Based on or inspired by the insane true story (it’s not immediately clear which), Strange Darling is the sophomore effort of writer and director JT Mollner, and stars Willa Fitzgerald as The Lady, a young woman for whom her own safety is top priority, who takes a chance on meeting a swell-seeming guy for a one night stand. At first, things appear amicable, but nothing is what it seems when this twisted get-together spirals out of control in a flash, and The Lady is forced to do whatever it takes to survive as she is ruthlessly pursued by The Demon (Kyle Gallner) across multiple states in one of the most deadly serial killer murder sprees in U.S. history. Shot entirely on 35mm film by producer and director of photography Giovanni Ribisi, and told in 6 distinct chapters in non-linear fashion, the film also stars Ed Begley Jr., Barbara Hershey, Steven Michael Quezada, Madisen Beaty, Bianca A. Santos, and Denise Grayson.
 
If I were to give readers one piece of advice when it comes to a film like this, apart from going in as blind as humanly possible, it would be to let go of the idea that one can figure this movie out before the next chapter begins. Given all the unexpected turns it has to offer, there’s little to discuss without spoiling, so if this review feels a tad vague, it is a deliberate choice. Whatever kind of serial killer movie one thinks this is at the start, or even further into it, well, it’s not that movie. That’s not to say that it doesn’t eventually find a more straightforward path as far as narrative is concerned, but the surprises in store for those whose grip on the “predictability” of movies like this is loosened are far and away some of the best any thriller this year has had to offer. As the cat-and-mouse chase between The Lady and The Demon plays out, it’s never clear where exactly the turns will come, or just where they’ll lead. As much as the film is lovingly informed by and pays tribute to the grindhouse horrors and slashers of old, it remains entirely undefinable by their usual tenets, comfortably sitting alongside them while forging a path all its own. In most films like it, the structural whiplash of flipping between chapters in non-linear fashion may seem like a crutch used to keep the narrative interesting without offering any real justification or depth, but for Strange Darling, that whiplash is not only a welcome tool used to piece the puzzle together, but the very mechanism by which the viewer learns that the film is, in fact, a puzzle.
 
But it’s not just the structured edit of the film that makes it such an impressively strong second effort for Wallner; in navigating the jigsaw pattern by which the film takes shape, the audience is also treated to two of the most exciting performances of the year to date between Fitzgerald’s Lady and Gallner’s Demon. The two characters could be perceived as one-note, arch ideas at first, the former for the risks women endure in public life, the latter for the literal manifestation of those risks, but Wallner is careful not to pigeonhole his actors, allowing Fitzgerald in particular to really strut her stuff through a range of different modes. To say anything further would be to spoil a film wherein even the lighter plot points I find myself dancing around so as not to ruin the experience, but suffice it so say, if awards bodies took horror performances more seriously, Fitzgerald’s work here, at the very least, merits a mention in the conversation.
 
Much of this film’s uniqueness may be attributed to the way the film is shot by actor Giovanni Ribisi, who also produced the film, and whose choice to shoot on 35mm feels purposeful rather than entirely stylistic, though style the film does employ to great effect. There’s something about the grainy textural look of the movie that offers a more robust sense of the danger all around our protagonist, much in the way that one can just tell something is off in older horror hits like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or films of the more unexpectedly brutal variety like Deliverance. Strange Darling is a far cry from either of those films narratively or even thematically, but tonally, the three share a distinct vibe of things being just a bit too eerie and stomach-churning, courtesy of an aesthetic that I can only describe as “grimy.” Perhaps the film itself is not exactly the most grotesque of its kind, but it fits well within that camp nonetheless.
 
Movies like Strange Darling come around so rarely, catapulting new voices in the world of cinema like those of JT Mollner to dynamic new heights with startling energy and exciting vigor; catching one this early, before Mollner becomes a household name, feels akin to discovering a great band right after their debut album. I can honestly say I haven’t seen a film like it in a very long time, and I doubt there will be another so uniquely positioned in this calendar year. Needless to say, I would encourage all readers, especially those that are fans of grindhouse horror and thrillers, to take a chance on seeing the film as soon as they are possible able. It feels like the beginning of a truly special era for Wallner and Co., and is bound to be one of this year’s great hidden gems.
 
I’m giving “Strange Darling” a 7.6/10
 
- The Friendly Film Fan

If ever you’ve wondered why video game movie adaptations have begun migrating to television, or why their theatrical output has such a tarnished overall reputation, I’ll first ask how it’s possible that The Super Mario Bros. Movie has been your only VGM experience (even then, not a great one), but if somehow their notorious reputations have spared your eyes to this point…well…wonder no more. Based on the popular video game franchise of the same name, Borderlands stars Cate Blanchett as Lilith, a bounty hunter who is hired by Atlas (Edgar Ramirez) to find and rescue his daughter Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), who supposedly holds the key to unlocking a secret treasure vault on the chaotic planet of Pandora – Lilith’s home world – and who was released from captivity by former disillusioned soldier Roland (Kevin Hart). In the course of her mission, Lilith meets and forms an alliance with a ragtag team of misfits, including Krieg (Florian Munteanu), a muscle-clad “psycho” who protects Tina, Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), and Claptrap (Jack Black), a scrappy robot companion programmed to help Lilith accomplish her goals upon her return home, as well as Tina and Roland themselves. Together, this scrappy team of six must brave desolate landscapes, alien monsters, and bandit attacks, surviving long enough to figure out where the vault is, what’s inside, and whether the real treasure was each other all along.
 
I’m not what you might call a traditional gamer; I’ve never played the Borderlands games, I don’t really even know what they look like, and I have no special attachments from them that would indicate whether or not I thought this worked as an adaptation. What I would consider myself is a film connoisseur, albeit one still very much in the early stages of that connoisseur-ship, so regardless of the adaptability demonstrated by this version of Borderlands, I can confidently tell you that it doesn’t work as a movie, especially not a movie with little-to-no sense of self and even less teeth for the world it inhabits. If it sounds as though the plot description above is overly chaotic and messy, friend, it is only because whatever plot this film has to begin with is simultaneously over-complicated and drearily under-written.
 
