Movie review by Greg Carlson

“Cha Cha Real Smooth” is writer/director/actor Cooper Raiff’s follow-up to “Shithouse,” and the titles of both films disguise, or at least misdirect, the earnest and heartfelt positivity of Raiff’s hip-to-be-square worldview. “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January prior to a limited theatrical run and a streaming home on Apple+ this June, feels a lot like a spiritual sequel to “Shithouse.” Raiff’s recent Tulane grad Andrew has much in common with “Shithouse” freshman Alex. Both young men (Raiff was born in 1997!) wear their hearts on their sleeves, rely on supportive moms, struggle with the “growing up is hard to do” transition into adulthood, and yearn for romances that seem to be just out of reach.

Raiff’s writing is built around the willingness of his characters to expose their vulnerabilities. Many viewers have responded enthusiastically to the filmmaker’s investment in the humane and the candid – “Shithouse” received the Grand Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature at South by Southwest and “Cha Cha Real Smooth” picked up an audience award at Sundance. Others have not been convinced. Manohla Dargis, who “didn’t believe a single second” of it, blasted “Cha Cha” as “American indie entertainment at its most canned and solipsistic.” Michael Phillips, Derek Smith, and Bilge Ebiri also torched the movie, taking aim at protagonist Andrew.

Certainly, one person’s interpretation of emotional openness might be another person’s definition of what Phillips calls “creeping smugness and self-regard,” but I think Raiff is a legitimate addition to the broad group of artists identified with the New Sincerity trend as popularized by David Foster Wallace and Jim Collins (and frequently applied as a descriptor to the work of Wes Anderson). Stylistically, Raiff is much closer to the realistic, low-budget DIY aesthetics practiced by booster/supporter Jay Duplass than he is to the painstaking miniatures imagined by Anderson, but both clearly eschew cynicism and, to paraphrase Wallace’s ideas on the subject, risk accusations of sentimentality and softness.

Dylan Gelula was brilliant opposite Raiff in “Shithouse,” and Dakota Johnson is equally beguiling as Domino in “Cha Cha Real Smooth.” Johnson has recently made a series of excellent career choices in front of and behind the camera (she is one of the producers of “Cha Cha”). Her quiet, melancholy Domino has lived through her 20s while Andrew has only started his, but the two apparent opposites are drawn together through several curious similarities. To the movie’s great benefit and the viewer’s relief, Raiff skips anything like a psychological assessment or explanation, but we can easily discern that both Andrew and Domino are longtime caregivers who labor emotionally to meet the needs of the other before the needs of the self.

“Cha Cha Real Smooth” values the connections (and the temporary disconnections) between people deeply and unfailingly committed to each other. Mothers, sons, daughters, brothers, and step-parents are all integral moving parts in Raiff’s well-calibrated machine. If coming-of-age stories are your catnip, and you enjoy the secondhand embarrassment of painfully awkward social interactions, and you ache at the bittersweet hopelessness of right place-wrong time sparks, then make a date with “Cha Cha Real Smooth.”

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Directors Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes, anticipating the recent Supreme Court decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade, began work on their documentary “The Janes” in 2019. The movie, now available to view on HBO Max following a January premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival (which also hosted Phyllis Nagy’s “Call Jane” and Audrey Diwan’s “Happening”), chronicles an important moment in the still-unfolding history of abortion rights in the United States. Filled with candid and unflinching on-camera interviews with the women – and a handful of men – directly involved, “The Janes” joins the growing collection of valuable media records on the practice.

Officially the Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation, but more popularly just called Jane, the Chicago-based group provided an estimated 11,000 safe abortions from 1969-1973. Lessin and Pildes combine well-positioned stock footage with more specific archival imagery to illustrate the recollections and listen to the voices of their interview subjects, several of whom punctuate the testimony with a potent visual aid: the index cards used to keep track of the information – financial, medical, and otherwise – of the rapidly-increasing numbers of primarily low-income clients. One card notes, “Afraid of pain.” Another says, “Be cautious, father is cop.”

