Like most Lynn Shelton films, Sword of Trust is amiable and humanistic almost to a fault. The filmmaker has a gift for oddball humor, and for allowing her actors to form memorable and moving rapports, yet with the exception of Your Sister’s Sister, there often seems to be little at stake in her work. Sword of Trust often feels similarly slight, even though it’s about the legacy of the American Civil War and the “post-truth” crisis that’s currently plaguing the country. An engaging tension between tone and theme animates the film, but you may wish that Shelton had approached her material with more focus.

Much of the film is set in an Alabaman pawn shop presided over by Mel, who’s played by Marc Maron and who resembles every character the actor-comedian played since enjoying a career resurgence with his series Maron (episodes of which Shelton directed). Like Maron himself, Mel is a lovable curmudgeon, a recovering addict who utilizes his past troubles as a signifier of his hard-won wisdom and humility, which he laces with acidic humor and sharp timing. Since Maron, a spin-off of his “WTF” podcast, Maron has grown astonishingly as an actor, with a rumpled charisma that suggests 1970s-era legends like Elliott Gould. Unlike most comedians acting in films, Maron isn’t afraid to slow down his performative biorhythms, which is especially evident in a lovely early scene in Sword of Trust when Mel sees an ex (Shelton) and silently trundles toward the front of the shop closer to her, clearly weighing his words.

Shelton takes her time acclimating the audience to life in Mel’s pawn shop. Mel has a lackadaisical millennial assistant, Nathaniel (Jon Bass), who’s enthralled with internet conspiracy theories, and he enjoys ice teas with Jimmy (Al Elliott), an elderly African-American man who runs a nearby restaurant. These loose observational moments are Shelton’s specialty, and she subtly allows us to grasp the sadness of her characters. These people have forged a kind of liberal bohemian idyll in the middle of a red state, but they’re lonely, drifting through life. Maron telegraphs this loneliness in how he has Mel appraise objects, with a weariness that suggests a need for both connection and money.

Kicking the film’s plot in gear is a couple, Cynthia (Jillian Bell) and Mary (Michaela Watkins), who inherit from Cynthia’s deceased grandfather a Union sword that a cult of truthers believes to be evidence that the South won the Civil War. This is a spectacular idea for a satire of our modern age—in which memes and online mythology warp discourse—that Shelton reduces mostly to an inciting incident and a MacGuffin. Cynthia and Mary partner with Mel to sell the sword to the cult, which leads to a few surprisingly scary-flaky scenes that momentarily jolt the film’s easygoing vibes. Particularly eerie is a scene with Hog Jaws, a truther henchman who’s played by Toby Huss with an unusually casual sense of menace. This is a man who doesn’t need to threaten people because he understands he’s inherently threatening.

Given its narrative involving a Jewish man pretending to take reactionary Southern values seriously, Sword of Trust at times suggests a kind of sketch-TV version of BlackKklansman. Shelton sees the truthers as bigoted buffoons, as symptoms of people’s current need to follow their own ideology, regardless of facts and carefully nurtured online, but with few exceptions, she doesn’t bring the tension between the liberals and the good-old-boys to a head. The filmmaker comes very close to suggesting that everyone has their reasons, even hateful fanatics—a potentially explosive implication in itself that, in this context, deflates the satire. One wishes that the film’s political textures had been nurtured, as they are essentially window dressing for what becomes a miniature coming-of-age road-trip comedy, the sort of indie that used to be common in the ‘90s. Yet Maron’s commanding aura of regret gives Sword of Trust an emotional center despite its missed opportunities.

Cast: Marc Maron, Jon Bass, Jillian Bell, Michaela Watkins, Toby Huss, Dan Bakkedahl, Lynn Shelton, Al Elliott, Timothy Paul, Whitmer Thomas Director: Lynn Shelton Screenwriter: Lynn Shelton, Michael Patrick O’Brien Distributor: IFC Films Running Time: 88 min Rating: R Year: 2019

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Numerous nonfiction films about the Anthropocene—the supposed new epoch we’re living in, named and notable for widespread human-made changes to the environment—center on easily quantifiable catastrophes like retreating glaciers and rising ocean levels. But Richard Ladkani’s Sea of Shadows, which bristles with drama and a panicky sense of righteous anger, uses the potential extinction of one little-known species of whale to symbolize a far larger and potentially globe-spanning problem.

The whale in question is the vaquita, a dolphin-like creature endemic to the Gulf of California. At the time of this film’s making, there were most likely less than 15 left alive. Not a target of hunting themselves, the vaquitas had the bad luck of swimming in the same waters as the heavily fished totoaba and dying in the nets meant to catch their more valuable neighbors. The vaquitas are ultimately collateral damage in an illegal fishing scheme driven by greed, economic insecurity, failing security apparatuses, interstate organized crime, and more.

The film’s primary narrative is delivered in bold, clear, tabloid terms by Carlos Loret de Mola, a Mexican journalist who seizes on the vaquita story as a sensational new wrinkle in his country’s long-running cartel saga. Commonly referred to as the “cocaine of the sea,” the totoaba are caught for their swim bladders, which are believed by many Chinese to have medicinal value. Literally more valuable than gold, each bladder can fetch up to $100,000 in China. The business continues to flourish despite what looks like an unprecedented deployment of Mexican naval assets to stop the now-illegal totoaba trade.

De Mola’s accusatory accusations are delivered both on television excerpts included in the documentary and in long impassioned diatribes delivered to the filmmakers. He claims that not only is there a cartel boss behind the outlawed fishing scheme (“Who is the El Chapo of Totoaba?” is one of his more pungent headlines), but that the Mexican military is at best ineffectual and at worst fully aware of who’s running the operation.

