TONY

Directing: A-
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: A-
Editing: A

I thought a lot about the 2004 film Sideways while I was watching Tony. On the surface, there’s nothing earth-shattering here, but is there anything wrong with it? I would be hard pressed to find any genuine criticisms of this film, which is just lovely from start to finish, with surprisingly elegant nods to how Anthony Bourdain got into heavy drug use in his early adulthood.

Nearly everything about this movie charmed me. Maybe the best thing about it is the choice to focus on Bourdain’s very early career. This is generally the only way a biopic is successful, when the story narrows its focus to a single incident or particular time of the person’s life. In this instance, a college-aged Bourdain follows his high school crush from New Jersey to Provincetown, is quickly brought down by his own hubris, and winds up takig a job at a local restaurant run by a Portuguese chef played by Antonio Banderas. (Banderas is actually Spanish, but there is no indication he changed his accent at all. I suppose I could criticize that? Chef is a composite of Bourdain’s early-years mentors, though, so I suppose I can let it go. It’s not like I’d be able to distinguish between a Spanish or Portuguese accent anyway; it’s only that the character is referred to as Portuguese and Antonio Banderas is widely known to be Spanish.)

Bourdain himself, through most of the movie telling people to call him “Tony” until a key moment that makes him change his mind, is played by Dominic Sessa, who was previously seen in the wonderful 2023 Alexander Payne film The Holdovers. I noted then that he was impressive, and in Tony he proves to be inspired casting; I find myself eager to follow his acting career going forward. Granted, both of these particular parts are young kids of bravado masking insecurity, so hopefully we’ll get to see him play many kinds of roles.

Emilia Jones plays Nancy, the crush Tony follows to Provincetown, and she’s also lovely, if playing a part that mostly exists to move the plot forward. But that’s just it—the plot moves forward so assuredly, thanks to excellent direction by Matt Johnson. This is the guy who directed the incomparable Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, which opened earlier this year; and the surprisingly excellent BlackBerry in 2023. And Tony’s breezy 106 minutes were edited by Curt Lobb and Robert Upchurch, both of whom also worked with Johnson on both those other movies. These guys clearly make an excellent team.

I’m not usually struck by the cinematography in movies like this, but even without it ever calling attention to itself, I was here—and Tony was shot by One Battle After Another cinematographer Michael Bauman. All of this underscores that even the best director is nothing without an excellent crew working with them.

Rounding out the cast are Tuner’s Leo Woodall, as a kitchen colleague who introduces Bourdain to drugs; and Stavros Halkias, who had a memorable turn as a cop in Bugonia. (Here, his character also works in the kitchen, and takes a lot of good-natured hits at his weight.) Although there’s a few others who work in this kitchen who really don’t get much in the way of lines—all of them Black characters, it is perhaps worth noting—this restaurant staff become a kind of found family for Bourdain as he’s away from home.

We only get the slightest hints at Bourdain’s relationships with his parents, including an encouraging father (Rich Sommer) and a skeptical mother (Dagmara Dominczyk). But even the smallest parts in Tony are almost uniformly great performances; it’s a big part of what makes this movie irresistible. And there’s something about Sessa’s performance as Tony in particular, you can’t help but root for him even as he’s being a dipshit twenty-something with far more confidence than could possibly be justified.

Maybe the best thing about Tony, and its focus on the very start of a career that he stumbled into when convinced he was going to do something else (specifically writing, and he lies about being a writer for much of the film), is how it sidesteps this man’s lifelong struggles—not to mention his sad and tragic end—without completely ignoring them. Johnson alludes to the directions Bourdain’s life is destined to go, but only ever in a way that showcases the young man’s vast potential. I didn’t care as much about Tony’s pursuit of Nancy as I did about his evolving relationship with Chef, who allows Tony to sleep on his porch in exchange for clearning dishes as the restaurant.

It should be said that Antonio Banderas is a good a reason to see Tony as any, in one of the warmest roles he’s ever played. I’m starting to feel a little like I’ve been sleeping on this Matt Johnson guy—I’m consistently delighted by his films, and he should be credited for clearly knowing how to assemble teams that fit perfectly as collaborators and make great art. I’ll be eager to see what we get next from Johnson and from Dominic Sessa. It’s such a treat to experience such synthesis of talent.

Just like that chef’s jacket, this movie is a gift.

Overall: A-

TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+
Special Effects: B+

I’m starting to feel trolled by writer-director Jane Schoenbrun. Like, I’m not sure I will ever fully get their work—and maybe that’s exactly what they want? To say Schoenbrun’s latest two films have been wildly critically acclaimed would be an understatement; the cinephiles over on Letterboxd are not far behind. But, I was largely baffled by I Saw the TV Glow in 2024, and now feel a bit more of a direct connection to Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, which has a lot of similarities, is overall a bit more straightforward, and then veers toward the end into similarly surreal directions.

If nothing else, Schoenbrun clearly has a thing for 80s and 90s TV and movies, I Saw the TV Glow being about an obsession with a 90s TV show, and this one about an obsession with a long-running slasher movie franchise spawned in the 80s. In the world of Teenage Sex and Death, the Camp Miasma series is meant to have existed right alongside the likes of Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street, and also similarly stretched well into the following decades with endless sequels and reboots, with diminishing returns. The opening credits are incredibly economical storytelling, the camera passing over a series of newspaper clippings about franchise stars, new movies, and “woke” reactions to the earlier films—particularly an overtly transphobic scene in the first one.

