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New In Theaters

A Good Day to be Clean

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Union County

by George Wolf

Union County is an absolutely stunning feature debut from writer/director Adam Meeks. Expanding his short from 2020, Meeks delivers a film that feels like a persistent memory, one with a deceptively subtle grip not easy to shake.

Gripping performances from Will Poulter and Noah Centineo blend seamlessly with a supporting cast of predominantly non-professional actors, imbedding us within a rural Ohio community struggling to escape the opioid epidemic.

Cody Parsons (Poulter) and his brother Jack (Centineo) are both addicts, but they navigate the court-mandated drug rehabilitation program is strikingly different ways. Jack is upbeat and smiley, charming girls at a local bonfire with an aura of positivity. But Cody, from his first day in the 18-month program, is reserved and quietly intense.

The heart and soul of the recovery program – and of the film – is Annette (Annette Deao). She is a tireless anchor of hope for the addicts, picking up the phone at all hours and absorbing their anger and frustration with the patience of a sage who knows there can be better days ahead.

Meeks, an Ohio native, goes straight to the frontlines of this national crisis, but he is careful to show us more than the grim, barren landscapes that so often characterize the Midwest. From the blooming of greenery to the changes in wardrobe to the rebuilding of a wrecked car, Meeks finds understated metaphors that gracefully mirror the journeys in play. His pace is led by a compassion that never wavers, no matter the tragedy or roadblock.

Poulter, who has been compiling a litany of standout performances since his teens, has never been better. We feel Cody’s struggle even in his quietest moments. And when he finally allows himself enough joy to smile, Poulter makes it a moment of internalized triumph. It’s a towering, award-worthy performance.

With more limited screen time, Centineo finds the wayward, fractured heart of a man whose more frequent moments of celebration may be misplaced, given the never-ending road he’s traveling. Jack is the loose family cannon, but Centineo makes his relationship with Cody, and their cautious sister Kat (Emily Meade, also terrific), both sympathetic and heartbreaking. 

And Deao? She’s a revelation. As a fictionalized version of herself, Annette (who did study acting years before her current career) consistently grounds the film with the unwavering commitment to all those – like herself – who are a daily lifeline for their community members just struggling to see another one. One of the film’s most pivotal moments comes from Deao’s real experience in the program, and it’s just one reminder of the life-and-death work being done in these American trenches every single day. 

The struggle is indeed real, in rural Ohio and so many other areas like it. But the hope, the humanity and the steps forward are equally real. Union County doesn’t rest until you feel every bit of all of it, and feel thankful for the time you spent here. 

Outtakes

Primeval Bloodbath

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Feed

by Hope Madden

Horror owes Ireland a huge debt for vampires. Yes, basically every culture and nationality has a vampire myth, but Ireland gave us Dracula and Carmilla. Remmick is the coolest vampire to come along in decades. But those bloodsuckers are predated by some millennia by the Dearg Due, Ireland’s first vampire, who finally gets her cinematic due in Marco van Belle’s indie horror, Feed.

It’s been a year since Orla’s (Grace Collender) tragedy. Her influencer/bestie Nessa (Daisy Jelley) is sure that a week away in a remote Irish cottage will help bring Orla out of her depression, and if Nessa can take advantage of the beautiful spot for some posts, all the better.

This is essentially a cabin-in-the-woods horror, isolating five attractive young people of mixed gender in a natural, even primeval, setting.

Is it a tired set up? It is. Do filmmakers drag it out time and time again because it’s effective? Also yes. Locals are spooky, there’s no phone service, characters are out of their element, and a natural evil is disturbed.

An early-film flashback gives us a sense of what that evil is, but van Belle could mine the mythology more effectively. It would have more effectively set Feed apart from other films. Instead, we spend most of our time inside the cabin with the more predictable storyline.

The cast does a fine job of finding characters hiding in these fairly typical characters. Jelley is the most hamstrung as the vain best friend and failing influencer, but Clinton Liberty, as Orla’s boyfriend, struggles with the film’s most underwritten character.

