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Film Diaries

What we've been watching lately

Movie still from Taipei Story. A woman business attire looks out a window, her reflection in the glass.

Taipei Story (1985)

Taipei Story opens on a young woman walking through an empty apartment. She pauses at a window and lowers her sunglasses, oversized and dark. “I know her!” Mom calls out from beside me. “She’s a famous singer.” The opening credits run as Mom hums a few lines off-key. “Do you recognize it?”

The year after my parents met in a café in Taipei, Taipei Story was released. The smog dusts each scene in static. “Now that’s the Taipei I remember,” Dad says while Mom Googles. “Yes, Tsai Chin,” she says. “Just look at the Spotify. You’ll find her.” 

In Taipei Story, Tsai Chin plays a young woman navigating a path forward as her childhood sweetheart Lung clings to his past. I asked Mom to watch the movie with me, hoping to hear more of the Taiwan she knew when she was in college and working and newly married and planning to move away to America.

“Pretty depressing,” was all she had to say about the movie. “I mostly enjoyed the background things. Did you know she was best Mandarin female artist in 1991? And she married the director?”

Mom watched for the popular singer she grew up with; for the extras in familiar-to-her school uniforms; for the background hum of motorbikes (“Is that 100cc? 150?”).

“People live like that,” Mom says as we watch Chin grab two beers from the kitchen, sipping from one before joining her father and Lung at the table. She hands the men the beers and sits, empty-handed. Chin watches as her dad knocks his spoon to the floor and, without hesitation, takes hers. “More traditional families,” Mom continues—“their furniture is very stiff. You see the chairs there? The elaborate Chinese-style carvings? We had a chair similar to that at Ama’s house. It had hardly any cushion.”

Athena Scott writes fiction and tries her best to call home to mom every day.
Movie still from Welcome to the Dollhouse. A young preteen girl stands outside wearing plastic glasses and plastic heart earrings with "Love" on them looks solemnly at the camera.

Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995)

love’s a confusing thing / in my suburban home, / i feel so alone...

Have I ever tried as hard at anything—least of all seduction—as 11-year-old Dawn Wiener trying to fuck a high-schooler at her parents' twentieth-anniversary garden party? She marches out of her shared bedroom, down the stairs, onto the deck, and into the crowd. She’s a girl on a mission. Her chosen armour is riddled with plastic: twin plastic beads perch stiffly above her high ponytail like a prank of bunny ears, like a joke of a halo. Thick plastic frames circle her eyes and clutch her head, in a time when “aesthetic” was unthinkable, and glasses could never be cool. Trite plastic hearts proclaim LOVE swinging from her earlobes, as bright and as blatant as her own pathetic desires. A trio of plastic buttons on the front of her ridiculous crop top fail at either decoration (by virtue of being a perfect match for the blue fabric they’re sewn into), or function (belied by the elasticated hem above her waist). Trillions of plastic microfibres make up the awful top (with its rows of polka-dotted ruffles and perpetually mismatched sleeves stopping either above one wrist or halfway down the other palm in any given shot), and the high-waisted tapered leggings (ribbed and bulky and wrinkling in all the wrong places). Plastic white, plastic pink, plastic blue and red and green and white and blue again. But my girl Dawn? She’s the opposite of plastic. Every jagged facet of her reality insists that her destiny—far from the sparkling, love-drenched confection that surrounds her sister Missy—is an onslaught of endlessly mounting shame and denial. Yet, she tries, dear Dawn, dumbass Dawn, dull and stubborn as quartzite. She will always fail, and she will always be trying.

Rasiqra Revulva works for The Puritan, makes music with The Databats, and published her debut collection "Cephalopography 2.0" with Wolsak & Wynn.
TV still from Digimon: Digital Monsters. Two young boys look out a window, one with binoculars, the other pointing.

Digimon: Digital Monsters

In the throes of a breakup, I take my laundry home to Long Island. The clothes are soiled with espresso and depression. My mom insists I sort out the lights from the darks and run separate loads, something I never do at Ma’s Laundromat, but I oblige. 

The basement, which in the early aughts was painted Crayola blue and yellow, is painfully beige and could pass as a Container Store outpost, the American Girl Doll outfit chest and dollhouse—a replica of our own home—cordoned off on shelving units, my childhood neatly archived. 

I snoop through my distant belongings to find a dented Digimon lunchbox and collection of Digimon figurines. As a young fan, I diligently sorted these toys by season with index cards reading “1st,” “2nd," and “3rd” above three separate sections. By now the strawberry-sized characters have been all mixed up.