The villain in Camp Miasma is a person with a sort of helmet made of concentric squares that look like those of an air conditioning vent. This seems far less functional for a serial killer than even a hockey mask, but whatever. In the franchise world, this villain’s name is The Little Death. I can’t tell whether Schoenbrun is being tongue-in-cheek or deliberately on the nose here: the French phrase for an orgasm, la petite mort, literally translates to “the little death.” There’s a moment when all these old slasher movies are described as “about two things: flesh, and fluids.”

Much of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma feels like Schoenbrun fucking with us. The protagonist, Kris (Hannah Einbinder, great as always), is a filmmaker who has been hired to reboot the Camp Miasma franchise. She has driven to the middle of nowhere to meet with the “final girl” from the first film, Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson, always a welcome presence), who never appeared in any of the sequels and now lives as a recluse. Kris feels that a meeting about potential collaboration will “unlock” her vision for a new film. Anyway, in one of Teenage Sex and Death’s best scenes, Kris is on a group video call from her car with several studio people, who go out of their way to oversimplify this vision: “It’s meta!” No, it’s not meta. “It’s allegorical!” No, it’s not allegorical. Except that Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is so obviously meta—particularly in this very scene, when Kris literally says, “If anything, you are all characters in a movie!”—and allegorical. There’s another scene in which Billy Presley complains about how the Camp Miasma movies are discussed in such academic ways, and if this movie isn’t academic, then I don’t know what it is.

It may yet be that I don’t quite know what it is. This is apparently Jane Schoenbrun’s M.O. And by the end of Teenage Sex and Death, which is very much about both of those things but also adult sex and death, and transcending both sexual and gender repression, it becomes the very thing it is examining, all while sticking firmly to its allegory. I mean, as far as I can tell.

The key difference between Teenage Sex and Death and I Saw the TV Glow is that I was far more taken with this movie. I found it far more narratively inviting, even as it gets a little gonzo-weird in its final act. Gillian Anderson is excellent as Billy Presley, even as the film quite directly acknowledges, not once but twice, the character’s obvious similarity to Sunset Boulevard’s Norma Desmond. Normal Desmond deluded herself into thinking she was still in the movies she used to make, but Billy Presley actually is.

It seems important to mention the transgender elements of this movie, which were an even bigger part of I Saw the TV Glow, in ways I wondered if I just could not quite get because I do no identify as trans myself. Schoenbrun uses the “Little Death” character itself to represent transness here, which felt to me a bit like a mixing of metaphors. I’m not sure if Schoenbrun intends for their work to be impenetrably academic, but it’s not difficult to imagine these films being analyzed to the hilt in Queer Studies courses. Maybe I’m just not smart enough, and perhaps I should sit in on one of these classes and have the with-it youth explain it to me.

If nothing else, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is well-acted, well-shot, and makes effective use of an obviously limited budget for its effects shot, which sometimes look like matte paintings but in a clearly intended way. Even with all its bonkers surrealism that got very close to losing me, the narrative kept me compelled—and, not for nothing, but people coming to this just for the slasher elements will get something way different from what they bargained for, but still get plenty of scenes of excessive and cartoonish violence and blood. As already noted, it’s about flesh and fluids, and in the end, how cinema historically stimulated those two things.

It’s not quite an orgasmic experience but it’s fun to watch someone else aspire to it.

Overall: B

SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: C+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-
Special Effects: B

I can’t for the life of me figure out why there seems to be this unwritten rule these days that superhero movies need to be two and a half hours long. It’s bad enough we’re all obligated to sit through the credits in order to see a tacked-on scene at the end; they have to make the movie over-long as well? Side note: the post-credits “scene” in Spider-Man: Brand New Day is arguably the lamest moment in the movie. I really didn’t think it was worth waiting for.

Was the rest of the movie worth sitting through? I guess. It was fine. There’s something to be said for Tom Holland in the role that made him a star (and no other role he’s ever had came even close to having the same effect), and the undeniable chemistry that he has with Zendaya, one of the most gifted actors alive. There’s even a kind of comfort in seeing Jacob Batalon yet again as Peter Parker’s friend Ned, even though, like all of them, he is noticeably older, and there’s been an understandable about of chatter regarding how the dynamics of Spider-Man change when he and his friends are no longer teenagers. He even says at one point in this movie, “I’m not in high school anymore.”

It would seem, however, that Marvel Studios have backed themselves into a corner, with this insistence on connective tissue, even after their content has long since saturated the market. The Spider-Man character does have a kind of appeal that is broader than most other superheroes, and as series fourth-installments go, this one actually is pretty entertaining and charming. It’s also over-stuffed, with not just John Bernthal as The Punisher, but Florence Pugh as “Thunderbolt” Yelena Belova, here using a sauna as her office; Michael Mando as The Scorpion, a bit under-used; Tramell Tillman as Head of Department of Damage Control Bill Metzger; The Bear’s Tramell Tillman as Detective Jean DeWolff, who seems to serve as replacement for JK Simmons in the previous three films (The Daily Bugle doesn’t even get mentioned here); and even Marissa Tomei in enough flashback scenes to land her eighth-billing in the credits.

And none of those are even the primary villain in this movie, played by Sadie Sink, her character being apparently such a spoiler that I won’t name her here, even though it’s also widely known. Suffice it to say she serves as even more connective tissue for the broader MCU narrative going forward, in a way many Marvel fans are thrilled about and I’m just like: okay, whatever, fine. I will say it’s a fascinating pivot to see one of those movies have a tiny, 24-year-old young woman as one of the most powerful villains ever.

“Most powerful” is always relative, of course. Mark Ruffalo also returns as Bruce Banner, AKA The Hulk, who is evidently indestructible whenever he’s Hulking out. This has always been my problem with superhero movies, and Marvel movies in particular: the characters are effectively gods, which saps them of any need for emotional investment. At least Peter Parker is undergoing an evolution of his powers this time around, which leaves him unmoored and vulnerable. Somewhat ironically, this aspect of the store is also underdeveloped, because writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers—who also wrote all three of the previous Spider-Man movies—had to pack so much shit in there.

