If you're looking for someone to knock You Can See Everything down a peg, it ain't me, babe. I finally tried to capture what's wonderful about Nathan Fielder's unlikely blockbuster in a review below.
But I was even more taken recently by a film that shares similar themes: the Korean master Lee Chang-dong's latest, Possible Love, which I reviewed below as well.
Also reviewed this week, in declining order of preference: Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, Wild Horse Nine.
Special Screenings
Thursday, October 29
Ozzy & Black Sabbath: Back to the Beginning (2026)
AMC Southdale/Emagine Willow Creek/Marcus West End
A new doc about Ozzy and the boys. AMC: $15. 6:30 p.m. More info here. Emagine: $17. 6:30 p.m. More info here. Marcus: $15.50. 7:15 p.m. More info here.
Cellular Cinema Halloween
Bryant Lake Bowl
Spooky local experimental short films. $10. 7 p.m. More info here.
Bella (2025)
FilmNorth
A man searches for his prize-winning dove. Part of the Twin Cities Jewish Film Festival. $12/$16. 7 p.m. More info here.
Mama (2025)
FilmNorth
A Polish housekeeper living in Israel is estranged from her family back home. Part of the Twin Cities Jewish Film Festival. $12/$16. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
Grandview 1&2
Featuring future Just the Ten of Us star Heather Langenkamp. $13.19. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
They’re Here (2026)
Main Cinema
The much buzzed-about short documentary about the ICE occupation. $10. 6:45 p.m. More info here.
Vertigo (1958)
Riverview Theater
Not to make everything about You Can See Everything, but the Vertigo comparisons people have made are very interesting. $5/$7. 2 p.m. More info here.
North by Northwest (1959)
Riverview Theater
RIP Eva Marie Saint. $5/7. 4:25 p.m. More info here.
Dial M for Murder (1954)
Riverview Theater
Nooo Ray Milland don't kill Grace Kelly she's so sexy ahh. $5/$7. Thursday 7 p.m. More info here.
Hausu (1977)
Trylon
A Trylon holiday tradition. $8. Thursday-Saturday 7 & 9 p.m. Sunday 1 & 3 p.m. More info here.
Drive My Car (2021)
Walker Art Center
A grieving director bonds with his chauffeur while directing Chekhov in Hiroshima. Read my full review here. $12/$15. 7 p.m. More info here.
Friday, October 30
Green Room (2016)
Alamo Drafthouse
Nazis are the real monsters. $13.99. 9:30 p.m. More info here.
Trick or Treat (1986)
Alamo Drafthouse
Starring Skippy from Family Ties. $13.99. 9:45 p.m. Saturday 6:45 More info here.
Le Répondeur (2025)
Alliance Française
A busy writer hires a man to impersonate him on the phone. Free. 6 p.m. More info here.
BTS WORLD TOUR 'ARIRANG'
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Marcus West End
The K-poppers, live from Sao Paolo. Now, that’s scary. $30. 5:45 p.m. Saturday 3:45 p.m. More info here and here.
Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16
A washed up actor and his abusive sidekick drift through a director’s obsessive recreation before hippies ruined everything. $20.69. Friday-Saturday 3 & 6:45 p.m. Sunday-Monday 2:30 & 6:15 p.m. More info here.
Ratatouille (2007)
Granada
A Taste the Movies event. This dinner better be prepared by an actual rat. $169. 6 p.m. More info here.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)
Luminary Arts Center
With live orchestral score, “Renaissance-inspired costume attire” requested. $28.33. 7:30 p.m. Saturday 3 & 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Vertigo (1958)
Orchestra Hall
OK, this would be fun. $60-$139. 7 p.m. More info here.
Warren Miller’s Days Off (2026)
Riverview Theater
A doc about how skiers relax when they’re not on the slopes. Sold out. 6 & 9 p.m. More info here.
The Crow (1994)
AMC Southdale/Main Cinema
Perfect timing, since the movie is set on Mischief Night. Presented by Midnight Mayhem. AMC: Also Saturday. $7. 8 p.m. More info here. Main: $13. 10 p.m. More info here.
