Ross McElwee is no stranger to dealing with death in his films. In 1993, he grappled with the loss of his father in Time Indefinite. At the time of the documentary’s release, he told an interviewer, “The filmmaking itself, in its attempts to confront death directly, to somehow paint it into a corner, turns out to be just another denial of death—a way of distracting the filmmaker from dealing with death and then getting on with life.”

Decades later, McElwee found himself staring down another loss: his 27-year-old son Adrian’s death by opioid overdose. The film he made in response to this tragedy, Remake, takes an opposite approach to death than Time Indefinite. Through processing a video archive that includes footage shot by Adrian himself, McElwee unblinkingly faces the paradox of his son’s virtual presence and physical absence as each passing day threatens to relegate him further into the realm of memory. Remake thus functions as a tribute to both the power of documentary to reconstitute the past and a concession of its limits to supplant it.

This investigation of Adrian’s life and death dovetailed poetically with another idea already in progress for McElwee: documenting the attempts to adapt his breakout film, 1985’s Sherman’s March, into a fictional work. That project, in which the director grapples with his singleness and Southernness, now feels like a progenitor of everything from reality TV to social media storytelling. Both self-reflexive journeys for McElwee in Remake drive home the painful realization that documenting his life can neither pause time nor preserve people.

I spoke with McElwee ahead of the theatrical debut of Remake at New York’s Film Forum, which will also screen Sherman’s March the week prior. Our conversation covered how his editing collaborations unlocked a new style of filmmaking, why he excised a storytelling device that enumerated opioid deaths, and what he thinks of himself as now if not a filmmaker.

Over the course of your career since Sherman’s March, the autobiographical style of filmmaking has gone from being novel to essentially a default mode of popular image-making. Since you’ve also worked as a professor, how would you instruct students to keep the focus on the perspective over the persona?

People don’t want to see me or hear from me. They want to see what I see. My son said, “Why can’t you appear before the camera more than you do?” But, yes, it’s been an interesting two decades. I’ve actually retired from teaching, but my students were all coming through with the idea of making nonfiction films, which meant making TikToks or something like them. Of course, we were giving them 16mm equipment to work with, but we quickly realized [that we were] going to be doing something different. They’ve actually adjusted quite well.

The first few assignments we sent them out in groups of two, [making] it a little more difficult to just film yourself. And using 16mm equipment, which you only have an allotment of 20 minutes to film, and it’s bulky. The 16mm film has to be loaded into camera magazines. It’s antithetical to the way that they’re used to firing off little quick videos on their phones. There actually hasn’t been such a huge problem of making the transition from analog to digital in terms of teaching.

As a fellow son of the South now living above the Mason-Dixon Line, has grappling with the paradoxes and contradictions of southern identity been helpful as a framework in sifting through other identities?

For me, there’s a component of awkward challenging that one senses as you look at my films over the years. Part of it is perpetually being defined as an outsider. Even when I’m down South filming, I live up North. What does that mean? Even when I’m up North, I’m from the South, so I’m always undergoing a compromise in how I feel about filming, and also how I’m perceived as a subject in the film. I tried to use that to some positive effect in creating a persona who drives the films forward. Someone who’s a little perpetually confused as to where he is in this world of North and South, and you could extend the metaphor to quite a few other things.

Walker Percy was the person that I identified with when I was younger. His novel The Last Gentleman was a seminal book for me in which he explored a lot of these contradictions of being a Southerner, but also dealing with what it means to meet people from the North. I think that it’s not so much literally about the South versus the North for me. It’s much more about perpetually finding myself in an outsider position. Not because of anything in my character or my persona, but more because I’m holding a camera. That makes me a different kind of being.

Remake’s coda gets at this idea that the camera is a tool for you to connect but might also serve as a shield keeping others from doing the same. Has this been a challenge you’ve gotten better at reconciling, or have others around you just come to accept this blurring of life and art that the camera facilitates?

I think both things are true. When I was experimenting with that, it was awkward in Sherman’s March because there weren’t a lot of people doing it. There were some, but not a huge number, and certainly wandering around the South with a camera was a very unusual thing for people who lived there to encounter. I managed to somehow work that into my persona, so people trusted me to film their lives. I think part of that has continued, although I think people are much more used to people with cameras filming real life. It’s become somewhat easier in some ways, but also more difficult because people are now much more aware of the fact that anything that anybody films of them can end up on the internet, and then you no longer have control of the image that you’ve allowed to be made of yourself. So, times have changed.

In previous interviews, you’ve described your own presence in the work as akin to playing a character who was a version of yourself but not the whole self. Did Remake require more of your true, vulnerable self?

I think in the beginning, I do play that character. It’s not really playing a character. It’s just exaggerating a certain quality about what’s real in you. In this case, it was this curiosity about intersecting with Hollywood, and seeing if it’s possible that they could take one of my documentaries and turn it into a fiction film, and how ironic and surreal it was for me. I play with those notions a bit, and it’s humorous and self-deprecating for the most part. I think it does change completely when my son dies, and I think at that point on, what you called the true self, or a truer version of the self, is what I fell into letting drive the film forward.

How did the decision to narrate the film to Adrian come about? Was it different from how you think about voiceover in your other work?

I can’t remember exactly how it happened, but I think I was just looking at the crayfish footage in the very beginning and end of the film. I actually remember audibly talking to him as I was watching footage and beginning to organize it, and using the second-person singular “you” when I’m thinking about Adrian. Then, suddenly I said, “Maybe part of the film, if not all of it, should be in the second person as a direct address to my son who’s no longer there.” I realized it did probably have a place in the film because I sampled it out on some people, and it just seemed to be appropriate. The whole film, that would be too much.

But no, I’ve never done it before, and I think it takes the film into a different mode than I’ve worked with. It becomes more like a letter to my son, who’s in a place where he can never receive the letter. It’s an epistolary attempt to connect with him, and it seems to work.

Both Sherman’s March and Remake follow micro and macro storylines, with larger political concerns inevitably bleeding into your personal life. How do you balance those in a cinematic narrative?

There’s no formula. I’ll say both with nuclear weapons and the opioid crisis, there’s a connection there that I never really directly thought about. Both are incredibly destructive forces that have been unleashed on the world, but I think it’s always been a matter of deciding how my addressing these issues can be done in a way that’s perhaps different and more effective than the way other documentary filmmakers have tried to address [them]. There have been dozens of films about nuclear weapon proliferation, both then and even more now. Of course, opioids have gotten a tremendous amount of press and presence in the world of documentary filmmaking, and I didn’t want to do that approach where it would really be objectively about just that.

At one point, I had little title cards that appeared in Remake, which started to do the countdown of how many people had died on opioids, which wasn’t ever addressed by me in these experiments that I did. I was just letting the cards pop up, and then the film would resume being about my life with whatever I was filming with Adrian or whatever was happening with Sherman’s March. I thought my intention at that point was to try and say the father is so distracted by all of these other things that he’s dealing with, he’s not even aware of what’s going on out there. Because on one level, I read the papers just like everybody else, but it didn’t seem to have anything to do directly with my life. At a certain point, I realized it was breaking up the film too much, so I abandoned that approach. But it kind of comes back at the very end where I do say the whole opioid catastrophe has caused me to be really angry at so many different sources, and I give a grocery list of places where I hardly know how to vent my anger.

Did Joe Bini, your co-editor, bring any of the texture from his work on fictional material with filmmakers like Andrea Arnold and Lynne Ramsay?

Joe brought his skills to help me solve major passages of the film that I was stymied by. I’d been working on the film for quite a while before Joe came in, and as to whether they derive from or reflect his work on other films, I guess they do. Looking back on it now, I don’t know if anything I saw that he edited was transferred over to the passages that Joe edited.

But let me just also say about his presence in the film that he wasn’t only a wonderful editor, but he also worked with us for a couple of months. I felt his humanity and his way of relating to me as a filmmaker who’s struggling with this project was something I really hadn’t experienced before in an editor. Of course, I’ve only had one or two editors before this because I’ve always edited in my own films. But working with him was just such a pleasure in a way that’s hard to articulate because he was just a really great person to work with, indefatigable and coming up with ideas all the time about how to improve something. But I can’t answer your question specifically about whether I can trace connections to those films. I never tried to do that.

I think we’re always the sum of our influences and experiences, and at a certain point you can never disentangle them. I’m thinking about those glimpses of your archive that represent the mental state of feeling like the reels of your life are out of order, which has a certain expressionistic quality that I see in Ramsey and Arnold but less so in your previous work. Were there elements of Remake that required you to rethink elements of your style and aesthetics?

