‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’
Directed by Jane Schoenbrun (R)
★★★★
“There is absolutely no one else, alive or dead, who could have made a feature that looks and feels like this one,” said Ryan Lattanzio in IndieWire. Jane Schoenbrun, the nonbinary trans director of I Saw the TV Glow, has followed up that acclaimed 2024 release with an “often spellbinding” film that’s part slasher sendup, part “future cult lesbian classic.” Hacks’ Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, a queer indie filmmaker who’s been handed a chance to direct a reboot of a 1980s slasher series whose mass killer was genderfluid. But when Kris decides she’d like the final girl from the original film to appear in the reboot, the “entrancingly sexy” pas de deux that ensues steers the tale in a surprising direction.
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Once Einbinder and costar Gillian Anderson are brought together, said Richard Brody in The New Yorker, the heart of this movie becomes a “sharply written” two-hander, “with plenty of scope for the two leads to shine.” Anderson’s Billy lives like a recluse, but she’s funny and insightful, and she helps Kris discard her sexual inhibitions while Schoenbrun is simultaneously weaving in “gleefully gory” scenes from the fictional earlier Camp Miasma movies. Anderson, incidentally, “appears to be enjoying her foray into sapphic high-camp tremendously,” said Jessica Kiang in Variety. But then every actor here seems to be having fun, even as the movie’s second half “uses the silliness of slasher convention to get to some fairly profound places,” particularly about culturally constructed obstacles to women’s experience of pleasure. The result is Schoenbrun’s “most accomplished, most persuasive, and most playful movie yet.”
‘The Samurai and the Prisoner’
Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Not rated)
★★★
The “detached, dispassionate” tenor of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s new film “recalls the work of another Kurosawa,” said Tim Grierson in the Los Angeles Times. A hit this summer in Japan, The Samurai and the Prisoner shares with Akira Kurosawa’s Ran “not just a feudal-Japan setting but also an older man’s dim view of our species’ vain stabs at glory through conquest.” It’s 1578, and a seasoned warrior played by Masahiro Motoki is trapped in his besieged castle after defy ing a fearsome warlord. But fans of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s great horror films “may be thrown off by his new movie’s relatively muted approach.”
They may also be thrown by the title, said Jordan Mintzer in The Hollywood Reporter. This isn’t a samurai film but “a refined murder mystery dressed up in feudal garb.” Inside the castle, an unknown killer begins racking up victims, and Motoki’s clan leader keeps turning to one of his prisoners for help. “This sounds like the perfect setup for a suspenseful feudal thriller—think Knives Out meets Throne of Blood.” Unfortunately, four murders occur, and the story “winds up repeating the same scenario each time.” Be patient, though, because Kurosawa “choreographs his material with grace,” constructing an intricate drama that’s “as psychologically rich as his best work,” said Nick Schager in the Daily Beast. It “reaffirms Kurosawa’s standing as international cinema’s preeminent jack of all trades. Simply put, he can do anything.”