It’s worth noting that the first three Spider-Man movies were all released two years apart: 2017, 2019, and 2021. I found the first two to be pretty generic superhero movies, but the third one, No Way Home, ran with the “Spider-verse” concept and became a cultural moment the likes of which Marvel had not seen since 2019 in Avengers: Endgame, and has not seen again since. And it’s been five years—half a decade—since No Way Home was released. That movie was a pretty spectacular climax a trilogy that would have been well served to be left alone; Brand New Day was reportedly intended to be the first in a new trilogy. Holland is a charismatic performer, but how many of these movies do we need? Not counting other Marvel movies the character appeared in, there have now been 11 of these movies in the past 24 years.

All this is to say, Brand New Day is at multiple disadvantages. In addition to how much older Peter Parker is, it’s inevitably a bit of a comedown after the thrill of how surprisingly well-constructed No Way Home was. Brand New Day will make a shit ton of money, which is precisely why they keep making these movies, but it never had any hope of living up to what came before it. So, it evidently doesn’t even try. There’s nothing especially clever about the story here, and getting back to the point of its excessive run time, it makes the inevitable mistake of engaging far too long with chaotic, CGI-fight battles. The visual effects aren’t terrible in this movie, but neither are they great.

It’s the cast that elevates the material. Holland and Zendaya are plainly irresistible screen presences, and most of the rest of the cast have complentary charisma (though I must admit The Punisher as a character does little for me). This is a movie that isn’t anything special, but neither does it disappoint. I got about what I expected out of it. I suppose enough other people will feel the same way to justify its existence.

Why don’t you just straight up rip off Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse while you’re at it?

Overall: B

THE END OF OAK STREET

Directing: B-
Acting: B-
Writing: C+
Cinematography: B-
Editing: B+
Special Effects: B

If there is some deeper context to The End of Oak Street, I couldn’t tell you what it is. It seems safe to assume writer-director David Robert Mitchell feels there is one, but he is not wholly successful at communicating it. Once the deeply uneventful plot involving fundamentally uninteresting characters takes a turn, it can’t be denied that this film becomes wildly entertaining—but it’s also the epitome of a popcorn flick, delicious but empty cinematic calories.

I spent a lot of the movie trying to figure out what year it was supposed to be. All the men and boys are wearing incredibly short shorts, even by today’s standards; I figured it had to be either the seventies or the eighties. A scene featuring a car dashboard cassette player leaned me toward the latter, but I also wondered if it was meant to be some undefined place in time. But then, very near the end, there is literally the dialogue exchange, “What year is it?” and “It’s 1982, of course!” Okay, so we’re getting specific now.

I suspect it’s no accident that Mitchell set this movie the same year E.T. was released. The End of Oak Street is quite obviously a riff on the Spielbergian tones of the time, crossing the adventure and subject matter of Jurassic Park with the setting and tone of movies like E.T. and Poltergeist. That said, Oak Street also feels like a riff on J.J. Abrams’s 2011 film Super 8, which was itself an homage to Spielbergian sensibilities. It’s worth noting that Abrams produced The End of Oak Street, which thus feels like a copy of a copy of a copy.

I’ll give it credit for an odd twist, at least: instead of scientists cloning dinosaurs in the modern age, as in Jurassic Park, a random wormhole ports an entire neighborhood, a couple of miles in diameter, into prehistoric times. This produces the same effect, of dinosaurs interacting with modern people and streets, the difference being that we’re in their time instead of them in ours. But, the main characters never leave this neighborhood, largely because the light that ported them has created high cliffs at the circle’s edges.

The family in question consists of married couple Denise (Anne Hathaway) and Greg (Ewan McGregor, in arguably his least remarkable performance ever); their children Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery), and to a lesser degree neighborhood adolescent Jeannette (Jordan Alexa Davis). Rounding out the principal cast are their neighbor who hates their dog, Mel (P.J. Byrne); the elderly neighbor who is encouraging Denise’s writing, Mrs. Huddleston (Anne Gee Byrd); and the local librarian, Mrs. Valcourt (Emily Kuroda). Nearly every character who is not a member of the principal family gets some degree of a setpiece, some of them getting spectacular death scenes.

And that is all we’re here to see, really. The End of Oak Street can’t quite pick a lane when it comes to tone, opening with an almost self-consciously obtrusive score by Michael Giacchino (Cloverfield, The Batman), and quickly shifting from the facade of 80s suburbia to most of those suburbanites appearing as dead bodies on clean streets and manicured lawns. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t absolutely eat that shit up—once the porting of the neighborhood occurs, I was rapt until the end of the film. I was always very conscious of how blandly plotted it was, especially with a certain death of a character that the film cheats its way out of in the end.

Say what you will about the sappiness of Steven Spielberg, but at least he has narrative integrity, even when he’s got plot holes. But some of the storytelling in The End of Oak Street is just plain egregious. It barely qualifies as “science fiction,” providing no semblance of an explanation except that these bright lights somehow “moved” their neighborhood—the Oak Street of the title now ends at a humid jungle.

And of course, at first Mitchell is coy about the dinosaurs, keeping them hidden behind bushes or around the corners of houses. One striking detail is how furry and/or feathery the dinosaurs in this film are, a clear nod to more recent research suggesting they probably looked more like birds than reptiles. This would not have been the prevailing view in 1982, of course, and yet none of the characters here say anything along the lines of, “They’re hairier than I expected.”

