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'Head' trip: How the Monkees and Jack Nicholson shattered the 4th wall and the Hollywood mold 50 years ago

Fifty years ago, Columbia Pictures and Raybert Productions released a fascinating ’60s celluloid artifact promised to be “the most extraordinary adventure western comedy love story mystery drama musical documentary satire ever filmed.” That film, Head , effectively (if temporarily) detonated the careers of reluctant TV teen idols the Monkees — but it simultaneously ushered in the New Hollywood and kickstarted the career of a certain future Oscar-winning actor.

“That was a very strange experience,” chuckled the Monkees’ Micky Dolenz, visiting Yahoo Entertainment in 2016 to discuss the Monkees’ comeback album Good Times! , when asked about the notorious cult classic. “[ The Monkees series co-creator and Raybert co-founder] Bob Rafelson brought this guy in one day. He was a B-movie actor, and he said, ‘It’s a friend of mine, and he wants to do some writing. And his name is Jack Nicholson. … Jack’s going to hang around the set and go to your homes and hang out with you at home and you’re going to just see what kind of movie we put together.’”

The strategy came at a point in the made-for-TV band’s career where they were feeling stifled onscreen (NBC forbade them from making overt political statements or even saying the word “hell” on the “Devil and Peter Tork” episode). The Monkees had also seized creative control of their musical output with their third album, Headquarters , the year before. So, while Dolenz and his bandmates Michael Nesmith, Peter Tork, and Davy Jones (credited as “David Jones” in Head ) didn’t quite know what to expect when they joined Rafelson and Nicholson for a weekend brainstorming trip to Ojai, Calif., they did all agree that Head would not be a typical pop-music matinee.

“When the idea of doing a movie had come up, the obvious way to go, which would have been much more commercial, would have been to do a 90-minute version of a Monkees episode,” Dolenz told Yahoo. “And it was discussed. And I remember agreeing with [Rafelson, who argued], ‘I don’t know if we should do that. We’ve been under the thumb of the censors and of the network. This gives us an opportunity to go out and push the envelope a little bit, in humor and in the sensibility of the whole thing.’”

Nicholson used tape recordings of the Ojai sessions to write the screenplay for Head , reportedly — and not surprisingly, given the bizarre result — while dropping acid. (Nicholson had written the script for Roger Corman’s countercultural LSD film The Trip the year before.) Suffice to say, the super-meta movie — filmed around Southern California one month after the cancelation of the band’s Emmy-winning TV series, directed by Rafelson and produced by Rafelson and his Raybert partner and Monkees co-creator Bert Schneider — definitely would not have made it past those NBC censors.

Head plays out like a lysergic dream sequence — beginning with Dolenz leaping off Long Beach’s Gerald Desmond Bridge, then frolicking with a school of hippie mermaids in the kaleidoscopic waters below to Carole King and Gerry Goffin’s woozy, psychedelic epic “Porpoise Song” (which is now widely regarded as one of the all-time greatest Monkees tunes).

Over the course of the ensuing “circular” 86 minutes (the film was deliberately crafted to have neither a beginning nor an end, so that viewers could drop in at any point in the disjointed storyline), the following events transpire: The Monkees find themselves trapped in a giant vacuum cleaner (with a baseball-bat-sized blunt). The band members engage in a kissing contest with a nubile brunette (spoiler alert, it ends in a four-way tie). They’re terrorized by both a King Kong -sized Victor Mature and an enormous bloodshot eyeball that dwells inside a public restroom’s medicine cabinet. And so on.

“We hope you like our story/Although there isn’t one,” declares the film’s Nicholson-penned song “Ditty Diego — War Chant,” a vicious parody of the Monkees TV show’s original cheery theme song. But amid all the drug-addled chaos and kookiness and non sequiturs and laughably cheap green-screen, Head does offer many compelling, fourth-wall-shattering moments, bravely skewering the Monkees’ goody-goody image and the entertainment industry in general.

In “Ditty Diego,” the band members address their prefab personas and lack of credibility, intoning, “Hey, hey, we are the Monkees/You know we love to please/A manufactured image/With no philosophies.” They address crass consumerism via Dolenz’s losing battle with an exploding Coca-Cola vending machine and the band members’ portrayal of jumbo dandruff flakes in an obnoxious shampoo commercial. Tork gets into an onscreen argument with Head ’s directors over one violent movie scene’s direction, arguing that it will alienate the band’s teenybopper fanbase. Jones, the main heartthrob of the group, dumps fellow teen idol Annette Funicello (who plays his small-town girlfriend), then competes in a boxing match with a man twice his size and allows his pinup-pretty face to be pounded into pulp.

And, after Jones does a delightful, old-fashioned soft-shoe routine with choreographer Toni Basil to Harry Nilsson’s “Daddy’s Song,” he encounters Frank Zappa, who, in the movie’s most amusingly deadpan one-liner, tells him, “That song was pretty white.”

Far less amusing, but just as effective, is the juxtaposition of footage of screaming female Monkees fans alongside images of the Vietnam War (including the execution of Viet Cong operative Nguyen Van Lem), and a scene in which the Monkees, after performing Nesmith’s “Circle Sky” at a cult-like concert, have their mannequin doppelgängers torn apart by those same hysterical fans.

“Who knows what it’s really about. But I can give you a couple of hints,” Dolenz told Yahoo Entertainment. “What I think it was about, on sort of a philosophical level, is breaking out of the Hollywood mold. … There’s one scene in the movie which I think speaks to that, and it’s the kind of spine of it. It’s the one where Mike and I are cavalry guys, and we’re being attacked by Indians in covered wagons. Teri Garr — in her first onscreen [speaking] appearance — is wounded, sitting there, dying. And I’m there with my rifle and Mike’s looking out for the Indians, and all of a sudden the special effects guy … hits me with three arrows. And I look down and I go, ‘Oh, Bob’ — and I’m talking to Bob Rafelson, the director — ‘That’s it ! I’m finished ! I’m through with all this fake Hollywood!’ And I break off the arrows, throw down the gun, turn around, and walk right through the back of the set, through the big painting, the scrim. Tear a big hole in it and walk out.”

Most people didn’t understand or appreciate what Head was trying to accomplish, and negative audience response at an August 1968 test screening led the film’s creators to trim 24 minutes from its original length. But when the finished Head officially premiered three months later, on Nov. 6 in New York, it still flopped, eventually recouping only $16,111 of its $750,000 production budget. (Perhaps it was a bad omen that Nicholson and Rafelson were arrested at the premiere , after Nicholson tried to affix a Head sticker on a police officer’s helmet.)

“It did get some critical acclaim, but it didn’t sell any tickets, because nobody got it,” Dolenz shrugged. “The kids didn’t get it at all; they were expecting a Monkees episode. I think it was even rated where little young kids, our youngest fans, couldn’t even get in, because there was some violent things; I can’t remember what the rating was.” [Editor’s note: Some posters advertised Head as being “not suitable for children,” although in the U.S. it was surprisingly rated G.]

Despite Head ’s initial failure, and the fact that the Monkees split up shortly thereafter, the movie changed Hollywood in unexpected and lasting ways. “There was no independent film industry [back then]. … The studios controlled everything,” Dolenz explained. But just one year later, in 1969, provocateurs Rafelson and Schneider released the groundbreaking Easy Rider , directed by Dennis Hopper (who had a cameo in Head ) and starring Nicholson and The Trip ’s Peter Fonda. A year after that, Rafelson and Schneider formed BBS Productions with Stephen Blauner and released the Rafelson-directed Five Easy Pieces , which was nominated for four Oscars (including Nicholson for Best Actor). And it all started with the Monkees.

