Black Zombie still featuring a Black man in white drawing circles in chalk on the floor of a dark, cavernous room

Hot Docs ’26: Black Zombie

Posted in2026, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

***/****
directed by Maya Annik Bedward

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs from April 23-May 3, 2026. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Angelo Muredda Late in Maya Annik Bedward’s Black Zombie, a cross-cultural survey of the zombie in Haitian folklore and horror cinema, a Vodou priest who’s served as an authenticity expert throughout the film derisively summarizes Western imaginations of West African culture as a history of voyeurism. “I hope this isn’t that,” he says of Bedward’s documentary, whose title explicitly subverts Victor Halperin’s 1932 pre-code horror film White Zombie, a foundational colonial narrative of white innocence besieged by the ostensibly monstrous threat of Blackness, and whose intellectual project seeks to dismantle that film’s corrosive source text, William Seabrook’s Haitian travelogue The Magic Island, which exported the zombie and Vodou to the West as figures of exotic superstition. A rigorous if somewhat segmented essay on the colonial violence inherent in the horror genre’s extraction of West African beliefs, Bedward’s work easily clears this admittedly modest bar. Though it will read a bit introductory for historians of the Haitian resistance movement, French colonialism, and genre cinema, it’s nevertheless a formally engaging and provocative piece that effectively re-situates the zombie in the context from which it’s been extracted: the belief among enslaved Haitian plantation workers that death might return their spirits to their ancestral home in Ghana, while further violence at the hands of colonial administrators and their proxies might render them zombies, undead and hopelessly rooted on the colony for the rest of their days.

Coel and McKellen in a cozy little room, McKellen standing in a doorway wearing a jean jacket: "Now I’m Gandalf the Denim."

The Christophers (2026)

Posted in2026, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, UK

***/****
starring Ian McKellen, Michaela Coel, James Corden, Jessica Gunning
written by Ed Solomon
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Angelo Muredda “It wasn’t very good, that last one,” retired octogenarian visual artist Julian Sklar says of his most recent piece in Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers. It’s tempting to read the self-deprecating remark, written by Ed Solomon and delivered with caustic wit by the 86-year-old Ian McKellen (here embracing his irascible old icon era in a role purpose-built for him), as a pithy meta-commentary on Soderbergh’s own low-stakes late period. Whatever one thinks of the video gamey perspective-play horror of Presence or the Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?-inflected couples spy therapy of Black Bag, Soderbergh needn’t make any excuses for The Christophers. It’s a puckish, intellectually rigorous two-hander about art, criticism, and influence that goes down as easily as his pop hits but lingers in the rearview like his deeper dramatic experiments. 

Jeremy Irons smoking and looking officious in Palestine '36: "An Irons curtain has descended across the continent"

Palestine ’36 (2026)

Posted in2026, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Denmark, Drama, France, Jordan, Norway, Occupied Palestinian Territory, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UK, War

***/****
starring Hiam Abbas, Karim Daoud Anaya, Yasmine Al Massri, Jeremy Irons
written and directed by Annemarie Jacir

by Angelo Muredda “A new page in history is written today,” a stodgy Englishman pronounces at a launch for the first state-sponsored radio broadcast in so-called Mandatory Palestine early on in Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine ’36. Although the boast is met with eye-rolls from the few well-to-do Palestinians in the mostly colonial British audience, one of whom jokes to her partner that “this is the part where they elevate us,” the line ironically serves as a good encapsulation of Jacir’s project to make something significant and new out of a familiar form. A mainstream historical epic that hits its dramatic beats with energy if not freshness, and which demonstrates classical filmmaking chops if not revolutionary aesthetics, Palestine ’36 can’t help but feel like a turning of the page in spite of its modest aesthetic choices. In the frankness with which it dramatizes the Great Revolt of the late 1930s against the British occupation and its military support for the Zionist project, the film is a rebuke to the representational lacunae that make up Western depictions of the history of the Middle East and the Palestinian liberation movement, which usually gets barely named at all.

