WOLF (Christian Cargill; UK)

The wolf learned to survive by confronting the world, while the bird sings whether anyone is listening.

Christian Cargill’s WOLF left me with a warm smile, both for the unique way it profiles pop artist Patrick Wolf and for the gentle affection it shows for its subject. Online synopses describe it as narrated by Tilda Swinton (whom I could listen to for hours), but I’d be remiss not to mention that it’s much more intimate than that. WOLF unfolds as a direct, soft-spoken conversation between Swinton and Wolf off-screen, who, as we discover immediately, have known each other for a long time. The wolf’s image became a symbol of survival in response to the abuse Wolf faced as a teenager. Swinton’s performance in Sally Potter’s Orlando later helped him see himself as a “shapeshifting outsider.” (Side note: If you can, I urge you to turn this into a double-feature with the 1992 film!)

Meanwhile, Cargill lets their exchanges unfold through childhood home videos, frenetic concert footage, beautiful hand-drawn animations, and tranquil images of Wolf painting and tending his garden. Both are important to his life, but I found the latter especially touching. A garden involves knowing when to nurture and when to cut back, and it becomes an incredibly evocative way to approach the weight of grief Wolf carries throughout the film. Both Cargill and Wolf don’t shy away from the struggles that left him unable to make music for years, but they never become the sole focus, either.

That brings me to the repeated imagery of the birds. They recur throughout the film, both real and illustrated, in diary pages, and even in artwork done by Wolf’s mother. As Wolf says in the film, “A bird will sing, and it’s lovely if someone happens to be walking by, but that’s not the reason why it sings.” The bird sings as an expression of being alive, and, ultimately, the boy who once imagined himself as a wolf capable of fighting back becomes a man who finally finds freedom in singing.

School for Defectors (Jeremy Workman; South Korea/USA)

At one point in School for Defectors, three girls rehearse a K-pop routine in a room lined with educational posters about North Korean prison camps. It’s a brief image in this 92-minute documentary, but it captures the balance Jeremy Workman keeps returning to: students trying to live ordinary teenage lives while carrying enormous histories with them. The students in question are all children of North Korean defectors and are enrolled at Jangdaehyun School (JDH) in Busan. JDH has only 20 students, making it the smallest of these specialized schools.

School for Defectors opens with a deceptively simple question a teacher poses to the students: imagine what you’ll look like in ten years and what kind of work you’ll be doing. We’re given the opening credits instead of any responses, but the teacher tells us something important, which ends up acting like a credo for JDH itself: “We are dreaming forward with hope.”

I appreciated that Workman gives plenty of space to the trauma surrounding these families, from learning about the incredibly perilous escape journeys to discrimination from classmates after arriving in South Korea. He never lets the film define its students by that history; instead, we watch them dance (pay attention to Philip’s incredibly slick moves), play video games, worry about college, go to the beach, and cheer on classmates when they succeed. As the school’s principal explains, grades are undeniably important, but they want to offer a community where these kids can figure out who they want to become.

That idea is really fleshed out through a student-led book project we watch develop from start to finish. As I circled back to the film’s initial question, I realized what I watched unfold wasn’t really abstract anymore; these kids are already working through the process of building what’s to come.

Gasmask (Harry Cepka; Canada/USA)

Imagine civilization collapsing. What do we turn to? Memories, I’d imagine, though our methods of remembering will inevitably differ. In Harry Cepka’s Gasmask, we watch people in this post-apocalyptic world scavenge old phones, photos, movies, sounds, and electronics, all in an attempt to remember. One remembers by playing, another by moving, and another by searching. All the while, the narrator records everything on an old phone, as if making new memories might be the key to unlocking the old ones.

But what happens when one doesn’t want to remember? We see the reverse play out, too, giving the film a poignant opposition: What survives when technology dies, and, more importantly, is remembering always worth preserving?

Shot in stark black and white and slipping between moving images and still photographs à la Chris Marker’s La Jetée, Cepka makes a dystopian poem that circles these questions of what memory is for. And maybe that’s what has stayed with me the most in the weeks since watching the World Premiere at VIFF: that memory is never passive, no matter what we do.

All of a Sudden (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi; France/Japan/Germany/Belgium)

Watching a 197-minute movie on day ten of a film festival may seem daunting, but not when the film quite literally practices the patience it advocates. In All of a Sudden, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi gives his characters time to just exist beside one another. For a film orbiting around what it actually means to care, or better yet, engage with someone, it couldn’t be more fitting.

Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira) directs the Garden of Freedom, a Paris nursing home in the early stages of implementing Humanitude, a care practice she later describes as built on the core philosophy of “engaging with others.” This work, rooted in dignity and human connection, is something she believes in deeply, even as her employees quit, the board refuses raises, and her co-worker tells her she’s edging toward burnout.

Marie-Lou also embodies a beautiful contradiction: everyone at the Garden relies on her, but when she goes home, she’s alone. When a resident dies, she waits to cry privately on the tram ride home. Before we even meet playwright Mari (Tao Okamoto), who has terminal cancer, we already understand that Marie-Lou spends her life giving care without really receiving it. By the time they meet, their friendship grows from an initial act of care that Marie-Lou performs almost automatically. So far, the film has mostly relied on static shots, but when Marie-Lou and Mari take their first long walk together, the camera tracks them. As they engage with one another, they bring movement into the film.

While Humanitude is Marie-Lou’s professional credo, it also seems to be Hamaguchi’s focus for the film. The idea is tested in different settings, from being introduced through elder care to Mari and Marie-Lou’s friendship, Mari’s theater, and physical touch. This becomes a recurring motif, first born from a reciprocal foot rub the two women share. For me, it may have been one of the movie’s purest expressions: no hierarchy, no patient or caregiver. One touches, and the other touches back.

Later on in the film, I scribbled down a telling line: “Up close, no one is normal.” All of a Sudden seems deeply suspicious of boxing people into categories like healthy or sick, or normal or abnormal. That foot-rub scene reappears at the nursing home, but it becomes a puddle of bodies on the grass, young and old, touching and sharing the same space. That philosophy of touch becomes communal, dissolving the boundary between the person who gives care and the person who receives it. While we’re repeatedly shown places and people with bodies that are often discussed clinically, Hamaguchi keeps reclaiming the body as something capable of pleasure, affection, movement, and connection. It’s an extraordinarily gentle and tactile film, but never a slight one. My favorite of VIFF, easily.

The Beloved (Rodrigo Sorogoyen; Spain)

If the first 20 minutes of Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s The Beloved hook you, you’re in luck: this overwhelmingly tense lunch sets the tone for the whole movie. Esteban Martinez (Javier Bardem), a legendary filmmaker, meets Emilia (Victoria Luengo), his estranged daughter, after 13 years apart and offers her a role in his new film, Desert. “It’s a story about betrayal, a story about abandonment, it’s a story about love, about people who can’t look each other in the eye,” he tells her. He insists she earned the part on her own merits, but also admits he wants to help her because, as a father, he never really did.

That lunch also reveals how differently they remember their shared past. Esteban recalls taking Emilia to the cinema as one of the few good memories of his life. She remembers one such outing very differently: Esteban was drunk and high, got into a fight, was thrown out of the theater, and put his tween daughter in a cab home alone. Instead of responding with curiosity or remorse, he disputes her version. For a filmmaker whose job is to construct narratives, Esteban seems desperate to retain editorial control over their history.

Once we arrive in the desert and witness huge landscapes, convoy shots, and endless sets and crews, the film’s physical scale expands. As for Esteban and Emilia? Their emotional conflict merely has more space to roam. Then, Sorogoyen takes this idea to a whole other formal level. As tensions rise, The Beloved slips between color and black-and-white, widescreen and boxier frames, and different film formats. Are we looking at different ways to frame experience? Quite possibly. Esteban also keeps trying to direct Emilia outside the boundaries of the film they’re shooting. It starts benignly by giving her acting notes, but he eventually starts telling her how she should handle her drinking because he sees his younger self in her. Emilia draws the line explicitly: she came there to be an actress in his movie, not to be his daughter.

Perhaps Esteban has changed, perhaps he hasn’t. Either way, cinema may be the only language he knows well enough to try to reach Emilia through, though it still cannot give him final cut over the story they share.

Yugo Goes to America (Filip Grujić, Aleksa Borković; Serbia/Croatia)

I knew Yugo Goes to America had me almost immediately. Maybe it’s inevitable when you’re also from former Yugoslavia and have, yes, actually ridden in a Yugo before. The lore, oh the lore. Filip Grujić, Aleksa Borković, and the rest of their crew set out to drive across the United States and answer one crucial, incredibly important question: is it really the worst car ever made?

Mechanically? I mean, the evidence isn’t flattering. The Yugo they buy from a couple in Pennsylvania breaks down in New York, eventually decides it only wants to go in reverse, has the speedometer practically experience an exorcism, inspires stories about cooling the engine with literal ice (which is also put into practice), all while running to the tune of constant clanging noises. At one point, the boys meet one of the businessmen who originally imported Yugos to the U.S., and even he sits inside it, shakes his head, and insists it’s not representative of the cars they sold.

Sure, all these almost Looney-Tunes-esque issues had me howling, but I also found myself beaming at the reality that many people still love this damn thing. Across the country, strangers stop to reminisce, while enthusiasts, including Nick in Ohio (whom the crowd loved), quickly share their own collections. Meanwhile, Filip, Aleksa, and the gang run into ex-Yugoslav communities that feed the crew, fix the car, and, heck, even take turns driving it for the sheer nostalgia of it all.

I don’t think I laughed harder at VIFF, or, as Filip himself puts it, “All I know is that in the worst car, I had the best fun.”

Look Back (Hirokazu Kore-eda; Japan)

I initially wondered whether we really needed a live-action version of Look Back, since the animated adaptation of the manga came out two years earlier. In hindsight, the film seems ridiculously suited to Hirokazu Kore-eda. As he shared in a pre-recorded message to VIFF audiences, Look Back is about “friendships, encounters, and farewells.” That’s when I was assured I was in good hands (why did I ever doubt him!). Everything he said is basically catnip for a filmmaker this attentive to memory and human connection.

Having seen the 2024 anime, I was impressed by how faithfully Kore-eda preserves the emotional beats while letting the live-action version breathe a little longer. The attention to detail is beautiful throughout, with incredibly faithful recreations of certain areas, like Fujino’s room, or similarly, the initial appearance of Kyomoto.

I loved how Kore-eda allows the duo’s friendship to develop as we watch the seasons change (so many happy trees and landscapes, à la Bob Ross!). Yuta Bandoh’s gentle score is gorgeous, but so are the repeated images of the girls drawing against lush outdoor scenery. It’s these sorts of moments that made me get cozy in my seat and allowed me to get whisked away as I watched their shared obsession gradually become a life.

I’ll admit that the anime hit me harder emotionally, though I also believe that may be because I knew exactly what was waiting for me. Yet, Kore-eda finds his own tenderness in the material, and an answer to a question I’m sure has plagued many a creative: why keep making art when it can hurt this much?

Ba’s Book (Ashley Duong; Canada)

In Ba’s Book, Ashley Duong admits pretty quickly that straightforward interviews with her family weren’t getting her very far. “I can’t remember that period of my life anymore,” her grandmother tells her, while her father, who has already written a memoir, struggles to talk openly about what those memories mean.

What’s a documentarian to do? Duong settles on a new approach: she travels to Vietnam, where she meets her family members and stages scenes from her father’s past with younger relatives. Using his book as a guide, Duong covers his childhood in war-torn Vietnam, his years in Iran during the Iranian Revolution, and his eventual path to Canada. As her family members watch these recreations, she allows them to interrupt and correct the scenes. Suddenly, the memories — and emotions — flow.

That’s what fascinated me most about the film: how cinema itself becomes the language this family seems to need. As the film draws to a close, Duong says something beautifully simple that perhaps explains Ba’s Book best: “My dad’s book wasn’t for me, and this film isn’t for him. But maybe this is just how we show up for each other.”

Nowhere to Lay My Eyes (Hong Sangsoo; South Korea)

Seeing before naming. That’s what jumped out at me while watching Hong Sangsoo’s surprisingly gentle Nowhere to Lay My Eyes. Perhaps I had last year’s polite implosion, What Does That Nature Say to You in my mind a bit too much. Nevertheless, it’s still a deliciously slippery Hong outing.

Sanghee (Kim Min-hee) arrives on Jeju Island with her brother to visit her mother and stepfather. She hasn’t seen her mother in years, though we soon discover her younger sibling has been making secret trips. Discoveries abound in this 73-minute outing, as Sanghee and we also learn that her mother’s new husband has a daughter. With both of these strangers, Sanghee doesn’t quite know what to call them. A familial term? Perhaps later, she repeatedly says. Through it all, everyone seems unfailingly polite and pleasant. Sometimes, it almost feels awkward, though I also write this as an aficionado for the melodramatic.

Hong cleverly refuses to define things too quickly in Nowhere, though everyone else tries to do it for our heroine. Sanghee makes short experimental films by carrying a camera around and waiting for something beautiful to catch her eye, though, as she puts it, she dislikes deciding beforehand what she wants to find. “It feels dead somehow,” she comments. That philosophy begins to seep into the family drama. We listen as her mother presses her to know what the films are for, while her new stepsister pauses and asks her how to live knowing nothing is eternal. Similar to her variation of “later,” Sanghee pushes back on answers.

Of course, we get our classic Hong-isms throughout, and we watch much of the dialogue play out through meals, walks, awkward silences, and seemingly ordinary conversations. For a film this gentle and funny, it left me thinking an awful lot about what happens when we stop trying to, well, name the thing in front of us and simply look at it.

A Place of Absence (Marialuisa Ernst; USA/Bolivia/Mexico)

Grief is not passive in Marialuisa Ernst’s A Place of Absence. The documentary is built around a particularly cruel kind of grief, where you still love someone who is gone without knowing what happened to them. Is mourning even possible? You are, as the title says, living in a place of absence. Ernst calls this “ambiguous loss,” and she traces that uncertainty through the Caravan of Mothers of Missing Migrants as they travel across Mexico, searching for children who disappeared along migration routes north.

Ernst wisely avoids reducing these women to sorrow. We watch as they march, organize, speak to lawmakers, and tirelessly search shelters and prisons. But we also see them planting trees, dancing together in the caravan, and supporting one another through years of uncertainty. Their grief is immense, of course, but so is their agency.

The journey with the Caravan of Mothers is connected to the disappearance of Ernst’s uncle Guillermo during Argentina’s dictatorship and the place of absence her own mother has lived with after losing her little brother. As Ernst weaves these threads together, the film becomes increasingly expressive, with nature itself becoming a language of memory. One mother walks barefoot through what the film identifies as the largest mass grave in the Americas, leaving rose petals across the graves. In another scene, we see Guillermo’s photo placed at the foot of a tree in a lush forest. Early in the film, Ernst beautifully shares that one thing she’d love to teach her daughter is the belief “that human beings are bonded to each other from within. Like trees.” By the end, I would say she achieved that goal. A Place of Absence may be heartbreaking, but it’s also never hopeless.

Club Kid (Jordan Firstman; USA)

“Let’s do this forever.” Jordan Firstman’s Peter declares this early on in Club Kid, and as the film thrusts us into a blur of bodies and music, it’s easy to get swept up in this hedonistic fantasy. One early shot sets the stage brilliantly: Peter and his friends pile into an Uber as the camera swirls around them continuously. Just another night out on the town, right? A decade or so later, not much has changed for Peter — until his 10-year-old son Arlo (Reggie Absolom) arrives.

Sure, these clubs are loud and messy, but what I appreciated is how Firstman allows this community to fold Arlo into something warm and communal. We see drag queens gossiping with him, Peter’s friends willing to lend a helping hand, and soon enough, we watch Arlo DJ to a room full of adults who adore him. It’s ridiculous and hilarious in equal measure, and the club scenes come so alive that I momentarily thought I could smell the familiar club AC blasting in my face.

Firstman and Absolom perfectly bounce off one another. Peter never patronizes Arlo or treats him like a fragile child. There’s a little Paper Moon in the odd-couple dynamic, though it’s seen through the lens of queer nightlife and millennial arrested development. Funny, sensory, and surprisingly tender, I wasn’t expecting to tear up given its initial party-animal setup. My heart is so very full.

Tangles (Leah Nelson; Canada/USA)

Poignant, bittersweet, and the type of film that made me lunge for the phone to call my mom as soon as it wrapped up. To put it bluntly, Leah Nelson’s Tangles absolutely wrecked me. Adapted from Sarah Leavitt’s graphic memoir — which I strongly urge you to read as well — the film follows illustrator Sarah (Abbi Jacobson) as her mother, Midge (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), begins showing signs of early-onset Alzheimer’s. On paper, this could have become a relentlessly grim tale. What Nelson does with the script, however, with the help of Leavitt herself and Trev Renney, is make it come astonishingly alive. Tangles is funny, romantic, warm, occasionally sexy, and deeply attentive to the ways ordinary life must keep moving, even when something devastating has entered it.

One big aspect of Sarah’s life is her relationship with the ever-calm-and-cool Donimo (Samira Wiley), which gives the film a beautiful queer love story. This also introduces another layer to the film: how the partners of caregivers to those with Alzheimer’s must navigate this new and unknown landscape. Sarah is falling in love, trying to build her career as an artist, fighting with her family, screwing up, laughing, and figuring out who she is, all while her mother’s illness begins consuming more and more of her world.

The hand-drawn animation is an absolute standout. Mostly rendered in black and white, the film also allows for occasional color, water, monsters, and other surreal flourishes to erupt whenever Sarah’s emotions overflow. Midge’s diagnosis transforms into an image of sinking dread and drowning, while the anxiety of returning home becomes Sarah literally wading through water.

Louis-Dreyfus gives Midge such warmth that watching her change is devastating. Bryan Cranston, as her husband, Rob (my favorite “dad” performance of Cranston’s since Malcolm in the Middle), also shines as a man who initially brushes off the reality of the situation only to try and hold everything together as the disease progresses.