Some of the interviewees elect to share only a first name, but Lessin and Pildes smartly frame the speakers in well-lit, detailed close-up, often in the cozy surroundings of living spaces and kitchens. The approach underlines the common and the everyday without diminishing the legacies of action. Some of the women are known to feminist scholars; all are remarkable to the filmmakers, who select compelling thoughts from Judith Arcana, Marie Leaner, Martha Scott, Eleanor Oliver, Peaches, Sheila, Eileen, Laura Kaplan, and Heather Booth, to name a few.

In 2018, Rachel Carey’s “Ask for Jane” dramatized the story of the Chicago movement. Many films, past and present, have also centralized abortion stories or included abortion as a subplot. Spanning mainstream studio fare and independent releases, fiction and nonfiction, and comedy and drama (and beyond), the growing list includes “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” (1982), “The Last American Virgin” (1982), “Dirty Dancing” (1987), “Story of Women” (1988), “Citizen Ruth” (1996), “Vera Drake” (2004), “The Abortion Diaries” (2005), “I Had an Abortion” (2005), “Lake of Fire” (2006), “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” (2007), “Obvious Child” (2014), “Grandma” (2015), “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” (2019), “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” (2020), “Unpregnant” (2020), “Plan B” (2021) and many more.

Class and race are thoughtfully addressed in “The Janes.” Dr. T.R.M. Howard and so many of the film’s other fascinating side-trips could easily sustain separate feature-length studies. Leaner’s insights, which include linking the civil rights movement to her abortion activism, are among the movie’s highlights (“I said here’s an opportunity, for me to take a stand in defining ‘Who am I as a person? What do I stand for?’”). Another sharp segment considers the unwelcome chauvinism and misogyny of presumed movement allies and the Black Panthers.

Lessin and Pildes make a series of inspired choices in the design and structure of “The Janes.” The arrests of the abortion providers don’t occur until there are only 25 minutes left in the 101-minute film. By emphasizing the organizational workings and personal motivations of the members of the Jane Collective for the majority of the running time, the filmmakers demystify the clandestine mythology of Jane in part by exploring the boundaries between the implications of the term “underground” and the accessibility of the network – which hid in plain sight on bulletin boards and was shared via word-of-mouth.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

While some Josephine Decker fans have decided to turn up their noses at her adaptation of Jandy Nelson’s 2010 YA novel “The Sky Is Everywhere,” I was delighted by the filmmaker’s impossibly beautiful, candy-colored vision of grief and love. Nelson prepared her own book for the screen, making a few key changes to the story of teenage Lennie Walker (Grace Kaufman) as the heroine figures out how to cope following the unexpected death of beloved older sister Bailey (Havana Rose Liu). Decker’s affinity for the fantastic, combined with the vivid hues of Ava Berkofsky’s fluid cinematography, will appeal to the young and young-at-heart – especially those who have lost a sibling or close family member.

While “The Sky Is Everywhere” addresses serious and very grown-up issues, this outing’s more family-friendly tone is a distance from the worlds conjured by Decker in cult favorites “Butter on the Latch,” “Thou Wast Mild and Lovely,” and “Madeline’s Madeline.” Like “Shirley,” the screenplay for “The Sky Is Everywhere” was written by someone other than Decker, offering the moviemaker’s admirers another opportunity to observe how she handles material not originated (or co-originated) by the director. The critical consensus prefers unfiltered Decker, but there’s a thrill in the knowledge that her unique style is reaching a much bigger audience.

Along with Berkofsky’s saturated storybook palette, Decker collaborates here with production designer Grace Yun and art director Cat Navarro, who both worked wonders on “Hereditary.” Set decorator Alex Brandenburg and costume designer Christopher Peterson also deserve special mention; all four of these remarkable talents supply a distinctiveness that invites the viewer into a place where everything is just slightly more intense than the reality we inhabit most of the time. And all these contributors align with Decker’s own flair for the performative and the theatrical.

