Club Zero

CLUB ZERO   *

Jessica Hausner

2023

IDEA:  A nutrition teacher at a boarding school trains her pupils to obey a regimen of "conscious eating," which entails starvation as a means of achieving greater wellbeing.

BLURB:  It is a challenge to think of many other narrative feature films as immaculately designed yet with so very little to say as Club Zero, one in which pompously affected form is so risibly out of step with any perceivable function. No amount of icy-cool static long shots, slow zooms, persistent drumming on the soundtrack, or flamboyantly over-stylized sets and costumes can mask a painfully obvious and superficial allegory of religious-ideological indoctrination that culminates with a recreation of the Last Supper. Hausner is evidently going after jet-black absurdist social satire à la Yorgos Lanthimos, down to the deliberately stilted line readings, but she forgets to make her story compelling or any of her characters or situations convincing within the flimsy framework she’s established. Her world isn’t absurdist but merely nonsensical, so devoid of sociological or psychological nuance that it all but loses resonance with the reality it’s ostensibly critiquing. Where is this school located? Why do the students in Miss Novak’s class not interact with a single other student in the whole school, or have other classes? Why does literally everyone look like they’re dressed for the Met Gala? Hausner seems to care not a whit. She’s smugly fixated on her color-coordinated Architectural Digest mise en scène, lazy ironies (get it, “Silent Night” because people died on Christmas!), and pseudo-épater-la-bourgeoisie cheap shots that even an actor as talented as Mia Wasikowska is unable to give weight to. The most authentic part of Club Zero may be when Mathieu Demy, making physical what the audience has been doing mentally the whole time, rolls his eyes.

Silent Friend

SILENT FRIEND   ***

Ildikó Enyedi

2025

IDEA:  Three timelines spanning over a century are united by the same gingko tree on the campus of a German university.

BLURB:  Silent Friend is a highly idiosyncratic work that, unlike the plants it spends so much time observing, escapes classification. Deeply reverent of nature but not quite environmentalist, full of science but prone to New Age-y metaphysical gaping, and interested in non-anthropocentric perspectives while mostly hewing to banal human concerns, it sparks curiosity more than the full-blown wonder it seems to be courting. Still, as Enyedi shows us, curiosity is a vital thing; across her three parallel timelines, she presents it as the bedrock of creativity, knowledge, discovery, and advancement. Curiosity drives Dr. Tony Wong to attempt to understand infant neurology, and then the biology of a gingko tree; Grete to break the glass ceiling and become a trailblazing botanist and photographer; and Hannes to build a device in order to better connect (literally) with a purple geranium. In all these cases, Silent Friend extols the power of the scientific spirit to challenge received wisdom and create new data, and in turn enhance how we understand and coexist with the world around us. Inevitably, Enyedi turns toward medium self-reflexivity, using the storyline of an old photographer to center the camera among a wide-ranging group of instruments humans use to expand their perception, joining pens, microphones, computers, brain scanners, hallucinogens, and so much more. Teasing the boundaries of what we can perceive through such instruments, Enyedi and DP Gergely Pálos imagine the lived experiences of flora by lavishing indulgent attention on bark, branches, leaves, and flower petals while people are rendered out of focus in the background, and at times zooming in to the plants’ cellular level as the soundtrack crackles and hisses like nature ASMR. This admittedly gets pretty repetitive over 150 minutes, and the scenes that aren’t as purely sensory are often bogged down by extended, prosaic human drama. Silent Friend works best as an insinuating, contemplative, kinetic Zen koan, exploiting image and sound to adjust our consciousnesses to a frequency accessible only through technological medi(t)ation. 

Blue Heron

BLUE HERON   ***1/2

Sophy Romvari

2025

IDEA:  A Hungarian immigrant family in British Columbia struggles with how to manage the eldest son's erratic behavior.