Working alongside the navy are various members of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, an international non-profit, marine wildlife conservation organization committed to saving the vaquita and whose members’ high-dudgeon remarks are braided into de Mola’s denunciatory screeds. They have their own destroyer-sized vessel, which they use to pull up nets threatening the vaquita, and also alert the navy to illegal fishing boats out hunting for totoaba at night. The latter is the more dangerous of their missions, as the fishing boats often bristle with heavy weaponry and their rock-throwing crews are brazen enough to face down the Mexican marines in a hard-to-believe riot that the cameras catch in broad daylight.

But the risk is worth it for the activists, because as Sea Shepherd crew member Jack Hutton, they’re “fighting for the planet.” That point is what explains much of the film’s apocalyptic action-flick tone. In between the crisply dramatic night-time maritime chases and episodes of dark cartel violence, much of it shot with a glistening aerial wide-angle cinematography that evokes some of the work of Matthew Heineman, are explanations as to why this one particular whale matters so much. Many of those arguments center on the vaquita as symbol of what needs to happen in order to arrest the rising levels of species extinction on the planet.

Sea of Shadows can come close to feeling hyperbolic. But despite its good-versus-evil dynamic, there’s little pretense in the film that this is an easy problem to solve. Fortunately, Ladkani keeps an eye on the plight of the fishermen themselves, many of whom are essentially forced to keep up with the illegal fishing because they need to pay off corrupt officials or are massively in debt to the cartel bosses they have to buy equipment from. After all the impassioned statements from the mostly Anglo EAN activists, Ladkani leaves the final word to Javier, an old San Felipe fisherman who’s just trying to do the right thing. “They are killing my ocean,” he says. “With the death of a sea comes the death of a people.”

Director: Richard Ladkani Distributor: National Geographic Running Time: 104 min Rating: NR Year: 2019

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Today, during the Women’s World Cup final between America and the Netherlands, Disney premiered the first trailer for its live-action remake of the 1998 animated move of the same name. The film follows a young Chinese woman (Yifei Liu) who, after the Emperor of China (Jet Li) issues a decree that one man per family must serve in the Imperial army, disguises herself as a warrior in order to spare the life of her ailing father (Tzi Ma). According to Disney’s official description of the film: “Masquerading as a man, Hua Jun, she is tested every step of the way and must harness her inner strength and embrace her true potential. It is an epic journey that will transform her into an honored warrior and earn her the respect of a grateful nation…and a proud father.”

Mulan features a celebrated international cast that also includes Donnie Yen as Commander Tung, Jason Scott Lee as Böri Khan, Yoson An as Cheng Honghui, and Gong Li as Xianniang. The film is directed by Niki Caro from a screenplay by Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Elizabeth Martin, and Lauren Hynek based on the narrative poem “The Ballad of Mulan.”

See the action-packed teaser trailer below:

Disney will release Mulan in March 2020.

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Michael Dowse’s action-comedy-cum-Uber-commercial Stuber is tiresome from its very first scene, a dizzying chase through a ritzy hotel whose shaky-cam presentation is a disorienting imitation of an action style now a decade out of date. L.A.P.D. partners Vic Manning (Dave Bautista) and Sarah Morris (Karen Gillan), whose collegial friendship is quickly and awkwardly established in a pre-fight conversation about whether Vic’s grown daughter (Natalie Morales) is having anal sex, are in pursuit of Oka Teijo (Iko Uwais), a drug dealer who, as the film will frequently remind us, sells heroin to kids. After some incoherent wrangling, Teijo escapes, and Sarah has been felled by a bullet to the gut, making Vic’s continued hunt for the dealer—you guessed it—personal.

Stuber imagines Vic as working-class superhuman, his hypermasculine, extralegal excesses justified by the logic that, as a cop hunting a drug peddler, he is ipso facto a good guy—perhaps the best guy. It would be one thing if this tired myth became an object of satire or derision, but the film’s feeble attempts at irreverence don’t extend to the L.A.P.D. or Vic’s violent machoism. The humor that revolves around Vic concerns chinks in his aging hard-body armor, like his fading eyesight, or the thought that—gasp—such a man might accidentally end up in a male strip club. Vic’s methods of pursuing an investigation—his referring to criminals as subhuman animals, his intentional escalation of confrontations, his torturing of suspects—aren’t undermined by the film’s humor, but presented as the things that real men do.

In short, Vic is Stuber’s straight man, in every sense of the term, and his Uber driver, Stu (Kumail Nanjiani), is the innocent goofball whose trepidation and reluctance to commit violence creates the film’s odd-couple dynamic. Still recovering from Lasik surgery, Vic has to order an Uber after crashing his car while pursuing a lead on Teijo’s whereabouts. Never quite understanding that Uber isn’t like a taxi in a Hollywood film, Vic ropes Stu into his quest, instructing him to “run his meter” while the cop saunters into gang hideouts and seedy strip clubs in search of Teijo. And Stu follows Vic on his journey through the film’s stereotyped suburban Los Angeles, full of Latino gangsters who seem to have sprung from Mike Huckabee’s nightmares, because he needs a good Uber rating from his clearly unhinged passenger.

Seemingly sensing that this constitutes rather thin motivation for Stu’s participation in the extremities of Vic’s trail of vengeance, the film provides additional motivation by having Nanjiani intone, “Heroin is so bad, and I think it’s worse when kids do it.” Nanjiani does his best to sell the line with his sardonic deadpan, but it would be funnier if it didn’t capture the precise extent to which Tripper Clancy’s script has thought out its primary conflict.

True to the buddy-movie formula, Vic and Stu learn to appreciate each other’s divergent lifestyles as they barely escape gunfights and car chases, with Vic learning that it’s okay to be sensitive sometimes and Stu learning to embrace ultra-violence as an essential expression of masculinity. If that sounds like reactionary nonsense, well, that’s because it is. Before he overcomes his purported weakness with Vic’s help, Stu is further feminized by his association with a fledging spin-cycle business he has just signed a lease on with his friend Becca (an underserved Betty Gilpin). He’s never had the guts to confess his undying love to Becca, and in between bloody shoot-outs, Vic counsels him on “manning up” and telling Becca how he feels.

