Sham

If anyone can make a great Cancel Culture movie, it would have to be Takashi Miike, right? Sham is based on a true story, a court case from 2003 in which a teacher is accused of severely abusing one of his 9-year-old students. The film begins with the boy’s mother’s courtroom testimony, as she describes the sequence of events: the teacher is racist, stating that the boy, whose great-grandfather was American, has “tainted” blood which explains his stupidity; the teacher physically punishes the boy for minor classroom infractions (pinching his nose until it bleeds, lifting him up by the ears until they tear); and finally, after having been reported to the school authorities, the teacher finds the boy alone on his way home from school and tries to persuade him to jump off a building. This occupies Sham’s first 20 minutes, a harrowing account told in horror movie style, with the teacher’s face obscured by deep shadows when it isn’t flashing a menacingly psychotic grin. 

The next 40 minutes then present the teacher’s version of these events, and they could not possibly be more different: the teacher is a nice family man who looks out for and is loved by his students, is gentle with his corrections, and is full of life, humor, and humility. Following this section, the final hour then follows the trial in which the truth is attempted to be discovered and established. Thus, we have a variation on the Rashomon structure, with two competing versions of the same events. But unlike Kurosawa, who was interested in the nature of truth and how people tell lies, even to themselves, and how we can function in a world where that is the case, Miike’s concerns are less cosmic. It’s clear which version of the truth he believes in, right from the start. While the opening 20 minutes operate as a horror movie, then the next 40 are shot without the filter of genre, the story of an ordinary man caught in a Kafka-esque sequence of accusations that he is increasingly unable to defend himself against. This isn’t a movie about the impossibility of truth; it’s a movie about a man who is accused of abuse not being given the benefit of the doubt.

Given the on-going revelations of the #MeToo movement within the Japanese film industry, where such high-profile filmmakers as Sion Sono and Tak Sakaguchi, among others, have been credibly accused of all kinds of harassment and abuse, it’s not encouraging to see a director of Miike’s obvious stature come out with a film that wants us to question whether we should, in fact, “believe women.” Which isn’t to say that Sham is not a good movie. In fact, it’s a terrific courtroom drama, a fine exercise in classical style from a man not known for making classical films of any kind. Coming on the heels of his boxing movie Blue Fight (aka Blazing Fists), it’s another surprising turn toward the conventional for Miike, one without any of that previous film’s small concessions to the director’s oddball quirks. But other than the fact that Sham is exceptionally well-crafted, and Miike remains among the most supremely competent filmmakers of our time, it’s a movie that could probably have been made by anyone, even Hirokazu Kore-eda.

As sturdy as it is, then, one must wonder why Miike chose to tell this story, at this time. Sham lacks any of the nuance or expressionism of Todd Field’s Tár, probably the only great film yet made about Cancel Culture, or the courtroom intensity of Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, nor are its performances on the level of Sandra Hüller, Cate Blanchett, or Swann Arlaud in those films. Gô Ayano (A Bride for Rip Van Winkle) plays the teacher at an increasingly high emotional register as he pleads for the truth, and Kô Shibasaki (Battle Royale) seemingly has only one note as the mother leveling the accusations. Cold and emotionless, she leaves no doubt which of these characters is truly abusive and homicidal, giving us even less room to imagine than Miike does.

In the end, Sham is best described as a courtroom drama about how everyone (friends and coworkers, the media, the public at large, the legal system) is ready to believe the worst in people, regardless of the evidence, or lack thereof. It’s a true story: people do get falsely accused of things all the time. But it misses the point at issue in accusations of abuse: that narratives like the mother’s always get discounted, that institutions always protect their own, and that the public is always willing to turn a blind eye to the horrible things happening around them in favor of social stability. Cherry-picking a case like this one, and making a whole fancy movie about it, doesn’t refute any of those facts. The real question at issue in Sham, if we want to be generous to Miike — and perhaps there are those like this writer who may be too inclined to do so as fans of the director’s work in general — is not whether we can ever believe accusations of abuse, or if we should discount them more than we’re willing to, but rather how can we, as a society, construct a system wherein the truth can ultimately win out, where abusers will be punished and the innocent redeemed. The truly harrowing position of Sham is not that there’s no such thing as truth, but rather that there is truth, and we, as a flawed people, have yet to develop a system in which we can find it. — SEAN GILMAN

Hellcat

Brock Bodell’s directorial debut, Hellcat, begins with a wounded and frantic woman, Lena (Dakota Gorman), waking up in a moving camper trailer. A drawling voice emits through a taxidermal wolf head stationed on the trailer wall, advising her to stay calm. Lena’s panic increases when she hears moans emanating from a locked room at the back of the trailer. She learns that the wolf head’s voice belongs to Clive (Todd Terry), the truck driver towing her trailer, and the two characters begin communicating in a push-pull, captor-captive dynamic of negotiations.

