Thoughts on Ken Russell's The Devils

     At Nitehawk Cinema in Brooklyn, I saw Ken Russell's The Devils, a 1971 historical psychological horror film written and directed by Ken Russell, based in part on the 1952 book The Devils of Loudun by Aldous Huxley and the 1960 play The Devils by John Whiting. The film is based on real events from 17th century France, including the fall of Urbane Grandier, a Catholic priest who was accused of witchcraft, as well as on Sister Jeanne des Anges, who was sexually obsessed with Father Grandier and who inspires the accusations.

    The film begins in 1634 France, following the Huguenot rebellions, Cardinal Richelieu (Christopher Logue) influences King Louis XIII (Graham Armitage) in order to gain more power. He suggests to the king that they should demolish cities through France to prevent Protestant uprisings. The king agrees, but to leave the town of Loudun alone, because he had promised the Governor he would do so. 

    In the town, where Catholics and Huguenots live together in peace, the governor dies, and control of the town is left to Father Urbane Grandier (Oliver Reed), a charismatic priest who the nuns all find sexually irresistible. Grandier knows this, and uses his power and charisma to seduce women and sleep with them, then discarding them afterwards, being dismissive when they come to him to confess their sins of sexual thoughts. He has an affair with the daughter of another priest, but abandons her when she tells him she is pregnant from their encounters.

    There is a plague going on in the town, with many dead and buried in a mass grave, and likely the plague would also be blamed on demonism and witchcraft.

    Sister Jeanne des Anges (Vanessa Redgrave) is a hunchbacked Sister of the Ursuline convent, and is obsessed with Father Grandier and is sexually repressed and neurotic. She masturbates in private, with one of her Sisters looking on in voyeuristic pleasure. The women live in a white stone tower that has small windows to the town, and looks more like a lavatory than a place of worship, keeping them secluded from the outside world.

    Though Father Grandier has been a scoundrel, he does fall in love with Madeleine De Brou (Gemma Jones), and secretly marries her. When Sister Jeanne des Anges finds out about this, she becomes insanely jealous, and when Madeleine returns a book after initially asking to join the convent, Sister Jeanne attacks her through bars and calls her a whore and other sacrilegious names.

    Baron Jean de Laubardemont (Dudley Sutton) rolls into town with orders to demolish the city, and Father Grandier is appalled and calling out the injustice of their actions, and makes him pause his actions so he can go talk to the king about it. A new confessor takes his place, Mignon, and talks to Sister Jeanne, who, out of anger and resentment towards Father Grandier, speaks of his affairs and his marriage, and inadvertently accuses him of witchcraft, which the religious leaders will not only use to destroy Grandier, but to torture the nuns as well.

    This film was long buried and banned for its controversial content of extreme violence (especially with the later torture scenes), nudity, and scenes of sacrilegious acts. It got an X rating upon its release, was banned or heavily censored, and was hard to access for decades, not being available on physical home media or streaming much. In May 2026, Warner Bros. announced that a 4K restoration of the film would be released in theaters, premiering at the Cannes Film Festival. In the U.S., it was re-released with an NC-17 rating (the rating that replaced the X rating in 1990), and was a huge success.

    I had heard of the film's controversy, and was interested in seeing it. I've seen a few of Ken Russell's films, like Whore, Gothic, and Lisztomania, and I really liked how intense this film got, depicting how power corrupts and that conservative religious figures will use Christianity and supposed fear of demons as an excuse to torture and murder innocent people. The Cardinal and his minions are absolutely heartless, doing inhumane acts of torture on people to "exorcise" demons or get confessions out of people, and commit sodomy acts of rape on the nuns, sending them into "religious" frenzy.

    The set design by a young Derek Jarman was fantastic. His designs were inspired by neo-classical artists, as well as the silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc, and Grandier's home is in a winding tower with a pit in the middle for the staircase.

    The acting was fantastic. Oliver Reed had a commanding voice as Father Grandier, and his screams when being tortured made me feel it too in the theater. I loved his line during a show trial: "Call me vain and proud, the greatest sinner ever to walk God's earth, but Satan's boy I could never be, I haven't the humility." I loved how his character went from being full of himself and taking advantage of women, to falling in love with one, and in a great sequence, it shows him in a quiet religious moment of enjoying nature and breaking bread and having serenity, intercut with the insanity and horror going on in the name of "God" back in town.

    Vanessa Redgrave was excellent as Sister Jeanne des Anges. I liked how she could have a bit of a sarcastic humor to her line deliveries, and I felt for her character feeling frustrated, wanting God to remove her hump, and having sexual fantasies about the priest. I liked her line about the real reasons why women would join the order: "Most of the nuns here are noble women who have embraced the monastic life because there was not enough money at home to provide them with dowries. Hahahuh, or they were unmarriagble because ugly or burden to the family. Communities which ought to be furnaces where souls are forever on fire with the love of God are merely dead with the grey ashes of convenience."