If you imagine the scenes in Jurassic Park where two kids and a couple of adults are scattering away from dinosaurs in pursuit, then you’ve got the gist of about 75% of The End of Oak Street. I regard Jurassic Park as one of the best movies ever made, so this is actually a complimentary comparison; it’s just that Jurassic Park was brilliantly paced and plotted, had real ideas for both the characters and the audience to ponder, and had incredibly sharp wit. The End of Oak Street gets about halfway there on all fronts, all the while using actors who are known widely to be deeply gifted but who give performances that feel phoned in. The delivery of some of the neighborhood kids is especially wooden. On top of it all, cinematographer Mike Gioulakis shoots some scenes with the camera looking at the character who is speaking from behind another character in very odd close-ups, which is very distracting. (Gioulakis also shot the 2014 It Follows, which was also written and directed by David Robert Mitchell.)

I had a great time watching The End of Oak Street, while also recognizing early on that it’s nothing special. It’s strange when a movie this thrilling to watch is simultaneously disappointing, though a lot of viewers clearly won’t care about that. If you’re just looking for a thrill, this movie will work for you. Although I still think you’d get more out of simply rewatching Jurassic Park, which had a depth that this movie doesn’t even aspire to.

Listen, this guy needs protein too.

Overall: B-

THE ODYSSEY

Directing: A-
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: A
Editing: B+
Special Effects: A-

It’s only taken me a few hours to realize I liked The Odyssey even more than I thought I did. And I had mixed feelings about it for a while, particularly during the first hour, in which it felt like a bit too much was going on for me to take in. But then, in its second half, The Odyssey really pulled me back around, and in the end both its 172-minute runtime and its climactic final act felt deeply earned.

How long has it been since we had a truly epic film like this, anyway? Or at least one that was successful? “Epic” is a term pretty broadly applied, granted, but it may be safe to say that The Odyssey is the greatest epic fantasy film we’ve been given since the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the last of which was released 23 years ago.

The source text, of course, was written by the Greek poet Homer somewhere around the 8th century B.C. I won’t pretend to have any insights about writer-director Christopher Nolan’s adaptive choices, as although as an English major I presumably did read this once or twice, I remember basically none of it, aside from what has seeped into permanent pop culture through millennia. I can say that anyone upset about Lupita Nyong'o being cast as Helen of Troy, or Elliot Page as Greek warrior Sinon, or even John Leguizamo as Greek servant Eumaeus, is a straight up idiot. I suppose if you really wanted to be regressive you could call this the Bridgerton-ization of The Odyssey, but really: who gives a shit? Ancient or not, this is still fantasy—indeed, along with The Iliad the oldest fantasy fantasy of European origin there is—and the geographical area covered in The Odyssey quite logically covers ethnic groups of multiple skin tones.

If I really wanted to nitpick with any sense of justification, it might be the choice to have every single character in this version of The Odyssey speak with an American accent. This was not just because Matt Damon, in the lead part, happens to be American so everyone else was asked to follow suit; it was instead reportedly that Nolan wanted to break the long-held trop that ancient characters would speak in a British accent and thus make their speech sound of a higher class. (The modern British accent is only a couple hundred years old anyway, and ancient Greeks pre-date it by, again, millennia.) To be sure, something as simple as hearing a character like Tom Holland’s Telemachus refer to his parents as “mom” and “dad” as opposed to “mother” and “father” is a little jarring. But that’s about the extent of it, and actually you quickly get used to the anachronistically modern way of speaking. It gives the dialogue an accessibility, at least to American audiences, never before had with Homer’s works. It’s easy to envision classrooms watching this adaptation as the default going forward, after they read Homer’s The Odyssey.

In a way, this version of The Odyssey brings us full circle in pop entertainment. There have been countless adaptations and reimaginings of this work over the years, particularly over the more than a century that motion pictures have existed. Just a couple examples include the Coen Brothers’ brilliant 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and even The Wizard of Oz frequently gets compared to it. To be fair, for The Wizard of Oz to be closer to The Odyssey I suppose the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow and the Tin Man would have had to be killed by the end. In any case, Nolan has brought us back to a more direct adaptation of the ancient text, just with an update to the language.

Surely there is a lot of artistic license in the adaptive process, as always. This, I think, is among the chief complaints by the vocal minority who are dismissing this film as “silly”—which was not a word I would use. Thrilling is a better word. And it’s thrilling in multiple ways. For instance, Anne Hathaway’s performance as Odysseus’s wife Penelope: if anyone in this film deserves an Oscar nomination for their performance, it’s her. I have long thought she was a great actor, but I was enthralled by her screen presence here.

You may have also heard that every actor with a pulse is in this movie, and it certainly does feel that way. This was also reportedly a conscious choice on the part of Christopher Nolan, who wanted to use star power as a means of underscoring the iconic nature of these characters: Athena the Goddess of Wisdom (Zendaya); the witch Circe (Samantha Morton); Calypso (Charlize Theron); Menelaus the king of Sparta (John Bernthal); Odysseus's second-in-command Eurylochus (Himesh Patel); Antinous, a sleazy suitor of Penelope (Robert Pattinson).

Even Bill Irwin, who had voiced the TARS robot in Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar (which, incidentally, both Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway were also in), was tapped as the on-set performer as the giant cyclops Polyphemus. This is the first of several thrilling sequences in The Odyssey, although a word of warning to those going to IMAX screenings: the action sequences in particular are really loud. I literally had to plug my ears several times, it was so loud, and it began with Polyphemus’s roaring. So, maybe bring ear plugs. Once that’s done, you can delight at watching a cyclops casually munching on Greek warriors, or at the fascinating creature design choice of Polyphemus’s face. It’s like he was born with a facial deformity, where his one eye and nose are sideways. Somehow, it works, and to a degree actually humanizes the creature.