The truth is, Borderlands is as desolate a film in terms of entertainment, inspiration, creativity, or even pure visual flow as its many desert locales and bare-bones sets are in relation to the most basic forms of color theory. In fact, the only set that has anything close to a real identity in terms of its color, or indeed its characters, is a bustling town our ragtag misfits come to about halfway through the film’s 102 energy-draining minutes, which is only used to introduce Jamie Lee Curtis, set up a bland and overly long action set-piece, and tease a plot “twist” anyone who’s seen a movie before could see coming 40 miles away. Visually speaking, it’s an eyesore, so lacking in anything remotely interesting to look at that the copious amounts of poorly-composited green screen backdrops become the only interesting thing to look at simply for being included often enough that one could make a dangerously effective drinking game out of just noticing them. In fact, the film is so devoid of anything tangible or even recognizable from a pure narrative storytelling perspective that any fan service or entertainment it offers doesn’t just go unappreciated but unnoticed by anyone who’s not joined to the games at the hip. Even Deadpool & Wolverine’s cacophony of cameos – which I still contend ultimately don’t mean much to the film itself, to the legacy of the 20th Century Fox canon, or the MCU itself – are at least recognizable enough that there’s a drip of entertainment in just seeing some of those guys show up again. Borderlands doesn’t even have the right level of relevance in the world of gaming anymore for people to have absorbed any recognition of its fan service through pure cultural osmosis (apart from the parts of the movie that are made from that).
 
What really kills any momentum the film builds, however (on the off chance it builds any momentum at all), is that the script itself seems entirely uninterested in the story being told and makes no effort to actually create or sustain any creative sparks that might be resting in the margins of its hollow shell, ditto for its cast, not that most of them seem even remotely aware what kind of movie they’re in, apart from Blanchett; her dead-eyed, practically expressionless pitch is the film’s most clear indicator of just how over this sort of thing everyone is by now. Even amongst that cast, Greenblatt seems to be the only one making a game effort at actually injecting any life into the film at all, and as fun as her performance could be to watch in a film that actually cared about character development at all, whatever efforts she makes here are immediately shot down like a bird out of the sky by Eli Roth’s rush to just get to whatever the next set-piece is without so much as the balls to make that set-piece as fun as Greenblatt’s performance clearly indicates it should be.
 
I won’t wax on and on as to how draining this film’s inclusion into the “cultural canon of cinema” is or whatever, or how it doesn’t actually have anything meaningful to contribute to that canon, because the truth is there are lots of movies way better than this that also don’t contribute a lot of meat to movie history and are just around for the fun of it, and also because as much as I like the ones the ones that do meaningfully contribute, I wouldn’t consider myself pretentious enough to pretend that every good movie has to. But what I will say for Borderlands in regard to whether or not it even could do that is that the movie wouldn’t have anything to offer even if whatever it had was meaningless. In other words, the film is…nothing. It didn’t piss me off, it didn’t make me cringe, it didn’t even bore me to tears so that I begged it to stop or offered my soul in exchange for something interesting to happen. The only thing it did make me feel, for one hour and forty minutes it ran, was the worst thing a movie like it could ever make anyone feel: complete and total apathy. Even then, I struggle to confirm with myself that it made me feel anything at all.
 
I’m giving “Borderlands” a 2.1/10
 
- The Friendly Film Fan

If you’re old enough or offline enough to have never heard the term “BookTok,” you’d be forgiven for not understanding in any capacity how author Colleen Hoover’s best-selling books – It Ends With Us and its sequel, It Starts With Us – became such sensations across the world for young readers, or how Hoover herself has taken a turn in BookTok spaces to become as prickly a subject amongst its myriad of creators as J.K. Rowling has become amongst Harry Potter enthusiasts who aren’t transphobes. Hoover’s first book, originally published in 2016, gained immense popularity on TikTok over the course of 2021, leading to its topping the New York Times bestseller list at the start of 2022. That book – It Ends With Us – has been the subject of numerous online debates regarding the fluctuating appeals of young adult literature (ranging from dark fantasies to romance dramas and the subgenres which intertwine the two), popularity vs. quality, spotlighting or perpetuating abuse in writing, etc. It is also from that book, and a script written by Christy Hall, that director Justin Baldoni draws his big-screen adaptation of the same name, which starts Blake Lively, Baldoni, Brandon Sklenar, Jenny Slate, and Hasan Minhaj.
 
Lively stars as Lily Bloom, a young woman with hopes of opening a flower shop in Boston, who’s moved back home following the death of her abusive father. Between the early days of opening the flower shop and taking on a new employee (Jenny Slate), she meets Ryle Kincaid (Baldoni), a young neurosurgeon who sweeps her off her feet with his persistence and blunt honesty, and a long-term romance develops between the two. But Ryle isn’t always the paragon of peace Lily needs in her life, and parts of Lily’s past still consume her mind as she soon re-encounters her first childhood love, Atlas (Sklenar), who also works and operates a restaurant in the city. With two paths in front of her, Lily must decide not only which fork in the road to follow, but whether it would be better to forge her own path, leaving behind the trauma that’s haunted her from childhood.  
 
The idea behind It Ends With Us is an admirable one, an earnest examination of the dichotomy between the difficulty of leaving an abusive relationship or staying in one. Even more tragically, it’s an idea that a lot of young women seem to have a specific connection to. But if you’re going to examine that dichotomy with all the nuance and care that navigating the subject requires, the form that examination takes has to be in the hands of an artist that knows exactly what they’re doing and who demonstrates a particular skill in telling stories like this, especially if the script is not going to be of any real service in that regard. Unfortunately, Baldoni is not that filmmaker; in fact, given the pitifully off-balance nature of the film’s story structure, his having cast himself as the main love interest of the protagonist – behind-the-scenes cast drama notwithstanding – makes the whole enterprise feel more like a way-too-underbaked ego project than a sincere undertaking, especially when considering that the film gives far more screen-time to a past version of Lily’s rival love interest that Baldoni doesn’t really have to compete with for the bulk of the audience’s attention (not that Sklenar’s modern one is anything to write home about).
 
And that, really, is the main problem with It Ends With Us; beyond whatever earnestness it can muster (and setting aside that there seems to be little-to-zero sense of craft in how Baldoni shoots, edits, or blocks a scene), there’s no sincereity in the telling, no effort to genuinely get at the heart of the issue. It’s as if the whole film is just the most basic outline of what a story like this looks like in its earliest possible stages before any fine-tuning work has even been considered, cannon fodder to give Baldoni an excuse to look sexy on camera but not have to actually put in any work to make his character someone that anyone who looks like Blake Lively would believably fall for long-term, no matter how pushy they got. Any chance we get to see exactly why Lily stays with Ryle for so long, or even how she falls for him further, is rushed through in montage, not given any room to breathe. Lively herself is a talented individual, and has demonstrated greatness in acting previously (see: The Shallows); she could sell falling for a handsome shit-bag if she really needed to, but despite her best efforts, the script affords her no room to take things where they clearly need to go. It would be clear to anyone with an eye for these things that Lively is in a different movie than almost everyone else, a better one trapped inside the CW-style dialogue this one forces her to espouse.
 
