Check out my April preview column for interesting movies that might still be playing on local screens. Now for the May highlights….
I Saw the TV Glow
[Watch the trailer. Opens May 17 at the Esquire Theatre, Clifton.]
The A24 studio has transformed art house theaters in recent years with such edgy and smart action films, comedies, and dramas as Everything Everywhere All at Once and Love Lies Bleeding, introducing millennials to independent movie houses that were not previously on their multiplex-dominated radar. The distributor hopes I Saw the TV Glow, a thriller with horror and dramatic elements from director/writer Jane Schoenbrun, will be the next hit in their stable.
I Saw the TV Glow played at this year’s Sundance Film Festival in the Midnight section and received some astonishingly good reviews. Its story is complex enough that I can’t briefly do it justice, even after having seen the trailer, but it centers on a teenage boy and girl in suburbia who become fascinated and even obsessed by a strange 1990s TV series that’s set in a world like their own yet supernaturally different. Some critics see in it a metaphor for trans identity; some also see in it a tribute to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
In Vanity Fair, Richard Lawson couldn’t have been more moved by the film: “The writer-director Jane Schoenbrun is a child of modern media—much like the rest of the old-Millennial age cohort, those of us weaned on VHS and broadcast TV in the 1990s and perhaps too well-positioned as initial receptors of the internet’s advent. In their first film, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, Schoenbrun dove, deeply and frighteningly, into the internet. For their second, the astonishing I Saw the TV Glow, Schoenbrun explores the stuff that came right before we had access to everything, when objects of obsession were less accessible and thus perhaps more special, more significant. In investigating pre-internet fandom, Schoenbrun finds a heady allegory for identity.”
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair
[Watch the trailer. Screens at 7:30 p.m. May 6 at the Woodward Theater, Over-the-Rhine.]
Schoenbrun’s first film came out in 2021, but I don’t recall it screening here in that terrible coronavirus year. But just ahead of the eagerly awaited I Saw the TV Glow, World’s Fair will play at the Woodward Theater. As the theater’s website succinctly and perhaps ominously describes its story, “In a small town, a shy and isolated teenage girl (Anna Cobb in a stunning feature debut) becomes immersed in an online role-playing game.”
Sasquatch Sunset
[Watch the trailer. Now playing at the Esquire Theatre.]
This sleeper hit from indie directors David and Nathan Zellner starts its third week at the Esquire and has also been at several multiplexes. That it’s finding an audience is strange given its bizarre premise. A family of furry sasquatches (played by Jesse Eisenberg, Riley Keough, Christophe Zajac-Denek, and Nathan Zellner) spend a year trying to survive in a tough wilderness, occasionally recreating and trying to procreate. It’s billed as a comedy-drama, but as the Sasquatches don’t talk, don’t look for snappy wisecracks.
Jayson Musson: His History of Art
[Watch the trailer. Now on exhibit at the Contemporary Arts Center, downtown.]
For something completely different in the way of a “movie” experience, head to the CAC any time through September 8 to see this art film that’s part of an exhibit devoted to Musson’s work. The 60-minute work screens repeatedly in its galleries.
His History of Art was made while Musson, who was born in the Bronx and is now Brooklyn-based, was a 2022 Artist in Residence at Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum. He created three episodes of a faux TV series—with a laugh track—that seek to inform and intellectually challenge those somewhat intimidated or misinformed about art history. CAC Director Christina Vassallo was executive director of the Fabric Workshop in 2022.
His History of Art is brainy and challenging, but also a comedy. Musson, a visually compelling figure on screen with behemoth hair, thick beard and generous smile, discusses art with a Muppet-like puppet named Ollie, and sometimes they use salty language to make a point. There are also some unconventional characters making guest appearances. For instance, a famous prehistoric-era miniature sculpture “The Venus (Woman) of Willendorf” has a cameo in Musson’s presentation as a life-size-or-larger figure that talks. The statue is notable for its nudity, especially the large breasts, so this makes for an unusual situation.
The overall point is satire, but there’s also a deeper motive. “Good humor always moves toward truth,” Musson explained to The New York Times. “This exposure of truth is what causes a joke to resonate with a listener and connect with their often-unspoken experiences and feelings. Jokes uncover, jokes expose, jokes bring into the light things which are oft buried by individuals and a society.”
Blackwoods
[Watch the trailer. Screens at 4 and 7 p.m. May 11 at the Garfield Theatre, downtown.]
Presented by Cincinnati World Cinema, this new feature is from Cam Marshall’s local Hear and See Productions, which makes films addressing societal issues, especially those that explore Black themes and family dynamics. This story is based on a Black male wellness retreat Marshall attended at Red River Gorge in 2021 after his father passed away. He discovered there was a need to have close male friends to share such times of need, but that making new friends can be difficult.
Married to Comics
[Watch the trailer. Screens at 7 p.m. May 16 at the Esquire Theatre.]
John Kinhart’s new film is about the extraordinarily talented Cincinnati couple Justin Green and Carol Tyler, both of whom excel in the relatively new and serious art form of autobiographical comics. They moved to Cincinnati from California in the late 1990s; Green died in 2022. In 1972, while living in San Francisco, he wrote what’s considered the first such comic masterpiece, Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary. Tyler continues to make important work, such as 2015’s Soldier’s Heart: My Campaign to Understand My World War II Veteran Father. This film chronicles their careers, their personal crises, and their deep love for each other and their art.