Zendaya and Robert Pattinson in The Drama: "Resistance is futile"

The Drama (2026)

Posted in2026, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, Alana Haim, Mamadou Athie
written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli

by Angelo Muredda SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The high-concept marital satire of Force Majeure meets the prosaic celebrity home tours of ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST in Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama, a dark comedy about a promising young couple undone on the eve of their wedding by a revelation from childhood. The film follows in the tradition of Borgli’s earlier works like Dream Scenario and Sick of Myself, which revel in the destructive force of abrupt, foundation-shaking status shifts between partners in a relationship. It’s good to have a thematic calling card, and The Drama expertly mines the talents of its cast where the prior Dream Scenario merely coasts on the audience’s pre-existing parasocial relationship with Nicolas Cage. But for all of the film’s conceptual wirework–not to mention the rich extratextual discourse surrounding the filmmaker’s recently recovered edgelord essay about dating a teenager when he was 26–The Drama is ultimately too timid to earn its bona fides as a provocative text.

Vicky Krieps and Cate Blanchett reading the opening pages of a book as Charlotte Rampling looks on: "Aw, it says, “I can’t wait to watch you grow up and decide whether to cancel us from the right or the left”"

Father Mother Sister Brother (2025)

Posted in2025, 2026, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, UK

**½/****
starring Tom Waits, Adam Driver, Mayim Bialik, Charlotte Rampling
written and directed by Jim Jarmusch

by Angelo Muredda When Alexander Payne’s Venice jury awarded Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother the Golden Lion last fall, Reddit and Twitter prognosticators and amateur sleuths combing through his fellow jurors’ Instagram posts and likes theorized that Payne must not have responded to either the politics of audience favourite The Voice of Hind Rajab or the formalist fireworks of No Other Choice. More likely, he meant it as a gesture of goodwill from one endangered independent American filmmaker of a certain age to another, using his influence as jury chair to invest in Jarmusch’s latest understated comedy-drama, which is about as slight as major international prize winners get. A late-style checklist of Jarmusch’s aesthetic predilections–from the laconic tone to the episodic anthology structure to the recurring motif of deep conversations in cars to the appearance of Tom Waits–the film is an amiable but decidedly minor work about the common and unique ways families communicate, talk past each other, and either play into or subvert their parts in one another’s life stories.

Ben Whishaw lounging in bed and smoking: Marmalade and cigarettes, baby

Peter Hujar’s Day (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Drama, Esoterica, Germany, Spain, Theatrical, UK

***/****
starring Ben Whishaw, Rebecca Hall
screenplay by Ira Sachs, based on the book Peter Hujar’s Day by Linda Rosenkrantz
directed by Ira Sachs

by Angelo Muredda Celebrated New York portrait photographer Peter Hujar becomes the subject of a distinctive portrait himself in Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day, a gentle, minor-key experiment in memorializing the everyday. Anchored by a puckish performance from Ben Whishaw, who spends most of the time platonically seducing his interrogator–Hujar’s friend, author Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall)–and, by extension, the spectator listening in like a fly on the wall, the film lovingly recreates not a day in Hujar’s life but his languid recalling of it the day after.

After the Hunt group setting: Garfield and Friends

After the Hunt (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Crime, Drama, Italy, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Julia Roberts, Ayo Edibiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg
written by Nora Garrett
directed by Luca Guadagnino

by Angelo Muredda SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. “It happened at Yale,” an onscreen caption proclaims at the start of Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, a handsomely-mounted but undisciplined culture-war sampler platter. The film is the unruly if rarely boring child born of the intellectual marriage between the Guadagnino who saw Dario Argento’s Suspiria and imagined a 150-minute adaptation about postwar Germany and longtime actor and first-time screenwriter Nora Garrett, who told BUSTLE that After the Hunt was inspired by her time in a pair of online philosophy courses in the early days of the pandemic about “how to live morally in what often feels like an immoral world.” What exactly happened to inspire a feature-length reflection on morality is not defined with much precision in After the Hunt, which prefers to raise an assortment of questions about race, gender, and privilege in higher education with the nuance of an edgelord podcaster thinking out loud rather than look directly at a concrete example of those mechanics at, say, Yale. But if a low-stakes psychological thriller about well-dressed academics in immaculate cream suits and rumpled chambray shirts with not one but two beautiful minimalist apartments is what you’re after, you could do worse.