Collender’s solid and both Rhys Mannion and Oskar Smith find nuance and personality for their characters. Naimh Hogan’s central villain has come cool trickery, but her presence lacks real terror. Charlotte Bradley, on the other hand, is effortlessly frightening as the innkeeper who’d rather keep the vampire.

It’s a good looking movie and van Belle uses the tools of the influencer within the vampire myth well. He just doesn’t break out of routine often enough to make Feed particularly memorable.  

Shudder Premiere

The Passenger

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Hellcat

by Hope Madden

Writer/director Brock Bodell’s Hellcat keeps you guessing and intrigued with a tight premise, two locations, and a cast you can count on one hand.

Dakota Gorman is Lena, and she’s not having a good time. She’s awake, her head is spinning, her stomach is not right, and she’s moving. Unsure of how she got here, Lena’s in an Airstream, rolling down a highway to God-knows-where.

For the majority of Hellcat’s 91-minute runtime, Gorman is alone to throw fits, connive, sleuth, convulse, and rebel inside that camper. Physically alone, anyway. Over a sound system rigged to the pick-up hauling the thing is the voice of Clive (Todd Terry). Clive wants Lena to stay calm and stop busting up his home until he can get her to a doctor. She’s been infected, he says.

It’s a clever but simple premise, and the tensions and questions are mined well. Lena is quite sure she’s been drugged and kidnapped. Bodell drops well-timed hints and clues to keep you leaning one direction and then the other. Evidence suggests that Clive is not what he says he is, although there’s still some proof that maybe he’s not a villainous liar. It’s tough to know.

Gorman’s physical performance is impressive and grueling. She gives Lena a savvy, angry edge that makes you believe she’ll find or fight her way out of this.

Likewise, Terry makes you want to believe Clive.

The long, lonesome highway allows for some clever attempts at escape, and given your conflicting loyalties throughout, Bodell is not afraid to twist the knife.

As we head into the third act, things get a little contrived but weirdly, entertainingly so. The full backstory/mythology is never entirely articulated, which is a bit convenient given the direction things take. And the practical FX are slightly hokey.

But on the whole, Hellcat is lean, mean, and effective.  

The Screening Room

Screening Room: One Night Only, Cookie Queens, Ice Cream Man & More

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Hope & George review this week’s new releases: One Night Only, Super Troopers 3, Ice Cream Man, Cookie Queens, Tinsman Road, Big Baby and The Yeti. PLUS! News & Notes from The Schlocketeer Daniel Baldwin!

New In Theaters

Always Be Cookie-ing

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Cookie Queens

by George Wolf

Did you ever look at the girl selling you Thin Mints and think, “she’s going to be a Supreme Court justice some day?”

You might start, once you meet the youngsters of Cookie Queens, a triumphant look at goal setting, upselling and the fleeting years of girlhood.

Writer/director Alysha Nahmias travels to North Carolina, Texas and California to immerse us in the frenzied weeks of cookie season with four budding entrepreneurs. There’s Ara in San Diego, an impossibly cute and precocious 5-year-old who hopes to be strong enough to pull her own wagon of treats. 8-year-old Shannon Elizabeth is in El Paso, practicing karate and trying to make sure her parents don’t have to skip a mortgage payment to pay for unsold cookies. Nikki is a 9-year-old in Chino, who has a family tradition to uphold while she’s chasing enough sales to earn a trip to Europe. And then there’s 12-year-old Olive, the future Supreme who sets sales records, schools her troop on upselling, and already frets about disparities in the relationship between management and labor.

With a week-by-week countdown and some helpful onscreen stats, Nahmias builds a subtle layer of sales tension while letting us glimpse how these girls, their families and friends are navigating life. It’s all endlessly engaging, full of inspiration, frustration and some way-too-early hints about the ways of the world.

We see older teenage sisters pine wistfully for the carefree days of youth, while those younger ones are already wondering about their purpose in life and learning that success can hinge on their appearance.