Oh, sure, the whole premise of the film! I’ve never tried to deal with something so personally tragic. My father died, and that’s certainly part of Time Indefinite, but it’s quite a different thing when a parent dies as opposed to a son. Do you have children, just curious?

I do not.

It’s just a totally different, negative experience. But I’m usually in search of comic moments when I’m filming life around me, my own life, the lives of others, and that went out the window with this particular film. And the other component, by the way, is that a lot of this footage was shot by my son, and it occupies an important stretch of the movie. I had no control over what he shot, and I actually discovered quite a bit about his life by looking at that footage.

So, I think it’s radically different for me to make a film like this. Again, Joe was instrumental, and with Patrick Saxer, the associate editor, they kept coming up with ideas to do interesting cross-cutting between the present, which wasn’t the true present of the film at that point, and the past as represented by the home movies that I’d shot. I would’ve done some of that, but not as much as they did, and it was gratifying to see that work out as well as it did in the film.

A frequent refrain in Remake is your narration “I used to be a filmmaker.” Do you know what you are now, or has making this film brought you closer to an answer?

What I am now is someone who’s on the road pushing his film at the behest of his distributor as hard as he can. To be honest, I have no idea what I’ll do next. It could be another film of some kind that’s radically different from Remake, and maybe radically different than any film I’ve made previously. I just don’t know. I’m not forcing myself to really make that decision yet.

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“In Lebanon, contemporary history is not taught in schools,” reads the opening text of Lana Daher’s Do You Love Me. The documentary is a stunning visual and sonic excursion through Lebanon’s history comprised of material obtained from over 20,000 sources—a feat made all the more impressive by the fact that the country has no national archive. As images start to fly by too fast to read their accompanying (and not always subtitled) Arabic and French text, we’re cautioned that the narrative doesn’t follow a strict chronology as “disorientation is part of the journey…welcome to Lebanon.” Indeed.

The poetic observation “in this city, all memories melt into the sea” gives way to an arresting sequence of men, in shot after shot, simply facing the scenic water with their backs to an unknown lens. Guns begin to feature prominently—as do flowers and food stalls. Explosions and various depictions of wartime, from both newsreels and Lebanese action movies, are stitched together until fact and fiction become indistinguishable. (To tackle the seven decades worth of source material spanning film, photography, television, and home video, Daher collaborated with editor and co-writer Qutaiba Barhamji, and as a contribution to ongoing preservation efforts she also helpfully indexed quite a bit of the trove at https://www.doyouloveme.film/.)

“Since we have no one to refer to, we no longer know who we are,” states filmmaker and journalist Jocelyn Saab into a microphone while surveying the rubble of the house she lost to an Israeli airstrike. In a clip from Saab’s Lebanon in Turmoil, a female guide explains to a group of French-speaking tourists that the country has more than 18 religious communities, which, she theorizes, may be a source of the country’s conflicts—though she also touts its amazing cuisine.

Cut to a man on a boat waxing rhapsodic about the harmonious nature of Beirut. It’s a place where everyone gets along and no one hates each other, he assures an off-screen interviewer. But when pressed to expound further, the man laughs. “What do you want me to say?” he asks, reluctant to “air dirty laundry” in public. (In another scene from Lebanon in Turmoil, a far franker woman points out that sectarianism is actually enshrined in the government.)

A group of well-dressed elders engage in a game of cards—shot from various angles, it’s unclear whether they’re playing for the camera or themselves—while voiceover ominously tells us that “every bullet divides this city.” And as we segue between mirror images of the deadly real and cinematically staged, the distinction is rendered irrelevant, often to the brink of dark absurdity.

At one point, Do You Love Me’s soulful Arabic soundtrack even gives way to a catchy hip-hop number in which female singers deadpan rap, “In 2020…country is fucked…Corona for breakfast.” A man decries war tourism, calling it a form of fetishism. He’s certain that preserving bullet-riddled buildings does nothing to advance society. Whereas an artist complains that he had an exhibit just two months ago, and now the museum that hosted his work has been demolished. Collective memory is in a constant state of being erased as it forms.

In fact, as a pair of women discuss the state of the nation, one laments that reading a newspaper is a game of guessing what’s been erased. Elsewhere, a man who takes pride in his VHS tapes notes that he collects tales that tell a part of a truth at a given moment for certain folks. Daher’s film understands that historical truth and personal memory are inseparable from one another. (A woman even insists that she doesn’t have childhood memories so much as stories her parents told her.) “We’ve been exchanging favors for as long as I can remember…you hand me your tragedies, I give you my imagination” are the lines that play across the screen at Do You Love Me’s heartfelt close. And then suddenly we’re treated to a montage of dancing revelers set to an engaging pop score. Amid the bombs and economic shocks, the band will always play on.

The post ‘Do You Love Me’ Review: Lana Daher’s All-Archival Cinematic Love Letter to Lebanon appeared first on Slant Magazine.

With Minions & Monsters, Pierre Coffin uses the adorable titular characters that he voices to pay tribute to silent comedians, classic film genres, and the communal theatrical experience. From the get-go, the film sets itself apart from prior entries in the Despicable Me series with its playfulness. After the modern Universal Pictures logo hits the screen, the image begins to rewind, running through all of the studio’s logos all the way back to the 1910s. The Illumination logo that follows even shows the Minions in “rubber hose” style, setting the tone for many more nods to cinematic and animation history to come.

The story proper opens with a framing device, with a Universal Studios tour guide (Allison Janney) introducing the group she’s leading to two particular Minions, James and Henry, as forgotten pioneers of early Hollywood. Cue the flashbacks to their origin story, which sees several Minions inserted into everything from Eadweard Muybridge’s “The Horse in Motion” and Georges Méliès’s “A Trip to the Moon” to the Lumiere brothers’ “Workers Leaving a Factory” and “The Sprinkler Sprinkled,” widely considered the first comedy ever made.

This Zelig-like journey through film history arrives at a cohesive narrative after the Minions stumble onto a western film set and try to help the escaping villain succeed in his train robbery, seeing him as a new evil master to serve. The resulting chaos, of course, marks the collective of mischievous little mumblers as potential stars. But unlike the rest of the Minions, James, Henry, and new buddy Ed are the only ones who primarily see cinema as the master they’d permanently like to serve, with the help of European expat director Max (Christoph Waltz).

The rest of the film’s first half proceeds as an exuberant celebration of the next 20 years of Hollywood history, with explicit references to Safety Last!, Steamboat Bill Jr., Modern Times, and Citizen Kane, among others. However funny some of them are, there’s not a ton of depth to these various nods, but in this era where A.I. is proliferating throughout society and risk-averse corporate entities are thumbing their nose at cinema history, the film’s highlighting of the geniuses and craftsmen of yesteryear becomes something of a radical act.

Once the Minions get the boot from Hollywood not long into the sound era, Minions & Monsters begins to walk a more well-trod path—that is, it starts to behave a lot like the other Despicable Me films. While James and Henry set about to make their return to Hollywood with a monster movie, the rest of the Minions find themselves working with an alien robot, Dort (Jesse Eisenberg), intent on taking over the world after being mistreated by a group of tough guys.

Dort’s presence does lead to a handful of fun scenes inspired by low-budget 1950s sci-fi films, but the character is saddled with a non-starter of a love story with a spunky suffragette named Debbie (Zoey Deutch). At this point, over halfway through the film, James and Henry summon Goomi (Trey Parker), a creature resembling a Funko Pop version of Cthulhu, who after finally being freed promises to help them make their monster movie. These two newly introduced storylines not only feel tacked on, but they’re given no room to breathe.

Things, of course, go haywire for both sets of Minions, and Minions & Monsters continues to build to an extended action climax that, while moderately engaging, feels like something we’ve seen before in other modern-day animated films. Still, the film does at least freshen up the series formula, slyly using the kid-favorite Minions to smuggle in a celebratory message about the theater-going experience and the enduring power of cinema.

The post ‘Minions & Monsters’ Review: Pierre Coffin’s ‘Zelig’-like Love Letter to Old Hollywood appeared first on Slant Magazine.

It was a shock to see Johnny Knoxville in 2022’s Jackass Forever, 12 years after Jackass 3D, sporting natural silver-gray hair. The intrepid leader of the Jackass crew finally served up a reminder that while he, Steve-O, and the rest of the loveably loony band of misfits have survived more death-defying stunts than Evel Knievel, time comes for us all.

