Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA   ***1/2

Jane Schoenbrun

2026

IDEA:  Tasked with rebooting the once-popular "Camp Miasma" horror franchise, a queer filmmaker visits the reclusive former actress who played the final girl in the original film.

“Meaning, and where it is made, does not have a discrete origin in either spectators’ bodies or cinematic representation but emerges in their conjunction.” — Vivian Sobchack

“An unraveling or breaking of the boundaries of the spectator is the fundamental condition of cinematic pleasure.” — Steven Shaviro

“We are not the same viewer before, during or after the horror film event.” — Anna Powell

BLURB:  Do we make movies or do movies make us? A version of this question is posed by Hannah Einbinder’s Kris in a moment of apparent delirium, but any true cinephile knows the answer is an emphatic “Yes.” Engaging deeply with psychoanalytic and phenomenological theories of film spectatorship, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a profound expression of how cinema shapes subjectivity, and how we encounter ourselves through that process. Kris already has some understanding of this when she goes to visit Billy Presley (a breathtakingly seductive, eccentric Gillian Anderson), the actress who helped awaken her to her sexuality as a girl watching “Camp Miasma.” A schlocky, outdated slasher for most, “Camp Miasma” is a primal scene for Kris, and it’s only gradually she learns how intimately she wants to return to it, not to analyze and remake it as an academic but to surrender herself completely to the carnal desires and sensations it activated within her. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma charts this shift of consciousness as both a queer trans-coded narrative and a metaphor for how and why we watch movies. We seek the thrill, especially but not exclusively in horror films, of vicariously transgressing our physical limits, of being voyeur and object, of letting our bodies be captured by images and sounds that reorient our perception. When the cinephilia is particularly intense, as it is for Kris, the desire approaches a death drive: to be devoured by the thing you love. In stark contrast to Jane Schoenbrun’s first two features, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma turns not on a dysphoric frustration with the body in relation to media but with its liberation, via the consummation of an impossible cinematic fantasy of immersion. Reflecting the Kris-Billy dyad, the film potently blends the cerebral and the sensual, irreverent pastiche and emotionally sincere manifesto, speaking the language of High Art while validating the Low. Its final accomplishment might be that it provokes the same intoxicating passion for movies that so palpably powered its own creation. 

Blue Film

BLUE FILM   ***

Elliot Tuttle

2025

IDEA:  When a camboy is invited to an in-person meeting with an elder fan, he discovers a disturbing past connection with the man.

*LIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD*

BLURB:  Nominally, Blue Film is an attention-grabbing provocation: a taboo subject under a euphemistic sign. The film appears to be delivering on its title in the first few minutes, a webcam video of Kieron Moore’s “Aaron Eagle” strutting his stuff for an unseen online clientele, before our expectations are subverted in short order. This is just about the maximum amount of skin bared in the whole movie; the rest will be preoccupied with philosophical conversation in a manner far more akin to My Dinner with André than any porno. Instead of recreating an aesthetics of exploitation — which he only rarely hints at through some questionable format changes to digital video — Tuttle uses a charged scenario to rigorously explore morality, loneliness, power, aging, regret, and the potential for atonement. What is transgressive here stems simply from the premise, the mere suggestion that a pedophile is a human being with complex issues seriously worth looking at rather than some elusive cosmic evil to dismiss. Blue Film challenges the limits of our empathy by presenting a (former) pedophile, Hank, who is erudite, caring, and repentant. Reed Birney weaponizes a tender, avuncular sagacity to make this figure at once unnerving and exceptionally rational, so self-aware and morally alert he can eloquently unpack his psychology without denying his heinous actions. Moore is a terrifically receptive screen partner, his braggadocio slipping before our eyes to reveal another kind of wounded, lonely man who wants nothing more than to be wanted, regardless of who it is wanting him. His own hostile tendencies show how desire, and insecurity, can become warped into abhorrent impulse. Besides some scenes bathed in the titular color, Tuttle keeps his visual palette spare, and chaste; the body parts he’s most drawn to are faces, through which he excavates a whirlwind of emotions over a night neither Aaron nor Hank will be able to forget.

Barrio Triste

BARRIO TRISTE   ***

Stillz

2025

IDEA:  Four poor adolescent boys in Medellín, Colombia run off with a news reporter's camera and spontaneously document their adventures.

BLURB:  Barrio Triste is effectively (and affectively) designed like a rediscovered diary transmission from the past, sent by a group of downtrodden teenagers as visual proof of their existence against a society that renders them lost, invisible. Call it Los Olvidados. The film’s low-resolution video format and first-person perspective revive the once-ubiquitous found-footage subgenre, giving agency to characters who, in the opening minutes, co-opt Stillz’s camera (a TV news camera in the diegesis) to record their lives. Stillz takes full advantage of the aesthetic possibilities of this setup by executing long, winding tracking shots through the streets and along the rooftops of the barrio, mapping a lived geography thick with environmental and sensory texture. What is captured is not just squalor, but play, generosity, and beauty; little girls biking, the protagonist feeding a carrot to a horse, a rainbow peeking faintly through fog above the city. Neorealist observation gradually morphs into mystical intervention as the boys trudge on and night descends. Now, we’re in Dante’s Inferno, complete with a burning car, labyrinthine ruins, and a silhouetted satyr. Even in such baleful moments, Barrio Triste rarely loses a sense of ambient wonder, conjured as much through the woozy, smeary video image as Arca’s score, a malleable blend of electronic dissonance and plaintive piano. All the while, dead pixels seem to multiply on the screen, appearing like stars in the darkness. Maybe they are like the teenagers of Barrio Triste, turning visual absence into presence.

