What movie would Sean Connery choose to follow up his run as James Bond with? Well, it’s The Offence, but this was his second movie after. And it’s definitely the first film John Boorman did after Deliverance. What they created was a film that absolutely cannot be easily explained. I’ve watched it in the double digits and there are whole sequences that I can’t unpack. In the year 2293, Earth has lived beyond the end of the world. There are two populations, the immortal Eternals and the mortal Brutals. The Eternals live in the Vortex, a country estate that affords them comfort at the expense of excitement. The Brutals live in a wasteland growing food for the immortals, yet face constant danger. The Brutal Exterminators are the ones that keep the machinery running, as they are ordered by a giant flying stone head named Zardoz to kill other Brutals and exchange food for more weapons. One of the Brutals, Zed (Connery) goes for a ride on Zardoz, even temporarily killing its pilot, Arthur Frayn. Zed goes to the Vortex, where he meets Consuella (Charlotte Rampling, The Damned, Asylum) and May (Sara Kestelman, Liztomania). They defeat him with psychic powers and use him for menial labor. Consuella wants hm destroyed, while May and Frayn want to keep him alive. Zed learns that the Eternals are watched over by an artificial intelligence called the Tabernacle. Because they live forever, they have become bored and no longer have sex. Some of them have fallen into comas and are known as Apathetics. And despite their vast resources of knowledge, all they care about is making special bread, meditating and enforcing their social rules by artificially aging anyone who violates their byzantine rules. The Eternals misjudge Zed — he is far more intelligent than he lets on. He learns that he is part of Arthur Frayn’s eugenics experiment and that Frayn is also Zardoz. He’s also learned to read, and once he discovers that Zardoz isn’t a god but a play on the Wizard of Oz, he becomes enraged. Zed lives up to Arthur’s goal for him — to deliver death and freedom (one and the same) to the Eternals. He absorbs all of their knowledge as he leads the Brutals on a killing spree against the Eternals. The film ends with still images of Consuella and Zed falling in love to the tune of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony — an ode to soldiers — and giving birth to a son before they age into skeletons. It’s complex and simple and moving and silly all at the same time. Kind of like the rest of Zardoz. I didn’t even mention the animated scene of how erections work or Connery in a wedding dress or the weird outfit Zed and the Brutal Exterminators wear — knee-high boots and a giant red thong. The film was inspired by Boorman almost making The Lord of the Rings. Although the project ended, he wanted to see if he could create his own fantasy world. A fantasy world that makes little or no sense, as evidenced by the spoken word intro that 20th Century Fox executives asked Boorman to create. The goal was to help the audience understand the film. But just look at this dialogue: “I am Arthur Frayn, and I am Zardoz. I have lived three hundred years, and I long to die. But death is no longer possible. I am immortal. I present now my story, full of mystery and intrigue — rich in irony, and most satirical. It is set deep in a possible future, so none of these events have yet occurred, but they may. Be warned, lest you end as I. In this tale, I am a fake god by occupation — and a magician, by inclination. Merlin is my hero! I am the puppet master. I manipulate many of the characters and events you will see. But I am invented, too, for your entertainment — and amusement. And you, poor creatures, who conjured you out of the clay? Is God in show business too?” There’s no way to really prepare you for this movie. Trust me when I say that there has never been a movie like it before or since.

Marissa (Bridget Regan) and Eve (Joanne Kelly) have seemingly been pitted against one another since they were born. Their father, Raymond Hale (Samuel Roukin), was an oppressive collector of art who felt that his life of privilege kept him from his true calling of being an artist. He sword that his daughters would be guided to becoming the best artists who ever lived. To do that, Hale taught them that their pain would guide them to become better at their craft, despite the damage that it would do to their psyches. Marissa became a cold, unfeeling art scenester, using her sister’s art to gain entry into a world that she doesn’t have the talent to survive in. Eve has regressed inward, spending as much of her time as possible inside the family’s crumbling home, the same place where she found her father dead from suicide.

Their relationship is best summed up by a flashback where both paint in front of a waterfall. Their father yells at Marissa, complaining about how she doesn’t seem to care. He then forces Eve to burn her sister’s canvas, intonning, “The seed of creativity is adversity.”

Eve became a prodigy and was known in the art world before puberty.

Marissa was always jealous of her.

And if this seems like an art world version of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, the filmmakers should take it as a supreme compliment.

Years later, the sisters come back together as Marissa learns that Eve plans to donate the priceless art that her father owned to a local gallery. It just so happens to belong to the fiancee of the girl’s childhood friend Cormack (Alain Uy), who has also remained in their hometown. Instead of becoming a great painter, he’s content to take care of Eve from afar and have a tattoo shop.

Appearances are reality for many in this film. Marissa is as much a mess as Eve, but she never admits it. Eve may appear like she’s hanging on to life by her fingernails, yet she can feel joy at the opportunity to reconnect with her sister.

Director and writer team Melora Donoghue and Kimberly Stuckwisch have created an entire world populated by characters who live and breathe. Marissa blows into town, seemingly always one step ahead of her sister. Yet Eve, while innocent, is not without guile. I rooted for her in this.