A Girl Walks Home at Night (2014)
TriLingua Cinema
The stylish, subversive Iranian vampire flick. $5. 5:45 p.m. Saturday 4:05 p.m. More info here.
Hmonglloween Horror Film Scare-A-Thon!
TriLingua Cinema
Scary shorts from local Hmong filmmakers. Free. 8 p.m. More info here.
Saturday, October 31
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
Alamo Drafthouse/Parkway Theater/Riverview Theater
A perfectly reasonable way to spend a Halloween. Alamo: $13.99. 9:45 p.m. More info here. Parkway: Sold out. Midnight. More info here. Riverview: $5/$7. 9 p.m. More info here.
SEVENTEEN WORLD TOUR 'NEW_ (2026)
AMC Southdale 16
K-pop concert films—they just keep coming. $15. 5:30 p.m. More info here.
Phantom of the Opera (1943)
Lagoon
The Claude Raines version. $13. 12:15 p.m. More info here.
Cronos (1992)
TriLingua Cinema
Great early Guillermo del Toro. $5. 6:20 p.m. More info here.
Edward Scissorhands (1990)
Walker Art Center
A special screening for middle schoolers. Free. 1 p.m. More info here.
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021)
Walker Art Center
An anthology of three stories from Ryūsuke Hamaguchi. $12/$15. 7 p.m. More info here.
Sunday, November 1
Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1974)
Alamo Drafthouse
They’re giving all our jobs to robots, even Godzilla’s. $10.99. Noon and 3:45 p.m. More info here.
V for Vendetta (2005)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/B&B Bloomington/Emagine Willow Creek/Marcus West End
Natalie Portman shaves her head. Also Thursday. Prices, showtimes, and more info here.
The Irregular at Magic High School The Movie-Yotsuba Succession Arc (2026)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16
A confusingly titled anime. $14.69. 7 p.m. Tuesday 7:15 p.m. More info here.
The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
Emagine Willow Creek
IMDB’s favorite movie, now and forever. Also Wednesday. $11. 3:15 & 6:45 p.m. More info here.
Wild at Heart (1990)
AMC Southdale 16/Emagine Willow Creek
Starring Minneapolis metal band Powermad. AMC: Also Tuesday. $7. 4:15 p.m. More info here. Emagine: $13. 10 p.m. Wednesday 9 p.m. More info here.
The Hunt (2012)
Grandview 1&2
People have got it in for Mads Mikkelsen. Also Thursday. $13.19. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
The Muppet Movie (1978)
Heights Theater
Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Edgar Bergen, yaaay! $15. 1 p.m. More info here.
Name Your Nightmare
Marcus West End
One last secret horror movie. $6. 7:15 p.m. More info here.
Monday, November 2
You’ve Got Mail (1998)
Edina Mann
What if predatory capitalism was romantic? Also Wednesday. $10.90. 7 p.m. More info here.
Error_MovieTitle_Unknown (2026)
Emagine Willow Creek
A secret new movie. $7. 7 p.m. More info here.
The Manitou (1978)
Emagine Willow Creek
A woman develops a supernatural tumor. $9. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Return to Haifa (1982)
Main Cinema
A Palestinian couple discovers that their son has been adopted by an Israeli family and joined the army. Presented by Mizna. $5-$15. 7 p.m. More info here.
Marcus Mystery Movie
Marcus West End
Another secret movie. $6. 7 p.m. More info here.
Tuesday, November 3
Wild at Heart (1990)
Alamo Drafthouse
If you’d rather see it in Woodbury. Also Wednesday. $13.99. 7:45 p.m. More info here.
Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)
Alamo Drafthouse
And that was the last Friday the 13th movie they ever made. $10.99. 8 p.m. More info here.
Wednesday, November 4
Mean Streets (1973)
Lagoon Cinema
The movie where Scorsese became Scorsese. $13. 7 p.m. More info here.
Tape Freaks
Trylon
The freaks are back with more analog oddities. $5. 7 & 9 p.m. More info here.
