THE PRESIDENT'S CAKE

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

Sometimes it’s worth just checking out what’s playing at your local movie theater, and looking up a movie you’ve never heard of. I had certainly never heard of The President’s Cake before doing this, when I also learned this was Iraq’s 2025 submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. It’s Iraq’s 14th submission, in fact; the country has never secured a nomination—although The President’s Cake, which made the short list, came the closest.

I’m not certain I have ever even seen an Iraqi film before. According to my extensive movie watching records over on Letterboxd.com, I have only seen 11 other films in the Arabic language; only eight of them feature length. None were from Iraq, although I have seen several excellent films from Iran. I’m used to seeing subversive storytellers using film to reflect and expose the oppressive regime in Iran, but seeing something from an Iraqi perspective is both novel and new.

Not only that, but the story in The President’s Cake centers around children—in particular a 3rd-grade girl, Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef), whose name is drawn in class as the school’s chosen student to bake a cake for the president’s birthday. This is set in 1990, so the president was Saddam Hussein, the year he turned 53. The opening title cards inform us that the country is subject to UN-backed sanctions which significantly exacerbates the population’s poverty. Nevertheless, the entire country is required to celebrate his birthday every year, and a student in every school is chosen to bake a cake. We see Lamia’s teacher pass around a box into which all students must enter their name written on paper; one kid, who arrives late, must enter his name five times as punishment. One student’s name is drawn who has to clean the school; another must bring fruit; Lamia’s name is drawn for baking the cake.

The actual capability of each kid and their family evidently does not matter. When Lamia’s classmate and friend, Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem), protests that he’ll be in the city with his father, the teacher notes that it is his “duty” to report anyone who disobeys, and mentions another family who was “dragged” for a similar infraction.

The President’s Cake is very impressively staged, as Lamia travels with Bibi (Waheed Thabet Khreibat), the grandmother who is taking care of her, to the city, ostensibly for ingredients. Lamia and Bibi live in a very rural area among marshes where Lamia commutes to school and back on what appear to be community canoes. Whether here or in the city they travel to, we see constant images of Saddam Hussein, in framed photos, paintings, even a wall mural pretty impressively rendered at the local school. The students are conditioned to shout things in their class like, “We sacrifice our blood and souls for you, Saddam!” In the city, the kids weave through both bazaars and crowded processions celebrating Hussein’s birthday.

Much of the film takes place in the city, where Lamia runs away after Bibi attempts to transfer custody of her to a friend, both due to her age and her inability to afford the cake ingredients. Lamia runs into Saeed, there pickpocketing with his disabled father. Both the marshes and the city are rendered in a way that feels deeply lived-in. In both environments the people are well aware of the state of the country but barely acknowledge it, just living their daily lives as they can. In one scene in the city, where the kids try everything from selling Lamia’s late father’s watch to offering labor to thievery in attempt to secure cake ingredients (eggs, flour, sugar, sugar, and baking powder), Lamia winds up in a coffee shop with a kind of jam band performing, the singer a young woman of some sophistication.

Lamia has a beloved rooster, which she has named Hindi, she’s brought with her. This seems like an unnecessary complication to a journey into the city, but I guess you can’t expect a 9-year-old to think logically. You might be right to worry about the fate of Hindi, who kind of has an adventure of his own. Lamia meets many people as she runs around the city, of course; sometimes they’re very kind and helpful, sometimes they’re clearly bad news. Sometimes you simply can’t tell.

There’s a few scenes in a hospital, and we meet people with injuries both their and elsewhere. There are casual references to being “bombed by the Americans.” Lamia and Saeed stick together for a while; they have conflict; they have resolution. All of this unfolds with the backdrop of everyday life in Iraq, with compulsory birthday celebrations happening and jets flying overhead. Lamia is too young to be concerned with geopolitics, or even war, until its effects come right up to her. All she knows is she wants to stay at home with her Bibi, and she needs ingredients to make a cake.

I don’t have a clue what life is like in Iraq today; it’s an entirely different universe from mine. But a film like The President’s Cake, even set 35 years ago, offers valuable insight into a culture and history that Americans were long encouraged to dismiss and dehumanize—to a large degree we still are. It doesn’t feel like writer-director Hasan Hadi made this film for that purpose, but rather to tell a deeply human story from the point of view of an average person who grew up in this historical context. It’s deeply affecting, and a truly impressive feature film debut.

The resilience of scrappy kids in The President’s Cake.

Overall: B+

SCREAM 7

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

Here’s a pro tip on Scream 7: go in with your expectations in the toilet, and you might still have kind of a good time. That was my experience, anyway. That doesn’t mean the movie is good. In fact it might be the worst one yet. It’s certainly the worst-reviewed of the entire franchise, by a pretty significant margin. A lot of media coverage wants us to know Scream 7 is expected to have a “franchise high” opening weekend box office total, but that spends little time noting that this franchise is thirty years old, and that $40 million in 2026 is the equivalent of little more than $19 million in 1996. So sure, the original Scream earned all of $6.35 million its opening weekend that year, but it eventually earned over $100 million domestically—and then Scream 2 opened to $32.9 million its opening weekend just one year later in 1997, the equivalent of nearly $66.6 million in 2026. Might point is, suddenly the “franchise high” of $40 million thirty years in doesn’t seem all that impressive, does it?

Granted, it’s still more than Scream 7 deserves. I’d say it’s beyond me why people even keep going to see these movies, except that I just did—in fact, Scream 7 is the first film in the entire franchise for which I am writing a full review (I saw the first three in theaters, but only ever saw the other three streaming, nearly all of them well after their theatrical run.) I did ask in my personal blog after seeing the 2022 Scream reboot: How many fucking movies do we need in this franchise, anyway? A good question to keep asking. There were only five at that time.

