Remake

REMAKE   ***

Ross McElwee

2025

IDEA:  While Hollywood targets his 1986 documentary Sherman's March for a fiction remake, Ross McElwee reflects on the intersection of his filmmaking practice with his relationship with his late son Adrian, who died from an accidental fentanyl overdose in 2016.

BLURB:  The act of recreation, somewhat counterintuitively, typically entails alteration. We can never exactly reproduce the original; something about the way it looked, felt, or meant is unavoidably changed. Ross McElwee’s classic 1986 documentary Sherman’s March is not his only work being remade (however unsuccessfully) in the director’s Remake: so too are his memories, and by extension the decades of footage to which they’re inextricably linked. By meditating on the death of his son Adrian, the famously self-reflexive McElwee simultaneously ruminates on a life organized and revised by moving images, constantly crossing the porous border between reality and representation. The filmmaker’s memories become his filmed scenes (and vice versa), and in piecing them together in non-chronological montage, he considers how they shed their temporal bearings, unfolding completely in the present as the traces of the reality to which they no longer belong. In one of his most poignant musings, he wonders if all that footage of Adrian has retroactively turned his son into a fictional character he now primarily knows through the screen. The ethical implications here, especially related to McElwee’s misgivings about how his constant filming of Adrian might have harmed his son’s mental health, are powerful, if underexplored. But there is never any doubt that Remake is an impassioned, lucid, heartsick elegy from father to son through the medium that structured/s so much of their lives, often mutually. Among other things, it is a testament to how that medium can be a form of therapy, remaking fragmentary, ephemeral, and painful experiences as a narrative we can put our arms around. 

The End of Oak Street

THE END OF OAK STREET   *1/2

David Robert Mitchell

2026

IDEA:  A family of four fights to survive rampaging dinosaurs after their Michigan suburb is transported back to the Mesozoic Era. 

BLURB:  The End of Oak Street has the brainlessness of a bad B movie and the wateriness of something that’s been focus-grouped and re-rewritten into mush. It contains such sterling dialogue as “Maybe it will take us home! To our time!” and “Is that a fucking dinosaur?,” the latter of which has admittedly comedic intent but sits awkwardly in a movie that only fitfully commits to comedy, let alone the drama at its center. That such a warmed-over Syfy story attracted a big Hollywood budget and a pair of A-listers proves to be among its less baffling qualities. This is a movie that begins with the ripe premise of prehistoric creatures besieging a suburb and goes nowhere with it beyond a generic survival scenario. Some perfunctory domestic strife suggests the dinosaur mayhem as a corollary or parallel, but Mitchell rarely does anything interesting with his creatures to enrich subtext; they are merely implacable predators to be evaded and/or shot with the surprising number of shotguns owned by this neighborhood’s old-lady population. The characters are as bare-bones as the world they inhabit and as dimly motivated as the visuals, which contain an amount of split-diopter shots so gratuitous even Brian De Palma would likely protest. Mouth agape, lines spoken in monotone, Ewan McGregor seems to want to be anywhere else, and Anne Hathaway’s versatility is wasted on a role that calls for her to mostly tremble, cry, and scream (ditto the poor kids). Michael Giacchino’s boisterous score emerges as the most heroic thing from a film that, ironically, has many teeth but no bite.

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 nostalgic, 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.