Thursday, November 5
Swingers (1996)
Alamo Drafthouse
I’d be happy to leave this one back in the ’90s. $13.99. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Frogman (2022)
Emagine Willow Creek
A found-footage horror film with a cult following. $13. 6:30 p.m. More info here.
Frogman Returns (2025)
Emagine Willow Creek
Stick around for the sequel. $13. 8:30 p.m. More info here.
American Theater (2026)
Riverview Theater
A disgraced director stages a drama about the Salem witch trials. $15. 7:15 p.m. More info here.
The More the Merrier (1943)
Trylon
A Jean Arthur/Joel McCrea screwball comedy set amid a D.C. housing shortage. $8. 7 p.m. More info here.
Opening
Follow the links for showtimes.
Aadarsha Kutumbam - House No. 47
A new Indian action-comedy.
Breeder
She doesn’t just breed dogs!
Christmas at the Kringles
A family meets their evil, Yule-obsessed neighbors.
Everest the Other Side
Climbers scale the mountain’s dangerous north side.
Godzilla Minus Zero
The big guy is back, starting Tuesday.
Hell House LLC (2016)
The found-footage horror flick, re-released for its 10th anniversary.
Jimmy
A sanctimonious look at the life of Jimmy Stewart from your friends at Angel Studios.
The Mosquito Bowl
College football players enlist after Pearl Harbor.
The Only Living Pickpocket in New York
They don’t make ‘em like this anymore, as writer/director Noah Segan takes ostentatious pains to remind us throughout the nonetheless endearing character study. John Turturro is the titular thief, an easygoing Bronx elder who cares attentively for his comatose wife, plies his trade while causing as few waves as he can, and smooths over any rough patches by slipping you a few high-denomination bills. But then he robs the wrong target (a highly connected jerkoff played to the douchey hilt by Will Price) and, well, you know how that goes. Hey, did you know that New York is the greatest city in the world? And did you know it used to be so much better? From its thirdhand soundtrack funk score to its broad borough-by-borough characterizations to its cute oldguyisms (they say “Esty” for “Etsy” etc.), this movie lays it on t-h-i-c-k. Is there Steve Buscemi? You know it, bud. But Turturro’s presence holds it together; he’s just one our greatest onscreen hangs, somehow a more calming presence the more evidently he’s masking his melancholy. And I can’t help but cherish the moments of screentime he shares with Giancarlo Esposito, who plays his onetime foe and now ally in the police department. You really expect me not feel a certain way at the sight of an aged Buggin’ Out and Pino Frangione seated calmly side by side on a subway? B
Paging Hezbollah
A doc about Israel booby-trapping Hezbollah's pagers. Hm.
Sight and Sound Presents Joshua Live!
The biblical production comes to the screen.
Wild Horse Nine
It’s 1973 and a rheumy, cadaverous, yet jaunty skull of a man, dressed gaudy and inescapably American, taunts two pretty young Chilean leftists in an airport, predicting the worst for their beloved new Marxist president. Later in the film, Chris Carlisle (John Malkovich) will share even grimmer visions of Salvador Allende’s fate—he’s a CIA lifer who helped take out Lumumba in the DRC and Árbenz in Guatemala before that, even JFK back home, and he knows how this shit plays out. In addition to blurting out coup details, Chris is also increasingly forgetful and working on a tell-all memoir, upsetting his boss (Steve Buscemi again, looking here like a stateside Gary Oldman), and his partner/buddy Lee (Sam Rockwell, squinting in a My Name Is Earl daze and saying “fuck” a lot). Chris and Lee travel to “Easter Island” to see “the big heads”—or rather, Rapa Nui to see the Moai, as the culturally sensitive keep reminding them—bantering for banter’s sake all the while. So yeah, it’s a Martin McDonagh movie, convinced as ever that the more men obfuscate through digression and anecdote and overall verbal irrelevancies the more they reveal about their relationships with each other. But though Malkovich gives it his all, this time I’m not so sure. For starters, fuck the CIA. We’ve all fallen for onscreen scumbags in the past, but McDonagh forgets to make these guys intriguing enough that we overlook how reprehensible they are. It’s like he thinks that the fact that they’re speaking the lines he wrote for them is enough to make us care. Like hell it is. Rapa Nui does look gorgeous though. B-
And in theaters for Halloween...