Orlando

ORLANDO   ****

Sally Potter

1993

IDEA:  Instructed by a dying Elizabeth I to never grow old, a nobleman lives for centuries, first as a man and then as a woman, dealing with England's shifting customs and geopolitics.

BLURB:  In a film brimming with the most exquisite sets and costumes (can Sandy Powell do any wrong?), the most sublime effect of Orlando might be Tilda Swinton herself. Her porcelain facial features and fulsome eyes seem to be magically lit from within; whether she’s looking directly at us or not, her visage envelops the frame like some numinous icon we cannot help but be ensorcelled by. Suffice it to say, there could be no better actor to embody an ethereal, gender-fluid immortal who defies time, space, biology, and social order, who tries on human culture as if it were a series of costume changes with nary a perfect fit. Just as nobody can fix Tilda Swinton into any mold, nor can one fix Orlando, whose protean, centuries-spanning process of becoming throws into relief the absurdities and contradictions of the rigid roles foisted upon her by society. As a man, Orlando is expected to be aggressive and commanding, and even he, though ill-suited to these traits, unthinkingly indulges in the privileges of machismo when he claims a woman as his simply because he adores her. Orlando remains the same person as a woman, but is now suddenly forced into immobilizing, elephantine gowns, lectured by pompous men, and stripped of her property rights. Potter’s film exposes gender as a performance constructed differently and arbitrarily across eras and cultures, and the sexed body not as an essentialized form but a surface onto which social mores are attached and reified. This is all conveyed with incredible wit, gemlike editing, a swoon-worthy score, and not a wasted frame. Potter’s storytelling economy is as breathtaking as Orlando’s mad dash through the hedge maze, her pristine sense for color and camera movement as gratifying as a queer hero who lives an eternity, taking all the time they need to define their own freedom.

The Odyssey

THE ODYSSEY   ***

Christopher Nolan

2026

IDEA:  Following the Trojan War, Odysseus and his men go on an arduous journey to return home to an Ithaca in ruins.

BLURB:  With his version of The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan whittles the epic poem into one of his favorite stories: the brilliant but morally conflicted man whose work estranges him from his family, and his humanity. The filmmaker’s fixation on this brooding archetype has become as expected as his predilection for nonlinear cross-cutting and cacophonous soundscapes, but what is surprising is how richly it fits into Homer’s text. Nolan’s Odysseus — played by Matt Damon in a register much closer to morose than vainglorious — undergoes a modern reframing as a reluctant, guilt-stricken hero burdened by postwar trauma. His conscience flares in soul-sick visions of Athena and slivered flashbacks to the chaos of the Trojan War (among the places where Nolan’s fractured editing works best), culminating in a stirring, plangent third-act catharsis that recontextualizes the war through Odysseus’s profound shame and regret. As per usual, Nolan wants to ground even the most fantastical of ideas in a sense of realism, so the modern psychology applied to Odysseus is echoed in set pieces and other characters that are brought down to human scale (pointedly, none of the gods appear). In some ways, this feels like a symptom of Nolan’s paucity of visual imagination; he still seems indifferent to the concept of mise en scène, preferring spartan locations and quick, static close-ups of actors over more epic-friendly wide shots composed in depth, and his color palette remains mostly limited to dusky blacks, blues, and browns, with yellow highlights. Yet the aesthetic does end up suiting this grittier, sepulchral Odyssey, particularly in such standout scenes as the invasion of Troy and the visit to Hades, which are given an equally haunting moral weight (and in the latter, a killer monologue from Elliot Page, second only to Anne Hathaway in bringing real theatrical fire to the film). Ludwig Göransson provides a reliably robust, eclectic score, and Nolan’s incessantly loud sound mix, for once, feels well-modulated around his actors. When Odysseus returns home, so does The Odyssey bring home its thesis of how powerful men poison society with self-interest and ignobility, and how easily we enable them. It’s a not-so-subtle lament that rings out a resounding cry in a retelling acutely tailored to our modern times.

Attenberg

ATTENBERG   ***

Athina Rachel Tsangari

2010

IDEA:  Living with her terminally ill father in a small industrial seaside village in Greece, 23-year-old Marina struggles with issues of intimacy and independence. 

BLURB:  Leading from its title — a mispronunciation of the last name of Sir David Attenborough — Attenberg depicts a society in which language and conventional structures fail to adhere. Not only is the figure of symbolic authority, the father, literally on his deathbed, his power is already diminished in the eyes of his daughter Marina (a persuasively guileless and ungainly Ariane Labed), who imagines him without a phallus. Marina is in a developmental limbo where social institutions introduce a radical otherness she’s unable to assimilate. So she regresses to the pre-verbal, anti-social comfort of acting like an animal, or mirroring her friend Bella in a bodily synchrony that forestalls the anxiety of difference. This colorful, confounding dysfunction is often played for droll comedy, but it never yields the kind of shock-jock sadism that sometimes infects the work of Tsangari’s fellow Greek Weird Wave auteur Yorgos Lanthimos (who, ironically, appears in this film as its most normal, affable character). The behavioral perversity and formal austerity that comprise Attenberg are undergirded by empathy for Marina’s clumsy stabs at self-actualization, a process Tsangari analogizes to a wider, Greek national crisis of identity formation. At the same time, for all its quirks, the film mostly hews to the beats of a typical coming-of-age story, including the retrograde implication that maturity is achieved through heterosexual sex. But Tsangari leaves us not with her heroine’s triumphant initiation into adulthood, but with an ominously lingering shot of one of the industrial landscapes that have appeared throughout the film as a sign of stunted growth. The construction continues.