Yes, some parents can Cookie vicariously, but Cookie Queens never lets the focus stray from these wonderful young ladies. Even with all they are juggling during the height of selling season, their sparks of joy and enthusiasm can’t be denied.

And for us grown-ups, the film might make you sorry about the world we’re leaving these kids. But would I bet against them growing up and changing it?

Not a chance.

New In Theaters

We All Scream

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Ice Cream Man

by Hope Madden

With Ice Cream Man, filmmaker Eli Roth visits the underappreciated horror subgenre focused on hordes of deadly children. Wolf Rilla may have done it first with 1960’s Village of the Damned, but Roth is following more closely in the footsteps of Narciso Ibañez Serrador and his 1976 film Who Can Kill a Child?

Since the Seventies, there’ve been plenty of killer-children flicks, most famously Children of the Corn from Stephen King’s novel. But Roth finds humor in the mayhem, channeling  2015’s Cooties in particular, but with a noticeable difference.

Generally, these films represent an adult nightmare. Our victim-heroes are grown-ups faced with the impossible task of defending themselves, and occasionally a handful of untainted children, from ravenous, murdering swarms of youngsters. It’s a tough spot to be in, hence Serrador’s title.

Roth changes that up. It’s little leaguer Jared (Charlie Zeltzer) and a couple of other kids who managed who find themselves face-to-face with the Ice Cream Man’s minions. His wares change children into frenzied killing machines. Only those lactose intolerant enough not to digest the tainted snack treats remain healthy.

Roth delights in the childish carnage. Early kills are especially nasty, all of it laced with a macabre humor and ghoulish playfulness. A similar tone is one of the reasons his 2023 film Thanksgiving was such an enjoyable return to genre work.

But Ice Cream Man never hits the spot quite as well as Thanksgiving. By removing the adult victim-hero, Roth creates a children-in-peril horror that doesn’t pull on the emotions of similar fare, like It or Devil’s Backbone, because children are also the villains.

The switch also eliminates the vicarious fear and revulsion adults often harbor, sometimes deep down, for children. Cooties read like every middle school teacher’s secret fantasy. It’s also funnier and better paced without foregoing any of the blood or nastiness.

Roth can’t manage to keep the pace moving, often pausing the action when it makes the least sense. The plot, what little there is, feels like a convenient, even cliché afterthought.

Which is not to say that Ice Cream Man is all bad. For bloodthirsty horror fans, it gets nasty. There are also a handful of randomly funny moments, and others that are just offensive. More offensive are the dips into gen AI, which is particularly weak and plain ugly during the backstory. The film’s less irreverent than it thinks it is, though, and that’s its biggest weakness.

Outtakes

Her Business

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Due West

by Rachel Willis

Director Evan Miller focuses his attention on a desperate Woman in his first feature film, Due West.

Co-writing with Hardy Janson, Miller opens the film by letting the camera rest on a solitary woman standing outside a quiet bar. This unnamed Woman (Adrianne Palicki) smokes, taps her foot nervously against the wall, and waits for a text that tells her she will need $700 by tomorrow.

It’s not much to go on, but it’s clear from the tension that bleeds from every gesture and expression from the Woman that this is a steep sum of money. And money she desperately needs.

It’s hard not to be hooked as we follow her from moment to moment. Even as two bar patrons shoot the shit with a female bartender, our gaze never strays from our protagonist for long. When she re-enters the bar, her anxious body language belies the smile on her face.

Though not explicitly stated, it’s easy to figure out why the Woman needs the money. The sum, the cryptic texts, and the command to text from a burner phone when she reaches her destination speak to a procedure recently made illegal in many states after a certain, damaging Supreme Court ruling.

The film’s dialogue, at times, is stunning. It brings with it snatches of backstory, life lived in a small town in West Texas, where the people know your business whether you want them to or not. Especially when you don’t want them to. Sadly, there are also times when it leaves subtlety behind – to the film’s detriment.

The second half of the film is when it starts to fall apart. Though our sympathy lies with the protagonist, as we learn more of her story, as she makes certain choices, judgment bleeds into the film. It ends up making a statement that there is a “right” type of situation when a certain procedure is justified. Whether intentional or not, it’s a harmful choice for a film to make when women deserve the right to care regardless of the why.