Tangles refuses to let Alzheimer’s become the totality of anyone’s life. What I appreciated most about it is that it understands the nuances of grief. I sobbed through chunks of this, though I also laughed constantly. What a beautiful film.

The Debut (Jesse Eisenberg; USA)

The Debut opens initially with the buoyancy of a musical, before quickly revealing the sharper teeth we’ve come to expect from director Jesse Eisenberg. Julianne Moore is phenomenal as Mona, a meek suburban housewife who decides one day she’s going to audition for a New Jersey community-theater production of the fictional musical, Nosy Neighbors, with songs by Eisenberg. What we come to see, however, is how consumed Mona becomes by the role itself. I kept thinking about her role in Todd Haynes’ Safe, another film where Moore plays a repressed housewife slipping into an altered reality, but in The Debut, she mischievously subverts that familiar fragility. Mona may be painfully awkward and initially quite naive, but she’s also ferociously determined.

Shot on warm 16mm and filled with some terrific long takes, The Debut has the scrappy theatrical chaos of Peter Bogdanovich’s Noises Off, complete with explosive rehearsals, eccentric actors, and an exacting director by way of Paul Giamatti’s always-superb neurotic form. Eisenberg may poke some fun at this world, but it’s clear he absolutely loves these people.

The Debut is a satire built for the big screen, and at VIFF’s opening night premiere, the audience would erupt in raucous applause and cheers on the regular. Though, what surprised me the most was the film’s sweeter register. We come to see that while Mona’s family barely registers her, the theater gives her a found family of her own (along with many bananas!), and a tool belt for her character that becomes a form of armor for tackling this new terrain. By the time we reach the climactic performance, Mona’s transformation is equal parts absurd and utterly electric. The Debut is ultimately about finding your voice, but also what happens when someone finally gives you the room to actually use it.

Tenor: My Name is Pati (Rebecca Tansley; New Zealand)

As I geared up to watch Rebecca Tansley’s Tenor: My Name is Pati, I initially wondered why it wasn’t called My Name is Pene, considering it tracks Pene Pati’s extraordinary rise through the opera world. After watching the documentary, I realized why: it isn’t a story about one man succeeding alone. In Tenor, family is everywhere. Born in Samoa and raised in New Zealand, Pene grew up surrounded by music, something we see through a glorious abundance of home videos, alongside his relationship with his brother, Amitai, a fellow tenor and also a rising opera star. What stuck out the most to me, however, is the communal Samoan understanding that success belongs to everyone who helped build it. Pene carries the torch beautifully.

Tansley fluidly moves between these intimate family spaces and the almost absurd grandeur of the international opera circuit. One moment we see Pene back home doing chores to help his parents, and the next he’s commanding a stage in Paris, Berlin, London, or New York. Early on, Pene identifies himself as an emotional singer first, and it’s easy to see that in his immaculate performances, but also in the pressure he carries to represent his family and community.

The final stretch, which I dare not spoil, absolutely got me. Seeing a certain milestone after hearing something Pene longs for early on gives the film its perfect emotional payoff. Tenor is joyful, generous, and incredibly moving.

The 45th edition of the Vancouver International Film Festival is well underway, running from October 1-11. This year's program is truly sensational, with more than 160 features on offer and so many titles I’ve been dying to see.

One through-line I’ve found throughout the festival, whether for R&R coverage or while preparing to moderate Q&As (for the first time ever!) and host the VIFF podcast, is a recurring interest in connection and belonging. Whether through family, friendship, community, or the uneasy spaces where people try and sometimes fail to understand each other, that search has surfaced time and time again. It’s genuinely been one of the most moving elements of the festival for me so far.

I’ll be sharing fresh dispatches of films I want to put on your radar as VIFF continues, but to kick things off, I’ve chosen three titles: Marine Atlan’s La Gradiva, Radu Jude’s The Diary of a Chambermaid, and Ian Bawa’s Strong Son.

La Gradiva (Marine Atlan; France/Italy)

Marine Atlan’s command of the visual language in her feature debut is sublime. Opening with lush summer photographs set to Satie, La Gradiva is so beautiful that, for a while, I was prepared to just let it wash over me. A train seen from a first-person perspective slowly transforms into an eye, and from there the film becomes filled with observation. People watch one another through doorways, windows, and across crowded rooms, trying to figure one another out. They often get it wrong.

​A group of French high school students and their teachers head to Naples to study Pompeii. It feels cruelly perfect that the trip asks them to reconstruct vanished lives from fragments, even as they fail to understand the living people beside them. At the center is Toni (Colas Quignard), a drifting teenager carrying a romantic story about his family’s Italian past. As he tries to excavate this history, the story begins to fracture.

​Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy hovers nearby as another specter of these ruins. Instead of a marriage that has slowly ossified, Atlan gives us adolescents on the brink of adulthood, surrounded by people whose lives have been permanently fixed into history just as their own identities are supposed to remain endlessly open. As the film closes with the dedication, “For all those who are not from here,” La Gradiva leaves behind a question sure to haunt: how much can we really ever know another person before they become memory?

You can watch La Gradiva at VIFF on Friday, October 9th, and Sunday, October 11th.

The Diary of a Chambermaid (Radu Jude; France/Romania)

Radu Jude has never exactly lacked bite, and I’d argue that he’s even sharper when he isn’t detonating every ten minutes. His latest, The Diary of a Chambermaid, works precisely because it keeps things at a gentle simmer. Loosely based on Octave Mirbeau’s novel, the film follows Gianina (Ana Dumitrascu), a Romanian live-in nanny and domestic worker employed by a wealthy family in Bordeaux. She cares for their son, though she’s left her daughter back in Romania with her mother.

Pierre and Marguerite Donnadieu seem perfectly kind. But are they? Every conversation is sprinkled with reminders: a joke about the “dash of Romania” in her cooking, Pierre parading her out at their dinner party to speak on Eastern European politics (while standing, mind you), or a supposedly generous favor that isn’t so generous when you sit with it.

Then comes a killer formal idea: when not working for them, Gianina spends her evenings literally performing The Diary of a Chambermaid with an “inclusive” amateur production — something her employers encouraged. The joke writes itself. The wealthy consume exploitation as provocative art, while remaining remarkably blind to the version taking place at home. All of this has exquisitely embarrassing “We’re enlightened people!” energy, and Gianina knows it, too, muttering in Romanian under her breath.

The heat never needs to be cranked higher. The longer Chambermaid simmers, the uglier all that good liberal hospitality begins to look. It might just be my favorite Jude yet.

You can watch The Diary of a Chambermaid at VIFF on Tuesday, October 6th, and Wednesday, October 7th.

Strong Son (Ian Bawa; Canada)

Harvey (Mandeep Sodhi) is very strong. His father, Jagdeep (Amrit Parbhakar), will happily tell you so, whether you ask him or not. But in Ian Bawa’s Strong Son, a bodybuilder’s impressive physique offers little protection against the emotional weight of caring for an aging parent.

Bawa’s debut feature, developed from his “Sad Dad” shorts and dedicated to his own father, is devastatingly tender without abandoning its sense of humor. Jagdeep sings, dances, and proudly boasts about his son, yet his insistence that Harvey be strong leaves little room for the younger man’s distress. Sodhi’s quiet and frequently tearful performance plays beautifully against Parbhakar’s buoyancy and stubbornness. The affection between them is unmistakable, from Jagdeep photographing Harvey’s workouts on his iPad to watching wrestling together. It’s still there, even when words fail.

Cinematographer Markus Henkel bathes the film in a soft, warm light that makes everything feel lived in, while Bawa’s moments of absurd comedy interrupt Harvey’s distress without ever diminishing it. I come back to Jagdeep’s declaration we hear multiple times in the film: “This is my son. He is very strong.” It takes on a new meaning, as the film smartly resists the easy triumph of a man learning to “tough it out.” Strong Son understands that strength can also mean admitting you cannot do everything alone.

You can watch Strong Son at VIFF on Tuesday, October 6th.

Remember how I said that R&R is on a brief hold until the Vancouver International Film Festival kicks off? Well, I lied. I decided to squeeze in a few more watches from my Radiance physical media stack, and ended up spending the week with three wealthy Italian men, none of whom have a clue how to behave themselves. Boys!

The three films were released between 1963 and 1971, and wealth and privilege are the obvious connections between them. What’s more interesting, though, is how their respective filmmakers explore the limits of male control. Through a tightly constructed drama, an increasingly vicious comedy, and a fractured psychological thriller, we’re left wandering through worlds that refuse to play by the rules their protagonists feel entitled to.

Let’s rewind and revive.

Corruption (Mauro Bolognini; 1963)

In Mauro Bolognini’s Corruption, everything can be orchestrated if your pockets are deep enough. Which makes it funny that the film’s opening tries to convince our young hero, Stefano (Jacques Perrin), otherwise. At his graduation, Stefano listens to his headmaster speak about moral responsibility and making a conscious effort to walk through life with goodness. This pursuit of good, he says, is their “true education.” He pauses, looks at the camera, and suddenly, Giovanni Fusco’s ridiculously sexy jazz score kicks in, as if taunting the headmaster. Stefano comes into focus again, smiling as he waits to receive his diploma. As Fusco’s score grows more confident, the title card appears directly across Stefano’s face: CORRUPTION. So much for subtlety.

Stefano has made the decision to enter a monastery, determined to search for something “immaterial” in a vapid world. He has firsthand experience of this landscape defined by power, as his father, Leonardo (Alain Cuny), is a wealthy Milanese publisher with a philosophy the polar opposite of Stefano’s headmaster. In Leonardo’s world, as he tells his son, “There are two sets of morals: One for those who command, and one for those who obey.” Dubbing Stefano’s education “pointless,” he tells him it’s time he became an industrialist, too.

When Stefano reveals those plans to his father, we get a brilliantly comical scene where they’ve both retired to their sprawling home, and as Leonardo walks around and turns off all the lights, his son’s declaration causes him to immediately switch them on again. Tension builds as the audience waits for Leonardo’s rage, yet it never arrives. He simply strolls to his bar, pours himself a drink (offering Stefano one, too), and begins discussing their respective worldviews. The exchange can be read as remarkably civilized, when in actuality, it’s merely tactical. Leonardo is an industrialist, remember?

The film then moves to the main stage: aboard Leonardo’s gorgeous yacht. Telling Stefano that they need some bonding time, alone, the men head out the following day. The catch? Leonardo failed to tell his son that he invited the alluring Adriana (played by the impossibly stunning Rosanna Schiaffino), too. And so begin the mind games.

Leonardo’s true power lies in his ability to turn relationships into transactions. Rather than argue with Stefano, he slowly begins building the ultimate chessboard, with Adriana at the center of his gambit. Bolognini is smart here, as he doesn’t reduce her to a simple temptress. Of course, Stefano is fascinated by her immediately, yet any sort of outward attraction morphs into blunt glares and a repeated interrogation of her sexual history. As the summer heat bears down and their attraction swelters even more, Stefano still manages to assume the moral high ground. Silly little pawn.

Bolognini choosing to make Stefano imperfect is important. The young man’s ideals are sincere, no doubt, but they’re also rigid, shaped in part by his inexperience. Leonardo is well aware of this vulnerability, so he knows exactly where to exploit it.

For a film as visually stunning as Corruption, its mechanics are hideous. This isn’t merely a battle between father and son; everywhere Stefano turns, people operate by the same transactional logic, even those who speak his language of morality. Corruption is the admission fee to ride the train to cushy adulthood. When Adriana congratulates Stefano for finally “understanding” how the world works, Bolognini has turned that word into something poisonous. Knowledge is power, I guess, but why is the reward so rotten?

You can purchase Corruption via Radiance or MVD Shop.

The Magnificent Cuckold (Antonio Pietrangeli; 1964)

When we first meet Andrea Artusi (Ugo Tognazzi) in Antonio Pietrangeli’s The Magnificent Cuckold, he, for all intents and purposes, has absolutely nothing to worry about. A jaunty tune by Jimmy Fontana plays as Andrea struts down the street, and it doesn’t take long to figure out that he’s rich, successful, and very happily married to the frankly absurdly beautiful Maria Grazia (Claudia Cardinale). So in love this pair is that when she asks him one evening if her neckline is too low, he encourages her to wear it anyway. “If you got it, flaunt it,” he exclaims with gusto. Other men can look, sure, but in Andrea’s eyes, Maria is yet another one of his flashy toys.

What happens, though, when you break your own toy? Or, more accurately, when your “toy” turns out to have a will of its own?

Andrea discovers this pretty quickly. In his world, affairs abound among the elite, and after a flirtatious encounter with Cristiana (Michèle Girardon), Andrea decides to dip his toes into uncharted territory. Cristiana practically gives him a masterclass in the mechanics behind it, showing him how to discreetly park his car, disappear into a hotel room, manufacture an alibi, and avoid names. After their first tryst, Andrea leaves, paranoid his fling’s French perfume is still on his hands. His solution? Buying his wife a chinchilla stole, because nothing says marital bliss like panic-purchasing fur after adultery.

Maria Grazia doesn’t suspect a thing, but Andrea can’t relax. He now understands how easily a spouse can lie. Suddenly, the very beauty of his wife that he once proudly displayed becomes a threat to his ego — never mind the loving marriage they’ve built. It’s Andrea’s pride, first and foremost, that has made a spectacular mess of everything.

In the early 1960s, Italy was going through what was known as the “Economic Miracle” (il miracolo economico), and much of Pietrangeli’s 1964 comedy reveals the upper-class world Andrea surrounds himself with. While this economic boom undeniably improved material life, what happened to the emotional life? Wealth can’t fix insecurity, and Andrea’s increasingly spectacular breakdown exposes some of the contradictions beneath all that newfound prosperity.

Andrea has seemingly “made it” in life, accumulating all of the outward markers of successful modern bourgeois life. For all the genuine affection he shows Maria Grazia, she’s tangled up in that same logic of possession, alongside his inherited business, convertible, multiple homes, and social position. Of course, you can’t secure another human being like an asset. This is what makes the chinchilla stole hilariously ironic: after violating his marriage, his instinct is to literally buy something for his wife. Again, affection and commodities get muddled together with guilt and status.

The paranoia only gets worse for Andrea, and he starts authoring his own nightmare as his fantasies grow increasingly elaborate. Pietrangeli gifts us with some increasingly outrageous dream sequences as Maria Grazia moves confidently through hotels, surrounded by men, and eventually delivers an entire sexual spectacle.

Which brings us to the best part of The Magnificent Cuckold: the confident and charming Maria Grazia herself. Andrea’s peers initially describe her as a “fortress” when it comes to her loyalty to her husband, but the film gives us more insight into her mind as it goes on, and, more importantly, gives her agency. The great irony is that Andrea’s increasingly desperate attempts to understand and control his wife only reveal how little he seems to understand her at all.

Andrea has everything a man of his world is supposed to want, but in this commedia all’italiana, the joke is that “everything” never amounts to enough to feel secure.

You can purchase The Magnificent Cuckold via Radiance or MVD Shop.

The Double (Romolo Guerrieri; 1971)

“What do you want?!”

Lucia asks Giovanni this more than once in Romolo Guerrieri’s The Double, and, honestly, it may be the most difficult question anyone has put to him. Maybe he wants, well, everything? Giovanni (played by giallo mainstay Jean Sorel) is a wealthy, handsome layabout who lives a cushy life thanks to his father’s brick factory and brother’s construction business. He’s an architecture graduate but only dabbles in the profession, sympathizes with hippies from a safe distance, and openly admits to his own idle lifestyle with a dazzling smile. He’s not really committed to any version of himself, so if you ask him what he wants, the answer will change depending on who’s in front of him.

Giovanni’s slippery nature is precisely what makes an already head-scratching film even more of a puzzle to solve. The Double opens with our lead being shot in a parking garage by a man dressed in black, then instantly splinters into memories and repetitions as Giovanni’s life, quite literally, flashes before his eyes. I hesitate to fully commit to that notion, however, as we soon discover that not all that flashes can be trusted. Guerrieri keeps pulling the rug out from under us, sometimes so casually that it takes a moment to realize the scene we just watched may not have even happened at all (my notes throughout this one were unhinged, to say the least). Giovanni daydreams about murders, and he replays certain scenes with different characters, all while his actual memories unfurl in an infuriatingly unchronological way. Even Armando Trovajoli’s wonderfully breezy score gains a separate anxious piano line, as though an entirely different movie is leaking into this one.

All of this, of course, brings us back to the central question his wife, Lucia (Ewa Aulin), poses: What does Giovanni want? The deeper we dig into his memories, the more the story comes into focus, yet the mystery grows less and less interesting than watching a man who has spent his entire life projecting whatever he wants to see onto everyone around him.

Nowhere is that projection clearer than with Eddie (Sergio Doria), an American traveler who barely needs to speak before everyone around him decides exactly who he is. It’s not just Giovanni who does this, either. While he immediately dislikes him as a “loner,” Lucia is fascinated. Their friend, Roger (Silvano Tranquilli), reduces him to his “hippie” lifestyle, and Lucia’s mother, Nora (Lucia Bosé), is clearly attracted to him, as well. As Giovanni’s jealousy grows, he turns Eddie into a sexual rival, with some insane hallucinations, to boot. His problem, then, becomes one of narcissistic privilege: he cannot stop making other people characters in a story about himself. So much so, in fact, that this is what floods his mind when he’s shot.

To answer Lucia’s question, Giovanni wants freedom, provided everyone else exercises it on his terms. Maybe that’s why he never gives her an answer. He wants everything, though he doesn’t seem particularly interested in understanding what any of it is. For a man who spends so much time trying to decode everyone else, Giovanni never seems to consider that he might be the real puzzle.

You can purchase The Double via Radiance or MVD Shop.

Listen, sometimes, you just gotta trust the physical media backlog.

I’ve had Tai Kato’s Blood of Revenge sitting in my “To Watch” pile for a while now, with Sadao Nakajima’s Aesthetics of a Bullet joining it several months later. Now, as I’m preparing to cover another year of the Vancouver International Film Festival (more on that in the weeks to come, because I have some other projects lined up with them, too!), I was staring dumbfounded at my stack and trying to figure out what else I could chat about before I officially become MIA until mid-October. Then I spotted these two yakuza flicks. Easy peasy.

