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Now With Extra Whitening!

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Slanted

by George Wolf

Writer/director Amy Wang’s debut feature Slanted has so many plates spinning in the air, I expected most of them to eventually come crashing down. For just over ninety minutes, Wang juggles social satire, body horror, high school comedy and cultural drama with a fearless commitment to boundary pushing.

Actually, maybe more like boundary shoving.

Chinese-American teen Joan Huang (Shirley Chen) has a singular mission: to beat out her high school’s Queen Bee Olivia Hammond (Amelie Zilber) and be elected Prom Queen.

Just imagine her gigantic framed picture in the hallway next to all those other white, blonde Queens of the past!

Joan’s mother, Sofia (Vivian Wu) and best friend, Brindha (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) aren’t thrilled when Joan bleaches her black hair, but that’s just the beginning. Lured into the office of the smiling Dr. Singer (R. Kieth Harris), Joan is hooked by his pitch of a perfect new life. She tricks her mother into signing a consent form and undergoes Dr. Singer’s experimental surgery.

And when Joan Huang wakes up from the operation, she’s Jo Hunt (McKenna Grace). No scars, no bandages, just all pretty, blonde and perfectly white.

Dr. Singer’s first recommendation: “Go see Michael Buble!”

Anyone who remembers Eddie Murphy’s classic “White Like Me” SNL bit from 1984 will recognize the world that suddenly opens up to Jo – and Wang skewers that world with biting humor and wry precision. But as much as Wang pushes her character envelopes, she gets balance from a more subtle hand that calls out the systems that breed and perpetuate this Lilly white playground. (Keep an eye on the local business names, as well as the photographs chosen for mantles, bedroom walls and school lockers.)

Could there be a price to pay for Jo abandoning her family, friend and heritage? Oh yes. And while I won’t be the first or last to mention the resulting mashup of Mean Girls and The Substance, give Wang credit for not giving a flying F.

There’s plenty of last year’s Grafted here, too, though Wang never dives that deeply into a horror show. What she does do is pull all of these influences through her own lens with unapologetic abandon, and a fittingly flawed final girl.

This is a wonderfully ambitious, high concept debut for Amy Wang. At turns both familiar and ferocious, it never lets you get too comfortable with its message. Funny, horrific, bittersweet, angry and insightful, Slanted feels like an experiment gone right.

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A Good Enough Cry

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Reminders of Him

by Hope Madden

A couple of years back, director Vanessa Caswill leaned affectionately into cliché, cast well, and elevated Love at First Sight above its tired romcom streamer roots. Can she do the same with the Nicholas Sparks style tearjerker Reminders of Him?

She can. But here’s the more important part. Caswill isn’t trying to exit the sobby romance genre. She is trying to make a movie that will please the same people who loved A Walk to Remember, The Longest Ride, and of course, novelist Colleen Hoover’s last feature adaptation, It Ends with Us. She’s just also trying not to make utter crap.

Caswill succeeds to a degree on both counts, again by casting well and embracing cliché.

The effortlessly woebegone Maika Monroe is Kenna, who’s just returned to her small hometown after a 6-year stint in prison for involuntary manslaughter. All Kenna wants to do is rebuild her life and meet the daughter she gave birth to in prison.  Too bad that daughter lives with the parents of the Kenna’s boyfriend, who died in that crash that sent her to prison.

So, the stage is set for a work-ethic driven story of redemption. Which is, of course, just an excuse for the romance. Kenna falls for Ledger (Tyriq Withers), her late boyfriend Scotty’s childhood bestie who returned to the neighborhood five years ago to help raise Scotty’s daughter.

Monroe’s performances tend to be internal, so she wears Kenna’s misery more than performs it. There’s a naturalness to it that helps the often unrealistic dialog and plot choices feel more believable.

Caswill also does not pretend that poverty—which is what Kenna lives in as a felon who’s lucky to get a job bagging groceries—looks at all glamorous. And though she may make poverty look a lot safer than it is, she surrounds Kenna with some fun ensemble players and a bit of needed joy.

Withers is primarily there to be inarguably handsome, but he and Monroe do share enough chemistry to make the romance somewhat compelling. And though Lauren Graham and Bradley Whitford suffer with woefully underwritten characters, both veterans have talent enough to enrich what the script lacked.

Does Reminders of Him do exactly what you expect it to do, scene after scene? It does. But it’s supposed to. It just does it a little better than it really had to.