Between the cyclops, the giant Laestrygonian soldiers, a huge whirlpool, a multi-headed sea monster, a witch that turns men into pigs, and much more (including a lot of screen time dedicated to the Trojan Horse, which is only covered at length in the Latin Aeneid), there is plenty to thrill and entertain in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. The onscreen effects are almost always thoroughly convincing, and if you actually pay attention you’ll see that the cinematography is incredible, particularly paired with elaborate staging and blocking so finely choreographed it almost goes unnoticed. The more I think about it, the more I want to watch this movie again.

Dude, where’s my penteconter?

MADDIE'S SECRET

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: A-

I am left a little bemused by Maddie’s Secret, an elaborate and sharply observed homage to 80s and 90s “movies of the week” set in the world of modern social media food content production—in which first-time feature writer and director John Early cast himself in the title role. As a straight, cisgender woman. In which he almost totally plays it straight.

In short: I don’t get it. Why was it necessary for him to cast himself in this part? It’s not like he’s channeling Divine—or even John Travolta—here; there is no camp to be found, although ironically I suspect John Waters would love this movie. Would it play differently had Early actually cast a woman in the part of Maddie? I can’t imagine the act of homage and the very subtle satire here would be particularly different in that case. So what was the point, then, aside from the fact that it gets more people talking about the movie?

And here’s the weirdest part. Early is good in this role. It actually doesn’t take very long to just accept him as this character, in spite of facial structure and detectable Adam’s apple, which are fairly obscured by the 38-year-old Early’s enviable softness of skin. When Early presents as himself, he presents as pretty culturally “male,” but he can shift into zones of androgyny with unparalleled ease. He speaks with a soft voice as Maddie, and surrounds himself with quite a number of women in supporting parts—even more than male parts. Every one of them seems to understand the assignment, even if I don’t.

The thing is, as good as Early is, I was still regularly thinking about the fact that this was a self-identified man playing the part of a woman. This could only take me out of the story at regular intervals, even though the superb production is just as committed to the loving homage of the TV movies of our childhood as, say, Far From Heaven was committed to the loving homage of Douglas Sirk films. The key difference is that it’s a bit easier to take the characters in Far From Heaven seriously, since it makes no anachronistic casting choices.

I keep thinking of Divine and John Travolta, who were cisgender men playing the part of cisgender women in John Waters films, and the presentation was similar in that they played it straight—but, those movies were far more heightened than this one, under the direction of a man who practically invented camp. John Early is working far more subtly, even if the final product is still heightened. Maddie works as a dishwasher where chefs record themselves cooking original recipes, and when she quickly becomes a viral star after posting some food content of her own, the suppressed eating disorder from her childhood begins to resurface.

Early is 12 years younger than I am, but I can remember the very movies he’s referencing here. I can remember watching TV movies about women with bulimia, and their exaggerated close-ups of them binge-eating before purging seared themselves into my memory. Seeing similar scenes in Maddie’s Secret (which are done shockingly few times, only once or twice) brought those memories right back, which I suspect was by design. There was a moment during this film that I thought: Is this movie going to take a turn? I thought, maybe it will suddenly get truly wild. It never quite does, though. Early has a stupendous hold on the fine line of tone that he was clearly going for here, and he consistently gives us just a taste of the melodrama without ever truly taking it over the top.

Does any of that qualify as something to recommend Maddie’s Secret, though? This is where I struggle. Were I to tell you that you should see this movie, I would struggle to tell you why—even though so much of it is so finely attuned, so competently put together. Is it funny, at least? Not really; that doesn’t seem to be what Early was going for, although there were a couple of moments that got me laughing pretty hard. They almost felt accidental, even though they were clearly very precisely constructed. I suppose, if pressed, I could say Maddie’s Secret is worth watching for the marvel of how Early basically disappears into a role that, by his own assertion, is not drag. Honestly it’s not campy enough to be drag. It has no connection to trans people, either, which puts this film into a deeply niche space that defies categorization.

Will I ever watch this again? I will forever be impressed by the perfectly imperfect flyaways of Early’s blonde wig, but nevertheless: not likely. Early has long been a peculiar performer for whom a choice like this weirdly makes sense, but I’m going to have to spend some more time pondering whether the final product makes much sense for the rest of us.

It’s not much of a secret anymore.

GAIL DAUGHTRY AND THE CELEBRITY SEX PASS

Directing: B-
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

When a movie knowingly leans into how dumb it is, it’s always a tricky prospect, a truly fine line between genuinely entertaining and outright embarrassing. Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass walks that line, with humor that lands maybe half the time. It does find its footing, at the very least, and eventually I was laughing pretty regularly in spite of how embarrassed I was for everyone involved.

There’s a sort of built-in defense of a movie like this “But that’s the point!” Well, the point only means something if it actually works, and unfortunately the first act works less than the rest of the movie does, which makes it easy to see audiences checking out early. I’m not sure it would even mean much if I assured you it’s worth the wait, especially since even I found it barely worth the wait, but there remains the fact that I did.

Honestly, either you’re going to be up for a deeply silly movie like Gail Daughtry or you’re not. The tone is set immediately, when only minutes after Gail (Zoey Deutch) and her husband Tom Soursap McNoodleman (get it??—played by Michael Cassidy) agree on who their celebrity sex passes are, Tom has sex with Jennifer Aniston in the back room of a stop on her cook book tour in Kansas City. And therein lies the premise telegraphed by the movie’s title: the only way to even the score is for Gail to travel to Los Angeles with her bisexual hairdresser colleague and friend, Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) and have sex with her celebrity sex pass, John Hamm.