Except… they go together in an even more intriguing way. Hear me out.

You see, only eight years separate Blood of Revenge (1965) and Aesthetics of a Bullet (1973). Eight! And yet, morally, they feel like they’re operating in totally different universes. In Kato’s film, the lead is trapped by what yakuza identity means, while in Nakajima’s, we’re stuck with a man trapped by what yakuza identity promises.

See what I mean? This is what makes this pairing so fun. Enough teasing. Let’s rewind and revive.

Blood of Revenge (Tai Kato; 1965)

Blood of Revenge caught me off guard immediately as it began, its confidence palpable. Two yakuza kneel beneath Tai Kato’s camera as sake is poured, the composition completely symmetrical. The frame then gradually expands and begins to turn as drums thunder, and more bodies reveal themselves across the screen. For a moment, this ostensibly unbreakable order dominates, until a knife enters the picture.

​That sudden rupture starts to make sense once you settle into Kato’s 1965 ninkyo film, set in 1907 Osaka. Nearly everyone is trying to preserve some version of order while the world around them is slowly changing. At the center is Asajiro (Koji Tsuruta), a man with unshakable loyalty to his dying boss, thrust into responsibility for a yakuza organization, a legitimate business, and all the people attached to both. For Asajiro, honor comes above all, though resorting to violence is the last thing on his mind. He believes, sincerely, that an honorable man should somehow be capable of carrying both duty and feeling. If only things were so simple.

Hatsue (Sumiko Fuji), the geisha Asajiro loves, gives his conflict emotional weight; the clearest test of his impossible balance. Their relationship begins with pure kindness: he pays for a few days of her time so she can leave town and visit her dying father, asking for nothing in return. This gesture enrages the hot-headed Karasawa (Toru Abe), an enforcer working alongside the scheming rival boss Hoshino (Minoru Oki), who has paid for one of the days already. More on that later. When Hatsue and Asajiro finally admit their feelings for one another upon her return, duty comes knocking on the door shortly after. Asajiro’s boss is slowly dying, but he makes the conflicted decision to spend the time with Hatsue. By the time he returns, his boss has died in his absence, and the guilt attached to that single night changes everything.

When Asajiro is asked to succeed him, his boss’ inexperienced and spoiled son, Haruo (Masahiko Tsugawa), is enraged. Asajiro, ever noble, accepts, but wastes no time drawing a boundary between the yakuza organization and the family’s legitimate construction business. After all, as his late boss always said, “violence has no place in business.” Instilling in Haruo the understanding that he should become a respectable businessman his father hoped he could be, he asks him to run the business, while he’ll be in charge of the yakuza organization. It’s an intriguing contradiction: Asajiro accepts that he himself cannot shed the identity literally tattooed onto his back, yet he still believes he can protect the next generation from being consumed by it.

Heartbreakingly, his decision also seals his relationship with Hatsue. At this point, Karasawa has bought her, and she runs back to Asajiro, begging him to take her away. He refuses. His responsibilities have changed, he tells her; he is no longer the man he was. Kato then gives the audience one of the film’s most devastating sequences, cutting between Asajiro’s formal succession ceremony and Hatsue riding away in a carriage toward her new home, while a song about love surrendered to honor plays mournfully.

As double-crossing abounds by way of Asajiro and Haruo’s professional rivals, our hero keeps showing remarkable restraint, until finally, the ultimate betrayal erupts. Just as the beginning of the film confidently announced a world of order, this eruption declares the film’s title: Asajiro is out for blood-soaked revenge. The man who has spent the entire runtime containing himself strips down to his tattoos and is consumed by unadulterated rage. The road to the supreme tragedy has reached its end. Asajiro has managed to preserve nearly everything he believed he was responsible for, except, perhaps, the life that, in another world, he might have chosen for himself.

You can purchase Blood of Revenge via Radiance or MVD Shop.

Aesthetics of a Bullet (Sadao Nakajima; 1973)

Imagine sitting near the bottom of that economic food chain, and suddenly being handed a shortcut. Sure, you skirt past any formalities or training, but that shouldn’t matter, right? You’ve been handed a golden ticket. Sadao Nakajima’s Aesthetics of a Bullet wastes absolutely no time announcing that this isn’t going to be a stately world of chivalric yakuza cinema. Sayōnara ninkyo eiga, kon’nichiwa to a grimier, disillusioned yakuza world of the 1970s. That shift is apparent before the yakuza themselves even appear. Blaring right as the title card drops, Japanese band The Brain Police delivers its proto-punk rhythms as we watch extreme close-ups of women shoveling food into their mouths cut between close-ups of garbage piling up. The indulgence suddenly stops, and 24-year-old Kiyoshi Koike (Tsunehiko Watase) finally appears, broke and peddling underfed rabbits on the street and losing money at mahjong.

He is, to put it kindly, a loser.

Koike lacks money and status; hell, he could use a sprinkle of luck and a dash of dignity, too. He borrows cash from his girlfriend only to gamble it away, and he doesn’t treat her well, either. Ignorance here doesn’t equate to bliss, but it doesn’t stop Koike from convincing himself that his circumstances are the only thing standing between him and greatness. A chef, he could have once been. Imagine! So, when an unseen yakuza organization hands him a pile of money, a gun, and their clan’s name in exchange for causing some trouble, Koike practically gets Looney Tunes dollar signs in his eyes.

Now is where I urge you to remember the film’s title. As soon as Koike touches down in Miyazaki, we see how seriously he takes these gangster aesthetics. Buy suit → add gun → Instant Important Man. Let’s grab the most expensive hotel room, too! After he settles in, Koike decides to spend some time in front of the mirror rehearsing, “I’m Kiyoshi Koike of the Tenyu clan,” over and over, until he thinks he finally nailed the delivery. But… did he? Let’s try once more for good measure, but this time, with a cigarette. There. Much better.

The punchline, of course, is that Koike believes he has finally become somebody. The men who sent him see him as ammunition. The bullet, so to speak. And one thing to remember about bullets is that they don’t choose where they are aimed.

For a while, this cosplay paints a pretty picture. Men back down when Koike flashes his gun and invokes the Tenyu name, while women surround him in clubs as he flaunts his wealth and spiffy suit. After yearning for something more in his life for so long, every interaction confirms the fantasy back to him. Maybe he really has become somebody.

Turns out, a suit, a cigarette, and a gun can only do so much heavy lifting. Even with all these aesthetics, the old Koike keeps peeking through the costume. He becomes comically attached to his gun, constantly pulling it out to polish it, admire it; he even falls asleep cradling the damn thing. Yet the very moment he actually needs to use the gun, the swagger evaporates. In one brilliant sequence, Koike stares at it before we get a sudden flash to a stylized image of a man being shot. Seconds later? Our newly minted gangster is curled into a fetal position on his hotel bed, crying alone.

Nakajima keeps turning the dial on this contradiction, until it becomes increasingly cruel. Koike has been handed all the symbols of power, but none of them are really his. Turns out, being the “bullet” is much more appealing when nobody actually expects you to hit the target. Who would have thought!

What surprised me is that Nakajima never settles for humiliating Koike solely for our amusement. Make no mistake, he’s utterly vile. He repeatedly mistreats the women around him and lashes out whenever his fragile ego is threatened. But the film keeps showing us a frightened man underneath all that posturing. For perhaps the first time in his life, Koike has been given access to seemingly endless riches, but the cruelest joke is that he mistakes access for ownership. Koike thinks he’s finally become somebody. Nakajima knows he’s just been given better props.

You can purchase Aesthetics of a Bullet via Radiance or MVD Shop.

As I mention in the episode, I originally sat down expecting I’d watch the film via the Deaf Crocodile release, take some notes, and turn it into one of my usual essays. Instead? Down the rabbit hole I went. One watch became two, plus the commentary track, then the original novel by the Strugatsky brothers, the history surrounding the film (and Estonia itself during this time), and even its video game adaptation. As I looked upon the endless folders of notes, it finally dawned on me: I need to revive the pod (see what I did there?).

Another reason I’m delighted to share today’s chat? I have returning guest Philip Marinello of The Substance Podcast back on — and I also have him to thank for putting the film on my radar in the first place. Initially, I knew almost nothing going in beyond the fact that a handful of people whose taste I trust adored it. Now? I’ve joined the club.

Together, Philip and I get into Kromanov, the Strugatskys, Soviet Estonia, Sven Grünberg’s incredible electronic score, the film’s production history, the Stalker connection, and the questions of authority and identity that eventually swallow the story even more than the avalanche does.

For anyone who hasn’t seen Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel, I’d recommend watching before listening. Otherwise, take a look at my original Letterboxd review below, and come check into the hotel with us.

From its opening moments, Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel feels slightly untethered from reality. Inspector Glebsky drives through an isolated mountain landscape while a French report plays on a radio. As he drives, Sven Grünberg’s electronic score floats along, immediately reminding me of an eerier version of Eduard Artemyev’s work on Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Interesting association, considering that both films are based on the novels of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky — who also wrote the script for Grigori Kromanov’s 1979 film. Finally, Glebsky arrives at the eponymous hotel, stranded in isolation. By now, through voiceover, Glebsky has already told us that he still returns to the events that happened here, often on sleepless nights, wondering if he acted correctly.

So naturally, my first thought was: Is this going to be a morality tale?

Once Glebsky steps inside, things immediately become stranger. I was initially expecting a traditional mountain lodge (I later discovered that this was what Kromanov had originally envisioned, as well). Instead, he enters a dark, almost futuristic environment of tiled floors, glass, mirrors, neon, icy blues and steel greys, all occasionally interrupted by pockets of warm hues. The characters he encounters emerge half-obscured from the darkness (or sometimes even simply from above), while reflections multiply across the walls. These people, although many are first-time guests, somehow manage to seem like installations of the hotel itself.

Production designer Tõnu Virve referred to the film’s approach as “hyperrealism,” and that feels exactly right. The hotel is simultaneously inviting and artificial, cozy and claustrophobic. At times, it becomes a kind of beautiful prison. When the avalanche occurs early on, the space is filled with guests wandering, drinking, dancing, and waiting while the world outside becomes increasingly inaccessible.

Glebsky is also a fascinating character himself. Within my first 15 minutes with him, I scribbled in my notes that he looked like a “well-intentioned lawman.” How absurdly comedic that would grow to become. He is calm, handsome, rational, and thoroughly confident in his ability to understand the world around him. He believes in evidence. Procedure. Logic. Categories. So many categories. The problem is that Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel refuses to fit into any of them. What’s more, Glebsky is the only one in the film with a Russian-sounding last name, a detail only bolstered by the fact that he’s played by Latvian actor Uldis Pūcītis, meaning his lines were dubbed. How fitting, then, that in a film so preoccupied with outsiders, even Glebsky’s voice adds another subtle layer of distance between him and everyone else.

Perhaps what I loved the most about Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel is how often it aggressively wanted me to compare it to other works. I kept thinking of Clue, World on a Wire, Twin Peaks (I could go on), but no comparison truly fit. Glebsky spends so much of the movie trying to make everything fit the categories he understands, and at some point I realized I was doing a version of the same thing as a viewer. By the end, the meat and potatoes are what matter, really: What happens when the systems we trust to explain reality just stop being useful?

Apparently, I’ve been hanging around the Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel since May. Two viewings, a novel, a commentary track, a video game rabbit hole, and way too many Google Docs notes later, I’m still not entirely sure I’ve checked out.

Philip Marinello’s The Substance is a semi-weekly podcast with well over 150 episodes that has conversations to help folks better appreciate goodness, truth, and beauty. There’s a strong emphasis on cinema, with regular conversations with wonderful guests from the film world, as well as shows featuring academics, advocates, and faith leaders working to make the world a better and fuller place.

Follow Philip on Instagram, Letterboxd, and check out The Substance on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

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Damiano Damiani’s Confessions of a Police Captain opens in a fog of suspicion. When Deputy DA Traini (Franco Nero) first arrives at a violent Palermo crime scene, he asks Commissioner Bonavia (Martin Balsam) why the powerful construction magnate Ferdinando Lomunno (Luciano Catenacci) has managed to evade arrest despite three attempts to put him behind bars. Could it be a lack of evidence? Bonavia’s answer is calm, yet markedly bleak: “Lack of everything.” It’s a short exchange, but one that points toward the much larger problem at the heart of this 1971 political thriller. Bonavia and Traini both believe in justice, yet what separates them is their faith in the institutions responsible for delivering it. How much faith can justice place in the law?

It’s important not to reduce Bonavia and Traini to “good versus bad.” These two men represent two definitions of justice. Bonavia, the older of the two, has spent years watching procedure fail him. He’s exhausted, his faith utterly destroyed. Traini, on the other hand, remains fresh, believing that the law can work if pursued honestly. Principled to an absolute fault, he declares early on, “I like to be thorough.”

Justice and vengeance do not belong in the same conversation in Traini’s mind, but his idealism should not be mistaken for naivety. “Like an initiatory relationship, between teacher and student,” explained Damiani in a 1972 interview with Les Lettres françaises when describing the two men. “The captain’s starting point is the DA’s destination. At the beginning, the captain already knows, he has lost his illusions, while the DA still has them, they’re tied to his education.”

Ultimately, the conflict between Bonavia and Traini becomes truly tragic: they disagree about their methods precisely because they agree about morality.

Balsam brings Bonavia’s worldview to life with an unnerving stillness, as though nothing around him has the power to surprise him anymore. Even as Riz Ortolani’s score swells and swoons at the film’s start, Bonavia barely moves emotionally.

Damiani didn’t conceive Bonavia as a swaggering, guns-blazing archetype, either. According to the filmmaker, the character was partly inspired by real Sicilian police officers he knew who repeatedly arrested Mafia figures to no avail. Other elements of the story, including the labor unrest and Palermo’s real-estate corruption, were also drawn from reality.

At one point, Traini’s superior, District Attorney Malta (Claudio Gora), tells him that Bonavia is “introverted, boorish, but efficient,” dubbing him a “good man.” The irony is that being a “good man” has not protected Bonavia from compromise; he’s operating inside a system that has steadily taught him how little goodness can accomplish on its own.

Lomunno is the obvious criminal figure in Confessions, but Damiani’s target is much larger. Confessions of an Entire Goddamn System, more like. “We need honest social structures,” he declared in his 1972 interview. “We believe [the judiciary] is eternal, untouchable, neutral — yet this neutrality is relative.” The film becomes much more disturbing once it’s made clear that Lomunno is connected to almost everything: banks, politicians, construction, property, judicial authority, you name it. One wonderfully poisonous line comes as Traini begins connecting the dots of his investigation. As he explains them to Malta, his boss warns him to pursue justice, of course, “but with caution.” How deliciously sinister that even the vocabulary of righteousness comes with bureaucratic qualifiers. It’s terrifying.

Perhaps my favorite part of Confessions is that Damiani’s film never feels like a bland political lecture. It’s genuinely thrilling. Damiani understood genre as a vehicle for political ideas, tracing part of Italian political cinema’s lineage back to the American film noir he encountered in his youth, as he shared with French film magazine Écran in 1972. Damiani admired Francesco Rosi’s political analysis, as well, but felt that the filmmaker observed his subjects from a distance. Notably, however, he believed Rosi’s cinema led to Elio Petri’s work, particularly Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (a personal favorite of mine, as well, and one I urge you to seek out). “Petri’s film is what then allowed me to make Confessions of a Police Captain — which will in turn allow another Italian filmmaker to go even further in that direction,” he told Écran.

Roberto Curti, an authoritative scholar on Italian crime cinema and the poliziottesco, likewise notes just how perilous Damiani felt it was to address this institutional rot, with the filmmaker again crediting Investigation as an important precedent. Curti takes this lineage one step further, positioning Confessions alongside Investigation among the major films preceding the 1970s poliziottesco explosion. In Italian Crime Filmography, he goes so far as to call it “the true antecedent of the poliziottesco,” which many critics trace to the surprise success of Stefano Vanzina’s Execution Squad in 1972.

Et voilà.

With Confessions, Damiani communicates the politics through crime-film mechanics. Distrust abounds: people follow one another, surveillance is endless, and even those supposedly on the same side tap each other’s phones. Corruption keeps spreading outward until it feels like no one possesses the complete picture. Damiani described political cinema as creating “shocks” in public opinion through emotion, and Confessions embodies that philosophy, making you anxious long before you start analyzing why.

Ironically, for all their friction, Bonavia and Traini are never as far apart as either man believes. Their antagonism boils over into a full-blown screaming match, during which Damiani finds a visually comic way to emphasize their similarity. After shouting themselves hoarse, both men storm back to their vehicles, still bristling with frustration. The catch? Each man has climbed into the other’s car. Once they realize the mistake and switch back, Damiani sends them down the road on the same path anyway. While both spend the scene hurling insults and demanding to know what side the other is on, Bonavia lands an extraordinary question aimed at Traini: “What’s your limit?” Is this perhaps the film’s essential question? By now, what’s legal isn’t even the main part of this argument, but at what point does participating faithfully in a broken system become mere participation in the injustice that system produces? Conversely, what happens to justice itself when an individual decides that the system doesn’t deserve their obedience? Traini and Bonavia are both intelligent and stubborn, but they’re also trapped.

Bonavia and Traini are both committed to justice, no doubt about it. Confessions of a Police Captain is bleak because Damiani understands how little individual goodness can accomplish on its own. That’s what’s unsettling. Political authority, money, law, and criminal power can all become so entangled that determining where one ends and another begins is almost impossible.

I keep returning to Bonavia’s question, which hangs over everything, challenging not only Traini but the audience, too: What’s your limit?

You can purchase Confessions of a Police Captain via Radiance Films or MVD Shop.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Simple, right? Most of us never think about it — until we reach higher ground. Suddenly, every step requires more effort, and every breath becomes more deliberate. Given enough time, the body slowly acclimatizes to conditions that won’t change. Heartbreak is similar, is it not?