That earlier film introduced us to a bunch of new Jackass-ers, including Sean “Poopies” McInerney, Zach Holmes, and Rachel Wolfson, all of whom return again in Jackass: Best and Last. But if you were expecting the four years between the two films to lead to the crew’s elder statesmen taking even more of a back seat, that’s fortunately not the case.

Still reeling from the nasty concussion he got from being flipped on his head by a bull in Jackass Forever, Knoxville does serve as more of a master of ceremonies here, gleefully cheering on, or taunting, his compatriots from behind the mic. But while he may hold a subordinate position this time around, he still gets knocked around a few times by a ram while carrying a birthday cake and takes a hard shot to the groin from a giant carnival hammer.

If the last film suggested that Knoxville and company were more than ready to pass the torch to a younger generation, Jackass: Best and Last represents a course correction of sorts, as it proceeds as a celebration of the gonzo accomplishments of the original core group. We see a number of Jackass stunts from years past—several of which never aired, mostly for legal reasons—including some with Ryan Dunn, who died in a car crash in 2011, and Bam Margera, who was fired during the filming of Jackass Forever. Thus, even those who’ve moved on from the group remain deranged brothers in arms with those who continue to carry the torch.

The flashbacks at times lend a surprisingly touching emotional undercurrent to the film. On a few occasions, Knoxville is caught off guard and holds back tears, while another cast member breaks down before a stunt, lamenting that “this might be the last stunt we ever do.” This series has always been essentially about male bonding, and as dismissive as some members might be—Chris Pontius quips, “I’m not in touch with my emotions”—the finality of this entry is a reminder to both the Jackass crew and the audience that all good things must come to an end.

This wallow in nostalgia and sentimentality, though, isn’t a sign that the boys have grown soft. Jackass has always set out to entertain through the wildest of gross-out, self-flagellating tactics, and the film proves that even a tinge of melancholy won’t stop Steve-O from letting things go up his butt, from a thick, metal robot finger to a ping-pong ball, or everyone else from enduring electrical shocks and smacks to their genitals out of a twisted, implacable desire to walk the line between entertaining their audience and forcing them to cover their eyes in disgust.

None of the new material in Jackass: Best and Last is exactly top tier. But even on their way to hanging up their spurs, the crew is as willing to push boundaries as ever. As evidenced by a gut-churning, post-laxative game of Twister, Knoxville and his fellow Jackass-ers remain the poster children of anarchic lunacy. And whatever legacy they do leave behind—one of symbolizing American cultural decline or one of literally suffering for their art—Jackass: Best and Last proves that through the series’s unhinged show of depravity and devotion, Jackass will, for better or worse, endure as a symbol of America in the first quarter of the 21st century.

The post ‘Jackass: Best and Last’ Review: Johnny Knoxville and Company’s Wistful, Gross-Out Goodbye appeared first on Slant Magazine.

We’re approaching two decades of the box office dominance of superhero movies, during which time they’ve transitioned through just about every subgenre imaginable, including espionage thriller (Captain America: The Winter Soldier), neo-noir (The Batman), heist comedy (Ant-Man), and jukebox musical (Joker: Folie à Deux).

So, you’d be excused for thinking that Marvel and DC are struggling to find a new angle from which to iterate on the familiar curves and swerves of the superhero genre. This is ultimately what hurts DC’s newest effort, Supergirl, the most. Despite being fairly light on its feet, Craig Gillespie’s bratty, high-flying space western is fatiguingly overfamiliar in a genre that can’t help but keep looking backward for inspiration as it clings to relevance.

One of the last two remaining Kryptonians, Kara Zor-El (Milly Alcock) and her canine best bud, Krypto, are celebrating her 23rd birthday. Kara spends her time planet-hopping in a half-drunk stupor trying to forget the pain of losing her home, while her do-gooder cousin, Kal-El (David Corenswet), urges her to establish a new one on Earth with its superpower-giving sun.

One night, while dancing in a seedy bar on some backwater planet, Kara meets Ruthye (Eve Ridley), a young girl seeking revenge for the death of her parents at the hands of Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts), the leader of a group of space-faring human traffickers. Though Kara initially refuses to help, an altercation with Krem sees Krypto caught in the crossfire and fighting for his life. Kara begrudgingly joins Ruthye in tracking down the villain in a bid to save her only friend and discover the hero she can be as they cross paths with a trio of “glitch” pirates, a bevy of extraterrestrial thugs, and Lobo (Jason Momoa), an interstellar bounty hunter with an attitude.

This Supergirl is very different to the ethereal bombshell played by Helen Slater in the 1984 cult classic, the fiercely optimistic version inhabited by Melissa Benoist in the late-2010s CW series, or the ferocious take on the character briefly brought to life by Sasha Calle in the doomed 2023 Ezra Miller vehicle The Flash. As written by Ana Nogueira and conceived by James Gunn, this Kara is a punk-lite party girl with a devil-may-care attitude, less Joan Jett than Charli XCX. With a glint in her eye and a shock of shaggy blond hair, Alcock is the impudent flipside to Corenswet’s dimpled boy scout, with Noguiera’s script ably teasing out what makes the character more complicated than her more famous cousin.

While Superman symbolizes and embraces hope, Supergirl has always been animated by despair at losing her home and her people. That’s no exception here, and the film’s scale—smaller and more personal in comparison to other superhero movies—allows the themes of home, grief, and resilience after loss to shine bright, even when the set pieces leave something to be desired.

Gillespie’s direction betrays a discomfort when it comes to action, with scenes of mayhem that are always amping up but never quite peak despite the post-riot grrrl indie-pop needle drops on the soundtrack. More curious still is the way the film frequently leaves Kara’s fisticuffs entirely off camera or just out of sight, cutting many would-be banger sequences off at the knees.

Throughout, Supergirl draws from at least 10 different long-tapped cinematic wells. The main touchstone is Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy movies, but the filmmakers borrow liberally from westerns and samurai pics, while also pinching from Star Wars and Mad Max, all of which are derivatives of those classic genres, giving Supergirl a feeling of being a copy of a copy of a copy. Schoenaerts’s strikingly grotesque Krem, his face encrusted with subdermal piercings, feels like an early draft of a Mad Max baddie, and Ridley has the unenviable task of trying to wring genuine pathos out a role we’ve seen played many times before by more gifted adolescent performers like Natalie Portman and Hailee Steinfeld.

But Supergirl’s closest spiritual antecedent is Kathy Yan’s Birds of Prey, which won a dedicated cult of fans and critical appreciation for how it managed to spin its more familiar genre elements into anarchic, girly-pop perfection. Alcock’s Kara Zor-El, like Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn, has all the makings of a character ready to step out from the cultural shadow of the male character she’s derivative of and go her own way. If only the film had the same guts.

The post ‘Supergirl’ Review: Craig Gillespie’s Bratty, High-Flying, If Overly Familiar, Space Western appeared first on Slant Magazine.

Befitting writer-directors Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani’s backgrounds in visual and installation video art, Bouchra’s most striking quality is its aesthetic. The film’s collage style combines photorealistic backgrounds, textures, lighting, and mocap with pseudo-stop-motion, low-frame character animation and expressionistic color, populated by glassy-eyed humanoid animal character models whipped up in Blender 3D software on a tight budget and short timeline. The result is akin to the meeting point between Wes Anderson’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox, a brooding Wong Kar-wai romance, and Anthrocon-adjacent corners of DeviantArt.

At its best, this results in strange and beautiful images: of the humanimal characters wandering through grainy worlds drenched in deep neon hues and cloaks of shadow. Pockmarked concrete and dust specks are visible amid the drastically different architectural framing of rainy New York City and sunblasted Casablanca. Hand-painted art decorates a home, and pen-scribbled storyboards for the film we’re watching are glimpsed in cutaways. When framed in close-up, though, the characters are digital abstractions, all blurry textures and stiff movements.

The eponymous character—a stand-in for Bennani, whom she also voices—feels dual alienation as a Moroccan expat artist in America and lesbian in a socially conservative Muslim family. The jarring contrasts of realism and artifice speak to the Prada-sporting coyote Bouchra’s self-distancing and sense of otherness as she navigates jobs, girlfriends of different species, and an effort to rekindle her relationship with her mother. Aicha (Yto Barrada in some scenes, Dounia Berrada in others) struggles to accept her daughter’s sexual identity: To Bouchra’s particular angst, Aicha has responded to her coming out by not acknowledging it for nearly a decade.

