Reader's Choice Archives | Deep Focus Review

Friendship

Brian Eggert — Wed, 07 May 2025 14:30:11 +0000

Note: A24 will release Friendship in theaters on May 9, 2025. This film was screened at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival and originally reviewed on Patreon on April 9, 2025. Given some failing or peculiarity in my personality, I haven’t formed many lasting relationships with other men. The suggestion of a “guy’s weekend” sounds like an unbearable chore. Camping trips, watching or playing sports, gaming together online, or even just a hangout with an all-male crew—such typical male-bonding rituals register with me as tedious or entirely off-putting. So, with that recognition and second-hand embarrassment, I watched the events unfold in Friendship, an unrelenting comedy that plays like the inverse of I Love You, Man (2009). In a singular performance that crystallizes the frenzied energy of his riotous Netflix shows, Detroiters (2017-2018) and I Think You Should Leave (2019–present), Tim Robinson plays Craig Waterman, a seemingly average person with no substantive male friendships. When Craig begins to buddy up to his new neighbor, a parasitic relationship forms, and the experience brings out the worst, most desperate, competitive, possessive, insecure, and narcissistic aspects of his behavior. It’s hilarious and horrifying. The trouble begins with a misdelivered package. Craig walks down […]

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Caught by the Tides

Brian Eggert — Wed, 07 May 2025 13:30:35 +0000

Note: Janus Films and Sideshow will release Caught by the Tides in theaters on May 9, 2025. This film was screened at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival and originally reviewed on Patreon on April 15, 2025. A document of the historical and thematic undercurrents in the last 20 years of Jia Zhangke’s cinema, Caught by the Tides, the latest from the Sixth Generation Chinese director, plays like a medley or greatest hits album of scenes and ideas from his previous work. Jia has spent his entire career chronicling the sociopolitical and infrastructural changes resulting from China’s race to globalize, expand its economy, and urbanize its landscape, and how those dramatic updates have impacted his characters. He has approached this preoccupation by blending fiction and documentary within a single film (see Xiao Wu, 1997). However, sometimes he dabbles in pure nonfiction (I Wish I Knew, 2010) and occasionally pure drama (Mountains May Depart, 2015). Caught by the Tides is among Jia’s most experimental and unconventional films. In terms of structure, the film transcends the standards established during the last three decades of Jia’s output, even while ruminating on the same basic themes. On the surface, Caught by the Tides […]

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Fear Street Part Three: 1666

Brian Eggert — Mon, 05 May 2025 15:04:24 +0000

The last installment of the Fear Street trilogy, 1666, not only solidifies the series in the folk horror subgenre but also raises questions about how to define the format—as film or television. Director Leigh Janiak’s ambitious final chapter reaches back to colonial times in America to search for answers about the curse on Shadyside, whose long history of killings stems from Sarah Fier, a witch who vowed revenge before early settlers hung her from a tree. The capper reframes the mythology by putting the trilogy’s hero, Deena (Kiana Madeira), into Fier’s perspective, where she sees what really happened. Along the way, the movie, if it already wasn’t apparent from the references to witchcraft and the occult in 1994 and 1978, goes full folk horror. That would be enough story for a full feature, except Janiak and her cowriters Phil Graziadei and Kate Trefry return us to the story proper, in 1994, to wrap up the conflict established in the first entry. Whether one defines the Fear Street trilogy as a long six-hour movie, three movies, or a television miniseries doesn’t really matter. However you cut it, the result is so damn entertaining. 1666 underscores how the series as a whole […]