A quick note: This piece discusses Romancing in Thin Air from beginning to end. If you haven’t seen the film yet, I highly encourage you to seek it out first. It’s a beautiful experience to encounter on its own terms.

On the surface, Johnnie To’s Romancing in Thin Air begins as a romantic comedy, but what it’s preoccupied with is much more fundamental: how do you help another person breathe again after grief has stolen the air from their life?

First, you learn how to breathe for yourself. Before placing us in the mountainous Shangri-La County, To puts the focus on screen idol Michael Lau (Louis Koo), who, while receiving an award at a ceremony, publicly proposes to his girlfriend and co-star, Yuanyuan (Gao Yuanyuan). After suffering a humiliating (and equally public) jilting on his wedding day, Michael spirals, ending up at Sau’s (Sammi Cheng) hotel in the high-altitude Yunnan province. Battling his burgeoning alcoholism while suffering from altitude sickness, Michael, quite literally, is unable to breathe properly.

The air has also become stale in Sau’s life, and both she and her inn are frozen in time as she continues to hold out hope that her husband, Xiaotian (Li Guangjie), will return after he went missing in the forest seven years earlier. Initially, it’s lovelorn Michael who needs the most care, but he doesn’t recover because he falls in love. That would be too easy. Instead, he begins to recover because he starts paying attention. Once Michael learns the truth about Sau’s past, he doesn’t try to rescue her. He takes stock, noticing what needs repairing.

What To does so brilliantly is redefine romance through acts of maintenance. When Michael starts paying attention, his own understanding of love, once built on elaborate spectacle, shifts. Love shouldn’t always be born from a grand declaration or movie-star moment, right? It should reside in small gestures, patience, and thoughtful care. It could be cooking at the inn, or helping repair the roof. Maybe it’s making sure you’re well enough to care for someone else, as Michael chops wood to keep himself away from the bottle. Or perhaps it’s simply observing. Michael spends much of the film watching Sau from a distance, learning where her grief has settled before ever trying to change it.

Eventually, Michael discovers there are some things that cannot be repaired. This is why the recurring detail of the broken piano matters so much. Early on, Michael discovers that Sau’s piano has three broken keys. When he tries to fix it for her, he makes matters worse, and she sends it off to be professionally repaired — and brought back to its original broken state. The piano belonged to Xiaotian, and as long as it remains untouched, the possibility of his return remains untouched, too.

At one point, Michael returns to the piano. When Sau sits next to him one day, he explains how much time he’s spent trying to compose around the broken keys. He can’t, so he accepts them as part of the instrument itself. “This is what people are like,” he tells her. “The things we’ve lost, we hold in our hearts. We can’t let go, hold ourselves captive.” Love is knowing the difference between what can be repaired and what must be lived with.

Xiaotian is ultimately found, though not in the way Sau had spent seven years hoping for. Faced at last with the certainty she had postponed for so long, Sau begins the painful process of letting go. Michael, meanwhile, discovers one final way to care for another person. If repair has guided him this far, creation becomes the next step.

Drawing on all his observations thus far, Michael pens a script based on Sau’s ill-fated love story. When he brings it to Yuanyuan to read, she’s moved to tears by the romance, but gently asks him why it has to end so sadly. “That’s how it is,” he replies.

Once his film, Romancing in Thin Air, reaches theaters, the news eventually finds its way to Sau, who goes to see it for herself. Her own fairy tale unfolds on screen, along with the heartbreak that followed. Overcome with emotion, she rushes to leave the theater… but she stops herself. Then, cinema begins to imagine the ending that reality could never give her. Xiaotian, who lost his life just as he was about to leave the forest, makes it out. Michael accompanies Sau to the hospital, watching as she and Xiaotian are reunited while the melody he composed for her begins to play.

As the real-life Sau collapses in the theater and whispers, “thank you,” it’s clear Michael has stopped trying to repair reality itself. There may be no more compassionate gesture than what he gave her: a space where healing can exist.

By the film’s conclusion, Michael isn’t trying to “win” Sau in the conventional romantic-comedy sense. After watching his film, Sau realizes it’s time for a new chapter. Heading back to the forest’s entrance, she buries her husband’s things and steps onto the bus to head home. Seeing smoke rise from the inn she sold, she gets off the bus, only to discover that all the familiar faces are still there. Michael bought the inn, and he’s given everyone their jobs back. His final gift? An act of preservation. As they reunite, she helps him unload her old truck. In turn, he helps her preserve the life she’s finally ready to keep living.

The piano still has three broken keys. The inn is still the inn. Heartbreak never becomes easier because the air changes. It’s we who slowly learn to breathe differently.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

The greatest gift is helping another person find enough air to keep moving forward.

Romancing in Thin Air is currently available at Barnes & Noble at 50% off. If you’re reading this after the sale, you can purchase it through Radiance or MVD Shop.

Isn’t it delightful when you start a new project with one idea in mind, only to have it morph into something you never would have guessed? Like your brain cells suddenly break into the most elegant waltz (mine are as I type this while listening to Cho Young-Wuk’s Oldboy score), slowly tracing a pattern you didn’t even know was there. I’m grinning from ear to ear writing this round-up today because, after going through my stack of physical media, I noticed two films that clearly belonged together, and a third that just might fit.

Lo and behold, a few things have happened since then. For one, all three titles come from Radiance, whose catalog is, coincidentally, currently 50% off at Barnes & Noble. The sale runs until August 2nd, so I’m hoping to cover a few more titles before it wraps up.

But that wasn’t the real surprise. I started this little project pairing together what I thought were three political films. Somewhere between finishing the third essay and reading them back-to-back, it dawned on me that politics were the scenery all along.

Across Jean-Pierre Mocky’s Solo (1970), Brian De Palma’s Hi, Mom! (1970), and Francesco Rosi’s Illustrious Corpses (1976), each protagonist begins their journey convinced they’re somehow standing outside the forces shaping the world around them. In Solo, Vincent thinks he can skirt around both history and the system. In Hi, Mom!, Jon mistakes observation for distance. And in Illustrious Corpses? Poor Inspector Rogas has no idea just how alienated he is.

The filmmakers follow suit and end up dismantling the genre sandbox they’re supposedly playing in. With De Palma, comedy curdles into something terrifying. Mocky’s film starts off feeling like it’ll be a slick, jewel thief caper, before becoming much more tragic. Rosi’s story (adapted from Leonardo Sciascia’s novel, Equal Danger) begins as a detective tale, only to leave everyone with questions and secrets.

For these reviews, I wanted to track that very dismantling. Let’s rewind and revive.

Hi, Mom! (Brian De Palma; 1970)

Why does this movie keep smiling at the audience while everything it’s showing becomes increasingly grotesque? It helps to think of it as a deranged variety show of the 1970s. The most surprising thing about Brian De Palma’s Hi, Mom! isn’t its politics or its provocations, but how funny it is and how unsettling it feels to be laughing alongside it. Again and again, the film invites giggles through a young Robert De Niro’s shameless charm and relentlessly buoyant energy, only to reveal that the ground beneath those jokes has been slowly shifting the entire time. By the time De Palma arrives at the oft-discussed Be Black, Baby sequence, the laughter turns to uncomfortable horror, before unexpectedly returning in a different form. This time, it’s nervous, because you’re left wondering when exactly the comedy stopped being comfortable, or whether it ever really was.

The film follows De Niro’s Jon Rubin, a Vietnam War vet, who returns to New York City and decides he’ll become an amateur pornographer. He rents a comically vile apartment in Greenwich Village (complete with soiled cat litter in the bathtub — great!) because its windows face a more affluent high-rise across the street. As he sets up his camera to Eric Kaz’s jaunty theme song, we discover that his specific brand of adult filmmaking is what he refers to as “peep art,” or, as a bigwig porn producer Joe Banner (Allen Garfield) calls it, “Confessions of a Peeping Jon.” Our lead’s slimy antics shouldn’t have you howling, but the film pushes you to do so anyway, be it through Kaz’s music, the banter between Jon and Banner, or the bizarre way we watch how things unfold in the building across the street for the first time: a mash-up of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window meets… the Brady Bunch title sequence. De Palma’s obsession with multi-frame split screens is on full display here, and by dividing the screen into a grid of windows, the layout mimics the iconic — and wholesome — sitcom grid. The satirical juxtaposition is brilliant.

Jon’s plan, as he explains to Banner, is to seduce a young woman in the apartment across the street: Judy Bishop (Jennifer Salt). After fabricating a bogus excuse to cross paths with her, the two share a date that feels lifted out of a rom-com (save for Jon punching a pizza), and by the time the second date rolls around, Judy is throwing herself at Jon, who has timed his camera across the street to catch their throes of passion. As limbs fly in an equally comedic frenzy, unbeknownst to Jon, his camera suddenly tilts below, leaving their romp only a memory. That doesn’t work for Banner, who immediately sends Jon packing.

While this only gets us to the first half of the film, Hi, Mom! has already been racing through different versions of what it means to watch. Initially, it’s through windows, telescopes, and viewfinders, until De Palma broadens the scope to include television and documentaries. What’s the first thing that Jon does after giving up on his pornographer aspirations? He sells his camera for a television set. Observe and absorb, over and over, until every act of looking becomes another performance.

Until this point, De Palma has allowed us to watch from a safe distance. Then, we arrive at the film’s radical centerpiece, Be Black, Baby, which runs towards us to close the gap. Already, Hi, Mom! has been building to this sequence, peppering the film with flyers for a local experimental theater troupe’s production. We even get a documentary, cinéma vérité style, featuring the troupe — led by Black performers and one white university student — asking white passersby if they know what it’s like to “be Black in America.”

Once Jon spots an advertisement seeking an actor to play a racist cop in the production, he decides to try his luck. A hilarious audition scene follows (featuring De Niro aggressively slapping around a broom), and before long, we’re plunged into the third part of the documentary, dubbed “The Theatre of Revolt.” Without giving too much away, it’s a sequence that dismantles the comfortable distance between performer and audience. Suddenly, De Palma’s game snaps into focus: everybody is watching somebody. Jon watches his neighbors, the audience watches the performance, the documentary crew watches the audience, the television viewers watch the documentary — and we watch all of it. For a film that seems allergic to adopting a cohesive plot, Hi, Mom! keeps returning to the same uncomfortable idea: once everything becomes performance, is anyone still just watching?

Perhaps most disturbing of all is that, after the Be Black, Baby sequence ends, the film decides to bring back its Cheshire cat grin with full force. The playful “normalcy” it adopts again is De Palma’s final sleight of hand, because nothing has actually been resolved. The laughter returns, the jaunty music returns, and eventually even Jon’s grin returns. But ours? Ours has changed, leaving us to question not just what we’ve been watching, but why we were so eager to watch in the first place.

You can purchase Hi, Mom! via Radiance, MVD Shop, or B&N.

Solo (Jean-Pierre Mocky; 1970)

Vincent Cabral spends the opening of Jean-Pierre Mocky’s Solo behaving as though history is something that happens to other people. Joke’s on him, of course. The 1970 film begins almost like a caper, introducing us to Vincent (played by Mocky himself) as an incredibly charming violinist and jewel thief who smuggles diamonds inside a tube of toothpaste, transfers them in his instrument case, and drifts through life with an effortless confidence. It’s easy to get swept up in his spell, as he whistles, flirts, steals, and seems entirely unconcerned with the political unrest that’s still simmering as he returns to France. It’s an intoxicating introduction, and one that makes Vincent feel like someone who’s unknowingly wandered in from an entirely different movie. After the massacre of a bourgeois orgy in the film’s opening minutes, police scramble to identify those responsible. Georges Moustaki’s melancholic score starts to play — a piece borrowed from a Greek partisan song — and Solo’s elegiac undercurrent starts to seep into your bones, just as history begins catching up to Vincent himself.

Released just two years after the events of May 1968, Solo emerges from the uncertainty left in its wake. Its subject matter proved controversial enough that Mocky organized midnight screenings at Cannes himself after the festival declined to include it. The gamble paid off.

Rather than reconstructing the student uprisings that brought France to a standstill, Mocky turns his attention to the fractured society that remained. In an interview with Cinema the same year Solo came out, Mocky explained that his goal was to “make an observation, to take stock,” describing May ‘68 as “the first spark in a frozen engine.” Vincent embodies that observation. As he shrugs and tells young revolutionary Marc (Éric Burnelli), “You want to change society. I use it.” Vincent simply wants to drift through it, exploiting its cracks without ever getting involved himself. Flippant? Perhaps, but as the film unfolds, we realize Vincent has been telling us exactly how he understands the world all along.

Vincent has returned from years abroad, and as soon as he sells the diamonds he’s nabbed, he’s off to find his brother, Virgile (Denis Le Guillou). With their parents out of the picture, Vincent still pays for his younger sibling’s tuition, revealing that, even for all his aimless drifting, family remains the one thing he refuses to leave behind. Virgile, however, has other plans. He and his fellow revolutionaries are responsible for the film’s opening massacre, and they’re already planning another. What makes Vincent and Virgile’s relationship so moving isn’t merely that they end up on opposite sides of France’s political divide (though one could argue Vincent stands on neither), but that Vincent never stops seeing Virgile as his little brother. While Virgile speaks in grandiose terms of sacrifice and society, even going as far as to say he’d kill his own brother if the cause demanded it, Vincent consistently speaks in terms of finding his brother and saving him. Even when Commissioner Verdier (Henri Poirier) mistakenly identifies Vincent as the ringleader, and even after their names are splashed across newspapers and television screens, Vincent’s goal never changes. One fights for society. One fights for one person.

Vincent belongs everywhere and nowhere. “I cannot stand this society made of hypocrisy and sordid things,” Mocky told Cinema 9 in 1970. With Solo, the filmmaker is attacking a moral rot that is much larger than any one political movement. Vincent’s journey carries him through nearly every layer of French society, crossing paths with wealthy elites, university students, police officers, thieves, and revolutionaries alike — yet he never fully belongs to any of these worlds. It’s here that Mocky’s description of Solo as an “observation” really clicks. Wherever Vincent wanders, hypocrisy follows. The bourgeoisie grossly indulge themselves, never once thinking of the consequences. The police eagerly pursue the wrong suspect, only to meet the truth with little more than a shrug. As for the revolutionaries, well, the cause comes before anything else — even their own. It’s precisely because Vincent never fully belongs to any of these worlds that he never loses sight of the people inside them.

Of course, as the film continues, Vincent’s laissez-faire attitude cannot carry him for much longer. When one young revolutionary bleeds out from the crossfire, the spell finally breaks. Ultimately, what our lead spends the majority of the film doing is repair work. He steals cars to help others escape, calls ambulances instead of abandoning the wounded, and repeatedly improvises his way through increasingly desperate situations, including one wonderfully tense roadblock sequence. History has finally caught up with Vincent. Drifting is no longer enough.

I’ve thought a lot about the film’s title ever since the credits rolled. It proves more heartbreaking than it first appears. Vincent spends the film performing alone and drifting alone, all while trying not to lose the one person who still anchors him to the world. But maybe the title is tragic because Vincent never learns to live another way. Every act of rescue and survival becomes a solo. Performing against the orchestra of history, Vincent never stops trying to carry its weight by himself.

You can purchase Solo via Radiance, MVD Shop, or B&N.

Illustrious Corpses (Francesco Rosi; 1976)

Early on in Inspector Rogas’ (Lino Ventura) investigation surrounding the string of murders targeting a handful of Supreme Court judges in southern Italy, he speaks to a man he initially believes may be a suspect. “How goes it?” the ever-calm Rogas asks — a perfectly ordinary social question. “It doesn’t,” the man succinctly replies, causing Rogas to probe further and ask what’s wrong. “Everything,” the man says bluntly. “How about before?” Rogas continues, thinking it’s a recent crisis. The man, confused, doesn’t understand the question. “Did it go well before?” Rogas asks again, to a simple “no” in response. “So?”

“So here we are.”

In Francesco Rosi’s Illustrious Corpses, every conversation is another little diagnostic test. As Rogas digs deeper, each encounter asks the same question: How healthy is this society? The answer rarely changes. Not very. Casual exchanges carry the weight of institutional decay, and before the conspiracy even comes into focus, we’re introduced to a country that already sounds tired. Rogas, however, still believes that careful investigation can cut through the fog. As clues multiply and the suspects never quite fit, we slowly realize this detective tale refuses the traditional detective story comforts. The answers Rogas uncovers only seem to generate new questions, until even his faith in the very institutions he once trusted begins to erode.

Italy itself feels similarly adrift. Caught between a conservative government led by the Christian Democrats, a rising left, and escalating violence, truth had become increasingly difficult to locate. As Rogas discovers, secrecy is one of the ways this system preserves itself. “I am opposed to the politics of secrets,” Rosi told Jeune cinéma in 1976, shortly after the film’s release. Judges, politicians, police officers, and party leaders all seem to know something, yet no one is willing to say enough. Compartmentalized truths keep the machinery running. It’s hardly surprising, then, that the director told Paese Sera that same year that the audience’s journey was one “alongside a policeman who initially believes in the institutions and the State as they are, and by the end no longer does.”

By this point, the film’s architecture speaks as loudly as its characters. Be it the vast government buildings, the shadowy catacombs, empty town squares, or endless rows of apartment buildings, the locations are tremendously imposing and labyrinthine — indifferent to the lone man wandering through them. Pasqualino De Santis’ camera swirls and pans, never letting us forget that someone is always watching. Everything decisive happens behind closed doors. When Rogas arrives, the decisions have already been made elsewhere. “It’s the mechanism of power that pushes people aside,” Rosi told Paese Sera. No wonder Rogas gradually shrinks inside the frames he occupies.

Whether Rogas solves the mystery ultimately matters less than what the investigation takes from him. What Rogas loses is his belief that institutions are capable of delivering justice. And yet, Rosi isn’t a pessimist. His plea is to keep asking questions. Fifty years later, that’s still the challenge Illustrious Corpses leaves behind. “We have to find a way out through truth.”

You can purchase Illustrious Corpses via Radiance, MVD Shop, or B&N.

