- Mediocre “Alley Cats” is for Hardcore Ricky Gervais Fans Only (August 7, 2026)
Rarely has an animated show felt more like an extension of its creator’s personality than Netflix’s “Alley Cats,” a Ricky Gervais production from top to fuzzy bottom. It’s a disheartening reminder of how far the once-creative star of “The Office” and “Extras” has fallen, becoming almost a parody of himself with his “edgy” humor and boasting about defeating a cancel culture that Netflix clearly never believed existed if one looks at its roster of stand-up specials.
All six of the short (15 minutes or so) episodes of “Alley Cats” follow a nearly identical format as Gervais’ Gus and his cat buddies sit on a couch, riff for a few minutes, wander around town for a loose plot, and end up with piano-accompanied thoughts about life and death in a way that’s aggressively manipulative. Gervais even has the nerve to use the opening piano riffs of Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles” more than once, leaning into a show that’s surprisingly sentimental.
More than ever, Gervais as a writer exists only in extremes: He’s either trying to offend with lame attempts at graphic humor or leaning into the kind of manipulative storytelling he honed on “After Life.” He’s made a show with an extended conversation about a cat being fingered by local kids and yet another reminder that Gervais can’t believe in a God that gives children (or kittens) fatal diseases. It’s the only show on TV that addresses both cats watching their owners erotically asphyxiate and what happens after we die.
Alley Cats. (L to R) David Earl as Puke, Diane Morgan as Olive, Jo Hartley as Kitten, Ricky Gervais as Gus, Tom Basden as Ponce, Andrew Brooke as Fang, in Alley Cats. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2026
That description probably makes “Alley Cats” sound more entertaining than it is, even with its undeniable points for originality. The short length of each episode (and the overall season, which can be watched in less time than it takes to see most feature films) allows for “Alley Cats” to be more forgettable than atrocious, and the writers do find a joke here or there that connects. The voice work is relatively strong (including former Gervais collaborators like David Earl, Kerry Godliman, and Tony Way), and the animation has charming simplicity that fits its subject matter: A show about homeless, raunchy cats shouldn’t look too pretty.
What’s ultimately disheartening about “Alley Cats” is how little impact it makes either on the legacy of Ricky Gervais or the current state of streaming animated comedy. Gervais used to be such an important voice in TV comedy (and, for a brief window, was also an interesting filmmaker), but like so many once-edgy artists, he seems content to repeat himself and fall into all the routines his detractors expect. And the saddest truth is that there’s nothing about “Alley Cats” that’s particularly interesting outside of how it reflects the current state of its creator’s career and sense of humor.
Alley Cats. (L to R) David Earl as Puke, Jo Hartley as Kitten, Diane Morgan as Olive, Ricky Gervais as Gus, Andrew Brooke as Fang, Tom Basden as Ponce, in Alley Cats. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2026
Ricky Gervais thrives on attention, whether it’s in being a provocateur on an awards show stage or repeatedly espousing his atheism on podcasts. The problem is that comedy requires interest in something other than yourself, and Gervais has never met anyone funnier or smarter than himself. That ego seeps through so much of “Alley Cats,” a show that should be a casual, funny hang but can’t get out of the shadow of its own creator’s worst instincts.
The tagline for “Alley Cats” is “Nine Lives, Zero Fucks.” Ricky Gervais has certainly had the former as he’s maintained popularity for nearly three decades now. And he’s made the latter his entire personality. As a huge fan of his work with Stephen Merchant, I believe there’s always a chance that this undeniably smart TV creator could find that magic again, but it’s only going to happen if he’s able to leave the predictable comedic alleys that his fans know by heart.
Whole season screened for review. Now on Netflix.
- A Man of Letters: Kent Jones on “Late Fame” (August 7, 2026)
Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe) is “a man of letters,” declares a young man who accosts him on the street one day, eagerly explaining he’s stumbled across a poetry collection Saxberger wrote long ago and believes it to be an overlooked masterpiece. Setting aside the relative merits of Way Past Go, which nobody’s mentioned to Saxberger in decades, the young man has a point; Saxberger now works at the post office, sorting other people’s mail. But the tantalizing possibility that his once-lofty literary ambitions have belatedly earned him a following—not only this slightly snobbish student of the arts (Edmund Donovan) but a society of self-described “enthusiasts”—is enough to awaken strong emotions in Saxberger, causing him to reassess his own merits.
