Zach Cregger hits a high score for video game movies with Resident Evil

An accurate visual representation of trying to navigate the internet these days while evading AI slop

Writer/director Zach Cregger switches up his storytelling impulses for Resident Evil, and not just because he’s working from pre-existing material for the first time. His first two horror features, Barbarian and Weapons, were non-linear exercises hopping between different points of view. They could suddenly grind one plotline to a halt before jumping to a wholly separate character's story to immensely compelling effect.

Though Resident Evil draws on a Capcom franchise spanning 11+ games (not to mention countless other pieces of media, including seven prior movie adaptations), it uses a simpler story structure. Cregger’s 93-minute chase movie is like a zombie-riddled After Hours. One guy just navigating a chronological series of increasingly madcap ordeals over a solitary night. Weapons was a horror epic. Resident Evil is intentionally more streamlined.

Cregger and Shay Hatten’s screenplay begins with medical courier Bryan (Austin Abrams) walking into a hospital on a phone call with his girlfriend. Their tense chat about his partner being pregnant is cut off by his job obligation. This guy always juggles so many plates and mundane hurdles. Just as he's departing to clock out, a hospital staffer asks him if he wants to make one more delivery to the snow-covered, mountainside domicile of Raccoon City. Since this important gig pays double, Bryan accepts.

Armed with a portable green cooler containing the pivotal item, Bryan’s off on his quest. Immediately, Resident Evil’s protagonist encounters trouble when a disoriented woman leaps in front of his car. Suddenly, a guy with no survival experience whatsoever is stuck in an isolated, snowy Hell that keeps throwing new pursuers at him. Said pursuers are a malicious bunch prone to bursting out tentacles or taking a chomp out of his body. So begins Bryan’s grueling night fueling Resident Evil. Those Umbrella Corps. folks who ordered this delivery better tip well.

It's akin to saying "Terminator: Dark Fate is the best Terminator since Terminator 2!", but Resident Evil is automatically up there with Exit 8 and Sonic the Hedgehog 3 as the best live-action video game movie ever made. Cregger's route to that accomplishment is simple. Past video game movie misfires often fell into two categories. One boondoggle functioned as a tedious prologue too obsessed with teeing up potential sequels that would be faithful adaptations of their source material (2018's Tomb Raider, 2021's Mortal Kombat, Assassin's Creed). Then there were failures Warcraft and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. These focused on the most tedious characters imaginable and trapped audiences in excessively convoluted narratives.

The sweaty creative impulses binding these foolhardy video game movies are absent in Resident Evil. Cregger isn’t interested in saving all the fun stuff for potential follow-ups. Nor does he bake everything in too many “twists” or subplots. No matter your pre-existing Resident Evil knowledge (I have none, for the record), this feature excels at delivering enjoyable scares. Just focusing on cromulent filmmaking and entertainment puts Resident Evil heads and shoulders above most denizens in this tortured cinematic realm.

Much of that entertainment comes from Cregger and Hatten rendering Bryan’s exploits as one lengthy series of dominos colliding into each other. Randomly firing off his gun at a zombie ends up inhibiting his car, for example. Similarly, impulsively tossing a ladder down at a pursuing dog comes back to bite him. On and on, the ripple effects of his behavior go. Like Walter White or that foolish person who gave a mouse a cookie, everything Bryan does has consequences. Committing to that informs Resident Evil’s most pulse-pounding sequences and its darkest laughs.

That quality’s connected to another critical virtue of this script: Bryan’s everyman nature. This character doesn’t start Resident Evil a clumsy oaf and then immediately become a hero once chaos emerges. If a dark corridor looks too ominous, he’ll likely bounce rather than venture forth without blinking. He’s constantly a decidedly ordinary guy reacting to everything around him vulnerably. It’s constantly engaging to see that persona clash up against increasingly unhinged zombies. Plus, emphasizing this quality ensures there’s always tension for whatever gory set piece Resident Evil cooks up next. This guy's ability to perish is always potently palpable.

It isn't just Bryan making Resident Evil a hoot, though. The various undead/enhanced adversaries are also terrifically realized. Artists like concept designer Dean Sherriff, makeup artists like Jakub Gründler and Vera Boyadzhieva, and animatronic designer Johnnie Spence (among many others) deliver exquisite, grody work manifesting these creatures. Happily, their creativity also becomes more prominent as the runtime progresses.

As Resident Evil’s story transpires, Bryan encounters increasingly bizarre zombies. Initially, he just runs into (literally) a woman with odd eyes and rigid limbs. Over an hour later, Bryan’s contending with a massive toad/human hybrid with acid vomit. Letting the Resident Evil foes ramp up in visual outlandishness ensures the artists behind these characters fly their freak flag high. The movie is all the better for such remarkable makeup and design work. Plus, this narrative approach ensures there’s always something new around the corner to freak audiences out.

Unfortunately, several of these entities materialize via CGI. That tool isn’t inherently bad, some of these warped creations couldn’t come to life any other way. However, the heavy presence (especially in the third act) of digital foes automatically ensures Resident Evil is a step down from the more tangibly realized Barbarian and Weapons. Meanwhile, the scripts gives Bryan way too many superfluous lines commenting on the world or challenges around him. I don’t need Bryan saying “I am so bad at shooting” after he proves subpar firing a gun once again. The visual of him constantly failing is amusing before an extraneous line poking you in the ribs.

That flaw is extra frustrating since Austin Abrams is a strong physical performer. He can sell Bryan’s internal world without these asides. After stealing the show in Weapons, Abrams proves more than capable of headlining a feature with Josh Brolin and Julia Garner nowhere in sight. I especially love how instantly believable his franticness is. When he’s portraying Bryan scrambling to get bullets into a shotgun or running for his life as zombies jump off nearby rooftops, you can feel the sweat pouring down his forehead or the trembling of his fingers. His conviction in portraying Bryan as a normal human who somehow wound up in a Resident Evil storyline is sublime.

Two other returning Weapons artists, composers Hays and Ryan Holladay, also deliver quality work in Zach Cregger’s latest concoction. Their often sparser compositions, heavy on clanking noises, sometimes effectively echo the “James” track that introduced Abrams’ Weapons character. However, that musical route also captures how ill-prepared Bryan is confronting Raccoon City’s chaos. He doesn’t have a lush orchestra backing up his exploits. Instead, much like how he has only his cooler and whatever weapons he uncovers, Bryan’s got ominous, stripped-down, electronic-informed creations accompanying his voyages.

The Holladay duo delivers superb sonic parallels to this guy’s journey. Their craftsmanship and commitment to emphasizing Bryan’s outmatched nature are two virtues heavily informing Resident Evil as a whole. The digital frights and self-aware remarks are unquestionably frustrating. However, this fusion of Brian Yuzna and After Hours also features the dynamite bleak yuks, sharp visuals, and excellent scares Zach Cregger’s name is associated with. The director's “weakest” horror project yet is still a great time towering above most other zombie films and video game movies.

Disney's continued butchering of Fox Searchlight Pictures crystallizes corporate lethargy

Live photo of me screaming about how much cultural power Disney has

In 2014, then-presidents of Fox Searchlight Pictures (the arthouse division sister company of 20th Century Fox) talked to Variety about the creative impetus behind a studio that had produced multiple Best Picture Oscar winners and countless box office hits. "You take creative gambles under pretty rigorous budget guidelines. The constraints on the budgets allows us a lot of freedom on how we can distribute the movie, so it is liberating in a lot of ways," Gilula declared. 

A few years earlier, Utley sang the praises of having Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life made at the studio to Deadline Hollywood. "This film is daring; it’s not a traditional three-act narrative. Not everyone appreciates the movie, but those who do are absolutely evangelical about it," Utley observed, "Its originality and audacity rattles people and is getting attention and gaining fans."

"Originality and audacity" were often in high supply at Fox Searchlight, while the studio often admirably backed diverse filmmakers. In the final four months of 2014, for instance, Fox Searchlight Pictures put out four movies. Three of them were directed by Black filmmakers and two were directed by women directors. That year, Fox Searchlight supplied North American theaters with eight theatrical releases, the same amount of titles Fox Searchlight delivered in 2010. In 2017, the year Searchlight's slate included The Shape of Water and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, the arthouse studio got 11 theatrical releases onto the big screen.

Then Fox Searchlight, like so many News Corp. entities, was bought by Disney in March 2019. Rechristened Searchlight Pictures starting with the February 2020 feature Downhill, Searchlight's theatrical slate for 2026 includes four movies. Two of them are sequels to features greenlit and produced before the Disney merger. The announcement of Searchlight's 2027 slate now featuring a Family Stone sequel reflects the chilling reality of studio mergers and how Disney has butchered a once vital source of theatrical arthouse films.