According to Wiki, “the first three seasons that made up Digimon: Digital Monsters” (Pokémon’s narratively complex rival, to my 8-year-old devotee self) “aired on Fox Kids from August 14, 1999 to June 8, 2002,” the era of my parents’ divorce. I can still feel my pretzled legs and socked feet itchy on the living room carpet of our new house. I knew that if I sat close enough, stared long enough, my stalky body would disintegrate into pixels and I’d be absorbed by the TV into the Digiworld.

I likened me and my older brother, Matt, to the characters TK and Matt, whose parents divorced and split the brothers into two homes—TK with the mom, Matt with the dad. Both Matts were blonde-haired and blue-eyed, and although me and my human Matt lived primarily with our mom, he often stayed at my dad’s house in a neighbouring town, a teenage boy shooting hoops in the driveway with friends and throwing parties our dad was too chill (stoned) to care about. On Digimon, I saw my own divide, me and my budding boyhood.

Annette Covrigaru is a gay/bigender american-israeli writer living and roller skating in Brooklyn, NY.
Movie still from Beyond the Hills. A woman sits in a kitchen looking solemn, while a group of nuns preparing food all look at her sternly.

Beyond the Hills (2012)

I’ve been purposefully seeking films that defy ideas on spiritual deprivation, especially through their thematic excesses; hysteria, queerness, mysticism, and tragedy are all in cinematic opposition to whatever penance Lent requires. Beyond the Hills, in its neorealist approach, might appear minimal but its naturalism escalates the terrible tale of its two girls towards a horrific and bedevilled end.  

Beyond the Hills is based on a Moldovan exorcism that led to the death of 23-year-old Maricica Irina Cornici (also known as “The Tanacu Exorcism”) at a monastery in 2005. In making the film, director Cristian Mungiu returns to his Romanian hometown, reconstructing it as land against modernity. While the 2017 horror film The Crucifixion blatantly erases Cornici’s known queerness, Mungiu’s interpretation of her (based on a series of non-fiction novels by Tatiana Niculescu Bran) is far from straight-washed; her final hysteria is very much tied to her heartbreak over the pious Voichita (Cosmina Stratan).

Alina (Cristina Flutur) mourns the “beyond,” life outside the poverty they can’t rid themselves of, a life that led them to separate; Alina to Germany to find work & Voichita to the “cave” of reclusion as a nun. There’s a temporal beyond too. In the beginning, the two girls ascend the Romanian hills, further away from the city Alina hopes will welcome them back. But, they ascend backwards, a regression disorienting time to a place remiss of any queer future. The cinematography hints at this through a parched lens, a deprived, bleached-out palette.

This is a film about displacement. Both Alina and Voichita remain the orphan girls they were when they met as children, trying to settle somewhere safe but never locating “home,” or allowed to settle with each other, fully. The viewer becomes displaced too through the handheld camera’s destabilizing focus, our gaze hovers over Alina, not unlike the Satanic presence the Church suspects has aligned with her. We become the queer/strange/imagined elsewhere she covets, witnessing her crucifixion from beyond the screen.

There are 464 sins Alina must atone for but she would rather rage her sins into the frozen earth at Voichita’s feet in a beloved/bedevilled offering.

Alex Hall is a film writer based in Toronto.
Movie still from Final Exam.Two young women with long hair look off ac

Final Exam (1981)

For reasons that will likely amuse no one else, Final Exam, a slasher movie of no great acclaim, has become something of a secret handshake among a group of my horror-movie-obsessed internet friends. You see, most of us who had posted on a now-defunct forum near the beginning of the pandemic had been enticed into watching this nearly forgotten little movie when one of us posed a question coyly alluding to the ending. The movie is now an in-joke, cheekily brought up whenever someone asks for recommendations. “Have you seen a little movie called Final Exam?”

Revisiting it now, I was pleased to find that it still merits a recommendation, and not just in jest. I have a soft spot for first wave slashers and the way they generate tension through negative space, narratively and visually. Final Exam is set on an almost deserted college campus, a creeping dread setting in as the movie isolates its characters in darkened, at times pitch-black frames.

The movie seems curiously indifferent to slasher formulas. The violence is not particularly novel, aside from a moment when the killer catches an arrow with his bare hands (something the actor was trained to do for real). There’s little of the usual moralizing around sex, and the most promiscuous character is treated rather warmly. And the killer’s banality (a schlub in a green jacket) removes the grandeur afforded to the better-loved slasher villains, making the proceedings that much scarier. This is a world of senseless, unmotivated violence.

Allusions to real-life horrors pepper the dialogue (a character excitedly brings up Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower Sniper, during a class discussion), yet when death comes to the characters, whatever coping mechanisms they have (encyclopedic knowledge, mockery, desensitization) come up short. As one character puts it, “People are killed every day for no reason at all.”