Grzegorz Królikiewicz’s The Dancing Hawk (1977) is yet another descent into the Polish filmmaker’s feverish, visceral style of cinema. Where his feature film debut, 1973’s Through and Through, was nightmarish and suffocating, The Dancing Hawk feels even more furiously corrosive. This time around, the effect is one of prolonged agitation, mirroring the story that unfolds on screen: a portrait of a man, from birth to death, slowly severing himself from his own humanity.

Adapted from Julian Kawalec’s novel and set against the shifting social realities of postwar communist Poland, The Dancing Hawk introduces us to Michał Toporny (Franciszek Trzeciak), a peasant man who, thanks to his work ethic and slippery, opportunistic nature, rises through the ranks to become an industrial magnate, but in the process transforms into a hollowed-out version of who he once was.

It would have been easy for Królikiewicz to chart Toporny’s ascent clearly, but he was never interested in neatly filling in the gaps for his audience. Królikiewicz was a filmmaker who thrived on ambiguity, often pushing viewers into a sensory experience that mirrored the psychological states of his suffering characters. Here, Toporny’s world is fractured through disorienting edits, asynchronous sound, surreal imagery, and incredibly claustrophobic — and sometimes nauseating — camerawork (thanks in large part to cinematographer Zbigniew Rybczyński, whose work six years later on Gerald Kargl’s Angst would carry the same anxiety-inducing intensity). In The Dancing Hawk, all of these elements come together to transform social mobility into a process of spiritual erosion.

The system that Toporny wishes to thrive in rewards self-erasure — and it’s exactly what he commits himself to. Living in a small farming village with his wife and newborn, when Toporny gets his first whiff of a way out, he cruelly declares to his wife, “Honey, I’ve had enough of this life!” Calling their home a “hovel,” he glares at her, disgusted, and leaves. His wife continues to wail long after he’s gone, and even as the seasons change, she keeps mourning. In that time, Toporny trades it all. An upper-class wife, another newborn son, and a chance to become someone else, something more than he once was. Initially, he’s embraced. A narrated reel plays to an audience, celebrating Toporny’s success: “We are building a new order, with new people. People like him can achieve anything as obstacles are no longer there!”

This, of course, is a lie. Whenever Toporny jumps over an obstacle, a new one materializes, seemingly more difficult than the last. Eventually, he has to make a decision that symbolizes the entire rejection of his former life. When he decides to go through with it, he crosses paths with an old mentor. Toporny tries to argue, pleading, “You taught me to work for the country, not just my own folks.” The man’s response is the whole film in miniature: “I taught you to have a heart.”

But by this point, Toporny has already fractured in two. The clearest articulation of this comes a few scenes before this one, when Toporny is staring into a mirror as he dresses for his new life among Poland’s managerial elite. What we’re staring at is much more destabilizing: his reflection doesn’t mirror his movements. Instead, it combs its hair differently and touches its own face independently. Who is this outsider? Which one is Toporny?

The influence of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane hangs heavily over The Dancing Hawk. Both films trace the gradual unraveling of men who attempt to reinvent themselves through systems of power and status (the Radiance release includes an essay by film scholar Piotr Kletowski, who cleverly dubs Królikiewicz’s film as a “plebeian and multidimensional Citizen Kane”). However, while Welles’ Charles Foster Kane becomes increasingly isolated through his newspaper empire and sprawling estate, Toporny’s transformation is far less somber and much more abrasive. This isn’t a story of grandeur — and Królikiewicz makes that clear.

As Toporny continues his upward climb, Królikiewicz progressively destabilizes the world around him. We listen to conversations – and entire scenes – that loop unnaturally, sound that’s disconnected from the images on screen, and even rooms themselves that rearrange as our lead stands within them. By choosing to externalize Toporny’s mental decline, we’re forced to inhabit it alongside him.

Yet, for all its caustic rage, The Dancing Hawk never fully spills over into treating Toporny like a monster. We watch as he grows more corrupt within this social machinery, further estranging himself from his roots, but the real tragedy is that the system he lives in actually rewards that estrangement. “This is a downfall story, essentially,” explains critic Carmen Gray in an interview on the Radiance disc extras. “With the idea that if you’re living in some kind of oppressive or corrupt system, and if you sacrifice your own dignity or respect, not only to go along with the system, but to prosper and do well in it, it can never end well for you, because you’ve sold your soul.”

Notably, Królikiewicz also chooses to steer clear of overt on-screen violence, never allowing it to become spectacle in the first place, like in one critical scene in the forest near Toporny’s village. This is an approach similar to what Królikiewicz did in Through and Through, in which the murder committed by our protagonists is kept off-camera. While the violence is withheld, Królikiewicz makes up for it by emotionally overwhelming the viewer with intrusive camera angles and carefully weaponized sound design.

What makes The Dancing Hawk so devastating is that Toporny doesn’t realize how consumed he is with ascending into this new social order until it’s too late. At home, with his new family, he manages to push his wife away so far that, in one moment, when he comes home with the joyous news of yet another promotion, nobody is there. In fact, every attempt at reinvention leaves behind another emotional casualty. Be it his wives, his children, or even an entire village, Toporny scorches it all.

By the time we get to the film’s final act, Toporny has certainly escaped his origins, but even more so, he’s permanently severed from them. While visiting his doctor to discuss his failing health, Toporny comes to a painful realization: he’ll likely die alone. Not for want of trying, though far too late to repair what has been lost, he decides to take his emotionally distant sons back to the village he once abandoned. Once they arrive, someone hurls a rock through the back car window, causing the boys to suddenly flee. This moment is critical, signifying that the violence Toporny helped create finally returns — physically — toward him. It’s never revealed who threw the rock, but the answer feels irrelevant. Królikiewicz doesn’t want to give any grand speech or cathartic showdown, because the question itself is beside the point. It’s about the loss of one’s roots, where the very ground he crawled on as a child is now rejecting him entirely. As Toporny’s personal collapse only continues from here, the film suddenly becomes much more hollow. His children participate in the burning of Toporny’s old farmhouse, suggesting that the only thing their father passed down to them is destruction. What could possibly be the idea of a “home,” when they were never given a real one to begin with?

Approaching the conclusion, Królikiewicz bookends The Dancing Hawk with imagery that appeared near the beginning. Another storm sweeps the same farming landscape, but this time, we’re not watching a struggling young farmer attempt to survive it. By now, Toporny’s fate is largely relegated to the margins, but the physical and emotional demolition he’s left behind is fully a part of the ecosystem. Spiritually emptied out while the world deteriorates alongside him, the true horror of The Dancing Hawk is Toporny’s very own success.

You can buy The Dancing Hawk via Radiance, MVD, or Diabolik.

In Takashi Miike’s Agitator, momentum never quite belongs to anyone. The first few minutes are suspended in a deceptive stillness, offering no indication of the scale it’s about to unleash. Minutes later, we’re thrown into motion, packed into a car with yakuza members and staring through a windshield as they speed through crowded city streets. Yet, the shift doesn’t feel like control. If anything, it signals that the world we’re entering is one where that momentum is difficult to track.

That sense of kineticism holds for a delicious beat. After zipping past countless vehicles, the car comes to a halt as horns screech, and our antiheroes continue on foot, running down those same packed streets, fully armed, and bursting into a bar. The fact that Miike took on a guerrilla filmmaking approach for Agitator makes it all the more fraught. Cuts are fast, jumping between the many different members as they all rush through — and then we pause. Door open, guns raised, a snarling pack clad in sunglasses, leather, and double-breasted suits, ready to strike. The result? A man — their boss — sitting alone and whistling.

It’s here that we realize two things. This is a system that’s constantly reacting but can just as easily stall or reset itself without warning. It’s also very clear we’re now in Miike’s territory — another visceral, sharply stylized work from a filmmaker who thrives on disruption (or, perhaps more fittingly, agitation).

It’s worthwhile noting that Agitator came out in 2001 — the same year that Miike directed five other films: Ichi the Killer, The Happiness of the Katakuris, Visitor Q, Family, and its sequel. That Miike completed a sprawling gangster epic running 200 minutes in its extended cut (130 theatrically — I watched both via the Radiance release) is genuinely baffling. That said, here’s where it gets interesting: for a filmmaker undeniably known for his excess, Agitator does the opposite. Even with all its moments of the expected (and sometimes torturous) violence, it seems to delight more in the mundane, dwelling in that rootlessness before barreling toward the inevitable.

Agitator may be difficult to follow at the start, and that’s okay. Boiling it down, it follows a network of yakuza factions caught in an increasingly unstable power struggle, kicked off by a man named Kaito (Hiroki Matsukata, of Battles Without Honor and Humanity fame — a touchstone Agitator echoes, Miike-style). Alliances shift, tensions escalate, and everything ripples outward from a single point of conflict.

But for all its motion, Agitator is most powerful when it pauses, like when we’re made privy to a surprise birthday party or one-on-one bathhouse catch-ups. As Miike himself so perfectly put it in an interview for the Radiance release, “It’s not people committing crimes that makes it interesting. It’s the way that those people behave in that situation that gives rise to the story.”

This emotional core is best conveyed through the relationship between our lead, Kunihiko Kenzaki (Masaya Katô), and Yoichi Higuchi (the ever-cool Naoto Takenaka). Though he’s worked his way up as a lieutenant in the Higuchi gang, Yoichi is also Kunihiko’s closest friend — something revealed through the film’s flashbacks. Having known one another for 31 years, Yoichi serves as Kunihiko’s father figure; in the extended cut, we learn that Kunihiko’s mother abandoned him when he was a teenager, so Yoichi took him in earlier than he might have otherwise. As critic and historian of Japanese film, Tom Mes, writes in Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike, “Miike’s outcast characters have a strong tendency to form groups. These serve as surrogate families characterized by a sense of belonging.”

Kunihiko’s loyalty is what ends up making him the titular agitator in Miike’s film, as his emotional dependence rests in Yoichi’s hands. As we watch the ripple effect of that first point of conflict pull Yoichi in, Kunihiko is ready to go to war for him. But the film doesn’t reward those who are incompatible with the system’s logic. During one dinner that they share, Yoichi tells Kunihiko to stop his tirade of revenge and accept that Kaito has “won the war.” While the younger man begs him to consider otherwise, Yoichi’s mind is made up — he knows how this world works, and he’s accepted it with a sense of calm that only comes from having lived in it for decades. Kunihiko, on the other hand, still believes in something beyond it. Ultimately, the film cannot metabolize this loyalty. “The unit must make an effort to stay together,” writes Mes of Miike’s filmography. “If the ties start to show strain, the end is nearly always inevitable.” In Agitator, that inevitability becomes a slow unraveling. The very thing that gives Kunihiko purpose — his devotion to Yoichi — also ensures his place within an engine that cannot sustain it. What begins as loyalty becomes friction, and that friction is enough to seal his destiny.

In a film that appears so driven by escalation, Agitator repeatedly makes room for moments that shouldn’t exist. Or, at least not in a narrative sense. It is in this way that I found myself thinking about Beat Takeshi’s cinema — films like Sonatine, where the violence stops to make way for something more human (I often point people to this film with the selling point: “You also get some yakuza fun in the sun!”). With his crime epic, Miike does the same. In one scene, a group of gangsters discusses a certain song as they drive, musing on who the artist is. Before we get an answer, they quickly exit the car, guns firing, before returning for their getaway, where we finally get an answer to the question. Other occasions, like pausing to listen to a piano being played before pivoting back to chaos, or something as basic as laundry duty, remind us that these are still real people — they’re just operating within a ruthless system of organized crime. In doing so, while these moments humanize the characters, they, more importantly, interrupt the system itself. The film’s momentum repeatedly stops to make way for something that has no place within it… only to be swallowed back up again.

While these pockets of banality are “routines” of yakuza living, the true routine of Agitator is violence. It may register as disruption, but in practice, it is what sustains the environment itself. After all, as Hirata (Kazuya Nakayama) wisely says at one point, “Honor doesn’t pay the bills anymore.” While some scenes are inarguably harrowing, many of the deaths are fast and clinical — presented and gone. So is the life of a yakuza, right? “There is one thing that binds the [familial] themes … and that’s that they all result in violence,” writes Mes.

“The characters’ outcast positions, the end of childhood and the disintegration of the group all result in what forms the surface of Takashi Miike’s films: the depiction of crime, violence, sex, vice, rape, narcotics and death. This is the world that the characters either find themselves in or create for themselves.”
— Tom Mes

What’s most heartbreaking is how easily the violence in Agitator folds back into the very system that produces it. Within this dog-eat-dog world, it’s human attachment that causes real instability. In Agitator, escalation is constant, but does it ever produce any meaningful change? Of course not. Powers shift, alliances dissolve, all while betrayals stack one atop the other. Yet the structure itself remains intact, endlessly recalibrating without ever truly breaking.

The real rupture lies in the expressions of loyalty — bonds that cannot be absorbed without consequence. Kunihiko’s devotion to Yoichi is a structural liability, the same sort of tremor that reverberates through other men around him. This contradiction is distilled with brutal clarity in the film’s tagline — and in the words Sakuraba (Yoshiyuki Daichi) utters when Kunihiko runs to rescue him: “Thank you, fuck you.” It’s the film’s shorthand, collapsed into the same breath. Call it attachment and betrayal or gratitude and resentment, whatever it is, it forms the film’s beating heart. Violence sustains the machinery; human attachment threatens it.

All that we’re left with, then, are the people caught in this network. “It feels like an ensemble drama at times,” Miike says in the Radiance interview. “But each of the male characters, at least, is able to project themselves onto the role. They can find their own ideals inside it. They want to follow their desires, but they don’t have the courage. They know they can’t do it.”

And so, even with all its movement, Agitator reveals itself as a character drama shaped by those who exist unmoored, without stable ground. As Tom Mes observes, Miike’s characters are defined by this rootlessness, by identities that they can neither fully inhabit nor escape.

That brings us back to Kunihiko, who embodies this tension completely. His loyalty to Yoichi goes beyond devotion; it becomes a way to anchor himself in a world that offers no other sense of belonging.

“[These men] have this sense of longing like a child might. I think that’s really what’s at the root of every film in which yakuza appear.”
– Takashi Miike

Kunihiko’s final act of rebellion shouldn’t come as a shock — and is it even rebellion, anyway? Agitator shrugs off the question. It’s merely the system’s logic carried through to its natural end. There is no version of this story where loyalty survives intact. His final words, “When you go out, go out with a bang,” ring hollow, because what choice did he ever really have?

Even with all the acts of violence and invariably shifting hierarchies, what remains etched in the heart are those pockets of humanity that slip out of reach. In a world that never stops moving, the only moments that feel real are the ones that hesitate — and even those are fleeting, already on their way to slipping back into the very system that cannot sustain them.

It’s been a while since we’ve gone through a round-up of some of my physical media treasures, hey? Between going on vacation and taking on some new projects, my writing has slowed down a bit here at Rewind and Revive. That being said, by a sheer stroke of luck, everything I’ve been consuming cinematically lately has been absolutely delicious. Whenever that happens, I feel the urge to lean into a bit of exploratory play — whether that took the form of my Robert Hossein essay from February or last month’s review of Kin-dza-dza!. Nevertheless, as my physical media stack grows, it’s getting to the point where covering them in a timely manner feels like a game of whack-a-mole.

For today’s round-up, I initially had planned to come to you with five reviews, though as I watched the first three films, I realized that I already had too much to say, and, more importantly, I had a sudden “Eureka!” moment while thinking about them in conversation with one another. Hear me out, because I know that, on paper, grouping a classic Greek tragedy, a 1970s Korean psychological drama, and a movie about an ‘80s teen girl punk band together sounds mad.

What struck me about these three films is the shared tension they carry, though presented in completely different ways. Each film follows a woman as she navigates forces that attempt to define her — whether through expectation, perception, or performance. While there is no neat resolution across any of these stories, there is something to be said for recognizing how identity shifts under those conditions. Just… noticing those forces at play, and what it means to move within them.

Even for a round-up format, I wanted to let these three titles breathe. The following films stayed with me, and I hope they give you something to think about, too.

Let’s rewind and revive.

Iphigenia (Michael Cacoyannis; 1977)

At one point in Michael Cacoyannis’ Iphigenia, King Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra (Irene Papas), tells her husband (Kostas Kazakos), “Your silence is enough,” after she discovers his cruel secret. It’s a moment that comes well into the film’s 129-minute runtime, but it speaks to what Cacoyannis does so well throughout: showing us the truth well before anyone says it out loud.

What surprised me most about this Euripidean tragedy is how much time we spend waiting. Immediately through Giorgos Arvanitis’ patient cinematography, we’re shown the Greek army halted at Aulis, stalled by windless skies. Their tempers are rising — as is the temperature itself — and you can practically feel the suffocating heat.

Agamemnon’s men are restless, so he allows them the thrill of the hunt at the nearby temple of Artemis, though, as he warns, no deer should be harmed. After the inevitable happens, we don’t even have to wait for the oracle’s demand to arrive by word of mouth; Agamemnon’s fate is instantly sealed. Arvanitis cuts to a gorgeous but ominous shot of the temple’s high priest, Calchas (Dimitris Aronis), elevated almost in a ritualistic tableau. Flanked by torchbearers against the pale sky and jagged stones, the composition feels like the gods announcing their divine judgment.

When Iphigenia (Tatiana Papamoschou) is finally named as the sacrifice, it lands to us as mere confirmation. For Agamemnon, it’s the same confirmation, though one he refuses to face, his expression contorting in agony. The divine machinery has already begun moving, and it will only stop at the cost of the very cause he claims to serve. As he later tells Iphigenia herself, “Greece is more powerful than both of us.”

In an archival 1977 interview with Cacoyannis and Papas for French television (included on the Radiance disc extras), the filmmaker mentioned that Euripides often dealt with the “corruption of war” — something he claimed he resonated with because “it’s exactly like current events.” In Iphigenia, the army becomes the living chorus, or as Agamemnon calls it, the “thousand-headed monster” that he cannot escape. Crushed between the love for his child and public expectation at the brink of cannibalization, he convinces himself that he has no other choice.