For starters, why is Searchlight releasing multiple sequels in a single year? Ready or Not 2: Here I Come and Super Troopers 3 launched in 2026 under this banner, bombed, and mostly looked like Disney execs trying to applying their "franchises, franchises, franchises!" mentality to a studio that once distributed Malick, Mira Nair, and Tamara Jenkins movies. Last years Searchlight slate included a War of the Roses remake (The Roses), a Family Stone legacy sequel is on the way.

Like with Disney's bastardized version of 20th Century Fox now limping along as a home for Avatar, Ice Age, and Planet of the Apes, Disney's exploitation of Fox Searchlight reflects corporate cowardice. Executives the Mouse House long fired took chances and risks on making Ready or Not, The Family Stone, and other notable 20th Century Fox/Fox Searchlight movies. The Disney brass don't have the guts to pursue such original fare. However, they will exploit the hard work and creativity of other artists. A Love, Simon Hulu show is a great idea. Making a new original theatrical film in the vein of Love, Simon, no can do. The Family Stone 2? Yes! Letting Searchlight executives nurture and finance artists who could make the next original film that echoes The Family Stone? That's an automatic no no.

Yes, Searchlight still releases some two (sometimes three) original theatrical releases at the end of the year. Not only do these titles exist, but they're often some of my personal favorite movies of the 2020s, like Poor Things, All of Us Strangers, and The Testament of Ann Lee. This year, Wild Horse Nine and Behemoth! are the two original Searchlight releases getting the big-screen treatment. The immense artistry of Things and Ann Lee is indisputable. However, pre-Disney merger, Fox Searchlight released eight original movies a year, including giving major Sundance acquisitions theatrical releases. 

Limiting Searchlight to only two or three original movies, all crammed into the final six weeks of the year, is not a sustainable business model. Searchlight's Disney form must return to releasing movies of all shapes and sizes year round. 

Here's a "fun" fact too about the new version of Searchlight: Disney's version of the arthouse studio has drastically whittled down the amount of women-directed movies it puts out. Searchlight has put out 29 theatrical-exclusive titles since Downhill's February 2020 debut. Of those, only four (Nomadland, Nightbitch, The Testament of Ann Lee, Theatre Camp) were either directed or co-directed by women (and I'm being charitable putting Nightbitch in there, since it was dumped to a handful of theaters, had no reported box office numbers, and is now considered "A Hulu Original"). Only roughly 15% of Searchlight's theatrical releases over the last six-and-a-half years were helmed by folks belonging to marginalized genders.

Fox Searchlight was not perfect with gender representation in its theatrical output, not by a long shot. Its eight 2015 films, for instance, had no women-directed titles. However, it's worth noting that, in 2017, three of its movies were helmed by women, 75% of Searchlight's women-directed output for the entire decade. Black women filmmakers once helming multiple titles for the studio, like Amma Asante and Kasi Lemmons, have "mysteriously" vanished after the Disney/Fox merger. Perhaps if a Black lady director has an idea for Belle 2: The Belle Awakens, Disney executives will consider them for a Searchlight Pictures gig. 

Not only has Disney's version of Searchlight limited the overall number of movies released each year, but it's also tremendously constricted who gets money, promotional energy, and easier access to movie theater screens. As usual with any corporate merger, marginalized lives (especially when they're not white) pay the highest price.

What's bizarre is that other major studio arthouse divisions like Searchlight Pictures have been consistently releasing movies year-round during the 2020s. Focus Features, the arthouse sister studio to Universal Pictures, has been dropping tons of new releases (even more annually than it did in some pre-COVID years), which has offered up more chances for the studio to deliver massive hits like Obsession. When you have more times up to bat, you have more opportunities to score home runs. That sounds like a better idea than cramming your only three annual theatrical releases in the final six weeks of the year.

Anyone who's read my pieces for a prolonged period of time knows me and Sony Pictures Classics (the arthouse counterpart to Columbia Pictures) don't often see eye-to-eye. However, the studios constantly putting out new titles into theaters during every corner of the year. This approach has delivered some recent hits, like I'm Still Here and Becoming Led Zeppelin. While Sony Pictures Classics gets international titles and documentaries to the broader public, Disney is busy shoving Fox Searchlight Pictures into the same M.O. as its big, mainstream-skewing labels (Marvel Studios, Pixar, etc.). Specifically, the Mouse House is making Searchlight akin to Marvel and Pixar in emphasizing both as few annual releases as possible and tons of sequels.

Amusingly, this approach isn't even delivering major box office hits to Disney. Adhering to "FRANCHISES! FRANCHISES! FRANCHISES!" is proving to be a bad move when you're dealing with an arthouse studio and not Star Wars movies. Super Troopers 3 and Ready or Not 2: Here I Come were both bombs. Among this year's titles hailing from arthouse studios, Ready or Not 2 will end up below Sundance 2026 acquisitions Buddy and The Invite. Super Troopers 3, meanwhile, couldn't even crack $7.5 million in its North American run, putting it behind Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die, I Love Boosters,  Tony, and the documentary Epic: Elvis Presley in Concert. 

Boiling things down to the most basic cynical capitalistic impulses, letting Searchlight acquire original indies certainly seems like it would produce better box office results than Ready or Not or Super Troopers sequels. Indie and arthouse hits are built on delivering the unexpected (see: Obsession, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Marty Supreme). Orienting your arthouse label largely around legacy sequels is antithetical to that. To boot, putting out more titles a year would give a studio more chances to deliver those kinds of sequels. Focus Features putting out so many movies a year produces bombs like Black Bag (an artistically awesome movie with a killer score, FTR), but also ensures hits like Hamnet, Conclave, and Obsession are possible. 

Conglomerates like Disney aren't about logic, common monetary sense, or even (God forbid) doing good things for art. They're about making sure executives never look foolish or made a bad call. Thus, Disney's still committed to those live-action remakes of old animated films even after Snow White and Moana cratered financially. Even after a summer where audiences shrugged their shoulders at arcane brand names, the Mouse House is gearing up to spend countless millions on a new Pirates of the Caribbean movie. And Searchlight Pictures is still dedicated to further sequels of pre-Disney merger 20th Century Fox/Fox Searchlight Pictures movies.

Much like city councils ignoring wide swaths of citizens who hate invasive Flock cameras or the U.S. government ignoring increasing public support for Palestine, the bourgeoisie ignore reality to ensure their pockets are lined further. Relying on sequels and "safe" franchise fare makes shareholders and Disney executives happy. Thus, that's the mold this once-prosperous arthouse studio must inhabit under Mouse House leadership. A corporate merger didn't open up new exciting horizons for Fox Searchlight Pictures. The quality films emerging from this era of Searchlight (like my beloved Poor Things, All of Us Strangers, and The Testament of Ann Lee) are testaments to the artists behind those films flourishing despite countless obstacles in their respective paths. Quality films managing to get released with the Searchlight Pictures logo can't erase the larger problems plaguing this studio as a result of its Disney ownership and pointless consolidation. 

So prepare, dear readers, for Little Miss Sunshine 2, 2 Napoleon 2 Dynamite, Black Swan 2: Here We Go Again, Return to Cedar Rapids, and Martha Marcy May Marlene: Attack of the Clones, and other legacy sequels at the expense of original films. Bask in the regurgitation of the past at the expense of new art tapping into the present. And cheer for when David Ellison gets his hands on Warner Bros. I'm sure he'll treat that studio as well as Disney's handled Searchlight Pictures. 

Lisa Laman's Bite Sized Reviews: The Weight and Dreams in Nightmares

Howdy folks! Lisa Laman here, how about two capsule reviews for arthouse titles that either recently debuted in theaters or are preparing to reach multiplexes?

The Weight

Immediately, The Weight made me feel like I was watching a cross between a 30s drama and a 50s noir. Perhaps any feature chronicling chain gang prisoners smashing rocks in the Great Depression era will conjure I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang memories. It wasn’t just surface level visual trappings, though, that thrusted me back to films like The Big Heat. The Weight effectively evokes the artistry and evocative atmosphere dominating those 20th century films.  

Down-on-his-luck mechanic Samuel Murphy (Ethan Hawke) and his daughter Penny (Avy Berry-Worrall) were already facing tremendous turmoil after getting evicted while at church. Then Murphy crossed some cruel, violent-prone cops and ended up in prison. This incarcerated man only has a short time before his child is put up for adoption, and he never sees her again. This makes an offer from Warden Clancy (Russell Crowe) extra enticing. That offer? Murphy and three other prisoners will move gold bars across rough forest terrain.