“I would argue Head had incredible influence on Hollywood over the next several decades,” musician Sean Randall wrote in Huffington Post in 2017. “The awkward, disjointed, deep thought randomness and repeated themes reminded me strongly of David Lynch and Mulholland Drive . … The film also [has] a slightly less comedic And Now for Something Completely Different vibe, one of Monty Python’s cinematic efforts after Head came out. … Further, I’d wager that this film, while not being successful itself, opened the door for other musician cinematic vanity projects, like Pink Floyd’s The Wall . Or the lesser-known Metallica 3D concert film Through the Never , which definitely looked to Head for inspiration.”

“Now [ Head has] become a real cult thing,” Dolenz proudly said of the film, which was released on Blue-ray in 2010 and whose soundtrack, featuring additional musical contributions from Ry Cooder, Neil Young, Stephen Stills, Leon Russell, and Jack Nitzsche, is now a coveted collector’s item. “I know Quentin Tarantino, when I first met him, he said it’s like top five for him. Edgar Wright and a lot of people have said that. It’s like top five movies for those kind of filmmakers.”

Read more from Yahoo Entertainment:

Turn it up: An oral history of the forgotten New Monkees

KISS revisits ‘Phantom of the Park,’ 40 years later — ‘Wow, that was weird’

40 years ago, Aerosmith kicked ass in ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’

In praise of feminist icon Stephanie Zinone, or why ‘Grease 2’ is better than ‘Grease’

Nigel Lythgoe on his disco cult movie, ‘The Apple’: ‘The best part of making it was finishing it’

40 years ago, the Doobie Brothers’ ‘What’s Happening!!’ episode preached evils of bootlegging

Get back to me: The totally new wave legacy of ‘Square Pegs’

Follow Lyndsey on Facebook , Twitter , Instagram , Google+ , Amazon , Tumblr , Spotify.

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• Documentary

HEAD TRIP follows a troop of San Francisco characters and performers traveling across America to New York City for shows at CBGB's, Gowanus canal in Brooklyn and a special visit to Washington Square Park with an awful lot of dachshunds. The 10-foot tall, 300-pound, festively painted Fiberglas Doggie Diner Dog Heads are well known in the Bay Area.

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HEAD TRIP is a 2020 Nollywood romance film. It is directed by Muyiwa Aluko. It stars Gideon Okeke, Ego Nwosu and Efe Warri Boy Chude finds himself stuck in the office with a colleague -Dinma- and one lonely night leads to spark and the ultimate head trip.

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Q&A after the screenings with filmmakers John Law, Flecher Fleurdujon , and special guests! 

This newly restored documentary follows a troop of San Francisco characters and performers traveling across America to New York City for shows at CBGB’s, Gowanus canal in Brooklyn and a special visit to Washington Square Park with an awful lot of dachshunds. Leaving San Francisco during the opening salvo’s of the Iraqi war in 2003 as a sort of goodwill voyage, the documentary Head Trip was first run at the Roxie in 2008. This newly edited version has improved sound quality and the addition of an interview with Bishop Joey/Ed Holmes of The First Church of the Last Laugh.

The 10-foot tall, 300-pound, festively painted Fiberglas Doggie Diner Dog Heads are well known in the Bay Area. A popular restaurant chain from 1949 until 1986, there was one Dog head left at one restaurant out on Sloat Avenue by the zoo, which in turn closed down in 2001. That Doghead was salvaged by the city of San Francisco and reinstalled on the traffic median across from the zoo entrance, where it remains to the day. 

There are at least 12 existing Dog Heads taken from various restaurants that are in private hands. Three of these surreal objects traveled across the country along with San Francisco’s punk rock performance troop Cyclecide Bike Rodeo to New York City, stopping at roadside attractions.

The movie HEAD TRIP tells this story .

The screening includes a rare short film, THE LOADED WARRIOR, directed by Jason Broemmel, featuring performers from S. F. Cyclecide Bike Rodeo. See a group of feral bicyclists attempting to survive in a world where beer is becoming extremely scarce. THE LOADED WARRIOR is a remake of the most incredible action movie of all time, The Road Warrior, with bikes instead of cars, and beer instead of gas. (15 mins, 2009)

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9 Psychological Horror Movies That Will Seriously Mess with Your Head

From cold, hard classics to underappreciated gems, here are some psychological terrors that get under your skin.

There are all kinds of ways to frighten an audience, as the proud, diverse catalogue of horror movies demonstrates, but psychological horror is a particularly tricky technique to pull off. All of cinema is an exercise in empathy, but to drag an audience down into the pits of a disturbed mind requires vision, technical precision, and a willingness to put your viewer through absolute hell.

We're taking a look back at some of my favorite psychological horror movies that really got inside my head and did some dirty work. These films aren’t necessarily about psychology, though many of them are by nature of they genre, they’re films that make you feel like you’re having a psychological episode — films that wring the phobias, anxieties, torment, and afflictions of their characters from the audience so that you're transported into an experience of mental chaos.

So you won't see titles like Silence of the Lambs or Les Diaboliques -- they're some of the best movies ever made in the psychological horror genre, but their effect is different. What you will find here are a whole bunch of mentally taxing freakout films that will prod at your psyche and put you through the ringer. It's by no

This is obviously nowhere near a comprehensive list, it's an assortment of my favorite (or perhaps most dreaded) movies that mangled my mind. Along the same train of thought as my list of visually stunning movies , sometimes I just like to celebrate a few faves without getting into qualifiers and rankings. Think of this as a starting ground, a conversation starter, and a few of my personal favorites, and be sure to keep that conversation going sound off in the comments with the movies that messed you up the most.

Jacob's Ladder

Part war movie, part political thriller, and all emotional torment, Jacob’s Ladder is one of the most fearless, ambitious, and enduring head trip movies ever made. The film stars Tim Robbins as Jacob Singer, a man who finds himself tortured in a hallucinogenic limbo between nightmare and reality after a mysteriously framed trauma on the Vietnam battlefield. Trapped in recurring nightmares from the war, grief over the death of his young son, and a series of recurring visions and panic attacks that leave him reeling to regain his grasp on reality, Jacob attempts to adjust to his post-war life while battling a growing suspicion he might already be in hell.

Directed by Fatal Attraction helmer Adrian Lyne , Jacob’s Ladder grips the audience tight from the first moments and never lets go. Subway stations with no exit, pick-pocketing Santa Clauses and visions of demonic infiltration torment Jacob; the entire film presented from his unreliable, but always sympathetic view. Tim Robbins gives an aching, soulful performance as Jacob.; a performance that rightfully elevated his career from a supporting and comedic actor to that of a respected dramatic lead.

It’s unusual to see such a brazen, oddball script carried out with the freedom of a big studio budget, and the result is a visually engrossing, nerve-jangling trip down a rabbit hole of depression and anxiety that uses paranoid visions of hell on earth to evoke true-life traumas of war, grief, and love lost; all encapsulated in the heart-breaking tale of a fractured man desperately searching for a moment’s peace.