“The film was screaming out to have this physicality to it,” Cacoyannis shared during Cannes press coverage following the film’s release. By taking the first 20 minutes to ground us in the suffering of Agamemnon’s people, the simmering anticipation only drives the tragedy home more forcefully later on.

If Agamemnon embodies the paralysis of a man crushed by the system, Clytemnestra becomes its fiercest opponent. For a film built on the tension of waiting, her fury doesn’t arrive out of nowhere — it, too, simmers. Early on, before she realizes the truth, she draws a clear boundary between public power and private life, telling her husband, “The world is your dominion, so rule it! But in my household, I’m the ruler.” Initially, the line feels like bold defiance, but in hindsight, it reveals that Clytemnestra refuses to fall in line, even before she knows what she’s being asked to accept.

When Clytemnestra discovers her daughter’s fate, there’s no illusion left to maintain. She sees through Agamemnon completely, viciously cutting through every excuse he has tried to construct — or, better yet, saying aloud what the film has already shown us.

Iphigenia, on the other hand, undergoes the quietest transformation of all, yet perhaps the most unsettling. As she’s surrounded by the wails of her mother’s resistance and her father’s rationalizations, she simply… absorbs it all, turning it into something she can believe. “My weddings. My children. My glory.”

You can purchase Iphigenia via Radiance Films or MVD Shop.

Splendid Outing (Kim Soo-yong; 1978)

For a moment, Kim Soo-yong’s Splendid Outing tricks us into thinking we are moving toward a familiar image of power. It opens with a car driving from a mansion toward an imposing skyscraper in Seoul, before cutting to a first-person POV as the camera glides through hallways, past deferential figures, and into an office. When the person behind the desk is finally shown, it’s President Gong Do-hee (played brilliantly by Yoon Jeong-hee), a woman who appears completely in charge of her corporate empire. She remains composed and confident as she moves through a series of meetings, including a conference on the feminist movement in South Korea. As she approaches the stage, the camera suddenly goes out of focus — the first hint of the unraveling to come — but she nonetheless boldly declares, “The era of men symbolizing power has come to an end. All forms of power must yield before wisdom and intelligence.”

Shortly after, the film starts to shift its gaze. At a congratulatory gala that same afternoon, various men approach her with praise. However, their remarks are laced with subtle condescension, even noting that she chose to remain single after her husband’s death. Gong brushes off the comments with practiced ease, though this exchange also suggests that her authority is something she must continually assert — instead of something that would simply be granted to her if she were a man.

That same night, Gong retires to her bedroom, exhausted. Jung Il-sung’s cinematography adopts a surreal tone, enveloping her space in a blue glow as the score turns ominous, complete with spectral crooning. As dream sequences begin to blur with flashbacks of the “jokes” made at her expense earlier in the day, the composure she has maintained cracks, revealing the emotional strain that her carefully constructed image cannot contain for much longer.

The following day, after visiting a shaman who offers insight into her dream, Gong sets off on her “splendid outing,” this time, driving herself to a small seaside town. From this point on, the film descends into a nightmare, her sense of control erased under increasingly hostile conditions. Faces crowd the frame through fisheye lenses, bodies press in from all sides, their screaming voices suffocating her. It is within this disorientation that Gong is taken to an isolated island and finds herself trapped with a man who insists that she is his wife.

Released in 1978, the film managed to slip past strict censorship while still carrying its underlying critique. At first glance, Splendid Outing appears abstract, but as Gong’s sense of self continues to fracture, it’s the society she inhabits that comes into sharper focus.

What’s most unsettling is the suggestion that Gong’s sense of self was never as stable as it first appeared — it was only holding its shape at a distance.

You can purchase Splendid Outing via Radiance Films or MVD Shop.

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains (Lou Adler; 1982)

For most of its runtime, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains feels like a film about crafting an image. What’s harder to track — and something I’m still torn on — is the moment that image stops belonging to the person who made it.

Corrine Burns (15-year-old Diane Lane, alongside an equally young Laura Dern!) seems to understand the weight that an image can carry from the moment we meet her. Fake it till you make it, right? Even before she dons her signature black and red eyeliner and skunk hair, she carries herself with a defiant energy that’s both sarcastic and restless. Watching her give an early interview, where she casually applies makeup mid-conversation while plugging her band’s name, instantly brought a smile to my face. Sure, we soon find out that they can barely play (their first performance was borderline painful to watch), but it doesn’t seem to matter. What Corrine has instinctively is attitude, and, well, that’s sometimes enough to get people looking.

After the Stains’ disastrous first performance, her bandmates (Dern and Marin Kanter) look visibly uncomfortable, but Corrine holds her ground, ripping off her jacket and beret before turning on the audience itself. As she heckles them and screams that she’s perfect, you can’t help but sneer with her. Soon enough, after an incident on tour is picked up by a local news segment that interviews Corrine (complete with her own carefully shaped version of events), the Stains return to the stage to a packed crowd — and an audience decked out to look just like her. This collective, unapologetic confidence is infectious (hell, I even wanted to be swept up in it all). In a follow-up segment, the male reporter dismisses it all as a mere passing spectacle, while the female reporter leans into the sense of female empowerment. Regardless of how it’s framed, the effect is the same: the Stains have gone from being watched to being reproduced.

As Corrine leans further into the persona — even swiping Billy’s (Ray Winstone) song and performing it with her band — the line between performance and authenticity begins to blur in a different way, and it doesn’t help that the very machinery that built the Stains is just as quick to turn on them. Billy won’t let The Looters be pushed aside so easily, so when he finally calls Corrine out as a phony in front of her fans, the very crowd that so eagerly adored her recoils instantly. What was once seen as raw and unfiltered has been churned and spat out into something hollow.

It’s at this point that I was expecting to see some seeds of growth take root — not a tidy resolution, but something that’s less… flat. What follows is an ending that left me conflicted, precisely because it suggests a version of Corrine that seems strangely out of step, or, more accurately, one that doesn’t fully belong to her. Perhaps most frustrating is that the tension extends beyond the film itself. While The Fabulous Stains is directed by Lou Adler, its original script — written by Nancy Dowd with input from punk journalist Caroline Coon — reportedly ended very differently, before being reshaped in such a way that ultimately sacked its creators. In that sense, the aspect that bothers me about the film also makes for a strangely fitting conclusion: it becomes the very thing it’s been circling all along – an image no longer in control of the person who created it.

All of this to say, despite the uneasy landing, the film’s energy has moments that do resonate. Lane is already radiating star power (as is a spectacular but quiet early scene with Dern), while Corrine’s aunt (Christine Lahti) delivers an incredibly heartfelt monologue after the Stains’ early success, sharing the pride she feels in seeing her daughter and nieces escape their small-town existence. More than anything, though, it’s the lasting influence of the Stains themselves, which, fittingly, outgrew the film that first contained them, finding a new life years later on late-night television among up-and-coming musicians and audiences who saw something real in its imperfect defiance. “We don’t put out!”

You can purchase Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains via Fun City Editions or MVD Shop.

Do you ever stop and wonder how much time passes before the absurd becomes merely routine? It’s a curious exercise to keep in mind as you watch Georgiy Daneliya’s 1986 satirical sci-fi, Kin-dza-dza!.

The first few scenes of the film feel deliberately disorienting. After presenting us with opening credits over a desolate landscape of rock and sand, we’re suddenly jolted into 1980s Moscow. The camera cuts, adopting an intrusive handheld approach as we meet the Russian construction foreman, Vladimir (Stanislav Lyubshin) a.k.a. ‘Uncle Vova’ in his family home. After his wife sends him on a mission to obtain some macaroni, Vladimir runs into Gedevan (Levan Gabriadze), a Georgian student carrying a violin, who urges him to come help speak to a strange, lost man in shabby clothing. Claiming to hold a teleportation device, Vladimir tests it with the push of a button, and, with the same, jarring cut, we’ve arrived on the planet Pluke, in the galaxy of Kin-dza-dza. Soon enough, it becomes clear that for a society brandishing such advanced technology, survival depends on mastering a set of bizarre rituals.

I had known a little bit about Kin-dza-dza! through word of mouth, and was immediately intrigued by its premise. Elements of Daneliya’s film brought Karen Shakhnazarov’s Zerograd (1988) to mind, a film that, though not science fiction, delights in the same bureaucratic absurdity; operating within a world with rules that seem logical to everyone inside the system, but completely irrational to an outsider. It’s a particular sort of late-Soviet tone where humor and dread are squished together on a loveseat. The absurd isn’t the joke here; it’s that everyone keeps participating in it.

At the same time, my dystopian sci-fi brain kept circling the harsher satire of Polish filmmaker Piotr Szulkin’s Apocalypse Tetralogy — specifically The War of the Worlds: Next Century (1981) or Ga-ga: Glory to the Heroes (1986). I knew that Kin-dza-dza! wouldn’t reach the grotesque or aggressively oppressive levels of Szulkin’s dystopia, but it does work with some of the same ingredients: repetition and ridiculousness while exposing the horror of the system itself. Think: deadpan absurdism versus nightmare satire, or, in layman’s terms, approaching similar ideas from totally different emotional registers.

Kin-dza-dza! ultimately reveals itself to be far stranger — and much drier — than any of those comparisons could quite prepare you for.

Life on Pluke operates on head-scratching logic… until you surrender to it. The inhabitants communicate using an incredibly reduced vocabulary: “koo” and “ku.” The latter functions as a generalized obscenity, while the former stands in for nearly everything else. Currency comes in the form of “ketse,” which are matches (yes, really).

Meanwhile, social class is determined by handheld devices that flash either orange or green, marking the difference between the ruling “Chatlans” and the subordinate “Patsaks.” Since these beings operate on constant bartering and corruption, you might wonder whether using such devices at close range is wise. Have no fear — status is encoded even further by the color of one’s pants! Crimson trousers mean you’re very wealthy in ketse, and those who come across you must respectfully utter two “koos” in greeting. Yellow means that you’re well-off enough to receive a singular “koo.” If you have neither crimson nor yellow pants, well, I’m afraid you’re a Patsak… and Patsaks must wear a tiny cowbell on their nose whenever a Chatlan is present. With these greetings, what we’re witnessing is a linguistic parody — communication reduced to ritual rather than nuance, as if bureaucratic systems have forgotten what words are even for.

In a 2010s interview, Daneliya summarized how he and co-writer Revaz Gabriadze (whose son plays Gedevan) arrived at this semantic logic for Pluke’s inhabitants. “They annulled all superfluous words, leaving just one: ‘koo,’ for the sake of convenience. So that not to differentiate them by nationality […] they invented a device — the visator.” The reason for both, of course, is exactly what Daneliya explained: convenience. While these rules seem utterly ridiculous, they are obeyed with absolute seriousness. The result? A society that keeps functioning out of habit, long after its logic has collapsed.

Much of the film’s humor comes from how quickly its protagonists begin adapting to these rituals. At first, they shake them off, with Vladimir wryly telling Gedevan that they’ve landed in a “capitalist country.” Later, once they’re called Patsaks enough times, they declare it “flagrant racism.” Fascinatingly, while these seemingly barbaric beings speak in so few words, they also possess the ability to understand any language almost instantly, immediately recognizing both Vladimir’s Russian and Gedevan’s Georgian. Bewildered by these rituals, our heroes realize they’ll need to play along, and the next thing we know, they’re greeting passersby with the correct number of “koos” and bartering for survival (see: performing songs) like seasoned pros (Gedevan’s delivery of “Strangers in the Night” had me howling, wishing I could throw an entire box of matches ketse at the screen). It’s an unsettling realization of how easily human beings can normalize the strangest systems if they’re desperate enough — or if they remain inside them long enough.

What gives Kin-dza-dza! its odd aftertaste is the pockets of melancholy to be found when the “koos” and laughter subside. At one point, Vladimir and Gedevan sit in the desert wearing paper hats, staring out across a vast landscape with no clear direction left to follow. It’s a fleeting moment, but one filled with existential resignation. By the 1980s, Soviet filmmakers mixed satire and exhaustion with ease, depicting stalled societies where, even when the film was comedic, the background hummed with sadness. As our heroes gaze at this worn-down terrain, they eventually stop resisting.

Shortly after this moment, Daneliya briefly pauses the film to provide a playful “dictionary” of Plukanian terms. Make no mistake, this is an important turning point. By now, Vladimir and Gedevan have moved from confusion to (reluctant) participation, and the audience has no choice but to follow along. Once the rules of Pluke click into place, the film becomes more engaging, allowing us to finally surrender to its peculiar logic.

The longer one spends on Pluke, the more it starts to resemble a cracked mirror of our own world. “About the fact that humankind would finally arrive at what we saw on that planet […] I’m afraid we’ll even outdo them, because we’re already doing that,” Daneliya reflected in that interview, now a decade and a half ago, which manages to feel even more prophetic — and is the film’s bleakest joke.

By the time Kin-dza-dza! ends, Daneliya lands one final joke I dare not spoil. It’s subtle, unsettling, and the perfect answer to the question that opened this piece: how long does it take before the absurd becomes routine?

Kin-dza-dza! is currently available to purchase via MVD Shop.

There is a particular kind of freedom that corrodes from within. It arrives with a jarring, pit-in-your-stomach recognition that the freedom you clung to may have been your undoing all along. Perhaps what we call “freedom” is only a more comfortable form of containment.

Robert Hossein’s cinema is built on this promise of autonomy — an obsession with moral blindness. His men move as if they are choosing, mistaking motion for agency, believing themselves above the system that encloses them. This sort of masculinity may appear stable from a distance, but up close, it’s posture. Hossein never allows that fantasy to hold. It is not motion but immobility, he would later suggest, that brings about a man’s fall. A man pacing inside a prison cell is in motion, sure — but he is not moving.

Across the three films in Radiance’s Wicked Games1 set — The Wicked Go to Hell, Nude in a White Car, and The Taste of Violence — Hossein stages variations of this very corrosion, moving from visible confinement to seductive delusion to violence stripped of ornament. The collapse is never explosive; it merely reveals what was already there.

What began as an exploration of his work gradually became something else: a way of returning to a cinematic world that became increasingly legible to me — one that understood how the very structures meant to secure us can become vehicles of erosion. It’s in this kind of acknowledgment that I was offered a strange form of solace, not because it resolves anything, but precisely because it refuses to.

Born in Paris in 1927 to a composer father and an actress mother, Hossein grew up between performance and composition, or, more accurately, between spectacle and structure. His father, André Hossein, would later score many of his films. The music lures you in at first, then returns in restrained, mournful rhythms that refuse to swell into release. As a child, Hossein described himself as silent, watching from a height, observing people below “like puppets.” In a 2007 interview with Vremya Novostei, he recalled climbing trees and looking down onto the street — “a theater that belonged only to me.” That detached, elevated vantage point never quite leaves his cinema.

After those tree-top years, Hossein formally trained under René Simon before performing at the Grand Guignol — the famously macabre theater once housed in a convent chapel. This again leaves Hossein straddling two opposites: discipline and artifice. The violence on stage was elaborate, yes, but it was choreographed. Shock has rules, too.

Even as he began directing for the stage, Hossein moved through French cinematic circles as an actor, often embodying roles marked by masculine assurance and composure. In 1955, though, the performance that truly put him on the map was Rémi Grutter in Jules Dassin’s now-legendary heist classic, Rififi. Rémi, a heroin addict embedded within his brother’s criminal machine, stands in stark contrast to the precision of Tony’s (Jean Servais) crew. In a film obsessed with time, codes, and professional restraint, he is a weak seam. His addiction keeps him circling and reactive. In motion, he is still stuck.

A decade later, in Bernard Borderie’s lush period romance Angélique (1964), Hossein embodies a very different register of masculinity. As Jeoffrey de Peyrac, the brilliant and controlled count, his composure is also his virtue, preferring intellect to force. Yet his belief that dignity will protect him leaves him exposed. The court does not respond to reason; instead, it responds with ritualized punishment.

On the opposite side of that illusion was Hossein’s role in Georges Lautner’s 1981 action-thriller The Professional2. As the unflappable Commissioner Rosen, he steps into authority stripped of romance. Rosen moves as an extension of the institution itself — not passionate, not theatrical, simply… procedural. If Jeoffrey believes dignity will protect him, Rosen behaves as though protection is irrelevant. His function is enforcement.

These performances reveal something consistent across decades. Whether volatile, dignified, or bureaucratic, Hossein’s men move through systems that promise order while making collapse inevitable. They inhabit roles that appear autonomous — criminal, nobleman, commissioner — yet each role narrows rather than frees. When Hossein begins directing for the screen, the emphasis shifts: he stops merely inhabiting these systems and starts designing them.

So, now that he is no longer solely inside the machine, what kind of worlds does he build?

The first world he builds is a prison — but not the one that ultimately traps his men. With his 1955 feature directorial debut, The Wicked Go to Hell, Hossein constructs a space where confinement is strangely coherent. The film divides itself cleanly into two: the prison and what comes after. It opens from above, with prisoners aligned in near-perfect symmetry. The frame is already imposing order before the narrative does.

It is telling where Hossein chooses to place any warmth. Behind bars, a strange communal rhythm forms, where levity becomes a means of survival. The musical interludes in which prisoners sing through cell doors suggest that confinement, however brutal, produces camaraderie. Our two leads, Macquart (Henri Vidal) and Rudel (Serge Reggiani), despise each other. At least the hatred is sustainable on the inside. Hierarchy clarifies roles, while proximity enforces a code.

Once they’re outside, though, the rules evaporate and the warmth drains almost imperceptibly. Meals are eaten in silence at gunpoint; a man collapses slowly against a wall, and the bond between our men begins to rot. When Eva (Marina Vlady) enters this fragile equilibrium, the suffocation intensifies. She isn’t the “cause” of their collapse — she’s a catalyst, revealing how little substance their loyalty ever had once the walls disappeared.

In his autobiography, La Nostalgie, Hossein describes learning early, through producers like Jules Borkon, that suggestion carries more force than repetition. While it can be easy to dismiss this “economy” as aesthetic minimalism, it’s actually a guiding principle. In The Wicked Go to Hell, that restraint is moral architecture. What destroys these men is not conflict itself, but what remains when order is gone. Even the final image withholds catharsis. From afar, the men are simply absorbed.