The script, co-written with Ayla Mrabet, is a diaristic account of mostly mundane experiences, many of them centered either on mediation through screens—Bouchra’s reality TV and social media diet, as well as her metafictional attempts to translate her life into the film we may or may not be watching—or social interactions centered around screens. These are glancing, naturalistically delivered discourses on such thrilling questions as the ethics of sharing friends’ YouTube videos and “What if they made an Is It Cake? theme park?”

These slice-of-life scenes are generationally accurate representations of everyday life—they seem to be recreated from lived experiences, and never make any reference to the fact that all the characters are animals—but they aren’t given the narrative or dialectical form to actually say much about that life. The scraps of characterization around Bouchra, her family, her lovers, and the conflicting social milieus they inhabit never seem to add up to a comprehensive whole.

And there’s not much else to grab ahold of. The narrative, tinged with metafictional irony, jumps around in time and place confusingly, and with little directional momentum. It’s unclear what Bouchra is actually discovering in her journey of self-discovery, which seems to take her from one single-scene romantic partner to another and back again with little connective tissue. Her reconciliation with her mother and ever-progressing film project, the closest thing to structuring threads holding the film together, seem largely repetitive and disjointed for most of the film before intertwining at the end—the most moving segment, both an embrace and rejection of conventional dramatic form and cinematic fiction—en route to a pat, abrupt resolution.

The post ‘Bouchra’ Review: Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani’s Personal Work of Outsider Art appeared first on Slant Magazine.

Alice Winocour’s Couture begins as if it will really lean on the old-school movie star wattage of Angelina Jolie. Jolie plays Maxine, a filmmaker on her way to the offices of a fashion house for an interview about her upcoming film. As she walks up the mirror- encased staircase of the luxury brand’s headquarters (the actual location is Chanel’s 31 Rue Cambon apartment), she seems briefly startled by her reflection. It’s as if she’s aware of the vulgar opulence of the place sullying the effortlessness of her pared-down cool.

A star of Jolie’s caliber makes it all but impossible for us to see anything other than the actress in the frame, and Couture’s opening sequences point to Winocour’s desire to take advantage of that impossibility, refusing to extricate character from star. Indeed, the film proceeds for a spell as a study of the surfaces of glamour, and an alluring one at that. Until, that is, Maxine receives a worrisome call from her doctor about a biopsy and Couture turns into something different.

It doesn’t help that the film’s other storylines dilute the emotional link that we were on the brink of developing with Maxine. Throughout, we peek in on Ada (Anyier Anei), an 18-year-old model from South Sudan who’s struggling to learn her runway walk, and Angèle (Ella Rumpf), a make-up artist who’d rather be writing books but is told by her publishing coach that her writing is “not very credible.” By the time we return to Maxine, with Dr. Laurent Hansen (Vincent Lindon) telling her the bad news, you could be excused for thinking we were never going to see her again.

Winocour does try to animate Maxine’s storyline back to life by interspersing shots of a seamstress’s hands ripping white lace, cutting delicate fabric or stitching it, with Couture’s more narrative-advancing sequences. This is a sensible move to explore the multivalence of the titular word itself (after all, “couture” means stitching, or sewing, in French), but, then, so much of the film cumbersomely deals with the reality of its characters’ lives on the level of allegory. This makes the scenes that aren’t operating in that register, such as the love-making between Maxine and her co-worker, Anton (Louis Garrel), feel that much more welcome for being so at ease.

Garrel’s magnetism is so astonishing that you feel as if he’s the only one who could withstand Jolie’s on-screen presence, and that makes it a pity that the two actors share just a couple of scenes. At one point, Anton is undressing Maxine and notices the blood-orange markings around her breasts. Those markings vividly render the violence of illness, and Winocour pointedly cuts at one point to the apartment’s wide-open windows—a different kind of gash. All the while, the lovers’ dialogue is flooded by the carefree enjoyment of others.

Agnès Varda’s 1962 masterpiece Cleo from 5 to 7 ingeniously explored the agony of a woman facing the imminence of death, surrounded by those who don’t have to. Throughout, Corinne Marchand’s character walks past almost unbearably insouciant crowds in the street worrying about medical exam results. Varda’s film is so masterful because it knows that the experience of agony is best translated through duration, not the fragmentation of time.

It’s in the rare instance when Winocour doesn’t interrupt Maxine’s drama that the character survives the enormity of Jolie’s presence and comes to feel credible. And all that the filmmaker needed to do was find gravitas in characters lying half-naked, quietly, in an apartment in Paris—the very stuff of such great French films as Contempt and The Mother and the Whore. Otherwise, though, this is a film interrupted, prone to assaulting us with cliché lines like Maxine asking Anton, “Do you think we are responsible to what happens to us?” In such moments, Couture reminds us of the vulgarity of the flat surfaces that define our times.

The post ‘Couture’ Review: Fashion Drama Doesn’t Rely Enough on Angelina Jolie’s Star Power appeared first on Slant Magazine.

The Aussie import Leviticus could scarcely pick a better time to wash up on American shores. Writer-director Adrian Chiarella’s feature debut, which turns the conversion therapy inflicted upon two queer teens into a real monster, arrives hot on the heels of two breakout horror films, Backrooms and Obsession. When asked if he hopes to ride the wave of their box office triumphs, Chiarella professes his ambitions are more modest: “I just hope it speaks to people who are going through these sorts of experiences.”

Leviticus, which premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, offers multiple points of entry for anyone struggling to untangle their desire from imposed societal shame. Depending on how one wants to look at it, Chiarellla has made one of the sweetest horror films ever made, or one of the scariest teen romances. A tentative but tender bond forms between two male classmates, Joe Bird’s shy newcomer Naim and Stacy Clausen’s swaggeringly confident Ryan. But when the strict religious community in their provincial Australian town discovers the true nature of their relationship, a so-called deliverance healer arrives to “make new what was defiled.”

Chiarella visualizes the curse placed on Naim and Ryan as projections of their desires. The demon that preys on them throughout Leviticus takes the physical form of the crush against which their defense would be weakest, and it only grows stronger the more it understands their connection. This coming-of-age tale acknowledges that the process of self-discovery takes a different shape for those who must battle external and internalized homophobia. Gaining knowledge of oneself is often quite scary before it can be sustaining for the soul.

I spoke with Chiarella ahead of Leviticus’s opening week. Our conversation covered why horror was the right vessel for his commentary, how his cast transformed their characters, and what his experience as an editor brought to shaping the final film.

You made a point of casting actual teenagers for Leviticus. How do you go about harnessing the rawness of people still going through a lot of the processes of self-discovery that the characters are?

There was already a very organic connection between Joe and Stacy that was very apparent at the casting sessions, but if we were going to build this natural chemistry between the two of them, I just needed to know that they were comfortable around each other to go through the grind of actually shooting this film every single day. They’d stayed in touch ever since they first got cast in the roles, even though they were in different states.

And then, when we got into rehearsal two weeks out from the shoot, I sent them out to do a lot of exercises in situations. I drove them out to locations where we were going to shoot, and I got them to wander around those spaces, get lost, and then find each other. I sent them into a crowded shopping mall and told them to stay in character the whole time so they could feel what it would be like to have this connection between each other in public. And then, they just went out on their own and did things like escape rooms. They went and held a snake, because there’s going to be a scene with one. They started to understand what it would be like to be scared around each other, and to try to scare each other. That stuff was important too.

Joe and Stacy have talked about how the intimacy coordinator on the film helped teach them to play levels of desire. Did that approach correspond with your own understanding of their relationship in the writing?

When I was writing the film, I knew that the intimacy had to manifest in different ways throughout the story. I knew that scene on the bus, for example, was the point in the story where their intimacy had to reach the highest level. They had to really come together in terms of their physicality, but I never really knew how it was going to happen. I knew after they went to see the girl at the hospital, I felt like they were about to have a big breakup, so we needed to know that they really explored their feelings for each other. But how are they going to do that? Is it going to be at one of their houses? What do they do? And I remember a filmmaker friend of mine said, “Well, it should just be on the bus. If you’ve got on the bus there, why not [on the way back]?” I knew that that was going to be the high point of that exploration of intimacy.

You’ve said you struggled with that scene on the bus in the edit, and I’ve also heard you cut some scenes, including one near the end where the title was more clearly outlined. What guided you in the editing room in making these choices?

I started as an editor, so I knew the possibilities of what you could do. I was able to navigate the edit with some level of confidence. I also had an amazing editor, Nick Fenton, who’s worked with some extraordinary directors. I was very lucky that he chose to work on this film. Ultimately, one thing I’ve always believed as an editor, and now as a director, is that you have to tell just enough so that the audience can draw the connection themselves.