Outtakes

Wait a Minute, Baby

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Son of Sara

by Hope Madden

It’s hard to do something new with the “pregnant with Satan’s baby” formula. There are only so many ways it can go, and you can’t hope to unseat Rosemary’s Baby. But writer/director Houston Bone and a game cast breathe weird life in this oft-told tale.

Sara (Chloe Van Landschoot) is very pregnant. Overdue, huge, and constantly vomiting, she’s ready to be done. Her devoted girlfriend Carol (Tymika Tafari) takes good care of her. Still, Sara’s definitely not entirely OK.

She runs into Troy (Garrett Hnatiuk), the pre-Carol fling and baby daddy, and feels strangely compelled to take him up on his offer of dinner. Back at his house. Out in the middle of nowhere. With his mom (Jane Moffat).

While moments of Act 1 smack of cliché —certainly that package of bloody ground chuck in the refrigerator—Bone’s script and his actors’ talent, plus Sara’s convincing pregnant state, keep you invested.

Bone gives his cast breathing room, never rushing a scene, always lingering just long enough for someone to be intriguing. That could be Hnatiuk’s awkwardly seductive dancing, Tafari’s disdainful glare, Moffat’s contemptuous sneer, or Landschoot’s childlike gesturing. The chemistry between and among the actors is top notch, and the way they inhabit their characters ensures even formulaic scenes feel unusual and fresh.

Son of Sara is not a spendy affair, but it rarely feels trapped by its budget. Bone and crew make great use of what funds they do have, and the filmmaker’s instinct for relationship-driven humor and discomfort overcome nearly every cinematic setback.

Even if a few beats buckle under familiarity, the underlying change in theme quietly upends a status quo expectation in enormously enjoyable ways. Son of Sara has an F-you quality to it that doesn’t draw attention to itself and is all the more satisfying for it. It’s fun, tightly constructed, compellingly performed horror and you’re out in under 90 minutes. What do you have to lose?

New In Theaters

Carnal College

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I Want Your Sex

by George Wolf

Even when a Gregg Araki film does not work for me at all (hello, Kaboom), I’m interested in his next move. Whatever he’s up to, you can make a safe bet it will be audacious, horny and pretty damn fearless.

I Want Your Sex is all that and a bag of charming.

Cooper Hoffman is a damn delight as Elliot, an affable, mop-headed goofball who’s thrilled to get a job working for Neo-pop artist Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde, fantastically self-absorbed smoke show). Erika deals in frank sexuality, and waits a full week before giving her new assistant a no-nonsense, carnal proposition.

What’s Elliot to do? Yes, the studious Minerva (Charli XCX) is his girlfriend, but to her sex is an uninteresting chore, so….it’s DTF time!

Erika gets a new sexual muse, and Elliot gets to broaden his, ahem, horizons in various kinky ways. Though co-workers Vikktor and Zap (Daveed Diggs and Mason Gooding, respectively letter perfect) consistently roll their eyes at Elliot’s naïveté, he’s pretty okay with Erika’s benefits package.

That is, until there’s blood, a body, and two detectives (Margaret Cho, Johnny Knoxville) wanting answers.

Araki, who also co-writes with Karley Sciortino, crafts much of the film as a mystery told via shifting timelines. But each step in the Elliot/Erika relationship is so engaging you forget there are two cops ready to pop in with more questions. They can wait a hot minute, because Araki and company are having too much fun with this neon-colored tapestry of sexual mores, hipster sweat shops, Harold Robbins novels and penis rugs, all wrapped around frisky exclamations and hilariously droll asides.

Hoffman and Wilde are a down and dirty joy together, and their natural, committed chemistry gives the film a sweet, dare I say even sentimental layer I wasn’t expecting.

I was expecting the sexcapades, and all the usual Araki flourishes. But even while pushing all of these fetish boundaries, I Want Your Sex may be his most accessible film. And most thoroughly enjoyable.