Tarek M. is a perfectly ordinary member of society by day, stark raving cinephile by night.
Film still from Sextool. A burlesque performer with a tophat and cane performs on stage in front of red curtains, tongue sticking out.

Sextool (1975)

While commenters wage wars of words over the de-sexualized money machines from Disney and Marvel, the weight put upon representation as a measure of social and political progress seems dubious at best, regressive and distracting at worst. What’s so refreshing about encountering Fred Halsted’s 1975 Sextool in this contemporary moment is not only its catalogue of explicit sexual acts but also its framing of sexual fantasy and desire as a key part of queer life. 

Expanding the episodic canvas of his previous films, Sextool juxtaposes its sex scenes with vignettes of a Los Angeles party populated by muscle men, trans women, drag queens, and supposedly straight men. Halsted’s strategies of decoupage make dynamic connections between the mostly static frames and bodies of the party with the ecstatic fragmentation of the sex scenes. The camera glides across fists, asses, cocks, armpits, mouths, and various fetish objects (cigars, nightsticks, boots, bananas, dildos, piercing needles, and boxing gloves), cutting across them to create hypnotic rhythms of domination. The montage’s breakdown and recomposition of bodies express a libidinous fantasy that subversely queers cultural iconography: the fresh-faced blonde sailor becomes fodder for polymorphous gangbang, Marlene Dietrich’s cabaret stylings influence a voeyuristic drag performance, brutal policemen become fetishized objects for the oppressed subjects, and Halsted himself plays the macho boxer whose violent sparring organically morphs into sexual acts of domination.

Desire here is a matter of rummaging through dominant straight culture to pluck out and repurpose elements that can propose an oppositional erotic world. Even the surprising tenderness of the final sex scene, in which the film’s primary “straight man” finally gives up the ghost and fucks another partygoer, gives way to a rejection of homonormative monogamy as the newly initiated hunk naively asks to see his new lay again, only to be told of his libertine plans with many others. Sextool’s complete resistance to sanitize, pathologize, or make queer sex for a straight gaze makes Halsted himself into a queer superhero, exchanging a fist in the face of his enemy with a fist in the ass.

—Trevor McCulloch is a Chicago-based cinephile, sometimes writer, and full-time menace.
Movie still from Tarnation. A person in a tank top tilts their head to the side, standing outside against a field.

Tarnation (2003)

I’m revisiting Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation on the eve of making a documentary about my family, searching for insights from someone so unflinching, someone whose mashup of personal archive and collective, cultural archive, becomes a stream of consciousness from which it is impossible to look away. 

To begin: one stream of consciousness stream-of-consciousness engenders another, and Caouette’s grandmother gnaws her fingers exactly the same way mine did. I find myself rewatching this moment, this point of connection, over and over again. I know I’m not the first to seek out my own family in Caouette’s, or to see his mom Renee as some flickering protean being: her face becoming that of all the women I’ve met who were also Renee. 

If time and space could collapse for just a moment, we might assume Gena Rowlands was embodying Renee when she played Mabel Longhetti in A Woman Under the Influence, made 29 years before Tarnation. It’s as if one of those three Longhetti kids had been filming at Cassavetes’ knees, had somehow been considering since childhood what it means that Mom’s stories might be half truth and half delusion.

Tarnation is an ethically imperfect film, like any film about one’s family. Love muddies documentary ethics. And when there is love and something else, something darker, as is so often the case in families, then it can be hard not to just throw up one’s hands and scream and give up on the whole venture. When and how does someone with significant mental illness sign off on their own image? If Caouette showed less of himself it might be easy to accuse him of voyeurism, but he is no less laid bare, and maybe that's the best answer I can glean about how to make a no-less-imperfect film about those close to me: to show myself again and again.

Tarnation could simply be a movie about suffering, but it isn’t. Hovering on the margins of the story at all times is Renee, and her willingness to take part, to reveal herself. Once, Caouette calls after her: “Will you just help me with my stupid film?” And she does. 

Nora Rosenthal is a writer and filmmaker and the editor-in-chief of Rat Chat magazine.
Movie still from The Cruise. A man with glasses looks out onto a river in New York, the Brooklyn bridge and skyscrapers behind him.

The Cruise (1998)

The title of The Cruise has a twofold meaning. It alludes to the sightseeing tours Timothy “Speed” Levitch, the film’s central subject, gives on New York City’s double-decker buses, tours that garnered a cult following in the late ‘90s. It’s also a reference to Levitch’s self-created doctrine: to “cruise” is to live nomadically, loyal to the present moment, and in dissent of the thraldom of conformity. 