In addition to its abortive attempts at establishing a funny buddy-comedy dialectic, Stuber aims at shock humor through the gratuity of its violence, but it’s hardly the first comedy to make close-ups on crushed faces and bullet wounds part of the hijinks. More than its violence, the film is defined by its vileness, its straight-faced attachment to outmoded ideas about masculinity and law enforcement. Only the repetitious mention of the Uber brand and Stu’s token references to meme-era wokeness distinguish this film from any given Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle from three decades ago. It would be quaint if it weren’t so dull.

Cast: Dave Bautista, Kumail Nanjiani, Betty Gilpin, Natalie Morales, Iko Uwais, Jimmy Tatro, Mira Sorvino, Karen Gillan, Steve Howey, Amin Joseph, Scott Lawrence Director: Michael Dowse Screenwriter: Tripper Clancy Distributor: 20th Century Fox Running Time: 93 min Rating: R Year: 2019

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“I wrote this when I was going through a break up,” said writer-director Ari Aster as he introduced the finished cut of Midsommar to its first New York public screening back in June, “I’m better now.” Judging from what ensues in the film, much of Aster’s healing comes at the expense of the character Christian, played by Jack Reynor. As the emotionally distant romantic partner of Florence Pugh’s Dani, Christian bears the brunt of the film’s rage once his girlfriend becomes empowered to confront her past and present traumas through the rituals and traditions of a small Swedish village they visit.

Aster’s sophomore feature certainly doesn’t lack for that uneasy tension between hilarity and horror—spawned by fraught, complicated relationship dynamics—that marked Hereditary. As Pugh’s performance strengthens in tenacity over the course of the film, only Reynor’s fully realized portrayal of Christian stands in the way of total audience alignment with Dani’s retributive awakening. Instead of letting his character become a simplistic villain to draw our ire, he plays Christian in such a way that frustrates rather than outright antagonizes.

Midsommar has all the trappings of a major breakout for the American-Irish Reynor, thanks to his nuanced rendering of contemporary masculinity. The character fuses the sensibilities he’s honed across a range of productions from studio fare like Transformers: Age of Extinction and Delivery Man to mid-budget American indies like Detroit and On the Basis of Sex, though the 27-year-old’s best preparation may have come from playing tortured young Irish men in homegrown fare like What Richard Did and Glassland.

It’s been a whirlwind for Reynor to process the wide swath of reactions sparked by Christian. He and the rest of the cast first saw Midsommar just a day before A24 began screening it before crowds, and, as he expressed, some of the fervent responses caught him off guard. I talked with Reynor over the phone a week later to discuss how he approached playing such a polarizing character and what he’s learned from the audience’s feedback. We discuss plot points from the third act in generalities, but those looking to avoid any spoilers for Midsommar might want to bookmark and return to this interview after seeing the film.

I was in a Q&A where you asked the audience if they thought Christian deserved his fate, but I couldn’t see in the frame how they voted. What was the verdict?

I think almost half the people put up their hands instantly, in a very tellingly reactionary fashion. [laughs] It was really interesting.

Is that what you were expecting?

It wasn’t what I was expecting, but I think I should have been expecting it. I think it says more about me that I wasn’t expecting it than it does about them. It’s an interesting one, because my feeling about this movie is that I’m okay whether you feel like Christian deserves it or not, it’s fine. But it needs some real thought. Ultimately, the reason I wanted to do the movie was because I felt like this character was not one-dimensional. Ari never wanted him to be that way. Both of these characters represent the human condition, the things we can all relate to, in all of our relationships, be it with a parent, a family member, a friend, or a romantic partner. At one point or another, we’ve all been guilty of being insensitive or emotionally unavailable to a person or self-involved in a toxic, dysfunctional way. Just as we have experienced emotional needs and those needs not being met. These are all parts of the human condition. So that, for me, was the really interesting thing to portray.

Ultimately, the purpose of something like Midsommar is to challenge people to acknowledge the fact that they can relate to both of these people. And, ultimately, we do find ourselves in alignment with Dani at the end of the movie. This is a movie about her liberation from a toxic relationship and the catharsis that comes with it, albeit that the catharsis is confusing, painful, complex and not entirely clear. It’s very clear that it’s ultimately where we’re supposed to find ourselves at the end of the movie.

I was interested in giving extra layers of dimensionality to Christian and challenging myself to empathize and relate to a guy who, on the surface, is just an archetypal toxic alpha male. What allowed me to get into that was to follow this guy’s journey, which is the reverse of the hero’s journey. This guy’s structures, identity, and everything about him breaks down and is stripped away from him before he can even realize it. It’s happening all around him, and he doesn’t see it before it’s too late. But he finds himself literally stripped bare in this humiliating, exposing place, which is absolutely terrifying. That allowed me to get into the character, looking at him and acknowledging there are plenty of elements of that character that are in me and every single human being on the face of the planet. It’s the human condition.

I think you also said something to the people who thought Christian deserved what he got, “Go home and take a look at yourself in the mirror.” I don’t think anyone would want to be judged by their worst day or the worst thing they did. People are complicated, and they make decisions that don’t even make sense to themselves.

I totally agree, dude. I might have been a little bit reactionary myself to the audience! [laughs] But now that I’ve had an opportunity to talk about it, this is how I feel.

Some scenes that supposedly showed Christian in a more sympathetic light were left on the cutting room floor—obviously, what makes the most sense for the film is what should win out, but is there a part of you that wishes people might see the fuller picture of the character you created?