If no bars go missing and they arrive on time, they all get their freedom. While on the road, though, the vivid personalities of Murphy and the other prisoners inevitably begin clashing. More ominously, the dehumanizing approach to people emanating from every Weight authority figure grows increasingly inescapable.

Ethan Hawke’s one of the best American performers around. He’s spent decades reaffirming that reality. However, comparing his Weight work here to his Blue Moon turn as Lorenz Hart from just last year really solidifies his quiet range. Whereas Hawke’s Hart was a boisterous soul with a witty retort and story always on the tip of his tongue (while sorrow lurked beyond his eyes), his Samuel Murphy is a palpably agonized soul. Even before he’s locked up, Hawke makes the man’s years of anguish hauntingly tangible. Profoundly believable world-weariness permeates this performance. The man defaulting to whispers and withdrawn body language achingly reflects this reality. 

Last year, Hawke rendered a playwright of the past with magnetic and emotionally rich externalization. In The Weight, he proves equally adept at more understated acting tendencies caked in dirt and regret. The range here is remarkable. That microcosm of Hawke’s acting prowess ensures The Weight’s dramatic anchor is mighty engrossing. 

The Weight’s intimate scope lets this performance and the distinctive personalities of the other prisoner characters flourish. Much of the films runtime is about folks like Indigenous woman Anna (Julia Jones), leftist Singh (Avi Nash), and Scandinavian immigrant Olson (Lucas Lynggaad Tonnesen) recounting their respective pasts. These anecdotes about American authority figures dehumanizing them are hauntingly realized, especially the understated performances of Julia Jones portraying her character recounting her childhood experiences at school driven by the motto “kill the Indian, save the man.”

Such stories transpire on a mission where their superiors constantly reaffirm that gold bars are infinitely more valuable than any human lives. Looking out for oneself and stigmatizing “the other” is the norm in this land. The pervasiveness of those tendencies, and how they inevitably lead to rot, fuel much of The Weight’s tension. Meanwhile, emphasizing the humanity of characters like Murphy and Anna accentuates the effectiveness of that suspense.

Director Patrick McKinley and screenwriters Matthew Booi and Shelby Gaines certainly come up with some enjoyably realized Weight sequences certain to make people hold their breath. A scene where Murphy tries helping a jeopardized comrade only to end up stuck underwater is especially sublime. This set piece’s timing and steady introduction of new sources of conflict are both top-notch.

If there's a drawback to the film, it's just that McKinley and cinematographer Matteo Cocco's visuals could've used extra doses of distinctiveness. The films crisply filmed, with plenty of wide shots and controlled camerawork. However, the persistent blue and grey color grading is both not super interesting to look at and too reminiscent of other movies. Some weird editing also frustrates, namely an awkward third-act cut from Murphy walking around to Anna in jeopardy. A largely strong enterprise like The Weight deserved consistently excellent imagery.

Still, despite these shortcomings, striking shots do emerge throughout The Weight. Overall, the film’s a finely tuned endeavor that’s especially impressive in its execution of both suspense and letting talented actors strut their stuff. Offering plenty of breathing room for artists like Ethan Hawke and Julia Jones to excel benefits the project to no end. Plus, The Weight’s final 15 minutes (which conclude with one of the year’s best closing lines) are tremendously successful. As if that weren’t enough, this film uses the same end credits style as Predator, where each cast member gets to be on-screen with their title card, often smiling.

The Weight just knows how to keep delivering the goods. Those awesome 30s and 50s movies would be proud.

The Weight begins playing in theaters everywhere on September 18.

Dreams in Nightmares

With their devastating 2021 directorial debut Test Pattern, filmmaker Shatara Michelle Ford immediately threw down the gauntlet as an artist worth keeping an eye on. For their next directorial effort, Ford’s gone in a fascinatingly opposite direction. The intimate gaze and emphasis on everyday interactions endure. However, their new title Dreams in Nightmares is a lighter, more comedic enterprise. Test Pattern intentionally kept its number of locations limited to reflect the horrifying circumstances its lead character endured. Nightmares, meanwhile, is a road trip feature bouncing across several different North American locales.

Ford's script focuses on longtime pals Z (Denée Benton), Tasha (Sasha Compère), and Lauren (Dezi Bing). Reuniting in New York City after Z and Tasha both lost their respective jobs, the three chums have a wonderful night out. As they're sitting in Tasha's apartment, recuperating from all the dancing and bathroom stall sex, a question keeps coming up: where is Kel (Mars Storm Rucker)? The fourth member of their friend group has been AWOL for so long. Where did they go?

A plan suddenly begins brewing. The trio will go on a road trip to try and find Kel. The hesitant, practical-oriented Tasha isn't exactly ecstatic about this idea. However, they all pile in a car and begin tracking down spots Kel might be hiding away in. This includes Kel's chipper, chatty ex Sabrina (Jasmin Savoy Brown) as well as Kel's parents, who refuse to acknowledge that their child uses they/them pronouns. Like any road trip comedy, Dreams in Nightmares sends its lead characters through outsized antics on their way to their destination.

Ford’s script, though, realizes those hijinks as deeply specific to the three leads. Poet Lauren, for instance, insists the group’s Chicago exploits include stopping by to see fellow trans lady Toni (Joss Barton) perform poetry. This produces a strikingly realized sequence where Toni recites evocative verbiage related to modern trans existence, accompanied by warmly captured footage of a trans woman navigating everyday life. This stirring mixture of words and images is like nothing else I’ll see in a 2026 movie. From Barton’s personality-drenched line deliveries to the emphasis on depicting mundane trans lady existence, this set piece is tremendous.

This detour epitomizes how Dreams in Nightmares uses the familiar road trip movie form to create an utterly unique and absorbing creation. You’ve surely seen indie comedies before where characters pile up in a car to find a friend or important person. However, focusing on these fictional individuals and performers immediately gives Dreams in Nightmares numerous idiosyncrasies. The easygoing, lived-in rapport between the three leads alone renders this a must-see.

Dezi Bing’s Lauren especially fantastically realized, especially regarding comic timing. However, communicating her role’s gung-ho demeanor without uttering a word is particularly special. A scene where the three Dreams in Nightmares leads encounter Kel’s parents initially features Lauren largely sitting silently. Even here, though, situated between Tasha and Z, Bing exudes a compelling, dedicated aura that makes it clear Lauren's brain’s always scoping the situation at hand. All the subdued build-up just makes her blunt comments towards these parents extra impactful.

Throughout Dreams in Nightmares, Dezi Bing’s engrossing whether Ford hands her externalized or deeply withdrawn material. Rucker’s screen presence is similarly transfixing. Whenever they’re on-screen, their infectious buoyancy inspires an automatic smile. Bing and Rucker’s engrossing personas crystallize how Ford and casting director Rebecca Dealy absolutely hit a bullseye assembling the Dreams in Nightmares cast. When your movie heavily focuses on long car rides or characters scouring maps in gas stations, you need talented performers to make the mundane compelling. The Dreams in Nightmares leads firmly accomplish that.

Best of all, Ford keeps impressing viewers right up until the credits roll. One of the last Dreams in Nightmares sequences depicts Z and her partner Reece (Charlie Barnett) on a crucial phone call. I’ve never seen a telephone chat rendered on-screen quite like this one, as Ford and cinematographer Ludovica Isidori toss the camera around various lovingly rendered images. Each new line inspires a cut to an image of either one or both of these characters basking in romantic sunlight. Their words are rooted in here-and-now communication. However, the visuals reflect a dreamlike bond between two people defying time.

It’s an evocative sequence as tenderly realized as it is idiosyncratic. This dedication to uniquely and memorably rendering the connections between people flows throughout Dreams in Nightmares. Like a sublime road trip with friendship, this movie lodges itself in your memory.

Dreams in Nightmares is now playing in select theaters. 

History and the present collide in the grandiose experience La bola negra

In 1919, Different from the Others put gay experiences on German movie theater screens. Over a decade after its debut, Nazi's obliterated every copy of the project they could get their fascist palms on. Authoritarianism wiped out visual evidence of queer community and existences. Partial copies of the feature endure, but Different from the Others’ annihilation from the art canon encapsulates the difficulty of preserving queer history. These stories and lives have always existed. Widespread erasure and suppression don’t erase that reality.