Sometimes, the moments that you don’t show, or the moments that you let the audience imagine in their head, are going to be so much more powerful than anything that the best director in the world could ever shoot. You’ve always got to think of your film as not only this beautiful thing that looks and sounds incredible. You’re also making something that’s a prompt to fire up the imagination of the audience. I’ve always had that mentality when I approach it.

Did that play into the “show, don’t tell” approach around the mechanics of the deliverance healer or the monster he unleashes?

It’s funny, people always say “show, don’t tell.” I think sometimes with filmmakers, showing becomes telling. They’ll show you a flashback to explain someone’s backstory and think they’re really clever. No one spoke, so they didn’t tell. They showed you. No, you told us! Like I said, it’s also about what you don’t show as much as what you don’t tell.

The first time I watched the film, I clocked that there’s a porous boundary between horseplay and foreplay among Naim and Ryan. But watching it again, it also struck me that this raw physicality and emotional inarticulacy among queer boys would make them uniquely vulnerable to how the monster would prey on them. Was that a connection you were drawing as well?

Definitely. And that’s why the character who ultimately dies is the one who struggled the most with that, and who expressed his desire through violence because of his own internalized homophobia. That’s what makes that character the most susceptible to this monster, so that was very much at the heart of the thinking behind the whole mechanism of this story.

Another thing that really grabbed me on rewatching the film was how present power lines were in the setting. Was this just a natural feature of a Australian town that might have seen better days, or did these structures mean something more?

They just looked really spooky when we were making it, like weird figures on the landscape. I also had this obsession with parallel lines when I was [developing Leviticus]. I always come up with visual ideas and motifs that we can look to, and I had said to the team, “I think there’s something about parallel lines with these two things that can never really meet.” You can see moments where there are little bits of parallel lines, so I think our DP and our camera operator were just constantly pointing the camera at things like power lines.

How were you finding the balance of explaining but not excusing the actions and ideas of Naim’s mother, Arlene? She’s so much more complicated because you don’t just flatten her into a unidimensional villain.

A lot of that is Mia [Wasikowska]. In the early days of the script, I thought maybe we were gonna have this horror movie mom like Piper Laurie in Carrie. But the more I thought about it, we were making a much more grounded film, so I steered away from that in the script. Then, when Mia came on, she knew that the real terror in this character would be a much more muted approach to how she was going to express her own feelings about her son and her choices.

I also thought that we sometimes see these sorts of stories about parents of queer teenagers, or parents of any teenagers, where they just get redeemed at the end. I think the truth is that it takes a long time to mend relationships between parents and children when something traumatic has happened. If we had made a film that was set over 10 or 15 years, maybe we would have been able to reach that moment with Arlene. I think we ended her story in the way that we did because it’s a story that takes place over such a short space of time.

How did you approach writing her final self-justification when she puts a bow on all that’s happened? She’s not entirely wrong that fear does have value; that’s how our species, to some extent, has survived. But I also think that’s only one part of the puzzle because we also need community, support, and love, which is what Naim is trying to tell her.

Yeah, I think what makes horror as a genre so universal is that fear is experienced by everyone. It’s a biological mechanism and a survival tool that we’ve had ever since we were animals. It doesn’t matter what culture you’re from, you can always understand fear, which is why horror movies travel so well. But I think the thing about fear is that it is often used to coerce and control people, and that was the thing that I wanted to explore with her as a character.

Did Mia’s approach to making Arlene’s emotions more muted inform how you shot the moment of her surrendering Naim over to the deliverance healer? To me, that was the scariest shot in the film: panning over to the negative space in the car as Naim screams for help while she betrays no emotion.

I think in the script, I had her smacking the steering wheel and getting all tense and trying to deal with the emotions of it on her own. Mia was like, “I’m gonna try something else,” and then she just sat there. I hadn’t shot-listed that. We had the short-sighted shot of her in the car, and that felt right because she was in this quite disconnected space. But when Mia performed the scene, in the moment, I said to the DP and the operator, “When she’s sitting there, just rebalance the shot.” It was really just inspired by what she was doing, and that, to me, is filmmaking: when you can really respond to what the people in front of the camera are doing, and then you actually rework the camera around that.

There are several shots in the film, like that really impressive oner in the school hallway when Ryan gets attacked by his monster in the bathroom, that probably could have just been done with some conventional coverage. How do you make the case that something harder is worth the effort?

I think that comes down to my background in editing. One of the things I noticed when I was cutting low-budget features and short films is that sometimes, when people are under this pressure to move so quickly, they just get standard coverage. You feel like, “Okay, I’m seeing the actors do it for the first time in this space. What am I gonna do?! Get the master and the two singles, okay? Great.” Then, when you get in the edit, and you’re assembling, you’re like, “Okay, here’s another scene that looks exactly like the last one.”

I knew that the best directors don’t get too showy, but find a way to convey the core emotion of the scene through the camera work, and there’s not really a science to it. It’s just about watching a lot of films, trying things out, and spending a bit of time in preparation thinking about what this thing is going to be. There are scenes that we had very specific, elaborate shots for, but they changed on the fly once I saw the actors in the space. It’s a tricky thing between preparation and [being] in the moment, but I think that’s the wonderful thing about filmmaking.

There are striking moments in the film where you aren’t just presenting the sonic landscape as it would be, so does the same approach apply to the sound design?

Yeah, that was something we worked on with Emma Bortignon, our sound designer. She used every minute of her time in post doing effects, all the way through to the final mix. It was about giving a sense of real life. We didn’t want to drown the film in music, although we had an incredible composer, Jed Kurzel. And we also didn’t want to go too heavy-handed with the sound design. We wanted moments where you’re just observing life, and then organically find the ways in which the sound design might get a little heightened, or just find the right moment for that cue to come through for Jed’s score. It was just a very delicate process of calibrating all of that [sound] around what was happening between the actors.

I love that you’ve embraced this new phenomenon of “clipping” and released a lot of footage from Leviticus for people to make their own fan edits. Has seeing how people so directly make your work their own changed the way you understand it?

I had noticed that it was something particularly prevalent in queer movies and TV shows where there’s a love story. So when the fans started doing it with the trailers, it came up in a conversation with the team at Neon. They were like, “Should we release some clips? Maybe that’ll just encourage people to do it more.” And I said, “Sure, why not? Let’s see what people do and encourage that creativity.” It’s not something I ever expected. When you make a film, you don’t even expect anyone to watch it. But when people start responding with their own creativity, doing fan edits, fan art, and fan fiction, you think, “Oh, this has got a life that’s like bigger than anything I could have imagined.” I think that’s because Joe and Stacy have this undeniable chemistry, and it’s there in the trailers and the few little scenes that we’ve released. I mean, the film’s not even out yet, but people are already latching onto that, which is really great.

The post Interview: Adrian Chiarella on Grounding the Horror of His Coming-of-Age Film ‘Leviticus’ appeared first on Slant Magazine.

With Toy Story 5, Pixar’s existentially restless series moves past ruminations on how toys remain frozen in time as their human owners age to ask what even is a toy in the age of widespread tech adoption. This idea is introduced at the top of Andrew Stanton’s film when Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), the child who inherited Andy’s toys at the end of Toy Story 3, receives her first tablet, Lilypad (Greta Lee), and becomes zombified by it. Worried about the girl’s social isolation and her own future, Jessie (Joan Cusack) marshals Woody (Tom Hanks) and Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) to rescue Bonnie from the device’s grip. To celebrate the film’s release, we ranked all of Pixtar’s features to date. Jake Cole

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on June 21, 2013.