Nearly everything – every coincidence, every chance meeting, every story beat, every line of dialogue from the awkward to the genuinely awful – feels contrived to follow a pre-determined path, not in service to a natural progression of events, but in adherence to a story structure the film is forcing on its characters. Between the forty-five establishing shots of Boston layered throughout the glacially-paced running time and the music supervision that would rather an entire Taylor Swift song play all the way through than let the audience sit silently with the characters in their most intimate moments, there’s hardly a moment where the film allows itself to be still with its characters, apart from one scene in the latter half of the film where Lily and Atlas are having a discussion regarding a sensitive topic on Atlas’s couch. It’s only in that moment where the film finally displays a sense of empathy towards its characters, rather than just sympathy, and if that scene’s tone were the one that the film elected to use in order to explore its complex themes, a halfway decent movie might have emerged. Unfortunately, the film stands as a grim reminder of what happens when a book becomes popular through algorithmically-driven virality before anyone bothers taking a closer look at what’s actually on the page.
 
I’m giving “It Ends With Us” a 3.4/10
 
- The Friendly Film Fan

It may seem at first glance, given all the odds stacked against it, that the very existence of a film like Deadpool & Wolverine should be regarded as an out-and-out triumph, and in some manners of speaking, it could be considered one. The opening weekend box office was practically guaranteed to be overwhelmingly large (to the degree that any film’s box office in the year of our lord 2024 can be a guarantee), the CinemaScore for the film is an A, the Rotten Tomatoes numbers look solid even on the critics’ side, and the myriad of production roadblocks the film had to overcome just to get made – from Disney’s acquisition of Fox to an entire worldwide pandemic between films to SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes taking place during filming – could make even the most anti-superhero critic offer up some sympathy votes toward the idea of the film actually coming to pass. But ideas are not final products, and in a cinematic manner of speaking, Deadpool & Wolverine’s final form is as shallow and unremarkable as any of its lesser MCU contemporaries are typically regarded – in truth, it’s far from a triumph at all.
 
This isn’t to say that the film doesn’t have anything in it to recommend; the fan service itself is rather inspired in a vacuum, and a couple of key performances – chiefly Hugh Jackman’s return as Wolverine and Emma Corrin’s introduction as Cassandra Nova – actually shine in a few spots despite the script giving them very little to work with. Jackman in particular brings real pathos and weight to a performance that could easily have just been a cruise control job. Plus, despite my issues with the music supervision on the film as a whole, the introductory titles sequence’s use of *NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye” remains a great deal of fun. Past that sequence, however, the “fun” of Deadpool & Wolverine becomes less about rewarding audiences for investing in the story or characters, and more about distracting the viewer from the fact that the movie has nothing of real weight to offer. In fact, there really isn’t much of a story at all. There’s a plot (or at least the outline of a plot), locations, characters, action beats, etc, but none of it ever congeals into something meaningful or cohesive. Rather than use its fan service as an additive or enhancement to the storytelling, D&W instead elects to use fan service as storytelling, bouncing from cameo to cameo without much rhyme or reason and squeezing every last drop out of any recognizable, newly-Disney-owned IP it can get its hands on. (There’s also a particularly egregious Furiosa joke that makes less and less sense the more one thinks on it.) This is made especially apparent by how the film chooses to deploy its soundtrack, which is chock full of recognizable songs, most of which come careening through the speakers at seemingly random moments with little – if any – connection to what’s on screen, and a not insignificant portion of which are played for a less than a second during a scene where Deadpool is smashing Wolverine’s head against a radio. Even most of the characters we’ve come to know and love from the other Deadpool films, like Vanessa, Negasonic Teenage Warhead, Dopinder, Colossus, etc – characters we’ve grown attached to – are shoved to the side in favor of getting Deadpool to the “Void” so we can get to all those fan service cameos quicker, a big one of which turns out to be fairly disappointing given the actor’s single-note performance in the film.
 
But perhaps D&W’s greatest sin, even more than the hollow fan service or the less-than-half joke hit rate, or even the fact that it’s also quite an ugly-looking movie (does Disney just not do location shoots anymore?), the cardinal nail in the coffin for both the film itself and its vision of the MCU going forward, is its treatment of the chief piece of X-Men film history that’s renowned for its artistic vision and genuine emotional depth: Logan. Without question the best X-Men film to date, Deadpool & Wolverine takes the legacy of closure and catharsis that both audiences and Logan’s titular character finally experienced after 17 years of Hugh Jackman’s stewardship, and turns it into a punchline before outright robbing it of any sense of finality. Whatever your patience for Ryan Reynolds’ shtick as Deadpool (and being a fan of the first two films, I know I have enough patience to still enjoy the bits where he’s just playing the character), the very idea of a studio such as Marvel refusing to let a genuine artistic endeavor that was meant to act as finale be a finale – just because they own the rights to it now and have the option to undo its finality – is probably the biggest indicator as to why their multiverse plans have gone so awry. Stories need endings, but if there’s one thing Disney doesn’t seem to believe in, according to D&W, it’s that.
 
As unfortunate as it is, all I got out of this movie is that the MCU is far more desperate to be liked again than I initially thought, to the point that they’ll throw any amount of money at fan service just to buy back audiences’ good will, regardless of how little sense most of it makes both in the larger context of both the MCU and in this film proper. There are bound to be a lot of people who will have tons of fun watching this movie for that very fan service, and that’s great, but for me, it’s the cinematic equivalent of dangling a mobile in front of a baby in order to distract them from the fact that the dangler has nothing of actual substance to offer. And if this, plus Disney shelling out over $80 million just to get RDJ back into the MCU and bringing back the Russo Brothers to direct more Avengers movies is a sign of just how desperate things have actually become, I’m afraid whatever good will I’ve had towards the post-Endgame phase of this undertaking is likely to be quickly squandered into relative detachment, or worse, active disinterest.
 
I’m giving “Deadpool & Wolverine” a 4.6/10
 
- The Friendly Film Fan

It is a well-known story amongst many people close to the movie world that when James Cameron pitched Aliens as the sequel to the original beloved 1979 film Alien, he merely walked up to the whiteboard in the meeting room, added an “S” to the original title and promptly converted that “S” into a dollar sign ($). Of course, Cameron had already enjoyed critical and commercial success with his second directorial effort in The Terminator, so it’s not as if the studio executives in the room had only the dollar sign to go on, but if the story is to be believed, that move is what cinched the film’s production “yes,” which would lead to Cameron becoming a household name following that film and the success of Terminator 2 just five years later. Unfortunately, no such story exists about Lee Isaac Chung’s jump from his intimate and indie-budgeted Minari in 2020 to the heights of helming a major summer tentpole for Universal Pictures in the form of a sequel/reboot of the 1996 disaster classic Twister, but it sure would have been a fun marketing joke.