Brad Anderson ’s thoroughly creepy, slow-burn slip into insanity takes place in an abandoned mental hospital, where a team of asbestos cleaners hard up for cash take on a hazardous, rushed gig to clear out the facility with only a week’s time. As you might expect, the crew you pull together for that kind of gig isn’t the most upstanding bunch of fellas, and as the week wears on, each man’s dangerous secrets start to come to the surface inside the haunting, possibly haunted walls of the asylum, where all manner of cruel, crude procedures were once conducted on the patients. When the team starts listening to the discarded, deeply unsettling recordings of a patient who suffered from multiple personality disorder, each new tape more disorienting and chilling than the next, and their obsession with the archives seep through them like a corrosive force of madness.

An early adopter of digital filmmaking, Session 9 certainly isn’t the most visually accomplished film on the list, but Anderson uses the gritty, lo-fi imagery to enhance the film’s gothic style, digging the dingy sense of rot and morbid mental degeneration. Session 9’ s violent climax doesn’t quite live up to the moody, atmospheric escalation that precedes it, but when it’s focused on the horrors of the mind, it plays out like a campfire tale of encroaching psychosis that digs deep under your skin.

We Need to Talk About Kevin

We Need to Talk About Kevin is a spectacular, shattering movie that takes on one of the most hot-button, haunting issues in contemporary America — school shootings — and refracts it through the shattered psyche of a woman who feels wholly responsible for and trapped by the incomprehensible violent deeds of her son. Tilda Swinton gives a bravura performance as Eva, mother to a son who seems to hate everything about the world, including his mother, from his very birth. As an infant, he screams incessantly. As a toddler, he fouls his own diapers long after he should be potty trained. As a teen, he's downright sinister. Doctors say there’s nothing wrong with him, Kevin’s father says there’s nothing wrong with him, but Kevin always shows Eva exactly what he is, an unrepentant monster in the making, and she watches in horror, and anger, every step of his maturation from budding sociopath to full-grown murderer, trapped by the bonds between mother and son.

Skipping through time and memory, We Need to Talk About Kevin fragments Eva and Kevin’s story into a nightmarish kaleidoscope of misdeeds and psychological warfare between them -- we see Kevin played by three young actors, Rocky Duer, Jasper Newell, and Ezra Miller, each as impeccably cast as the next. In exploring their hideous, unconventional journey, Ramsay crafts a visually stunning onslaught of mental torment, rich with metaphor, where blood red beacons of the dread past and still to come haunt Eva in every frame. And they’ll haunt you too.

Watching We Need to Talk About Kevin is like feeling a noose of despair and helplessness tighten around your neck. It sucks the breath out of you, and Ramsay uses every tool in a filmmaker’s supply to needle the senses, from the skewed deployment of chipper music to expert instances of poetic imagery. When Eva goes to the store to buy eggs, they’re all shattered, and when she goes home, she grimaces through her bitter feast, pulling the shells from her teeth. And so it is for the entire film; Eva grits her way through her lot, part circumstance, part self-prepared; a prisoner to inconceivable misfortune she can never escape. Likewise, We Need to Talk About Kevin is a film that’s hard to get away from. Ramsay never gives you easy answers, denying them most of all in the final moments before the credits roll, making the film a marathon of mental torment you can never seem to outrun.

Annalynne McCord abandons her tradition of playing vixens and femme fatales in Excision , turning out a career best performance as Pauline, an obviously disturbed teenage girl who isn’t getting the help she needs. And Pauline knows she needs help, but her parents don’t, and they’re not willing to lay down the funds for the psychiatrist she keeps asking for, so in between her contentious therapy sessions with her under-qualified priest (played by cult film icon John Waters ), Pauline indulges her fascination with anatomy and medical procedure, only furthering her descent into deranged obsession.

An outcast at school and in her own home, Pauline plays life by her own rules, growing more intimately involved with her grotesque fantasies with each passing day. She dreams of toe-curling sexual encounters with a half-decapitated corpse. When she loses her virginity, she plans it so she’ll be on her period, imagining rivers of blood pouring over her. The only person she can bond with is her sweet younger sister ( Ariel Winter ), the golden child, who also happens to be dying of Cystic Fibrosis. It's only a matter of time before her visions start to bleed into her real life, and while most of Excision ’s runtime plays out like a gory dark comedy, balancing cringes with laughs, when Pauline gets it in her head that she’s her sister’s only hope for survival, the film becomes a tragic tale of horror.

Make no mistake, McCord carries Excision on her ever-haunched shoulders, but the biggest surprise is the performance from Tracie Lords , who plays Pauline's tightly-wound, image-obsessed mother and proves herself a genuinely talented actress, delivering the film’s most crushing emotional blow with one primal scream. Excision isn’t just a heartbreaking tragedy about delusion and the way we abandon the mentally ill, it’s also an incredibly effective exercise in anxiety that trades in the paranoia of pathology (STDs are a present motif) and stomach-churning visuals of surgical violence. Equally heartfelt, delightfully deranged, and downright nasty, Excision triggers unwavering unease, but always displays a warmth for the misfit and attention to character that’s all to rare in the well-mined tradition of body horror.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Who knew a single plate of spaghetti could be so damn distressing?  The Lobster and  Dogtooth   director  Yorgos Lanthimos has made a career of helming perversely punishing, psychologically upsetting films, and in that regard,  The Killing of a Sacred Deer is his most potent accomplishment yet.

Cynical as it is singular, The Killing of a Sacred Deer is a tale of crime and punishment that harnesses the capricious cruelty of the old golds in order to turn the failings of man into a horrific show of penance. Colin Farrell stars as Dr. Steven Murphy, a venerated surgeon who lives a pristine suburban life with his elegant ophthalmologist wife ( Nicole Kidman ) and their two children, teenaged daughter Kim ( Raffey Cassidy ) and young son Bob ( Sunny Suljic ). It all goes to hell in a hand-basket when Steven takes an unusual teen,   Martin ( Barry Keoghan ), under his mentorship. The relationship between the possesses a potent awkwardness that makes you want to shield your eyes and turn away from second-hand embarrassment, but that niggling discomfort elevates into full-blown primal horror when Martin blindsides Steven with a demand for sacrifice.

Played out with Lanthimos’ signature deadpan and absurdism, The Killing of a Sacred Deer is instantly unnerving, always enigmatic, and occasionally confounding. It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what this film even is, let alone why lodges so deep under your skin — aside from the performance by Keoghan, which is downright mesmerizing and blood-chilling — but it crawls inside your mind and unleashes discord with precision. A terrifying tragicomedy mined from myth (seek out the tale of Iphigenia if you find the film too oblique),  The Killing of a Sacred Deer  drops you directly into a surreal world of pain, where spaghetti-twirling monologues become the stuff of nightmares -- and like any true nightmare, it's almost impossible to describe the effect once it's over.

Funny Games

Funny Games will fuck you up. This movie doesn't pull any punches, so I won't either. Michael Hanneke 's 1997 take on home invasion horror wants to hold you responsible for your taste for cinematic violence, taking the audience captive along with the characters and forcing you down a path of provocative punishment that can be downright sadistic. It is not a pleasant watch.

The film follows two smirking young sociopaths ( Arno Frisch and Frank Giering ), who come knocking at the door of an average suburban family -- mother Anna ( Susanne Lothar ), father Georg ( Ulrich Mühe ), and young son Georgie ( Stefan Clapczynsk i) -- and unleash a psychological and violent hell on them, while Hanneke spares no effort doing the same to the audience. Funny Games puts you through the ringer, scene after scene, moment by moment, as the misdeeds grow from imposition to outright torment.