    This line from Grandier was very relevant to today: "Every time there is a so-called nationalist revival, it means one thing! Somebody is trying to seize control of the entire country! The significance of our walls is that we are self-governing! Richelieu hates this!"

    I really enjoyed this film. While I felt like it focused too much on the nuns being sexually repressed, I did like how it talked about the corruption of religion and state and using witchcraft trials as an excuse to persecute people, and I liked how over-the-top and big Ken Russell went with this film. I'm glad it got restored and brought back, and I enjoyed seeing it in theaters.

Thoughts on The Only Living Pickpocket in New York

    In Manhattan, I saw The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, a 2026 crime thriller film written and directed by Noah Segan, a producer who has frequently worked with Rian Johnson (Johnson executive produced the film). The film stars John Turturro as Harry, an aging pickpocket and career criminal who lives in the Bronx with his wife, Rosie (Karina Arroyave), who is catatonic and unable to speak, and Harry takes care of her at home. He goes out on the subway and steals watches and wallets and cell phones from people, using sleight of hand tricks from years of experience, and brings the items to a pawn shop run by his friend Ben (Steve Buscemi), who acts as a fence for his stolen goods. Harry doesn't own a cell phone, and is more old-school in his ways, mentally belonging to a long-ago era of New York City. He often bribes and tips people with cash, like his neighbor to check in on Rosie, or a health care aide taking care of Rosie at a local center.

    One night, Harry pickpockets from a young man, Dylan (Will Price), breaking into his 1969-era car and stealing his duffel bag and his wallet with a USB crypto wallet. Harry dumps the bag when he finds a gun in it, but keeps the USB card and shows it to Ben, who suggests that he take it to Frank, a fence in Chinatown who is better with electronics.

    Unbeknownst to Harry, Dylan turns out to be the member of an organized crime family, and being younger and more tech-savvy, identifies Harry from street security cameras, as well as following from a tracker on the USB device. Ben's store has been ransacked, and Ben is alive, but confesses that he gave Harry's address to Dylan. Harry makes it home, and Dylan and his friends are threatening Rosie and telling Harry that he has 6 hours to get the USB card back to him. So now Harry has to retrace his steps, find where the card went since it's not at Frank's anymore, and get it back while knowing that he messed up and targeted the wrong guy.

    Harry's acts as a pickpocket makes it harder for him to make a living, because lost credit cards can be instantly cancellable, and cell phones can be tracked, and people don't carry large amounts of cash on them anymore. He can steal jewelry, but Ben calls one watch "fugazy," an old New York City slang term meaning false or counterfeit, despite that Harry nicked it off of a rich businessman, and Dylan says he doesn't wear his best watches out in public. 

    I really liked this movie. It has a 90s indie movie feel to it, with casting of great New York actors like John Turturro, Steve Buscemi, Giancarlo Esposito as a police detective, and a lot of character actors in smaller roles, like Kelvin Han Yee as Frank. A scene with Turturro and Esposito sitting side by side on the subway together was a fun Do the Right Thing reunion, with their characters as friends instead of enemies. The movie has an old-fashioned feel of people from the outer boroughs having playful jabbings at each other's neighborhoods, like "My daughter is fine. She lives in Queens, but other than that, she's fine," or commenting on how far Harry travels between the Bronx and Brooklyn to get around. 

    Despite that Arroyave has no spoken dialogue, I did like how subtle expressions could be read on her face, like a hint of a smile when Harry puts on the song "Native New Yorker" and is dancing for her in their home as a fun private moment between them.

    I thought that Tatiana Maslany would have a bigger role, but she's only in one scene as Harry's estranged daughter, and she makes the most of her own scene, filling in a lot of exposition over Harry being a negligent father, and showcasing her talented range in a brief moment.

    I think one of the most unbelievable parts of the movie was when Harry uses a working pay phone on the NYC streets, and there aren't any current working pay phones in NYC, many have been removed and replaced by cell phone charging stations, and it made me wonder if the film was a period piece taking place in the 90s or 2000s before I saw a smartphone again.

    I myself am a native Long Islander, and I lived in Manhattan for four years, then lived in Queens for sixteen years, and have now lived in Jersey City for three years. So while I have never been a native New Yorker, I still have always felt connected to the city and New York culture, and my family had roots in Brooklyn and Queens before moving to Long Island. So it felt like I got this movie, and connected well to the characters and the aspects of the less popular versions of New York City shown in the film, and it felt real and personal and well-worn.

Thoughts on You Can See Everything

   In Manhattan, I went to the Quad Cinema to see You Can See Everything, a 2026 meta-documentary directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim. The film focuses on Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of a now-defunct health technology company Theranos, who is currently serving an 11-year federal prison sentence for defrauding investors. 