The basic plot outline of “The Sky Is Everywhere” sets up a love triangle suspending Lennie between the attentions and affections of Bailey’s boyfriend Toby (Pico Alexander) and fellow musician Joe (Jacques Colimon). The resulting complications are familiar genre staples which Decker and her actors nevertheless handle with confidence and aplomb. But the real attraction of the film is the manner in which Decker gets at the messiness and unpredictability of the everlasting shadow of grief. From survivor’s guilt to the crushing sorrow accompanying the unfulfilled promise of bright stars burning out too soon, Lennie pinballs from the highest highs to the lowest lows.

Our protagonist resides in a gingerbread cottage tucked amidst the breathtaking redwoods of Humboldt County and flanked by an aphrodisiacal rose garden. Yet, Kaufman provides Lennie with enough self-doubt, second-guessing and insecurity that she successfully grounds a character who occasionally floats right off her feet at the joy of making music or the recognition of romantic butterflies. “The Sky Is Everywhere” is Decker’s most conventional film – in this kind of territory one wishes all the supporting characters were more sharply drawn – but the moviemaker’s core ideals remain. Decker is committed to immersiveness and immediacy. Her bold and passionate choices value and validate the subjective experiences of female artists/creators toiling to figure it all out.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Kate Dolan’s dark and atmospheric feature debut “You Are Not My Mother” lives at the fringes of folk horror, but the underlying family melodrama drives a story more interested in generational trauma than supernatural fairytale. In significant ways a thematic companion piece to Natalie Erika James’s intense “Relic,” Dolan’s movie carefully locates the sweet spot between creepy Celtic lore and the equally troubling responsibilities that come with being the child of a parent suffering from mental illness. The writer-director trusts her viewer, letting us wonder (and decide) how much of what we witness belongs to the realm of the mystical.

Hazel Doupe plays the ominously-named Char, a bullied teenager living with her grandmother Rita (Ingrid Craigie) and her depressed, barely-functioning mother Angela (Carolyn Bracken) in a shabby North Dublin housing estate. On a day that could be like any other, Angela disappears following a harrowing car ride to drop Char at school. Dolan makes Char’s feelings of stress, guilt and frustration absolutely palpable. When Angela returns, as inexplicably as she vanished, her daughter is ecstatic to find a more responsive, attentive parent. A skeptical and superstitious Rita, however, believes that the prodigal Angela is an imposter, a changeling.

The secrets and lies that lead Char on a journey of self-discovery pull double-duty as the fuel for this bildungsroman’s engine. Wouldn’t we all rather believe that the faults, flaws and shortcomings of our own parents are the result of some hex or curse and not a genetic predisposition to bipolar disorder or some other affliction? In collaboration with the skillful Doupe, Dolan pinpoints what happens when roles are reversed and a child must become the caregiver to her own mother. In one of the best scenes in the film, Angela loses herself in a whirling dance to Joe Dolan’s “You’re Such a Good Looking Woman.” We watch helplessly as Char grows more and more frightened at her mother’s manic, out-of-control behavior.

Dolan sets the action at Halloween, a seemingly obvious ploy to intensify Char’s perceptions of the crisis unfolding in her own home. The decision is a good one, though, as the filmmaker uses Samhain’s affiliation with masks, disguises and false-faces, bonfires, and sacrifices to explore, as we hear in a field-trip scene, “a time when the veil between our world and the other world [is] at its thinnest.” This liminality is also embodied by Char’s suspension between what should be a more carefree childhood and the harsh realities of her premature adulthood.