As it is, Twisters is never explicitly clear whether it means to act as a sequel to the original film or to re-invigorate the franchise for a new run of disaster flicks, but in both cases, it more or less follows the same formula as its predecessor, with an all-new cast largely standing in for the same parts the old guard had back in 1996. Daisey Edgar-Jones stars as the headstrong professional scientist working out of a weather station following an earlier tragedy who’s asked to come back into the field, Anthony Ramos is the one asking her to get back in the field, Glen Powell joins the cast as Tyler Owens – dubbed the “Tornado Wrangler” – who runs a YouTube channel with his own, more rough-and-tumble crew, which includes Nope breakout Brandon Perea clearly filling in for Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s “Dusty” character. The only meaningful difference, plot-wise between the first film and this one is the protagonists’ ultimate goal: instead of simply sending sensors into the tornados, the goal is to collapse and disrupt one in motion.

Legacy sequels/reboots are hard enough to do in honoring the original film or franchise’s spirit while also attempting to bring something new to the mix, but in cases such as this wherein the originals are remembered and rewatched, but not exactly beloved, that something new is a critical piece of the puzzle. If a filmmaker can get both of those right, and especially if they can get the latter part elevated above the first film’s level, then a truly worthy successor has emerged. Is Twisters a worthy successor or just a barely-elevated copycat? Your answer may depend on how much value you place on the original film. Having just seen Twister for the first time directly before seeing this one, I can say that Twisters is more or less the same movie with a few inversions in its plot mechanics; it just looks a lot more expensive. 

This film has more of a handle on the emotional core of its story than the original does, that’s for sure, but not so much of a handle that it becomes a standout element. Beneath all the howling winds, yeehaws, and homages to the original, it still functions largely as a movie that doesn’t quite know what to do with all the elements it has put together, even when they work individually, apart from pulling the same moves that its predecessor did. Daisy Edgar-Jones and Anthony Ramos are doing what they can to elevate the material they’re a part of, but with a script that plays things this safe, there’s not a lot of ground to mine as far as character work, and Ramos gets the short end of the stick in that regard. The one bright spot as far as characters are concerned – well, two bright spots – are Glen Powell and Brandon Perea; every time they were on screen, I just wanted to follow them, despite the fact that both of them are unforgivably underutilized. Powell in particular has a thoroughly natural and occasionally overwhelming charisma that’s practically tailor-made for a movie like this one, and yet even when he is on screen, the film doesn’t seem to want to take advantage of that very powerful tool despite how openly he offers it. In Perea’s case, whether due to the size of the part in the context of the film or the performance itself, the movie gives quite generously. (Harry Hadden-Paton more or less functions as the comic relief of the film, and he’s appropriately placed, but there’s not a whole lot to his character beyond that.)

Where I will give the film half-credit is in the manner by which it introduces disaster exploitation companies that profit off of people’s suffering for real estate development opportunities; I say half credit because it introduces the idea but refuses to actually engage with it in more meaningful detail. Director Lee Isaac Chung has gone on record as saying that he doesn’t want his film to be bogged down in “a message,” but for Twisters, there’s not even really so much as a theme to lift it off the ground it’s drilled into. (Even Alex Garland’s Civil War earlier this year – which also avoids delving into its political blood pool right at the center of it all – at least makes a point about our obsession with images and how culpable we are when we’re more obsessed with them than with the ethical ramifications of what those images contain.) To be fair, this isn’t a Twisters-exclusive problem – the original film also wasn’t too keen on actually having something to say about climate change’s effect on whether phenomena – but it was an opportunity this film ultimate leaves unfulfilled; as far as the original is concerned, the tornado action felt so visceral and the film is so well-paced, it was hard to get distracted enough to even wonder if it had anything to say. Here, the tornado action is also well-rendered, but it almost feels momentum-less, apart from two distinct sequences which stand-out far above the rest, one of which takes place at a rodeo and – just like the first film’s drive-in set-piece – is the best tornado sequence in the movie.

All in all, Twisters gets the job done for those who want nothing more than to watch the first film again on a larger-budgeted scale, and it has its fair share of crowd-pleasing natural disaster goodness, but for those who remember that original film well or want to see another Glen Powell movie star moment, it’s unfortunately rather lackluster in terms of novelty or innovation. (Which, visually, is saying something, considering how it was shot.) And if studios are going to keep bringing talented directors from smaller, more intimately-rendered indie films like Minari onto larger tentpole projects the second they get noticed, the least they can do is not make the scripts for those tentpole projects feel as though they came off an assembly line. 

I’m giving “Twisters” a 6.5/10

- The Friendly Film Fan

The Bikeriders was written and directed by Jeff Nichols, and is based on the 1967 photobook of the same name. It takes place between 1965 and 1973, as Kathy (Jodie Comer) recounts the early days of the Outlaws MC (or the Vandals) – an old-school biker club from the streets of McCook, Illinois – to Danny Lyons (Mike Faist), who would go on to eventually author said photobook. From her first day, meeting Benny (Austin Butler) and Johnny (Tom Hardy), to her marriage to Benny, to club picnics and rides across the American Midwest, to meeting members of other clubs, to the introduction of new members of the crew and the departures of longstanding friends, to the eventual evolution of the club into a proper gang, Kathy helps Danny to assemble a portrait of an American society which has since faded into relative obscurity, and hopefully, give their legacy one last good ride. The film also stars Emory Cohen, Boyd Holdbrook, Damon Harriman, Michael Shannon, and Nordman Reedus.  
 
It’s been nine years since writer and director Jeff Nichols last released a feature film, and the movie world as a whole has felt his absence. Since Loving was released in 2016 to very little fanfare (which it ultimately deserved to have), few filmmakers have been able to replicate or even approximate what Nichols brought to the table as an artist. Here was one of the few filmmakers left making mid-budget films for adults that were centered around movie stars but didn’t seem to be especially interested in whatever awards contention they could possibly be slated for along the way – the kinds of movies summers and falls were chock-full of and used to be built around. (Midnight Special is the sci-fi exception.) There are still a select few who do this kind of work – hell, Richard Linklater, who released Hit Man this year – is one of them, but they’re becoming fewer and fewer as studios seem increasingly to only be interested in pushing large-budget projects for large box office returns. (Disney even ultimately let this movie go after removing it from the schedule following the SAG-AFTRA strike of last summer; originally produced under the 20th Century Studios banner, the film is now distributed under Focus Features, one of the few major studios left that seems genuinely interested in these kinds of projects beyond their awards prospects.) Now, Nichols has returned to the silver screen to deliver not only one of the best movie of the year, but exactly the kind of film that movie fans like me have been craving to return to theaters for a long time.
 