The Scream franchise is becoming a victim of its own success, the only difference from overlong horror franchises of the eighties and nineties being the protracted time in which it happened. The Friday the 13th franchise had seven films within eight years; A Nightmare on Elm Street within ten. I suppose we could look to the Halloween franchise, which is now has a history of 46 years and counting—that one hit seven films within 20 years, so still 33% shorter than it took Scream movies to get there. Halloween managed an additional six films within the next 24 years. How many Scream movies are we going to have 50 years into its franchise life? How old will Neve Campbell be in 2046, anyway? (She’ll be 73. It’s worth noting that Jamie Lee Curtis was 63 in the 2022 film Halloween Ends.)

Anyway, the first four Scream films all had a key element in common, that being that they were all more fun than anyone could have reasonably expected them to be, especially as they went on. The next three films have had the opposite thing in common: none of them have been as good as they could have, or should have, been. Why don’t the people making these films put all that work and effort into making something original and actually good? We all know the answer to that, of course, and I’ll just mention here that Neve Campbell, who appeared in the 2022 Scream reboot, declined appearing in Scream VI because she felt she was worth more than she was offered for the part. And for Scream 7, she was paid nearly $7 million.

I really felt that both Scream (2022) and Scream VI (2023) were overrated, and in this new era of the franchise there’s not enough of the meta elements that made the early films special. You’d think that reuniting Neve Campbell with Courtney Cox for Scream 7 would infuse the franchise with some new energy, even if it’s mostly about nostalgia—the very thing referenced in the one dialogue exchange this go-round about “the rules” of how these movies are supposed to go. With nothing more along those lines, and nearly none of the large amount of humor that also made the earlier films work so well, one is left feeling a bit like this was all time wasted.

Scream movies are also all murder mysteries, and the one that unfolds in Scream 7 is also maybe the weakest in the franchise. Even this many films in, the story could have worked a lot better simply with better writing. The motive revealed for the killer(s?) here is flimsy at best, putting the overall contrivance of the story into sharper relief.

Is it fun to see Campbell and Cox together again? Sure. There’s even a narrative thread involving AI that allows several actors from previous films make cameo appearances, and the three-person team of writers, which includes director Kevin Williamson (who also wrote the first two and the fourth Scream movies, incidentally), seems pretty self-satisfied about its cleverness. It’s not that clever, guys. AI as narrative trope is so overdone I’m falling asleep just writing about it.

Here is the crucial question: does Scream 7, as a slasher movie, feature fun kills? There’s a couple, including one involving a high wire on a play stage, and arguably the best one involves the handle of a beer tap at a bar. This film is populated with young people who are created only for their predictable slaughter, and if that’s all you’re coming for then I suppose you won’t be disappointed. Some of them are even halfway interesting, although Isabel May, as Tatum, daughter of Campbell’s Sidney character, is unfortunately the least interesting of the lot. One wonders how the Scream 7 that might have been as the third of a reboot franchise with Jenna Ortega in it might have compared. There’s a whole lot of bullshit to the story of how this franchise pivoted back to the Sidney character and now her daughter, but given the quality of the last two films, it’s entirely possible that this Scream 7, bland and narratively redundant as it is, is actually better than a new Ortega film would have been.

One franchise tradition Scream 7 keeps is cold open sequence in which the first kills take place. Early films pointedly cast huge stars to get killed in these scenes; most famously Drew Barrymore in the original and then Jada Pinkett Smith in Scream 2. These movies have long since opened with pretty throwaway actors in the cold open—this time Jimmy Tatro and Michelle Randolph. Who are they? Who cares! We know they’re dead the moment the open the door to original killer Stu Macher’s house, which has been turned into a sort of museum / fun hours of horrors. The open the door with a key found a combination lock box, which made me think at first that this was an AirBnB situation. Given how late at night it is when they arrive, what it turns out to be makes little sense, but then so does just about anything else in this movie upon the slightest critical examination.

That’s the primary issue with Scream 7, really, how it falls apart under the slightest bit of scrutiny. There’s some construction going on at Sidney’s house in the new small town she now lives in, filled with walls covered in translucent tarps. As soon as I saw those I thought: those are Chekhov’s Tarps. I usually don’t try to predict what’s going to happen in movies, and allow myself to be surprised, which means that if I do find myself predicting things, then it’s a stupidly predictable movie. Which is to say, Scream 7 is sort of fun it you completely turn your brain off. I just have this thing where I kind of like using my brain.

Can you guess which Scream movie this is from? Does it matter?

Overall: C+

EPiC: ELVIS PRESLEY IN CONCERT

Directing: A-
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A
Music: A-

From the vantage point of 2025, Elvis Presley is a fascinating cultural artifact, the kind of superstar we just don’t get anymore, and a once-in-a-generation talent whose cultural footprint lasted decades, not just past his prime, but past his literal life. Really the only comps to come after him were The Beatles, who broke out the decade after Elvis did; and Michael Jackson, whose stratospheric fame occurred two decades after that. And even Michael Jackson’s peak was a solid forty years ago.

Who really talks about any of these figures anymore, unless they are senior citizens? Oh sure, you could still say plenty—depending on who you’re talking to or what circles you travel in. The fact remains that with stars like Elvis, who continued to make a cultural mark for generations, just don’t have the impact they did even twenty years ago. Elvis, for his part, died in 1977 at the age of 42, at the end of eight years of his fabled residency in Las Vegas. Fans were convinced he was still alive for years afterward; this is something even I remember from my childhood in the eighties. The band Living Colour even released a song called “Elvis Is Dead” in 1990.