It’s no wonder that wide swathes of queer cinema have fixated on preserving history and creating connections with the past. Documentaries like Barbara Forever and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed vividly explore the urgency of these missions. Narrative features like Velvet Goldmine, The People's Joker, Flee, and countless others, meanwhile, fixate on the past, present, and letting queer stories endure. Into this pantheon comes the historical epic La bola negra, courtesy of directorial duo Los Javis (consisting of Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, who also penned the script with Alberto Conejero).

This creative pair deliver an absolutely towering Spain-set title that hops across three different time periods and a wide swath of pre-existing source material, namely Conejero's 2013 play La piedra oscura and Federico García Lorca's unfinished play La bola negra. One of the eras chronicled is 1917, where young Carlos (Milo Quifes) is riddled with anguish over whether or not he'll get into a local casino. Allegations of him being gay are plaguing him and his family's reputation, much to Carlos' frustration. Then there's Sebastián's (Guitarricadelafuente) 1937-set yarn. This trumpet player was the only survivor in his village from a grisly bombing.

Fleeing the carnage, he fakes his way into the Nazi-endorsed Nationalist army so that he can live to see another day. His "keep your head down" plans go sideways when leftist fighter Rafael Rodríguez Rapún (Miguel Bernardeau) is captured and Sebastián finds the man...absorbing. Irritable. A body he wants to caress and a soul he yearns to know. Finally, in 2017, there's Alberto (Carlos González), presumably a stand-in for co-screenwriter Alberto Conejero. He's a former playwright with a contentious relationship to his mother, Teresa (Lola Dueñas), who suddenly learns his grandfather's passed away. This discovery and some kind of “inheritance” this man left sends Alberto on a rabbit hole defined by the past.

La bola negra’s roots come from the stage. However, Los Javis and cinematographer Gris Jordana imbue this feature with staggering imagery that’s only feasible in cinema. Though it chronicles eras of chaotic war and modern domestic strife, nearly every La bola negra image is painterly. Sumptuous theatricality informs Los Javis and Jordana’s ingenious compositions. This quality is already remarkable in how many downright mythic images it produces. No wonder this film features Carlos and Sebastián walking or scrambling above marble statues of gods. These imagery impulses echo the grandiose aesthetic emanated by finely chiseled sculptures.  

However, this facet’s also effective in restoring grandeur to lives erased. The queer existences chronicled here are told to suppress themselves. Keep their personalities under wraps lest they “shame” their fathers or incur Nazi wrath. Even Alberto often feels inclined to withdraw himself thanks to his abusive mom. Los Javis and Jordana’s visual impulses, meanwhile, lather these lives in majestic tableaus as grand as their emotions and yearnings. Lives once existing solely through whispers and subtle glances now materialize on-screen in a masterful visual landscape proudly calling attention to itself. Rich sunlight cascading on two men tracing fingers on each other's bodies or a bright red flare speeding across a beach at nighttime are just two of the countless pronounced images La bola Negra delivers with maximum characterization and showmanship.

Also impressing on this front is this title’s channeling of Quo Vadis, Aida? in manifesting impactful empty spaces. Binding every disparate era explored here is this visual motif, which specifically materializes as voids in the top half of the frame. Quo Vadis, Aida?’s emptiness hauntingly suggested the lives lost to genocide. Here, vacant areas communicate both queer existences erased from society and the gulf between Carlos, Sebastián, and Alberto’s internal and external lives. Not only does this visual fixture lend insight into the characters, but it also produces incredibly memorable images infused with precise blocking. Gris Jordana’s cinematography is a gift that keeps on giving.

Unfortunately, a problem does frequently plague La bola negra. There’s this strange inclination to hammer home visually obvious elements with obtuse dialogue. Maybe it’s a relic of this film’s stage play roots and/or the screenwriters being theatre veterans. Whatever informs this problem, I kept wanting Los Javis to let the images do the talking. Yet another monologue relaying the title’s themes isn’t necessary when a single magnificent image proclaims a thousand words.

Inevitably, certain corners of La bola negra get the short thrift whilst the film juggles so many narrative beats. Alberto’s personal life, for instance, gets lost in the shuffle against the more towering Carlos and Sebastián’s early 20^th century woes. Biting off more than it can chew means La bola negra can’t quite reach the heights of other 2020s films hopping between disparate time periods, like The Secret Agent. Luckily, so much of the proceedings are a delectable enough feast to make these shortcomings less fatal than they’d normally be. On the one hand, the scripts eyes can be bigger than its stomach. On the other hand, holy moly, these painterly images!

Beyond those luscious images, La bola negra’s well-crafted charms are abundant. Case in point: Raül Refree's score is a creative collection of compositions. His tracks often contrast period-era imagery with distinctly modern instrumentation. This includes one beach-set World War II scene transpiring against what sounds like club tracks. These distinctive auditory flourishes blur the lines between the past and present, a perfect trait for this story. Meanwhile, the performances are largely excellent. Guitarricadelafuente gets the most to do with his tormented Sebastián work, and he certainly thrives with all this material. Penélope Cruz is also a wonder in her one-scene appearance as show woman Nené Romero. Her deftness alternating between Romero's boisterous stage persona and her more haunted everyday demeanor is astonishing.

107 years after Different from the Others, La bola negra has emerged to continue the legacy of time-fixated queer films. Admittedly, its polished sensibilities can’t erase certain shortcomings, namely over relying on dialogue. The ragged edges, though, still speak to the La bola negra creative team’s impactful audacity. Such audacity produces a David Lean-style epic championing lives quietly erased and understated yearning communicated in glances or alleyways. In one of her final lines, Romero notes that queerness and challenging gender norms are about embracing everything that’s possible. In its most towering images and evocative sequences, La bola negra vividly communicates such infinite possibilities.

La bola negra begins its U.S. theatrical run on October 16.

I Will Never Make It To Venice OR: The Dastardly (Constant) (Inescapable) Return of Imposter Syndrome

On days when imposter syndrome seems unstoppable, just curling up in Jennifer Lopez's fur coat from Hustlers seems extra enticing

Every day, it lunges at my brain. There's no warning. No floorboards creaking to provide one glimmer of the imminent attack. No heavy breathing just behind my back to suggest, "he's right behind me, isn't he?" Instead, my psyche is suddenly overwhelmed by a mighty familiar intruder, though that recognizability doesn't dilute this terrifying experience. It's my old pal imposter syndrome, once again here to creep into my brain and transform every one of my thoughts into "you're not doing good enough/did you see what that other writer's doing?/why can't you be different?" 

No matter how many items I check off one day's to-do list, no matter how many years of therapy I attend, no matter how many coping tools I memorize, imposter syndrome still lurks. It's even looming over my brain as I type these words down, telling me, "Lisa, nobody's going to want to read this."

Nary a day goes by without some form of imposter syndrome flashing across my mind. However, at the start of the fall movie festival season (when studios launch their big award season contenders at lavish festivals), that imposter syndrome especially becomes pervasive for me as a writer. Ever since I was a kid scouring ComingSoon, SlashFilm, Entertainment Weekly, and similar outlets, autumn events like the Toronto International Film Festival, Venice International Film Festival, and Telluride Film Festival were momentous occasions. New eras of the year's cinema scene had begun. Not only that, but my favorite writers would regularly attend these events and report back with vital dispatches about what worked, what didn't work, and everything in between at these festivals.

Various Entertainment Weekly writers going to Venice's cinema extravaganza solidified them in my mind as the pinnacle of pop culture writers. To attend these events was to be a REAL film critic. Young Lisa Laman clutched dreams of pursuing an occupation like Lisa Schwarzbaum or Roger Ebert. She also wondered if, one day, she too would be at TIFF or similar shindigs. Cut to years later, and I'm privileged enough to make writing my full-time gig. I do what I love (typing out thoughts about film and television) as a means of paying rent. I'm incredibly lucky to have reached this status quo and to be surrounded by instrumental people (like ScarleTeen editor Heather Corinna, GALECA founder John Griffiths, or former Dallas Observer editor Eva Raggio, among countless others) who got me here.

Yet, like I said earlier, imposter syndrome cares not for the achievements you've accomplished nor the therapeutic mechanisms you've trained in. It festers, like a sharp pain in your foot refusing to vanish or a repellent odor from some mysterious point of origin in your fridge. Around late August or early September, coverage of events like the Venice Film Festival from major publications often instills pangs of imposter syndrome in me. "Why aren't YOU there?" my brain will think to myself. "I guess you're not a real critic." 

My not attending these effusive celebrations is suddenly a referendum on my abilities as a writer. "Everyone whose there is a real film critic," my imposter syndrome-consumed brain will say, "Not fakes like you."