Partly, but then it would have been a very different film. I think, ultimately, it’s the director’s decision that we’re aligned with Dani. And it’s an interesting one. If the scenes where Christian exhibits more compassion and provides her with stuff she needs in the moment had been left in, the film would be even more divisive and polarizing for an audience than it is. But as I said, it was the director’s decision to take it out.

How do you tackle playing beats in Midsommar like the one when Christian turns on a dime and decides he also wants to research the Hårga in direct mimicry of Josh, his friend and colleague. The underlying reasons of jealousy and entitlement read clearly to us, but Christian himself seems a bit aloof and isn’t cognizant of why he’s doing what he is. How do you approach those moments?

I looked through the script, and there’s so much of being a dick and being aloof. But I wanted to play this guy, further to your point, on his worst day. It’s the worst of this guy. Although that’s pretty much all we see of the character, my baseline for Christian is that he’s a well-meaning guy. He would probably think he’s a good dude who tries to do the right thing. When you pitch the character there for yourself and allow the character to do questionable things, I think it gives context to everything. So that’s what I tried to do, making it a case where an audience is watching a good dude do really, really dickish things. All they’re seeing is these awful things he’s doing, but it’s all coming out of a guy who’s largely well-meaning. Some of the stuff he does is really unforgivable, particularly the element of stealing Josh’s idea for the thesis and being so brazen about it. It’s unbelievable. If there’s one thing in particular I find unforgivable about him, it’s that. I think to base the character as someone who means well but is acting out their worst aspects of their character in this moment is how I got into it.

You’ve spoken about wanting to get in on the ground floor with directors and being a part of their success, not just latching yourself on when they’re already established. How do you know or gauge who’s going the distance and who’s a one-hit wonder?

You never really know completely. You’re taking a swing, and there’s so much luck involved. It’s a question of educating yourself as much as possible in the culture of cinema and making an educated guess from there. Ari in particular is someone who I thought his short films were visionary when I watched them, because I never got to see Hereditary before I signed on to do this movie. The script was really interesting, but what he wrote goes far beyond the words on the page. The conversations I had with him prior to signing on to be a part of the film were definitely incredibly encouraging for me. We have a common admiration for a number of quite obscure filmmakers, but some of the best filmmakers who ever lived, nonetheless. To me, that was a sign that this was something I wanted to be a part of and this was a director who valued the artistic merit of the project above all else. As long as you’re in the company of someone like that and as cultured as he is in the conversation of filmmaking, you’re probably in good hands. I’m going to endeavor to continue down that route interrogating directors I work with.

Is that education aspect of it a part of what your new Instagram movie review account, Jack Reynor’s Cinemania, is about? Watching movies with an eye to your own development as an artist?

One-hundred percent, man. That’s something I started not only because I wanted to start conversations with others about the cinema I love, but because it also helps me to advise and absorb what I’m seeing when I’m watching it. It educates me further in the grammar of cinema, and it’s a very useful tool for me as much as it’s an outlet. I absolutely love it.

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Takashi Miike’s Audition still feels like the most visceral and evocative horror film since Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There are commonalities between the movies as well, as both are still discussed with a degree of skittish awe—almost as if they’re radioactive—and both bend narrative expectations to reveal social fault lines. Yet to view Audition only as a horror film, to continually emphasize the graphic power of its final act at the expense of what precedes it, is to ignore the film’s robust vision. Audition is a psychological drama, a detonation of romantic-comedy clichés, as well as a brutal examination of social isolation and malaise, and the gulf that often exists between men and women. Miike’s greatest film to date isn’t a gonzo shock artifact, but a furious and mysterious howl of despair.

Based on a novel by Ryû Murakami, Audition has a conceit that could easily drive a mediocre rom-com, though Miike emphasizes social texture, underscoring the insidiously trivializing elements of such formulas. Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi) is a middle-aged widower, a little soft around the middle, who’s raising his teenage son, Shigehiko (Tetsu Sawaki). Worried about his father, Shigehiko says that Aoyama should marry again, with a flippancy that suggests how someone might ask a family member to pick up dinner on their way home from work. Shigehiko is generally sensitive and thoughtful but sees women as accessories.

Indeed, the most unsettling element of these scenes, at least for contemporary American audiences, is the casualness of Shigehiko’s objectification, which Miike presents empathetically. This objectification is understood to be complicated by grief, as Shigehiko and Aoyama are processing a loved one’s death, in addition to a protective guilt that’s common for children to feel about their parents as they develop their own lives. Achingly lonely, Aoyama senses Shigehiko’s guilt and agrees to look for a new wife. At the urging of his filmmaking partner, Yoshikawa (Jun Kunimara), Aoyama holds a fake audition for a melodrama as a way of fishing for young, attractive, and obedient women.

Audition’s linking of rom-com tropes with savagery has always been disturbing, though this equation is thornier in the wake of #MeToo. The first hour of the film can be read several ways, often simultaneously. Outwardly, the narrative resembles an innocuous romantic bauble. On another level, men hurt women throughout Audition, partially because the men see women as “others” to be enjoyed and procured when convenient—a sentiment that’s alternately celebrated and rued by pop culture, giving the populace a kind of ideological whiplash. (Rom-coms condition us to see lovers as objects aiding us on our paths toward fulfillment.)

Though poignant, Aoyama is nevertheless revealed to have bedded and discarded his assistant, whose pain he’s oblivious to as he pursues a dream woman. (In this and other threads, there are shades of another classic film of male manipulation and self-isolation: Vertigo.) Even innocent Shigehiko confesses to a fear of women, born in part from his dead mother, whose absence failed to prepare him for healthy relationships with the opposite sex. Shigehiko brings home a girl, and Aoyama cheers him on as one might an athlete making a score—a punchline that feels cute and characteristic of the jokes of many American or Japanese rom-coms but becomes retroactively sinister. We’re seeing men reinforce one another’s limited views of women as prizes to be won, which are to complement the men’s notions of themselves.