Time really puts things into a new perspective—such as Evlis’s so-called “older” era, which would cover his ages of 34 to 42, a pretty comical idea if you’re many years older than that now. And this era is the focus of EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, the new documentary concert film consisting of mostly previously unreleased footage, directed by Baz Luhrmann. It’s worth noting that this us Luhrmann’s first feature film since the overstuffed and underwhelming Elvis in 2022; indeed it is Luhrmann’s best film since Moulin Rouge! in 2001.

There’s something about Luhrmann’s style, though, his very specific flair, that fits perfectly with a concert film. The dizzying editing of his narrative films is significantly dialed back, but it’s still a bit more amped than you typically see in other documentaries, even concert films. He really gets out of the way of Evlis Presley himself, whose undeniable chemistry and stage presence simply speaks for itself—whether it’s mid-performance or during the large amount of wonderful behind-the-scenes rehearsal footage we get to see.

I’m not sure I could give EPiC a better compliment than to say it cast Elvis Presley in a whole new light for me. This was a superstar who was far before my time, whose crazy fame is mostly associated with the fifties, and who had been dead for years before I even knew who he was. I always thought his music was fine, but I was pretty indifferent to it, preferring instead to listen to contemporary pop music. Years, decades have since passed, and only when new movies come out (Elvis; Priscilla) does it even occur to me to consider him again. And here we get a concert film that seems to shed more light on the man, and is far more mesmerizing a visual achievement than any narrative film about him could ever hope to.

A great deal of restoration work went into putting the clips in this film together, and combined with the 2022 Elvis film this reveals a man with a true obsession. It’s probably relevant to note that Baz Luhrmann himself is 63 years old; born past Elvis’s breakthrough but plenty old enough to remember a living Elvis with endlessly adoring fans. Now he presents this concert film, editing together a select few concert performances from Elvis’s early Vegas residency years, and I truly see the appeal for the first time: Oh. I get it now.

The magnetism of Evlis Presley cannot be overstated. If “rizz” were a thing in the seventies, Elvis Presley would have been the King of Rizz. The man had charisma to spare, which was expertly fused with talent and a kind of raw sexuality (his insistence that he was “not selling sex” notwithstanding). I have a new appreciation for those ridiculous costumes he wore, the only thing you ever see Elvis impersonators wearing. I would watch a documentary on whoever designed all those jumpsuits.

There’s a moment during one of the concerts in the film, which made me wonder if he did this during every performance, when Elvis gets off the stage and walks through the crowd, basically inviting the audience to swarm him. He literally kisses countless women as he passes by them—on the lips. Did Elvis get cold sores, I wonder? Mono? Did he pass on any infections this way? Try and imagine any singer doing this today.

Luhrmann edits in a ton of archival footage, photographs, and especially interview audio that jumps back and forth with the live performance footage, all of it restored and remastered masterfully, and all of it with his typical cinematic flamboyance. The performance is by far the reason to see EPiC, however, easily the closest any of us today will get to seeing him live in concert. His backup band, a rather large one, integrates with him seamlessly, and he seems to have an easy rapport with them—just as he does with the audience. And now that I look at the man as someone several years older than he was, I finally see how genuinely sexy he was. Most of those jumpsuits are unbuttoned to well below his chest, and I have no complaints.

Editing is often what makes a movie, and that is especially the case here. Elvis comes across as both earnest and humble, generous with his talent and there to give his audience a good time. For all I know the man was an asshole, but you’d certainly never suspect it based on this movie. Luhrmann makes zero effort to illustrate what Elvis was like, or what his Las Vegas performances were like, by the mid-seventies. This is an era of Elvis’s life specific to the beginning of that residency, after countless phases of his career had already passed and yet filled with hope and possibility. What better way to honor a long passed yet dearly departed icon?

You’ll only truly feel like you’re at the show if you see this in a theater.

Overall: A-

MIDWINTER BREAK

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

I have kind of a thing for movies about older married couples who have been together for decades. Life isn’t all young love, you know—nor is it even all about new love (though I do also enjoy movies about older people who find love). I’m fully aware that the average moviegoer isn’t exactly demanding stories like this, and my being on the precipice of 50 years old is probably a factor here. So what? If any of you young whippersnappers don’t care about this then go read some other movie review!

Well, here’s the thing. Midwinter Break is still, unfortunately, kind of forgettable. We could start with the title itself. I saw the trailer to this movie several times, and still I often struggled to remember the name of it. Midwinter Break sounds like an off-brand version of the Vacation franchise, except trust me, nothing outrageous happens here.

What does happen is some very good acting. Ciarán Hinds and especially Lesley Manville effortlessly elevate what is otherwise pretty milquetoast material, about an older couple whose one child has long since moved out, they are set adrift in their lives together, and the absence of other family puts their conflicting spiritual beliefs into sharper relief. Stella buys tickets to Amsterdam as a Christmas present to Gerry, and they mean to go on an adventure together. You know, in midwinter.

I was very interested in the location shooting in Amsterdam, as I will be visiting there for the first time this summer (not in winter, thankfully). We do get several shots of Stella and Gerry walking along the canals, and one brief sequence of them walking through the Anne Frank House, which winds up becoming a relevant detail in one of their later conflicts about their respective approaches to religion. I’m not sure it’s the best reflection of the narrative onscreen that I found myself thinking, oh right: I definitely need to book timed tickets to the Anne Frank House before we get there.

To call Midwinter Break “meditative” would be an understatement. It’s filled with quiet, contemplative scenes. Early on, we just settle into Stella and Gerry’s quiet routine together, the comfortable way they coexist, though we see very quickly how Stella feels alienated and Gerry is a bit oblivious. She goes to Christmas mass without him, and she’s very devout; Gerry, for his part, basically puts up with her piousness, though he does also scoff a bit, something that naturally comes up later.