Combining those thoughts with my exhaustion over the work and energy I do put into my writing is a potent combo. It can make things feel pointless, like all my value lies in watching movies at a specific festival rather than my actual artistic contributions or the ways I treat others. In recent years, I've gotten better about not letting these imposter syndrome thoughts beckon me down a catastrophizing spiral. Thank you to my therapist on that front. However, that hasn't always been the case, and I'm still prone to getting lost in a labyrinth of imposter syndrome-inspired worst-case scenarios. That includes when my insecurities over what I do and don't attend as a film critic flare up. In years past, this mindset has sometimes led to me thinking my "failings" as a writer reflected me also "failing" as a person.

Last night, I had pangs of this specific autumn movie festival-inspired imposter syndrome suddenly creep up. Given that I've been focused on moving the last two weeks and have sometimes had to go multiple days without watching a movie as a result, such insecurities had extra personal material to work with in 2026. "Look at all those people in Venice/Toronto/Telluride watching so many movies a day while you haven't logged anything on Letterboxd in three days!" my brain might say. These statements seem silly typing them out now (things in our brains tend to be much less ominous when we bring them out into the real world), but encased in my anxiety-vulnerable mind, they can, in the moment, seem like devastating indictments of my value. 

In my calmer, protein waffle-aided Friday morning mindset right now, though, I want to reassure myself and anyone else suffering from imposter syndrome (however it manifests) reading this that you're enough. True, I probably won't ever make it to the Venice International Film Festival. That's not the worst thing in the world, not by a long shot. Not only do all the films screening there eventually make it to North Texas, but my life isn't materially worse by not being there. People are making good memories and bonding with friends at this Italy-set endeavor. I can do the same in early September, watching movies with pals at the local Spacy microcinema or doing lesbian bar karaoke. 

Better yet, other people going to Venice isn't a reflection of my value as a person. Honestly, it's not about me at all. Dating back to my public school days (where I was paranoid about if and how other kids could "tell" I was autistic), I've had a survival instinct ingrained into my head that things are, by default, about me. If someone's frustrated, I must've done something wrong. If some piece of technology is on the fritz, then I must be the cause. This is why I'm always saying "I'm sorry" even if I'm just standing around existing. But like I said, it's not about me, and that includes other people going to autumn fall festivals.

Instead of filtering the existence of all fall film festival coverage as an indictment on me not doing enough, I'm retreating to my original mindset of celebrating both other people going and the art they produce via these events. Rachel Handler's coverage of events like the 2023 Venice Film Festival for outlets like Vulture, for instance, is always a must-read. The existence of these events isn't inherently a sign that I'm doing anything wrong or inferior. It can instead be a chance to relish and support the talents of other writers (like Siddhant Adlakha or Hannah Strong) who're there. Instead of seeing these film festivals as an opportunity for further inward, individualistic indictments, I'm viewing them as chances for communal support.

Plus, my personal experiences suggest I might get more overwhelmed than enthralled attending one of these festivals. I've carved countless joyous memories at both of my Austin Film Festival experiences, for instance. However, being somebody who doesn't drive and (thanks to autism) is prone to being overwhelmed by drastic schedule changes or sensory overstimulation, there were tremendously stressful segments of those experiences as well. Navigating expensive Lyft prices, being locked out of an AirBnB at midnight, suddenly being shunted to a deafeningly loud Austin street full of noisy clubs...it's not all as cool as watching masterpieces like No Other Choice and Hamnet in sold-out auditoriums. 

My mind circa. early September will tell me being in Venice is the "only" way to solidify myself as a "real" film critic. However, would me being overwhelmed in an unfamiliar place really help anyone, including myself or the prospective publications I was writing for? Perhaps bouncing around these film festivals in-person isn't something I'm capable of...and that's fine! The talented people who cover these autumn film festivals can clearly roll with the hubbub more easily, and that's awesome. 

Writing all of this out while bubbly Tyler, the Creator/Chappell Roan/Nina Simone songs play in my ear is one thing. In a week's time, though, when the evening rolls around, and I see some headline involving the Toronto International Film Festival, that imposter syndrome will creep in. Suddenly, my brain will be full once more of all the places I'm not occupying, the tasks I haven't accomplished, the Word documents I haven't finished. All will be used as evidence to declare, without a shadow of a doubt, that I'm a failure who's far behind everyone else in my career.

But you know what? I think I'm enough. It's hard to even type that out, given how difficult I find it to sing my praises (I detest the idea of coming off as "cocky"). But looking around the freshly decorated apartment I just moved into and at all the writing I accomplished this week, I do believe I'm doing enough. All those fall film festivals aren't a signal of me failing in my field. They're instead exciting displays of promising-sounding movies on the horizon and a chance to support other people in this vital career path. 

Whatever circumstances inform your own version of imposter syndrome, dear reader, I hope you also know you're enough. Imposter syndrome can be inescapable. However, reminders of our value can also be pervasive, if we just know where and how to look.

The five Netflix movies that had the longest theatrical releases

With the release of the American trailer for the Spain-originating feature La Bola Negra, a new era of Netflix movies begins. La Bola Negra, you see, will be the first Netflix motion picture to get a normal theatrical release before its streaming debut. Not just one week of showings and then vanishing like Glass Onion. Not screenings two months after its Netflix debut like KPop Demon Hunters. La Bola Negra will hit theaters October 16, gradually expand in the weeks afterward, and then hit Netflix in early December.

The trailer itself emphasizes the “in theaters October 16” detail in the top right hand corner of its first 15-ish seconds. The closing text, meanwhile, only emphasizes its theatrical release date while eschewing the “tum-dum” Netflix theme music closing out most other Netflix movie/TV show trailers. Even the trailers YouTube thumbnail suggests a fresh epoch is among us. Unlike every other Netflix trailer on the channel, the La Bola Negra thumbnail doesn’t the Netflix N stamped in a corner.

The intent is clear: this streamer wants you to think of La Bola Negra as a standalone movie, not as a Netflix tile.

This is no one-off either. In 2027, Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew and Charlie vs. the Chocolate Factory will both get normal wide theatrical releases before their respective Netflix debuts. Netflix is by no means becoming a massive supplier of theatrical entertainment, but even this Silicon Valley entity can’t ignore the reality that the big screen helps movies. 

Ever since Netflix began its original narrative film push with October 2015’s Beasts of No Nation, Netflix has done the bare minimum when it comes to theatrical releases. Netflix gives its award season titles (Roma, The Power of the Dog, Maestro, etc) extremely limited theatrical runs (largely concentrated in just New York and Los Angeles) two weeks before their streaming bows just so they can qualify for the Academy Awards.

All the while, Netflix executives have taunted and diminished the theatrical movie experience and reveled in the idea of putting independent movie theaters out of business. This despite movie theaters housing 2020s hits like Oppenheimer, Barbie, Sinners, and Obsession, while costly Netflix movies like The Electric State and The Gray Man have fizzled into oblivion. Now, with summer 2026 poised to become the second biggest summer ever at the domestic box office, not even Netflix can ignore reality anymore. “Thar’s gold in them hills,” as they say, and “them hills” happen to be your local movie theater. 

Before we start living in a new Netflix future, though, let's take a brief look at the past. What Netflix movies, up to this point, have had the longest theatrical runs in North America? Typically, Netflix only does 14-ish days between an obligatory theatrical debut and a streaming premiere. However, there have been instances of Netflix stretching that release out just a tad longer, especially if there's major award season buzz hovering around a title. Ahead are the five Netflix original movies that got the lengthiest pre-October 2026 theatrical runs from the company.

Note: Glass Onion techncially had a 30 day gap between its North American theatrical debut and Netflix premiere. However, Netflix pulled it from theaters after seven days, so it is not counted on this list.

5. Maestro (28 days)

We may never know "who abandoned Snoopy in the Vestibule" (much like we'll never know what Scarlett Johansson whispered into Bill Murray's ear in Lost in Translation). What is clear, though, is that Bradley Cooper's Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro did get one of Netflix's longer theatrical releases. The feature began playing in select theaters (roughly eight over its opening weekend) on Wednesday, November 22, 2023. It would then drop on Netflix just in time for Christmas on December 20, 28 days after its premiere. As we'll soon see, 2022 was the year Netflix flirted extensively with longer theatrical runs. The following year, major Netflix award season players like May December only got two weeks in theaters before an unceremonious Netflix drop.

Maestro, being the most high-profile of Netflix's 2023 award season fare, got the theatrical run closest to those lengthier 2022 big screen stints with 28 days in theaters. Now, audiences could ponder who left Snoopy behind on a massive screen.