Uncategorized

Politics at the Dinner Table

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My Father’s Shadow

by Rachel Willis

Nigerian brothers Akin and Remi (Godwin Chiemerie Egbo and Chibuike Marvellous Egbo, respectively) are playing in nearby fields when they unexpectedly encounter their father (Sope Dirisu), home briefly from Lagos. The younger boy, Akin, begs their father to stay. Instead, Folarin takes his sons with him back to Lagos in director Akinola Davies Jr.’s film, My Father’s Shadow.

What follows is one day in Lagos with Akin and Remi around the time of Nigeria’s infamous 1993 presidential election.

The boys are our eyes and ears into their father’s world, a world separate from the life they lead with their mother at home. From their father’s interactions with friends and colleagues, Folarin’s great personal investment in the election and the democratization of his country is made clear.

Davies also shows us the chaos of the city around them. Fuel shortages cause vehicles to run out of gas in the streets. People stand outside petrol stations, waiting and hoping to get gas. We learn that Folarin’s situation at work is far from ideal, and the time he spends away from his family trying to bring home more money feels futile.

Anyone who knows Nigeria’s history may know that while the candidate from the Social Democratic Party (Moshood Abiola) won the election—an election declared free and fair by several independent observers— the military regime led by President Ibrahim Babangida cited claims of vote buying. The presidential election was therefore annulled in a televised announcement.

Folarin and his sons are sitting in a café eating dinner when the announcement is made. The people in the café erupt in disbelief and anger, frightening and confusing the boys. As Folarin reacts with anguished rage, a friend pleads with him to flee the city. Davis intersperses archival footage into the narrative, heightening tensions in the film’s final moments.

Davies’s film is touching during the events of the day Folarin spends with his sons, and he gives us enough information to understand what hinges on the election. Still, the truly impactful moments are when the family is attempting to get out of Lagos.

However immediately relevant the storyline seems, the overall message of the film is not political. Instead, it focuses on the importance of family, and the choices we make for them, especially in times of upheaval. It’s something that resonates beyond a single moment in time.

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Who Has Ears to Hear, Let Him Hear

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Undertone

by Hope Madden

Ian Tuason’s paranormal podcast feature Undertone offers a lot of reasons to be impressed. It’s a single location shoot, and almost a one-hander. Aside from a catatonic mother (Michéle Duquet) and a variety of voices, Nina Kiri is on her own.

Kiri plays Evy, who is recording her paranormal podcast Undertone from her dying mother’s house. Evy’s been staying at Mom’s for a while now, and if she’s honest about it, she’d like it to just be over with. Evy’s waiting for the death rattle.

She loves Mama, but the relationship is thorny with Catholic guilt and shame. We sense this more than see it as Tuason crowds his set design with Catholic iconography. It’s a busy if impressive set, and Tuason makes great use of it with fascinating camera work. He uses mainly stationary cameras, often set off-angle so they feel more like a voyeur’s or ghost’s point of view, or even a security camera. The movement reinforces that sense. On the rare occasion that the camera does move, it does so in an obviously mechanical way that even more closely resembles security footage.

This gives the film a Paranormal Activity vibe—fitting, as Tuason is slated to write and direct the next installment in the found footage franchise.

But Undertone is less about what you see and more about what you hear. The somewhat oppressive sound design is intentional, of course, and frequently effective.

Kiri delivers a heroic performance. Not only has she no conscious actor to react to, but the vast majority of her performance is simply Evy, in headphones, listening to something.

The film falls apart at the story level. Evy and her podcast co-host Justin (voiced by Adam DiMarco) decide to listen to a set of 10 audio files emailed to them anonymously. The files conjure up something supernatural that, combined with Evy’s isolated, spooky, guilt-laden environment, starts affecting her headspace.

But the sound files and podcast are silly. The mythology within the house—Evy’s relationship with Catholicism and her mother, the demonic yarn being revealed by the audio files—none of it comes together into a coherent horror story. And worst of all, nothing happens.

Undertone is an impressive technical achievement but the story’s just not there.

Outtakes

Fearless Oscar Predictions 2026

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Who ya got: “Sinners” and its record-setting 16 nominations or “One Battle After Another” and 13 nods?

There are other deserving nominees, to be sure, but these two films have dominated the movie year 2025 and much of Awards Season 2026. There is no reason to think it won’t continue come Oscar night.

Which is better? Wow. What day is it? Let’s just say we have extra love for the split in the Best Screenplay category this year, where they both can collect the hardware.

And what a great year for Horror! Don’t forget del Toro’s visionary “Frankenstein” nabbed 9 nominations, Amy Madigan’s Aunt Gladys gets recognition for “Weapons” and “The Ugly Stepsister,” Emilie Blichfeldt’s beautifully brutal debut, is up for the Best Makeup and Hairstyling award. All well deserved.