Bodell directs Hellcat with a consciously unsteady hand, the camera constantly pushing and wobbling. Sounds of wind and rattling metal accompany the images. Visual motifs tease out the plot’s central mysteries — what’s happening to Lena? What are Clive’s motives? The proceedings are appropriately nervous. 

Hellcat is entrenched in basic storytelling mechanics, grappling with the tensions between what’s known or unknown, seen or unseen, real or imagined. It draws on the interplay between beat-by-beat plot developments and Lena’s inner world (through imaginary tableaux and internal home video montages). The film is both limited and empowered by its own chamber drama machinery. Its effectiveness depends on the timing of plot revelations and the gradual expanding of narrative and spatial fields of vision.

To some degree, Hellcat’s central conceit helps limit its narrative challenges surrounding character agency, but it increasingly struggles to maintain a hold on narrative logic as its scope widens. Occasionally, plot seems to determine character motivation, rather than vice versa. It also grapples with the necessity for an escalation of visual and tonal intensity. It doesn’t quite deliver on this front, instead coasting on its premise’s basic stakes and the intensity of Gorman’s performance.

And to be sure, Gorman is committed, enthusiastically leaning into the challenge of playing many solo scenes. She’s so invested in the role that one can’t help wondering if Hellcat might’ve been more exciting as an expressly claustrophobic, interior-focused film that drew more exclusively on her devotion and screen presence. Perhaps Hellcat’s aspirations to tension and dread could’ve been more successfully achieved by a heavier reliance on Lena’s internal experience rather than on her external conflicts with Clive.

For all its flaws, Hellcat is lovingly made, steeped in genre references and intriguing paranormal mythology. It contributes to a recent cinematic trend of women-centred body horror (from Julia Ducournau’s Raw [2016] and Titane [2021] to Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance [2024] and beyond). Its playful ambition is sometimes to its detriment — the premise begs for something just a bit more grounded, visceral, and paranoid — but its spirit and its efforts are commendable. — MIKE THORN

Anything That Moves

In a world completely in thrall to corporate IP and mega-budget computerized imperialist fantasies, we should be eternally grateful to festivals like Fantasia for platforming a genuine underground madman like Alex Phillips. His All Jacked Up and Full of Worms was a highlight of 2023, an insane drug-fueled odyssey that played fast and loose with narrative (or even general coherence) in favor of gross-out gags and a general who-gives-a-fuck vibe. Since then, we’ve gotten other weirdo gems like Braden Sitter Jr.’s delirious The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man and Zach Clark’s The Becomers, true DIY efforts that speak to our collective need for outré, uncompromising artistic visions. This stuff is weird, for sure, but absolutely essential to our cultural ecosystem.

Anything That Moves follows Liam (Hal Baum), a young man who works for a DoorDash-style delivery service that’s actually a front for a sex worker operation. Liam cycles around Chicago alongside his girlfriend Thea (Jiana Nicole), servicing various clients in a series of sex-positive scenarios; truly, Liam will happily fuck… anything that moves. Much of the film’s first act simply follows Liam on his various amorous encounters; he pleasures Julia (Jade Perry), Thea’s sister, and when their father catches them all together, he winds up seducing dear old dad, too. Liam beds an aged starlet, helps Thea enact a cuck fantasy for a single dad, and works as a kind of therapist/surrogate for a couple with a newborn who are experiencing intimacy issues. This being a Phillips film means there’s gonna be some odd stuff, too; at one point, Liam walks down a dark alleyway only for a man a couple of stories up on a fire escape to begin urinating on him. A separate encounter in a remote, wooded area threatens to turn violent, staying just on the right side of fantasy versus a harsher reality. Liam seems to genuinely love his clients, and isn’t satisfied until he makes them cum (a prolonged state of ecstasy dramatized here via bright, heavenly lights and soaring orchestral music). Liam loves the old, the fat, men, women; he’s a true pansexual. But there’s trouble in paradise, as Liam’s clients begin turning up dead after sessions with him. A couple of bumbling cops (played by Jack Dunphy and the great filmmaker Frank V. Ross) obviously suspect Liam, and he begins desperately trying to warn potential victims before they’re targeted.