Hanneke frames the film like a middle finger to audiences who come looking for cheap thrills, breaking the fourth wall, toying with reality, teasing payoff and relief that will never come, and delivering instead a crushing portrait of human depravity -- one that makes you complicit in every moment. The film practically begs you to turn it off to stop the senseless parade of torture. After all, you're the one holding the remote, you're the one with the power to make it all stop. But you won't. But even if Hanneke seems to forget he's being wildly indulgent in his quest to punish audiences for their indulgence, he is an exceptional filmmaker, and he wraps you up in the lurid suspense so that you stick with the suffering through every unflinching frame. It's a taxing, discomfiting experience that reaches through the screen and slaps you in the face.

In the Mouth of Madness

When it comes to transmitted madness via psychological horror, nobody does it like Lovecraft, and nobody's done Lovecraftian horror on screen as well as horror maestro John Carpenter did with his 1994 tribute  In the Mouth of Madness .

Rich with references to the literary great, In the Mouth of Madness takes an almost meta approach to psychological horror with the story of John Trent ( Sam Neill ), an insurance investigator who we know is about to go mad. When we first meet him, he’s in a padded cell, telling a psychiatrist a confused story of twisted horrors and the end of days. Trent finds his way to madness on the hunt for Sutter Cane, a renown horror author a la Stephen King (who the film honors and pokes fun at simultaneously) who recently went missing. When Cane’s publisher hires Trent to track down his cash cow, the investigator’s mind overturns every possible stone on the hunt for the author, always looking for a scam, even as his grip on reality slips out from under him in the increasingly surreal journey that greets him.

This is not what you’d call a coherent film. In the Mouth of Madness strains at its own logic sometimes, and the scripting is a bit jarring, but logic is nowhere near the point and jarring is the names of the game because Carpenter masterfully conjures that specific, singular Lovecraftian terror — the menace of a great unknowable threat, the knowledge of your own inevitable descent into insanity, and the plummeting sensation of feeling your world turn upside down.

The Vanishing

To this day, my first viewing of The Vanishing ( Spoorloos ) remains one of the most devastating cinematic experiences of my life. It’s inescapable. Years later, I’m still hung up on the ending, haunted by its impact and steadfast humanity. This film opens you up, with precision, not without care, and very intentionally leave you vulnerable.   There’s a blunt, matter-of-fact honesty to the story that cuts much deeper than melodrama, and director George Sluzier crafts an impeccable, intoxicating mystery, with intelligent work from writer Tim Krabbé , that demands resolution even if you dread each turning of the page.

Sluzier sets an exquisite trap and the lure is Saskia ( Johanna ter Steege ), a radiant young woman who disappears at a rest stop during a road trip with her boyfriend, Rex ( Gene Bervoets ). In a film full of masterful tricks, perhaps the most impressive is the way The Vanishing makes us fall in love with Saskia so quickly so that when she is gone, her absence haunts us along with Rex, who obsessively searches for her. His endless devotion catches the eye of Saskia’s abductor, played with chilling, understated menace by  Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu , who seeks out contact with Rex, culminating in a horrific, haunting mindfuck finale.

The Vanishing presents two types of madness, each terrifying in their own way — the cold, calculating psychosis of a serial killer and the blistering, unhinged desperation of a grieving man desperate for closure. Either one is fuel enough for nightmares aplenty, but together they’re the yin and yang of human suffering, perfectly matched, opposite ends of the spectrum. It’s devastating. The Vanishing is a masterpiece, an essential experience in empathy and agony that grips you by the throat and never, ever lets go.

( Disclaimer: Kluzier went on to remake his own film in English and that 1993 redo abandons everything that made the original so special. Be sure to seek out the original — no imitations. )

The horror of  Creep is all about the terrifying uncertainty of what the hell is going to happen next, and it works like a nauseous charm thanks to one extraordinary performance from Mark Duplass . You never know what to make of Duplass in this tightly-constructed paranoid horror pic. He's charming, disarming, and absolutely offputting, raising alarms with every cocked eyebrow and eager smile. You never know what he'll do or say next, and the whole film crackles like a livewire with the tense anticipation of what's around the corner.

Duplass co-wrote the film with director Patrick Bice , who also stars as Aaron, a naive videographer who heads to a remote mountainside cabin after responding to a mysterious Craiglist gig. All he has to do is film for a day and he'll make an easy grand, so he heads off to the woods where he meets Duplass' Josef, and from the moment he comes into frame, there's never a doubt he's an absolute weirdo, and probably a dangerous one, so all of their their queasy interactions course with jaw-clenching tension.

Bice and Duplass methodically build up the tension and intrigue, always knowing when to deliver a payoff and when to hold back, and it all leads to one last nasty surprise to top them all. Not your average found footage flick, Creep is all in your head and takes its time rooting around in there before following the natural path to  more traditional horror beats.

More Recommendations: Unsane ,  American Psycho, A Tale of Two Sisters, Black Swan, The Invitation, Oldboy, Eraserhead , and obviously,  The Shining .

World Premiere

She loved blossoms more, escape from tribeca, horror, comedy, thriller, science fiction.

Hoping to bring their dead mother back to life, three brothers build a time machine in this visually decadent, bizarre and altogether mesmerizing head-trip.

Cast & Credits

Yannis veslemes, screenwriter, cinematographer, executive producer, associate producer, co-producer, add'l credit 1, add'l credit 2, add'l credit 3.

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Where to watch

1982 ‘À la recherche de Douglas’ Directed by François About

They all got him!

Parisian Phillippe is obsessed with a former lover named Doug, and seems only capable of experiencing sex through his delirious, popper-induced memory.

Phillippe Veschi Giuseppe Welch Alkar David King Dave Ruby Jean Francois Tavirg Jerome C. Fox Joseph Dickson

Director Director

François About

Writer Writer

Editor editor.

Catherine Ripert

Cinematography Cinematography

Composer composer.

Guy Printemps

Les Films de la Troïka Mustang Productions

Primary Language

Spoken languages.

English French

Releases by Date

07 apr 1982, releases by country.

• Theatrical NC-17

Adult   70 mins   More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by Liz

More sex films need cats wandering around the frame looking confused and annoyed imo

Review by patrick ★★★½

Loved them on the roof with the flowers behind them. Loved the taxi cab ride with the radio and the men of the city. The men on the water tower were my favorites. A melancholic movie about living the fantasy while pleasuring yourself. The cats were great as were the apartments. Only rating lower in context of the other movies in this Anthology series.

Review by Nick

Philippe et Roger vont en bateau

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Make the Case: ‘Being John Malkovich’ Was a Head Trip Masterpiece—and the Best Film of 1999

Throughout the week, The Ringer will celebrate the 20th anniversary of one of the best years in movie history and argue why some deserve to be called the best of ’99. First, we open a tiny door to get inside Spike Jonze’s first feature.

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Share All sharing options for: Make the Case: ‘Being John Malkovich’ Was a Head Trip Masterpiece—and the Best Film of 1999

Welcome to 1999 Movies Week, a celebration of one of the best years in film history. Throughout the week, The Ringer will highlight some of the year’s best, most interesting films, and in this series, make the case for why a specific movie deserves to be called that year’s best. First up is Spike Jonze’s cerebral fantasy dramedy Being John Malkovich.