    The film's first third focuses on her in a beachside rental cabin in San Diego with her partner, Billy Evans, and their two children, a baby and a toddler, as absurdist comedian Nathan Fielder and documentary filmmaker Lance Oppenheim document the month before she is set to begin her prison sentence. Holmes and Evans had invited the entertainment company A24 to document their lives in this period, and they sent Fielder and Oppenheim to capture footage. Fielder, known for doing high-concept prank comedy in his shows The Rehearsal and Nathan For You, has a persona that mixes being awkward with deadpan humor, and is quiet but asks direct questions to Elizabeth and Billy, trying to understand them and break through Elizabeth's seemingly pleasant demeanor, with her big, unblinking eye stare and smile that looks like a smirk. Elizabeth denies that she lied about anything, that her device that she claimed could diagnose many diseases from a single drop of blood could work despite proof that it did not, and claims she isn't deceiving Nathan, who is polite but skeptical.

    Billy, meanwhile, is protective of Elizabeth, doesn't trust the cameras or Nathan, and is more tense and shifty-eyed, often interrupting when Nathan's interviews with Elizabeth seemingly get too much like an interrogation or cracking through her facade. When Nathan asks him how he met Elizabeth, he said he met her at a party, figured out within an hour who she was because of her notoriety, and still pursued a relationship with her. Nathan asks Billy how he could be sure that she wasn't scamming him, and he goes "What would she get out of me?" Nathan goes, "Well, your family is rich." Billy: "Well, there are different levels of wealth . . ." and evades answering further before excusing himself from the conversation.

    Elizabeth is a very literal person, and seemingly doesn't understand how the way her mind perceives things isn't the way others do. Nathan explains to her that when she told investors that her device "can" work, she meant it more in the realm of possibility, whereas her investors heard it as meaning that it was currently able to work. Nathan tries to explain this further to her by showing her the classic Abbott & Costello routine "Who's on First," where the joke is about a baseball player named Who, leading to much confusion. Elizabeth finds it amusing, but when Nathan asks her what was funny about it, and then asks her what the baseball player's name on first was, she doesn't know, and doesn't get the joke. 

    There's a moment where Elizabeth is whisking eggs in a bowl, and Billy looks annoyed and walks over and takes the bowl, and starts whisking them faster, in a moment of passive-aggressive control. Nathan asks him why he did that, and Elizabeth explains that he doesn't think she whisks them well enough, and it's this awkward and uncomfortable moment of Billy being this emotionally abusive and controlling partner, that the film sheds more light on later.

    The film not only questions Elizabeth and Billy, but Nathan himself, as he can't understand Elizabeth, while seemingly getting too close to her. He lives in a guest room during the production, he goes out swimming in the ocean with Elizabeth, playing around, and there are several moments where it looks like there is romantic tension between Nathan and Elizabeth. He is questioned on this later in the film by another person, wondering if he is cutting out any footage or recording of his talks with Elizabeth that makes her look more guilty, because he may be protecting her, and he doesn't have an answer for this.

    There is a 2022 Hulu miniseries based on Elizabeth's story, The Dropout, starring Amanda Seyfried as her, and Nathan shows it to Elizabeth and Billy, and Elizabeth can barely watch it, seeing it more as fiction than her real life, including a quote from the film where Seyfried as Elizabeth says she created a character to become, which Elizabeth denies ever saying to a New York Times journalist.

    The film sets this like a drama, with horror movie music and slow camera push-in zooms on people, but it also has comedic breaks with the editing, like Nathan tapping on the hardness of his guest bed because it doesn't have a mattress on it, or him retorting back to Billy, "You don't know what's in my head."

    After Elizabeth goes to prison, the film continues on for 90 minutes, with more about Billy, questioning his controlling relationship with Elizabeth, as well as more revelations, and the documentary filmmakers questioning their own unrecorded moments with Billy and Elizabeth, and trying to piece things together to understand the whole story. It gets more meta as it goes on, with fact and fiction bouncing back and forth, and it is really inviting and strange and interesting to watch.

    This is a standout film, and came as a surprise announcement, premiering at the Telluride Film Festival before opening in limited release. I really liked it a lot, and found it fascinating.

Thoughts on Who Killed Teddy Bear?

    On Criterion, I watched Who Killed Teddy Bear?, a 1965 crime thriller directed by Joseph Cates and co-written by comic book writer Arnold Drake and Leon Tokatyan. The film stars Juliet Prowse as Norah Dain, a nightclub DJ and aspiring actress who lives in Manhattan, and keeps getting obscene phone calls from a creepy guy claiming to be watching her. She is disgusted and calls him out for being a pervert. She finds a decapitated teddy bear in her apartment, and calls the cops. The police detective, Lt. Dave Madden (Jan Murray) investigates her case, and takes a personal interest in Norah. His wife was raped and murdered, and he openly listens to audio recordings of his interviews with Norah and other women talking about obscene phone callers, with his ten-year old daughter in bed listening to the recordings. He is a red herring, as his suspicious behavior makes Norah uncomfortable and worrying that he may be the caller, but he isn't.

    The reveal of the caller happens a little earlier than I would've liked, but I still found the film interesting as a depiction of Times Square as a sleazy place in the mid-1960s. Norah works as a DJ at a club, where there are creative camera angles from below of people dancing and doing shimmys and hip twists and very 1960s dance moves. 