Directed by Bennett Miller and skillfully edited by Michael Levine, The Cruise is a strong piece of nonfiction portraiture, a depiction of a man in a wearing search for meaning. Footage was filmed twice—the first summer with a crew, the second, in the wake of DV cameras advent, just Miller—but only the second iteration was used, where Levitch, experiencing “self-consciousness fatigue”, let his performative guard down. The result is a portrayal of common artistic struggle, oscillating from scenes of Levitch’s brilliant, trenchant monologues in front of tourists or the camera, to others that are all too familiar: banal and bureaucratic encounters that curb the potential of Levitch’s existence. He refers to this as the “anti-cruise”, and the film offers examples: meagre pay and hours at work, his conservative family’s expectations, and a brief spell of incarceration. 

“Anti-cruise” is essentially anti-change, whereas to “cruise” is to believe in and strive for a better world. He knows that cruising entails failing repeatedly, but it also means living a life motivated by adventure and love. Levitch is aware, for instance, that the pursuit of individuality, at the crux of cruising, is a delusion, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth the effort. “Biologically, we have the same infrastructure as plants,” he says. “[But] I want to be the flower that smells most profusely, that veers most drastically towards the sunlight.”

Rosemary Flutur is a writer based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal.
Movie still from Xiao Wu. A man in glasses dangles on a horizontal bar.

Xiao Wu (1997)

At the salon about midway through Xiao Wu, the debut feature by Jia Zhangke, the hairdresser turns to the titular character, who is pacing, watching his karaoke bar hostess and then lover, Mei Mei, get her hair cut, and says with an oblique vagueness that seems very 2022: “Everyone’s into mood and taste these days.” This is 1997. The British Government is transferring sovereignty over Hong Kong to the People’s Republic. China is changing rapidly and Fenyang, Zhangke’s small provincial hometown where the film is set, is trying to keep up. Local shops are closing to be demolished. Wu, sleight, shy, slumped, is a pickpocket and the Government is cracking down on pickpockets. Zhangke positions Wu’s alienation beautifully within China’s enormous structural changes. 

What happens to Wu? With arcing pans and long dramatic shots of the rural landscape, Zhangke indicates that the world is tragically too vast to wait for Wu. He walks around in an oversized suit, whistling with puffed cheeks, toying with his lighter that plays Für Elise when lit. He is repressed and resistant to change. He tells Mei Mei that pickpocketing is “all [he] can do”. Alone at the public baths, he sings: “My feelings are like an untouchable net”. 

Yet Wu’s retreat isn’t by choice. What he, like all of us, needs always but particularly in moments of transformation, and what he grasps for—like wet hands on a pool edge—is connection and love. Xiao Wu sparkles as both an unrelenting portrait of the impacts of China’s modernisation and, more generally, all who are left behind by the vicissitudes of contemporary life. Wu’s friend rejects his gift for a wedding to which he was not invited. His mother seems to have given away the ring that was a present from him. Mei Mei, like everyone else, leaves.

Thea McLachlan is a journalist living in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal.
Movie still from The Goddess of The Ziggurat. Two men stand in front of their car, looking up at something.

The Goddess of The Ziggurat (2003)

It’s the early 2000s and Iran is a strange place to be. I still remember walking into the dimly lit living room, a Kinder Surprise toy in hand, and watching mum backlit by a news clip of the two towers going down. I couldn’t sleep at night because of all the threats George Bush Jr. made to the “Axis of Evil” countries. I paid a classmate who claimed he knew sorcery to write me a death hex to topple America. A year and a half later there’s a film on the silver screen: The Goddess of The Ziggurat (الهه زیگورات). It was one of Shahab Hosseini’s first roles as a pretty-boy, a decade before his breakout as an international star in Asghar Farhadi’s films.

The film begins with stock footage of New York on 9/11, and green screen footage of Shahab Hosseini as a NYC cab driver as he witnesses the carnage that ensues. His wife and children die intercut with footage of the towers crumbling and… end opening credits. 

The film changes hue, quite literally, from an intense blue tinge of the intro into a more organic look, and the protagonist returns to Iran and moves to a village in the Khuzestan province as a country doctor, overlooking the sacred ancient Ziggurat of Choghazanbil. Arriving there,  his friend claims the Zigguratt was the World Trade Center of the ancients considering that holiness was a way to attract financial investors.

If you didn’t think opening with real footage of 9/11 had enough shock value, the film ends with the protagonist drawing his last breath, looking at the Choghazanbil Zigguratt as the picture fades into the World Trade Center crumbling and fades back into the ruins of the Zigguratt. I will never forget witnessing the sheer insanity of such a cultural product of Iranian cinema as a 9-year-old.