It’s not that I didn’t find Midwinter Break compelling, though I do think that with other actors it would really have been a drag. Plenty of viewers will likely find this a drag regardless. But director Polly Findlay gradually builds up the idea of a secret that Stella is living with, and it has to do with when she was once caught in crossfire during a siege in Belfast when she was pregnant. Eventually Stella delivers a long monologue about it to an expatriate fellow Irishwoman she’s met in Amsterdam, and Manville’s delivery, as always, is impeccable, even moving. Nevertheless, once the reveal we’ve been waiting for occurs, it’s hard not to think: that’s it?

Ultimately Midwinter Break is about the beginning of a long-term marriage unraveling, due to religious incompatibility, basically. Stella uses the word “spiritual,” but I would argue it’s more religious—the taking of comfort through religious ritual. It ends on a very subtly hopeful note, after an emotional exchange at the Amsterdam airport while they wait for their delayed flight in a snow storm—I do rather wish we could have seen more of the city to give this relatively drab story some more environmental character. Ultimately, Midwinter Break isn’t for everyone, but some, like me, might at the very least be moved by the performances.

This is a vacation we’re bound to forget.

Overall: B-

CRIME 101

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

Let’s talk about this title first. It’s dumb, right? It has to be the dumbest thing about this movie, although this movie is mostly not dumb. But apparently I am an idiot, because it did not register to me until I got home how prominently Highway 101 in Los Angeles figures in the plot. Oh, right: duh. It’s a double meaning!

And the cinematography is easily the best thing about Crime 101, from the camera work during car chases, to the many drone shots of the vast city of Los Angeles, painting a surprisingly loving portrait of a city many love to hate. There’s a lot of overhead shots of a freeway—oh, I guess that’s probably Highway 101 right there—and they are consistently beautiful. Cinematographer Erik Wilson (who also, as it happens, shot all three of the Paddington films) will sometimes get a bit artier, shooting the reflection of car lights off the sides of downtown L.A. skyscrapers.

I went into Crime 101 expecting it to be fine, and found myself locked in from start to finish. “Crime” as a genre isn’t particularly my favorite, but if it’s well done I can really get into it. This one, written by director Bart Layton and based on the novella by Don Winslow, features a star studded ensemble cast, each of them introduced at the beginning with no clear connection to each other. For a minute I wondered if this was going to be a jewelry heist version of Crash. Thankfully Crime 101 is just a fun narrative puzzle that clicks satisfyingly into place before your eyes, and has no sense of inflated self-importance.

Chris Hemsworth plays the seasoned thief, a guy from an unclarified but difficult background; Halle Berry is the insurance broker he catches the attention of in an attempt to score what she later calls “walk-away money.” Mark Ruffalo is the cop who is narrowing down his seemingly implausible leads toward catching this thief, whose M.O. is never to use violence against his victims. We get some notable people in smaller parts, such as Nick Nolte as the guy who hires Hemsworth for his jobs, or Jennifer Jason Leigh as Ruffalo’s estranged wife. Leigh only shows up very briefly in a couple of scenes—so brief that, with her straight long blond hair, I mistook her for Patricia Arquette. Honestly, Jennifer Jason Leigh deserves better than this.

Evidently just to mix things up, Nolte’s character hires the clearly unpredictable son of one of his other, now-deceased clients. This young man is played by Barry Keoghan, because who else are you going to get to play an immature loose cannon? (Keoghan also appeared in the previous film Bart Layton directed, American Animals (2018).) This character, who spends a lot of time tailing people on his motorcycle and/or threatening them physically, serves the dual role of throwing a monkey wrench into the plot and then also being a key part of tying up all the narrative threads in the end.

Honestly, this story, such as it is, is not exactly masterful, but it’s good enough. I’ll give it credit for zagging in a few unpredictable directions, particularly when it comes to its couple of prominent female characters. Monica Barbaro plays Hemsworth’s love interest, randomly rear-ending his car before he asks her out, and I was sure she existed only to be later put in peril. Instead, she really exists only to become an uncomfortable mirror of his issues. I can respect that. Halle Berry’s arc in the film takes some unpredictable turns as well. A scene in which she tells off her boss is equal parts contrived and satisfying, and happens in between said story turns.

Crime 101 clearly wants us to pick up on subtext about the City of Los Angeles, and has affection for it while acknowledging its faults. We get regular shots of people living on the streets, and the implication that Hemsworth’s thief once lived there. Ruffalo’s cop deals with a level of police corruption that is both infuriating in its reflection of truth, and a bit heavy handed. Watching this movie, I kept thinking a lot about another crime thriller that doubled as a love letter to L.A., the solid 2004 Michael Mann film Collateral, in which Mark Ruffalo also coincidentally co-starred. Crime 101 is not quite as good as that but it’s close; indeed, it feels a lot like its spiritual sequel.

And I must admit, I have an odd soft spot for the City of Los Angeles, which is widely and unfairly hated; it moves me when a film goes out of its way to bring beauty to its depiction. Movies like Crime 101 give it an unusual sense of place, and a sense of urban surroundings when it is otherwise thought of as just sprawling. Combine this with a great cast and a compelling-enough story given thrilling propulsion by skilled editing, and you’ve got a winner.

There’s a lot going on under the surface in Crime 101.

Overall: B+

PILLION

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

What a time of dualities we live in, where we live in a country under constant attack on progressive values, the embrace of the full spectrum of of queer expression being just one among countless. There’s a strange dissonance to the combination of defiant resistance to the mainstreaming of prejudice and bigotry, and the very existence of a film like Pillion.

Telling stories that feature queer joy, pointedly in the place of an endless parade of queer tragedy in all mediums of storytelling, is a thing these days. Pillion is representative of a deeply specific sort of queer joy, the kind experienced by those who enjoy consensual debasement and dominance, maybe even a bit of pain. This is far more common than many might thing, queer or not. This film, in its way, heralds the broadening of this awareness.