As a director, Dolan knows just when the eyes of her actors will communicate what words cannot convey. And while the filmmaker draws fine performances from the entire cast, Doupe and Bracken elevate “You Are Not My Mother” to another level. Both are called upon to express the full range of emotional highs and lows. Both show tenderness and vulnerability. Both can also turn on a dime, setting themselves with a steely resolve as scary as any external force wreaking havoc on the delicate, eggshell equilibrium in their less than happy house.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Alexandre O. Philippe has steadily become one of the most devoted contemporary chroniclers of our silver screen dreamworlds. The roots of the filmmaker’s movie obsessions can be found in “The People vs. George Lucas” and “Doc of the Dead,” but the major turning point was “78/52,” in which Hitchcock’s “Psycho” – and especially the mythology, allure, and impact surrounding the shower scene – received an illuminating and entertaining reading that blended internet-era geekery/fandom with university-level film studies. Since then, Philippe has continued to develop a confident storytelling voice somewhere between the accessibility of Laurent Bouzereau and Jamie Benning and the erudition of Mark Rappaport and Thom Andersen.

“Lynch/Oz,” which premiered this week at Tribeca, contemplates the intersection of “The Wizard of Oz” and the filmography of David Lynch. Lynch addicts will need no convincing to seek out this latest look at their idol, but cinephiles of all stripes will discover that Philippe is not shy about going big. In other words, come for Lynch and stay for the feverish celluloid love lessons that reach far beyond DKL’s oeuvre. “Lynch/Oz” weaves together dozens of movies in an intertextual kaleidoscope. From “Star Wars,” “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Gone With the Wind” to “The Brain From Planet Arous,” “I Wake Up Screaming” and “Under the Rainbow,” Philippe can stitch like Arachne.

The director divides “Lynch/Oz” into six chapters, each tagged with an enticing one-word title (“Wind,” “Membranes,” “Kindred,” “Multitudes,” “Judy” and “Dig”) and hosted by an offscreen admirer of Lynch. Veteran film critic Amy Nicholson sets the stage with observations on the meaning and mystery of the breezes and gales that can blow us from the known and familiar to the dark and dangerous. Nicholson says, “I think if there is a driving question, or driving goal that really connects David Lynch in all of his films, it is that nothing should be taken for granted and that nothing is exactly what it is.” Nicholson initializes her argument by pointing out that the sound of wind that opens “The Wizard of Oz” is made by human voices. It works.

Speculative documentarian Rodney Ascher begins his section with some thoughts on “Back to the Future,” which Philippe split-screens with rhyming shots from “The Wizard of Oz.” The director uses this technique to great effect throughout the entirety of “Lynch/Oz,” suggesing that the 1939 text, via the repetition of repertory theatrical bookings and annual television screenings, enjoys a monumental influence that goes far beyond the homages and references in Lynch. Philippe’s own maximalism aligns perfectly with Ascher’s note that “The idea of going on a great journey, extending yourself beyond your comfort level – it’s a story that’s what? Three-quarters of American movies?”

Ascher declares that “The Miracle Worker” feels like “an early, lost David Lynch film.” The similarities between the dinner scene in Penn’s 1962 movie and Henry’s visit to Mary X’s house in “Eraserhead” are marked by what Ascher (like so many Lynch scholars) identifies as the contrast of the comic and the horrifying. Later, in the chapter featuring creative partners Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, the filmmakers maintain that Lynch’s use of doppelgangers – yet another ingredient from “Oz” – interrogates the false nostalgia that everything was better in mid-20th century America.

The brutal treatment of women in the films of Lynch, so often decried as misogyny, could be – according to Benson and Moorhead – the opposite; a kind of stealth feminism, a working through the ways in which patriarchal systems have destroyed women. Benson and Moorhead use “Blue Velvet” as a prime example, claiming that the movie addresses the issue through Jeffrey Beaumont’s discovery of something terrible he had no idea even existed. Their consideration of how Lynch stylizes characters and/or costumes after iconic personalities like Marlon Brando, Elvis Presley, Humphrey Bogart, Jayne Mansfield, Marilyn Monroe, and Bettie Page presents Lynch as a “populist surrealist,” an appellation that could just as readily describe “The Wizard of Oz.”

