily manipulative scene of a near-drowning––the viewer starts to feel as suffocatingly trapped as those inside the facility. It’s only when the film becomes more absurdly gleeful in its perverse tricks––from De Palma-esque split-diopter shots to Lithgow stepping on everyone’s feet during a community dance session to fantastical depictions of Jenny Pen––that were snatched from a somnambulant parade of horrors.

It’s not often we get features solely about the elderly, much less set entirely in a nursing home, and though Ashcraft makes the most of his locale with sharp, moody cinematography and enveloping, haunting sound design, The Rule of Jenny Pen seems a missed opportunity. Its most affecting moments are seeing the ways in which those shelling out money to be cared for are gaslit by the very caretakers attempting to convince them nothing is amiss. With those passages too few and far between, it’s Lithgow’s committed, eccentric performance that elevates an otherwise repetitive, blunt horror offering. As the actor begins to prepare for “the last chapter” of his life, in his own words, by portraying one of the most beloved characters in modern culture, there’s something sordidly humorous that he’s stepping into it directly after playing one of the most vile characters of his career.

The Rule of Jenny Pen opens in theaters on Friday, March 7.