Harambe
[Watch the trailer. Screens at 6 p.m. May 28 at the Esquire Theatre.]
This 2023 documentary has just a one-word title, but what a controversial word to say in Cincinnati. Harambe was the 17-year-old western lowland silverback gorilla shot and killed by a Cincinnati Zoo employee after a 3-year-old-boy fell into its restricted area and Harambe dragged him on May 28, 2016. That date still feels like it was yesterday, given how terrifying the incident was and how debatable the shooting turned out to be. This screening will be on the event’s eighth anniversary, which is being referred to as Harambe Day.
Director Erik E. Crown takes a scorching and critical look not only at the Zoo’s actions that day but also into the very nature of zoos. It is, ultimately, about whether animal rights conflict with zoos as an institution. A note at the film’s end says the Cincinnati Zoo denied requests for interviews.
While Harambe has received some positive reviews, it’s also been criticized on the Zoochat.com forum. I recommend seeing it and then seeking further information on the issues it raises.
Wildcat
[Watch the trailer. Screens May 16-19 and May 22-26 at the Speed Art Museum Cinema, Louisville.]
Deserving special attention is director Ethan Hawke’s new film opening in Cincinnati, probably at the Esquire. But you might want to see it first at the intimate Speed Art Museum Cinema, because Louisville is where the film was made and the local audience is sure to be buzzing about that. (A May 15 opening night screening with Hawke present is sold out.)
This is reportedly an impressionistically rendered portrait of the great Southern writer Flannery O’Connor as she struggles in the early 1950s to write stories true to her setting, which means regional characters driven by dark, even grotesque impulses. Her views of humanity’s conundrums were informed by her Roman Catholicism. She also had personal struggles as profound as any of her characters—she was diagnosed with lupus at age 25 and died of complications from it in 1964. Today she is the writer most associated with the Southern Gothic strain of American arts.
In the film, Maya Hawke, the daughter of Ethan and Uma Thurman, plays O’Connor and Laura Linney is her mother. Appearing on the festival circuit last year, response from critics was mixed, but there was at least one impressively positive one from Hollywood Reporter’s Sheri Linden. Here’s an excerpt: “Sometimes when you finish reading a good novel or collection of short stories, you look forward to picking it up again it in a year or two or 20, to reenter its world and discover new wisdom in its powers of observation, new flashes of light in its turns of phrase. Ethan Hawke’s Wildcat casts a similar spell, so rich is it in detail and nuance and creative juice. Drawing upon the distinctive voice of Flannery O’Connor, it’s a sublime portrait of a great writer, a movie I can’t wait to see again for its visual elegance, its electric leaps between an author’s life and her work, and the delicious, playful intensity of all the performances, with Maya Hawke and Laura Linney each taking on a half-dozen interconnected roles.”
As an actor, Ethan Hawke has taken on the most consistently interesting and challenging roles of just about anyone else, and his limited directing efforts have brought us two films I like very much, Chelsea Walls and Blaze. (Two others I haven’t seen.) So I wouldn’t miss this one.
All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
[Watch the trailer. Screens at 7:30 p.m. May 13 at the Woodward Theater.]
The directing debut of Raven Jackson (who also wrote the screenplay) tells the story of a Black woman’s life in Mississippi from childhood to adulthood. Three actresses play the principal character, Mack. The film had a limited first-run release last year, but it was enough for the National Board of Review to name it one of 2023’s best independent films. Barry Jenkins, director of Academy Award-winning Moonlight, is one of its producers.
Omen
[Watch the trailer. Screens at 7:30 p.m. May 20 at the Woodward Theater.]
This film was Belgium’s submission for the 2023 Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. The director is the Congolese-born Baloji, also a rapper. The story involves a young man who had to leave the Congo after being labeled an evil sorcerer. He returns with his pregnant white wife to heal the rift but finds himself still haunted by the rituals and superstitions of the local tribes.
The film has been getting some good reviews as it gets into theaters; it’s being handled in the U.S. by the innovative Utopia distributor. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw had this to say: “Congolese-born rapper, musician and film-maker Baloji (né Serge Baloji Tshiani) was a prizewinner at Cannes last year with this feature directing debut: a dynamic, teemingly populated, multistranded and tonally elusive picture which I initially thought would benefit from comparisons with Jordan Peele’s horror classic Get Out. In fact, it’s more complicated than that.”
Brainiac: Transmissions After Zero
[Watch the trailer. Screens at 7:30 p.m. May 27 at the Woodward Theater.]
This documentary about the 1990s Dayton alternative band Brainiac has been finding renewed interest of late. In an email, Woodward’s Chris Varias provided some information about what to expect from the film: “(It’s) telling the story of the band. I haven’t seen it, but apparently there’s particular focus on (member) Tim Taylor’s death and the aftermath and has on-camera interviews with Steve Albini, Fred Armisen, and members of Brainiac.”
The members of Brainiac will play a concert at the Woodward at 8 p.m. May 31.
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