There will be inevitable comparisons to Goodfellas based on the earlier stylization of The Bikeriders, especially in the first act, and they wouldn’t be unfair comparisons, generally speaking. The overall edit and – to put it simply – “vibe” of the film feels very much like the Scorsese epic of 1990, complete with freeze-frame title cards, voice-over narration, and a soundtrack reminiscent of the time in which the film takes place. But Nichols is no Scorsese (who are we kidding, no one is), so as much as the film initially attempts to replicate or otherwise embody those stylistic choices, it can’t stop itself from moving too fast at points, which ends up leaving the first act as a whole somewhat of a mess; not one that can’t be cleaned up, and it’s only a spill really, but somewhat of a mess, nonetheless. That said, the film does eventually settle into its own groove, a thoroughly masculine endeavor of honor, legacy, loyalty, brotherhood, etc, without ever feeling as though it’s obsessed with the masculinity it offers. And who better to carry that cool masculinity than one of the biggest movie stars of the moment, Austin Butler.
 
The Bikeriders has other stars doing good performance work – Jodie Comer in particular is quite underrated here as she gets to be the emotional core of the film – and of course there’s a bit of bizarre vocal experimentation (we will never know what Tom Hardy truly sounds like and while Comer’s accent does eventually stop being as distracting, it takes a minute for it to get there), but none of them come close to replicating the true “movie star” power that Austin Butler has in holding the camera’s gaze. He has a presence on screen that’s difficult to quantity exactly, but can only remind the viewer of someone like a Brad Pitt or Robert Redford to Glen Powell’s Clooney or Paul Newman. Audiences may see the film for all sorts of reasons, whether they’re Jeff Nichols fans, Tom Hardy fans, Mike Faist fans, or otherwise, but they’ll leave talking about Austin Butler. It’s his effortless cool that lets the engine of the movie come roaring to life, and it’s his scenes in the movie that keep it from losing focus too often to recover.
 
All that said, this isn’t a perfect movie, and just as the first act feels a little bit too fast for all the stylization it offers, the third act is perhaps a little bit too slow and lacking in some much-needed stylistic adrenaline. That’s not to say the ending isn’t good – that’s in safe hands – but from the break into act three almost until the ending itself, the film sort of feels like it doesn’t know how to end the story it’s telling, as if it’s simply waiting for the credits to eventually fade in and let us know it’s over. Even as much as we enjoy hanging out with all the guys in the club (the original ones, anyway), we know that the journey has to end, but we’re made to wait too long for that ending to get started, which only serves to feed the slight-but-noticeable pacing problem the film occasionally falls back into. Still, even with a few minor complaints like light pacing issues and strange accents, there’s little that can damper the movie’s “good hang” time.
 
My biggest hope for this movie, even if it is a stretch, is that audiences will turn out for it enough so that studios get the message that these kinds of movies are wanted in theatrical spaces, and that we want to see movie stars looking cool with great screen presence in a movie about dudes just rocking so hard. Maybe that’s a pipe dream, but it’s a dream film fans need to keep alive, and it’s a dream quite clearly that filmmakers like Jeff Nichols believe in as much as we do. I’ve waited for a long time for a film like The Bikeriders to come back to the silver screen (even Hit Man didn’t get that opportunity properly) and I’m happy to say that, at least for me, it was well worth the wait.
 
I’m giving “The Bikeriders” an 8.2/10
 
- The Friendly Film Fan

When Pixar first released Inside Out in the summer of 2015, I had just begun working at my local movie theater as floor staff, fresh out of my freshman year of college, and for the first time had gained total control over how many movies I got to see, and when I got to see them (relative to my work schedule). Of course, I had begun my embracing my cinephile self a few years earlier, often going to see things like Gone Girl or the premiere of How to Train Your Dragon 2 by myself, or Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and Pacific Rim with friends, while I sought other contemporary films out elsewhere, usually by taking a chance on blind-buying blu-rays. I was also coming to terms with battling depression around this time, understanding why I felt so much and yet seemingly unable to control my own sensitivities to how different things affected me emotionally. In short, I was in the perfect place both emotionally and physically for Inside Out to hit me like a ton of bricks. I saw it no less than four times in theaters, two of those times being on back-to-back days, and can still recall vividly each of the four spots where I cried during the movie (the Michael Giacchino score certainly didn’t help). It eventually landed at #2 in my Top 10 Films of 2015 – surpassed only by John Crowley’s Brooklyn – and still holds a high placement amongst my favorite Pixar releases.
 
Cut to nine years later, and Inside Out is still largely considered one of the last of the truly genius original works Pixar has made, as the studio has struggled to recapture the magic they once were the pinnacle of, instead focusing on sequels to other beloved works like Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. There was even a fourth Toy Story movie released, as well as a Lightyear spin-off film. Any other original properties Pixar has made thus far, from their pandemic releases like Soul, Luca, and Turning Red (all of which went straight to Disney+), to movies like Onward and Elemental, have all been generally well-received, but none have been as beloved or as big of hits as that first Inside Out film. In fact, only Coco seems to have come close in either capacity. And now, here we are at Inside Out 2, as Pixar once more attempts to re-capture the magic, or at least replicate the success, of one of the their most iconic original works.
 
Riley is now thirteen years old and moving on up in the world. She has her loving parents, her two best friends, and her own sense of self, and is ready to experience new growth as she prepares for high school life. All her emotions are in complete sync, as Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust have mastered the mind console to help Riley become her best self. There’s just one small problem: puberty is here to wreck shop. As she and her friends are invited to attend a three-day hockey camp intensive with one of the high school coaches, her sense of self is put to the test, and with these evolutions of inner and outer life come new and more complex feelings than the last ones, such as Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment, and Ennui. These new emotions threaten to destroy or irreparably alter the very foundations of who Riley is as a person, and it’s up to Joy and the gang to save Riley before her sense of self is altered forever.
 