And then Charlie Sheen shows up. The first hour of Being John Malkovich —Spike Jonze’s first feature film, Hollywood’s equally momentous introduction to dour-genius screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, and without question my favorite movie of 1999 back in 1999—is a plenty psychedelic and traumatic thing. Particularly for John Malkovich himself. This sublimely bonkers movie’s first half alone will forever change the way you think about puppeteering, threesomes, personal identity, office buildings, Cameron Diaz, and the lust of the elderly. But the most shocking and delightful scene is when a terrified Malkovich turns to the only friend he can trust and the last person you’d expect.

The plot of Being John Malkovich is best explained, in an earlier scene, by a frustrated New York City puppeteer and filing clerk named Craig (played by John Cusack with terrible hair ) to his office crush Maxine (a marvelously frigid Catherine Keener). “There’s a tiny door in my office, Maxine,” this breathless explanation begins. “It’s a portal. And it takes you inside John Malkovich. You see the world through John Malkovich’s eyes. And then, after about 15 minutes, you’re spit out into a ditch on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike.” Maxine’s response: “Sounds great! Who the fuck is John Malkovich?” The trailer struggled, quite understandably, to get the film’s premise across while sustaining anything resembling the film’s tone.

Indeed, the movie’s look and feel is a baffling mixture of glum and whimsical, radiant and morose, imaginatively limitless and viciously claustrophobic. (Craig’s office is on floor 7½, for reasons explained in the orientation video , and thus requires employees to both crowbar the elevator door open and slouch constantly like a dour-genius screenwriter.) There are enough big ideas in Malkovich to power a weeklong film festival and enough existential angst to terrorize several. (“The nature of self,” a flailing Craig muses. “The existence of the soul. Am I me? Is Malkovich Malkovich? Do you see what a metaphysical can of worms this portal is?”) Suffice it to say that Craig; his wife, Lotte (Cameron Diaz with worse hair ); and Maxine are soon entangled in a bizarre love rhombus, with Malkovich himself, playing a cartoonish but also winsomely mundane version of himself, as the unwitting, and very soon unwilling, physical vessel.

And he turns—for comfort, for protection, for solace, for advice—to the man he later affectionately refers to as Ma-Sheen .

Malkovich explains that his new girlfriend, Maxine, calls him “Lotte” during moments of intimacy, and Sheen responds just the way you hope he would: “ Ouch . That is hot .” As he absorbs this surrealist tale, he asks the right questions, from “Were you stoned?” to “How hot is this babe?” He marvels at the erotic potential of “hot lesbian witches.” He has but one request: “Let me know when you’re done with her, man.” He is holding a Rubik’s Cube during this conversation. He’d have an easier time solving it than thoroughly decoding and understanding this movie. But Sheen’s got the right attitude, and thus knows better than to even try.

I would describe Sheen’s majestic cameo as “memorable,” except I’d forgotten about it. Being John Malkovich turns 20 years old in October—it was, believe it or not, a legit Oscar contender, scoring nominations (but no wins) for Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actress (for Keener). The question of whether it has aged well is very much the wrong question. It is quite difficult, for example, to interpret, through a 2019 lens, Lotte’s immediate impulse, after her first trip through the Malkovich portal, to seek advice from her allergist about sexual-reassignment surgery. “Don’t stand in the way of my actualization as a man,” she tells her loser husband; “Suck my dick,” she later adds. You might laugh, but you will also take her seriously and regard her tenderly, especially after Craig locks her in a cage with a monkey, which I had also forgotten. This movie is way darker than I remembered, and even gnarlier intellectually. It’s still the best movie of 1999.

Also, it’s a love story. Maybe. Sort of. Eventually. “When I looked into his eyes last night,” Maxine tells Lotte, with regard to you-know-who, “I could feel you peering out.” Her icy veneer cracks, slightly. “Behind the stubble and the too-prominent brow and the male-pattern baldness, I sensed your feminine longing. And it just slew me.”

Now would be a good time to point out that John Malkovich agreeing to appear in a movie called Being John Malkovich is an act of profound kindness and bravery, and he is forever enshrined in the Good Sport Hall of Fame. He might still regret it. In 2015, he explained it to Rolling Stone this way: “I mean, in modern culture … [ long pause ] it’s kind of like if you get a blowjob from the wrong person, then your life becomes a blowjob.” If the movie had been a bomb, he’d literally have a bomb named after him; if it had been an outlandish blockbuster, he’d just look like a showoff. In reality, the movie was a very modest box-office success , prestigious but not ubiquitous. Malkovich’s gambled paid off but didn’t pay out too much. Also: “I was a little bit involved in casting Charlie Sheen as my best friend, which [ pauses ] there was some reticence about that, but it seemed to me a good idea.”

Over the course of this film, Malkovich munches on toast, orders bath towels, endures small talk with multiple civilians who can’t actually name any of his movies, smooches with Keener at great length, gets in a bar fight, does a puppet-ballet dance routine while wearing only a towel, fires off an extended and fantastic John Cusack impression, and delivers the line “That portal is mine, and it must be sealed forever, for the love of God” with stentorian zeal, shortly after entering the Malkovich portal himself, where this happens . He certainly appears to be enjoying himself. But he was correct in pointing out, in that 2015 interview, that Being John Malkovich ’s true stars, both then and now, are its rookie director and its rookie screenwriter, which does not happen often in Hollywood, then or now.

Jonze was already a minor sensation thanks to a run of transcendent MTV videos, from Björk’s “It’s Oh So Quiet” to Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You” to the Chemical Brothers’ “Elektrobank.” Few artists in the late ’90s, in any medium, worked harder to make total surrealism feel comfortably mainstream, and most of those other artists worked with him directly. For a debut movie, Malkovich is vivid in its visual glumness; its subtler touches (I love the way Malkovich slaps away Craig’s attempted handshake ) land just as surely as all the metaphysical slapstick. You somehow never get tired of watching people fall into that ditch by the New Jersey Turnpike.

Jonze also gets two world-class Playing Dowdy performances from the respective stars of multiple blockbuster romantic comedies. Pair this movie with 2000’s much sunnier but still prickly High Fidelity for Cusack’s master class in turning his famous charm into something pathetic and needy and hostile. And Diaz, despite looking like Roseanne Roseannadanna , has phenomenal chemistry with everyone, including the monkey. Together, they deliver elegantly awkward lines like “What is this strange power that Malkovich exudes?” (that’s Diaz) and “I could use Malkovich’s existing notoriety to launch my own puppeteering career!” (that’s Cusack) with an all-universe comic timing that only underscores the tragedy.

That tragedy, and elegance, and awkwardness is all Charlie Kaufman’s. As he would explain to Vulture in 2015 , writing this movie was not merely a matter of plugging in any semi-famous actor’s name: “With Malkovich , it isn’t as simple to me as ‘What if you found a portal into someone else’s brain?’ It’s ‘What if you found a portal into John Malkovich’s brain?’ That was what worked. That’s what I thought was funny. It wouldn’t have worked, in my mind, with anyone else.” And Kaufman specialized in absurdist, and increasingly despairing, fairy tales that could never have been written, or even stoned-edly conceived of, by anyone else. Jonze and Kaufman would reteam for 2002’s Adaptation , a dazzlingly meta spin on Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief in which Meryl Streep plays Orlean and Nicolas Cage plays … Charlie Kaufman. (And his twin brother.) I remember the line “a little push-push in the bush” very well.