Karyn Kusama particularly appreciates Lynch’s interaction with the meta-story of “The Wizard of Oz,” as illustrated in the betrayal and tragedy of Judy Garland by the motion picture industry. Kusama’s thesis, that Lynch is always telling the story outside the story, is arguably the most perceptive in the whole film. Her breakdown of Betty’s contrasting auditions in “Mulholland Dr.” exemplifies what Kusama pinpoints as the quintessence of Lynch: multiple realities/multiple interpretations “as the rule, not the exception – a multiplicity of possibilities.”

Lynch is my favorite living filmmaker, perhaps my most cherished filmmaker of any era, so I acknowledge my bias here. But Philippe strikes a balance between the mesmerizing, endlessly fascinating constructions of the David Lynch Cinematic Universe and the durability of the powerful spell on moviemaking enjoyed for decades by “The Wizard of Oz.” I love the freedom that Philippe gives to his interview subjects to scamper down their own respective rabbit holes (John Waters and David Lowery are the other two who bring some real gifts to the party). And whether the references are as overt as those in “Wild at Heart” or are integrated with a lighter touch, when it comes to David Lynch, there’s no place like home.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Talia Osteen’s high-concept “Sex Appeal” is more charming than it has any right to be. Osteen’s feature directorial debut, which can be seen in the United States on Hulu, takes turns embracing formulaic conventions and subverting them. Fortunately, some chemistry between appealing lead Mika Abdalla (as brainiac Avery Hansen-White) and Jake Short (as longtime torch-bearer Larson) offsets the predictability of both the biggest story beats and the thematic argument that love is the key to sexual fulfillment – the latter notion somewhat at odds with the unapologetic sex-positivity threaded throughout Tate Hanyok’s screenplay.

Suspension of disbelief is an absolute covenant in the teen sex comedy, and Hanyok and Osteen attempt some Olympic-level gymnastics to set up the film’s implausible plot engine: the inexperienced Avery, en route to a repeat appearance at the “nerd prom” that is prestigious pre-college competition STEMcon, will kill two birds with one stone. To prepare for the presumed ecstasy promised by her own IRL rendezvous with long-distance beau Casper (Mason Versaw), Avery gets to work designing an app that will “collect data and prescribe steps for a successful sexual experience.”

The catch: Avery’s intelligence-gathering leads her to enlist childhood pal Larson as her personal test subject/practice partner, and she is oblivious to the inevitability that his romantic feelings are at odds with her quest for carnal mastery. The agreement between Avery and Larson is redolent of “No Strings Attached” and “Friends With Benefits,” the 2011 romantic comedies that covered similar turf, but the “I’m with the wrong person” triangulations and complications come from the playbook of classic, paradigmatic screwballs like “It Happened One Night” and “The More the Merrier.”

The most curious dimension of “Sex Appeal” is the disconnect between the raw, R-rated vocabulary and the chaste, PG visuals that accompany all sex-related activity. One of the film’s funniest scenes is the rapid-fire checklist of “partner-pleasure approaches” offered by Ben Wang’s deadpan Franklin, which include digital techniques like the rock-and-roll, the surf’s up, the double-action revolver, the Spock, the reverse Spock, and the Devil’s Advocate. Avery’s imagination conjures up vividly-hued metaphors whenever she and Larson take another step: a Busby Berkeley-esque synchronized swim, a mission control rocket launch, a doo-wop musical number, and a waterlogged subterranean tunnel. The latter calls to mind the most notorious scene from the far raunchier and less enlightened 1990 cult film “Getting Lucky.”

Osteen draws engaging performances from her entire cast. Abdalla deserves extra points for working so hard to make the audience believe that someone of Avery’s intelligence wouldn’t have already managed to discover the basics and fundamentals of self-pleasure, if not partnered interactions. But we are in that cinematic fantasyland where such things are not only possible but of critical narrative importance. “Sex Appeal” may lack the kind of nuance that powered “Booksmart,” but the film deserves credit for sticking the landing. Alongside the broad comic strokes – which include the awkwardly well-meaning trio of Avery’s lesbian moms and Paris Jackson’s role as a kind of intimacy guru – Osteen’s female-oriented perspective respects the characters and champions and affirms wellness.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The newest David Cronenberg feature, “Crimes of the Future,” shares its name with the director’s own 1970 film, but the 2022 edition stands as a self-contained work and is not a sequel or a remake. The career-long preoccupations of the filmmaker, however, remain unmistakable. Cronenberg, whose movies are sometimes lumped in with lesser horror exercises, braids his creepy visions of the limits of the human body with a strong interest in the systems all around us – including politics and the consequences of bad decisions made sometimes by people with a lot of power and sometimes by people with virtually no power.