This sequel has an ambitious task ahead of it, not only in terms of the evolution of filmmaking in simply being a sequel to one of Pixar’s greatest works, but in how the movie itself tackles this intricately complicated subject matter across multiple planes of conceptual storytelling; how do you evolve the character of Riley while at the same time evolving the characters inside her mind that we already know and introduce new characters and concepts which must also evolve in just over ninety minutes? To put things lightly, that’s not an easy ask of any storyteller, so it’s admirable that for the most part that Inside Out 2 largely fulfills the ambitions it sets for itself, and the journey, for all the flaws it has, still feels natural and cohesive. Nothing feels forced, or as though the storytelling so desperately wants Riley to experience her new emotions that it forces the old ones out of the story entirely, nor does it so desperately want to create conflict out of nothing that it mischaracterizes the emotions we already know by having them force the new ones out at the first opportunity. In fact, the film handles its delicate balance of characters quite well; almost all of them feel as though they have an adequate amount of screen time and attention despite how many there are to juggle, even if some still feel a bit like back-burner joke characters overall. Anxiety, embarrassment, and Pouchy (you’ll get to know this one rather quickly) are all stand-outs from the new line, while Disgust gets a little more to do here than in the first film. It’s also still very creative in how it accomplishes showing the audience the ways in which different emotions effect Riley’s actions, particularly one climactic scene late in the film which may be the most accessibly-depicted version of that particular experience ever put to screen (I won’t spoil what it is, but you’ll know it when you see it).
 
The film also evolves Riley’s outer life – the scenes outside her mind – in much more engaging ways than in the previous film. The real-life sequences in Inside Out aren’t bad by any stretch, but they’re a little plain overall, acting more as templates for the real story going on inside Riley’s mind than as fully fleshed-out plots in and of themselves. With Inside Out 2, following Riley herself is much more interesting; we actually enjoy seeing how she evolves as a person, how she navigates her friendships and her relationships to authority and those around her. As she makes new friends, we actually care about how this affects her current ones, and we’re invested in her successes and failures inside the hockey camp she attends. For something that didn’t necessarily need a bump in audience engagement, it’s nice that the filmmakers and writers gave us reasons to want to get out of Riley’s mind as much as we wanted to be in it.
 
Where this film unfortunately runs into trouble is inside that very mind, not so much in terms of the characters, but more in terms of the worldbuilding aspect that the first film nailed so beautifully. Riley’s mind in Inside Out is a tapestry of rich, interesting worldbuilding, with so much variety in how concepts of identity, emotion, and memory are explored even in the smallest of dialogue exchanges that it truly feels like her brain is a genuinely fun place to explore. There are certainly new mental concepts introduced in Inside Out 2, but they’re almost all relegate to headquarters, and we spend so much time there just focusing on what Anxiety is doing that we don’t get to explore the rest of Riley’s mind that much. Without getting into spoilers, there’s really only one scene that expands the world in the same ways the last one continually did, while almost all the rest of the new stuff outside of headquarters is just alluded to, without actually being examined.
 
Of course, it doesn’t help that as the story continues, it becomes somewhat repetitive: anxiety is sort of helping Riley navigate growing up in an uncertain time in her life but is mostly steering her towards a disastrous break, and Joy and the gang need to stop this from happening. The film never really breaks from this line or even entertains the idea that things might go in a different direction. Even in the progression of the plot, no matter what obstacles the emotions face, the goal remains the exact same, and while lessons are learned, those lessons don’t ultimately change the goals or ultimate ends of any of the characters we already know. And as far as the new characters to whom we’re introduced, it makes sense that Anxiety would just take over and run the show for most of the film’s runtime, but we do feel the lack of variety in the new emotions (Envy gets the shortest end of the stick here) because of that choice in the storytelling.
 
(Also, this is a little nit-picky, I’ll admit, but the musical score and the comedy just did not hit the same this time around. Many of Giacchino’s original themes are present, but are so burdened by other instrumentation being layered on top of them that they fail to get a chance to really shine through or punch the emotion of certain moments. Additionally, there are a decent number of jokes to keep things entertaining – including one callback from the first film that’s easily the best joke in the movie – but the emphasis on a more serious tone and more dramatic plotting somewhat sap the film of the same comic cleverness the first film was practically covered in.)
 
Overall, while I admire Inside Out 2’s creative swings and ambitious storytelling, it can’t measure up to the magic of its predecessor. Maybe that’s simply due to how the storytelling evolves with more serious subject matter, or maybe it’s because I was simply in the perfect spot in my life for the first one to release, and the spot I’m in now doesn’t quite match with this one, but nevertheless, it’s a fact that must be faced. It certainly tries its hardest to evolve the storytelling from the first film in a way that makes sense and honors that legacy, and it largely succeeds in its ambitious task of making that progression feel natural, but the lack of more exploratory worldbuilding and somewhat repetitive story end up stifling the rest of what it could have been. Still, it’s decently well-balanced, the evolution of Riley’s outer life was nicely-handled, and it’s still one of the better Pixar sequels outside of the Toy Story franchise.
 
I’m giving “Inside Out 2” a 7.6/10
 
- The Friendly Film Fan

I’m not doing the “it’s a hit…man” joke.

There’s a certain kind of soul death in cinephiles that occurs when Netflix acquires a major summer movie from a beloved auteur filmmaker and seems all but set on burying it instead of giving it a proper theatrical release; in the now seemingly eternal release war between streaming and theatrical movie exhibition (and don’t get me started on the “windowing” problem), the worst thing a service can do is not allow a film deserving of buzz to generate that word-of-mouth by playing on a bunch of silver screens nationwide, especially after the service itself failed to properly market that film to a wider audience, leaving it to the filmmakers, stars, and critics who saw the movie to generate interest seemingly on their own. After all, wouldn’t it be better for a film that was greenlit to get eyes on a service to debut theatrically – the way it was meant to be seen – and then for the service to later offer people a chance to watch that film again, exclusively on their platform? Sure, this wouldn’t need to be the case for all streaming projects, but it should have been for Richard Linklater’s new movie, Hit Man, which stars Glen Powell and Adria Arjona (among others), and is based on the true crime Texas Monthly Article of the same name by Skip Hollandsworth. (It is at this point I must tell you that, deservedly, the film seems to be a hit for Netflix, but I still contend it was not Netflix that made it so.)
 
The plot herein focuses on Gary (Powell), a college English professor whose unique skill set in all things electronic ultimately leads to him working undercover with the New Orleans Police Department, who just had their number one undercover operative in stings suspended for overuse of force. Given his interest in human behavior, they ask Gary to take the lead on one sting operation involving solicitation for murder; after discovering he has a natural talent for these encounters, he becomes the department’s go-to guy, a fake hit man who tailors his personas to the specific individuals he meets, and always gets the confession. But things change when he meets Madison (Arjona) on the job, and she threatens to alter not only his perception of objective reality, but of himself. To say too much else would be venturing into spoiler territory, but the kind of fun this movie has isn’t what I’d call spoil-able.
 