So let’s dig in:

Best picture

  • “Bugonia”
  • “F1”
  • “Frankenstein”
  • “Hamnet”
  • “Marty Supreme”
  • “One Battle After Another”
  • “The Secret Agent”
  • “Sentimental Value”
  • “Sinners”
  • “Train Dreams”

Should win: “Sinners” or “One Battle After Another”

Will win: “Sinners”

Best Actress

  • Jessie Buckley, “Hamnet”
  • Rose Byrne, “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”
  • Renate Reinsve, “Sentimental Value”
  • Emma Stone, “Bugonia”
  • Kate Hudson, “Song Sung Blue”

Should win/Will win: Buckley. Probably the surest bet this year.

Best Actor

  • Timothée Chalamet, “Marty Supreme”
  • Leonardo DiCaprio, “One Battle After Another”
  • Ethan Hawke, “Blue Moon”
  • Michael B. Jordan, “Sinners”
  • Wagner Moura, “The Secret Agent”

Should win/Will win: Jordan

Best Supporting Actress

  • Elle Fanning, “Sentimental Value”
  • Inga Ibsdotter LilIeaas, “Sentimental Value”
  • Amy Madigan, “Weapons”
  • Wunmi Mosaku, “Sinners”
  • Teyana Taylor, “One Battle After Another”

Should win: Mosaku

Will win: Madigan

Best Supporting Actor

  • Jacob Elordi, “Frankenstein”
  • Sean Penn, “One Battle After Another”
  • Stellan Skarsgård, “Sentimental Value”
  • Benicio del Toro, “One Battle After Another”
  • Delroy Lindo, “Sinners”

Should win: Lindo – how does he not have an Oscar by now?

Will win: Penn*

*Hope disagrees. Her last shred of faith in humanity says Lindo will pull it out.

Director

  • Paul Thomas Anderson, “One Battle After Another”
  • Ryan Coogler, “Sinners”
  • Chloé Zhao, “Hamnet”
  • Josh Safdie, “Marty Supreme”
  • Joachim Trier, “Sentimental Value”

Should win: PTA or Coogler

Will win: PTA

Original Song

  • “Golden” from “Kpop Demon Hunters”
  • “Train Dreams” from “Train Dreams”
  • “Dear Me” from “Diane Warren: Relentless”
  • “I Lied to You” from “Sinners”
  • “Sweet Dreams Of Joy” from “Viva Verdi!”

Should win/Will win: “I Lied to You”

Original Score

  • “Bugonia,” Jerskin Fendrix
  • “Frankenstein,” Alexandre Desplate
  • “Hamnet,” Max Richter
  • “One Battle After Another,” Jonny Greenwood
  • “Sinners,” Ludwig Göransson

Should win/Will win: Göransson – the integration of music in Sinners was masterful.

Animated Film

  • “Arco”
  • “Elio”
  • “KPop Demon Hunters”
  • “Little Amélie or the Character of Rain”
  • “Zootopia 2”

Should win/Will win: “Little Amélie or the Character of Rain”

International Film

  • “The Secret Agent,” Brazil
  • “It Was Just an Accident,” France
  • “Sentimental Value,” Norway
  • “Sirât,” Spain
  • “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” Tunisia

Should win/Will win: “Sentimental Value” in a category so stacked that neither “No Other Choice” or “The President’s Cake” could crack it.

Documentary Feature

  • “The Perfect Neighbor”
  • “The Alabama Solution”
  • “Come See Me in the Good Light”
  • “Cutting Through Rocks”
  • “Mr. Nobody Against Putin”

Should win/Will win: “The Perfect Neighbor“

Casting

  • “Hamnet”
  • “Marty Supreme”
  • “One Battle After Another”
  • “The Secret Agent”
  • “Sinners”

Should win: “Sinners” or “OBAA”

Will win: “OBAA”

Best Sound

  • “F1”
  • “Frankenstein”
  • “One Battle after Another”
  • “Sinners”
  • “Sirāt”

Should win: “Sirāt”

Will win: “F1”

Cinematography

  • “Frankenstein”
  • “Marty Supreme”
  • “One Battle After Another”
  • “Sinners”
  • “Train Dreams”

Should win/Will win: “Train Dreams” in another category brimming with excellence.