    The movie explores a lot of mature themes like voyeurism, pornography, incest, and lesbianism, and feels more like a B-movie getting out from under the censorship of the Hayes Code.

    I liked Juliet Prowse's performance as Norah, where the film gives her agency as a woman who doesn't want the obscene phone calls to stop her from living her life as a DJ and actress, to be an independent young woman in New York City. Prowse's performance made her feel more like a person and less like a movie stock character.

    Sal Mineo was great in a supporting role as Lawrence, a waiter at the club who lives with his sister, Edie (Margot Bennett), who is 19 but talks like a child due to a brain injury from a childhood accident. Lawrence struggles with taking care of his sister and dealing with his own traumatic issues, and Mineo gave a great performance as a guy who focuses on making himself look fit and handsome on the outside, but is wrestling demons with his mental health on the inside.

    Elaine Stritch was fun in a supporting role as Marian, a manager at the club where Norah works, and she cares about Norah's safety as a young woman being stalked. There's a heartbreaking scene where Marian is trying to comfort Norah, but Norah mistakes it as Marian making a lesbian pass at her, and is horrified. Marian doesn't fully understand why Norah is angry, but is annoyed that she misinterpreted her act of friendship for something she found devious. It's a great scene that Stritch played excellently.

    I really liked this weird, lurid little movie, and the b/w cinematography by Joseph C. Brun was gorgeous.

Thoughts on When a Stranger Calls Back

    On Criterion, I watched When a Stranger Calls Back, a 1993 made-for-TV psychological horror film written and directed by Fred Walton, and is a sequel to the 1979 horror film When a Stranger Calls. This film aired on Showtime, and starred "scream queen" Jill Schoelen as a teenager named Julia, who comes over to babysit for a family, and while the kids are asleep, she is doing her homework in the living room, and a mysterious man knocks on the door, asking to come in to use the phone because his car has broken down. She doesn't want to let the man in, and offers to make the call herself, but when she tries to call, the phone lines are down. She doesn't want to let the man know that, so she lies and says she called the auto club. The man initially walks away, but then keeps showing up throughout the evening, asking for help, even as Julia is getting scared and telling him to leave her alone. He taunts her and says that he saw someone upstairs and that she isn't alone, and she goes to the kids' room and sees they aren't there. She comes downstairs and there is an intruder there, and she screams and runs out, into the arms of the children's father, just as the parents have come home.

Five years have passed, and Julia is now a college student. The children were never found again, and she has been through psychological torment for years. She has bolts on her apartment door, and lately, strange things have been happening to her in her home, where she comes home and sees things have been moved, or a window is open, or other clues that the children's abductor may be stalking her. Jill Johnson (Carol Kane), the heroine of When a Stranger Calls, is working as a counselor at Julia's college, and offers to help her, as the police have been dismissive of Julia's worries and thinking she's imagining things. Jill has been through this trauma herself, where the children she was watching were killed, and she is understanding of Julia's predicament, telling the cops, "I'd be willing to bet that her apartment is pretty bare, not cluttered. You would know if a book had been moved." She contacts the now-retired detective John Clifford (Charles Durning, also reprising his role from the original movie) to investigate the stalking and home invasions, going over Julia's apartment and figuring out who the stalker is. Jill also advises Julia to get a gun to protect herself, and offers her space to live in her loft for safety.

    

    I really liked this film a lot. I haven't seen the original movie, so I can't compare it, but this stood on its own, with the first thirty minutes being Julia terrorized by the intruder outside, and building a lot of suspense and uncomfortable dread, as she can't use the phone, doesn't want to open the door to a stranger, and is trying to sound calm and composed on the other side of the door. It worked really well on its own as a horror story.

    

    I liked how the film was about the police's inactivity to believe a young woman was being stalked, thinking she's just a paranoid college student, and how Jill was advocating for self-defense (she is shown teaching a self-defense class and advising the women to fight for their lives even if they don't believe in violence), and how John seemed to be the only person with police experience caring about Julia's case and believing her.

    I've always liked Carol Kane for her eccentric charm and talent as an actress, and I really liked Jill Schoelen in the 1991 horror B-movie Popcorn, so I watched this for both of them, and am happy I checked this out, this was better than I had expected.

Thoughts on By Design

     On Tubi, I watched By Design, a 2025 absurdist, body-swap comedy written and directed by Amanda Kramer. The film has an artsy, avant-garde feel to it, with sequences of a group of dancers representing the emotions in a character's mind, as well as the characters speaking in a very clipped, overly proper way that is intentionally stage-y. 

    Juliette Lewis plays Camille, a depressed woman who is lonely and feels unappreciated. She has weekly lunches with her friends, Lisa (Samantha Mathis) and Irene (Robin Tunney), who have more money than her, who complain to her about their problems because Camille is a good listener. Camille gives advice about not envying other women, saying that if aliens came to Earth, they wouldn't see any different between the women, and to appreciate what they have. She repeats the old adage of jealously being "drinking poison while waiting for the other person to die." Despite that Camille is a good friend, she feels depressed and empty, and wants to be loved.