In the audition process, an exploitation that Miike ironically stages with the cheeriness of a broad comedy, Aoyama becomes quickly stuck on Asami (Eihi Shiina), a young woman who conforms so perfectly to a Japanese ideal of subservience as to seem deranged from the outset. This is one of the film’s great black jokes. Aoyama is so determined to see Asami in a particular way (as a reflection of his own pain) that he misses her personal agency, overlooking her in the way that men in this film habitually overlook women. What Aoyama fails to see in Asami is a chasm of alienation and madness, fostered by the abuse of men, which far exceeds his understanding and experience, and which is expressed by her intelligent yet somewhat affectless eyes and coiled, wiry frame. She’s more than willing to educate him in the ways of her true self, in an act of torture born of vengeance, love, and reckoning.

In many of Miike’s most outrageous films, violence is a matter of gleeful aesthetic that’s impressive but fairly easily shaken off. Though far from being Miike’s most explicit film, Audition is his most disturbing for the patience he displays. Miike mounts a character study that’s rich in psychological ironies, portraying men and women as irreconcilably separated by social boundaries and personal traumas that must eventually be exorcised by violence. Aoyama and Yoshikawa can share a drink and a smoke at a bar and enjoy one another in a way that they can’t enjoy women, which is reflective of the behavior of many men in real life. This sadness, as well as the ghastly asymmetry between Aoyama’s deception and the punishment it eventually incurs, keep the film from being a pat male-hating parable. (As Japanese cinema historian Tony Rayns observes in an interview included with this disc, feminism doesn’t enjoy the stature in Japan than it does in the United States.) Like Hitchcock, Miike sympathizes with his male characters, yet he’s enough of an artist to see in his women what his men cannot. The women of this film perceive this mutual male enjoyment and yearn for it, and this is partially what Asami’s torture of Aoyama represents: a demand to be truly seen.

Miike also understands that men pay for their sexism, as this is a source of their feelings of hollowness. When Asami paralyzes Aoyama and sticks him with acupuncture pins and saws his foot off with fine wire, actions which Miike stages with a galvanizing calmness, she traumatizes him while providing him with a perverse catharsis. Aoyama’s fear of women has finally been realized and justified, as he’s seeing the heart of Asami’s sickness. But this interpretation is complicated by several slips in time and perspective. When Aoyama is paralyzed by drugged whisky, he flashes back to dates he’s had with Asami, which gain new significance, and which Miike rhymes with Aoyama’s encounters with other females, most perversely including his son’s date. In these sequences, Miike renders a free-associative vortex of male neuroses, in which women become interchangeable harbingers of longing and pain.

In these recollections/projections, Aoyama also sees images he shouldn’t be able to see, such as Asami’s apartment, to which he’s never been, and a burlap sack that contains a man whom she’s disfigured and taken prisoner, feeding as one might a dog. At a certain point in his drugged state, Aoyama flashes back to the night he slept with Asami in a hotel, only this time he checks his feet with relief to see that they’re still there. Aoyama’s torture and degradation might only be the fantasy of a guilt-ridden man, then, which is but another kind of horror, as this interpretation suggests no catharsis, no bridging of the gulf between Aoyama and Asami.

Asami’s torture of Aoyama suggests an explosion of the pent-up gender hostilities that fuel pop culture. As Audition progresses toward its no-exit finale, Miike gradually informs its atmosphere with the aura of a horror noir, and so the film grows sicker and more neurotic before our eyes. (The turning point is the first glimpse of Asami in her apartment, staring at her phone in anticipation of Aoyama’s call as the human bag sits in a corner. Later, when the phone finally rings, her lips curl into a blood-freezing smile.) Restaurants and alleyways go from being white and sterile to shadowy and inflamed with redness, as Aoyama begins to envision—or hallucinate—fleeting scenes of Grand Guignol atrocity. Yet, unlike many modern horror films, Audition understands such atrocity to be built on a seemingly banal bedrock of illusion, elusion, and accommodation that’s as scary, in its way, as a cooing wraith strapped in fetish gear, who, when confronting a lover, feels as if she’s facing her maker.

Cast: Ryo Ishibashi, Eihi Shiina, Tetsu Sawaki, Jun Kunimura, Renji Ishibashi, Ren Osugi Director: Takashi Miike Screenwriter: Daisuke Tengan Distributor: Arrow Video Running Time: 115 min Rating: R Year: 1999 Buy: Video

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Most of Marvel Studios’s films are the cinematic equivalent of breadcrumbs, which have been dropped into theaters strategically so as to keep one looking for the next sequel or crossover, when the endless televisual exposition will eventually, theoretically yield an event of actual consequence. Occasionally, however, a Marvel film transcends this impersonality and justifies one’s patience. Weird, stylish, and surprisingly lyrical, Ant-Man, Iron Man 3, and Doctor Strange attest to the benefits of the old Hollywood-style studio system that Marvel has resurrected: Under the umbrella of structure and quota is security, which can bequeath qualified freedom. Chuck Bowen

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on April 25, 2018.