Richard Linklater operates in a few different modes: there are the contemplative, existential time-piece modes of the Before Trilogy and Boyhood, there are the “hangout” modes of films like Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some, and there are the more commercially-oriented modes, most famously the 2003 film School of Rock. I’m not entirely sure where Hit Man falls amongst these modes, but I do know that it feels every bit like the Linklater mode of those latter three, a breezy time with snappy dialogue and characters we want to keep hanging out with because they’re just so much fun to be around. Sure, it moves more, it has more of a plot and story than those others, but it still feels very much like a quasi-“hangout” film; it’s just that instead of hanging out with a bunch of different people, or a specific group, we’re chilling with a specific individual – Glen Powell – and he’s a lot of fun to be around. A lot of that feeling is aided by the film’s zippy editing, which is paired with a very fun, dialogue-heavy script by Powell and Linklater, in a perfect matrimony of pacing and character that allows the viewer to jump right in at any point and exit at any time they have to; crucially, however, you never want to. And that is not simply because of a few fantastic set-pieces (a notes app scene comes to mind) or some genuinely tension-filled moments, but in all truth, because of one entirely too charismatic performer.
 
Yes, the key sell of Hit Man is not the snappy Linklater-Powell dialogue, the direction, or even the characters themselves, but the spectacle of watching Glen Powell simply be a true blue movie star for two hours, which is not an easy thing to do. Powell has always been a great actor, but after taking the Tom Cruise crash course in how to be a movie star, his version of that is out in full force; you can see it in Top Gun: Maverick, for all the film’s issues you could still see it in Anyone But You, and you can definitely see it here. This kind of part is perfect for an actor like him; he gets to show off a little range with every persona he adopts, culminating in Ron, the coolest guy on Earth. This is also in perfect lock-step with Adria Arjona’s Madison, the only one who can match Ron’s freak, who starts off a little shy but soon transforms into the hottest woman on Earth for the same two hours. All of this may seem like an oversimplification of what the movie has to offer its audience, but in all truth, the movie really is that simple. There’s nothing exceptionally deep or complex about it in the way that something like Before Sunset or Boyhood offer; it’s really just about Glen Powell and Adria Arjona being movie stars, Powell in particular. His sheer charisma carries the film on its back all the way to the finish line. My only complaint in this regard is that because the film moves so fast, we don’t really get to spend enough time with his initial persona of Gary, which to my mind, is when Powell gets to be funniest (apart from a great montage in the first half hour).
 
If the film has flaws, the side characters do leave a bit to be desired. Powell and Arjona are great, ditto to the singular excellent supporting character played by Austin Amelio, but the others don’t so much feel like characters in and of themselves as they do like set-up fodder for our main stars to do their thing. The performances are good, but the performers themselves don’t have much of an opportunity to embody something more fully realized. To be fair, one doesn’t need every side character in a movie like this to be a memorable piece of a pretty light puzzle, but it doesn’t hurt either.
 
In the end, there’s not a lot to say about Hit Man beyond that it’s just a damn good time and a lot of fun to watch. The script is clever, the dialogue and editing are pretty close to perfect, and most importantly, it gives Glen Powell the movie star part he deserves and Adria Arjona a massive career boost. This one really should be seen in a theater with an audience, but since Netflix is just gonna keep dropping the ball on that, at least checking it out would be worth your time.
 
I’m giving “Hit Man” an 8.6/10
 
- The Friendly Film Fan

It’s been nine years since Mad Max: Fury Road roared the once-thought-dead action franchise back to life with one of the most perfect action spectacles ever put to screen, and while there is still no direct sequel to that film (though The Wasteland remains in pre-production), Australian mad lad and franchise director George Miller has resurrected that film’s principle character for an origin story all her own. Anya Taylor-Joy stars as Furiosa, a young girl belonging to a place of abundance who is kidnapped from her home by the madman Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). Over the course of many years, Furiosa must learn how the wasteland works by way of trade and road war, how to survive its many cruelties and trials, how to rise through the ranks in order to eventually seek revenge on the man who took everything from her, and above all, how to find her way home.
 
The best of the Mad Max films have never been all that concerned with complicated stories, which makes this Mad Max Saga an especially interesting test case in seeing whether or not Miller and company can pull off a slightly more nuanced version of the Fury Road feeling without it seeming like they’re just trying to do the exact same thing again, and to that degree, it largely succeeds. While Furiosa absolutely makes an excellent companion piece to Fury Road in tying everything together in way that doesn’t feel cheap or condescending from the origin points of certain character traits to the introduction of specific vehicles to even some musical motifs from the original Tom Holkenberg score, it is still very much its own movie, with its own ideas, its own story, and its own sense of place. The plot mechanics of our titular character’s odyssey across the desert are decidedly more complex than those of its predecessor, which thrived largely due to its magnificent craftwork overlayed on top of its simplicity, rather than attempting to weave it into a tale requiring more finesse. This movie a tale of the blood-soaked tragedy behind all the rage and resolve our titular character possesses when we meet her in the previous film, which by nature invites further complications into determining how those parts of Furiosa came to be, and its deliberate avoidance of peddle-to-the-metal pacing present in Fury Road – along with the longer runtime – is the clearest indicator that Miller is attempting to paint a complete and all-consuming portrait of who Furiosa is as a character; he is not crafting an action extravaganza, but a revenge epic.
 
That said, the action sequences that do appear in this film – at least most of them – all carry the same visceral adrenaline that those of Fury Road did. There is a chase sequence towards the middle of the film (which is broken up into five distinct segments) which could easily outclass all other action sequences made this year; at one point, the man next to me’s jaw actually dropped in response to one of the fighting mechanics introduced during the scene. It’s the kind of action filmmaking only the truly insane are capable of performing at this level, and despite the fact that it is clearly laden with more visual effects than any singular scene of Fury Road has, the way it’s shot and edited makes it feel like something no one except George Miller ever could pull off. And while that scene in particular was the definite highlight of the film for me personally, there are a few others that deserve near-equal praise in how they utilize the sound design, as does the entire film in that specific respect; you can feel the rumble of every engine, the power of the tires in the sand, the crack of the gunshots across the desert air. It’s the sort of sound design that forces one to realize just how much better great sound can make an already great movie. There are a few admittedly nitpicky areas in which Furiosa falters, chiefly in the visual makeup of the film (some of the green screen is a bit obvious and the color grade doesn’t feel as saturated as Fury Road does, making it less vibrant) and the fact that unfortunately, that epic sense of pace does mean that this movie feels longer than it probably should, despite the fact that everything within that length is working about as well as it can be expected to, but the craftwork in this still operates high above almost anything else being produced in Hollywood right now.
 