    The women go into a furniture showroom store, where they look at assorted chairs that are centered in the room, until Camille comes across a chair that just speaks to her in an emotional way. She wants the chair, but the saleswoman is cagey on the price, assuming that Camille can't afford it, going, "We don't do installments." Camille comes back the next time (budgeting with her checkbook to skip some lunches with her friends to afford the chair), but the chair has already been sold. Camille is insistent on touching the chair, even as the saleswoman is telling her to accept that it's not hers and to leave. Camille sits on it anyway, and in a dance sequence in her mind, the chair and Camille have swapped bodies. Camille's body slides off the chair, and while she is breathing, she cannot move or speak. Camille's spirit is now in the chair, and her spirit makes the chair more mesmerizing and attractive to others.

    The chair is bought by Marta (Alisa Tores), a wealthy woman who bought it for her friend, a jazz pianist named Olivier (Mamoudou Athie), who is immediately attracted to the chair, and he also pictures dance sequences in his head when he is falling in love with the chair. He is so in love with the chair that he becomes very possessive of it, bringing it to a dinner party instead of sitting in another chair at the table, and having to be pried off of it when others want to sit in the chair too.

    Meanwhile, Camille has been laying on her mattress on the floor in her bedroom, unable to move or communicate, and her friends and her mother (Betty Buckley), and they continue to pour out their emotions and problems to Camille, still seeing her as a good listener and taking advantage of her. Only later when they do realize that she can't speak or move do they realize something is wrong, and make the connection with the chair to try to make things right away.

    The film is narrated by Melanie Griffith, and she has this sweet, soft voice that makes the film feel more like a dark fairy tale, about a woman who wanted to be appreciated, but instead was more loved as an object than as a person. I liked that the film cast the friends with Gen-X actresses who are all in their fifties, and who look more natural and aged and don't have a Hollywood look to them, that made their characters feel more real to me. 

    Juliette Lewis was really good in a physical role where she is often limp and being propped around, while still conveying sadness and emptiness on her face. There is a darkly funny sequence where a prowler (Clifton Collins, Jr.) breaks into her home and drags her out onto the balcony, threatening to rape her or kill her, but is disappointed that she isn't fighting back, and instead starts crying about his ex and unloading his problems onto her as everyone else has done.

    Mamoudou Athie has a very graceful and quiet quality to his acting that I've enjoyed since I saw him in Archive 81 and Unicorn Store, and he really gets into the dance sequences and using his body as an instrument of pleasure and ecstasy. 

    I liked how this film felt more like a weird art piece about women being objectified, mixing in the dance sequences with the narrative scenes, and it felt really interesting and unusual to watch.

Thoughts on Emily the Criminal

     On Tubi, I watched Emily the Criminal, a 2022 crime thriller written and directed by John Patton Ford. The film stars Aubrey Plaza, as Emily, a young woman who has $70,000 of student debt and is working menial jobs in the gig economy to get by in Los Angeles. She is having trouble getting a steady job because of her past felony conviction for assault, as well as a DUI arrest, and is stuck in dire financial straits.

    A coworker connects her to a "dummy shopper" service that turns out to be part of a credit card fraud ring, where she can earn $200 in an hour if she buys a flat screen TV with stolen credit card numbers and a fake I.D. She does it and wants to do more, so one of the organizers, Youcef (Theo Rossi), sends her out to buy a car, with the same credit card scam. However, when she is about to drive away with the car, the dealer discovers the scam, and tries to drag her out of the car, assaulting her, but she maces him with pepper spray, and drives off, demanding the $2000 owed to her by Youcef for pulling off this dangerous scam.

    Emily gets more into the criminal underworld, even as she is hoping that her friend Liz (Megalyn Echikunwoke) hooks her up with a job at the advertising agency she works for. Emily's criminal background, quick temper to fight, and tenacity makes her quickly adept at moving products through scams, though it puts her at more risk for violence and retaliation from others. All she wants is to pay off her student debt, do her painting, and have a steady, decent job, and she sees the crime as a temporary means to an end.

    I had seen this movie before, and really liked it. Aubrey Plaza is great at playing these dark characters who are morally gray, who are relatable even if their actions are questionable, and depicting how far someone who is in deep debt would go to pay off their loans, while also dealing with blocks in their career from past criminal records. She feels realistic as someone who would work in the gig economy to get by, while being angry at the system that is setting her up to fail.

    Theo Rossi as Youcef is really great in this film as well. He plays Youcef initially as a streetwise scammer, but is revealed more to be a funny and likable person who also has turned to a life of crime to survive. His dreams are to own an apartment and be financially stable, having immigrated from Lebanon with his family. A romance sparks between him and Emily, which makes his cousin Khalil (Jonathan Avigdori) more suspicious of Emily getting too involved with the fraud ring and jeopardizing their anonymity as scammers.

    This was an interesting little crime thriller to watch, and I'm happy I revisited it.