Viggo Mortensen plays the appropriately-named Saul Tenser, a curious performance artist whose ability to grow novel organs inside his body is matched by his capacity for what would have surely been excruciating pain in an earlier era. Despite the audience learning that humans have, in general, lost the ability to feel physical discomfort, Saul still writhes and emotes and grimaces and works very, very intimately with his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux), a former trauma surgeon who now applies her special skills to the removal of Saul’s innards. People pay to observe this spectacle, which is carried out by an insectoid apparatus that makes incisions via a biomechanical controller.

Longtime Cronenberg collaborator Carol Spier, as ever, offers up this arresting gallery of concoctions with the delights that only practical effects can provide (love that feeding chair and sleeping pod). Spier’s invention of exoskeletal hybrids places her in rare company alongside the likes of H. R. Giger, but her work stands on its own as some of the most elegant and exquisite nightmare fuel ever committed to cinema. In total, “Crimes of the Future” routinely transcends its budgetary limitations to arrive at a painterly series of compositions reminiscent of the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio and Goya.

While decidedly not for all tastes, Cronenberg’s unique oeuvre is as deliberately erotic as it is disturbing. The relationship between Saul and Caprice is the irregular heartbeat of “Crimes of the Future,” and Mortensen and Seydoux give off showers of sparks in their onscreen partnership. We can only speculate as to whether the movie would have worked as well with rumored early-choices Ralph Fiennes or Nicolas Cage as Saul and Natalie Portman as Caprice, but I for one am glad that Mortensen reported for Cronenberg duty once again. “Crimes of the Future” doesn’t offer the same opportunities of mid-2000s highlights like “A History of Violence” and “Eastern Promises,” but Mortensen balances the ridiculous and the sublime like few others.

Additionally, Kristen Stewart – who playfully suggested she had no clue what the movie was about the entire time she worked on it – is also delightfully comic as National Organ Registry record keeper and Saul stan Timlin. Manohla Dargis, who attended the Cannes premiere, noted that “It’s certainly the only movie [at the festival] that solicits both your laughter and disgust, alternately entertaining you with macabre jokes and testing your limits with grotesque imagery.”

It is because of, and not despite, the viscera that “Crimes of the Future” succeeds as a romance. “Surgery is the new sex” may be nearly as wild a concept as the symphorophilia practiced by the inhabitants of Cronenberg’s 1996 adaptation of J. G. Ballard’s “Crash,” but the intimacies of Saul and Caprice, complemented by Howard Shore’s terrific score, are the most successful components of “Crimes of the Future.” Through the central relationship, Cronenberg freely explores the personal and the public, speculating on life, love, and the future in his inimitable way.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

In Chloe Okuno’s feature debut “Watcher,” which premiered in the U.S. Dramatic Competition during the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, a frightening serial killer called the Spider haunts and stalks the neighborhoods of Bucharest. Maika Monroe’s aspiring actress Julia has unwittingly chosen this inopportune moment to relocate to Romania with her husband Francis (Karl Glusman), who has taken a new job to advance his career. While paying direct homage to “Rear Window” and several other sources, Okuno builds an effective thriller that draws the viewer into Julia’s increasingly hazardous disequilibrium.

Okuno, working from a screenplay by Zack Ford, makes excellent use of text and subtext to explore a range of ideas that unmistakably double as commentary on the commonplace experiences of women everywhere. For most, threats from diabolical murderers exist only in the realms of fiction, but the exhausting precautions women must take to safely navigate spaces private and public are underlined by Okuno’s choices. “Watcher” operates from within the genre framework of horror, and the casting of Monroe – most closely identified with her central performance in “It Follows” – makes an immediate thematic connection.