The Ugly/The Furious

TIFF ’25: The Ugly + The Furious

Posted in2025, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, China, Crime, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, Hong Kong, Martial Arts, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF

THE UGLY
*½/****
starring Park Jeong-min, Kwon Hae-hyo, Han Ji-hyeon, Shin Hyeon-bin
written by Yeon Sang-ho, based on his graphic novel Face
directed by Yeon Sang-ho

火遮眼
**½/****
starring Xie Miao, Joe Taslim, Yang Enyou, Brian Le
written by Frank Hui, Lei Zhilong, Tin Shu Mak, Kwan-Sin Shum, Aidan Parker
directed by Kenji Tanigaki

by Angelo Muredda In his 2007 book Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, Ato Quayson suggests that disability “short-circuits” the protocols of representation, throwing into crisis all kinds of formal and thematic properties as a text struggles to account for its disruptiveness. If there’s a prize for the most aesthetic nervousness, or for a text whose nervousness about how to depict disability all but causes it to self-destruct, it ought to go to Train to Busan director Yeon Sang-ho’s dispiriting The Ugly. A slow-burn procedural mystery-thriller about a documentary crew and a son in arrested development getting to the bottom of a historical murder, The Ugly is thrown into a full-blown panic attack by the aesthetic challenge posed by something as simple as depicting its disabled characters moving through the world.

Paula Beers in a red convertible, looking skeptical

TIFF ’25: Miroirs No. 3

Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF

Mirrors No. 3
***/****
starring Paula Beer, Barbara Auer, Matthias Brandt, Enno Trebs
written and directed by Christian Petzold

by Angelo Muredda Not content to have already put his stamp on Vertigo with 2014’s postwar noir Phoenix, where an Auschwitz camp survivor and cabaret performer who’s undergone facial reconstruction surgery finds herself remade into the image of her former self by the scoundrel husband who sold her out to the Nazis, Mirrors No. 3 sees Christian Petzold delivering a lower-key riff on Alfred Hitchcock’s masterwork. An uncanny, tragicomic European idyll that improbably takes equal inspiration from Vertigo, Final Destination, Mulholland Drive, and Hansel and Gretel despite largely being set on sun-kissed porches and in open garages, Mirrors No. 3 is a beguiling, singularly strange picture that could only have been made by the simultaneously heady and easygoing German auteur.

Tall Margaret Qualley holding flowers and short Ethan Hawke holding court in Blue Moon

TIFF ’25: Blue Moon

Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Comedy, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, Film Festivals, Ireland, Music, Romance, TIFF

***½/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Scott
written by Robert Kaplow, inspired by the writings of Lorenz Hart and Elizabeth Weiland
directed by Richard Linklater

by Angelo Muredda Contrasting epitaphs set the tone for Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, a melancholy tribute to the self-destructive genius of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, a not especially handsome guy played by Linklater’s decidedly handsome long-time muse, Ethan Hawke. Moments before we see the man’s lonesome onscreen death from pneumonia on a rainy street, a title card offers Hart’s posthumous characterization from a pair of observers: his contemporary Oscar Hammerstein II, who hails him as “alert and dynamic and fun to be around,” and cabaret performer Mabel Mercer, who pronounces him “the saddest man I ever knew.” Hawke’s Hart is both–a charming but embittered barfly in a personal and professional crisis who loves conversation as much as he resents having to make it with perceived dullards like Hammerstein, who, in the film’s timeline, has just replaced him as Richard Rodgers’s creative partner on the verge of their major commercial breakthrough, Oklahoma!.