The pairing of Alexander Skarsgård and Harry Melling is a fascinating one. Melling is still most well known as the fat cousin of Harry Potter—something he couldn’t be further from now, a handsome man of 36. Skarsgård, now 49, is still so hot it defies reason. This is only referenced a couple of times in Pillion, though there’s a slightly sad moment when Melling’s character, Colin, is told that Skarsgård’s character, Ray, puts Colin’s features into sharp relief. It’s hard for anyone to compete with Skarsgård on a visual level to be honest. This is a guy who is not only incredibly hot, but knows how to be hot. When Ray sidles up to Colin for the first time at a bar, giving him a hard, smoldering stare, I thought: I would also do whatever he wanted.

One might think that this is an odd pairing for a multitude of reasons, except for the genuine chemistry they have with each other. And one of the many great things about Pillion is how it depicts a BDSM biker community, and it is a “community” in a very real sense of the word, with genuine friendships and emotional connections. There just also happens to be camping trips with communal hard sex acts.

I actually think this is important, the unusual frankness of not just the sex in Pillion, but very specifically the queer sex—and even more specifically, the BDSM sex, among Ray’s biker friends if not necessarily between Ray and Colin, which is much more orientated toward a maste/slave kink (as Colin notes, “I’ve been told I have an aptitude for devotion”). Colin is very naive as he wades into this world, but as the story unfolds, we see subtle but pointed nods to notions of consent and boundaries. When Ray unzips his pants in front of another sub, that sub first looks over to Colin to make sure it’s okay.

And what a great achievement Pillion is, to have such an earnest and sincere love story within this context. Colin’s parents are so on board with his sexuality that, in the opening scene, he’s on a blind date his own mother set up. Eventually Colin’s parents have difficulty understanding him, but it has nothing to do with his gayness and everything to do with the dynamics of his relationship with Ray, and how Colin will drop everything for him, or wait on him hand and foot. But how do you explain this kind of relationship, especially with your parents, and especially if you’re so new at it yourself that you’re learning as you go along?

The story is told from Colin’s perspective, but Alexander Skarsgård’s performance deserves special commendation. We never learn a lot about Ray, except that he evidently has intimacy issues, and as a result he is very resistant to dropping the dom/sub routine. This becomes the source of conflict, as Colin realizes he loves living this way, just not all the time. His request to “take one day off a week” becomes a salient plot point, and turns Pillion into a beautiful meditation on setting boundaries. Colin gets his first taste of this with a fellow sub who observes that Ray doesn’t allow kissing, and the guy says, “I couldn’t handle no kissing.” Indeed, the first time we see that character, he is giving his dom a passionate kiss.

Pillion is a film that could easily be misunderstood by the deeply ignorant, but thankfully not just sex, but kink is now widely regarded as things to be embraced without shame. This film is broadly about the full expression of self and sexuality, and specifically about how to approach it in an emotionally healthy way. It would be accurate to call this a “coming of age” story, even though—thankfully—it’s not about kids. This is about how it’s never to late to discover your full self, even if that self is fulfilled by sleeping on the rug and cooking all the meals.

It does feel worth noting that although Pillion is largely billed as a romantic comedy—albeit a very frankly sexual one—I found it to be much more of a romance than a comedy. I got a few chuckles out of it, but this movie is not particularly funny. It is, however, very sweet—even heartwarming in the end. I found a bit of implausibility in some of Ray’s characterization, but this also added to his mystique. If only Colin had been introduced to a dom top who was more in touch with the separation of role playing with reality, or particularly with more of an intuition for actual guidance in unfamiliar territory—but, that story would perhaps not have been as compelling.

Underneath all the BDSM trappings, Pillion follows pretty familiar beats: a character loses his way a bit and then finds his way back again. All that matters is how pleased and happy we are for him once he gets there. This is a rare case where you can believe the hype, because this is a truly great piece of work by first time feature film director Harry Lighton, and I will be looking forward to what he has to offer next with eager anticipation.

I’m not really into licking boots but for him I get it.

Overall: A-

NIRVANNA THE BAND THE SHOW THE MOVIE

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

Here’s the burning question about Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie: what if, like me, you watch this film having zero familiarity with the Canadian TV show on which it was based, Nirvanna the Band the Show, which aired on Canadian premiere network Viceland 2017-2018; or the web series that was based on, Nirvanna the Band the Show, which was made 2007-2009? Does this movie even work for such audiences? The answer is an emphatic yes, and surprisingly well at that.

I suppose it might work better for audiences familiar with these earlier works, but I don’t know if it’s by that wide a margin. I had a great time with this movie, which blends old and new footage so seamlessly I kept wondering how the hell they did it. There is a sequence in which Matt Johnson and Jay McCarroll, playing fictionalized versions of themselves (as they did in the previous iterations of the show), go back in time 17 years to 2008 and encounter their younger selves. None of this looks like a special effect; none of it looks like digital de-aging—just looking at the screen is enough to convince you this is actual footage of these two from 2008. I had to find a current YouTube video to learn that not only did they indeed use original video footage from 2007 to 2009, but everything you see in this film was culled from the cutting room floor of those original web series episodes—everything you see here, even if it’s 17 years old, is something never seen before.

As far as I can tell, the series never used time travel as a plot device—this is something new cooked up for the movie, and how they tied the new footage together with the old. They use well-used plot tropes that make no sense upon close examination, which is clearly part of the point. In fact, it lifts so many plot elements from the Back to the Future series that the film is legally regarded as a parody, which allows them to get away with a lot. In this film, Matt creates a fake “flux capacitor” for their RV, which then magically works exactly the same way it does in Back to the Future thanks to short circuiting after he spills 1990s Canadian fruit drink Orbitz all over it. (It’s the last one of a case they’ve had for years. Who could never make a case of favorite discontinued drink last a decade and a half? This movie is very unrealistic.)