What we wrote about Full of Worms a couple of years ago applies here, too; Anything That Moves is frequently very funny, a clear case of friends goofing around and trying to one-up each other, seemingly as inspired by sketch comedy, improv, and Johnny Ryan’s Angry Youth Comix as they are by giallo and De Palma. If this new film is more straightforward and coherent as a narrative than its predecessor, Phillips still lets his freak flag fly. There’s more full frontal male nudity here than seemingly in all of Hollywood history combined, and the sex-positive vibes are clearly designed as a thumbing of the nose to mainstream respectability. The final reveal of the killer suggests an even more direct political call to action, as sex workers must unite to fight the repressive forces of law and order that wish to suppress libidinal energies. One suspects that both Robin Wood and John Waters would be proud. — DANIEL GORMAN

Queens of the Dead

To follow in any well-known filmmaker’s footsteps is a tall order. To not only follow one of the most popular and acclaimed horror directors of all time, but to also choose to directly pay homage to and even continue the loosely-connected zombie franchise he originated is something else altogether. That’s precisely what George A. Romero’s daughter, Tina, has chosen to do for her debut feature, Queens of the Dead, which she described herself, introducing it at its world premiere, as a deliberate attempt to queer the canon — the one her father helped to shape. This is, of course, done with a great amount of respect and reverence for his films, as there are frequent references to them (and one character even directly exclaims, “This isn’t a George A. Romero movie!”). It is, admittedly, a delicate balance to strike, and Queens, which is about a ragtag group of queer performers and club kids facing a zombie outbreak in Brooklyn, gets by quite successfully by leaning fully into the first-time filmmaker’s clear skill for comedy. 

The horror, such as it is, is another story, but one gets the sense from early on that scares and gore are not quite as important here as the vibe, and the effective use of a strong comedic ensemble. Led by Katy O’Brian, the cast also includes Margaret Cho as an electric scooter-riding badass, the drag queen Nina West, and, perhaps most memorably, Jack Haven (I Saw the TV Glow), who is absolutely hilarious as Kelsey, a harried intern to O’Brian’s character who has the film’s best reactions and comic timing. The script itself is full of biting one-liners and unexpected asides that kill, especially in a crowded theatre, though it falters when it comes to pacing or when it attempts to draw on emotion — you keep waiting for a joke to follow, and when it doesn’t arrive, things can feel a bit confused.

Moreover, your mileage may vary when it comes to how Queens chooses to “update” the zombie metaphor as a source of social commentary and satire, as George Romero always did. Here, the main insight is to have the zombies glued to their smartphones, a joke so obvious that it seems as though the movie ought to, at the very least, play with it a little (maybe a livestreaming zombie personality?), but nothing like that ever happens. It’s a disappointing missed opportunity, particularly as the film’s queerness is otherwise front and centre through the characters, their dynamics, and their New York environment, and so the seeming disinterest in using the genre as an outlet for further commentary is odd. 

Nevertheless, there’s at least one good joke landing every few minutes, which is a remarkably high batting average for a debut, nepo-driven or otherwise. With a cast that is so clearly game, and so capable of taking the script’s weaknesses and elevating them, the sum vision makes for a good time, especially if you happen to see it with an audience that cheers when legendary prosthetic artist Tom Savini shows up as the mayor of New York. Misfits unite, indeed. — JAKE PITRE