Busy with his gig and eager to impress his superiors, Francis immerses himself in work. An increasingly frustrated Julia spends long stretches of time alone. Adding to her feelings of isolation is the language barrier. Half-Romanian Francis speaks fluently and often communicates to others without bothering to fully translate for Julia, who neither speaks Romanian nor understands what is being said. Okuno uses this basic discourtesy as one of the first indicators that Julia cannot and should not depend on Francis. She also withholds subtitles to align non-speakers with Julia’s frustration.

Principal photography in Romania during the pandemic presented challenges to cast and crew. Okuno said in an interview for the virtual Sundance presentation that all-in, she spent six years getting “Watcher” made, so one can imagine that her commitment to the project was ironclad. And the film’s measured pace and carefully calibrated tone exhibit Okuno’s determination; the filmmaker maintains close contact with Julia’s point of view throughout the film. Perhaps Okuno’s most skillful feat as a storyteller is her ability to manipulate the viewer. For a time, we simultaneously question Julia’s sanity and empathize with her.

Some of Okuno’s cinematic inspirations are more obvious than others. The configuration of Julia’s new apartment, with a set of massive windows that look out directly into another building, establish a Hitchcockian baseline for the protagonist’s concerns. In one scene, Julia attends a screening of “Charade,” Stanley Donen’s own homage to the Master of Suspense. Others have noted allusions to titles as varied as “Halloween” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” and I would add “Repulsion” to the list. “Watcher” is more modest than these movies, but the comparisons indicate that we should do well to keep track of Okuno’s career.

It’s no spoiler to say that “Watcher” arrives at an intense climax that should startle even seasoned hounds. Okuno’s film is arguably grounded in a more realistic world than the one imagined by Alex Garland in “Men,” but a double-feature would reveal several intriguing ways in which the two movies are in concert regarding the extra work that women are called upon to do. When I reviewed “Men,” I quoted Taylor Antrim, who wrote about “the ubiquity of masculine power, about how male violence and thuggery are everywhere — and how ancient they are.” Antrim’s statement could just as easily be applied to “Watcher.”

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Novelist/screenwriter/director Alex Garland has earned a sizable and devoted following over the years. His previous two feature directorial efforts, “Ex Machina” and “Annihilation,” shimmered with retro-futurist cool and pop philosophical preoccupations enhanced by the presence of appealing performers, dazzling production design, and the sharp cinematography of Rob Hardy. “Men,” Garland’s latest, will draw the filmmaker’s faithful, but the modest environs, esoteric posture, and open text most likely won’t translate to massive financial success.

“Men” alludes to several hallmarks of folk horror, including themes of ominous spirituality and religion, an isolated protagonist, a rural/pastoral setting, and the creeping sense of bleak and unrelenting nihilism pervading the film’s tone. The plight of Jessie Buckley’s Harper Marlowe, the widow whose desire to heal from the apparent suicide of her husband leads her to book an old house in a small village, becomes an exercise in potentially unreliable narration. So bizarre and eldritch are the increasingly impossible aggressions that one begins to wonder how much could be taking place in the fog of our heroine’s post-trauma imagination.

Garland’s central gimmick is the casting of Rory Kinnear as all of the villagers with whom Harper interacts upon arrival in Coston. Caretaker Geoffrey, whose oversized teeth and bad haircut imply a kind of clownish and narrow country mouse, leads the pack of masculine menace. Kinnear will also inhabit a vicar, a boy, a police officer, a pub proprietor, and a nude stalker, among others. Garland certainly isn’t shy about leaving room for a reading in which the omnipresence of Kinnear fires a warning shot that indeed all men are of no use, no help, no support, and certainly no comfort to Harper.