Thoughts on Desperate Teenage Lovedolls and Lovedolls Superstar

    On Criterion, I watched Desperate Teenage Lovedolls, a 1984 underground film directed by David Markey, shot on super-8 film, that focus on a fictional all-female punk rock band called the Love Dolls, made up of teenage runaways who are trying to survive on the streets of Los Angeles. Kitty Carryall (Jennifer Schwartz) and Bunny Tremelo (Hilary Rubens) break out of their homes and form a band together, finding a drummer, Patch Kelly (Janet Housden), and fight rival gangs and bands. A manager named Johnny Tremaine (played by then-teenage Steven McDonald, of the band Redd Kross) offers to take them under his wing, but uses them for sex and to make money off of them. The Love Dolls want to get revenge on those who have hurt them, and make it as a huge rock band.

    The movie has a lo-fi vibe to it, with awkward and bad acting, though it's intentionally hilarious at times, like how one of their moms is clearly played by a young man in drag playing up a "nagging old lady" stereotype that is too ridiculous to take seriously. Or when Bunny tells Kitty that Johnny Tremaine assaulted her, going, "Johnny raped me," and Kitty blows right past that with, "Don't worry, we'll make it to the top. We'll show them that we're no tramps, we're real rock stars." "OK!" It was so silly that I thought it had to be intentionally dumb.

    The movie is short at 49 minutes, and has a great soundtrack of 80s punk rock like Black Flag, White Flag, the Bags, as well as several songs by Redd Kross, as McDonald and his brother Jeff act in the film. This movie has a very genuine feel to it, of being a part of the Los Angeles punk rock subculture of the 1980s, and its roughness makes it feel more charming.

    The sequel, Lovedolls Superstar, came out in 1986, and was also directed by David Markey, and is longer at 81 minutes. Following the events of the first movie, with a recap at the beginning like a TV episode, the band reunites after having fallen on hard times, like Kitty sleeping in the gutter, and Patch has become the lead of an acid-damaged religious cult. Bunny is replaced by Alexandria (Kim Pilkington), a sex worker on the streets of Sunset Boulevard, and Johnny's twin brother Rainbow Tremaine (also played by Steven McDonald) comes out of his hippie desert life to look for his brother, who met an ill fate in the last movie.

    The movie gets even more bonkers than the first one, with newcomers vowing to kill to avenge their loved ones, and an obsessed Lovedolls fan (Jeff McDonald) becoming an assassin to target a Bruce Springsteen impersonator. There are guest appearances from Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys, Vicki Peterson of The Bangles, and Sky Saxon of The Seeds. There's clearly more money in the budget for the soundtrack, with music by Sonic Youth, the Dead Kennedys, the Meat Puppets, as well as Redd Kross and Black Flag returning. And there's a lot of fun humor in the band being openly antagonistic towards a feminist talk show host, or commanding their fans to kill and thinking they're stupid.

    Despite that it's a short movie, it feels like it could have been cut down even more, as it often feels like padding for a movie with a slightly bigger budget, and even not by much. It can be messy to watch, but like the first one, it has the same kind of DIY heart and energy that I liked. And although Steven McDonald is a bassist and not an actor, he was a lot of fun to watch in both movies as the cock-rock sexist manager and the blissed-out desert hippie.

    David Markey is a filmmaker and musician, and his work has documented the Southern California punk scene of the 1980s, and he has worked with many of the bands featured in these movies.

    I watched these movies on Criterion as part of their programming of movies featuring all-female rock bands, and this was cool to come across these underground cult hits depicting the 80s L.A. punk underground culture.

Thoughts on Only Yesterday

     On HBO Max, I watched Only Yesterday, a 1991 Japanese anime drama written and directed by Isao Takahata, based on the 1982 manga Omoide Poro Poro by Hotaru Okamoto and Yuko Tone. The version I watched had a 2016 English dubbing cast of Daisy Ridley, Dev Patel, Alison Hernandez, Laura Bailey, and Ashley Eckstein. The film jumps back and forth between the past and present of Taeko Okajima (the adult version voiced by Daisy Ridley, the child version voiced by Alison Fernandez), a 27-year old unmarried office worker who lives in Tokyo in 1983, and takes a summer trip to the countryside to work on picking safflowers for the harvest season, and reminisce on how much she loved visiting the countryside as a ten-year old child in 1966.

    Adult Taeko is nagged at by her family for being single at 27, saying she can't afford to be picky, and they don't understand why she prefers the rural countryside, or going there to do farm work as a vacation. On the sleeper train there, she reminisces about when she was a child, and often feeling picked on by her family for not being good at math or for being outspoken, with her mother admonishing her behavior and her older sisters mocking her. Her mother would scold her for not eating all of her lunch, saying the food was going to go to waste, and not listen when Taeko would say she doesn't like onions. At school, the lunch rules would allow children to leave only one thing on their plate, which leads to a mock debate on whether that was wasteful of food. As those scenes take place in 1960s Japan, with the parents having survived WWII, a lot of postwar anxiety about struggle and hunger and not being wasteful would carry over into their parenting, and carrying generational trauma onto their children.