Emily Blunt and The Rock taking a nighttime stroll in The Smashing Machine

TIFF ’25: The Smashing Machine

Posted in2025, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Canada, Film Festivals, Japan, Sports, TIFF

**/****
starring Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Ryan Bader, Bas Rutten
written and directed by Benny Safdie

by Angelo Muredda The early narrative on Dwayne Johnson’s starring role as veteran mixed-martial artist Mark Kerr in Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine was that it was sure to mark an overdue career reinvention for the wrestler turned actor turned annoying social-media poster. After years of his star power waning in terms of prestige as well as audience appeal–the decline measured in cringe posts about how the “hierarchy of power in the DC universe is about to change” thanks to his appearance in Black Adam (which bombed) and unflattering headlines about how his character in the Fast & Furious franchise was contractually forbidden from losing a fight onscreen (which made him seem not invulnerable but narcissistic)–finally Johnson would develop both the deft comic touch and dramatic depth he’d shown in Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales and Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain. That Johnson is every bit as good as was promised by the PR campaign, as vulnerable and bruised onscreen as he has been aloof and guarded in real life, comes as something of a monkey’s paw situation, given that his fluid and charming performance is one of the only things worth unreservedly recommending in the otherwise fairly standard film. Despite the outcome at the Venice Film Festival, which saw Johnson go home critically lauded but empty-handed while Safdie took the Best Director prize, Johnson’s ascent comes at the expense of his director’s first real draw as an artist–a slightly spiky but mostly unremarkable sports biopic worthy of being in the awards conversation, in the derogatory sense.

Amanda Seyfried, arms spread wide in ecstasy amid a crowd of followers

TIFF ’25: The Testament of Ann Lee

Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Musical, TIFF, UK

Ann Lee
***/****
starring Amanda Seyfried, Thomasin McKenzie, Lewis Pullman, Tim Blake Nelson, Christopher Abbott
written by Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet
directed by Mona Fastvold

by Angelo Muredda Speaking at the press conference following the Venice world premiere of Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee, co-writer and second-unit director Brady Corbet, Fastvold’s husband, illuminated the couple’s fruitful creative partnership, which also yielded their co-screenwriting duties on 2024’s The Brutalist. “We firmly believe,” he said, pointing to Fastvold’s ownership of and final cut on the film, “that you can only serve one master at a time.” To say nothing of the film’s numerous aesthetic and thematic echoes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, not to mention those of their previous project, Corbet’s comment is an interesting critical pathway into an often impenetrably busy, ambitious work that, when one breaks it down, is about both a marriage in tension and a husband working in service–far more glumly than the gregarious Corbet–to his spouse’s singular vision of the world. Pricklier than the more awards-friendly The Brutalist, though vulnerable to the same structural imbalances and ambiguity, The Testament of Ann Lee is a pleasantly odd text: a rich, overstuffed period musical that makes a grand figure of its impossibly marginal fringe subject.

TIFF ’25: The Fence

TIFF ’25: The Fence

Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: Claire Denis, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, TIFF

***/****
starring Isaach De Bankolé, Matt Dillon, Mia McKenna-Bruce, Tom Blyth
screenplay by Claire Denis, Suzanne Lindon, and Andrew Litvack, based on Black Battles with Dogs by Bernard-Marie Koltès
directed by Claire Denis

By Angelo Muredda A sparsely populated construction site in West Africa becomes the locus of a nocturnal power struggle between Black labourers, white occupiers, and the land that rejects the latter like a virus in Claire Denis’s The Fence, an eerie postcolonial thriller where the subaltern not only speaks but compels, standing at the gate of the white occupiers’ ill-acquired homes and enterprises. Adapted from French writer Bernard-Marie Koltès’s 1979 play Black Battles with Dogs, the film comfortably slots into Denis’s oeuvre alongside her earlier works examining the uneasy presence of white settlers in Africa, even as its commitment to the symbolically freighted, dialogue-heavy text makes it, to its detriment, talkier than her usual work. Although it often threatens to devolve into a stilted filmed play, The Fence thrums along to its own strange rhythm on the strength of its magnetic cast, a quartet of polarized opposites bumping into one another in close-quarters, and Denis’s sensitivity to the particular sensory experiences of her characters, each feeling acutely out of place in an uncanny space that one longtime settler assures a new arrival is “very real.”