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Fear Street Part Two: 1978

Brian Eggert — Mon, 05 May 2025 14:55:24 +0000

The second film in the Fear Street trilogy, 1978 might seem to have the thankless task of filling time before setting up the conclusion in 1666, where all questions are answered and conflicts resolved. Or, it might also be the most compelling of the three, opting for an Empire Strikes Back approach by offering a darker and more complex scenario. It’s a little bit of both: a sequel that underscores how the trilogy has three distinct features but also forms a complete saga with an overarching narrative, segmented according to the primary time period in which each chapter unfolds. In the middle part, director Leigh Janiak shows her versatility and genre love with a summer camp slaughterfest reminiscent of the Friday the 13th or Sleepaway Camp series, albeit with a late-1970s aesthetic steeped in browns and faded yellow hues. Armed with the same relentless pacing and penchant for gnarly deaths as its predecessor, 1978 is particularly bloody and brutal, but fortunately, it’s driven by compelling characters and actors, resulting in another hugely entertaining piece of throwback slasher horror, albeit more rooted in the overarching mythology this time. Janiak and her fellow screenwriters Phil Graziadei and Zak Olkewicz pick up the […]

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Fear Street Part One: 1994

Brian Eggert — Mon, 05 May 2025 13:35:17 +0000

Netflix’s deliriously entertaining Fear Street series blends the narrative structure of a slasher movie with the release plan of a television miniseries for an unconventional trilogy. The movies resist categorization as young adult material by leaning into the horror genre, delivering a gory, hard-R presentation that only alleviates its tension with self-aware humor. Steeped in 1990s nostalgia, the first installment, Fear Street Part One: 1994, stands as a fast-paced and effortless start. It’s a nimble yarn directed and co-written by Leigh Janiak, who draws inspiration not only from R.L. Stine’s exhaustive series of Fear Street books but also popular horror cinema. Janiak embraces her clear love of Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream franchises, complete with conspicuously absent parents, a deep-seated local mythology, and a rising body count of dead teenagers. The series, released in July 2021, with each installment dropping one Friday after another over three weeks, weaves together original stories that become more involved in an overarching narrative with each subsequent entry, making them difficult to consider as stand-alone features. Still, 1994 accomplishes much, establishing the key themes that will appear in the two sequels, 1978 and 1666, while also delivering a thoroughly absorbing trilogy […]

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The Front Room

Brian Eggert — Thu, 01 May 2025 13:16:53 +0000

There’s no arguing with zealotry. No rationalizing with fanaticism. No debating superstitions. The Front Room is about how, in America, some Christian extremists think they know what’s best for everyone else, and telling them “No thanks” doesn’t work. The story involves one such fundamentalist who moves in with her stepson and his pregnant wife. Steeped in the “signs and wonders” of the Holy Spirit, she embeds herself in the family like a parasite, feeding on their energy and attempting to replace it with her own. A proud member of the “United Daughters of the Confederacy” who makes no apologies for her heritage in Southern racism, Solange is played by Kathryn Hunter in a vivid performance. Her body appears withered and frail, but she stomps with a cane in each hand as she walks, her movements resembling a contorted spider. Her gruff voice is loud and commanding, and she speaks with an authority that others yield to and admire. But for the non-believers who welcome Solange into their home, she’s a corruptive and hostile evangelical presence in their otherwise secular domestic sanctuary. Brandy Norwood plays Belinda, an anthropology professor at a local college who finds herself unemployed as she prepares to […]

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Rope

Brian Eggert — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 14:10:05 +0000

Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope is a unique experiment. It emerged from a pivotal moment when the director shifted between major studio partnerships and gained newfound creative freedom. Made during a transitional period that found him just free of the contract with taskmaster producer David O. Selznick that had brought him to Hollywood, and just before entering two long partnerships with Warner Bros. and Paramount Pictures, the 1948 release found Hitchcock embarking on a production that marks several firsts for him. On Rope, he served as producer for the first time, working alongside Sidney Bernstein under their short-lived production company, Transatlantic Pictures. Rope would be one of two features made entirely by the company, along with Under Capricorn (1949). The latter was such a financial disaster that Hitchcock and Bernstein had to dissolve Transatlantic, which had already begun developing Stage Fright (1950) and needed Warner Bros. to assist. Rope was also Hitchcock’s first color feature, his first film that attempted to replicate a work of stage drama, and his first experiment in reel-long takes upwards of ten minutes—a gimmick that had interested him for years and which Rope, with its single setting in a Manhattan apartment, could facilitate. Yet, this lesser-celebrated feature […]