Khashayar Mohammadi is a Kestrel that takes flight from Toronto.
Movie still from Taipei Story. A woman business attire looks out a window, her reflection in the glass.

Taipei Story (1985)

Taipei Story opens on a young woman walking through an empty apartment. She pauses at a window and lowers her sunglasses, oversized and dark. “I know her!” Mom calls out from beside me. “She’s a famous singer.” The opening credits run as Mom hums a few lines off-key. “Do you recognize it?”

The year after my parents met in a café in Taipei, Taipei Story was released. The smog dusts each scene in static. “Now that’s the Taipei I remember,” Dad says while Mom Googles. “Yes, Tsai Chin,” she says. “Just look at the Spotify. You’ll find her.” 

In Taipei Story, Tsai Chin plays a young woman navigating a path forward as her childhood sweetheart Lung clings to his past. I asked Mom to watch the movie with me, hoping to hear more of the Taiwan she knew when she was in college and working and newly married and planning to move away to America.

“Pretty depressing,” was all she had to say about the movie. “I mostly enjoyed the background things. Did you know she was best Mandarin female artist in 1991? And she married the director?”

Mom watched for the popular singer she grew up with; for the extras in familiar-to-her school uniforms; for the background hum of motorbikes (“Is that 100cc? 150?”).

“People live like that,” Mom says as we watch Chin grab two beers from the kitchen, sipping from one before joining her father and Lung at the table. She hands the men the beers and sits, empty-handed. Chin watches as her dad knocks his spoon to the floor and, without hesitation, takes hers. “More traditional families,” Mom continues—“their furniture is very stiff. You see the chairs there? The elaborate Chinese-style carvings? We had a chair similar to that at Ama’s house. It had hardly any cushion.”

Athena Scott writes fiction and tries her best to call home to mom every day.
Movie still from Welcome to the Dollhouse. A young preteen girl stands outside wearing plastic glasses and plastic heart earrings with "Love" on them looks solemnly at the camera.

Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995)

love’s a confusing thing / in my suburban home, / i feel so alone...

Have I ever tried as hard at anything—least of all seduction—as 11-year-old Dawn Wiener trying to fuck a high-schooler at her parents' twentieth-anniversary garden party? She marches out of her shared bedroom, down the stairs, onto the deck, and into the crowd. She’s a girl on a mission. Her chosen armour is riddled with plastic: twin plastic beads perch stiffly above her high ponytail like a prank of bunny ears, like a joke of a halo. Thick plastic frames circle her eyes and clutch her head, in a time when “aesthetic” was unthinkable, and glasses could never be cool. Trite plastic hearts proclaim LOVE swinging from her earlobes, as bright and as blatant as her own pathetic desires. A trio of plastic buttons on the front of her ridiculous crop top fail at either decoration (by virtue of being a perfect match for the blue fabric they’re sewn into), or function (belied by the elasticated hem above her waist). Trillions of plastic microfibres make up the awful top (with its rows of polka-dotted ruffles and perpetually mismatched sleeves stopping either above one wrist or halfway down the other palm in any given shot), and the high-waisted tapered leggings (ribbed and bulky and wrinkling in all the wrong places). Plastic white, plastic pink, plastic blue and red and green and white and blue again. But my girl Dawn? She’s the opposite of plastic. Every jagged facet of her reality insists that her destiny—far from the sparkling, love-drenched confection that surrounds her sister Missy—is an onslaught of endlessly mounting shame and denial. Yet, she tries, dear Dawn, dumbass Dawn, dull and stubborn as quartzite. She will always fail, and she will always be trying.

Rasiqra Revulva works for The Puritan, makes music with The Databats, and published her debut collection "Cephalopography 2.0" with Wolsak & Wynn.
TV still from Digimon: Digital Monsters. Two young boys look out a window, one with binoculars, the other pointing.

Digimon: Digital Monsters

In the throes of a breakup, I take my laundry home to Long Island. The clothes are soiled with espresso and depression. My mom insists I sort out the lights from the darks and run separate loads, something I never do at Ma’s Laundromat, but I oblige. 

The basement, which in the early aughts was painted Crayola blue and yellow, is painfully beige and could pass as a Container Store outpost, the American Girl Doll outfit chest and dollhouse—a replica of our own home—cordoned off on shelving units, my childhood neatly archived. 

I snoop through my distant belongings to find a dented Digimon lunchbox and collection of Digimon figurines. As a young fan, I diligently sorted these toys by season with index cards reading “1st,” “2nd," and “3rd” above three separate sections. By now the strawberry-sized characters have been all mixed up.