They wind up in the year 2008—specifically in Toronto, where the series were filmed. It didn’t even occur to me until later that all the establishing shots of the urban environment indicating it’s 2008 would likely also have just been pulled from old footage from the time. This includes things like a movie poster for The Dark Knight or other pop culture references. As part of the present-day Matt and Jay navigating 2008, there is one pretty hilarious scene where Matt goes into a movie theater playing The Hangover. (That film was actually released in 2009, but let’s not quibble.) Matt witnesses the scene in the film that features the line “Paging Dr. Faggot”—one of several things in that film that have no aged well—and it’s when Matt notices the entire audience finding this hilarious that he realizes something is amiss. It’s worth noting that a film with no queer content otherwise makes it a point to highlight how awful it is to use that language regardless of context; I was really happy to see it contextualized this way, even contextualized as humor (the humor being that he had gone far enough back in time that average people thought this was okay).

There are so many references to the Back to the Future franchise, in fact, that they go back in time, return to a present day that’s been altered, and then go back in time yet again to fix the mistake—this means they reference both the first and second Back to the Future films. And I haven’t even mentioned the mockumentary style, a whole lot of it shot guerilla-style with unspuspecting, real people on the street. This seems to have been largely the premise of Nirvanna the Band the Show all along, and it works here much better than, say, in Borat, which exists to expose regular people’s prejudices through the use of “ironically bigoted” humor. That shit never sat well with me, and there is none of it here. Even the presence of a queer epithet exists only to show how much progress has been made, rather than having the protagonists pretend to be homophobic themselves.

This gets back to how much of the film had me wondering how they pulled it off. Very early in the film, Matt and Jay attempt a publicity stunt in which they parachute off the CN Tower. A lot of this is clearly staged, but even here we see people around them who seem to have no idea what’s really going on—and it sure looks like there was actual footage shot atop that building, in one case all the way to the tip-top of its antenna, a spot not accessible to the public. Is it possible that this show is just so beloved to Canadians that they managed to get access for filming? Some of this footage is astonishing.

Clearly the most impressive element of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is its editing, not just with present-day footage combined with footage from the late aughts, but with narrative (or, as was mostly the case, improvised) footage of the actors interacting with regular people. I would recommend this film on that basis alone. But, there would also have to be a VFX element to this, particularly when old and younger Matt and Jay are in the same sequence together (using clever narratives where neither of their younger selves fully register that their friend looks 15 years older—there’s a lovely line about how you don’t notice your best friend growing older). There are also the scenes in which the RV-turned-time-machine does its time jumps, with effects that look exactly like those used in Back to the Future.

What I find most impressive about Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is how lovable the characters are, and how easily invested you get in the outcomes of their stories, even if you haven’t seen the series it’s based on. I don’t know much about how “Nirvanna the Band” came to be, as there isn’t a single reference in this film to the Kurt Cobain-fronted band, and I have no idea whether there ever was in the series; I can only assume this was itself a joke, this duo who call themselves “Nirvanna the Band” but make music that sounds nothing like Nirvana. It makes for a fun, if misleading, expansion on the series title. I have a friend who was a huge Nirvana fan and when I first told him I had seen this film, he clearly thought it must have been some amazing documentary about the grunge band. Nope, not even close.

I mean, it is in the documentary style. There is a lot of inconsistency regarding how the guy holding the camera follows Matt and Jay around without being noticed by key people in certain scenes, not to mention a documentary crew actually traveling through time with this duo, and even keeping tabs on the two of them when they have conflict and separate. But as I already indicated, plot logic is nowhere near these guys’ top priority here. And the overall experience is so much fun that anything you might want to nitpick is incidental. Given all the elements of how it was put together, the fact that this film exists at all is practically a miracle, and how funny it manages to be is icing on the cake.

Matt Johnson and Jay McCarroll pull an extension cord connected to the top of the CN Tower in Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie.

Overall: B+

GOOD LUCK, HAVE FUN, DON'T DIE

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

The more I think about Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, the less impressed I am with it. The best thing I can say about it is that Sam Rockwell gives a great performance, and is clearly having a blast. I wish I could say the same of the rest of the cast, who really seem like they’re just phoning it in. Well, Juno Temple gives a relatively strong performance, but far from a comic one; she plays a grieving mother bewildered by the offer of getting a subpar clone of her son who was killed in a school shooting. Michael Peña and Zazie Beets play school teachers who are a couple struggling in their relationship, and Haley Lu Richardson plays a suicidal young woman with an allergy to cell phones and wifi. Yes, really.

Rockwell is the otherwise nameless Man From the Future, who shows up at a diner and announces to everyone that he’s come back in time to save us from destroying ourselves with social media and AI. Social media gets name-checked early on, but only once or twice; after that, the target is both generally and consistently “AI,” and this film’s penchant for conflating the two (both being dangerous when unregulated notwithstanding) does nothing for its effectiveness.

This opening scene plays out very strong, giving a real sense of hope and promise for a fun and clever movie, which does not take very long to fade. And this is definitely a movie that thinks it’s clever—written by Matthew Robinson and directed by Gore Verbinski, I’d say at least this is a singular vision that is not written by committee, except that it feels like it was. I was diverted well enough by this film as I watched it, but it is blandly entertaining at best. The script takes on the point of view that AI is bad for us all, and then puts a bunch of VFX onscreen that looks like AI slop. I want to be amused by a centaur with an upper body made of hundreds of cats, except that it looks exactly like the AI crap that people keep sharing on Facebook.