From there, Jonze went on to further successes that can hardly be described as conventional—2009’s Where the Wild Things Are is full of Big Feelings, and 2013’s Her was rife with Big Ideas. (It also won him an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.) But both are Kaufmanesque—vibrant and strange and occasionally, unapologetically wrenching—in ways that nonetheless pale in comparison to, say, Kaufman’s own directorial debut, 2008’s exquisitely bleak Synecdoche, New York , whose last line I also remember and wish I didn’t. That one thrilled critics but didn’t make much money; same with 2015’s stop-motion opus Anomalisa .

It is mostly a compliment, and mostly a relief, that he mostly turned out to be too weird for Hollywood. Just don’t expect Kaufman to like it. “I’ve also seen critics say ‘This is a Charlie Kaufman–type movie, and so-and-so made it,’” he told Indiewire in 2016 . “And it’s like … why do they get to make Charlie Kaufman movies and I don’t? I think about that all the time.”

Accept no substitutes, but also accept that even Jonze and Kaufman will most likely never provide a worthy substitute to Being John Malkovich themselves. It’s awfully hard, even 20 years later, to find a movie even half as bizarre that was also even half as successful. Among the few contenders is Jordan Peele’s 2017 monolith Get Out , which has enough conspicuous overlap, from the metaphysical body-snatching to the regal presence of Catherine Keener, that there’s an elaborate theory that it’s secretly a Malkovich sequel. Peele’s response : “As far as I’m concerned, it’s true.” But as far as this singular and stubbornly inimitable movie is concerned, following it up at all is impossible.

In This Stream

1999 movies week: a celebration of the best year in film.

• Make the Case: Why ‘Three Kings’ Was the Best and Most Predictive Movie of 1999
• ‘Being John Malkovich’ Was a Head Trip Masterpiece—and the Best Film of 1999
• The 50 Best Movies of 1999, Part 1

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Is ‘Mother!’ a Head Trip? No, It’s an Allegory. Let the Term Papers Begin!

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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A few weeks ago, when Darren Aronofsky ’s aggressively out-there WTF head-trip horror movie “ mother !” was oozing onto the radar, it seemed likely to be one of those films that provokes a fiercely divided response. Whatever scandals the movie had in store for us, one contingent, you could imagine, would embrace the outrage; the other would recoil from it. (That’s the way these things tend to go.) An early piece in The Guardian, out of London, suggested that “mother!” might be the most controversial film to emerge from a major studio since “A Clockwork Orange,” and that’s the kind of advertising you can’t buy. A hot potato like “mother!” doesn’t come along every day, or even every year, so it’s fun to be able to say: Let the shock — and fiery debates — begin!

But now that “mother!” has arrived in theaters, it’s proving to be a divisive film, though not in the way I described. The two camps might be summed up as follows: There are those who, like me, find the movie to be an overly busy and self-fixated provocation, with a superficially diverting what’s-going-to-happen-next? quality that doesn’t, in the end, add up to all that much. And then there are the Enlightened Ones: the ones who resist the vulgar calls for mere drama and coherence and welcome the opportunity to experience the film on a heady stoned level of symbolic deep-think. To this contingent (which, at this point, I would say describes the bulk of the reviews), “mother!” is a uniquely artful and visionary experience because it’s no mere story, no mere head-scratcher, but a great big swirling ball of metaphor. It is — to use the buzzword of the moment — an allegory .

I don’t know about you, but the sound of the word allegory makes me go to sleep a little. I love any number of films that are allegories (“The Seventh Seal,” “Natural Born Killers,” “Woman in the Dunes,” “The Tree of Life,” and — yes — “A Clockwork Orange”), but if “mother!” is an allegory, it’s one that’s all work and no fun. It’s an allegory of everything and nothing at the same time.

Popular on Variety

It was Aronofsky himself who got the allegorical ball rolling by issuing a lengthy “director’s statement” about “mother!” before the picture had even been shown. “It is a mad time to be alive,” he wrote. He then ticked off issues like overpopulation, species extinction, “schizophrenic” U.S. climate-change policy, ancient tribal disputes, the killing of baby dolphins, politics as sports, and our daily state of denial about all of the above. “From this primordial soup of angst and helplessness,” he wrote, “I woke up one morning and this movie poured out of me like a fever dream.”

Fair enough. It’s sometimes the job of a serious movie to channel the madness of the moment. But I saw “mother!,” and wrote a review of it at the Venice Film Festival , without having read Aronofsky’s statement, and the movie I saw was a quirky hermetic chamber drama in which the defining quality of the characters is how thinly drawn they are (from scene one, Javier Bardem ’s blocked writer is a glowering cold jerk; Jennifer Lawrence ’s wife is all willowy supportive innocence), and then some visitors show up, played by Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer, who are over-the-top in their intrusive oddity, yet everyone seems naggingly cut off from the rest of the world, and so does the movie.

For a while, the quarrelsome drama is like the Edward Albee version of “Green Acres,” with Lawrence’s put-upon wife as the annoyed and perplexed Oliver Douglas character (everyone seems to be in on a conspiracy to make her feel like she’s the only one who doesn’t know why what’s happening is happening). On top of that, Aronofsky layers haunted-house tropes that root the movie, if not in the real world, then in the overly familiar world of megaplex genre pulp. His tropes are a bit more outré (a live pumping heart that seems to emerge from the walls, a floorboard bloodstain in the shape of a vagina), but our visceral reaction to this stuff is that it’s something that wouldn’t look out of place in a James Wan movie. It’s sometimes fun, but it signifies…very little.

Yet that, apparently, is where I have my blinders on. For as I’ve learned over the last few weeks, “mother!” is nothing but signifiers. It’s all an allegory. But an allegory of what?

The movie has been called a Biblical parable, with the Victorian octagonal house that Lawrence is renovating, surrounded by nothing but a stretching land of country green (no driveway!), as the Garden of Eden, and the other family that enters the picture, with its clashing adult sons, as a nod to Cain and Abel, and the broken sink symbolizing the Flood, and so on. None of this ever occurred to me, but if that’s what’s up there, it may suggest nothing so much as an allegory of Hollywood, with Aronofsky, like so many directors, recycling tried-and-true elements from his last film — in this case, the Old Testament hit “Noah.” Another layer of allegory in “mother!” descends from the title, and from the character names in the credits: Lawrence is playing “mother” (lower-case “m”), who is really Mother Earth, and Bardem is playing “Him” (capitalized), who is actually God.

At the same time, the film’s theme, pinging off the “Green Acres” factor, has been described in more than one place as “hell is other people.” As someone who’s often been more than a little guilty of feeling that way, I’m always up for a good hell-is-other-people movie. Yet the hell in “mother!” mostly consists of other people, like Pfeiffer’s overly noodgy and blaring drunk, acting in very broad ways that other people don’t tend to act.

There’s a fanboy element to the prospect of deconstructing what “mother!” is about. Instead of just sitting back and watching, you enter a video-game universe where nothing is what it seems and you learn how to master the game by deciphering what everything signifies. And in this case, it’s fanboy meets film snob. More than anything, “mother!” seems like a movie designed to please and flatter your inner grad student. If you can delineate the allegory, then you’re in the club. The club of people who get it! As opposed to a dumb-ass like me.