4. Marriage Story (30 days)

Large portions of 2019 were dedicated to speculation over whether or not Netflix would cooperate with major theater chains and give Martin Scorsese's The Irishman a normal theatrical release. In the end, negotiations between the parties broke down. The Irishman only got 26 days in theaters before it was relegated behind a Netflix paywall. Ironically, that same year, Netflix gave another title a slightly longer theatrical release. Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story began its theatrical release on November 6, 2019. It had 30 days in theaters before its December 5, 2019 Netflix bow. Allegedly, despite never playing in more than 130 North American theaters, it did clear $2 million domestically at the box office.  That puts Marriage Story ahead of other 2019 movies that played in more theaters, like Western Stars and Waves. 

3. Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (30 days)

As referenced earlier, 2022 was the year Netflix scooted a little bit closer to maybe doing longer theatrical releases (the Glass Onion "experiment" occurred during this time). A primary example of this was Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, which launched in theaters on November 9, 2022 and hit Netflix 30 days later on December 9. No reported box office data for these screenings ever came out, and an exact list of how many theaters it played in is hard to come by (though one pre-Netflix showing was a 35mm screening at the Museum of Modern Art). Interestingly, an Orlando Sentinel piece reveals that it played for at least one week at multiple local Regal Cinemas locations. Given that Regal Cinemas is one of the big three theater chains (alongside AMC and Cinemark) and has expressed hostility towards Netflix in the past, getting Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio into these locations was a breakthrough for streamer/multiplex relations.

2. White Noise (35 days)

Here's the title that's bound to puzzle the most people out of any movie on this list. Yes, Noah Baumbach's ill-fated 2022 adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel White Noise got a surprisingly lengthy theatrical run from Netflix. I guess the streamer believed that Baumbach's Marriage Story becoming an Oscar juggernaut meant that any subsequent films of his were major events. That wasn't a totally illogical assessment, but White Noise ended up scoring mixed reviews, barely made much of a dent in the 2022-2023 award season race (beyond leading man Adam Driver scoring a Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy Golden Globe nod), and never made any waves in Netflix viewership. All the while, White Noise hit theaters on November 25, 2022 and ended up on Netflix 35 days later on December 30, just before a new year began. While there was some pre-release logic to giving it such a lengthy stint in theaters (this was, after all, 2022, when Netflix was a tad cozier with theaters), hindsight makes it baffling that White Noise technically had more time as a theatrical exclusive release than Encanto (among other titles).

1. Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (42 days)

Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu's 2022 movie Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths isn't quite a topic of constant discussion in 2026 pop culture. However, it does have a major historical feat under its belt: the longest pre-2026 theatrical run ever for a Netflix movie in North America. Bardo began its theatrical journey on November 4, 2022, and landed on Netflix's platform on December 16 of that year. Why did a Spanish-language indie with lots of surrealist imagery get such a cushy theatrical run? Iñárritu's previous two movies (Birdman and The Revenant) had proved massive award season juggernauts, with both taking home the Best Director Oscar and the former film also securing a Best Picture trophy. I imagine Netflix thought a longer-than-usual theatrical run could help make Academy voters see Bardo as more akin to The Revenant than The Unforgivable.

Bardo going out into Mexico theaters on October 27 may have also inspired Netflix to give it a similarly early launch in another North American territory. Then there's the biggest reason of all for Bardo's longer theatrical presence: a mid-movie scene sees the title's lead character on a train that passes by a billboard for 2020's Sonic the Hedgehog. Netflix executives knew this collision of the worlds of Storm the Albatross and the Babel director was a monumental occasion that required a grander theatrical run. That's the most logical reason why Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths holds the record for longest Netflix theatrical in a pre-La Bola Negra world.

Two strong lead performances anchor the intriguingly wistful Late Fame

During the day, Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe) works at the post office. Once night falls, he often heads to a local pool hall and shoots the breeze with other people his age. It's a quiet life for someone who, when he was young, published some acclaimed poetry. One random day, twenty-something aspiring artist Meyers (Edmund Donovan) encounters Saxberger and recounts to him how much he loves his 70s book Way Past Go. For the first time in ages, Saxberger is a celebrity and an artist in someone's eyes.

Late Fame, which comes courtesy of director Kent Jones and screenwriter Samy Burch, proceeds to chronicle Saxberger joining up with a group Meyers has started called The Enthusiasm Society. This ramshackle gathering of young New York artists fawn over Saxberger, especially the gregarious and eccentric actor Gloria (Greta Lee). As everyone’s bonds deepen, Saxberger is coerced into writing a new piece for a poetry reading event that The Enthusiasm Society is hosting.

Jones and cinematographer Wyatt Garfield frequently imbue Late Fame with a quiet dreamy visual quality. This is especially true whenever Ed Saxberger is alone, wandering the nighttime wintery streets of New York. The camera darts around people, traffic lights, and even the sky as Dafoe’s wonderful voice intones narrative phrases like “can I still write?” on the soundtrack. Another scene conveying dreamlike qualities comes when Saxberger and the Enthusiasm Society members boisterously stroll down a sidewalk together for the first time. They’re clearly laughing and loudly chatting, yet we hear none of it. Don Fleming's melancholy score instead fills up the audience's ears.

In these and other Late Fame scenes, the movie simulates the idea that Saxberger is recounting the past in his dreams. Only fragments of yesteryear (like images but not sounds) fester, yet the emotions he felt endure. One can imagine this whole situation (some young poet stumbling onto him, lauding him as a hero while he’s spent decades in a mailroom) is both so inexplicable and impactful for this man. Of course it would infiltrate his subconscious. Of course he’d recount it. These striking visual and sonic choices are strong on a surface level. However, these dreamlike Late Fame flourishes also quietly submerge moviegoers into both this man’s psyche and a potent sense of melancholy reminiscence.

Executing that ambiance so effectively is a welcome cherry on top of a movie wielding two can’t-miss tools at its disposal. Something would have to go seriously wrong in Late Fame (like Birth of a Nation/Skyline/Gotti bad) for a movie starring Willem Dafoe and Greta Lee not to be slightly compelling. Luckily, this is a well-crafted feature so both skillful performers flourish like plants deposited in ripe soil. For starters, what a gift Dafoe is as an actor. He's so magnificent at deeply externalized performances, like his work in Nosferatu, The Lighthouse, or the Spider-Man movies.

Yet when he needs to play just a normal, understated guy, he’s also terrific (it’s why his Jesus Christ performance is so stirring in The Last Temptation of Christ). Thus, he’s tremendous playing Ed Saxberger. His subtlest physical traits really communicate how withdrawn this man has become at the start of Late Fame. Watching him slowly grow more comfortable and outspoken around the younger Enthusiasm Society members is quite absorbing in Dafoe’s hands.

This actor gets to play opposite Greta Lee for much of Late Fame, a performer who also excels here. Gloria constantly walks, talks, and even breathes like a leading lady from a 40s movie. She’s got a quick wit, snappy comebacks, and confident physicality that would, of course, captivate an older, more unsure soul like Saxberger. Lee’s replication of a Katharine Hepburn/Barbara Stanwyck persona is remarkably detailed and authentic. She gloriously commits to this outspoken portrayal, which makes Lee’s execution of rawer Gloria aspects extra shattering.

These performances inhabit a movie that happily ensures its plot avoids an especially lazy route. Burch's script (adapted from an Arthur Schnitzler novella of the same name) could've easily generated conflict between the Late Fame characters by devolving into a "kids these days" diatribe. Instead, the feature goes into more specific storytelling territory. That includes partially defining Saxberger’s comfort with these younger artists through how much they remind him of poets he hung out with decades earlier. The Enthusiasm Society members eschew technology, talk about mid-20^th century writers, and even have typewriters prominently displayed in their homes. They’re not vessels for Jones and Burch to lament about how “different” twenty-somethings are now.

Instead, Late Fame problems emerge through incongruity over varying levels of sincerity between characters. Saxberger craves a genuine, lasting connection with other human beings. The Enthusiasm Society, meanwhile, is made up by people defined by simulacra (namely through being rich kids posing as struggling 60s/70s artists). Even Gloria must embrace facades as a survival mechanism. This disparity between Saxberger’s craving for tangible bonds and the facsimiles defining his new friend group proves a compelling source of drama. This element also ensures Late Fame is distinctive compared to other movies about older souls intertwining with communities of young people.

Unfortunately, Jones and Garfield don’t imbue quite as many idiosyncrasies into the third act visually. While Late Fame features a more standard, less dreamlike home stretch, its generally a solidly engaging enterprise getting immense mileage out of two strong lead performances and Samy Burch’s thoughtful writing. Who can argue with a movie where Greta Lee’s so achingly maximalist or Willem Dafoe waxes poetic about old New York buildings? 