I will credit Gail Daughtry with this, my favorite thing about it: this is a movie with real affection for all of its incredibly dumb characters. In someone else’s hands, this movie would find ways to poke fun at Kansas City as much as it does Los Angeles and the people who live there, and it really does neither; not one of these characters is ever individually the butt of the joke. These are all people who are naive and yet somehow things keep working out for them, right down to a couple of Midwesterners who consistently meet Angelinos who are happy to help Gail in her quest to bed John Hamm. The more this aspect of the movie becomes clear, the more enjoyable it becomes.

Said Angelinos, by the way, include John Slattery, here depicted as a washed up actor who hasn’t had any work since he costarred with Hamm in Mad Men—which ended in 2015. He’s actually been in lots of stuff since then, but that’s not the point. Slattery is actually one of the principals in this film, but Jennifer Aniston is the first of countless, major cameos that might make one wonder how the hell whoever directed this managed to get them all on board. Well, Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is directed and cowritten by David Wain, who happened to direct and co-write the 2001 film Wet Hot American Summer. And that film featured the much younger Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, and Michael Ian Black; he later directed the 2012 film Wanderlust, which featured both Rudd and Aniston. Guess who all appear briefly in Gail Daughtry? And this just scratches the surface of the wall-to-wall cameos here. This guy clearly has some pull, and tons of people are perfectly happy to appear in his new movie, even if maybe they don’t know whether it’s great or just . . . kind of fine.

Wain eventually draws an unsubtle parallel with The Wizard of Oz, slotting Hamm into the role of the Wizard—sort of. Gail is a kind of Dorothy (oh, did I mention Gail is from Kansas City?), and she assembles a ragtag group of friends, which includes Caleb (Ben Wang), the overly ambitious guy from Creative Arts Agency; Vincent the papparazzo (Ken Marino) who’s “white whale” happens to be a candid shot of John Hamm; and of course, John Slattery. This movie, of course, needs some knowingly contrived villains, which include Italian actress Sabrina Impacciatore as Ludovica, who is awaiting delivery of a suitcase full of all the paperwork plans for taking down the global financial system; and her two henchmen, played by Niccolo (Mather Zickel) and Sergio (Joe Lo Truglio, also a David Wain mainstay who was in all the aforementioned of his films).

While we get ridiculously pointless voiceover narration by Frank the Mailman (Fred Melamed), the evil Ludovica’s briefcase of paperwork is the subject of a mixup that serves as the plot’s deliberately flimsy excuse for finally getting Gail and John Hamm in the same room together. How does that happen, you might wonder? Aside from knowing it veers between comic sex and comic violence as a bit of spice sprinkled on all the cheese, you’ll have to watch the movie! Just go in with fairly low expectations, fully expect it to marinate in its own cornball sensibilities, and you’ll have a pleasant enough time. I did, and eventually found myself cackling in an otherwise empty movie theater. I just had to get to the point where I could surrender myself to what this movie was doing, and then it kind of worked out.

Midwestern hairdressers on a mission in Los Angeles just can’t help but to have fun with it all.

Overall: B

THE INVITE

Directing: A
Acting: A
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A

The less said before you see The Invite the better, but here I am writing about it, and here you are reading it. What are we doing! Maybe go watch the movie and then read this. I mean, I won’t spoil any plot points, at least no more than are in the trailer, which is a truly rare example of one that is expertly cut. It intrigues effectively without giving anything away. And that is also my challenge here today.

Why don’t we start with the people who made it?

Olivia Wilde directed and stars in this movie, always a deeply impressive feat when it’s done well. This is her third feature film as director, and by all accounts she’s two for three: I never saw her 2022 film Don’t Worry Darling, in spite of being accused of shirking my duty for not seeing a movie everyone was talking about. Well, its almost universally weak reviews were enough for me not to waste my time. But! I do know Wilde is exceedingly capable, given her debut feature was the fantastic and hilarious 2019 film Booksmart, which may not have a cult following but it certainly deserves to.

Wilde returns to comedy with The Invite, in which she proves herself to be an incredible talent, both behind and in front of the camera. She’s phenomenal as Angela, one of only four people seen onscreen after just a couple of introductory scenes set outside of the San Francisco apartment that serves as the setting. She’s anxious, insecure, perpetually frustrated, and simultaneously authentic and believable. It’s also easy to believe she’s married to Joe, played by Seth Rogen. Now, all of the four leads are excellent here, but if I were forced to choose one that was the least impressive, it would be Seth Rogen, who has charisma to spare but also basically always plays a version of himself.

It certainly helps that he’s lifted up by the heavy hitters around him, which include Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz as Hawk and Pina, the neighbors Angela and Joe are barely acquainted with who have been invited to their apartment for dinner. Cruz has arguably cornered the market on being equal parts sexy and smart, and Norton is a veteran, versatile actor who seems always to understand the assignment.

The script, co-written by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, could easily be a play—come to think of it, I would jump at the chance to see a live stage version of this tightly polished script, which would translate easily. It’s actually based on the 2020 Spanish film Sentimental, marketed to English speaking audiences with the title The People Upstairs. And—oh! Guess what? Sentimental was written by Cesc Gay, based on his own play! It turns out the play was called Los vecinos de arriba, which literally translates to “The Upstairs Neighbors.” Okay, that makes sense. I might have to find that original Spanish film, which apparently has been remade in at least six other countries. Thank you for going on this journey with me.

The American version stands as a testament to the potential of reinterpreting stories in other cultures, which often falls flat. It is perhaps no accident that Wilde cast Cruz, who is herself Spanish. The Hawk character spends a fair amount of time speaking with Pina in Spanish, and this becomes a well-integrated plot point.