TIFF ’25: The Secret Agent

TIFF ’25: The Secret Agent

Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Brazil, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Mystery, Netherlands, Thriller, TIFF

O Agente Secreto
***½/****
starring Wagner Moura, Gabriel Leone, Maria Fernanda Cândido
written and directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho

By Angelo Muredda “He had a good voice,” an archivist muses to her colleague about a historical subject whose life under autocratic rule she’s been piecing together from audio cassette recordings and newspaper clippings late in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent. A chronicler of the gentrified streets, gated communities, and forgotten movie theatres of his northern hometown of Recife (which he has commemorated in films past, from his 2011 debut feature Neighbouring Sounds–partially shot in his own family home–to his death-tinged 2023 documentary Pictures of Ghosts), Filho appoints these contemporary junior scholars sifting through the detritus of the waning days of Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s as his authorial stand-ins. Taken as they are with colourful stories culled from a mess of poorly indexed sources, they’re also analogues for the spectator’s own entanglement with Filho’s equally anecdotal and sprawling work, which is attuned to the chorus of precarious, distinct voices that make up his hometown.

Benicio Del Toro and Mia Threapleton in front of a plane crash: "If only the pilot and the first officer had communicated with each other"

The Phoenician Scheme (2025)

Posted in2025, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Esoterica, Germany, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Benicio Del Toro, Mia Threapleton, Michael Cera, Riz Ahmed
screenplay by Wes Anderson
directed by Wes Anderson

By Angelo Muredda Midway through Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro), a stateless arms dealer and industrialist hated by any number of governments, drops everything to visit Marty (Jeffrey Wright), a shipping magnate from Newark, to muscle him into upping his investment in the titular scheme: a dicey Middle Eastern infrastructure deal. Physically tethered to Marty in the middle of a blood transfusion that’s necessitated by a gunshot wound he acquired in the course of securing his share from a sketchy French ally named Marseille Bob (Mathieu Amalric), Korda pushes the deal by pulling the tab of the hand grenade he brought Marty as a peace offering (the way some might bring chocolate), insisting he’ll put it back only if his pal increases his share. Unfazed by the threat of mutually assured destruction, Marty, a universal donor who’s already pushing blood from his body into Korda’s with a hand pump, pledges to give his financial share and more, “just to watch the grand finale.”

Zhao Tao in Caught by the Tides; petting a robot: "Hello, member of Daft Punk"

Caught by the Tides (2024)

Posted in2024, 2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, China, Drama, Esoterica, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Zhao Tao, Li Zhubing
written and directed by Jia Zhangke

by Angelo Muredda While some spent their COVID lockdowns making sourdough starters and boning up on the medicinal properties of horse dewormer, Jia Zhangke retraced two decades’ worth of cinematic memories, from 2002’s Unknown Pleasures to 2018’s Ash is Purest White, weaving them into a singular new project about urban alienation and the passage of time. Caught by the Tides is the formally playful product of that act of pandemic creative stir-craziness. Conceived and partially shot in the final days of China’s COVID-Zero policies in 2022, the film takes the real-life constraints of social distancing and contact tracing as an aesthetic inspiration to burrow into the past before standing firmly on the present. The strange times, and their restrictions on film shoots, prompt Jia to revisit and reposition the actors, characters, and settings of his oeuvre into a contemporary mosaic. Inspired, as he said at the film’s NYFF festival premiere, by ukiyo-e art from the Edo Period, a tradition of Japanese woodblock prints of transient urban life and folk scenes, he’s fashioned a singular floating world portrait of 21st-century China.

Life After still featuring Elizabeth Bouvia surrounded by men in suits

Life After (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Disability, Documentary, Hot Docs

***½/****
directed by Reid Davenport

by Angelo Muredda “I’ve done what I can, and the quality of my life is over,” 26-year-old disabled woman and assisted dying cause célèbre Elizabeth Bouvia says in archival footage of her 1983 legal fight to refuse medical care in the opening moments of Reid Davenport’s Life After. Bouvia, Davenport shows us through a montage of the media frenzy around her case–which largely evaporated once her petition proved unsuccessful–became a rallying point for the assisted dying cause, represented by an activist attorney from the Hemlock Society (whose more palatably named successor group, End of Life Choices, is later seen clashing with disabled activists in Congress) and given fawning news coverage for her frequently cited physical attractiveness and disarming affect. That the frank, direct, and relatable Bouvia made for good TV, as evidenced by a condescending “60 Minutes” update from 1998 in which Mike Wallace casually muses about the tension between her lingering prettiness and the ongoing cost to the taxpayer of her daily care, is not in dispute. But to what extent, Davenport wonders, can a disabled euthanasia activist who didn’t die, whose WIKIPEDIA page cryptically lacks either new details about her life or a conclusive date for her death, as Bouvia’s does when Davenport sets out to find her, truly be said to have no quality of life if she continued to live it?