Kinnear’s multiplicity also shatters any hope of solace or solitude for Harper. Garland’s awareness that women simply can’t enjoy the same privileges as men – namely, the general lack of fear when alone in public and even private spaces that men nearly always take for granted – fuels one of the movie’s central themes. As Taylor Antrim succinctly puts it, Garland embeds provocative ideas in “thoughts about the ubiquity of masculine power, about how male violence and thuggery are everywhere — and how ancient they are.” Anthony Lane pushes just as hard, claiming that in the film’s world, “men are defined, and propelled, by the ill will that they bear to the opposite sex …”

All these strange reverberations and reflections among the characters portrayed by Kinnear are mirrored by a fantastic sequence in which Harper explores the woods near the rental property. At the mouth of a long tunnel, she composes a haunting, wordless song built out of the ripples of her own sustained vocal echo. For one fleeting moment, the character’s reason for leaving the city seems to take tentative shape and maybe even flight. It’s my favorite scene in the film. The idyll is over almost as quickly as it begins, pointing toward increasingly nightmarish events that climax with wild, gender-inverting blasphemies of birth and rebirth as mysterious and incongruous as the frequent presence of the pagan Green Man in Christian chapels, churches and cathedrals.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Writer-director Mariama Diallo’s satirical short “Hair Wolf” attracted attention at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, earning a jury award for its funny/scary social commentary. Diallo returned to the festival in 2022 with debut feature “Master,” a promising extension of her interests in the contemporary politics and historical hegemony of insidious, institutionalized white supremacy. “Master” drops the humor of “Hair Wolf” but retains the pointed snark, inventing what ultimately transforms from a familiar genre exercise into an exposé of American racism. Despite a few rather generous critical comparisons to Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” “Master” certainly won’t be collecting an Academy Award for Best Screenplay – let alone a nomination. Even so, the film is worth a look.

Regina Hall draws the viewer to her wary, skeptical Gail Bishop, a tenured faculty member at the fictional Ancaster College. Bishop has recently been installed in the role of “master,” a kind of residential dean-of-students position with little visible upside (it’s also a perfectly-loaded word for the film’s title). Ancaster is sketched by Diallo as an old-money, East Coast, private liberal arts institution with ghostly historical allusions to the Salem witchcraft hysteria of the late 1600s. Bishop’s acclimation to her new quarters, which includes the disturbing discovery of maggot-infested drawers and startling Black Americana in the kitchen, is hampered by the sounds of the servant-quarter bells, which occasionally ring even though Bishop is the only person on the premises.

Bishop’s experiences as a newbie are paralleled by those of first-year enrollee Jasmine Moore (Zoe Renee), one of a very small number of Black students to matriculate at Ancaster. Diallo layers the exposition with a duality that emphasizes the feelings of anxiety experienced by both women. One level suggests the kinds of plot points that read as common genre elements (Jasmine’s investigation into the death of the college’s first Black student, who happened to live in the same dorm room, for example) and the other level is a barrage of sharply-staged microaggressions.

Not everything Diallo throws at the wall sticks, however. Odie Henderson’s review expresses frustration at what he perceives as Diallo’s remedial constructions for white audiences. Henderson writes, “Black folks don’t need the classes in Racism 101 ‘Master’ offers; life gives us PhD’s early on.” There may be some validity to that point, but a better critique of the film’s shortcomings would highlight the sizable number of red herrings and loose ends that detract from the more formidable discourse on the ubiquity of racism – visible and invisible, past and present.

Diallo also seems less certain of how she would like to develop Jasmine’s journey, which is ultimately less satisfying and more confounding than the one written for Gail Bishop. The subplot involving colleague Liv Beckman (Amber Gray), a literature professor enduring a contentious tenure review, ends with a stunning revelation. Diallo does some of her best work here, bringing together the storylines of both central characters while simultaneously nodding to the alarmism seeded by right wing bullshitters who, in Trump’s GOP, can’t be bothered to conceal their bigotry in fear-mongering attacks on misunderstood topics like Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, and diversity, equity and inclusion.