31. Cars 2 (2011)

The effect of the Toy Story films is practically primal. They appeal to anyone who’s ever cared about a toy—one they outgrew, gave away, or painfully left behind somewhere. These films, with scant manipulation and much visual and comic invention, thrive on giving toys a conscience and imagining what adventures they have when we turn our backs to them. Conversely, the effect of Cars and its infinitely worse sequel, toons about dudes-as-cars not quite coping with their enormous egos and their contentious bromances, is entirely craven in the way it humorlessly, unimaginatively, and uncritically enshrines the sort of capitalist-driven desires that Pixar’s youngest target audience is unable to relate to. Unless, that is, they had a douchebag older brother in the family who spent most of his childhood speaking in funny accents and hoarding his piggy-bank money to buy his first hot rod. Ed Gonzalez

30. Cars (2006)

Maybe it’s my general aversion to Nascar. Maybe it’s that Larry the Cable Guy’s Mater is the Jar Jar Binks of animated film. Or maybe it’s just that a routinely plotted movie about talking cars is miles beneath Pixar’s proven level of ingenuity, not to mention artistry (okay, we’ll give those handsome heartland vistas a pass). Cars is the first of Pixar’s films to feel like it’s not just catering, but kowtowing, to a specific demographic. Having undeservedly spawned more merchandising than a movie that’s literally about toys, Cars’s cold commercialism can still be felt today, with a just-launched theme park at Disneyland. And while CG people are hardly needed to give a Pixar film humanity, it’s perhaps telling that this, one of the animation house’s few fully anthropomorphic efforts, is also its least humane. R. Kurt Osenlund

29. The Good Dinosaur (2015)

The Good Dinosaur has poignant moments, particularly when a human boy teaches Arlo, the titular protagonist, how to swim in a river, and there are funny allusions to how pitiless animals in the wild can be. But the film abounds in routine, featherweight episodes that allow the hero to predictably prove his salt to his family, resembling a cross between City Slickers and Finding Nemo. There’s barely a villain, little ambiguity, and essentially no stakes. There isn’t much of a hero either. Arlo is a collection of insecurities that have been calculatedly assembled so as to teach children the usual lessons about bravery, loyalty, and self-sufficiency. The Good Dinosaur is the sort of bland holiday time-killer that exhausted parents might describe as “cute” as a way of evading their indifference to it. Chuck Bowen

28. Lightyear (2022)

In theory, Lightyear’s premise is a clever route out of the nostalgia trap, for playing on our knowledge of and presumed affection for Buzz Lightyear, while allowing the filmmakers to craft something completely new. In practice, though, the film is one of Pixar’s least inspired releases to date, a slickly produced but soulless spectacle whose jokey banter and wall-to-wall space-opera action drowns out the story’s emotional beats. The overall look of the film is disappointingly unimaginative, a conglomeration of elements borrowed from the canon of science fiction cinema—the bug aliens from Starship Troopers here, the light trip from 2001: A Space Odyssey there, and set designs cribbed from Star Wars all over the place. And, sadly, the film’s plot and characters are no more distinctive than its visuals. Keith Watson

27. Elemental (2023)

Easter Eggs and sight gags are a cornerstone of the Pixar universe, and there are some small delights to be found throughout Elemental, even if it’s easy to imagine the writers checking off their elemental puns from some brainstorm-generated master list. But if toys helped kids understand their imaginations better, monsters aided them in excavating their fears, and emotions come to life allowed them to make sense of their feelings, it’s not quite evident what Elemental’s use of fire and water will illuminate. As much as all Pixar films may convey potent metaphorical messages for the human world, Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., and Inside Out wouldn’t work, respectively, without toys, monsters, and emotions. That’s the point. But there are plenty of ways to tell a “fire and water don’t mix” story without literalizing fire and water. Which is to say that Elemental doesn’t make enough of a case for its own existence. Rubins

26. Monsters University (2013)

It’s perfectly fair to walk away from Monsters University with a shrug, wondering what Toy Story 3 hath wrought, and lamenting the fact that even Pixar has fallen into Hollywood’s post-recession safe zone of sequel mania and brand identification. Still, Monsters University proves a vibrant and compassionate precursor to Monsters, Inc., the kid-friendly film that, to boot, helped to quell bedroom fears. Tracing Mike and Sulley’s paths from ill-matched peers to super scarers, Monsters University boasts the animation studio’s trademark attention to detail (right down to abstract modern sculptures on the quad), and it manages to bring freshness to the underdog tale, which is next to impossible these days. Osenlund

25. Cars 3 (2017)

Cars 3 is content to explore the end of Lightning McQueen’s (Owen Wilson) career as a series of sports-film clichés: He’s an old dog trying to learn new tricks, struggling with a sport that seems to have passed him by, and facing, for the first time, a sense of vulnerability. The template turns out to be a natural fit for the Cars universe, rendering it with a visceral sense of speed, excitement, and struggle. Cruz Ramirez (Cristela Alonzo) is a plucky foil to McQueen and a three-dimensional presence in her own right. Cruz’s presence also allows the filmmakers to bring some social conscience to this sometimes backward-looking franchise, exploring the discouraging pressures placed on young female athletes while also nodding toward the historical exclusion of women and racial minorities from racing. Watson

24. Brave (2012)

In Brave, Merida (Kelly Macdonald) brings a curse upon her mother, Queen Elinor (Emma Thompson), and they have two days to figure out how to break the spell or Elinor will remain a bear forever, giving in to a savage nature which bubbles beneath the surface throughout the film as she tries to keep hold of her humanity—and keep herself from eating her daughter. The film flirts with commentary on the plight of women and responsibility, as well as on the struggle for balance in relationships between mothers and daughters. But ultimately it offers nothing more than a caricature of a well-worn conceit (a princess doesn’t fit into her shiny box, so she just breaks all the rules and does what she wants), neatly repackaged for another generation of young moviegoers who haven’t met Princess Jasmine from Aladdin and don’t realize that they’re eating yesterday’s leftovers. Richard Scott Larson

23. Onward (2020)

Onward doesn’t have a distinctive visual style, but it does showcase Pixar’s mastery of depth, light, and shadow. As in Monsters University, the fanciful and the everyday are well harmonized. That’s still a neat trick, but it’s no more novel than Ian (Tom Holland) and Barley’s (Chris Pratt) experiences. Animated features often borrow from other films, in part to keep grown-ups interested, but the way Onward recalls at various points The Lord of the Rings, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Ghostbusters feels perfunctory. And it all leads to a moral that’s at least as hoary as that of The Wizard of Oz or Peter Pan. While Onward begins as a story of bereavement, it soon turns to celebrating the payoffs of positive thinking. That you can accomplish whatever you believe you can is a routine movie message, but it can feel magical when presented with more imagination than Onward ever musters. Mark Jenkins

22. Toy Story 5 (2026)

Toy Story 5 leans into the sentimental beats that are familiar to the series, except those moments too often give the film the feel of a PSA aimed at convincing parents to monitor their kids’ screen time. Still, there’s some spark to the brief moments where we see an approximation of Bonnie’s (Scarlett Spears) imagination when she plays with her old toys. For a few seconds, the world is suddenly rendered in a kind of 2.5-D where the usual three-dimensional outlines of the characters are placed against flat backdrops that look drawn in crayon. A few tear-jerking moments are also effective, none more so than one involving Jessie finally coming to terms with her abandonment issues regarding her original owner. Still, for the first time, a seemingly unnecessary Toy Story sequel has at last pushed the material too far, finding a compelling new topic but failing to build a sturdy structure on top of it. Cole

21. Hoppers (2026)

Hoppers is hectic, laying on chatty world-building that only becomes less coherent the more of it there is: When is killing animals a big deal and when is it not? It falls well short of providing any satisfying exploration of its weighty theme of persuasion versus violence in the face of oppression. Characters’ goals and motivations change every few minutes as more and more characters and plot elements are introduced—often by way of characters sardonically explaining recent events, to the effect of “Wow, that just happened.” Eventually, the film manages to contort itself through a confrontation with an 11th-hour villain to arrive at a Disney-friendly platitude as disconnected from reality as its intra-species politics. Friedberg

20. Inside Out 2 (2024)

Inside Out 2’s theme is blared in big bold print early on as the wrecking crew that makes room in the control center for all the new emotions inside Riley’s mind (Kensington Tallman) puts up a giant placard that reads “puberty is messy.” There are a thousand ways that can manifest for a young girl like Riley, and maybe if Pixar’s film had taken place over a longer period than just a few days at a hockey training camp, we’d be able to see that mess with a bit more nuance. Instead, Inside Out 2 is left to contend with the deeply specific and limited range triggered by what would seem to be Riley’s very first conflict of social interests. Still, the film creatively mines plenty of material from even this thin slice of life, especially from the visual side. Well-timed comedic reactions feed gently into the exploration of emotions, and there are some fantastic running gags stemming from Riley’s cringeworthy childhood obsessions. Justin Clark

19. Turning Red (2022)

The strongest point of Turning Red is the culturally specific and widely relatable relationship between 13-year-old Mei Lee (Rosalie Chiang) and her mother, Ming (Sandra Oh). But the film turns increasingly plodding as it progresses. The culture clash embodied in the mother-daughter tension leads, after some sitcom-esque “sneak out to party” hijinks, to a rather uninspired battle between giant pandas that seems like it could have been taken out of the latest Marvel extravaganza. The metaphor of adolescent change and rebellion was perhaps a bit overworked even before it culminates in an extended, high-energy climax at a boy band concert in which the action feels less motivated by the characters’ feelings than it does by heavy-handed symbolism and the commercial value of combat between super-beings. Pat Brown