In any case, all four of these actors crackle with onscreen chemistry, and both Rogen and particularly Wilde are incredibly funny. Hawk is a bit of an odd character, which provides Norton with several opportunities for effectively subtle humor as well. Cruz isn’t especially funny, for her part, but she more than makes up for it in hotness and being arguably the most talented performer there.

You can guess what happens in The Invite based on the trailer, and you would be right, except that it’s much more complex than that. Fundamentally, this is a film about marriage, or more specifically what happens in years-long romantic relationships that largely move beyond the romance. Angela and Joe are bickering the moment we see them together, and anyone who has been married a long time will deeply relate to the things they talk about and how they speak to each other. Pina and Hawk exist as a challenge to Angela and Joe’s long-entrenched ideas about their relationship, and when Pina kind of sums things up, some may find it a bit of an oversimplification. The thing is, simple things don’t become untrue just because they are simple. And The Invite, which is hilarious and moving and sometimes genuinely sweet, is a deliciously complex presentation of simple ideas.

A dinner party that goes off the rails in all the best ways.

Overall: A-

GIRLS LIKE GIRLS

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

Between Leviticus and Girls Like Girls, I guess it’s the Month of Good Gay Movies, and I must say I’m delighted. It’s somewhat ironic that Girls Like Girls is set in 2006, because at that time movies about queer people had a pretty reliable, indie-janky vibe to them, some of them more charming than others. These days it’s much easier to find well-produced queer cinema, even if the budget is on the smaller side; I love that both of these movies were released on the same weekend, one week before most major cities have their Pride Weekend, but also simply in the month of June, which is Pride month. I can’t remember the last time I’ve been so satisfied with overtly queer cinema.

That’s not to say that either of these movies is perfect, of course; they are both definitively not—but, they are also both closer to it than they would have been twenty years ago, and for different reasons. Unfortunately I do think the script is Girls Like Girls’s weakest link, albeit not by a very wide margin. And a film need not to be perfect to be effective, and effective might be the best word to describe this film. I’m feeling all sorts of things about this movie, not least of which is that I really should have known to bring tissues into the theater with me.

This is a pretty straightforward love story, which just happens to be about two 17-year-old girls. And unlike Leviticus, which is a horror movie about the insidious influence of religious bigotry, regilion never even really gets mentioned here. The closest we get is Sonya (Myra Molloy) worrying about what her mom and her friends will think, if they find out how she feels about Coley (Maya da Costa), who is actually the film’s protagonist. And rather than struggling with her sexuality herself, Coley’s greatest challenge is with how Sonya expresses affection and then retreats out of fear. There is a heartbreaking, and deeply relatable, moment when Coley says, “Why can’t I be normal?” But that can be relatable whether you are queer, or just a teenager.

And this is the thing I love about Girls Like Girls, which simply illustrates what it’s like to be a teenager, dealing with other teenagers. These kids are all just learning how to be decent human beings through trial and error. But, Colely feels even more alone due to the recent death of her mother, and now living with a dad (Zach Braff) who did not raise her but is now trying his best to get to know her. This is a subplot that is at once an added dimension for Colely and a bit undercooked, but it does provide the context for the one scene in which I was constantly wiping away tears from my sleeve.

I did not know this until researching this movie—well, and director and co-writer Hayley Kiyoko’s recorded introduction to the film—but Girls Like Girls has had a bit of a journey over the past ten years. It began as a music video for the song by the same name, by Kiyoko herself, who began as a singer at the age of 16 and was taking acting roles not long after. The song was on her five-track 2015 EP This Side of Paradise, and it would be another three years before Kiyoko released her debut full-length album, the first of three to date, which I guess I need to check out now. Kiyoko also co-directed the music video, which eleven years later has 163 million views on YouTube. By 2023, Kiyoko had adapted the story from the video into a Young Adult novel, continuing its storyline, and along with co-writers Stefanie Scott and Chloe Okuno, it has now been adapted into a feature film.

It’s a good song, and Girls Like Girls the film follows many of the same beats as Girls Like Girls the music video, with several key scenes mirrored, just with different young actors. There’s a delightfully shocking turn in the video that was omitted from the film, and I can’t decide if that keeps the film on a higher level or if its inclusion would have improved it. It’s a curious thing to travel back in time when regarding all this story’s iterations; apparently the video was incredibly popular with many young queer people, and after the release of the film’s trailer you can find many fun comments on the video’s YouTube page like, “revisiting the ancient texts.” Because of course, something released in 2015 is an ancient text. And seeing a film created as a “period piece” set in 2006, complete with CD storage binders and a lot of scenes with texting over AOL Instant Messenger, makes me feel like I’m from the fucking Stone Age.

Honestly, I can’t decide whether Girls Like Girls overdoes it a bit with the AIM. Was it still that much in use in 2006? I think AIM and I think 90s. Grandpa Matthew went onto the Wikipedia to look into this, and evidently AIM was popular through 2005, at which time its decline began with the advent of SMS text messaging and Gmail. 2006 was pretty soon after that, so I guess I’ll allow it; it appears I didn’t even have my first iPhone until 2008, so for all I know I was still using AIM myself in 2006. I just can’t remember! Because I’m old!

Anyway, “period” details aside, there are moments of dialogue that come across as a little stilted. There are also scenes in which teenagers are socializing and talking about things no human adult would be interested in, and this comes across as authentic; it’s a different thing. The moment when Coley and Sonya have a “meet cute” of sorts didn’t fully work for me, and it was because of the writing. There’s a few scenes that unfold this way, but to Maya de Costa and Myra Molloy’s credit, they really sell it; they have real chemistry and it’s easy to believe they are falling in love with each other, yet being tentative with each other for their own separate, largely unclarified reasons.