Original Screenplay

  • “Blue Moon,” Robert Kaplow
  • “It Was Just an Accident,” Jafar Panahi, with script collaborators Nader Saïvar, Shadmehr Rastin, Mehdi Mahmoudian
  • “Marty Supreme,” Ronald Bronstein and Josh Safdie
  • “Sentimental Value,” Eskil Vogt and Joachim Trier
  • “Sinners,” Ryan Coogler

Should win/Will win: Coogler

Adapted Screenplay

  • “Bugonia”; Will Tracy
  • “Frankenstein,” Guillermo del Toro
  • “Hamnet,” Chloé Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell
  • “One Battle After Another,” Paul Thomas Anderson
  • “Train Dreams,” Clint Bailey and Greg Kwedar

Should win/Will win: PTA

Live Action Short Film

  • “Butcher’s Stain”
  • “A Friend of Dorothy”
  • “Jane Austen’s Period Drama”
  • “The Singers”
  • “Two People Exchanging Saliva”

Should win/Will win: “Two People Exchanging Saliva”

Animated Short Film

  • “Butterfly”
  • “Forevergreen”
  • “The Girl Who Cried Pearls”
  • “Retirement Plan”
  • “The Three Sisters”

Should win: “The Girl Who Cried Pearls”

Will win: “Butterfly”

Visual Effects

  • “Avatar: Fire and Ash”
  • “F1″
  • “Jurassic World Rebirth”
  • “The Lost Bus”
  • “Sinners”

Should win/Will win: “Avatar: Fire and Ash”

Production Design

  • “Frankenstein”
  • “Hamnet”
  • “Marty Supreme”
  • “One Battle After Another”
  • “Sinners”

Should win/Will win: “Frankenstein”

Film Editing

  • “F1”
  • “Marty Supreme”
  • “One Battle After Another”
  • “Sentimental Value”
  • “Sinners”

Should win/Will win: “F1”

Makeup and Hairstyling

  • “Frankenstein”
  • “Kokuho”
  • “Sinners”
  • “The Smashing Machine”
  • “The Ugly Stepsister”

Should win/Will win: “Frankenstein”

Costume Design

  • “Avatar: Fire and Ash”
  • “Frankenstein”
  • “Hamnet”
  • “Marty Supreme”
  • “Sinners”

Should win/Will win: “Sinners”

The 98th Academy Awards will take place March 15th, 2026.

Shudder Premiere

The Camera Never Lies

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Bodycam

by George Wolf

Take the frenetic desperation of The Blair Witch Project‘s final minutes, move it to a more urban battleground and layer it with plenty of first-person shooter sequences, and you’re in the ballpark of Bodycam, director Brandon Christensen’s shaky cam shakedown of two cops and one very bad choice.

Officer Bryce (Sean Rogerson) and officer Jackson (Jamie M. Callica) respond to a domestic dispute, and we follow along thanks to their bodycams. The house is dark and plenty creepy, and things escalate to the point of a fatal shooting. The possible fallout spurs Bryce to panic.

He has too much to lose for this situation to go public and convinces Jackson to help him cover up what happened. But when a techie colleague tries to scrub the cam footage, she notices some strange graffiti on the wall, and realizes it’s already too late to keep the killing a secret.

At least from certain, very scary people.

Uh oh. Bryce and Jackson are in for a bad time.

Christensen (Night of the Reaper, Z, Superhost, The Puppetman), co-writing again with his brother Ryan, doesn’t waste any time getting down to nasty business. And once the 75-minute film hits the midway point, the bloody fun is amped up a notch or three as the two cops come to grips with the promise of retribution for their actions.

“Why couldn’t you have done the right thing?”

In today’s climate, that question from one cop to another carries some serious weight. And though the implications are clear, Christensen is more committed to the repercussions.

Bodycam dishes them out in frenzied, crowd-pleasing glory.

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The Rain in Spain

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Heel

by Hope Madden

Few people who watched the Netflix series Adolescence would describe it as darkly comical.

And yet, Adolescence co-creator and co-star Stephen Graham lends his considerable talent to another look at the troubling behavior of young white men in Jan Komasa’s Heel.

Graham plays Chris, a well-intentioned family man. Anson Boon is Tommy. One morning, after a night of hard debauchery, Tommy wakes up in chains in Chris’s basement.

From there, Komasa’s film, written by Bartek Bartosik and Naqqash Khalid, could become something truly horrifying. Instead, it reimagines The Clockwork Orange by way of My Fair Lady.

There’s obviously something terribly wrong with Chris, his wife Kathryn (Andrea Riseborough), and probably their young son Jonathan (Kit Rakusen). But they don’t think so. Indeed, they’re so convinced of their benign purposes that the family hires a part time maid (Monika Frajczyk), even though there’s a human being chained up just off the laundry room.

Of course, during the interview, Chris does ask if Katrina has any distinguishing marks. That could be a red flag.

The performances across the board are marvelous. Certainly, we’ve come to expect nuanced, even surprising turns from both Grahan and Riseborough. But it’s Boon who really impresses. His Eliza Doolittle arc is fantastic and frustratingly believable.