The Dog Stars is ruff for all the wrong reasons

The Dog Stars protagonist Hig (Jacob Elordi) endures a challenging existence. Not because of the dystopian future he now navigates every day. Instead, he and audiences must suffer through another shrug-worthy late-period Ridley Scott directorial effort. Alas, the helmer behind The Martian, The Last Duel, and Alien has now delivered another snoozer more reminiscent of Gladiator II and Exodus: Gods and Kings.

Now that a pandemic has wiped out the world, Hig spends his days in tattered Denver, Colorado with his canine pal Jasper flying his yellow plane around, collaborating with gunfire-prone Bangley (Josh Brolin), and fending off violent "roaches," survivors of the apocalypse. Feeling despondent, Hig takes a chance and steers his aircraft towards his dream destination: Grand Junction. Bangley isn’t so sure this location either exists or is hospitable. However, Hig must take a chance and venture out into the world. Along his journey, he encounters and gradually bonds with Cima (Margaret Qualley) and her hostile father, Pops (Guy Pearce).

Hig first encounters these characters when he’s spying on Cima working on her farm. Suddenly, a gun’s cocked. “Put your weapon down!” a voice calls out. This is how Pops and Hig first meet. It’s easy to imagine this interaction playing out effectively visually. The camera would pull back to reveal the shotgun’s barrel but never cut away from this jeopardized character. Eventually, audiences would only get a good look at Pops when the Dog Stars protagonist turns around. This could instill tension (“whose that holding the gun?!?”) while subliminally using the camera to simulate Hig’s perspective.

Instead, Scott and cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt awkwardly cut to a medium shot of Pops right after he begins threatening Hig. The camera doesn’t simulate Hig’s point-of-view nor does its position say something about Pops (like a low-angle shot accentuating his intimidating nature). It’s just the same rudimentary camera angle Dog Stars keeps opting for. Scott’s Gladiator II inability to frame two characters in the same shot persist here. The Dog Stars is a movie full of inert visuals lacking specificity or personality. Even the cuts between scenes are awkward.

In a summer where low-budget movies like Obsession, It Ends, and Color Book have exhibited immense visual flair, the costly tentpole The Dog Stars radiating downright amateurish imagery is insulting. This flaw also provides a barrier between the audience and the characters. Hig, for instance, is suicidal and dreams of crashing his plane into a Telluride mountain. A superior movie would’ve reflected this harrowing desire through evocative imagery. Instead, Elordi just mumbles about this urge in flatly realized conversation sequences.

Similarly shabbily realized is Hig’s sorrow over his deceased wife. The only times audiences see this character, she’s pregnant, sitting in a bedroom, wearing a perfect bathrobe, and draped in billowing curtains. This "dead girlfriend" imagery isn’t just groan-inducingly familiar and a barrier to get invested in these characters. It also deprives The Dog Stars of any chance to establish an idiosyncratic identity. This flaw fails both audiences and the mindsets of the principal Dog Stars players.

The only time this movie truly comes alive is in a third act detour involving Allison Janney as a community leader who dresses like a 50s airline stewardess. The more pronounced creative choices in this Dog Stars segment (including the array of people wearing different period era clothes) is a welcome reprieve from the Temu Last of Us shenanigans otherwise populating the film. Plus, Janney’s kooky work is more specific than Brolin doing a pastiche of his other grizzled “man of the land” characters. This set piece is over way too quickly. However, it at least provides a jolt of life to an otherwise monotonous affair.

When it isn’t boring, The Dog Stars bizarrely falls back on weird, racially uncomfortable hallmarks to define the film’s primary bad guys. The two packs of violent post-apocalypse survivors Hig and Bangley contend with are a cornucopia of troublesome dog-whistles. One group is covered in tattoos (how EEEEVIL), bald, and speaks in an unrecognizable non-English language. The other is a slew of horseback-riding foes clearly evoking indigenous Americans, right down to their face paint and use of tomahawks in battle. The Dog Stars is so bereft of imagination that it’s rehashing dehumanizing indigenous American stereotypes from 50s Westerns.

Naturally, only white men with guns adhering to “traditional” living can “protect” their land and property from these forces. Amusingly, this cringe-inducing plot element exists in a story that still supports vaccines and deferring to medical professionals on diseases. In other words, the racially toxic Dog Stars material may lure some right-wing viewers in, but other core plot elements will repel them. That’s a microcosm of how this dreary affair is a movie for nobody. Action fans will only get three brief “fight” sequences over a 120-minute runtime. Jacob Elordi aficionados surely prefer him in less tedious productions.

Even devotees to grim cinema (like yours truly) will uncover none of the depth or evocative imagery from Come and See or Lynne Ramsay’s various masterpieces here. The Dog Stars frowns heavily, but that’s all its “bleak” atmosphere amounts to. Not even deeply talented performers like Jacob Elordi or Guy Pearce can imbue layers into this slog. Ridley Scott’s autopilot filmmaking instincts are an albatross The Dog Stars never escapes.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and La La Land are lusciously romantic sides of one cinema-savvy coin

Major spoilers for La La Land and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma ahead

Seeing two unrelated movies in close proximity can inspire one to ponder connections between these titles. However, experiencing wildly different pieces of cinema in similar timeframes isn't a guarantee that overlapping qualities will materialize. For example: I saw The Nutcracker and the Four Realms and Suspiria on the same day back-to-back. Oscillating between two radically different aesthetics was fun, but I don't think of those as "ah yes, they're actually the same movie."  Similarly, me seeing Sound of Falling and Crime 101 back-to-back theatrically didn't unfurl some third eye capable of seeing the parallels between Chris Hemsworth's bank-robbing antics and that meditative French movie.

All that pretext is meant to make something clear: I'm not just saying Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and La La Land are kindred spirits because I saw them (or rewatched in the latter film's case) theatrically within the span of four days. I know this very conceit sounds like the set-up to some punchline on a movie nerd Instagram shitposting page.

Yet, stewing on the magic of witnessing director Jane Schoenbrun and Damien Chazelle's majestic visions on the big screen, I began to see that the two movies were like Green Goblin and Spider-Man: "not so different." More binds Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and La La Land beyond both being pop culture pastiches and making me cry multiple times. They're each masterclasses in making  homages to the past while carving out new, unforgettable pieces of visual storytelling. In this modern age of shallow fan-service and rigid regurgitations of yesteryear, titles like Camp Miasma and La La Land are more vital than ever.

"It's conflict and it's compromise, and it's just... it's new every time. It's brand new every night. It's very, very exciting!"

Let's get the obvious parallel between Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and La La Land out of the way: they're both motion pictures sumptuously rooted in older eras of genre cinema. Jane Schoenbrun's Camp Miasma is a full-throated homage to 20th century slasher cinema. La La Land, meanwhile, is a deeply committed pastiche of 50s/60s musical movies, complete with a 2.55:1 aspect ratio emulating (though not exactly emulating) the expansive canvases of CinemaScope musicals like Oklahoma! and 1954's A Star is Born. Both movies clearly know the vocabulary and artists that defined the cinema eras they're obsessed with. La La Land lead Mia's (Emma Stone) bedroom is draped in posters of classic movies. Camp Miasma protagonist Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder), meanwhile, can name the leading ladies of Sleepaway Camp movies as easily as she breathes.

However, neither movie is an exact carbon copy of what inspired it. Mid-20th century musicals and classic slashers are springboards for new visual schemes, deeply specific images, and unique tones. In both cases, that includes distinctly setting these titles in the modern world. La La Land characters tap-dance like they're in Gentleman Prefer Blondes, but they also exist in a decidedly 21st-century ecosystem of financial woes and cell phones. It's like the old-school musical aesthetic reflects the internal hopeful psyche of people like Mia, which is constantly punctured by iPhone ringtones reminding them of modern woes. Meanwhile, Zoom calls, struggles in finding a DVD player, and openness about polyamory firmly set Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma in the 2020s.

The dissonance between Kris finding so much solace in vintage slasher movies and her anxiety over sexual exploration in the here and now is a backbone for Schoenbrun's script. Yesteryear art is cozy. Yesteryear art is familiar. It's hard confronting sexual ennui of the present. Both La La Land and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma fascinatingly collide the past and present. They're not interested in just mechanically recreating what worked in 1977 or 1988 in 2016/2026. Instead, they dive headfirst into contrasts between older styles of storytelling and modern complexities. There's a love for "Another Day of Sun" and the sexual identification that slasher films can provide (among other hallmarks of both genres), as well as raw recognition of the challenges current audiences face on a grueling daily basis.