Yet reading some of the reviews of “mother!” has been, frankly, a more befuddling experience than “mother!” itself. Even those who love the movie can’t seem to agree on what it’s about. They appear to be high on the idea that this movie could give them a high. We’ve probably seen a mere preview of the treatises to come, on film-geek websites and in university cinema classes. Can “Divine Ghost in the Patriarchal Machine: Misogyny and the Fall in ‘mother!'” be far behind?

Here’s the problem. I do think that Darren Aronofsky meant to make a movie of many layers. It’s not that I don’t believe the “allegorical” levels of “mother!” exist. It’s that they’re too abstract — a theoretical frosting spread over the literal-minded cake of the movie itself. Allegory can be like that. You could take the worst horror film of the year, about an innocent couple on their honeymoon torn apart by their encounter with a demon, set that movie on an idyllic tropical island and call the demon “Snake,” and voilà! — you have the Adam and Eve story. But who cares? The allegory of “mother!” demonstrates that a movie can mean a whole lot without what it means meaning anything. And the box-office grosses of “mother!,”  coupled with a rare F from CinemaScore, suggest that if satire is what closes on Saturday night, allegory is what crashes and burns on opening weekend (even if your lead actress is the biggest movie star on the planet).

Aronofsky, of course, ultimately brings the outside world smashing into “mother!” The world of fame and fan worship, of cataclysm and war. You could hardly miss those meanings, since the film hits you over the head with them. And critics, in their inflated rush to allegorize everything in “mother!,” have been quick to lump in the theme of the artist and his muse. But that theme isn’t an allegory in “mother!” It’s simply a basic dimension of the movie, executed in an overstated way, with Bardem as a celebrity poet (a celebrity poet? In 2017?) and Lawrence crushed by the surge of fame — the crowds, the editors, the handlers — that swirls around him.

That’s a good subject for a horror film, and maybe, as some have suggested, it represents Aronofsky drawing on his own experience as a highly celebrated Hollywood artist. (More than one wag has asked, “I wonder what Rachel Weisz” — Aronofsky’s ex-wife — “will make of this movie.”) But just because a movie has a meaning doesn’t make it an allegory. And just because a movie is an allegory doesn’t make it a good movie.

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Dream Scenario is a Worthwhile Head Trip

The new film starring nicolas cage is a thoughtful and engaging, if slightly overambitious, meditation on fame, attention, and parasocial connection..

Dream Scenario , the new film from Kristoffer Borgli, sports a premise so clever and exciting that it seems almost impossible to live up to or make good on as a fully realized film. Sometimes ideas are like that—more engaging as questions or conceits than developed as drawn-out experiments or inquiries. This is probably because questions or conceits are limitless in their potential, kaleidoscopic teasers with permutations of interesting outcomes, while experiments or inquiries only happen one way.

Dream Scenario ’s conceit is indeed excellent. The film is about an ordinary middle-aged man who starts mysteriously appearing in people’s dreams, all over the world. This is one of the most stimulating narrative prompts I’ve encountered a while, at least since I saw the wonderful trailer for Marc Forster and Zach Helm’s Stranger Than Fiction (2006) when I was fourteen. Unlike Stranger Than Fiction , which as a whole film and not a trailer I found fascinating but also a bit uncertain and a bit unfulfilled and a bit unsatisfying, I found Dream Scenario able to sidestep a hampering by its own scintillating prospects. It does eventually wobble as it builds a new story from its bracing gambit, but for the most part, it develops into a funny, interesting film with much to say about parasocial bonds and other illusions about possession of public figures.

The film stars Nicolas Cage (transformed by a fuzzy beard and bald head) as Paul Matthews, PhD, an evolutionary biologist and tenured professor at a small regional university. The film stresses that he is a very mediocre man. He hasn’t risen to any great heights in academia. As a father and husband, he’s fairly ineffectual. He suspects that a former colleague may have stolen his grad school research, but it’s been decades since and he hasn’t written his book on that work during all this time. It’s never directly stated, but it’s clear from little snide inflections and minute scowls in Cage’s performance that Paul lives his life feeling a little like a victim, wishing for notoriety and inclusion, and feeling resentful for his lack of it.

And then, people begin dreaming about him. No one knows why, but people all over the world begin reporting that they see him in the background of their dreams—watching the main events of the dreams play out, he is a curious but powerless and occasionally uninterested interloper. Paul becomes a celebrity, to the suspicious confusion of his wife Janet (Julianne Nicholson) and beguilement of his daughters Hannah (Jessica Clement) and Sophie (Lily Bird), and to his own delight.

Dream Scenario isn’t a fable about a man taken in and destroyed by fame; it’s more nuanced. Although Paul is tickled by his sudden notoriety, he hopes to use it to land a book deal for his own research. He signs with a management start-up (whose team consists of Michael Cera, Kate Berlant, and Dylan Gelula, all grotesque caricatures of media marketers), but they want him to appear in people’s dreams to advertise Sprite or other products, and Paul doesn’t want to sell out, just as much as he explains that he can’t control what he does in others’ dreams. His visage belongs to others, is seemingly controlled by their own brains and not his—a fact which begins to pose problems for him. And soon, his life becomes a waking nightmare.

For a while, the film evolves as a social satire rather than a sci-fi story about collective subconsciousness. It skirts past rails about cancel culture before settling in an inquiry about how the figures we encounter in life become characters in our own personal alternate realities, in a way that feels very relevant and useful in light of contemporary celebrity culture. It’s a longstanding fact of the social world that the more famous someone becomes, the more they belong to others and the less they belong to themselves, but Dream Scenario pushes an interrogation about this to extremes in a way that seems to resonate with, say, how our highly visual online culture leads to parasocial obsessions with celebrities like Taylor Swift . What does it mean when someone you don’t know becomes a dominant character in your life? What does it mean when you interpret someone else in certain ways, to the point where those interpretations begin to influence your opinions about the actual person?

Dream Scenario begins to lose its footing when it moves towards its third act, escalating into a different genre and abandoning its more philosophical questions for other ones that seem more immediate (especially given the looming threat of AI and the encroachment of various technological marketing assaults). Dream Scenario doesn’t spend enough time on these questions to pull off a multi-pronged critique, but it remains a fascinating and darkly funny film. Nicolas Cage, who has been enjoying a career renaissance as a character actor with films like Mandy , Pig , and even Renfield , is the film’s strongest propeller—his performance in Dream Scenario is a highlight even amongst this very strong recent run. He delivers a nuanced, very raw performance as the middling, over-his-head Paul. One scene, in which he attempts to behave like the more suave version of himself that someone else has dreamed, is one of the most cringey, hilarious interludes I’ve watched all year.

Dream Scenario is not the wild thought experiment that Borgli’s previous film, 2022’s Sick of Myself , is. That film, also a meditation on attention and audience, goes off the rails in a way that allows it to have a clearer thesis than Dream Scenario , which feels a little nebulous in terms of argument. Still, it is a very thoughtful and thought-provoking exercise, curious about what it means to be a captive audience, and also how your audience can hold you captive.

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Olivia Rutigliano

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‘Sacramento’ film starring Michael Cera, Kristen Stewart to premiere at Tribeca Film Festival in June

(FOX40.COM) — A movie filmed in Sacramento last year featuring Michael Cera and Kristen Stewart is set to premiere this summer.

The film, which is titled ‘Sacramento’, will be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival, which runs from June 5 to June 16, in New York City.

According to the festival, the movie follows two former friends on a road trip across California.