According to Wiki, “the first three seasons that made up Digimon: Digital Monsters” (Pokémon’s narratively complex rival, to my 8-year-old devotee self) “aired on Fox Kids from August 14, 1999 to June 8, 2002,” the era of my parents’ divorce. I can still feel my pretzled legs and socked feet itchy on the living room carpet of our new house. I knew that if I sat close enough, stared long enough, my stalky body would disintegrate into pixels and I’d be absorbed by the TV into the Digiworld.

I likened me and my older brother, Matt, to the characters TK and Matt, whose parents divorced and split the brothers into two homes—TK with the mom, Matt with the dad. Both Matts were blonde-haired and blue-eyed, and although me and my human Matt lived primarily with our mom, he often stayed at my dad’s house in a neighbouring town, a teenage boy shooting hoops in the driveway with friends and throwing parties our dad was too chill (stoned) to care about. On Digimon, I saw my own divide, me and my budding boyhood.

Annette Covrigaru is a gay/bigender american-israeli writer living and roller skating in Brooklyn, NY.
Movie still from Beyond the Hills. A woman sits in a kitchen looking solemn, while a group of nuns preparing food all look at her sternly.

Beyond the Hills (2012)

I’ve been purposefully seeking films that defy ideas on spiritual deprivation, especially through their thematic excesses; hysteria, queerness, mysticism, and tragedy are all in cinematic opposition to whatever penance Lent requires. Beyond the Hills, in its neorealist approach, might appear minimal but its naturalism escalates the terrible tale of its two girls towards a horrific and bedevilled end.  

Beyond the Hills is based on a Moldovan exorcism that led to the death of 23-year-old Maricica Irina Cornici (also known as “The Tanacu Exorcism”) at a monastery in 2005. In making the film, director Cristian Mungiu returns to his Romanian hometown, reconstructing it as land against modernity. While the 2017 horror film The Crucifixion blatantly erases Cornici’s known queerness, Mungiu’s interpretation of her (based on a series of non-fiction novels by Tatiana Niculescu Bran) is far from straight-washed; her final hysteria is very much tied to her heartbreak over the pious Voichita (Cosmina Stratan).

Alina (Cristina Flutur) mourns the “beyond,” life outside the poverty they can’t rid themselves of, a life that led them to separate; Alina to Germany to find work & Voichita to the “cave” of reclusion as a nun. There’s a temporal beyond too. In the beginning, the two girls ascend the Romanian hills, further away from the city Alina hopes will welcome them back. But, they ascend backwards, a regression disorienting time to a place remiss of any queer future. The cinematography hints at this through a parched lens, a deprived, bleached-out palette.

This is a film about displacement. Both Alina and Voichita remain the orphan girls they were when they met as children, trying to settle somewhere safe but never locating “home,” or allowed to settle with each other, fully. The viewer becomes displaced too through the handheld camera’s destabilizing focus, our gaze hovers over Alina, not unlike the Satanic presence the Church suspects has aligned with her. We become the queer/strange/imagined elsewhere she covets, witnessing her crucifixion from beyond the screen.

There are 464 sins Alina must atone for but she would rather rage her sins into the frozen earth at Voichita’s feet in a beloved/bedevilled offering.

Alex Hall is a film writer based in Toronto.
Movie still from Final Exam.Two young women with long hair look off ac

Final Exam (1981)

For reasons that will likely amuse no one else, Final Exam, a slasher movie of no great acclaim, has become something of a secret handshake among a group of my horror-movie-obsessed internet friends. You see, most of us who had posted on a now-defunct forum near the beginning of the pandemic had been enticed into watching this nearly forgotten little movie when one of us posed a question coyly alluding to the ending. The movie is now an in-joke, cheekily brought up whenever someone asks for recommendations. “Have you seen a little movie called Final Exam?”

Revisiting it now, I was pleased to find that it still merits a recommendation, and not just in jest. I have a soft spot for first wave slashers and the way they generate tension through negative space, narratively and visually. Final Exam is set on an almost deserted college campus, a creeping dread setting in as the movie isolates its characters in darkened, at times pitch-black frames.

The movie seems curiously indifferent to slasher formulas. The violence is not particularly novel, aside from a moment when the killer catches an arrow with his bare hands (something the actor was trained to do for real). There’s little of the usual moralizing around sex, and the most promiscuous character is treated rather warmly. And the killer’s banality (a schlub in a green jacket) removes the grandeur afforded to the better-loved slasher villains, making the proceedings that much scarier. This is a world of senseless, unmotivated violence.

Allusions to real-life horrors pepper the dialogue (a character excitedly brings up Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower Sniper, during a class discussion), yet when death comes to the characters, whatever coping mechanisms they have (encyclopedic knowledge, mockery, desensitization) come up short. As one character puts it, “People are killed every day for no reason at all.”