23. The Incredible Hulk (2008)

The aesthetic dexterity and psychological depth of Ang Lee’s Hulk is corrupted by Marvel’s “reboot” of the superhero franchise, Louis Leterrier’s intermittently kinetic but depressingly shallow The Incredible Hulk. In response to complaints that Lee’s unjustly excoriated 2003 effort was too talky and slow, Leterrier swings the pendulum to the opposite side of the spectrum, delivering a slam-bang spectacle so lacking in weight that, until the impressive finale, the film seems downright terrified of character and relationship development, as if too much conversation or—gasp!—subtextual heft will immediately alienate coveted young male fanboys. Nick Schager

22. Iron Man 2 (2010)

Upgraded with the latest CGI hardware but also more shoddy screenwriting software than its system can withstand, Iron Man 2 is an example of subtraction by addition. For a sequel designed to deliver what its predecessor did not, Jon Favreau’s follow-up to his 2008 blockbuster piles on incidents and characters it doesn’t need while still managing to skimp on the combat that should be this franchise’s bread and butter but which remains an element only trotted out at sporadic intervals and in modest portions. Schager

21. Captain Marvel (2018)

As another of the character-introducing MCU stories existing mostly to feed new superheroes into the Avengers series, Captain Marvel looks like something of a trial run. You know the drill: If the film lands with audiences, then you can count on Captain Marvel (Brie Larson)—like Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and even Ant-Man before her—getting her own series. But if not, then, hey, she’s at least assured of being asked to pop by the game room at Stark Industries for a kibitz in somebody else’s franchise down the road. Based on what’s on display here, Captain Marvel could well get her own star turn again at some point, but hopefully it will be with a different crew behind the camera. Chris Barsanti

20. Avengers: Endgame (2019)

There’s some fleeting fun to be had when Avengers: Endgame turns into a sort of heist film, occasioning what effectively amounts to an in-motion recap of prior entries in the MCU. Yet every serious narrative beat is ultimately undercut by pro-forma storytelling (the emotional beats never linger, as the characters are always race-race-racing to the next big plot point), or by faux-improvised humor, with ringmaster Tony “Iron Man” Stark (Robert Downey Jr., so clearly ready to be done with this universe) leading the sardonic-tongued charge. Elsewhere, bona fide celebs like Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Natalie Portman are reduced to glorified extras. Even the glow of movie stardom is dimmed by the supernova that is the Marvel machine’s at best competently produced weightlessness. Keith Uhlich

19. Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

What is this, a crossover episode? After 18 films, the overlords at Marvel Studios have gathered almost all of their indentured servants, er, star-studded stable together into the ever-crashing, ever-booming, and ever-banging extravaganza Avengers: Infinity War. Whether you look at this whirling dervish and see a gleefully grandiose entertainment or a depressing exemplar of the culturally degraded present moment will depend on your investment—in all senses of that term—in Marvel’s carefully cultivated mythos. The film is all manic monotony. It’s passably numbing in the moment. And despite the hard-luck finish—something an obligatory post-credits sequence goes a long way toward neutering—it’s instantly forgettable. Strange thing to say about a film featuring Peter Dinklage as the tallest dwarf in the universe. Keith

18. Thor (2011)

With some notable exceptions, Marvel Studios-produced films usually plateau at a glossy but totally indistinct level of mediocrity, and Thor continues the trend of weakly jumpstarting a franchise based on a Marvel comic with an adequate but instantly forgettable origin story. Kenneth Branagh’s film is reasonably well put-together, but unlike even his worst films, it has no internal life, instead feeling like an impersonal, assembly-line product. The film’s most notable feature is that it serves as a continuation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe set up by the Iron Man movies. Characters from those films pop up during Thor’s main narrative and after the end credits, living up to Marvel’s commitment to populating their films with the same bland versions of perfectly acceptable characters. While Thor is certainly competent, that’s just not enough. Simon Abrams

17. Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

A spectacle of star-spangled superheroics, Captain America: The First Avenger gives sturdy big-screen treatment to Marvel’s square-jawed—and square—jingoistic military man. With Joe Johnston delivering pyrotechnical action-adventure in a period guise, à la The Rocketeer (which was similarly fixated on its female lead’s buxom chest), this costumed-crusader saga is a capable, if somewhat unremarkable, affair beset by the same origin-story shortcomings that plagued another U.S.-virtue-via-army-weaponry fable, Iron Man—namely, a bifurcated structure in which the introductory first half exceeds, in compelling drama and kick-ass thrills, the latter fight-the-baddies combat. Schager

16. Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

While writer-director Joss Whedon takes considerable strides to make Avengers: Age of Ultron’s narrative feel more nuanced and personal, his few sublime scenes of expressive melodrama are drowned out by the massive amounts of exposition and backstory that make up most of the dialogue and subsequently make the film feel overworked. When the talk isn’t about the intricate plot and the characters’ mythology, it’s a whole lot of dick-centric jabs. In cases like the competition over who can pick up Thor’s (Chris Hemsworth) hammer, there’s a vague sense that Whedon is in on the joke, but then there’s a plethora of other exchanges that don’t seem so tongue in cheek. The bro-isms that underscore these interpersonal relations might explain why Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanoff strikes up a romance with Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), a.k.a. the Hulk, the only male Avenger who isn’t consistently preoccupied with the size of his…ego. The growing relationship between Romanoff and Banner is the tender heart of Age of Ultron, and Whedon clearly thrills in the cheesy but heartfelt melodrama that builds between them. Unfortunately, as the film has approximately another half-dozen or so plotlines to tend to, this section of the story barely makes up a sixth of the narrative. Chris Cabin

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In his alternately illuminating and infuriating précis The Velvet Rage, psychologist Alan Downs outlines the psychological hurdles that prevent gay boys from becoming healthy, self-actualized men, putting them behind schedule compared to their straight counterparts. Watching Frank Simon’s The Queen, a verité documentary about a 1967 New York City “camp pageant,” especially in our current era of peak Drag Race, one may wonder if the drag scene didn’t similarly arrive into full-fledged postmodernism behind schedule.

Whereas RuPaul’s pop-culture juggernaut presents drag as the ultimate vehicle for turning a self-referential mirror onto reality TV and, indeed, the entertainment industry itself, the contestants in Simon’s temperate portrait are openly, if not quite unapologetically, what-you-see-is-what-you-get. (Except for on-stage theatrical productions, dressing in the clothing of the opposite gender was still a felony in New York at the time of the film’s production.) Any notion that The Queen’s milieu is any less vanguard than Vanjie is today goes out the window, of course, the moment postmodern avatar Andy Warhol is spotted by the cameras serving as one of the trendsetters chosen to judge the Miss All-American Camp Beauty Pageant. And if any of the finalists feel intimidated by that, it doesn’t show on any of their faces.