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House of Pleasures

Brian Eggert — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 16:05:34 +0000

From social pariahs to sources of desire, sex workers have been given countless labels. Society and art have characterized them as deviants, criminals, disease-spreaders, and victims; elsewhere, they are empowered by their sexuality, maintain hearts of gold, or represent entrepreneurs in the so-called world’s oldest profession. Despite the range of available stereotypes, director Bertrand Bonello resists all of them in House of Pleasures, a deeply humanist work from 2011 that reconsiders the lives of sex workers with notes of realism yet no shortage of poetic license. The original French title, L’Apollonide: Souvenirs de la maison close, refers to the name of the film’s early 20th-century Parisian brothel, evoking a sanctuary of beauty and pleasure by alluding to the Greek god Apollo. The latter part of the title denotes “memories from the closed house,” employing a French euphemism for a brothel and underscoring the filmmaker’s intent to give a personal account from the sex workers’ perspective. As ever, Bonello resists crystallizing his subjects by neither romanticizing nor condemning them, preferring instead to consider their time between work, the textures they inhabit, the joys and humiliations they endure, and, above all, their layers of humanity. The house in the film is a […]

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Saint Laurent

Brian Eggert — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 15:55:21 +0000

Among the more fascinating details about Saint Laurent, Bertrand Bonello’s oblique film that ruminates on the revolutionary fashion designer, is that Yves Saint Laurent’s former lover and business partner, Pierre Bergé, did not endorse it. Bergé approved of the far more straightforward biopic directed by Jalil Lespert, called Yves Saint Laurent, which was also released in France in 2014. Lespert’s conventional drama hits every predictable beat, adopting a paint-by-numbers biographical structure that sought prestige attention, including a César Award for its lead actor, Pierre Niney. And though Bonello’s 2014 film earned multiple César Award nominations, several more than Lespert’s film—it won none of them—it also takes a more complex view of its subject. Instead of aggrandizing Yves Saint Laurent’s legacy and building his myth into a cinematic commercial for the YSL brand, Bonello invests himself in the complex and broken person—played in a committed internal performance by Gaspard Ulliel—who created some of the most iconic fashion lines of the twentieth century. Rather than a hagiography, Bonello confronts his subject’s personhood without dwelling on his genius, leaving viewers with no clear sense of how one should feel about Yves Saint Laurent. That’s part of what makes the film so exceptional. Saint […]

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Zombi Child

Brian Eggert — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 14:05:04 +0000

“Listen, white world, as our dead roar. Listen to my zombie voice honoring our dead.” – René Depestre’s poem “Cap’tain Zombi” Zombi Child, Bertrand Bonello’s slyly political genre trap, adopts the name and pretense of a horror film to confront matters of French identity, colonialism, and cultural appropriation. Defiantly conceptual, the French filmmaker’s 2019 feature looks at first glance like a coming-of-age drama spiced with a dash of Haitian Vodou magic. But Bonello never does anything in straightforward terms, and Zombi Child is no exception. Blending ethnographic attention to Haitian folk culture with an intellectual underpinning that investigates France’s history, the director’s typically unconventional approach raises questions about what he intends to convey. A reactive might wonder why a white Frenchman is making a film immersed in Haitian Vodou, and whether that constitutes cultural appropriation. Another perspective may view the film as a response to cultural appropriation, portraying the real horror of how the French treat cultures they’ve ruled over with a sense of otherness and mysticism. Zombi Child challenges the colonizer’s view, using the trademarks of a genre picture in service of a pointed critique of France’s mask of liberty as it compares to their historical behavior. Thoughtfully conceived […]

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