Tarek M. is a perfectly ordinary member of society by day, stark raving cinephile by night.
Film still from Sextool. A burlesque performer with a tophat and cane performs on stage in front of red curtains, tongue sticking out.

Sextool (1975)

While commenters wage wars of words over the de-sexualized money machines from Disney and Marvel, the weight put upon representation as a measure of social and political progress seems dubious at best, regressive and distracting at worst. What’s so refreshing about encountering Fred Halsted’s 1975 Sextool in this contemporary moment is not only its catalogue of explicit sexual acts but also its framing of sexual fantasy and desire as a key part of queer life. 

Expanding the episodic canvas of his previous films, Sextool juxtaposes its sex scenes with vignettes of a Los Angeles party populated by muscle men, trans women, drag queens, and supposedly straight men. Halsted’s strategies of decoupage make dynamic connections between the mostly static frames and bodies of the party with the ecstatic fragmentation of the sex scenes. The camera glides across fists, asses, cocks, armpits, mouths, and various fetish objects (cigars, nightsticks, boots, bananas, dildos, piercing needles, and boxing gloves), cutting across them to create hypnotic rhythms of domination. The montage’s breakdown and recomposition of bodies express a libidinous fantasy that subversely queers cultural iconography: the fresh-faced blonde sailor becomes fodder for polymorphous gangbang, Marlene Dietrich’s cabaret stylings influence a voeyuristic drag performance, brutal policemen become fetishized objects for the oppressed subjects, and Halsted himself plays the macho boxer whose violent sparring organically morphs into sexual acts of domination.

Desire here is a matter of rummaging through dominant straight culture to pluck out and repurpose elements that can propose an oppositional erotic world. Even the surprising tenderness of the final sex scene, in which the film’s primary “straight man” finally gives up the ghost and fucks another partygoer, gives way to a rejection of homonormative monogamy as the newly initiated hunk naively asks to see his new lay again, only to be told of his libertine plans with many others. Sextool’s complete resistance to sanitize, pathologize, or make queer sex for a straight gaze makes Halsted himself into a queer superhero, exchanging a fist in the face of his enemy with a fist in the ass.

—Trevor McCulloch is a Chicago-based cinephile, sometimes writer, and full-time menace.
Movie still from Tarnation. A person in a tank top tilts their head to the side, standing outside against a field.

Tarnation (2003)

I’m revisiting Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation on the eve of making a documentary about my family, searching for insights from someone so unflinching, someone whose mashup of personal archive and collective, cultural archive, becomes a stream of consciousness from which it is impossible to look away. 

To begin: one stream of consciousness stream-of-consciousness engenders another, and Caouette’s grandmother gnaws her fingers exactly the same way mine did. I find myself rewatching this moment, this point of connection, over and over again. I know I’m not the first to seek out my own family in Caouette’s, or to see his mom Renee as some flickering protean being: her face becoming that of all the women I’ve met who were also Renee. 

If time and space could collapse for just a moment, we might assume Gena Rowlands was embodying Renee when she played Mabel Longhetti in A Woman Under the Influence, made 29 years before Tarnation. It’s as if one of those three Longhetti kids had been filming at Cassavetes’ knees, had somehow been considering since childhood what it means that Mom’s stories might be half truth and half delusion.

Tarnation is an ethically imperfect film, like any film about one’s family. Love muddies documentary ethics. And when there is love and something else, something darker, as is so often the case in families, then it can be hard not to just throw up one’s hands and scream and give up on the whole venture. When and how does someone with significant mental illness sign off on their own image? If Caouette showed less of himself it might be easy to accuse him of voyeurism, but he is no less laid bare, and maybe that's the best answer I can glean about how to make a no-less-imperfect film about those close to me: to show myself again and again.

Tarnation could simply be a movie about suffering, but it isn’t. Hovering on the margins of the story at all times is Renee, and her willingness to take part, to reveal herself. Once, Caouette calls after her: “Will you just help me with my stupid film?” And she does. 

Nora Rosenthal is a writer and filmmaker and the editor-in-chief of Rat Chat magazine.
Movie still from The Cruise. A man with glasses looks out onto a river in New York, the Brooklyn bridge and skyscrapers behind him.

The Cruise (1998)

The title of The Cruise has a twofold meaning. It alludes to the sightseeing tours Timothy “Speed” Levitch, the film’s central subject, gives on New York City’s double-decker buses, tours that garnered a cult following in the late ‘90s. It’s also a reference to Levitch’s self-created doctrine: to “cruise” is to live nomadically, loyal to the present moment, and in dissent of the thraldom of conformity. 