Perhaps this was exactly the point? I can’t really tell how “deep” this movie is trying to be. If that is the intention, however, it fails. Satire needs to go hard, and this movie is jus lobbing thematic softballs. I wonder how many people watching even realize how deeply derivative it is? The aforementioned cat-centaur is the result of our group of heroes basically dreaming up their own adversary—exactly how the Mr. Stay Puft Marshmallow Man was manifested in the original 1984 Ghostbusters. Michael Peña plays a substitute teacher who makes the mistake of touching the smartphone screen of one of his students, which triggers to signal to all of them and causes them to mindlessly come after the teachers like zombies. Get it? There are even multiple scenes of teenagers, phones in hand, crashing through walls to get at the adults trying to hide from them.

Much later, in a climactic scene in which The Man From the Future is attempting to get the attention of a 9-year-old child said to be the architect of the AI that becomes self-aware, there is a moment when a bunch of dismembered and reassembled robot and toys come to life. One of them looks straight out of the Star Wars sequel trilogy; others look straight out of the scary neighbor kid’s yard in Toy Story.

A lot of these things reference movies so old that a many young viewers today won’t even know such references are happening. Or are we supposed to believe these similarities are coincidental? If so, that’s preposterous. If not, I can’t tell what the point was. Have Fun, Good Luck, Don’t Die has a lot to say about how our constant attention to screens is making us all brain dead, while doing exactly the same thing to its own viewers. Is this a lack of self-awareness, or a stroke of genius? I can assure you this film is not a work of genius, and a movie like this will hardly work as intended when the joke being made is on the audience.

But is it fun? Sure, some of the time. It’s far too long, at 134 minutes, for a film of this nature, which ultimately takes it into the realm of tedium. There are some scenes that work incredibly well, such as when Juno Temple’s grieving mother is asked by a smiling but impatient staffer to choose from comically limited personality options for her cloned son (who, by the way, is conditioned to inject ads into everyday conversation—this being something we already saw in the most recent season of Black Mirror). Or when she later meets another set of parents who have lost both their original daughter and two subsequent clones to school shootings, this being the kind of cutting, dark satire of our present era that this film doesn’t lean into enough.

Other times, the backstory just doesn’t land, as with Haley Lu Richardson’s young woman in a princess costume (she works children’s birthsay parties as a job) loses her “anti-phone” boyfriend (Tom Taylor) to a virtual reality game that mysteriously shows up at their door. They’ve been living off the grid, so who sent this console to him, and why? This movie has no interest in these questions—only that he’s received the device. In any case, the dissolution of this relationship is too rushed and contrived, even within the context of a film in which you readily accept its ridiculous (and overused) premise.

I cannot find any evidence that AI tools were used in the making of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, but it sure feels like it was. If you asked an AI prompt to create a comedy about the dangers of AI, it’s easy to imagine this movie being the result. Aside from Sam Rockwell’s impressively committed performance—it was his delivery alone that got the most laughs out of me—really nothing about this film is particularly smart or clever. It’s just a barrage of shit we’ve already seen before, repackaged and redelivered.

This movie is about as smart as it looks.

Overall: C+

ARCO

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

I think I have finally pinpointed the primary reason I don’t care for anime. It’s the frame rate—or at least, the frame rate of moving objects. I prefer animation that looks more fluid, with a frame right high enough not to detect each individual frame with the naked eye. To be fair, anime covers a diverse array of visual styles, and some of it likely has higher frame rates; conversely, there are plenty of other animation styles that use lower frame rates. I don’t tend to care for those either. The key difference with a whole lot of anime is how it combines this style with stories that are either bonkers-weird or so culturally specific that I have no hope of understanding what’s going on.

You may be wondering why the hell I’m leading a review of a French animated feature that is definitively not anime with a paragraph about anime. Well, again: it’s the frame rate. We see our protagonist, the title character, picking fruit from a tree, and we see his arm in four positions as it raises up to the brand. Immediately I am thinking about how this was animated, rather than what the character is doing at this point in the story. I always find it a distraction.

At least this story is easy for me to follow. The closest this gets to bumping on cultural specificity is in the choice to release this film theatrically in the United States with American voice performances replacing the original French ones. This is the story of a preteen boy (Arco, voiced by Juliano Krue Valdi) who travels back in time from the year 2932 to 2075, and a trio of grown-men conspiracy theorists are sure they’ve discovered an alien in him, or some other equally mysterious entity, because of having seen a similar sight to Arco’s manner of arrival (with a streaking rainbow tail across the sky) twenty years earlier. In the American theatrical release, these men are voiced by Will Ferrell, Andy Samberg, and Flea. They have several lines that just come across as somewhere on the line between odd and stilted. It was the thing that most made me wish I could have just watched Arco in the original French with subtitles. There’s a sense that there’s some level of nuance lost in translation.

And they got some pretty big names for the America voice actors. In the year 2075, Arco meets a preteen girl named Iris, voiced by Romy Fay, who is fairly unknown—but, her parents, only ever seen in hologram form because they are stuck at their jobs in the city, are voiced by Mark Ruffalo, and Natalie Portman (who also co-produced the film). Arco’s mother is voiced by America Ferrera. Another major character is Iris’s live-in nanny robot, Mikki, whose voice is a blend of Ruffalo and Portman.

The distracting frame rate aside, the animation is drawn beautifully. When we meet Arco, we are in 2932, and he is jealous of his sister who is of age and thus can legally time-travel with their parents. It seems they travel back in time to bring back specimens of fauna they mean to replicate. They wear hoods that have a diamond embedded in the forehead as a tool for time travel, and rainbow colored hoods. This makes them look a little like futuristic clowns. Maybe it’s a French thing. In any case, they live on platforms that sit on the ends of giant white stilts somewhat like trees, among the clouds. Arco sneaks out in the middle of the night, snatches his sister’s clown outfit, and leaps off the edge of his family’s platform—you’d think they would have protective railings in the future but whatever. The momentum of falling is what triggers the time travel.