*LIGHT SPOILERS AHEAD*

BLURB:  Through what means do we recall our childhoods? How much is pure memory, stories we’re told, keepsakes, or photographs and movies? With heartrending, metatextual specificity, Blue Heron shows that our pasts can’t be recovered but only partially reconstructed through multiple layers of mediation. Technology plays the primary role here, and throughout the first half of Blue Heron cameras appear regularly as mechanisms the family uses to record itself. Already framed as memories, these passages carry an understated but acutely felt nostalgia for bygone childhood pleasures: playing hopscotch with friends, family outings at the beach, watching Looney Tunes, doodling on MS Paint. Romvari subtly signals to us that there’s missing information, though, not just in relation to Jeremy’s enigmatic condition but within and between her images themselves, which are consistently being reframed through camera movement and obfuscated by windows, mirrors, and blurry foregrounds. The ultimate reframing — the masterstroke of Blue Heron — comes midway through, when the preceding fiction is recast as reality and Romvari steps in, via the proxy of a superb Amy Zimmer, as the creator-protagonist. With the kind of temporal sleight of hand only cinema can achieve, the film slips through time and perspective, evolving from a relatively standard memory piece into an investigation of technology’s capacity to preserve, reveal, and potentially even resolve past experiences. For Romvari, it’s the last point that is painfully ambiguous; even with her imagination and artistry, she still can’t fill the lacuna of her troubled late brother. In this inability, Blue Heron mournfully acknowledges the limits of knowing and representing, yet takes this not as a deterrent but a catalyst to keep remembering, and creating.

La Pointe Courte

LA POINTE COURTE   ***1/2

Agnès Varda

1955

IDEA:  After many years away, a man returns to the small fishing village where he grew up and converses with his Parisian wife about their declining marriage.

BLURB:  La Pointe Courte is a lovely demonstration of Agnès Varda’s formal ingenuity and boundless curiosity about people and their worlds, presaging yet more complex and adventurous works to come. From the first series of shots, her camera doesn’t so much record the environment from some privileged vantage as inhabit it, feeling around for textures and moods experienced from the inside. It glides patiently down empty streets, snakes through shipyards, and wanders across rooms bustling with children, picking up (or gleaning, to use a word that would later become very significant for Varda) the people and objects, big and small, that constitute a place. This sort of ethnographic observation aligns La Pointe Courte with documentary, allowing whole sequences, often of various kinds of labor, to unfold seemingly unstructured by an outside hand. But Varda counterpoints these scenes with the conspicuously choreographed ones between the two lovers, who strike poses in geometric compositions that make marvelous use of wooden poles, boat hulls, and the bodies of the actors themselves to fragment the frame. If the village-life portions feel neorealist, the self-consciously stylized duets between the lovers augur the coming French New Wave. La Pointe Courte could be watched simply as a ludic experiment in juxtaposing these modes, inviting us into a game of noticing how adventitious forces (animals, crowds, kids) push up against and mix with artistic control. This approach is not merely a matter of aesthetics but ethics, reflecting a democratic worldview of multitudinous subjects in which no thing and no one is beyond interest. 

Power Ballad

Part of my coverage of the 13th Chicago Critics Film Festival

POWER BALLAD   ***

John Carney

2026

IDEA:  Following a chance encounter and jam session with former boy-band idol Danny Wilson, wedding singer Rick Power discovers that Wilson has stolen his song and turned it into a massive hit.