A quaint portrait it’s not, and aside from the conditions of the rat-trap midtown hotel where the competing queens are put up in, it’s hardly fly-on-the-wall either. While it presents its subjects at arm’s length, The Queen consistently recognizes the constraints they face. An early shot introduces 18-year-old pageant hopeful Harlow (Miss Philadelphia) walking through a crowd of people, angular features instantly setting her apart from the rest and establishing her star potential. Virtually, the very next shot of Harlow shows her window-shopping for dresses, leaning in with her torso as a theater marquee looms behind her, contrasting Harlow’s existence against the taunting title of Claude Lelouch’s date-night smash A Man and a Woman. A juxtaposition of a different kind emerges as the queens are shown donning their eveningwear; one of the larger competitors struggles to pull a bra down over her natural plumage, while another rail-thin girl next to her tapes her pecs together to force cleavage.

During a stretch of downtime between rehearsal and the big show, one queen lounging on a sunken mattress tells anyone within earshot that, while she has enough money to go through with a sex change operation and lives within 30 miles of John Hopkins University (which at the time was offering such services), it’s “the last thing I want” to become a woman. Meanwhile, another muses that gay men are attracted to other men, which tends to make dating difficult for drag queens, an argument that has resurfaced season in and season out on Drag Race.

The urge to approach The Queen in 2019 as a measure by which our culture has come since before Stonewall is probably unavoidable, given the considerable gains the LGBTQ community has made in just a generation and a half, and has already emerged in the number of new reviews quoting contemporaneous criticism the film received back in the day, most of them either detachedly impressed or reflexively condescending. (Pauline Kael saying it “has considerable humor and drama, as well as that mixture of perversity and sadness distinctive to the drag scene” represents one of the doc’s least qualified endorsements.)

It’s still clearly more a function of the predominate documentary filmmaking style of the day that these queens come off so comparatively passive than it is a reflection of the era’s lack of wokeness. Especially once fourth runner-up Crystal LaBeija (mother of the House of LaBeija and Paris Is Burning’s Pepper LaBeija) chooses to get “temperamental” about how even the drag circuit is tainted by racist double standards. “You’re beautiful and you are young, you deserve to have the best in life, but you did not deserve this. Miss Thing, I don’t say she’s not beautiful, but she wasn’t looking beautiful tonight. She doesn’t equal me, look at her make-up! It’s terrible,” she fiercely rants. “I have a right to show my color, darling!” In fact, Crystal’s night-capping read may as well be subtitled, “In the beginning there was shade.”

Director: Frank Simon Distributor: Kino Lorber Running Time: 67 min Rating: NR Year: 1968

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Though it reacts to the death of a single person rather than those of millions, Spider-Man: Far from Home more acutely portrays the lingering aftershocks of grief than Avengers: Endgame. Much of this film finds Peter Parker (Tom Holland) mourning the loss of mentor and surrogate father figure Tony Stark and struggling to live up to his legacy. That Iron Man continues to groom Peter as a protégé from beyond the grave, bequeathing him much of his technology and a general sense of personal trust, only leaves the teenager more distraught. Holland nailed Peter’s awkward, nerdy skittishness from the moment he debuted as the character, but here he laces that anxiety with a striking sense of pathos.

Peter, now back from the dead, is drained and in need of a break, which he hopes to get in the form of a school trip to Europe. Determined to leave hero work behind for a few weeks while seeing sights and working up the nerve to confess his romantic feelings to MJ (Zendaya), he desperately clings to the hope of simply enjoying life. Of course, fate has other plans, and soon Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) arrives to demand Peter’s help in stopping a threat of Elementals, alien forces of fire, water, wind, and earth. Compared to Tony’s sardonic yet avuncular rapport with Peter, Fury is purely authoritarian, forcing Peter to work with Quentin Beck, a.k.a. Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal), a technologically advanced caped crusader who claims to be from a destroyed alternate Earth. Peter, motivated by his youthful self-doubt and his indefatigable earnestness, is so wowed by Mysterio’s displays of bravery and skill in fighting the Elementals that he humbly turns over access to the global drone network that Tony entrusted to the boy in the hopes that Earth has found a new superhero leader.

Of course, anyone with a passing familiarity with Spider-Man and his rogues’ gallery of foes can guess that Mysterio isn’t who he seems, and soon Peter finds himself confronted with the character’s prodigious skills as an illusionist. Like Spider-Man: Homecoming, Far from Home can look tacky at times, with its actors standing out garishly against visibly fake computer-generated backgrounds and effects that verge on the cartoonish. Here, though, that uncanny valley of dissonance is narrativized, a literal projection of the film’s villain.

Mysterio’s mirages also result in some of the strongest action scenes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, including a spellbinding sequence in which Mysterio plunges Peter into an ever-shifting illusion where Spider-Man is knocked around a space with indefinite parameters while being taunted by the false images of his allies. As Peter punches stone columns he believes to be Mysterio, dropped in and out of abysses, and even dog-piled by duplicates of himself, the scene marks perhaps the first moment in the entire MCU to fully, almost expressionistically, embrace the limitless possibilities of malleable comic-book action.

As overwhelming and frightening as Mysterio’s powers can be, there’s an inherent absurdity to his weaponization of illusions and parlor tricks that adheres to the oddball spirit of Silver and Bronze age comics over the more serious-minded, modern-era material that’s informed most of Marvel’s film output. Likewise, Far from Home intuitively understands Peter’s allure as a character. No other figure so thoroughly epitomizes Marvel’s mission statement of mixing the fantastical with the routine as Peter, who’s dealt with aliens, clones, and alternate universes but was struggling to pay the rent decades before New York was gentrified.