Fixed

Genndy Tartakovsky has earned the one for him. As creator of some of the most seminal animated television of the late ‘90s and early 2000s, his place in animation history is set in solid stone. This is the guy who brought anime into the American cultural consciousness, made Star Wars cool when it was suffering a PR crisis amidst the release of the prequel trilogy, and (with a tip of the hat toward Space Ghost Coast to Coast) built the foundation upon which Cartoon Network stands. A joke-filled, traditionally animated movie about a domesticated animal featuring adult themes? After the inordinate financial success of the Hotel Transylvania series, why not? Ralph Bakshi got away with it. Fritz the Cat remains one of the boldest, most provocative American films — animated or otherwise — ever produced. And the premise here certainly sounds like it could have come from Bakshi: Bull, an anxious yet amiable mutt, finds out his beloved testicles are going the way of the dodo. Convinced his manhood is the only thing that makes him worthy of affection — especially from his unrequited love, an Afghan Hound named Honey — he runs away from his home in the suburbs to live a hardscrabble life in the city.

Alas, FIXED is more Barbera than Bakshi, aping the good-natured slapstick of the former and foregoing the ruthless bite of the latter. While not altogether bereft of a Bakshi influence, Tartakovsky has too mainstream a sensibility for FIXED to provoke. It’s clumsily pitched at the intersection of adult and adolescent, and seemingly made by the boy who heard about sex from the neighborhood weird kid but doesn’t actually know what sex is yet. Like another recent confused animated film, Piece by Piece, FIXED doesn’t really know who it’s for: is it the pubescent boy stumbling upon it while browsing on his mother’s Netflix account after she’s gone to sleep, or the 30-year-old for whom Ed, Edd n Eddy remains the state of the art? Piece by Piece suffered because it was a wolfish documentary disguised in the sheep’s clothing of a LEGO movie. FIXED suffers because it’s a sheep in, well, an emasculated and sex-obsessed dog’s clothing.

To its credit, FIXED is a real movie, not the Frankensteined hatchet job stitching together discrete skits it so easily could have been. At 86 minutes — six of which are devoted to credits — the film is sufficiently breezy and diverting, and the script has clearly been workshopped within an inch of its life. Every incident carefully segues into the next, and occasionally these transitions offer platforms for playful animation. Bull accidentally inhales weed smoke and hallucinates his balls popping right out from under him; Bull looks on at a Shih Tzu dominatrix as he enters a dog brothel — The Humphouse, if you’re curious whether Tartakovsky is interested in subtlety here — barking at her subordinates to roll over and play dead; Bull and friends chase a squirrel and totally mangle it, blood gushing out of the hole where its head used to be Happy Tree Friends style — the kinds of things you can only get away with in this medium. Just as often, however, scenes lack the jazzy snap they ought to have. The dogs get to do plenty of gyrating, but sit-and-stay jokes about balls or sex or a dog’s role in the dog hierarchy supplant the animator’s prerogative to do something with the form. If nothing else, the voice cast at least sounds like they’re having fun reading the lines.

The confused tug-of-war between squeaky clean sitcom-style storytelling and over-the-top sexual content never fully resolves in FIXED, which wouldn’t be such a problem if the movie didn’t bark a call to be different under the pressures of conformity as its major message. The closest it gets to settling its Portnoy’s Complaint meets The Secret Life of Pets tension is during the climax, when a heartfelt moment arises because of the movie’s naughtiness, not in spite of it. Otherwise, FIXED reads like a flaccid homage to cartoons that work better when they use innuendo to get their points across. At least Tartakovsky’s got a great excuse: you can always blame the dog. — ETHAN J. ROSENBERG

Inner Walls

The shadow of Alex Honnold looms large. As the most famous rock climber in the world, and the undeniable face of the sport to those on the outside, there are no conversations about climbing that don’t in some way incorporate Honnold. The exposure he has brought to rock climbing is a touchy subject within the community — over-crowded climbs and underprepared climbers have increased injury and tension — and the newfound abundance of climbing documentaries is merely a reflection of the sport’s over-saturation in the zeitgeist. Free Solo, the 2019 film depicting Honnold’s unroped climb of Yosemite’s El Capitan, set the standard for films on the subject, and in the years since, many have tried to duplicate its achievements, with varying levels of success. The fact that Honnold is at minimum a talking head and just as often a main subject in nearly all these films only encourages the sport’s dependence on him as a spokesperson, but with that ubiquity comes diminishing returns each time. This year, Alexandra Elkin’s Inner Walls reflects the latest attempt at adding a new face to the roster of climbers drawing audiences to the theater to witness the towering heights of their accomplishments.