BLURB:  “This song changed my life.” The line, spoken by resurgent pop star Danny Wilson, comes at a point in Power Ballad when it carries a few different meanings. All these meanings can be traced to the thesis found throughout John Carney’s films thus far: that music has incalculable emotional and social power. Even more, though, the polysemy of the line is a reflection of how songs change meaning depending on context — who plays them, where they play, and perhaps most importantly, who’s listening. “How to Write a Song (Without You),” the cleverly titled earworm at the center of Power Ballad, puts this to the test, raising questions about authorial intent versus audience reception that Carney leaves generously open. Although he draws a pretty clear dichotomy between family man Rick Power’s working-class Ireland and bachelor Danny’s glitzy LA (represented rather clumsily through stock footage), the film doesn’t take a stance on the tune that transports between these disparate worlds. “How to Write a Song” is alternately or simultaneously cheesy, banal, heartfelt, kitschy, stirring, and catchy as hell; it can be played to a mostly empty shopping mall, a small wedding crowd, or a sold-out arena. The poignancy of the song as created by Rick — and the immature opportunism of Danny’s plagiarism — snap into focus at the end of Power Ballad, but the truth doesn’t invalidate the meaning(s) Danny’s version holds for his legions of fans. When the default is to be cynical about the state of popular art, Carney remains a jubilant romantic who teaches us how to hear a song, not a commodity.

Loafers

Part of my coverage of the 13th Chicago Critics Film Festival

LOAFERS   **1/2

Zach Schnitzer

2025

IDEA:  A group of friends in Chicago navigates the choppy waters of post-college life.

BLURB:  Each generation discovers on its own terms how to become adults, and each generation makes movies about itself doing it. Following in the footsteps of such post-college-malaise American indies as Slacker, Kicking and Screaming, and Hannah Takes the Stairs, Zach Schnitzer’s Loafers presents a group of mostly white, middle-class twenty-somethings who don’t know what they’re doing and self-medicate with a whole lot of weed and alcohol. Schnitzer’s loafers (of which he is one) are not dyspeptic eccentrics or academics but generally average, good-natured young folks struggling with the mundane problems of being an adult: romantic relationships, family, jobs, and friendships, and the strain put on these things by the caprices of everyday life. Made on a shoestring budget, Loafers has the warm lo-fi feel of a personal project put together by a bunch of close friends, and the cast — especially Dan Haller, Melissa Marie, and Ruby Sevcik — have real naturalism in front of the camera. An emotional outpouring in an alley late in the film, between Marie and Sevcik, is a highlight, the actresses showing formidable rawness in sustained close-ups. Elsewhere, Loafers is more scattershot or slapdash, as in the few-too-many boilerplate party scenes or the sequences on Chicago streets where camerawork, editing, and sound show their seams in patching up obvious production deficiencies. For a true DIY film, though, it’s easy to admire Schnitzer and crew’s go-for-it attitude, not to mention their emphasis on healthy male friendship, a rarity on screen in this or any generation.

The Invite

Part of my coverage of the 13th Chicago Critics Film Festival

THE INVITE   ***

Olivia Wilde

2026

IDEA:  The already shaky relationship of a married 40-something couple is further rocked when they invite over their enigmatic upstairs neighbors. 

BLURB:  As long as there are human relationships, there will be appeal to stories like The Invite, which turns our social foibles into uproarious theater and reflects back at us the desires, fears, and frustrations that are difficult to confront, or even acknowledge, outside the safe outlet of art. Which is to say that The Invite is not unique (if a remake of a film based on a play could ever be called that!), but it is terribly evergreen, and it’s deftly attuned to both how gratifying and discomfiting it can be to watch relationship drama roil under the proverbial microscope. And boy does this cast have a field day with it! Each actor chews voraciously into Rashida Jones and Will McCormack’s zesty script, lacing their deliveries and gestures with all manner of derision, passive aggression, or sexual desperation. Olivia Wilde nails the wild-eyed, fast-taking neuroticism and Seth Rogen the sarcastic, disillusioned surliness; as the disruptors, Penélope Cruz radiates sinuous, almost otherworldly sensuality while Edward Norton projects the calmly mysterious authority of a man’s man who’s also super into rugs. The near-constant interpersonal fracas is structured (literally) by the stylish production design, cinematography, and editing. The placement of an open window or a wall takes on heightened importance in a work so much about perspective, and how it often takes other people to show us different ways of looking at ourselves. This process results in quite the mess in The Invite, but the film poignantly suggests that sometimes it’s the mess that leads to the conversations that need to be had.