Arco wants nothing more than to travel back in time and see dinosaurs in person. I get it, that would be pretty awesome. But he makes a mistake and winds up in 2075, when houses are protected by automated glass domes from everything from gale force rainstorms to giant wildfires. Unlike in the distant future, the people of 2075 are integrated into a society with countless sorts of humanoid robots: the nannies are robots; all the teachers at school are robots; the police are robots; robots swarm to streets to work on repairs on damage from storms. I found myself amused by a pair of “insurance bots” that show up at Iris’s door with a very blue collar demeanor, and one of of them looks down at a tablet. Wouldn’t the robot already have the information from the tablet already stored in its memory? Younger audiences, of course, would not think to nitpick about this. Whew, good thing I’m here!

In any event, everywhere and any time between 2932 and 2075, every frame of Arco is beautiful to look at. Maybe that’s part of the point of the lower frame rate: it’s easier to soak in each frame. I still find it distracting. Lower frame rates are often a sort of cheat to save on production costs, and I can respect that. It doesn’t mean I have to have a preference for it.

Time travel stories are always tricky, and I am impressed when writers (in this case, Ugo Bienvenu, who also directed, and Félix de Givry) find a clever way to close the inevitable loop created by it. Arco does a pretty good job of it, both in terms of Iris’s attempts at helping Arco find his way back home, and of where Iris’s life leads after meeting him and how that influences the future. Having such a direct influence on how humanity lives 857 years later seems like a stretch, but I guess I’ll allow it.

It’s a fun premise, a fun story, and a compelling way to look at where society might be in 50 years versus centuries after that. Arco is the kind of movie that works very well as both surface entertainment and a treasure trove of themes when you dig deeper. I have mixed feelings about the three men who are chasing after the kids, who are quite easy to suspect as villains at first and then turn out to be something else. I can’t quite decide of that something else quite works, but if nothing else, even with the stilted dialog as performed in English, they are entertaining. Such is the case with Arco overall.

I guess that’s one way to look ahead.

Overall: B+

THE MOMENT

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

Listen, I’m nearly 50 years old now. Anyone who has been reading the movie reviews the more than 21 years I have been posting regularly would be for the most part as old or older. It should come as no surprise that I barely even know who Charli XCX is—even though she’s been actively making pop music for 13 years. As in, since she was 20 and since I was 36. I was well plugged out of the pop music zeitgeist by then, unless you count Kesha I suppose. And it was a year after Kesha released her second album that I even started paying attention to her.

Okay, what’s my point, then? The Moment follows a long tradition of pop stars using their music career as a launch pad into the movie business. Until last year, she only had a couple of parts and a couple animation voice acting gigs. The key difference with The Moment and any pop singer movie vehicle in the past is that here, Charli XCX not only plays herself, but in a documentary style. Anyone not in the know might actually only gradually realize it’s not actually real. This is something it very much has in common with its direct cinematic ancestor, This Is Spinal Tap, which was released eight years before Charli XCX was even born. That movie was hysterically funny, particularly in its time—when it had its own moment. The Moment has moments that are well-observed and very funny. But, I could hardly go so far as to call it hysterical.

As such, for me The Moment was kind of a mixed bag. I wonder if it plays any differently to her fans, who know all of her music and whatever her real story is? It’s clearly very much a product of its time, and casually reflects how pop stars make their money performing and not from music sales—something that has been the case for basically Chari XCX’s entire career. This makes all the people in her orbit approach her, and their own careers in relation to her, differently than they might have ten or twenty or forty years ago. What The Moment illustrates very effectively and vividly is that the industry remains as ridiculous as it ever was.

It’s a fascinating exercise to watch a pop star play herself in such a straight way. She’s not really satirizing herself, and plays most of the scenes straight. It’s everyone and everything around her that is heightened, and exaggerated—or is it? You get the feeling that most of this stuff is inspired by things she has actually witnessed in the wild. I would believe it. Charli XCX spends most of the movie either responding to everyone around her with a varying mix of frustration, exasperation, and befuddlement.

To get very specific, The Moment focuses on—and is literally a reference to—the whole “Brat Summer” phenomenon of 2024. (I barely knew what it was while it was happening.) This film is an alternate reality in which a documentary crew follows Charli XCX as she prepares for the tour in support of the Brat album. In this fictionalized world, her label (Atlantic Records, which is her actual label and gets name checked multiple times in the film) and other industry people are desperate to keep “Brat Summer” going as long as possible, if not forever. They bring in a douchey concert film director (Alexander Skarsgård—hey, at least he’s my age! which is astounding considering how hot he is) who ultimately takes over and strips the concert’s artistic vision of any of its soul, alienating the people who were helping her stay true to herself in the process.

I do have a particular nitpick about this, and that is director and co-writer Aidan Zamiri’s apparent inability to fully commit to the bit. There are passing references to the camera crew following Charli around, but there are countless scenes in which no documentary camera crew would ever actually have access or be privy to the conversations we see. This is a key difference from any of the Christopher Guest mockumentary films, which quite earnestly stay true to the “documentary” gimmick. It’s an inconsistency of style that I found distracting.

What I did find fairly impressive was the acting. The Moment is a film full of people onscreen who understood the assignment, and that includes Charli XCX—who, by the way, is credited as having the “original idea”—more than any of them. Charli has a choice to make by the end of the film regarding her artistic integrity, and there is a pretty clear difference between the fictionalized version of Charli and the real-world version of her.

When The Moment has humor that lands, it really lands—it got some good laughs out of me. They were just fewer and further between than a movie like this really needs. The story unfolds with incisive cleverness, but the tone goes a bit back and forth, and would have been helped by more frequently pointed humor. I had a good time; it just wasn’t quite the party I wanted it to be.

Charli XCX is just along for the ride. Or is she the one driving?

Overall: B