Directed by Bennett Miller and skillfully edited by Michael Levine, The Cruise is a strong piece of nonfiction portraiture, a depiction of a man in a wearing search for meaning. Footage was filmed twice—the first summer with a crew, the second, in the wake of DV cameras advent, just Miller—but only the second iteration was used, where Levitch, experiencing “self-consciousness fatigue”, let his performative guard down. The result is a portrayal of common artistic struggle, oscillating from scenes of Levitch’s brilliant, trenchant monologues in front of tourists or the camera, to others that are all too familiar: banal and bureaucratic encounters that curb the potential of Levitch’s existence. He refers to this as the “anti-cruise”, and the film offers examples: meagre pay and hours at work, his conservative family’s expectations, and a brief spell of incarceration. 

“Anti-cruise” is essentially anti-change, whereas to “cruise” is to believe in and strive for a better world. He knows that cruising entails failing repeatedly, but it also means living a life motivated by adventure and love. Levitch is aware, for instance, that the pursuit of individuality, at the crux of cruising, is a delusion, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth the effort. “Biologically, we have the same infrastructure as plants,” he says. “[But] I want to be the flower that smells most profusely, that veers most drastically towards the sunlight.”

Rosemary Flutur is a writer based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal.
Movie still from Xiao Wu. A man in glasses dangles on a horizontal bar.

Xiao Wu (1997)

At the salon about midway through Xiao Wu, the debut feature by Jia Zhangke, the hairdresser turns to the titular character, who is pacing, watching his karaoke bar hostess and then lover, Mei Mei, get her hair cut, and says with an oblique vagueness that seems very 2022: “Everyone’s into mood and taste these days.” This is 1997. The British Government is transferring sovereignty over Hong Kong to the People’s Republic. China is changing rapidly and Fenyang, Zhangke’s small provincial hometown where the film is set, is trying to keep up. Local shops are closing to be demolished. Wu, sleight, shy, slumped, is a pickpocket and the Government is cracking down on pickpockets. Zhangke positions Wu’s alienation beautifully within China’s enormous structural changes. 

What happens to Wu? With arcing pans and long dramatic shots of the rural landscape, Zhangke indicates that the world is tragically too vast to wait for Wu. He walks around in an oversized suit, whistling with puffed cheeks, toying with his lighter that plays Für Elise when lit. He is repressed and resistant to change. He tells Mei Mei that pickpocketing is “all [he] can do”. Alone at the public baths, he sings: “My feelings are like an untouchable net”. 

Yet Wu’s retreat isn’t by choice. What he, like all of us, needs always but particularly in moments of transformation, and what he grasps for—like wet hands on a pool edge—is connection and love. Xiao Wu sparkles as both an unrelenting portrait of the impacts of China’s modernisation and, more generally, all who are left behind by the vicissitudes of contemporary life. Wu’s friend rejects his gift for a wedding to which he was not invited. His mother seems to have given away the ring that was a present from him. Mei Mei, like everyone else, leaves.

Thea McLachlan is a journalist living in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal.
Movie still from The Goddess of The Ziggurat. Two men stand in front of their car, looking up at something.

The Goddess of The Ziggurat (2003)

It’s the early 2000s and Iran is a strange place to be. I still remember walking into the dimly lit living room, a Kinder Surprise toy in hand, and watching mum backlit by a news clip of the two towers going down. I couldn’t sleep at night because of all the threats George Bush Jr. made to the “Axis of Evil” countries. I paid a classmate who claimed he knew sorcery to write me a death hex to topple America. A year and a half later there’s a film on the silver screen: The Goddess of The Ziggurat (الهه زیگورات). It was one of Shahab Hosseini’s first roles as a pretty-boy, a decade before his breakout as an international star in Asghar Farhadi’s films.

The film begins with stock footage of New York on 9/11, and green screen footage of Shahab Hosseini as a NYC cab driver as he witnesses the carnage that ensues. His wife and children die intercut with footage of the towers crumbling and… end opening credits. 

The film changes hue, quite literally, from an intense blue tinge of the intro into a more organic look, and the protagonist returns to Iran and moves to a village in the Khuzestan province as a country doctor, overlooking the sacred ancient Ziggurat of Choghazanbil. Arriving there,  his friend claims the Zigguratt was the World Trade Center of the ancients considering that holiness was a way to attract financial investors.

If you didn’t think opening with real footage of 9/11 had enough shock value, the film ends with the protagonist drawing his last breath, looking at the Choghazanbil Zigguratt as the picture fades into the World Trade Center crumbling and fades back into the ruins of the Zigguratt. I will never forget witnessing the sheer insanity of such a cultural product of Iranian cinema as a 9-year-old.

Khashayar Mohammadi is a Kestrel that takes flight from Toronto.