Komasa plays with your expectations and manipulates your emotions. It’s really hard to root for the kid in the cellar, and it’s often a little tough to dislike this broken family, although there is clearly something very cracked and likely dangerous about them.

The sharp script never overplays its themes. Heel keeps you guessing, keeps you fascinated, and sometimes has you almost breathless. It’s also quite funny and touching.

The longer you watch, the more provocative Heel becomes. Even if you’re furious by film’s end, it’s hard to deny its power.

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Violent Femme

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The Bride!

by Hope Madden

One part Metropolis, one part Bonnie & Clyde, just a touch of Bride of Frankenstein and yet somehow entirely writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s own, The Bride! deserves that exclamation point.

Jessie Buckley is a force of nature in a dual role—sort of a triple role, really: an unhappy Chicago gangster’s moll; Mary Shelley, silenced far too soon; and a monster, chaotic, unruly, unburdened by memory and guided by peculiar fury.

The likeliest lock for Oscar in the 2026 race for her breathtaking turn in Hamnet, Buckley is perfectly paired with Christian Bale (that hack!), a unique image of Frankenstein’s monster. He is tender, lonesome, adoring, and very anxious. Frank has a serious anxiety issue, which is mainly calmed by watching his favorite movie star, the song and dance man Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal).

To watch Buckley and Bale, two masters of their craft, work off each other is a treat, each of them tearing through Gyllenhaal’s inspired and intelligent script with dark joy.

The leads are surrounded with memorable, noir-esque characters: Annette Bening as our mad scientist, Peter Sarsgaard as the gumshoe with some secrets, Penélope Cruz as the brains behind the investigation, John Magaro as the spineless gangster.

Great as they are, and they all are, the star here is Maggie Gyllenhaal. Her tale is hyperliterate with surreal flourishes, dazzlingly filmed, constantly surprising and yet charmingly inevitable, and fueled by a glorious, contagious rage.

There are dance sequences (an absolute blast) and shoot outs, a deep vein of dark humor, opportunities for redemption, and delightful easter eggs. (Ida’s nemesis is a gangster named Lupino; silver screen star Ida Lupino turned to directing, and one of her most cynical and impressive efforts was a 1963 episode of the TV show Thriller called “The Bride Who Died Twice.”)

The Bride! delights with an anarchic energy, but its underlying plot is tight, its characters clearly drawn and beautifully performed, and its aesthetic wondrous. In just her second feature, after 2021’s sublime The Lost Daughter, Gyllenhaal’s cemented her spot as one of the most exciting filmmakers working.

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Idol Hands

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Billy Idol Should Be Dead

by George Wolf

As great as Robert Patrick was in Terminator 2, Billy Idol would have made a pretty rad T-1000.

Billy was indeed up for the part, and a glimpse of his screen test with James Cameron is just one of the archival delights in Billy Idol Should Be Dead, a new doc that traces his life of curled lips, spiked hair and legendary rock god excess.

Adding plenty of never-before-seen footage to many of the sentiments from Billy’s 2014 memoir, director Jonas Åkerlund does a great job taking us inside young William Broad’s English upbringing and the Seventies punk scene that launched the Billy Idol persona and his early bands, Chelsea and Generation X.

Billy is refreshingly honest and self-reflective in the new interview footage, as Åkerlund often layers it with classic clips from the Eighties that accentuate how committed Idol was to the “sex, drugs and rock-n-roll” lifestyle.

But once the two-hour doc hits the halfway point, the career overview starts to suffer from a drifting focus. Billy’s longtime personal relationship with girlfriend Perri Lister gets plenty of scrutiny, while musical partner Steve Stevens is barely mentioned. Åkerlund (Lords of Chaos, Metallica Saved My Life) juggles a shifting timeline, animated segments, a black and white aesthetic and celebrity commentary (Miley Cyrus, Pete Townshend, etc.) with an approach that seems random. The film’s vision never feels fully formed, especially up against the heels of Morgan Neville’s expertly crafted Paul McCartney doc, Man on the Run.

And strangely, despite Åkerlund’s extensive experience in music videos, Idol’s catalog isn’t mined as deeply as it could be, and several chances to anchor some passages with more Idol hits are left unexplored.

The film might not reach the raw emotional honesty of docs such as Steve! (Martin) or Pee Wee as Himself, but for Billy Idol fans, there is plenty here to satisfy. From early clubs to MTV glory, from the gnarly scars of a motorcycle wreck to embracing family and moments as a doting grandfather, Billy Idol Should Be Dead does make you feel like you know a rock legend just a little bit better.

Hope Madden and George Wolf … get it?