When all was said and done, Girls Like Girls left me deeply moved, and I love that it’s part of a lasting legacy of making young queer people feel seen and feel good about themselves. The existence of movies like this makes it just a little bit easier to have hope for humanity.

If this isn’t truth in advertising I don’t know what is.

Overall: B+

LEVITICUS

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A-

Does Leviticus hit different if you grew up closeted and religious, I wonder? Well, I did, and there’s no escaping the very personal way this film unfolded in my eyes. This isn’t just “queer horror” in the metaphorical sense; queerness not only is the text, but it’s about how willfully ignorant people will use our own desires against us—sometimes to deeply effective, and even fatal effect.

Leviticus is very effective just as a straightforward horror movie as well; Australian writer-director Adrian Chiarella understands how to make this movie work on both surface and deeper levels, allowing viewers to wade in as far as they’d like. Teenage friends Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen) are introduced to us like believably regular buddies, roughhousing until they tumble in each other’s arms, and before they know it they’re kissing. That may sound a little corny, but Bird and Clausen are such gifted, natural performers that it feels totally organic. There aren’t even any tropes of internalized homophobia here; they seem totally comfortable with themselves and each other, and are only wary of the rest of the world.

But then Naim happens upon Ryan in his backyard, with another teenager (Jeremy Blewitt), and they’re doing something rather unsettling: taking turns hurling stones right at each other. We have already seen scenes in the local church by this point, so at first I thought maybe this was some kind of allusion to stoning as punishment. This practice comes up several times more, until the it is finally revealed to be something very different—and desperate—and one of the pieces of the narrative puzzle clicking into place.

Soon enough, Ryan and this other kid are brought by the religious locals to a so-called “Deliverance Healer,” and the boys are openly derisive of the practice—again, comfortable in their own skin, dismissive of what they understandably regard as crackpot ideas. Except in this film, the ritual works, and it cannot be undone: the result is a sort of inner demon that never leaves you, but externalizes and manifests as the person, as another character puts it, “you’re most into.” So, when either Naim or Ryan is alone, they will see the other one, who seduces them, only to physically attack them. Left unchecked, it will literally kill them, as happens to the teen lesbian character in a pool shower in the opening scene.

I never saw the acclaimed 2014 film It Follows—I avoid most horror movies—but I do know Leviticus has invited many comparisons, though by all accounts It Follows is an allegory for sexually transmitted infections. Leviticus also explores a kind of personalized nightmare that never goes away, but its explicit queerness is what sets it apart. And I mean “excplicit” not in a sexual sense (there are two sex scenes, of sorts, and neither is at all explicit), but in the sense that it’s about queerness, with queer protagonists, and the pressures of a world that can’t even be bothered to understand.

The one character I have some ambivalence about is Naim’s mother, played by Mia Wasikowska, who looks strikingly like a young Martha Plimpton. Wasikowska looks so young, in fact, I wondered if she was too young to play Joe Bird’s mother; well, Bird is 19 and Wasikowska is 36. I guess this woman would hardly be the first in the world to have had a baby at 17 (or in the world of the movie, probably more like 19; Bird is clearly playing younger). Maybe it’s just because I have reached the ancient age of 50, but to me they looked so close in age that I really thought at first that she was maybe his much older sister taking care of him after the death of their parents.

Anyway, that’s not even the real source of my ambivalence; it’s the characterization of Naim’s mother, who never engages with him, never truly talks to him, and certainly never listens to him, particularly when he’s trying to explain the extraordinary things going on. She takes him to church, and writer-director Adrian Chiarella imbues her with a kind of prejudice that is unexpected: rather than, say, being disgusted by his sexuality, instead she fears the hatred of others—and uses that as an excuse for bringing the “Deliverance Healer” to him: “I can’t lose you too,” she says, as though curing him of what she sees as an affliction will protect him from outside threats. Instead, she invites one that manifests from within. There may be something to this among those of us with real-world experience in religious intolerance: the backfiring of actions by loved ones who are convinced they mean well.

Still, there is something weirdly repressed about Wasikowska’s mother character, stripping her of dimension even as she’s very effectively used to make the movie’s point. And there’s something very sinister about the effects of treatment like this, a lasting trauma that cannot be undone. There’s also an unsettling irony to the fascinating detail of how this living nightmare works, in that the demon manifestations only appear if you are alone. So as long as you are sure you are with the real version of the person you desire and not the nightmare version, presumably you’re okay? But also you can never, ever let them out of your sight, presumably for the rest of your life? That seems like a kind or forced commitment, a nightmare all its own.

Or maybe these two will inevitably fall out of lust with each other, start having eyes for other people, and then it will be those other people these nightmare entities take the form of when they are alone. Maybe they should just open up the relationship but never be apart? Shared orgies until the end of time!

I digress. I have to hand it to this movie, it really makes you think. It’s also very effective with its horror-movie scares, both in scenes with very successful jump-scares and scenes in which you are simply terrified one is coming. I’ve never been so terrified watching a hand job in my life, I was so convinced it was going to end with a nightmare version of either Naim or Ryan popping up and scaring the shit out of me.

And that’s what it all comes down to: “We need fear,” Naim’s mother says, as justification for what she’s done to him. “It’s how we survive.” That line will stay with me, a haunting idea by virtue of its deeply misguided contextualization. Well, I’m not sure I need the fear Leviticus put in me with effective horror staging, but it offers certain depths that make me very glad I saw it.

Okay but what if a man stands with a man?

Overall: B+