“Late Fame,” opening in theaters this week, is the second narrative feature directed by Kent Jones, a former critic and programmer who also led the New York Film Festival from 2013 to 2019. Featuring a rich and contemplative lead performance from Dafoe—much as Jones’ last feature, “Diane,” foregrounded a revelatory turn from character actress Mary Kay Place—this smart and sensitive follow-up co-stars Greta Lee as Gloria, a middle-aged theater actress who aspires to the fading archetype of screen divas Sally Bowles and Marlene Dietrich but hasn’t yet broken through, instead settling into a far less lucrative role as tragedienne-in-residence for this “Enthusiasm Society.”
With the rich chemistry between Dafoe and Lee providing his drama with a gravitational core, Jones—working with a carefully nuanced script by Samy Burch (“May December”), who adapted a novella by Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler, shifting the setting from 19th-century Vienna to contemporary SoHo—turns “Late Fame” into a delicate, layered examination of the artist’s life, personal fulfillment, and ghosts of our cultural past that continue to possess and compel us in the present.
Ahead of the film’s release, Jones spoke with RogerEbert.com about the appeal of working within someone else’s sensibility, his own memories of the soul of SoHo, moving away from the auteur theory of criticism that originally drove his engagement with cinema, and much more.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
You took decades to complete the screenplay for “Diane,” your feature debut. How did you arrive at “Late Fame,” which was written by Samy Burch—herself adapting a novella by Arthur Schnitzler that was written over a century ago—as your next project?
Pam Koffler, [an American film producer] from Killer Films, called me one day and asked if I ever read scripts by other people—and because it was her asking, I didn’t stop to think about it. After I had read the novella, I went ahead and read Samy’s script. We should all be so lucky to get scripts by a writer like Samy, because she writes with a real movie sense. She has a sense of surprise. There’s nothing expected; inevitably, in a lot of scripts you read, there’s the moment you can sense coming early on, and once it arrives everything that’s been interesting about that build-up suddenly falls away to make way for something less interesting.
There are so many well-trodden paths in movies, some of which are unfortunately rewarded in the reception of the work or treated as if they’re a given. There was nothing like that in Samy’s script. I met with her and liked it even more after I met her, because I liked her. She and I got along really well; now we’re pretty close friends. I’ve reflected recently on how much I liked the idea of working with someone else’s sensibility that’s also at a remove from someone else’s sensibility—which is Arthur Schnitzler. I’m still thinking about that. I really enjoyed that process, but I can’t imagine it happening all the time. We really did connect; Samy also wrote the liner notes for the new Blu-ray of “Diane” that The Film Desk put out.
Kent Jones on the set of “Late Fame.” (Magnolia Pictures)
Where did your sensibility come into play, given the palimpsest quality that emerges from Samy not only adapting Schnitzler but also translating it, across generations and geographies? It’s a quintessentially New York film, and the Saxberger character would have arrived in SoHo around the same time you did; as a critic-turned-filmmaker, as well as the former director for the New York Film Festival, the story’s dialogues around cultural cachet, artistic currency, and the evolution of the city’s literary scene could have struck a chord for you personally.
Upon my first read, I knew that I liked “Late Fame.” I probably thought about these ideas; as we got into working together, these were the qualities of it that I moved toward—or at least that I didn’t move away from. The idea of going out, finding someone, and saying to them, “I read your work from 40 years ago, I think you’re a genius, and you never got your proper recognition” is so familiar to me from a particular strand of criticism.
When I was young, I came out of the auteurist school of thinking—which was all retrospective, and even when it wasn’t, it was. I mean that, if somebody was writing about Ingmar Bergman, they would write, “But Howard Hawks is better, because he was less pretentious about it.” And people actually wrote such things, if you can believe it. That vision of retrospective criticism had started in France, because all of these films had flooded into France after the war, but that was what had attracted me to criticism; the first piece I had published in Film Comment, for instance, was about Olivier Assayas; long before Assayas was recognized in this country, I’d seen “Paris Awakens” and didn’t understand why nobody here knew who he was. He’d been programmed in a few series, but I was very taken with him and became—like many others—invested in really promoting certain filmmakers.
