…who scams people and smokes all the time and probably needs a pedicure and perhaps smells funny to boot, not to mention is unable to get it up…okay, he night be able to manage that but keeping it up is another matter. And yet the film is apparently sapphic at heart.
Aside from advancing the usual “beware of evil cis white males” trope, what the eff is this? Some have called it a creepy thriller, others a kind of comedy.
Directed and written by Georgia Bernstein, Night Nurse pops on 7.10.
Channelling Jack London‘s “White Fang” through and through.
Brad Pitt costars, incidentally, as an ex-special forces guy, dressed in the usual camo fatigues with gray whiskers and a tennis-ball coif.
You can tell from the get-go that David Ayer‘s Heart of the Beast (Paramount, 9.25.26) won;t play Venice or Telluride.
“You have to smoke in movies like you don’t give a damn, like you don’t need it, like you don’t care one way or the other if you have any on you, like your Zen-ness is rooted in your soul and not in the way you look when you light up, you desperate asshole.
“Once an actor looks as if he anxiously wants or needs a smoke to stabilize or enhance his currency with an audience, he’s a dead man. Once an actor pulls out a cigarette in order to have something to do during a scene (and you can always spot actors who do this), the man has permanently surrendered his cool. He’s finished, discredited.
“I’ve smoked on and off in my life. For very brief periods, I mean. I truly hate smoking and particularly myself for succumbing from time to time, which has mainly happened when I’ve been in Europe, more particularly during my times at the Cannes Film Festival. There, I’ve admitted it.” — from an 11.30.08 HE post called “Shame“.
Anyone who goes by the name of “Ronnie Dodge” is obviously some kind of slippery con artist. It’s one of those self-satirizing, self-identifying names like R. Crumb‘s “Weasel J. Weisenheimer,” a rodent-like drug dealer. “The last 40 minutes [of Disclosure Day] had me speechless,” Ronnie says. Sure thing!
What is happiness, the myriad blessings of hanging with a granddaughter aside?
An overseas cinematic marathon on the horizon…a demanding, never-enough-sleep adventure in the quietest, friendliest, most serenely seductive, away-from-the-hurly-burly city in the western world.
I read Tom Wolfe‘s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” when it first came out in ’87. Loved it, hated the DePalma film. Several weeks ago (mid-April) I borrowed a hardback copy from the Wilton Library, and week aIter week I failed to sit down and read even a small portion of it. Earlier today I happened to read the beginning of an early chapter and it finally put the hook in. I spent most of the day and part of the early evening reading chapter after chapter after chapter. It was all I wanted to do. Such delicious writing, glorious in its wonderful flavor and specificity.
No one really believed the denials from directors Gareth Edwards and Michael Dougherty when they tried to dismiss all those Fatzilla observations that people were sharing all over. Now that Godzilla has slimmed down — he’s clearly not obese in the forthcominmg Godzilla Minus Zero — it’s obvious that Edwards and Dougherty were lying all along….fully exposed as the corporate bullshitters they were from the get-go. Will they ever admit they were shilling for the overweight multitudes? Of course not.
Yes, Aaron Sorkin‘s The Social Reckoning (Sony, 10.9) feels like a mid-range cerebral thing, but what do people want from a film like this? Space lasers, bank robberies, fist fights and car chases? It’s about Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) giving into the ruthlessness that was waiting to happen all along and not feeling especially bothered by this. Defiant even. It’s a story driven by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), but who is Bill Burr‘s “Charlie”? A composite of some kind? Strong will obviously be great, as usual, and I’m sure Jeremy Allen White, playing “Broken Code” author and tech reporter Jeff Horwitz, will be fine.
Sitting through Gregg Araki‘s I Want Your Sex (Manolia, 7.31) is going to send me into convulsions…it’s going to drain my soul, make me quiver with discomfort.
Nobody wants to see any freckly-faced, doughy-bod, tiny-eyed ginger guy with his shirt or, God forbid, his pants off. Nobody wants to watch a nude, vaguely chubby guy with skin the color of Elmer’s Glue All wearing a leather gay-bar harness…sweating and hyperventilating while a 40ish dominatrix rides him like a bucking bronco.
Posted on 1.24.26: With I Want Your Sex having recently premiered at Sundance, it is completely fair to repeat HE’s fundamental opposition to watching Cooper Hoffman simulating the performance of sexual acts.
There’s a reason why John Wayne, Paul Newman, Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper and Errol Flynn used to get the girl but Walter Brennan, Andy Devine, Wallace Ford, Edgar Buchanan, Donald Meek, Ernest Borgnine and Rupert Grint didn’t.
In response to this rule-of-thumb Paddy Chayefsky wrote Marty, a teleplay (and then a movie version of same) about a homely Brooklyn butcher (a guy roughly in Cooper Hoffman’s league) who had such bad luck with girls that he was on the verge of giving up.