Director Jon Watts deftly weaves the epic and the mundane aspects of Spider-Man’s existence throughout Far from Home. No less impressive than the film’s action scenes are Peter’s endearingly awkward attempts to grow closer to MJ, whose introversion magnifies
the clumsiness of his flirtations. Zendaya may be even stronger than Holland at portraying the intensity of romantic inexperience: If Peter’s face can be read like a book, MJ regularly falls back on macabre humor and blunt distractions to avoid being open about her feelings.

In the end, though, Far from Home’s driving principle is less Peter’s hang-ups or the face-off with Mysterio and more the effort to reposition the MCU around Peter Parker. At times this goal is made too explicit, with the characters’ shared scientific acumen and intelligence used to dubiously suggest that this hormonal teen might be ready to take a leadership role in the Avengers. Yet the film is ultimately on more solid ground when positioning Peter as the new emotional fulcrum on which the MCU can turn, with Tony’s sarcasm and megalomania replaced by Peter’s humility and guilelessness. It all suggests that the next phase of the MCU may be less cynical and more emotionally resonant than the prior one.

Director: Jon Watts Screenwriter: Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers Distributor: Columbia Pictures Running Time: 129 min Rating: PG-13 Year: 2019

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Anybody who’s seen Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man or similar folk horror films will hardly be surprised by any of the plot turns in Ari Aster’s Midsommar. From early on, there’s no doubt that the pagan rituals at the film’s center will spell doom for the group of friends who visit rural Sweden in a quasi-anthropological attempt to observe a cult’s summer solstice festival. The film masterfully builds itself around the inevitability of a mass terror, aligning our foreknowledge of that with the anxiety felt by the main character, Dani (Florence Pugh), in the wake of a recent family tragedy. The result is a deeply unnerving film about the indissoluble, somehow archaic bond between self and family—one more psychologically robust than Aster’s similarly themed Hereditary. And it’s also very funny.

The humor comes mostly from Dani’s traveling compatriots: her longtime boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor), and his pack of grad-school bros, Josh (William Jackson Harper), Mark (Will Poulter), and Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren). Pelle is the increasingly untrustworthy native Swede who invites the others back to his homeland to witness his esoteric culture’s midsummer festival, selling it as a visit to a sexually liberated hippie commune. The three young men rationalize away obvious warning signs that Pelle’s white-linen-wearing relatives may be members of a dangerous cult rather than the libidinous European models of their imagination.

Mixing pseudo-intellectualism with male privilege, the three oblivious American men, at least when they’re together, constitute as murderable a pack of horndogs as has ever been assembled in a horror film. Aster plays their cringeworthy behavior for laughs, but the jokes never feel frivolous. Instead, the ironic distance the film’s humor maintains between us and the young men reinforces the sense of isolation we feel as Dani accompanies them—the sole woman in the group, wrecking their homosocial summer excursion.

Dani received a pity invite to join the group from Christian, a narcissist whose fragile ego prevents him from being honest with her or anybody else. Christian has long wanted to break things off with Dani, but instead of taking action on that front, he’s made himself emotionally unavailable and essentially trained Dani to blame herself whenever he betrays her trust or neglects her needs. In the wake of the family tragedy depicted in the film’s haunting prologue, Christian plans the trip to Sweden without telling Dani, then, without warning his friends, begrudgingly invites her when she finds out about it. Midsommar is, to a surprising extent, a film about a torturous breakup—an unsparing breakup film that offers no hint of solace, no hope that that life goes on after we’re betrayed by and severed from the ones we love.

Midsommar’s opening scene ends with Dani’s heartrending, anguished cries, which echo throughout the rest of the film. These are piercing screams that are rooted in unbearable emotional pain rather than overwhelming terror. The otherworldly experience of perpetual daylight and chipper pagans in rural Sweden exacerbates Dani’s clinical anxiety, but the film doesn’t turn her medical condition into a superpower that warns her away from danger, as a cheaper horror film might. As it becomes increasingly clear that the cult celebrates midsummer in a way that involves both death and arcane sexual practices, Dani’s initial panic is defused when kind-eyed, soft-voiced Pelle appears to offer her the comfort Christian won’t.

Shot, as Hereditary was, by Pawel Pogorzelski, the burningly bright imagery of Midsommar is as beautiful as it is distressing. Throughout, the camera and mise-en-scène are almost uncannily in sync with the viewer’s psyche, responding to and manipulating our attention with subtly unsettling compositions and precise camera movements. The film shifts between incredibly still shots, quietly observing the arrangement of dwellings and obscure structures in the cult’s colony, and grandiose camera moves—as in the crane shot that arcs all the way over the car as the group drives up from Stolkholm, ending upside down, with the hyper-bright Swedish summer sky on the bottom of the frame. The transition between stillness and motion is pitch-perfect, coming at the precise moment one wants to draw closer to things, drawing out our anticipation of the terrible thing we know we’re going to see.

Although methodical in his approach to pacing and structure, Aster is interested in extremities—visually, physically, and emotionally—and knows just when to deploy one to enhance another. Midsommar has gory stretches, and its matter-of-fact images of violent death are more than just shocking, as they intend to leave us with a lingering impression of a woman’s feelings of grief, separation, and loss. The film finds the perfect setting for Dani’s confrontation with her own disturbing memories in the permanent daylight of a Swedish summer: You see everything, it’s impossible to look away, and there’s nowhere to hide.

Cast: Florence Pugh, Will Poulter, Jack Reynor, William Jackson Harper, Wilhelm Blomgren, Hampus Hallberg, Liv Mjönes, Archie Madekwe, Ellora Torchia Director: Ari Aster Screenwriter: Ari Aster Distributor: A24 Running Time: 140 min Rating: R Year: 2019

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