A great film can’t rest on craftwork alone, though. All the performers have to step up to the plate, and dear reader, they all knock it out of the park. There are, of course, some familiar faces involved which we get to know later on in Fury Road, and Tom Burke’s character does ultimately feel a tad superfluous when all is said and done despite his admirable performance, but this film truly belongs to the new blood. Anyone even remotely familiar with Anya Taylor-Joy is aware of her immense talents going all the way back to The Witch in 2015, but she gets to turn on a new mode here of feminine rage that feels not so much like a reaction to what was done to her, but an evolution of who she was destined to become; that’s a very hard line to act with minimal dialogue across two-plus hours, and she nails every moment she’s asked to. That said, Chris Hemsworth is the performance everyone is sure to be talking about coming out of this film; he's chewing scenery left and right, clearly having the time of his life playing the despicable (and occasionally hilarious) Dementus in what might be his finest performance to date. I’m not entirely sure I’m ready to hop on that train yet as we can only see how his part in all this stacks up with time, but it’s certainly the most fun he’s been to watch since at least Thor: Ragnarok, and probably ever.
 
In the end, though, this is still very much a George Miller film, and although Fury Road may be a better movie on the whole, this – I believe – is a better-directed piece of work, if only because the direction is more visible without a whole lot of other masters at work sharing the spotlight. It may seem trivial, but refusing to just play the hits again, even if they are hits for a reason, is an exciting thing for a filmmaker at Miller’s caliber to commit to, and despite any shortcomings the film may have, making this a different kind of movie than Fury Road was still absolutely the correct approach to telling this story, which he has rendered into existence with an exciting fervor. It’s so clear he cares about this world and these characters to such a degree no one else has even tried to make one of these, and if I had my way, no one else ever would, even after he’s long passed from this Earth.
 
I’m giving “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” a 9.2/10
 
- The Friendly Film Fan

With their debut feature, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, director Jane Schoenbrun burst onto the scene as a voice with a particular talent for examining gender dysphoria through coming-of-age horror, utilizing found footage and screen recordings a la Unfriended and Searching to explore how online spaces may exacerbate or further complicate the uncertainty of youth and our innate desire as human beings to belong to something…or somewhere. Hoping to pull off the hat trick a second time, Schoenbrun now has set their sights on the world of late-night 90s television in an effort to relay the experience of queer dysphoria primarily through the lens of trans identity using old-school, analog psychedelia as a means of telling their story. The central premise revolves around the relationship between Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), who meet on an election night at the local high school. The two bond over their shared love for a late-night show called “The Pink Opaque,” which somewhat mirrors real-life hits like Goosebumps or Are You Afraid of the Dark? Over the next several years, both Owen and Maddy begin to feel that something about their lives isn’t quite right; stuck or suppressed, they know that whatever experiences they share through The Pink Opaque feel more real than reality itself – could it be more than just a tv show?
 
The plotting of this movie may occasionally feel static, the characters within not fully drawn while their respective personal journeys stretch too thin for comfort, but further examination of these elements’ relationship to the film’s themes reveal their deliberacy in being crafted this way. I Saw the TV Glow is not merely concerned with the idea of trans identity, but the with the journey of its inherent and often terrifying uncertainty, prior to its embrace or rejection by the individual wrestling with it. It is in this way that we come to connect with Owen as a character; because he doesn’t know who he is, we also don’t, and any queer individual will instantly recognize just what that feels like – to not really know if the real you is just a bug in the system, an idea that requires suppression because the truth is a terrifying antithesis to the reality you know. When we first meet Owen, he is a husk, a shell merely watching life play out on a tv screen; we witness his journey from boy to man between cut-ins of him sitting at a fire, recollecting what it was like to have lived as himself at all, attempting to examine his own repression, recalling how Maddy’s presence in his life has altered it in a way that terrifies him.
 
It is also in this way that Schoenbrun pleads with their audience to recognize the dangers of suppressing one’s true identity as a queer individual (in this film specifically, a trans individual); the melancholy that accompanies it leaves one in eternal night, a forever death that eventually subsumes all else, even as no one else can see it happening until it’s too late. To quote the film itself, “the longer you wait, the closer you get to suffocating.” Working at both a movie theater and the ironically-named “Fun Palace” where the only light sources are entirely artificial, Owen suffocates under the guise of living life how it “should” be lived; one of the quotes playing in the background film on display states that “machines now walk the Earth,” as Owen does. In refusing to let go of the life with which he is familiar, he becomes nothing more than a robot, a believer in the idea that even as he suppresses his true self, love will save him from the melancholy that plagues him, even as the viewer knows it won’t; it can’t – only though embracing his identity can it ever be conquered.
 
But as much as the film is a warning against the suppression of identity, it’s also a call to those people who feel this dysphoria to embrace the truth, even if it’s terrifying to confront one’s true self; “there is still time,” written in chalk on a suburb street, reminds us that though time moves quickly, one can be free of the “midnight realm” and defeat “Mr. Melancholy” through true self-actualization. As Owen walks down the hallways of his school during act one, the first sign he sees states “to thine own self be true,” the last “without courage no other virtues matter.” There is, of course, other signage on the walls, including one just down the hall from the last, but for Owen’s walk, these are not coincidental placements. Immediately after he turns down a different hallway, he is bathed in the light of the trans flag colors as they make up the stained glass in the windows. In the opening section of the film, prior to the title card coming on screen, Owen can be seen participating in a group activity with a gymnasium parachute which also features the colors of the trans flag; he is the only one to get up and walk around underneath it, in direct contrast to the previous idea of his being a husk stuck in “reality.” I feel here than Schoenbrun is asking their audience to walk around as themselves for a while, just to know what it looks like – at the very least, it’s better than being stuck in a world where suffocation and melancholy are the alternatives.
 
While the success of I Saw the TV Glow as a film is sure to vary from person to person, there is something entirely undeniable about its being; there’s no doubt this film comes from a very personal place, as it sees queer youth – specifically trans youth – through a lens that only a queer person really can. In one act two bar scene, the band Sloppy Jane performs their song “Claw Machine,” which features the lyric “I paint the ceiling black, so I don’t notice when my eyes are open.” If you have ever struggled as a queer person with your identity, you understand this lyric better than anyone. The confrontation of one’s true self is a terrifying thing; it can be so easy to just paint the ceiling black so one doesn’t even notice it anymore. Schoenbrun’s film is both an understanding of that temptation, and a plea not to follow it, with all the style and vision a story such as this would require. Queer cinema, horror cinema, and queer horror cinema have shown audiences a lot of ways to interpret identity dysphoria, but rarely has it been this clearly rendered. It’s an almost impossible feeling to apply language to, but suffice it to say, to bear witness to something that allows one to feel seen in this specific way – I’ve never experienced anything quite like it.
 
I’m giving “I Saw the TV Glow” a 9.8/10.
 
- The Friendly Film Fan