While Honnold, of course, makes an appearance in Inner Walls, it’s actually his mother who plays a significant part in the film. Dierdre Wolownick, the oldest woman to climb El Cap, is, much like her son, a force to be reckoned with. At 66, she climbed the peak with Honnold, setting the record, and beating it four years later with a group of friends, after climbing for the first time only 10 years prior. The other main character in the film is Elkin herself, a comparatively inexperienced climber whom Wolownick invites to join on a trip to the valley. Juxtaposing the accomplishments of Wolownick, despite her age, and Elkin, despite her wet-behind-the-ears climbing bona fides, Inner Walls attempts to break down those, well, inner walls that come part and parcel with tackling impressive feats.

Given that description, viewers might expect to be presented with more of an emotional climb than a physical one, and Inner Walls certainly does accumulate a few such moments: Elkin, halfway up a wall, exclaiming, “I shouldn’t be crying, I’m a fucking adult,” for example. But Inner Walls is shockingly thin, not just in delivering those (melo)dramatic beats, but on anything of substance at all. The shared adventure presented here between a young, more inexperienced climber and a seasoned vet is clearly intended to invoke some sort of feeling, but unlike the rock faces that are being scaled, the attempt and execution both come off unfortunately flat, with nothing much beyond easy platitudes to chew on.

On a technical level, the film at least checks the necessary visual boxes of the genre: sweeping, splendid views of Yosemite and other climbing destinations fill the frames, with highlighted action vantages from the bottom, middle, and top of the grand edifices that are being climbed. But in this age of digital filmmaking, and particularly in the subgenre of nature-centered documentaries, and even more particularly in the sub-subgenre of climbing films, pretty images alone aren’t nearly enough. Inner Walls isn’t alone in this failure — a lack of substantive discourse or genuinely engaging formal design has been an issue in adventure documentaries for years, and many never quite find the right foothold from which to appeal to targeted audience in a way that doesn’t feel like pure retread, let alone other viewers. Honnold may have given climbing films a new allure, but it’s beyond time for them to step out of his shadow. If there is anything new under the sun, or mountain, to be found, the past several years and countless efforts are proof that it won’t be found there. — EMILY DUGRANRUT

It Ends

It feels like many horror films in recent years begin and end in the pitch meeting. A kooky premise is introduced, funding is secured, and the brainstorming ends there. This is why so many, in execution, may begin intriguingly, but lose steam and peter out. This is also why It Ends is so refreshing. It takes its easy-to-market conceit and plays with it, iterates on it, takes it to logical conclusions, and keeps things interesting until the very last moment. Indeed, it’s difficult not to want to give the film too much kudos for simply bucking the industry trend of unfulfilled promise. The best horror, now as ever, requires follow-through.

First-time writer/director Alexander Ullom has another trick up his sleeve beyond subversion: an authentic rendering of Generation Z. Most cinematic depictions of this broad category tend to simplify, caricaturize, or otherwise simply get them wrong. It surely helps that Ullom is of the generation himself, but that’s never a guarantee of insight or perspective, either. These characters — four twentysomethings who are feeling aimless after college, and end up on a literal endless road to nowhere — feel immediately familiar, and are written well enough to also feel startlingly real — particularly for the genre. The performers offer no small assist to the writing, bringing the characters further to life and quickly establishing the group’s inner dynamics and tensions. They speak and act like people, are believable under extremely bizarre circumstances (if they stop the car, they are attacked; keep the engine running), and each one makes choices along the way that are at least parsable by logical standards, even if you wouldn’t necessarily do the same.

This, too, is part of the film’s unique appeal. Its story and its central metaphor are both exceedingly simple, but are crafted thoughtfully and injected with genuine pathos. The audience can’t help but be drawn in, particularly with regard to the central provocation: how would you react? The further these young adults drive, the more acute that troubling metaphor becomes. Why do we keep going? What’s it all for? What does any of it mean? Gen Z is not the first generation, of course, to deal with an overwhelming ennui, an existential dread that permeates everything, including our closest relationships. Ullom succeeds, then, in providing various specificities in character and perspective to help reckon with such eternal dilemmas. Without putting too fine a point on things, perhaps It Ends is, quite sincerely, about the friends we made along the way. — JAKE PITRE