If The Wicked Go to Hell exposes the false promise of freedom, the second entry in Radiance’s Wicked Games set, Nude in a White Car3, makes it seductive.

The 1958 film opens with the visual polar opposite of oppressive confinement. We’re graced with sultry jazz and an evening stroll along the beach. André Hossein sets a scene with a score that feels like a hand at the back of your neck, guiding you into the seduction before you’ve had time to object. As Pierre (Hossein) walks, a blonde pulls up beside him and invites him inside her car. Hossein stages the encounter with the same compositional control as the prison in Wicked, only now the architecture is desire. Pierre accepts her invitation without hesitation, and within moments, the woman parks, disrobes, and reclines in the driver’s seat. The camera slowly pulls back as she turns the volume up on the radio, and the brassy tune takes over. We never see her face.

That absence is the first warning. Pierre asks to see her, but she refuses, drawing a gun. He’s unceremoniously kicked out of the car, and the mystery woman tries to run him down. Rather than dwell on fear, Pierre is entranced. So much so, in fact, that he memorizes the license plate so he can track her down. For a man as self-assured as Pierre, it registers as a challenge, not a threat.

Like the men in The Wicked Go to Hell, Pierre mistakes motion for agency. While the former film charted the erosion of social bonds, the failure here is erotic. Shortly after, Pierre casually shrugs off his landlord’s eviction warning. His ease permeates all aspects of his life, confusing charm with control. He’s unbothered by consequence, which is precisely why he sees the blonde’s actions as flirtation.

Pierre tracks the car to a lavish villa. Instead of one blonde, he finds two: sisters, Eva and Hélène (Vlady and Odile Versois, real-life siblings). Once inside the villa, he enters another prison in Hossein’s world, constructed from doubling rather than walls. The flightier sister uses a wheelchair, while the other is her caretaker and always composed. In some scenes, both women wear their hair up; in others, both wear it down. An early split-diopter frame holds both women in sharp focus, forcing us, like Pierre, to search each face for confirmation. As jealousy, performance, and surveillance take over, we continuously ask: who is watching whom? Who is playing at innocence?

As Vlady explains in an interview on the Radiance disc extras, most of the film was shot in the villa, which undeniably enhances its claustrophobic atmosphere. The titular “nude” becomes less a woman than a surface for Pierre’s projection — desire morphing into suspicion, then paranoia. When he finally comes to a decision, the damage is done. He has already selected the version of reality that flatters him the most. In the interview on the Radiance disc, Vlady observes, “[Hossein’s] films are full of anguish.” For Nude in a White Car, that anguish is born from seduction itself — from the moment desire becomes a trap of one’s own making.

By the time we get to 1961’s The Taste of Violence (the third and final film in the Radiance set), Hossein no longer stages seduction or confinement. Now? He stages what comes after. The violence here is inescapable — administrative, even. An outlier in the set as the only Western, The Taste of Violence still manages to fit in beautifully, compressing rather than liberating.

Set in an unspecified Latin American country at the turn of the century, the film opens with revolutionaries aboard a train as they approach a tunnel. Fog consumes the screen, and once it lifts, bodies lie where some of the men rode. The others? They’re frozen in a tableau — like a memorial. Tellingly, André Hossein’s music is missing; mechanical sounds take over. There is no invitation into fantasy here. And when the music does make an appearance later? It’s slightly mismatched, as if the consolation has come too late.

The Taste of Violence follows a group of revolutionaries, Perez (Hossein), Chamaco (Mario Adorf), and Chico (Hans H. Neubert), after they’ve kidnapped the president’s daughter, Maria (Giovanna Ralli), in hopes of returning her in exchange for their imprisoned companions. As the journey unfolds through desolate landscapes, it becomes clear that this world is full of watching and waiting. Townspeople, soldiers, women at doorways, men on horseback, everyone frozen, forever witnessing the consequences of the actions of war, even when those actions are taken in the name of “freedom” — a word that shifts meaning depending on who speaks it. Perez, ostensibly our hero, seems deflated. He continues to fight, but he’s tired.

When it comes to moments of bloodshed, only what remains is shown. In one later scene, two bodies from opposing sides lie locked together in death, their hats thrown off next to them, while their arms are outstretched. Here, the symmetry replaces ideology. Once these men leave the land of the living, they’re indistinguishable. Immediately after, a similar image places Perez and Maria side by side, lying on the shoreline. This time, they’re both alive yet still barely separated. Right on cue, music plays, almost as a clue. The crooning lyric, “Hear me, destiny,” swells, suggesting that fate may be the story’s true antagonist. As Perez’s sister wisely says at one point, “No one wins this game.” It’s no accident that the men throughout the film are in white, while the women are in black, either. Grief is made permanent, while masculine pride keeps the machinery of violence in motion. In the final scene, two figures move slowly apart across the vast landscape. What they’re heading toward is neither victory nor conclusion. In Hossein’s cinema, motion is never escape.

Once Hossein directs 1970’s Falling Point, he has learned to operate by saying very little. Stripping the world down to its residue, he trusts that the corrosion no longer needs to be demonstrated. Gone are illusion and seduction, leaving only repetition — and the brief cruelty of discovering that pockets of warmth cannot alter fate.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that between these films sits Cemetery Without Crosses (1969), another Western similar to Taste of Violence, in which revenge coagulates into futility (it is his best-known directorial effort). Yet, a mere year later, what we witness are the skeletal remains of his argument. If the earlier films we highlighted staged prisons, villas, and revolutions, Falling Point reduces the world to a beach house, three masked men, and one girl. It may begin in a manner structurally similar to the second half of The Wicked Go to Hell, but nothing needs to be proven anymore.

Three masked men kidnap Catherine (Pascale Rivault) in hopes of receiving a ransom from her father. However, the youngest criminal, Vlad (Johnny Hallyday), compromises the plan by taking his mask off and allowing her to see him. Now, Vlad is told he must eliminate the girl. Can he follow through?

Falling Point fractures time itself, opening with flashbacks and then replaying the kidnapping from multiple angles. Later, a scream on tape is rewound and replayed over and over until guilt itself becomes a form of torture. Where The Wicked Go to Hell built tension through social collapse and Taste of Violence through ideological inevitability, Falling Point does so through circularity. The past, in Hossein’s cinema, never stays put.

What unsettles most is that Hossein allows tenderness to surface. It’s almost cruel by design. Vlad cannot kill Catherine in her sleep. He cannot do it outside, either. They find themselves sharing a sandwich. A beer can explodes as he tries to open it. For a fleeting second… they laugh. This marks the film’s most human moment — and its most merciless. It changes nothing. The moral suffocation remains, though now it has settled into resignation. What once erupted now simply concludes.

Working through Hossein’s films, one thing remains clear: he does not offer redemption. We don’t see his worlds detonate in spectacle, nor does he dignify collapse with transcendence. What’s most devastating is simpler than that. He exposes the illusion of freedom.

No matter where his men reside, the pattern remains intact. While they believe they are moving towards something, be it freedom, control, vengeance, or rescue, what they’re actually moving toward is the unraveling already underway.

In this way, Hossein’s cinema resists consolation. For those of us who do not feel reconciled, who have watched promises curdle into depletion, that resistance does something unexpected. His refusal to console sharpens our instinct: to interrogate what we want, what it costs, what is sold as normal, and what we no longer consent to.

And perhaps that is the strange solace: recognition itself.

Today, I’m finally sharing a long-overdue podcast episode on a film that’s haunted me since my first watch in late November: Harry Kümel’s 1971 surreal gothic marvel, Malpertuis.

I originally planned to release this episode late last year, but the deeper I went (into the film, its production, and Kümel himself), the more it demanded patience. I found that English-language material on Kümel is scarce as of this writing, so much of this episode was shaped by a close study of the recent Radiance Films 4K release, whose essays, archival interviews, and commentaries served as my guiding light.

At a certain point, though, research gives way to trust. As such, I invited my friend and fellow physical media obsessive Philip Marinello (The Substance Podcast) to join me, and together we unpack the strange, seductive logic of Malpertuis.

I’ve included my original Letterboxd review below as a primer; otherwise, I invite you to step inside with us. Enjoy, my friends.

Harry Kümel drops you into Malpertuis the same way Jan (Mathieu Carrière) stumbles into it. From the opening alone, we watch the young sailor chase a girl through unsettlingly empty streets with no score, no noise; just footsteps echoing along narrow alleys. Then, he crosses a threshold, and suddenly a smoky, red-saturated cabaret erupts around him. The shift was disorienting. It took me a moment to realize I’d be trapped in Malpertuis, too.

At times, the film has a hyper-stylized theatricality that feels almost Fassbinderian. The bar fight cutting to close-ups of instruments, the red-beaded curtains, the perfectly curated chaos — it’s hard to know where to look, or what to focus on. Once Jan wakes up inside the labyrinthine mansion that is Malpertuis itself, the film slips into a chamber piece with hazy dream logic, flirting with Bergman’s darker work, especially Hour of the Wolf.

What struck me most is how repetitive the space is: endless corridors, looping staircases, doors that lead to nowhere, servants trekking down hallways that seem to stretch into the dark forever. I wondered how Kümel scouted such a grand location until I sat down to go through the Radiance Films extras. DP Gerry Fisher and art director Philippe Graff had the idea to hand-paint a few floors of that winding staircase on canvas to create the illusion of infinite depth. Similarly, in the sitting room where everyone gathers, Fisher thought of painting the flames on all the lamps scattered throughout. Malpertuis becomes less a house and more a funhouse — both for Jan and us.

Spoiling the late-game reveals would be a disservice. If you’ve read the Jean Ray novel, you’ll know what I mean. Once the film tips from gothic mystery into… something else, and everything clicks into place, it becomes utterly engrossing.

Next to Carrière, the cast is a joy. Michel Bouquet and Jean-Pierre Cassel are excellent, but Susan Hampshire is the undeniable star. She plays five roles, each wildly different, and earns every bit of trust Kümel placed in her (he’d initially considered Catherine Deneuve, but Hampshire had the range he needed). Of course, there’s also Orson Welles, who plays the dying estate owner, Cassavius. Imposing yet immovable in a bed draped in red — the most visually decadent area of Malpertuis — he radiates the weary and irritable gravity of a myth who very much knows he’s slipping, but seems to be enjoying it anyway.

I’m unsure if I’ll ever fully find my way out of Malpertuis. It settles into you; illusions flickering, folding over one another, the house continuing to exist just beyond reach.

Philip Marinello’s The Substance is a semi-weekly podcast with well over 150 episodes that has conversations to help folks better appreciate goodness, truth, and beauty. There’s a strong emphasis on cinema, with regular conversations with wonderful guests from the film world, as well as shows featuring academics, advocates, and faith leaders working to make the world a better and fuller place.

Follow Philip on Instagram, Letterboxd, and check out The Substance on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

For additional resources, check out The Projection Booth’s episode on Malpertuis, hosted by our friend, Mike White.

If you’re looking to buy a copy of Malpertuis, head on over to MVD Shop, where the Radiance release is on sale, as of this writing.

You can also listen to or watch this episode on:

YouTube

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Apple Podcasts

Between the holidays creeping closer, weeks of relentless Pacific Northwest rain, and a self-inflicted sugar cookie coma, things have slowed down a bit at Rewind & Revive. But rest assured — good (and riveting) things are on the way, dear reader.

Alongside working through my ever-growing Blu-ray stack (while also trying to catch up on new releases before the end of the year, help me), I’ve been developing my next podcast episode, dedicated to Harry Kümel’s Malpertuis, in honor of the recent (and gorgeous) Radiance Films release.

For today, however, I bring you yet another physical media round-up, this time with offerings from The Criterion Collection, Cult Epics, and Radiance once more. While I initially planned to add a fifth film, I opted for tasteful restraint; the four films below form a (surprisingly) coherent emotional and thematic arc. The movies I’ve chosen all operate on a distinctly human scale, tracking people under pressure and the ways they look after one another. Friendship, care, and imagination aren’t grand answers here — just the things that help everyone get through the day.

They’re all wonderful (in fact, the Aki Kaurismäki film included here has already become my favorite of the ten of his I’ve seen so far), and I hope they delight you as much as they have me. Without further ado, let’s rewind and revive.

The Ogre of Athens (Nikos Koundouros; 1956)

At the start of The Ogre of Athens, Thomas (Dinos Iliopoulos) isn’t disliked, nor is he feared. He’s simply… invisible. So when people finally begin to notice him (even if it’s out of fear), it hits a primal nerve — one he didn’t even realize he was starving for. Better to be an ogre than nobody at all.

Set in jittery post–Civil War Athens, Nikos Koundouros’ sophomore feature begins by flirting with both noir and neorealism before gradually dissolving into absurd fable. We’re shown a Greece still recovering from occupation and internal conflict, where fear spreads as fast as a rumour in a crowded street — and the city is a pressure cooker. On New Year’s Eve, the stiff, anxious bank clerk Thomas is suddenly mistaken for the titular Ogre: a crime boss who’s been impossible to capture. Seeking refuge after wading through thick paranoia, he stumbles into a taverna, and it’s a whole other world: joyous, chaotic, pulsing with music, dancing, and drink. Better yet, the morally questionable patrons here don’t fear Thomas. They revere him.

After some hesitation, Thomas embraces his role as criminal kingpin. What struck me most is that this “wrong man” trope isn’t used as a mere plot device. When Thomas gently urges love interest “Baby” (Margarita Papageorgiou) to appreciate those who care for her, we realize he and the real Ogre share the same isolating loneliness. If the absence of conscience shapes one, the absence of identity shapes the other. Of course slipping into the Ogre’s skin doesn’t feel like a costume.

As the hours pass and Thomas begins bonding with the taverna owner (Giannis Argyris) and his men, he’s swept into a heist: stealing a pillar from the Temple of Zeus for an American buyer — because nothing says “modern Greece” like exporting your ancient identity for cash. Koundouros keeps tugging at the film’s central tension: imported modernity versus tradition. On the taverna walls, Joan Crawford and Clark Gable grin down like glamorous saints of a future Athens hasn’t fully been invited into. These “criminals” aren’t hardened villains, either; they just want out of scarcity, even if it means chipping away at the stones their city was built on.

Masculinity, already brittle post-war, latches onto any power it can find, and for one intoxicating night, Thomas lets himself be lost in it. The film’s most powerful moment arrives in a whirl of zeibekiko stomps and clinking glasses as our lead joins in. Through the sweat and the sudden sense of freedom, it all fuses like a rebirth.

The Greeks love a tragedy, but the tragedy here isn’t that Thomas’ transformation was thrust upon him. Instead, he chose it, bit by bit, himself. “All my life, I’ve avoided a fuss,” he says. And that’s what undoes him.

You can purchase The Ogre of Athens via Radiance Films or MVD Shop.

School in the Crosshairs (Nobuhiko Obayashi; 1981)

Adolescence can be both magical and terrifying. In Nobuhiko Obayashi’s School in the Crosshairs, it happens to be both, often at the same time. The opening fools you into thinking this is bubbly pop-idol movie fare, with scrapbook-style cutouts of a teenage bedroom and the incredibly sweet (and very catchy) opening song “I Want to Protect You” by Yumi Matsutoya. For a moment, the film feels like the cinematic equivalent of a heart-shaped sticker… until the title card drops and the music turns ominous.

Hiroko Yakushimaru is wonderful as Yuka, a girl who suddenly discovers she has telekinetic abilities just as her school slips into the hands of a mind-controlled student government. A new transfer student (Masami Hasegawa) with the same powers becomes the student council president and, along with her nerdy yet villainous sidekick (played by Makoto Tezuka, son of the Osamu Tezuka behind Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion), builds a team of uniformed patrol guards, bans individuality, and swiftly turns students into obedient zombies. Anyone who dares to call it what it is (like the poor P.E. teacher who blurts out “fascism!”) soon finds themselves in a suspicious “accident.” Obayashi isn’t subtle about what terrifies him: youth systems that prioritize obedience over imagination and creativity.

Visually, it’s a treat to see Obayashi go full “live-action cartoon” mode. Neon scribbles outline characters like someone’s doodling inside the frame. A school event casually morphs into a dance sequence with the confidence (and meticulous choreography) of a full-blown musical. Another day sees a brief teenage existential crisis backed by a literal white-tuxedoed jazz band outside the school. And when the leading Bad Guy Kyogoku (Tōru Minegishi) spins through a piano solo in front of a blue-screen prism, it’s pure cinematic delirium.

What makes all this spectacle matter is Obayashi’s deep sympathy for young people. Yuka’s powers become a metaphor for puberty; frightening when suppressed, liberating when embraced. The school turns into a miniature society eager to mold kids into compliant citizens, and Obayashi makes a compelling case that rebellion, even when goofy, is how they keep their souls intact.

You can purchase School in the Crosshairs via Cult Epics.

The Island Closest to Heaven (Nobuhiko Obayashi; 1984)

How fragile and dizzying the world can feel when you’re young and uncertain.

(Nobuhiko Obayashi’s vision of youth and imagination surfaces once more in this roundup — and this film captures its gentlest form).

Perhaps the breeziest entry in Obayashi’s ouvré that I’ve seen, The Island Closest to Heaven is based on Katsura Morimura’s successful 1966 travelogue of the same name, revolving around a teenage girl, Mari (Tomoyo Harada), who heads to New Caledonia to realize her late father’s dream of finding the place “closest to heaven.” While Obayashi captures the travelogue ambiance beautifully (so many lush glimpses of flora and fauna!), the film also feels like a postcard to your younger self; the version of you who believes that if you wander far enough, maybe the world will finally start to make some sense.

Obayashi often uses narratives where youth is a site of rebellion, but here it’s much calmer. The island functions less as a location and more as a transitional space, where every interaction helps Mari make a bit more sense of what she’s actually here to do. Of course, Obayashi’s playfulness still peeks through, though much more subtly. An array of quirky supporting characters keeps things light, while color overlays and brief jump-cut moments add just enough whimsy to keep the movie from drifting into pure melancholy.