“When free-spirited Ricky suddenly reappears in father-to-be Glenn’s life, the two former best friends embark on a spontaneous road trip from LA to Sacramento in Michael Angarano’s original take on the buddy comedy,” a description on the festival website reads.

In addition to Cera and Stewart, the movie also features real-life engaged couple Maya Erskine and Michael Angarano.

Angarano is also the director and co-wrote the screenplay.

The movie was filmed in April and May of 2023 in various locations around the city including Old Sacramento, Gunther’s Ice Cream shop, East Sacramento, the R Street Corridor and downtown.

The film is approximately 84 minutes long and will be a part of the festival’s US Narrative Competition.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to FOX40.

• ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

Hollywood Arab Film Festival offers untold stories from the Middle East

GLENDALE, Calif. (KABC) -- In the world of film festivals, we've all heard of Sundance, Cannes and Telluride. But there is a relatively new festival starting to make an impact. And it's showing movies we basically never get to see.

The Hollywood Arab Film Festival kicks off its third year of celebrating movies from the Middle East.

"Bye Bye Tiberias" is one of several films that make up The Hollywood Arab Film Festival. It is a passion project for the festival's director, Maykel Bakhoum.

"We are a nonprofit organization, and our goal is celebrate diversity, celebrate inclusion in the Hollywood society," said Bakhoum. "And right now, diversity and inclusion matter more than ever. And we're happy we're living in that era that we can see our film screened in the industry here."

Filmmakers from the Middle East traveled to Los Angeles to participate in the festival, hoping Hollywood is open to what they have to offer.

"It's very important for us to be around here, " said Tarek El Ganainy. "Hollywood, at the end of the day, it is the capital of the cinema world. So having a voice here and having some sort of representation is something that we're always looking for."

"Now it's a matter of being able to find distribution because getting a film in a festival is one thing but for us, these festivals are a way of opening a door to distribution," said Mohamed Hefzy. "And I think without distribution these films will continue to be niche."

The Hollywood Arab Film Festival offers something moviegoers here don't readily get an opportunity to see.

"That's one of the reasons why we started the festival because I live here now for 16 years and we didn't get a chance to see Arab films screened on a big screen," said Bakhoum. "And we had that goal. We need to show people our story. Our story is telling who we are."

The Hollywood Arab Film Festival runs April 17-21, with all screenings held at the Look Cinemas in Glendale.

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Nicola Peltz Beckham, a billionaire's daughter, made an indie film where she plays a poor stripper. It didn't go well.

• Nicola Peltz Beckham wrote, directed, and stars in the indie film "Lola" about a teen living in poverty.
• The movie is being slammed by critics, with one calling it exploitative and "poverty porn."
• Peltz Beckham is the daughter of billionaire Nelson Peltz and is married to Brooklyn Beckham.

Nicola Peltz Beckham's directorial debut about a teen struggling to make ends meet in middle America is getting lambasted by critics.

"Lola," released in limited theaters on February 9, is written and directed by Peltz Beckham, who plays the titular character.

The coming-of-age indie film centers on a 19-year-old girl named Lola James who works at a drugstore and a strip club in hopes of saving up enough money to get her and her younger brother Arlo (Luke David Blumm) out of the home they share with their toxic mom.

Peltz Beckham's own upbringing is a far cry from Lola's. She's the daughter of businessman Nelson Peltz , whose estimated net worth is $1.5 billion. She's also married to Brooklyn Beckham, David and Victoria Beckham's eldest child. The couple wed in a lavish oceanfront wedding in Palm Beach in 2022 that reportedly cost $3 million and featured 500 guests including celebrities like Venus and Serena Williams.

Peltz Beckham, who's been acting since she was 12 , is best known for her roles in "Transformers: Age of Extinction" and "Bates Motel." She previously told WWD that she wrote the initial script six years ago when she was 23 over the course of three days. The character Arlo is inspired by her godson, and Lola's best friend Babina (Raven Goodwin) is based on Peltz Beckham's real-life friend Angela. Her brother Will Peltz has a role as a member of a Narcotics Anonymous group, while she revealed that her husband Brooklyn was cut from the movie because he botched his only line and kept staring directly at the camera.

Although "Lola" was released two months ago, the movie has become a topic of renewed discussion following a scathing review published by The Guardian on Friday that referred to it as a "vanity project."

In the review, writer Kady Ruth Ashcraft said that the film is inundated with "underbaked, oftentimes harmful tropes — the supportive Black best friend, a queer child meeting an unceremonious death, the virginal stripper saved by motherhood, a hypocritical Christian drunk."

Related stories

Ashcraft added that the movie feels exploitative of sex work and queer suffering.

"Peltz Beckham did achieve something with Lola: it's called 'poverty porn,' and in film, that means the exploitation of the conditions of poverty for entertainment and artistic recognition," Ashcraft wrote.

The criticism is even sharper when the heavy subject material is conceptualized and helmed by someone of a vastly different class.

"What makes Lola such a flagrant example of poverty porn is just how careless the project feels in the context of Peltz Beckham's exceptionally lavish life," Ashcraft wrote.

Ashcraft wasn't the only critic to call out the film.

"It's not a law that directors making slice-of-life flicks must be personally familiar with the material they are depicting, but before even watching 'Lola,' the disconnect between the dead-end world the film takes place in and Peltz Beckham's background stands out as jarring," Andrew Burton wrote for Spectrum Culture . "One can't help but feel that the project is doomed from the get-go because it is conceptually untenable."

Ayeen Forootan of In Review Online described "Lola" as a "poorly scripted and stereotypically melodramatic story," but praised the visual design of the film.

Peltz Beckham acknowledged the disconnect between her life and that of her character during her WWD interview, saying that she "did not grow up like Lola at all," but she still wanted to write a story from a perspective different from her own.

Business Insider reached out to Peltz Beckham and the film's distributor Vertical Entertainment, but did not receive a response.

• Main content

Kent State Golden Flashes

Baseball 4/18/2024 11:51:00 AM

Flashes Head West to Face NIU

KENT- The Golden Flashes take its longest in-conference road trip this weekend, heading to DeKalb to meet up with the Northern Illinois Huskies for a three-game series.

The Flashes and Huskies will meet at 4, 3, and 2 pm ET on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Kent State has won two-straight and coming off of an impressive 10-3 victory at Penn State on Tuesday night in State College.

It was a total team effort against the Nittany Lions with five players enjoying two-hit games and seven different Flashes scoring a run. Five pitchers combined to strikeout 11 Nittany Lions, led by Rocco Bernadina who allowed one run and struck out five and got the win. Kent State is averaging over nine runs a game in conference play. They will face a NIU staff that has pitched to a 6.36 team ERA in MAC play.

Northern Illinois is 6-9 in MAC play and 11-24 overall. They are led offensively by Eric Erato who leads the squad with a .344 average. Colin Summerhill has mashed this year, leading the team with 15 homers and 41 RBI, 13 more than anyone else on the team. On the bump, DJ Hess has been a stalwart out of the pen but the starters have struggled. No Husky starter has an ERA south of seven this season.

The weekend series will be streamed on NIU All-Access, fans can purchase a weekend pass to watch the stream. Live stats are also available and links to everything can be found on the baseball schedule page. The Flashes are back in the Buckeye state on Tuesday at Youngstown State for a 1 p.m. first pitch.

Players Mentioned

#27 Rocco Bernadina

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