    Taeko at school would struggle with embarrassment over crushes, and when the girls would talk about puberty with breasts and periods, and how one girl was an "early developer," and her mom wrote her a note to skip P.E. when she was on her period, which carries over as a rumor that any girl who skips P.E. is on her period, leading to Taeko feeling angry when she has a cold and has to sit on the sidelines and be mocked by boys for supposedly having her period and "cooties."

    She was much happier as a child when she got to go to the hot springs in the countryside, bathing and feeling like she was almost drowning, both literally and in a state of contentment, like she was where she belonged. Her adult self holds a lot of nostalgia for her time in the countryside, while feeling like she is romanticizing too much as an adult and not thinking about the downsides of farming, like droughts or bad seasons.

    When Adult Taeko arrives at the country town, Toshio (Dev Patel), the second cousin of her brother in-law, is there to greet her, and she barely knows him. But they connect and bond over their interests in organic farming and the countryside, and later, he talks about how the rural landscape was built by farmers as a collaboration with nature, instead of nature building itself, as outsiders would see it as, pointing out the irrigation ditches and gardens that people built. It's a wonderful way to see it as humans and nature working together to support one another, and it brings Taeko and Toshio closer together, even as she knows her time in the countryside will be brief before she returns to her city life.

    I really loved this film. It's a mix of being very sweet in parts, like with crushes and being excited as a kid to perform songs and watch children's TV shows, while also being honest about the more hurtful parts of being misunderstood as a child and being talked down to, holding onto small moments as core memories.. The film switches between the different ages of Taeko in a way to tie them together, for her to understand her past and figure out what she wants in life, and it culminates in a spectacular finale.

Thoughts on Resident Evil (2026)

    In Manhattan, I went to see Resident Evil, a 2026 horror film directed by Zach Cregger and co-written by Cregger and Shay Hatten, based on the Resident Evil video game franchise. The film stars Austin Abrams as Bryan, a medical courier who is fighting infected monsters while trying to deliver a last-minute package to a hospital in Raccoon City, the fictional city where the Resident Evil stories take place. He is trying to get the package there in under an hour, but he is facing icy and snowy conditions on the road, but constantly faces obstacles with the monsters, when he just wants to get home to his girlfriend Michelle to talk about her being newly pregnant.

    The film begins with Bryan as a medical courier in a hospital delivering an organ in a cooler bag while talking on the phone to his girlfriend Michelle (voiced by Sara Paxton), who found out she's pregnant, and him being unsure on how to talk about it, saying it could be a false positive, and things like that. He delivers the organ, and a doctor immediately offers him twice the pay to go to Raccoon City to deliver another item. Despite that Bryan promised his girlfriend that he'd be home in twenty minutes, he takes the job for the extra cash, and makes his way driving through icy streets, and accidentally hits a woman on the road. He goes out to find her, and she's frozen up and bloody. He brings her into his car, and the mayhem starts from there, with her being an infected monster, killing a cop who had pulled him over and offered to escort him to the hospital, and Bryan, who has only ever shot guns in video games and not in real life, is freaked out and inept. He can't shoot well, he accidentally electrifies himself when he jumps an electric fence to escape her, and throughout the night and on his way to the hospital, he encounters many monsters, with tentacles coming out of their bodies to grab him and mutate with him.

    It's a really fun horror movie, that has an atmospheric, creepy vibe to it, with the dark snowy night, that evokes the style of the game without using any stories from it. Austin Abrams, from Cregger's previous film Weapons, as well of Euphoria fame, is a really likable, relatable lead in it. As Bryan, he is a normal person working a gig job, who messes up with his girlfriend when he is trying to be supportive but sounds indecisive (when she asks him what he thinks of the pregnancy, he goes "It's your body, your choice," thinking that's the feminist boyfriend answer she wants to hear, but it doesn't help her); finds that shooting a gun is much harder in real life, like when he can't shoot padlocks off of chains or has trouble assembling a gun (as he says to Paul Walter Hauser's scientist character, "I'm not a gun guy."); and accidentally shoots the engine of his own car when trying to defend himself from the first monster. The humor helps the film feel more engaging in a "you wouldn't be able to survive this either" kind of way, like with Bryan's constant cursing or his muttering to himself anytime he's annoyed by somebody lecturing him.

    Without getting too much into spoilers, there is a scene where Bryan is at a dire moment after surviving a lot of monster attacks, and he leaves a voicemail message for his girlfriend, not being certain if he will further survive. It’s a really good scene, and it reminded me a lot of a scene from the 1986 horror comedy Night of the Creeps, where alien slugs get into people’s brains and kill them. The main leads are two male best friends, and in the scene, one of them is listening to a message his friend left him after he got attacked, as a goodbye message and describing what the slugs feel like inside of him, and it’s a really sad and heartbreaking scene. I don’t know if Zach Cregger got any inspiration from this scene, but it came to my mind while watching Resident Evil. 