It was sad but 1955 audiences understood the poor guy’s predicament because the actor who played Marty was Ernest Borgnine.
Things are different these days. Now it’s “whoa, Marty the Butcher totally deserves to not only find love but experience great, Last Tango-level sex in his lonely-ass life, and here’s hoping he finds both, and — this is even better — that Delbert Mann will allow us to share in Marty’s orgasmic satisfactions.”
Movies that have focused on the decidedly dodgy practice of voyeurism (Alfred Hitchcock‘s Rear Window being the best known, most highly-rated example) or which have observed or considered characters who indulge in peeping or listening in (Blow-Up, Peeping Tom, The Conversation, Hi Mom!, Dressed to Kill, Body Double, One-Hour Photo, American Beauty, The Lives of Others) own their own little guilty corner.
But there’s one moderately interesting, not-great-but-certainly-not-awful voyeurism film that’s been pretty much destroyed — you can’t rent or stream it, and nobody has even spoken about it over the last half-century, despite an intelligent, half-decent script written by the once hugely successful Michael Crichton (Westworld, The Andromeda Strain, The Terminal Man, Jurassic Park) and directed by Jeannot Swzarc (Somewhere in Time).
Released in 1973, this somewhat pervy, low-budget indie was called Extreme Close-up, and it’s been all but erased from general consciousness, even within fringe film-buff circles. You can’t find clips or trailers or one-sheets…nothing. Crichton reportedly wasn’t a fan, but why has this admittedly-flawed-but-oddly-intriguing erotic exercise been totally squelched and all but ground into mulch?
it was basically about a TV news reporter (TV actor Jim McMullan, best known for playing “Creech” in Michael Ritchie‘s Downhill Racer) who rents some surveillance equipment in order to construct a piece about what he suspects may be a growing voyeurism phenomenon. He gradually gets sucked into high-tech peeping on his own volition, of course. It becomes a growing fetish for the guy, and it gradually swallows him up.
This little HE riff is probably the last time Extreme Close-Up will ever be mentioned, much less reflected upon by anyone, ever. There might be a few VHS copies lying around, but forget discs or streaming. Extreme Close-Up bombed financially during the last full year of the Nixon administration, and was re-titled Sex Through A Window when it played the sub-run circuit.
I’m thinking of an old Jack Klugman anecdote from a ’70s talk show. While sitting in his brightly-lit living room one evening the Odd Couple star was watching his wife try on several different evening dresses…taking one off, putting another on, over and over. She wanted Klugman’s opinion about which was the most alluring, but his main thought, he confessed on the talk show, was that he wished he was a stranger looking at her from across the street.
It hit me a couple of days ago that Kent Jones‘ Late Fame (Magnolia, 8.7), which I raved about nine months ago during the 2025 Venice Film Festival, is finally opening theatrically after months and months of kicking around the festival circuit.
It’s much, much better film, trust me, than Fame‘s delayed, limp-wristed release date implies.
I don’t care how many exceptional films open between now and 12.31.26 — Late Fame is now and forever among the ten best of the year. I know this.
Posted on 8.30.25: “Late Fame Is Sparely Rendered, Just Right — A Short Story Perfectly Translated Into a Tight Film.”
I’d been told not to expect too much from Kent Jones’ Late Fame, that it was on the minor side. This turned out to be hooey.
Based on a 1914 Arthur Schnitzler novella with the same title, Jones’ film is a fine, true-to-itself, cut-to-the-chase rendering that has a fine short-story economy.
Willem Dafoe‘s performance as the late-60ish Ed Saxberger, a onetime celebrated poet who peaked 45 years ago (sometime between ‘79 and the very early ‘80s) only to abandon poetry for a humdrum job at the post office, is one of his all-time greatest.
And Greta Lee is wonderful as Gloria, an arresting, electrically flirtatious, life-of-the-party type who sings and acts in small clubs and regional productions. Soon after Saxberger is embraced and celebrated by a small group of rich-kid fans who want him to start writing again, Gloria and Ed take to each other immediately, and the prime current and intrigue of Late Fame is whether or not this attraction will lead to something or just be a passing, flash-in-the-pan fancy…this is what holds you.
It’s clear early on that the latter scenario is the most likely, and so the viewer is seized with concern about whether or not Saxberger will make a fool of himself. Don’t go there, bruh! Step back and hold yourself in check.
Sharply sculpted by screenwriter Samy Burch, Late Fame wins you over early on with a well-honed tone of no-bullshit clarity, and within 96 minutes it hits the melancholy mark with admirable bull’s-eye precision.
It’s easily one of HE’s best films of the year (and surely of the festival) because it holds a tight and true focus from start to finish. Congrats to Jones, Dafoe, Lee and also costar Edmond Donovan as one of Saxberger’s rich-kid admirers, and a tip of the hat to everyone else on the relatively small production team. Excellent, character-driven filmmaking of this sort is all too rare.