"All at once you look across a crowded room/To see the way that light attaches to a girl"

Also binding these two wildly disparate titles is a welcome sense of confidence. La La Land and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma are unabashedly colorful films embracing heightened flights of fancy. They each eschew constant senses of "grounded" reality in favor of following visuals that sweep you off your feet and lend tear-inducing insight into their respective luscious romances. For La La Land, this means eschewing the insecurities plaguing so many modern musicals. As Patrick Willems astutely noted in his Letterboxd review of Spirited, "the trope of characters in a musical going 'ugh please stop singing this is embarrassing' when a song starts needs to be punished with jail sentences." That's, unfortunately, a method so many modern movie musicals do. They try sanding down all the "weird" edges off their source material in the hopes of winning over folks who don't like musicals. In the process, they please nobody and exhibit creative cowardice.

La La Land, meanwhile, begins with a bunch of Los Angeles denizens harmonizing "Another Day of Sun" while stuck in highway traffic. From there, La La Land depicts a world where anybody can burst into song at any moment, and people are just seconds away from dancing their hearts out. There's so much love for old-school movie musical magic that Chazelle and company clearly have no patience for self-aware "urm, am I singing now?" quips. Even better, La La Land unblinkingly embraces the dream dance sequences that littered mid-20th century musical movies like Oklahoma! and Singin' in the Rain. 

That iconic Griffith Observatory dance sequence is mesmerizingly beautiful and wouldn't have been possible if La La Land slavishly devoted itself to self-conscious "gritty reality." Instead, it's a wondrous example of what happens when you lean into the heightened possibilities of musical storytelling.

Similar gloriousness involving eschewing reality permeates Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma's third act. Like so many great David Cronenberg movies, Shoenbrun makes Camp Miasma's home stretch a blurring of the lines between dreams and reality. There is no concrete basis for what "real life" is, and Camp Miasma's infinitely better for it. The focus is instead on using slasher movie hallmarks to depict the realization of Kris's sexual fantasies. Schoenbrun's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma finale, like that Griffith Observatory dance sequence amongst the stars, is a fiery rebuke to a moviegoing scene obsessed with "plot holes" and "why did that character not do [x "logical" act]".

Do not fixate on turning movies into math equations. Eschew turning scripts into vessels for expository dialogue "justifying" incoming plot detours. Just embrace overwhelming emotions and grandiose imagery you can't get when looking outside your window. "Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams," Federico Fellini once remarked. La La Land and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma take cinema's intertwining with dreams to create spellbinding deviations from reality. 

"If you get scared, you can just turn it off."

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and La La Land both occupy cinematic realms with typically firm endings. Camp Miasma's slasher films, for instance, typically with one lady (the singular "final girl") surviving all the grisly carnage. Meanwhile, in lesbian-centric art (whether it's films or TV shows), queer women don't get happy endings. Someone has to die. Someone must suddenly go AWOL. Lesbian cinema exceptions do exist (Carol, Saving Face, D.E.B.S., Bottoms, among others), but predominantly, media concerning lesbians refuse to give these characters upbeat conclusions that come naturally to cis-het couples.

Speaking of those traditional conclusions, La La Land is a tribute to Hays Code-era musical movies that almost always defaulted to having the main man and lady riding off into the sunset arm in arm. A key cornerstone of the Hays Code was that "the sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home shall be upheld. Pictures shall not infer that low forms of sex relationship are the accepted or common thing." Thus, musicals had to end with Debbie Reynolds jumping into Gene Kelly's arms, Gordon McRae and Shirley Jones joyfully riding in a wagon together, or the creepy marriage wrapping up Gigi.

Both of these deeply knowledgeable movies know every nook and cranny of their respective genres. Rather than just repeating what's worked in the past, Camp Miasma and La La Land profoundly impact viewers with exciting subversions of how these movies typically conclude.

For Camp Miasma, this means Kris and Billy (not just one of the leading ladies) survive Little Death's rampage. As they walk outside, drenched in blood and hankering for some convenience store snacks, they tenderly hold hands while pink and purple hues litter the sky. For starters, this unabashedly romantic sequence (which even includes the proudly sentimental ditty Donna Lewis's "I Love You Always Forever") is just the kind of "awwwww"-inducing set piece most tragedy-obsessed lesbian productions eschew. For another, this loveliness follows Kris and Billy having sex. Typically, 80s and 90s slasher movies used sex as a precursor to slaughtering people. Enjoying your body made you "evil" and "worthy" of perishing. 

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, though, is all about celebrating, not stigmatizing, sex. Physical intimacy and kinks are roads leading to personal fulfillment rather than the graveyard. Here again, Schoenbrun builds upon vintage slasher movie norms rather than just recycling them. In this case, the evolution of this genre's hallmarks ensures audiences leave the theater with their hearts full and a gooey smile on their faces.

La La Land, meanwhile, ends with Mia and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) failing to lead a happy life together. They actually do break up, go their separate ways (Mia even ends up living in New York City), and only briefly reunite when Mia and her husband stumble into Sebastian's jazz club. While Camp Miasma infused joyous wish-fulfilment romance into a domain often marked solely by tragedy, La La Land brings a dash of realism to the mid-20th-century musicals, which always had the leading man and lady end up together no matter what. However, not all relationships work out. Not every bond is eternal. La La Land commits to that all the way up to its bittersweet final shot, as Sebastian witnesses Mia leaving his club and (presumably) life forever.

With this moving conclusion (which involves a beautiful dream dance sequence where Sebastian and Mia imagine their lives together as a long-term couple), La La Land separates itself from many of the movies it's paying homage to. Damien Chazelle once more reaffirms that this feature is no rerun of An American in Paris, but rather a dazzling evolution of that form. Though they pursue opposite tonal ambitions, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and La La Land each commit to profoundly impactful endings subverting genre expectations. 

"Someone in the crowd could be the one you need to know/The someone who could lift you off the ground"

Something else binding Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and La La Land is how both could inspire lengthy dissertations on what makes them glorious artistic accomplishments. At the same time, though, each film inspires joys in wondrous, immediate pleasures. That includes a core element defining each motion picture: recognition of how soul-rejuvenating it feels to be in love and attracted to someone. Few things in this world are as wonderful as hands tenderly clasping in a darkened movie theater auditorium. Ditto feeling someone you've dreamed about running their fingers across your body. Or sharing previously concealed secrets with another human being. These intimate parts of existence make life so joyous.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and La La Land each use their maximalist visual approaches and vintage cinema aesthetics to vividly render the joys of falling in love or exploring your sexual identities. These features are not about using slasher movie trivia or old-school musical film homages just to flex the geekery of Schoenbrun or Chazelle, respectively. They're tools for probing profoundly intimate material. Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson, soaked in blood, walking hand-in-hand against a beautiful morning, or Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone being tiny dancing dots amongst the stars are the cruxes of these titles. Not just the nods to yesteryear art. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and La La Land are, above all else, masterclasses in cinema-savvy art that's richly human first and foremost.

That's such a welcome contrast to mainstream cinema's current obsession with "paying homage" to the past. Creepy CG renderings of deceased celebrities, rigid recreations of works once lauded for being dynamically unpredictable, endless callbacks eternally calcifying the world in 80s nostalgia...these are the cynical forms of the past dominating modern moviemaking. Such manifestations are all about name-dropping and references, but there's no heart to them nor an urgency to make something new from yesteryear's impactful art. The Flash, Tron: Ares, Deadpool & Wolverine, they're reruns, not cinematic evolutions.

The latter term beautifully applies to Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and La La Land, which share so many beautiful overlapping qualities, including gangbusters musical sequences ("Someone in the Crowd" in La La Land = "A Long December" Little Death slaughter scene in Camp Miasma). Their most important shared trait, though, is using cinema's past to weave odes to romantic connections. These are not hollow movies merely pointing at familiar movie titles. They use vintage musical movie and classic slasher film hallmarks as launchpads for sagas about the transportiveness of love, sex, and intertwining your soul with another human being. 

Both films are cognizant of how that's a messy process, whether it's in romances that don't last eternally or the awkwardness of being upfront about your sex-based hang-ups. Yet the possibility of enduring those awkward events or getting your heart shattered shouldn't prevent anyone from hoping for and pursuing the wondrous moments shared by Mia & Sebastian or Kris & Billy. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and La La Land utilize their deep knowledge of cinema's past to serve those human elements rather than the other way around. To be loved is to be vulnerable is to be alive. This is the truth fueling these modern classics and anyone who dares to keep their heart open.