A Complete Unknown

A Complete Unknown (2024)

Posted in2024, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Drama, Music, Theatrical

**/****
starring Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro
screenplay by James Mangold and Jay Cocks, based on the book Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald
directed by James Mangold

by Angelo Muredda “I like everything, Pete,” a young Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) confesses to his soon-to-be-mentor Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) early in James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, which traces for what feels like the hundredth time the chameleonic artist’s quick rise through the New York City folk scene in the early 1960s en route to his reinvention as a rock star circa 1965. (The film leaves him just as he goes electric.) Driving in Seeger’s car after Dylan’s famous pilgrimage to meet–and, in his words, “catch a spark” off–his hero, Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), by whose hospital bed Seeger has been keeping vigil, the oath-keeper to folk’s aesthetic and progressive causes and the scene’s as-yet unknown generational star and future turncoat talk past each other. Hearing the rambunctious rock of Little Richard on the radio and sensing his passenger’s divided artistic loyalties, the older man tries to put out the fire, espousing the values of traditionalism and the political utility of protest music while his protege, sounding like the puckish, curatorially adventurous future host of Theme Time Radio Hour he would turn out to be, sheepishly admits that sometimes electric instruments sound good.

Gladiator II (2024)

Gladiator II (2024)

Posted in2024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, Morocco, Theatrical, UK

*½/****
starring Paul Mescal, Pedro Pascal, Connie Nielsen, Denzel Washington
screenplay by David Scarpa
directed by Ridley Scott

By Angelo Muredda Late in Ridley Scott’s woefully derivative sequel Gladiator II, the titular gladiator two, Lucius (Paul Mescal), comes upon a secret shrine for his thematic and–surprise–genetic predecessor, Maximus (Russell Crowe). Introduced both long after a perfunctory opening animated credit sequence by Gianluigi Toccafondo that paints Rotoscoped-looking images over a reel of Gladiator highlights and well into a tired narrative that retraces the thinly-plotted original, beat for tedious beat, the shabbily decorated hovel, adorned with Maximus’s armour and a silly English engraving of his catchphrase “What we do in life echoes in eternity,” feels awfully cheap–fresh from the imagination of ChatGPT. Its memorial-from-Wish-dot-com aesthetic only makes the concept of a reverential successor to the populist hit Gladiator, 24 years in the making, seem even goofier than it already does.

A Different Man

A Different Man (2024)

Posted in2024, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Disability, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve, Adam Pearson, John Keating
written and directed by Aaron Schimberg

by Angelo Muredda Speaking at a recent Lincoln Center screening of his new meta dramedy A Different Man for New Directors/New Films, Aaron Schimberg suggested the project was inspired in part by the loaded reaction to his depiction of disability in Chained for Life, his previous film. Chained for Life cast Adam Pearson, an actor with neurofibromatosis, as an actor with the same condition playing a sanitarium patient in a dodgy European arthouse film-within-the-film about a mad surgeon restoring his disabled charges to normalcy through radical experimentation. Some critics, Schimberg claims, wondered whether it might not be inherently exploitative to cast Pearson and other visibly disabled actors–many of whom, like Schimberg (who has a cleft palate), had facial differences–in a send-up of disability tropes about deformity and beauty. Others would surely have balked at the opposite approach, were he to have burlesqued disability by hiring non-disabled actors to star in a postmodern examination of the aesthetic and ethical traps of disability on film. Why not split the difference and make everyone unhappy with his follow-up, Schimberg thought, by pitting Sebastian Stan, a non-disabled actor playing a disabled protagonist in search of a cure, against Pearson as his obnoxious frenemy–a disabled man as gregarious and comfortable in his own skin as Stan’s character is desperate to crawl out of his?