18. Luca (2021)

Possessing only a fraction of Pixar’s trademark emotiveness and none of the grandiose conceptualism of, say, Soul, Luca feels like a throwback to one of Mark Twain’s rollicking picaresque sagas, with Luca (Jacob Tremblay) and Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer) as fun-loving fish-monster equivalents of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. The episodic, shaggy-dog quality to the plotting has a way of undercutting Luca’s emotional beats, but in the end, the luminous atmosphere of the film’s setting is more resonant than any particular thing that transpires there. The setting feels lived-in and thought-through, and one gets the sense that the animators know who inhabits every single house, what business occupies each storefront, and what every little side street looks like—even the ones that we never get to see. Watson

17. A Bug’s Life (1998)

A Bug’s Life deals in a wealth of familiar themes and narratives, peddling the importance of community inherent to ant populations, positioning unlikely hero Flik (Dave Foley) as a fish out of water when he seeks help for the colony, and reinforcing the tyke-targeted notion that “being small isn’t so bad.” But when Flik, a “country bug,” goes searching for warriors to combat the ants’ oppressive grasshopper nemeses, and instead returns with a ragtag troupe of circus insects (think the gang from James and the Giant Peach performing amid the carnival debris of Charlotte’s Web), a more intriguing theme emerges. As the actors and acrobats help the ants to craft a massive bird (a salvation-bringing idol that will hopefully scare off the enemy), they also introduce art as an alternative to fear and violence, and A Bug’s Life presents entertainment as something not just diverting, but heroic. Osenlund

16. Incredibles 2 (2018)

Incredibles 2 is a fleeter, funnier film than the original, and it gets considerable comedic mileage out of Jack-Jack’s wild capriciousness, as evidenced by the hilarious sequence in which the Parr family’s youngest uses his multifarious abilities to battle a feral raccoon just for the hell of it. Because superhero movies are still male-dominated, it’s refreshing to see a film such as this one place a female hero at the center of all its skirmishes. Unfortunately, pulling Helen (Holly Hunter) away from her family makes Incredibles 2’s plotting feel slightly mechanical. As it ping-pongs between displays of Elastigirl’s derring-do and the rest of her family’s domestic worries, the film becomes almost sitcom-like in the way its broken up into clear A and B storylines. It also doesn’t help that the story’s villain is so half-baked, as from the moment the Screenslaver (Bill Wise) shows up, it’s painfully obvious who’s pulling his strings. Watson

15. Soul (2020)

When Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx) catches his big break auditioning to play with a pro quartet, Soul follows him into “the zone.” As pinks and purples swirl around Joe and as his fingers coax unexpected harmonies from the keyboard, the film gives itself over fully to his music. For these gloriously substantial few minutes, it’s jazz set to animation rather than the other way around. Walk away 15 minutes into Soul, at the end of what would make, on its own, a snazzy, sublime short, and you’ll have seen Pixar’s greatest, purest tribute to the arts. But Joe’s joy, and soon the film’s, is cut short when he plummets down an open manhole, and finds himself on the pathway to the Great Beyond. And it’s somewhere around here that Soul starts to veer down its own wrong path, abandoning its accessible storytelling, along with that vitalizing jazz soundtrack, for a confusing maze of pseudo-spiritual planes of existence. Dan Rubins

14. Elio (2025)

Elio’s aliens are truly some of the most, well, alien character designs to grace the big screen in quite some time, which gives an extra boost to the film’s core theme. Our villains are essentially human-sized leeches wearing sea-creature carapaces as armor, and it’s their despotic leader Grigon’s (Brad Garrett) creepy-looking but adorable-acting son Glordon (Remy Edgerly) who winds up being our eponymous hero’s (Yonas Kibreab) best friend. It’s the wrong assumption that all relationships are interchangeable that nearly dooms Elio, and, in the film’s most humanistic moment, it’s his planet’s collective of nerds who save him. Elio’s best trait is the one that permeates every truly great first-contact story—not just the hope that our first meeting with the strangest of strangers is benevolent, or that the universe is too vast to determine they all wish good or ill on us, but that connecting with humanity still has value. Clark

13. Toy Story 4 (2019)

As well-told and emotionally effective as Toy Story 4 is, it’s difficult not to believe the third film would have functioned better as a send-off to these beloved characters. In fact, Toy Story 3 might as well have been a send-off for everybody but Woody (Tom Hanks), as the new and potentially final entry relegates the traditional supporting cast of the Toy Story films to the background. Even Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) is reduced to dopey comic relief, pressing the buttons on his chest to activate the pre-recorded messages that he now misunderstands as his “inner voice.” Toy Story 4 is very much a Woody story. His gradual acceptance of his new position in life and his reconnection with Bo Peep (Annie Potts) are moving, and it’s still remarkable how much Pixar can make us identify with a toy. But for the first time, a Toy Story film feels a bit like it’s resting on its plastic laurels. Brown

12. Finding Dory (2016)

Partly due to its heady, somewhat devastating invocations of Dory’s (Ellen DeGeneres) distress, Finding Dory takes time to develop its comedic rhythm. Many of the original’s supporting characters reappear in a series of busy, lackluster callbacks, but a new school of secondary players add fresh life to another formulaic journey home. And though it suffers from some overly familiar caper antics, the film nobly embodies the “Rescue, Rehabilitation, and Release” motto of the Marine Institute where most of the story takes place. Dory’s short-term memory loss, a source of mostly comic relief in the original, is evoked with bracing seriousness after the blue tang recovers a sense of where she lost track of her family. Christopher Gray

11. Inside Out (2015)

In Inside Out, director Pete Docter envisions the human mind as a sort of ongoing board meeting, where five primary emotions engage in the immediate tasks of impulse-governing and crisis-management in front of a vast backdrop of core values and archived memories, which constitute our consistent yet constantly evolving identities. The plot is little more than an excuse to tour this massive expanse of what turns out to be rigorously demarcated emotional terrain. As such, the film often feels both wonderfully complex and weirdly reductive at the same time. That formula, though, seems as sound an embodiment of the human brain as any other. Every step of this journey can feel, all at once, both on the nose and dazzlingly inventive. The best analogue for Riley’s mind is a Hollywood studio backlot, where rickety old sets crumble as more modern, complex new products are developed. Gray

10. Coco (2017)

Coco offers a festive, reverent, and wide-ranging pastiche of Mexican culture, touching on everything from Frida Kahlo to luchadores to the golden age of Mexican cinema. With the possible exception of WALL-E’s depiction of our planet as a depopulated trash heap, this is perhaps Pixar’s bleakest vision, a world in which one dies not once but twice, the second time from a collective disregard for a person’s very existence. But as the script begins to unravel the secrets of 12-year-old Miguel’s (Anthony Gonzalez) ancestors, the film gets bogged down in its over-plotted family melodrama. With so much information to plow through, the film too often bolts from one plot point to the next when it should be simply sitting back and enjoying the moment. Because when it turns down the volume on its cacophonous narrative and turns up the music, Coco achieves moments as powerful as anything in the Pixar canon. Watson

9. Finding Nemo (2003)

Finding Nemo’s sea of details can offer new discoveries with each viewing (even the varying levels of sediment are staggeringly, gorgeously specific). The film targets the evils of packaging and captivity, juxtaposing the free-swimming fish of Australia’s coastal reefs with those contained for show in a dentist’s cold, sterile office. That same notion of the ills of constraint plays out on the micro level, as clownfish Marlin (Albert Brooks) needs to let go of his own confining fears, which he imposes on his missing son (Alexander Gould). Your favorite part of this enduring masterstroke might be the current-cruising sea turtles, the Bah-ston-accented crayfish, or Geoffrey Rush’s benevolent pelican, but odds are it’s Dory, Ellen Degeneres’s amnesiac regal blue tang, one of the greatest animated characters in history. Osenlund

8. Toy Story 2 (1999)

Toy Story 2 begins with an accidental tear of Woody’s fabric, the bust of a seam that renders the right arm of Andy’s beloved cowboy limp. Rarely—or, perhaps, never—has an animated film seen such an apparently minor wound produce such epic ripple effects. The rip prompts Andy to leave Woody behind when he departs for “Cowboy Camp,” which in turn leads to Woody accidentally ending up in the family’s yard sale, which then sees him shuffled off to evil Al’s Toy Barn, which introduces him to the rest of his hallowed “set,” as well as the notion that, like all toys, and all of us, he has a certain shelf life. To watch Toy Story 2 after having seen Toy Story 3 is to see the clues and feel the pangs of a brilliant, cohesive trilogy, which focuses, above all, on the universal, impossible need to claw for as much time as possible. Osenlund