Halloween (1978)
Screening at the Alamo, the Parkway, and Marcus West End
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
Screening at the Grenada, Marcus West End, Mia, and the Parkway.
Scream (1996)
Screening at the Alamo, AMCs Rosedale and Southdale, Emagine Willow Creek, and Marcus West End.
Ongoing in Local Theaters
Follow the links for showtimes.
Coyote vs. Acme
When a fed-up Wile E. Coyote belatedly recognizes that defective Acme products are the source of all his woes, he seeks out Kevin Avery (Will Forte), a lawyer who specializes in settling animated clients’ product-liability cases fast and cheap. But the fired-up Coyote, along with Avery’s idealistic niece (Lana Condor), decide to stick it to The Man. Or rather, The Rooster—as Acme’s CEO, Foghorn Leghorn reveals himself as the evil bully we always knew he was, and it’s a hoot to watch him intimidate his lawyer, an obligingly game John Cena. If much of the comedy here leans on nostalgia, the old bits remain good ones. And while there’s a reason classic Looney Tunes didn’t exceed 10 minutes, Bugs and Daffy and Porky and Tweety all turn up at opportune moments. The human/toon interaction is as seamless as it should be, with Forte a serviceable enough straight man that I won’t compare him to Bob Hoskins. Though having avoided mentioning Who Framed Roger Rabbit? as long as I could, I couldn't help but notice that this film flirts with the other’s idea of cartoons as manic chaos agents but never quite plunges in. As for the anti-corporate storyline, it could be a critique of animal testing if it wanted to. (It’s a stretch, I say, I say, a stretch to claim it’s metaphorically calling out Big Tech’s beta-testing.) What stage of capitalism have we reached when a solid piece of entertainment like this becomes a cause célèbre simply because biz pinheads nearly binned it as a tax write off? I’m just glad it gives today’s kids the opportunity to learn who Peter Lorre was the same way that I did. B+
Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971)
Naza
“After Oct. 7th,” an Israeli soldier tells journalist/filmmaker Yuval Abraham, “everyone kept saying: ‘There are no innocent people in Gaza.’” NAZA (the term is a euphemism that Israeli military and intelligence use for civilian casualties, a shortening of “nezek agavi,” or collateral damage) documents the horrific results of that thinking. From rooftops overlooking Tel Aviv, always at night, Abraham interviews 24 anonymous soldiers and intelligence officers, their faces obscured and voices digitally altered, as they discuss the IDF’s decision to attack civilian targets, sharing their personal rationalizations but expressing no regrets. Critically evaluating what’s at its core a work of journalism can feel downright obtuse—what does it mean to debate the aesthetic merit of a significant exposé? Yet Abraham and Rachel Szor, who previously captured the brutality of West Bank settlers in their Oscar-winning doc No Other Land, make striking artistic choices. They understand the power of cinematic distance: With the camera focused on modern, bustling, dazzling Tel Aviv, watching its inhabitants going about their lives, Gaza feels both a world away and perpetually present, especially as televisions blare recriminations and denouncements from Netanyahu and other Israel leaders—the same people who will condemn Naza and call for a prosecution of its makers and its sources. A-
The Odyssey—read full review here
What we tend to forget about The Odyssey is that it’s maybe 10% cool mythological shit like one-eyed giant cannibals and sinister witches and gods punishing impudent mortals and like 90% about exchanging gifts with your hosts and telling very long stories to impress them. What’s remarkable about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is that it honors this aspect of the epic while delivering the supernatural adventure film moviegoers want. Yet as always, Nolan is so transparent in his ideology you can almost believe he’s making an argument, when like any storyteller he’s just using fiction to justify his beliefs. Which, as always, is that we are always one well-told tale away from chaos. Whether the gods are real or not, warns the David Brooks of the cineplex, if we don’t honor them we will undermine the customs that hold our society together. Hey man, I just came here for the Cyclops. B+
Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)—ends October 29
Possible Love
Mi-ok and Sang-woo meet cute. Sort of. After she drops her wedding ring in the dark outside of a funeral, he gallantly flips on the headlights of his Porsche to find it. He’s tall, handsome, rich, and married to Ye-ji, a pretty, stylish documentarian who’s in town making a film about the aftermath of an industrial plant’s layoffs two years earlier. Mi-ok’s husband, the taciturn, haunted Ho-seok soon catches the filmmaker’s eye—he’s the subject her doc needs, she senses. Ye-ji befriends Mi-ok after the laborer’s wife proves a surprisingly articulate interview, and soon the two couples are awkwardly socializing across the class divide, until Mi-ok and Ye-ji become intimate with each other’s husbands in unexpected ways. And everything that the camera doesn’t surveil is peeped by 10-year-old Cheol, Mi-ok and Ho-seok’s son, whose unspoken anxieties manifest in a twitchy nose and a reluctance to participate in taekwondo. Writer/director Lee Chang-dong’s brilliant study of class in Korean society, the ethics of telling someone else’s story, the complex ways labor shapes our identities, and the varieties of marital love is nuanced at times, but also willing to be obvious, as though to remind us that life isn’t always subtle. As Ye-ji, Cho Yeo-jeong (the rich mom in “Parasite”) is a case study in the limits of good intentions, Zo In-sung’s Sang-woo is the sort of privileged guy who’s charming as long as he’s getting his way, and Sul Kyung-gu draws us into Ho-seok’s dark moods without striking a false note. But the film belongs to Jeon Do-yeon, the star of Lee’s Secret Sunshine (2007). As Mi-ok, she’s unexpectedly enlivened by Ye-ji’s camera, witty enough to cover up an embarrassing revelation with a blithe aphorism like “This is like a house from a novel I haven’t read,” savvy enough to recognize the limitations of her new friendship. You want a pull quote? “As insightful about the power dynamics of documentary filmmaking as You Can See Everything, more astute about the mechanics of desire between two couples than The Invite, and eight full minutes shorter than The Odyssey.” A
Primetime—ends October 29
If you were born too late to experience the ass-end of the Bush era, Lance Oppenheimer presents the grubby sanctimony of 2006 in all its garish, digitally green-tinted horror for you. In this maybe too engaging dark comedy about one of that moment’s most telling cultural artifacts, NBC’s Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson, rehearsing for Batman or maybe auditioning for Ahab) creates a national phenomenon by luring online creeps in front of the TV camera with the promise of hooking up with minors. Yet this is not really a story best told from within—Hansen’s troubled marriage and professional ambitions are of limited interest, and David Osit’s smart 2025 doc Predator is much better at tracing the legacy of To Catch a Predator. Not only does god write lousy theater, but he inspires screenwriter Ajon Singh to overcompensate for his divine sloppiness with too-tautly structured character arcs, so Merritt Wever’s Nicorette-chomping producer Andie Bender ponders whether she should jump ship to NBC and Skyler Gisondo’s twinky decoy Dan Plum strives to balance his thespian ideals against his tawdry job. And while I appreciate that Primetime assumes we all retrospectively view this once-celebrated bottom-feeder phenomenon as a grotesque relic, its strengths (especially Pattison’s magnetic performance) are more parodic than insightful. Is it really that much less scummy to snicker at these crass vigilantes than it was for TV viewers to cheer for the downfall of the creeps Hansen and his crew entrapped? B
Resident Evil
If video game movies we must have (not like we get to decide) better this gory schlock slapstick than the klutz existentialism of the tedious Exit 8. (Both share a plot point—pregnant girlfriend—if that means anything.) Zach Cregger keeps it simpler here than in Barbarian or Weapons, which means Resident Evil is a little dumber than those (derogatory) but also means Resident Evil is a little dumber than those (complimentary). Austin Abrams (the addict from Weapons) is our dumbass hero, a driver dispatched with a high-priority delivery to the hospital in snowy Raccoon City. His cargo, I sincerely hope you won’t be astounded to learn, is the crucial ingredient needed to synthesize an antidote to a man-made contagion sweeping the land. Symptoms typically include zombie catatonia, grasping tentacles, and blob-like absorption of other humans, but there are also acid-puking ghoulies and one tubby fella with an exploding, critter-infested gut. The script could occasionally try a tiny bit harder (how much Abrams muttering “fuck” do we need?) but in a world of forced MCU quippery that’s a venial sin. And in keeping with the source material, the stakes are both enormous (the end of the world!) and virtually negligible (game over). B