   There's an excellent elevator sequence late in the film, a sequence with Bryan screaming and running down a city street as people fall from buildings onto parked cars, and a POV shot modeled after first-person shooter games like Resident Evil, Doom, and Duke Nukem. It really does well in the survival horror structure, and makes the film more immersive to watch. I did feel that the film ended abruptly, when it felt like it could have still gone on a few minutes more, so that felt a little jarring as a viewer. But overall, it's a really good adaptation of the video game, and Cregger, an alum of the 2000s comedy sketch show The Whitest Kids You Know, has excelled in the last few years as a horror film director with this, Barbarian, and 2025's Oscar-winning Weapons. I recommend this film for fans of body horror and survival horror.

Thoughts on The Little Sister

   On Criterion, I watched The Little Sister, a 2025 French coming-of-age drama written and directed by Hasfia Herzi, adapted from Fatima Daas' autobiographical novel The Last One. The film stars Nadia Melliti in her debut screen acting role as Fatima, a 17-year old French-Algerian girl living with her family in Paris, and is the youngest of three daughters. She is athletic and plays soccer, and her sisters chastise her for not helping out more with cooking. She goes to university, and is struggling with exploring her sexuality as a lesbian, keeping it a secret from her family and meeting women at clubs and through dating apps, using fake names and backstories, like saying she has seven brothers. Her peers know she's queer, though she denies it and even joins in on the mocking of a gay student, despite him calling her out for being a lesbian afterwards.

    She has asthma, and her pulmonologist has her attend a seminar to learn how to improve her breathing, and she meets the assistant to the doctor, Ji-Na (Park Ji-Min), who is French-Korean, and is also secretly queer. She and Fatima can sense that the other is a lesbian, and they begin a romance, bonding over being the children of immigrant parents who learned French as a second language, and being queer women. Their romance comes to an abrupt end when Ji-Na reveals she struggles with severe depression, and pulls away from Fatima out of shame and guilt, leaving Fatima to feel lost and confused, and exploring more femme queer communities to understand herself better. She also has trouble reconciling her Muslim faith with her lesbian identity, and visiting an imam to ask advice about a "friend" only leaves her with feeling shamed for being homosexual.

    I really liked this movie. It's an interesting drama that focuses on a Muslim queer girl figuring out her identity, and portraying more of the LGBTQ culture of Paris, with queer dance clubs and pride marches and chants for trans rights. Melliti gives a very sensitive performance as the quiet yet headstrong Fatima, who is blunt when she needs to be while clearly apprehensive in early dates with women, and Park gives an introspective performance as Ji-Na, struggling with feeling like an outsider because of her sexuality, race, and mental health issues. There's a very personal and intimate feel to this movie which I got into, being inside of this world of French queer life. I agree with the consensus that this film is restrained yet powerful.

Thoughts on Hope

     At the Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn, I saw Hope, a 2026 South Korean science fiction action film written and directed by Na Hong-jin. The film centers on the citizens of a small village named Hope Harbor, which is close to the border of North Korea, or the DMZ, who are being attacked by mysterious creatures and fighting back with lots of ammunition.

    The film focuses on a few characters as they are fighting against the creatures: Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min), the police chief, who is racing through the town trying to figure out what's going on; Ko Sung-ki (Zo In-sung), one of a group of hunters who are being hunted themselves in the mountains; and Im Sung-ae (Jung Ho-yeon), a rookie cop who is more capable than other cops and fires back at the creatures. As people are discovering the destruction of the town and the rotting corpses of cows, they initially think a tiger from the mountains killed the cows before finding the town's wreckage and realizing it's something much bigger, before seeing cars being thrown airborne and crushing people from a distance.

    The movie works well because it combines a lot of action and humor, and running gags like Ko Bum-seok being shocked at the heavy artillery that the elderly residents have and being like "How did you get all of this?" and they go, "That's not important right now." Or an inept younger guy is impressed at Ko Sung-ki's horseback riding skills during a chase sequence and is like, "How does he know how to ride so well?" An elderly local, Mr. Hae-sul (Im Hyun-sik) tells a story about hiding from the monsters while trying to keep from pooping in a bush and holding it in so hard ("the hardest I've ever clenched") that even Im Sung-ae laughs when she is trying to take his testimony because it's so bittersweet and funny.

    The action sequences are really fantastic, especially a couple of intense chase sequences that combine a lot of impressive stunt work with cars, horses, and people, and none that I want to spoil right now.

    The downside to the film is the CGI of the creatures, especially when there is a lot of build-up to the first one. The design looks good, but once they move more, they look more pasted into the film, and it's hard to believe them as part of the story when they aren't blended in as well. Some later CGI characters look okay, it's just a flaw of the film, as well as the last few minutes, that adds in some lore about the creatures that feels way too late to add at the end of a two hour and forty minute movie.

    I enjoyed this film as a funny monster movie with a variety of likable characters to root for, and felt it stood out well for its stunt work and character development.