7. The Incredibles (2004)

Throughout The Incredibles, Brad Bird toasts and critiques the best and worst elements of countless James Bond and superhero flicks to suggest that Middle America is above the lies Hollywood sells the public. When called to a Dr. Evil-esque island on a top-secret mission, the film’s main character, Bob Parr (Craig T. Nelson), a.k.a. Mr. Incredible, not only reclaims his lost identity, but he must also confront the effects a past transgression had on someone else’s sense of self. There’s plenty of soul-searching that goes on throughout The Incredibles, but the film is most successful as a defense of family: When Elastigirl (Holly Hunter) comes to her husband’s rescue, Bird gets considerable emotional mileage out of the character’s continued attempts to bend (here, literally and figuratively) in order to keep her family together. The Incredibles may fight to save the world, but they teach us to know thyself. Gonzalez

6. Toy Story 3 (2010)

The Toy Story films, with scant manipulation and much visual and comic invention, thrive on giving toys a conscience and imagining what adventures they have when we turn our backs to them. They address the way we emotionally invest in toys, sometimes (as in Toy Story 2) even throwing in a canny bit of air-tight commentary on consumerism as a bonus for the adults in the room. Such is Pixar’s unique gift that these stories about toys fighting to be played with become, for us, confrontations with our own mortality—from birth to rot and everything in between. Though Lee Unkrich’s Toy Story 3 sometimes indulges the snarkiness that completely dictates the world of DreamWorks’s inane Shrek movies, its powerhouse of an ending, proof of the company’s emotionally rich ability of telling tales that force us to grapple with our mortal coil, is so humane it disarms our qualms. Gonzalez

5. WALL-E (2008)

WALL-E goes beyond inviting comparisons to E.T., Number 5, R2D2, even Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp. The Waste Allocation Load Lifter relies on them, for writer-director Andrew Stanton understands this robot janitor as a study in memory and inheritance. The last surviving bot of a failed program meant to clean up after our bad habits, WALL-E learns about desire from a movie musical we left behind and bides his time creating buildings from our compacted trash—totems that give expression to his hunger for purpose in the same way the pyramids attest to the ancient Egyptian race’s human possibility. Throughhout WALL-E, the eponymous robot’s loneliness is palpable not only in those soulful eyes, one of which he has to replace after it incurs great injury, but in his dogged, workaday need to clean and assemble, no doubt hoping that one day someone might notice that WALL-E Was Here. Gonzalez

4. Toy Story (1995)

At the start, the power of John Lasseter’s Toy Story resides in the novelty of imagining what goes on when toys are left behind on their own—a thought that, clearly, introduces a vast, engaging world of possibility. The flagship Pixar film also thrives on its accessibility, and the near-universal recognition of so many of its elements, from Mr. Potato Head (Don Rickles) to the distinct childhood thrill of spending a night out at a bitchin’ place like Pizza Planet. But its grandest achievement, of course, is its triumphant riff on the boy-and-his-dog tale, which preaches the value of the symbolic bond between toy and owner, a bond reinforced by the humbling of Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), who learns that, by manufacture alone, he’s no one special, but to one kid, and one family, he’s someone very special indeed. Osenlund

3. Monsters, Inc. (2001)

Pete Docter’s Monsters, Inc. set the bar very high for Hollywood escapism, not for the way it encourages detachment as an escape from routine, but how it cannily asks us to question why we walk away from the reality of our lives, though not always through cartoon doors. A celebration of realized childhood fears, abundant in subtle, cleverly deployed film references that never stoop to the easy snark that’s become the modus operandi of DreamWorks Animation, the film heartbreakingly attests to the way fear is intricately bound to childhood experience. A monster inadvertently makes a little girl cry, thus breaking the purity of their trust, and by film’s end, their reconciliation and subsequent separation becomes a humbling reminder of what it’s like to fear, imagine, and hope. Gonzalez

2. Ratatouille (2007)

A testament to Pixar’s courage, Brad Bird’s Ratatouille might be the animated film with the bravest premise, daring to not only make a rodent an adorable protagonist, but to place him in the kitchen—the kitchen of one of the premiere restaurants in the foodie mecca of France. The title alone is a bit of brilliant punnery, and rat Remy’s puppet-like control of awkward restaurant heir Alfredo Linguini (Lou Romano)—an effortless employment of the man-behind-the-curtain and big-thing-in-small-package tropes—is as thrilling to watch as Remy’s zinging visualizations of tastes and flavor combinations. What will always make Ratatouille close to a critic’s heart, though, is the inclusion of the critic himself, a formidable figure whose disenchantment is lifted by evocative art that opens his heart wide. Osenlund

1. Up (2009)

Is Pete Docter’s Up the only Pixar creation where a character has spilled blood? But that’s not what makes the film so special. It’s the inspired sense of scale, thoughtful framing, and dreamlike interplays of colors and shapes, the simultaneous fear and joy roused by its nutty flights of fancy and suspense, and the fearless emotional affect its story never ceases to risk. A series of colorful vignettes on love, fidelity, and adventure, Up is emotionally and aesthetically hieratic, conflating, from its very first, Citizen Kane-referencing sequence, the act of watching movies with the ecstasies and banalities of living. Life, like going to the movies, is seen as a grand communal experience, a ride worth enduring even when it teeters toward and over the brink of nightmarish abysses. To the end, the film works out adult ideas about our notions of self, our sense of disappointment and complacency, and the hopes we’re always choosing to either look up or down to, and doing so in a language of sound and image so intense in its visual clarity and depth that it needs no translation at all. Gonzalez

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With Toy Story 5, Pixar’s existentially restless series moves past ruminations on how toys remain frozen in time as their human owners age to ask what even is a toy in the age of widespread tech adoption. This idea is introduced at the top of Andrew Stanton’s film when Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), the child who inherited Andy’s toys at the end of Toy Story 3, receives her first tablet, Lilypad (Greta Lee), and becomes zombified by it. Worried about the girl’s social isolation and her own future, Jessie (Joan Cusack) marshals Woody (Tom Hanks) and Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) to rescue Bonnie from the device’s grip.

It’s an interesting wrinkle that Pixar, which began under the aegis of Steve Jobs, has devoted an entry of its flagship franchise to anxiety over the impact of screen addiction. But it’s also hard to ignore that here we are, yet again, with Woody and company being brought out of storage more than 15 years after the third film seemingly had the last word on the value of toys playing a transient role in the lives of children by affecting their cognitive and intellectual development.

Jessie’s attempts to break Bonnie of her attachment to Lilypad is consistent with her long-running fears of being forgotten by her owners. But the hamfisted subplot about Buzz’s desire to propose to the cowgirl and the return of Woody, who struck out on his own at the end of the fourth film, feel like nothing more than thin justifications for getting the gang back together.

The aesthetic whimsy that’s made the Toy Story movies so popular is all but absent in Stanton’s film. Most of the action occurs within two drab bedrooms, and Toy Story 5 contains few of the clever perspective tricks that dot its precursors. Ironically, for a work of art worried about the diminishing power of imagination, the film often feels like a procedurally generated series of images meant to remind you of the characters you loved in your youth. (There are fewer new characters than usual, but one, a primitive electronic toy that teaches toddlers to potty train, is notably voiced by Conan O’Brien, who brings all his manic, oddball energy to the part.)

Toy Story 5 leans into the sentimental beats that are familiar to the series, except those moments too often give the film the feel of a PSA aimed at convincing parents to monitor their kids’ screen time. Still, there’s some spark to the brief moments where we see an approximation of Bonnie’s imagination when she plays with her old toys. For a few seconds, the world is suddenly rendered in a kind of 2.5-D where the usual three-dimensional outlines of the characters are placed against flat backdrops that look drawn in crayon.

A few tear-jerking moments are also effective, none more so than one involving Jessie finally coming to terms with her abandonment issues regarding her original owner. Still, for the first time, a seemingly unnecessary Toy Story sequel has at last pushed the material too far, finding a compelling new topic but failing to build a sturdy structure on top of it.

The post ‘Toy Story 5’ Review: Pixar’s Sentimental and Redundant P.S.A. About Screen Addiction appeared first on Slant Magazine.