Sense and Sensibility
We can debate our preferred Pride and Prejudice or wonder why no Emma has surpassed Clueless, but for most people Ang Lee’s 1995 film is Sense and Sensibility. Director Georgia Oakley’s damp, darkened, lived-in Jane Austen faces this challenge head-on—perhaps too deliberately—battling our memories of sun-dappled landscapes and cute bonnets with a lowkey naturalism. Tossed out of their home by an elder half-brother after their father’s death, the Dashwood sisters set about finding husbands, as Austen heroines must do. The elder Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is constrained in her relations with her beloved Edward (George Mackay, putting his woodenness to good use) by her good sense, while a romantic sensibility allows the younger Marianne (Esmé Creed-Miles) to be swept away by the dashing Willoughby (a suitably caddish Frank Dillane). Edgar-Jones has a face made for period pieces, but there’s something inappropriately waifish and younger sisterly about her Elinor, and she struggles to achieve an outward representation of her propriety. Creed-Miles fares better, in part because Oakley favors her sensibility to Elinor’s sense—I often felt the director might prefer to be mucking around in something a little more Brontëan. In fact, this affair can feel unduly heavy when Fiona Shaw’s Mrs. Jennings isn’t around to liven things up, but we do get a real warmth between the sisters, and the two dance scenes are such standouts Oakley really should do a musical next. In short, no one gets in the way of the source material, and the film gets the job done. After all, how many truly terrible Austen adaptations that don’t star Dakota Johnson are there? B
Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom
Spider-Man: Brand New Day
Look, we all know what’s wrong with the MCU. Too long, too constructed to promote future installments, just plain too familiar. But I’m not here to relitigate all that. I’m here to tell people who might be in the mood for a Spider-Man movie whether they should see this Spider-Man movie, and my answer is a resounding “Uh, sure.” It is the one currently in theaters, after all, and it’s downright sleek compared to the Spider-Man: No Way Home, which was overstuffed with Spiders-Men, supervillains, and multiverse nonsense. Peter Parker’s existence (Tom Holland) has been magicked away from everyone’s memory, and as he watches his once-gf MJ (Zendaya) and once-bff Ned (Jacob Batalon) live blissful Peter-free lives at MIT, he throws himself into his work. He debates attempting to reintroduce himself while tracking a mysterious entity that leaps from body to body in search of some government secret and dealing with some freakily increasing spidery tendencies. Along the way, he encounters Florence Pugh’s Black Widow (says “potatoes” amusingly), Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk (bigger than ever), (a little too much of) Jon Berenthal’s Punisher, and, of course, Sadie Sink, who plays Jean Grey with an intense school-shooter vibe. Because this is Spider-Man, the fights are less monotonous than the MCU norm, though I was a bit fatigued by the time we got to the climatic battle with the evil ninjas. And as for future installments, I’m sure the device Peter invents that inhibits superpowers won’t be used against the good guys in future films. B
Verity