Much of The Island Closest to Heaven reminded me of what a live-action Studio Ghibli film might feel like, where a heroine’s exploratory nature and quiet coming-of-age lead to the realization that the “paradise” you’re chasing may already be all around you. Instead of a destination, it’s the people who help you get where you’re going.

I wasn’t expecting Obayashi to mix all that gentleness with these sudden flashes of MGM-style romance, but he does. Those glimmers are most evident in the title sequence, with sweeping credits set against a pastel frame and music that plays like a Technicolor fairy tale. It also has that classic Hollywood ache that promises adventure, heartbreak, and the marriage of love and loss.

I’d be remiss not to mention that The Island Closest to Heaven is still very much a product of its time. Its view of New Caledonia leans into an ’80s tourism fantasy, where nearly every local offers help with an effortless smile, and Mari’s older mentor figure, Yuichi (Tôru Minegishi), occasionally raises eyebrows with the age gap. That boundary is never crossed (their dynamic remains rooted in guidance), but it briefly jars against the story’s otherwise tender sincerity.

What ultimately stays with you is the film’s abiding kindness. It’s in the moment Yuichi tries to show Mari the “green ray,” hoping to give her a bit of emotional orientation (I beamed seeing this Jules Verne reference turn up just a few years before Rohmer’s classic), and in the way the village children gather around her bed after she wakes from an accident. By the time she returns home, it hits you that her paradise wasn’t actually a place at all. Instead, it’s the feeling of being held by the world, even when you’re still figuring out where you belong.

You can purchase The Island Closest to Heaven via Cult Epics.

La Vie de bohème (Aki Kaurismäki; 1992)

When money is scarce, making art can feel both exhilarating and ruthlessly cruel. There’s a quiet dignity in that precarity, and one that’s easy to recognize if you’ve lived it yourself. People doing their best in a world that doesn’t seem particularly interested in rewarding dreamers — at least not the ones without safety nets. And yet… they keep dreaming anyway. Art doesn’t save you, but it does give your suffering shape, and sometimes, it gives you each other.

I’ve always connected to Aki Kaurismäki’s films and the melancholy that surrounds his characters. It’s a working-class relatability he consistently nails, leaving you unsure whether to laugh or cry as he captures how life can be equally ridiculous and bitter. With 1992’s La Vie de bohème, he hits his familiar beats while reminding us that the world’s callousness is often best endured with a friend, a cigarette, and a bad cup of coffee (or whiskey).

In 1976, Kaurismäki read Henri Murger’s 1848 novel Scènes de la vie de bohème, immediately deciding he would adapt it someday. Though he initially imagined filming it in Helsinki, he recalled Murger’s declaration in the introduction — that bohemian life is only possible in Paris. Married to the idea, he waited until the opportunity arose, ultimately choosing not the capital itself but the suburb of Malakoff. Seeking authenticity, Kaurismäki realized that shooting in modern-day Paris would detract from the grimy, run-down look he wanted for the film. The result is marvelous, and I was often nudging myself to remember that this wasn’t, in fact, shot in 1950s or early ’60s France. Opening with a rooftop shot set to Damia’s crooning “Chantez pour moi, violons,” it’s hard not to be immediately whisked away.

The film brings together three men adrift in Paris: Marcel (André Wilms), a recently evicted playwright and poet; Rodolfo (Matti Pellonpää), an Albanian painter unable to sell his work; and Schaunard (Kari Väänänen), an Irish composer of stubbornly experimental music. As the trio bonds over their love of the arts, they become a bohemian version of the Three Musketeers, using friendship as a form of shelter when money, stability, and even love flutter away. Kaurismäki’s hangout energy feels oddly cozy here, inviting us to see home as the quiet solidarity found in shared meals and shared disappointments.

Life in La Vie de bohème moves in cycles. The men hover just above the poverty line, stumble into sudden bursts of creativity (and occasional luck, courtesy of an art collector played by Jean-Pierre Léaud and Sam Fuller as a gangster-publisher), enjoy fleeting moments of security, and then face the inevitable collapse of it all. Instead of melodrama, Kaurismäki offers familiarity: his characters have lived this pattern countless times, each devastation rendered routine.

Remember, though, routine devastation is easier to endure when your sense of self is bound up in the struggle itself. The women in La Vie de bohème aren’t wired this way. Where their love interests cling to ideals, both Mimi (Évelyne Didi) and Musette (Christine Murillo) navigate reality. Though they care (and oh, how deeply they care), rational self-preservation comes first. As Mimi heartbreakingly tells Rodolfo, “I love you, you know, but life is hard.”

Instead of offering escape or solutions, La Vie de bohème offers recognition. Kaurismäki never pretends this is enough to fix the world, but he does suggest that the simple act of showing up might be enough to survive it with dignity. One for all and all for one, after all.

You can purchase La Vie de bohème via The Criterion Collection.

Which parts of ourselves survive the stories we rewrite? In Iranian writer-director Alireza Khatami’s The Things You Kill, a man tries to escape the narrative that shaped him — as a son, as a husband, as a “disappointment.” Yet even as the land he stands on is dry and the pipes are cracked, the past keeps leaking back in. It begins as a grounded psychological drama, then slips into something feverish, laced with denial and distortion. Khatami removes the safety net of both score and certainty, stranding us in the barren Anatolian landscape — and in the barren places of the conscience.

Ali (Ekin Koç) is a university professor whose life feels like it’s narrowing rather than unfolding as the years go on. His literature course is quietly being phased out, while at home, the pressure to become a father gnaws at something he can’t fix: his infertility. His retreat comes in the form of a second home: a dusty plot of land and a garden he cannot bring to life. After the sudden and suspicious death of his mother, Ali spends more time at a place meant for renewal. Instead, it mirrors his growing unease, where the only things taking root are grief and resentment.

Eventually, Ali’s pain needs some form of direction. Reza (Erkan Kolçak Köstendil), the gardener hired to make his land fertile, becomes the vessel for the emotions Ali can’t articulate. Human memory is slippery; so subjective, so readily willing to contort itself to protect one’s fragile ego.

Khatami literalizes a linguistic idea at the heart of the film: translation. In one lecture, Ali explains that in Latin, translation means “to carry meaning across,” but in Akkadian it can also mean “to stone” — to kill. When you kill the part of yourself shaped by trauma, what dark version rises in its place?

There’s a compelling tug-of-war between identity and illusion. At first glance, the landscapes recall Abbas Kiarostami’s work, and so does Khatami’s willingness to treat cinema as an unreliable narrator. I felt glimpses of Mohsen Makhmalbaf, too, especially A Moment of Innocence, where the idea of reenacting trauma can create a more “bearable” fiction. Translation equals destruction, remember? While many have pointed to David Lynch, I invite you to consider traces of Krzysztof Kieślowski as well, whose films sometimes suggest that every choice creates a shadow self. Following this lineage, Khatami amplifies the same question: What does the other version of us know that we refuse to face?

Khatami also rejects a traditional score. In the Q&A that followed the film, he explained his decision to avoid a score because music can manipulate emotion too easily. Instead, he allows the sound design to swell: footsteps, the wind, the countless dogs that bark a chorus throughout. It’s atmosphere as an emotional compass.

That vulnerability extends to performance. When I asked about his collaboration with Koç, Khatami shared: “My main job is to give them the confidence that the camera sees you … Actors are very vulnerable. They bring a lot to the table.” The hardest scene to shoot with Koç was a confession — a single shot in which Ali slips out of focus for what feels like an eternity. Crew instinct said fix it; Khatami said leave it. “Everybody on set was scared — ‘This was a mistake, nobody goes out of focus for 30 seconds.’ But it was the only way to do it.” It becomes the film’s most honest gesture. Trauma makes us look away… and the lens respects that rather than correcting it.

Even the dogs feel like a deliberate metaphor. The first, a German shepherd that lives on the garden property, is only seen by Ali and Reza. Perhaps man’s best friend is tied to shame and secrecy in this instance. In the final act, a new puppy arrives, visible only to Ali and his wife. Hope? Fertility? Denial? Khatami refuses to underline it.

If identity is a story we construct, then love, guilt, and even redemption might be as real as we need them to be. Which leaves us, quite perfectly, where we began: Which parts of ourselves survive the stories we rewrite?

With all of my film festival work finally wrapped up, it’s time to give my unwatched physical media stack a little bit of TLC. After living in a delicious fog of media overstimulation, I naturally turned to kung-fu cats, carnivorous plants, and samurai disillusionment to level me out. This collection of films reminds me why I keep chasing the next strange image.

In other news, it’s also high time I dust off the cobwebs on my podcast. I’ve been a bit bummed I haven’t given the R&R pod the love it deserves, so I’ve been spending my free moments thinking about the wonderful films I want to dive into — complete with a talented roster of industry friends and filmmakers I’m tapping to get on the mic.

More to come on that soon, but for now, let’s get weird and rewind, shall we?

Through and Through (Grzegorz Krolikiewicz; 1973)

A deeply upsetting film that leaves a sensory itch all over. Grzegorz Krolikiewicz plunges you into a disorienting headspace made of claustrophobic frames, jarring edits, and an oppressive, almost rhythmic sound design that refuses to let up.

Through and Through is based on the real-life 1933 Kraków murder case involving Jan and Maria Malisz, an impoverished couple whose intense love for one another became the centerpiece of a sensational trial. They planned to rob a mail carrier on pension day, but when it spiraled out of control, three people were left dead: the postman and the owners of the apartment they’d rented for the crime. Only the owner’s daughter survived. What shocked the public most wasn’t the brutality of the crime, but the romanticism of the courtroom: each spouse took full responsibility in hopes of saving the other. Although both were sentenced to death, Maria was ultimately pardoned — on the very day of her planned execution.

Krolikiewicz presents only fragments of these events before the courtroom scenes arrive, and with them, the film’s most extended use of dialogue. Until that point, Through and Through rejects any straightforward narrative, replacing it with a swirl of weaponized silence or layers of droning, relentless noise. Initially, Maya Deren’s spatial disorientation came to mind, yet her work moves like a dream, where Krolikiewicz’s film lurches like an abrasive nightmare. More fitting comparisons would be somewhere in the vein of a rawer Dušan Makavejev, or the suffocating symbolism of Wojciech Has.

Notably, what I found most impressive is how Through and Through avoids showing overt violence altogether. Thanks to Bogdan Dziworski’s nauseatingly intimate camera, the crime doesn’t need to be seen. Instead, it’s replaced through intrusive close-ups of the victims’ faces (and Jan’s own expression of terror). It’s overwhelming in its brutality, precisely because of what’s left out.

Emotionally, the film is full of contradictions. Tender and brutal, disheartened and furious. When the closing monologues in court finally arrive, they feel like the only form of grace Krolikiewicz allows. A catharsis, of sorts.

You can purchase Through and Through via Radiance Films here or MVD Shop here.

The Cat (Lam Nai-Choi; 1992)

As swan songs go, The Cat might be the strangest. Yet for Lam Nai-Choi, it’s also weirdly fitting. Best known for Riki-Oh and The Seventh Curse, Lam bows out with a sci-fi–horror–action mash-up that you can’t help but just have fun with. The film, based on the novel Old Cat (an installment of the Wisely series and Nai-Choi’s second Wisely adaptation), follows Wisely (Waise Lee Chi-Hung) as he joins forces with a trio of aliens — one of whom is, yes, the eponymous cat — to defeat a goopy, tentacle-thrashing parasite which also happens to possess human bodies.

Along the way, we’re treated to a generous buffet of visual excess: an animal-fu fight between a cat and dog, stop-motion and puppetry madness, levitation sequences, and face-melting gore. The practical effects are pure camp magic, and the phrase “They just don’t make ’em like this anymore” has never rung truer.

Beneath the janky pacing and delightfully awkward dialogue, there’s something genuinely heartfelt in the mix. Like everyone involved was reverting to their childhood selves and living out whatever glittery, deranged genre dreams they still had left in the tank. The tone is a beautiful soup of contradictions, and it somehow works because it refuses to settle.

The Cat wears its ’50s B-movie maximalism on its sleeve. It’s gooey and strangely charming in its earnest chaos. If you love House, The Thing, or, well, some of, if not THE best darned cat acting put to camera, this is the one. Let movies be fun and weird again.

You can preorder The Cat via 88 Films here or MVD Shop here.

Los Golfos (Carlos Saura; 1960)

Carlos Saura’s debut feature opens with a jolt: a blind newspaper vendor is robbed in broad daylight. The film then cuts to the brutal grace of a bullfight. Madrid, too, enters the frame, seen as a city from the periphery.

Shot with non-actors and a raw, neorealist aesthetic, Los Golfos follows the lives of working-class boys on the margins. They’re always on the move, swiping what they can, be it food, trinkets, fleeting pleasures, all in the name of staying afloat. Itching to climb the social ladder, the “delinquents” come up with a theory: if their friend, a novice matador, makes it big, he may be their ticket to masculine glory. Crushingly, the realization is that no matter how bravely you perform, you’re still trapped in the ring.

Los Golfos is, put simply, bleak. Veritably so. Even the sensual flashes, like dance clubs or bodies moving at the beach, are fleeting. As quickly as they appear, they vanish, eclipsed by systemic immobility and the limits of dreaming under authoritarian rule.

Ironically, Saura never intended this to be his first feature. He had previously tried to adapt two books in the 1950s, but Francoist censors rejected both. The strategy for getting a film through at the time was to make your message vague. Imply, but don’t name. Saura didn’t shy away, and Los Golfos speaks through absence: a film where everything unnamed carries the loudest weight.

The film almost didn’t make it past the censors. As the Radiance Films booklet explains, Los Golfos was trimmed by 10 minutes, with officials insisting that the boys’ plight be portrayed as personal and not in any way allude to Spanish youth at the time. Even then, they weren’t satisfied. Los Golfos debuted at Cannes in 1960, but wouldn’t reach broader audiences for two more years.

This new restoration restores three of the four censored scenes, making it the closest we’ve come to the version Saura initially sent to Cannes.

You can purchase Los Golfos via Radiance Films here.

The Betrayal (Tokuzō Tanaka; 1966)

The Betrayal begins as if it will be a familiar chanbara tale, but by the end, a hollow devastation takes over. In Tokuzō Tanaka’s film, we witness what happens when the very notion of honor corrodes under systemic decay. Loyalty is twisted into a tool of exploitation.

Takuma (Raizō Ichikawa, of the Shinobi films) is a samurai asked to take the fall for the murder of a member of a rival clan. This wasn’t just any murder, however; it was disgraceful — a strike from behind. Honorable to a fault and engaged to his clan leader’s daughter, Namie (Kaoru Yachigusa), Takuma agrees. The promise? After a year in exile, he may return when the dust settles. What unfolds is a merciless cycle of broken promises. Betrayal piles upon betrayal. Even early on, with the flicker of Namie’s eyes when her fiancé accepts, we see that fracture instantly. Love sacrificed for duty.

Formally, it’s absorbing to watch how the film mirrors Takuma’s collapse. Tanaka starts with destabilizing handheld camerawork before settling into rigid statics, suggesting a temporary return to order that will not hold. Once we get to those fixed shots, we’re also offered selective framing, where certain scenes crop out figures, like showcasing attackers only from the legs, or Takuma on the ground. We’re given a subjective, ground-level perspective of humiliation. Most fascinating, however, was witnessing the exile period come and go, as if it were an ellipsis. By denying Takuma any narrative redemption arc or sense of urgency, Tanaka insists on futility.

So, what are we left with? Disillusion. “A samurai’s word is meaningless,” spits Takuma through maniacal laughter at one point, marking the erosion of the bushidō code. Even the film’s spectacular final act (which I won’t detail — it’s best experienced) is loaded with bitter irony. We’re dazzled by edge-of-your-seat thrills… yet it rings hollow. As Takuma’s worn-down body keeps swinging, what does it matter what the outcome is? His spirit is already destroyed. In the words of one character: “In this world, the faithless win, and the faithful lose … it’s the way of the world.”

Adela Has Not Had Supper Yet (Oldřich Lipský; 1978)

Adela Has Not Had Supper Yet may be in the running as one of my favorite detective spoofs next to Mario Bava’s Danger: Diabolik. Oldřich Lipský brings to the screen American sleuth Nick Carter (a dime-novel legend I admittedly didn’t know of!) as he’s summoned to Prague for a seemingly simple missing-dog case... only to find himself chasing an eccentric villain — mustache primed for twirling and all — who’s been feeding his victims to a carnivorous plant. Naturally.

Visual gags abound in Adela, and they’re played entirely straight-faced, which makes them even better. It plays like Peter Sellers–era Pink Panther by way of Inspector Gadget, with a flair for sepia tones, dime-novel illustrations, slapstick choreography, and sped-up chases. Carter’s (Michal Dočolomanský) crime-fighting arsenal is a delight, from retractable hat punches to bomb-sniffing spectacles, sprinkled with a healthy dash of steampunk swagger. What particularly surprised (and shocked) me was seeing that his partner, Commissar Ledvina, was played by Rudolf Hrušínský, whom I adored in Juraj Herz’s The Cremator. Almost unrecognizable, Hrušínský’s Ledvina exists primarily to fumble, eat sausages, and down beer — often at the same time.

The carnivorous plant, which lends its name to the eponymous title, is the real showstopper. Brought to moist, grotesque life by Czech surrealist Jan Švankmajer, Adela goes from weirdly charming to absolutely revolting, complete with a full set of teeth and a tongue. Gross.

I first tried watching this in the middle of film festival season, but I was too exhausted, so I circled back. If you’re even slightly soup-brained from too many meaty watches, this is a perfect reset button. There’s a gag in every scene, and beneath the spoof, Lipský still manages to sneak in a satire of bureaucracy and genre tropes. Overall, though, it’s a film that delights in being ridiculous — and a goddamn treat, at that. Supper is served.

You can purchase Adela Has Not Had Supper Yet via Deaf Crocodile here (the delux limited edition) or standard edition here.