I recently learned that the critic Tony Rayns had died and was recalling that crazy, buzzing energy between him, Pierre Rissient, Peggy Chaio, Berenice Reynaud, Max Tessier—all these critics focused on European and Asian cinema, some of them on Iranian cinema too. There was a lot of competition between them, but they were all very passionate in that sense. I felt that same passion for Monte Helleman very personally, because the first time I interviewed him was before “Two-Lane Blacktop” was restored and reclaimed by history, and I felt he’d been almost forgotten; that feeling was very familiar to me.
The more we got into “Late Fame,” the more I wanted to deal with poetry on a real level. Samy told me poetry was not her area of expertise, and she’d had a poem in the script that was very good but too close to Schnitzler, we thought. I knew something of the New York School of Poets, [who’d lived and worked in downtown Manhattan in the 1950s and ’60s,] through my friend Pete [Gizzi,] to whom “Late Fame” is dedicated. I’d read a lot of that poetry, and I wanted this film to reflect that, but there’s also the sense of the memory of New York of an earlier moment in time, and the ghost of it, in the story.
In the first draft, it was the West Village where he wandered, but he was supposed to be an older character at that point, and then, when we started working with Willem, I realized that Willem and I both came to New York around the same time, and we both had that sense. He was a founding member of The Wooster Group, named for Wooster Street in SoHo, along with Richard Foreman. Anthology Film Archives was there, and SoHo was a very different place at the time. Then, suddenly, that was all gone, which was crazy—but the ghost of it is still there.
Physically, it just isn’t that different, you know? I find SoHo very haunting, its arcades and those little buildings, all its cobblestones. That became more of a presence for me in the story, as it all developed.
Late Fame (Magnolia Pictures)
What brought you first to New York?
I just moved to New York because I wanted to move to New York. Then I did a year at McGill, and then I took a year off; I was just focused on movies. As a matter of fact, Godard came to Montréal, and I saw him give a few of his “Histoire(s) du cinéma” lectures. I met him when I was 17 years old. That was crazy. I took a year off, then I went to NYU because I had this romantic dream of coming down and studying with Nicholas Ray—which of course never would have happened, and he was dead by the time I got there anyway—but that was because they’d all come to New York.
How did memories of your experiences around that time inform the quasi-vérité way that you chose to film the literary salons, the spaces where The Enthusiasm Society elects to meet and the way those gatherings unfold?
Those kinds of mythic places that people recall, or that they try to emulate—like Gertrude Stein’s salon in Paris, or the Algonquin Round Table, or the Cedar Bar—I tend to think they happened spontaneously. It was interesting, because I had a friend who lived in an apartment on the Upper West Side, and she started inviting people over to her place on Sundays. And there was a conductor, some musicians, some theater people. I was there, too. At a certain point, after a few weeks, she said, “Everybody, I’d like to make an announcement. It’s always been a dream of mine to have a salon. And I’ve realized that’s what we’re doing now, and I just want to say, ‘Keep coming!’” It all fell apart, almost on contact, the minute that she named it.
What I wanted to do was to have people gathering in a place that felt out of time. It’s not really a kind of place that exists in New York anymore. The bar itself, all the interiors for the film, were shot in New Jersey, and so that café is very much a Jersey place—but it feels like a New York place from 30 years ago or even more. It was the same with the performance space at the end. It’s almost like Bushwick, but not really; it’s a different, more surreal art community that lives out there. I wanted to create a space that would be ideal for those kinds of gatherings, the kinds of places people wanted to be at, but never really were, and had these ideas of earlier moments when people were. I knew people who had been to the Cedar Bar. Alfred Leslie was a friend of mine, and he knew a lot of people who had been part of the New York poetry scene.
“Late Fame” asks these questions about whether art can reflect authenticity, and that’s this element of Saxberger’s poetry that the younger generation responds to, or at least that they interpret or infer in writing that’s from—as you’re saying—a place and a scene that came before their time. When Saxberger is reading his poetry aloud, there’s a slight edge that led me to think about Dafoe potentially harkening back to his own time as a member of an experimental theatre company. Greta Lee, in a much showier role, is constantly performing for this group of young admirers. Tell me about working with the layers of performance you wanted from these characters.