This is quite a movie. I hope it gets the kind of distribution where so many people can watch it.

You can watch this and so many of the films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. I’ll be posting reviews and articles over the next few days, as well as updating my Letterboxd list of watches.

Mr. McDaniel (Paul Lazar, Silence of the Lambs) is a retired teacher obsessed with a game all the social media kids are playing called Sweet Relief. They all name someone who they dislike and people vote on whether or not a murder would be justified. If it is, they must complete the murder. If they back out, they’re killed.

The game starts to infect a small town. Nathan (Adam Michael Kozak) moves away from home and cohabitates with Jess (Alisa Leigh). This causes his young sister Hannah (Lucie Rosenfeld) to be trapped with their strange mother who constantly watches McDaniel online. Hannah and her mother think that Nathan has betrayed their family and if they have to play the game to get him back, they’re in.

There’s also a child killer turned drug deal and now police informant reformed Gerald (B.R. Yeager) who is obsessed with the fact that he’s kind of a cop. He’s also still a murderer and when Jess catches him, all of these stories meet in a bloody and nihilistic finale.

Directed and written by Nick Verdi, this has a pace outside of what you see out of Hollywood. There are moments that just wait and wait for you. The characters all feel authentic and even when they’re locked into their own odd thought patterns, you never lose sight of the fact that they could be real.

It’s not perfect yet it’s rough edges are what make it interesting. The kids — and the adults and the senior citizens and everyone in town — are not alright. You can’t stop watching.

You can watch this and so many of the films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. I’ll be posting reviews and articles over the next few days, as well as updating my Letterboxd list of watches.

Directed and written by Ludvig Gür, Gudstjänst — which is being released in the U.S. as In the Name of God — is about Theodor (Linus Walhgren), a priest who is often the only person at his masses. The worshippers are dying off and his wife Felicia (Lisa Henni) wonders if they should move on. He’s happy that his mentor Jonas (Thomas Hanzon) has come to town. The problem is that it seems like he may be deranged. After all, he just killed a dove right in front of him and sprayed him with hot blood.

Yet when Felicia collapses and is soon hospitalized, dying from a mysterious ailment, Jonas offers to save her if Theodor follows him just as he did by going into the priesthood. Now, he must accept the true priesthood of God and kill sinners to save his wife’s life.

Jonas has already captured a rapist and all the younger man has to do is snuff out his sinful life. He does. His wife is healed. He becomes known as a faith healer and people come back to the church. His wife is with child. God has a plan.

Yet to make the prayers of his new followers come true, he must keep killing. Because the God who has listened to Theodor is the Old Testament one, the vengeful demander of sacrifice, the God that asked Abraham to murder his own son just to see how far he would go.

This is the very definition of a moral quandary. Isn’t murder a sin? Yet aren’t the people who Theodor is hunting and destroying evil incarnate? Isn’t all this murder making the world a better place? And if he can make miracles happen at the same time, isn’t that God’s will? Can you become addicted to creating magic happen in the lives of those who follow your teachings?

You can watch this and so many of the films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. I’ll be posting reviews and articles over the next few days, as well as updating my Letterboxd list of watches.

In this movie directed and written by its stars, Gavin Charles and Alex Conn, two filmmakers explore a dead mall yet find themselves trapped within its environment, as the hallways, stairwells and abandoned stores start to trap them.

Made in Kansas City on nearly no budget — $37 or so IMDB would like you to believe — this is a liminal horror movie. That means that it takes place “in a space between two states of being.” This is a big YouTube horror trend and before every Hollywood movie starts to run it into the ground, Charles and Conn are here first.

Hollywood pitch meeting shorthand: Think Skinamarink.

The duo keep yelling, “This is another liminal space!” as they find all these backrooms and the Lunch Zone inside what was once a place of capitalism. Now, it’s a husk. This feels like the next level of found footage and taking streaming video into the horror film.

So wait — for the old people like me — what are The Backrooms?

According to Wikipedia, they “are usually portrayed as an impossibly large extradimensional expanse of empty rooms, accessed by exiting (“no-clipping out of”) reality.” They’re also quite often filled with sinister beings.

In 2019, a 4chan thread posted a “photograph of a large, carpeted room with fluorescent lights and dividing walls.” It upset people and no one could quite figure out why. One anonymous poster was able to sum it up and some of their words came to be the title of this movie: “If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.”

A24 announced that they are working on a film adaptation of the Backrooms based on Kane Parsons’ videos, with Parsons directing. Roberto Patino is set to write the screenplay, while James Wan, Michael Clear from Atomic Monster, Shawn Levy, Dan Cohen, and Dan Levine of 21 Laps are set to produce.

So again, it’s nice that these guys got there first.

Much like the aforementioned Skinamarink, nothing much happens. But that’s sort of the aesthetic, I guess. Again, I’m ancient and I remember when found footage was Cannibal Holocaust and not The Blair Witch. I feel about this the way I do about pop music: I am almost forty years past when that music should be relevant for me. For those who it is for, I hope they love it.

You can watch this and so many of the films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. I’ll be posting reviews and articles over the next few days, as well as updating my Letterboxd list of watches.