“I can’t tell if you’re just very calm or you’re in shock,” Josh Hartnett’s Jeremy Crawford says to Dakota Johnson’s Lowen Ashleigh as she mops blood off her face following a grisly traffic accident, and who among us hasn’t wondered the same about a Dakota Johnson character before? (Lowen later admits, “I have resting bored face.” We get it, girl. You can’t act.) In this eye-roll of a Colleen Hoover adaptation, Lowen, a struggling novelist, has been recruited to finish the work of best-selling author Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), who has been rendered mute and immobile by an accident. (OR HAS SHE?) Lowen stays with the Crawfords in their fancy Vermont home while working on the book. Lowen discovers a SECRET JOURNAL wherein Verity confesses to CRIMES! (OR DOES SHE?) Lowen masturbates in a tub. Lowen repeatedly says “wow” in that dopey, unfazed way we’ve come to expect/dread from Johnson. While I’d blame Hoover for the plot, which would have gotten her laughed out of the 19th century by bona fide Gothic credibility-stretchers, Michael Showalter’s diffident direction, which aspires to no stylistic flair at all, is the real culprit—it’s like he’s trying to keep this dumb thing on the rails, which takes misunderstanding the assignment to all new levels of incomprehension. And now, if you’ll promise to believe me when I say there’s little or nothing more where this comes from, I’ll leave you with the only good line in the movie: “You deserve to rock in your sad little robot bed, you selfish Machiavellian cunt.” C-
You Can See Everything
Do Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim provide insight into the opaque mens rea of luminous fraudster Elizabeth Holmes? Does their film “speak … uncannily to the pathos and destabilizing confusions of the present moment”? Is it “a secret history of the tech industry”? To quote the great philosopher Lou Costello, “I! DON’T! KNOW!” Before it’s timely or significant or groundbreaking or whatever superlative you want to hurl, You Can See Everything is fun, challenging us to keep our psychological balance as we’re consistently wrongfooted. Like all documentaries, You Can See Everything strives for a narrative that approximates the truth. And like all fiction,You Can See Everything revels in the pleasure of being duped. (We’re not the first moderns to endure an epistemic crisis, after all; let’s hope we’re not the last.) Yet it feels uniquely of its moment, in the way a great horror flick reflects our most persistent fears in titillating ways. Fielder (or “Fielder”) plays the skeptic or dupe as the story requires, his increasing obsession with what Holmes is “really” thinking a synecdoche for our collective fascination with the unknowable about celebrities. Here’s proof that you can have a real-world parasocial relationship, and for once I understand the pleasure that rubberneckers must derive from true-crime podcasts. Fielder is Odysseus strapped to the mast as he sails past the sirens, taking a long gaze into an abyss that stares back into him with impossibly enormous blue irises, and he learns nothing—except maybe that you can never trust a guy who consumes YouTube at 2x speed. But you already knew that, right? A
Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother
It’s a surefire plot: a big tough guy is tasked with caring for an infant. Yet Mahershala Ali and director Bassam Tariq, reuniting after fleeing Disney’s fumbled Blade reboot, don’t play this dilemma for laughs. Ali’s Latif is a devout Muslim and a hitman who has struck a fragile ethical balance that allows him to reconcile these roles. When his wife dies, and the refrigerated breast milk is gone, Latif frantically searches for a way to feed his formula-allergic infant, while also caring for a teen daughter (terrific newcomer Adia) with a nascent furry streak (“That squirrel porn nonsense is clouding your heart,” he tells her) and a son (Jahleel Kamara) who’s developing an unsettling taste for first-person shooters and Rambo movies. To top it off, Latif is tasked with protecting his boss’s skeevy, worthless son (a thoroughly reprehensible Abubakr Ali) from a self-righteous Christian cult leader (John Cho, with a grill) who suspects the sleazeball of child trafficking. Latif considers himself a protector, but as his job increasingly endangers his family, he doubts his uprightness. DP Katelin Arizmendi exploits the film’s digital sheen, moving us through a grimy Houston and brilliantly capturing the varied palettes of Black faces with extreme close ups. And Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is the rare American film that takes faith seriously. Most that pretend to (Angel Studios schlock, say) fashion it into a sentimental weapon of self-righteousness, but the world of Latif’s mosque feels like a real place filled with real people. Oh, and the action scenes do kick ass. A-