I had very few conversations with Willem around this, but we were of like minds, basically, and needed to iron out certain scenes and lines of dialogue. When we were shooting, Willem was the guy who just wanted to keep going, to move ahead, because the moment is everything for him. Every actor is different, and sometimes there would be little adjustments I’d ask him to make here and there, but there was never conscious thought about that. It’s more like Ed is confronted with this situation, and he’s lured into it—in a way that we all would be; who wouldn’t respond to that? And there’s a part of him that recognizes the fragility, the borderline craziness, of the situation, and there’s another part of him where the state and the feeling of being young come back to him very suddenly, like muscle memory. When he’s reading the poem, that’s quite different, because he’s not expecting to read it, but then [Gloria] can’t keep it together to read it for him; when he reads the poem, he’s confronted with it in the moment, returning to this piece he wrote as a younger man about a woman that he was in love with. And he just gives it a good reading, I think.
With Gloria, it’s a little bit different. Greta is playing a character who’s playing a character, quite often, under every circumstance, in every different circumstance, with the sole exception of an awkward moment when he goes to her apartment. She’s someone who’s traveled the toughest road of all the characters, because she is someone who came to New York probably a little bit late and who’s singing a song in this environment, something that would have been the lingua franca of New York 30 years earlier but not so much anymore. She’s giving it her all—but the edginess that you’re talking about is definitely there. It’s present, it’s part of my sensibility, and it’s also just part of the story. I wouldn’t want her to be singing Rodgers and Hammerstein, so it had to be Brecht and Weill.
Late Fame (Magnolia Pictures)
Her performance of “Surabaya Johnny,” in this downtown cabaret, is one of the scenes that leaps to mind first when I think about “Late Fame.”
That was one of the rare instances where, if you’re talking about film references, I was thinking a lot about the way that it couldn’t look. I’m an extravagant Fassbinder aficionado, but the way he filmed those musical numbers in “Lola” or “The Marriage of Maria Braun” has such a bare-bones quality.
You spoke earlier about coming out of this auteur-theory school of criticism, embarking on your own path as a filmmaker. “Late Fame” is engaged with all these ideas about what it means to be discovered, to be celebrated, to consider oneself esteemed in the arts. Did the process change your own thinking about what constitutes a successful artistic life?
I would say, on the one hand, you have to just keep going—to keep making films, as many as possible—but also never waste your time on bullshit, because there’s a lot of it. It’s always hard to make independent films—that’s the nature of it, that’s what it is, those are the circumstances. There are a lot of people who think about getting into movies, but they think about it from the inside out; they want to have made something, rather than to be involved in the actual making, which is a completely different experience.
The auteurist part of criticism was a tool for me when I was young; it was getting me into other people’s work and into seeing it along a certain wavelength. I still think of it as valid; it is true in a way that’s what a movie is. But then, on the other hand, what it isn’t is people deciding on a theme and elucidating it over 40 movies. It’s not the theme; it’s the practice, and there are the preoccupations, but that’s for other people to figure out. What it’s really about is not wasting your time on bullshit, because there’s a lot of it out there. Some of it comes with a smile, but there’s no time, and especially not for that.
“Late Fame” is in select theaters August 7, via Magnolia Pictures.
- Book Excerpt: The Otherworld: The Mythic Dimensions of Christophe Gans by Scout Tafoya (August 6, 2026)
In this excerpt from his book The Otherworld: The Mythic Dimensions of Christophe Gans, author and RogerEbert.com contributor Scout Tafoya gets into the French director’s parallels to the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky and the video games that inspired his work.
First person POV camera was de rigueur in Japanese games by the time Team Silent’s “Silent Hill” was released in 1999 for PlayStation. Its visual language is distinctly Tarkovskian, with its floating ‘camera’, fogbound abandoned buildings, and creatures suffering from what appears to be radioactive fallout (pale white forms with the skin conditions of the first crews sent to fight the fires at Chernobyl). The idea of a shapeshifting landscape as exploration of a fractured conscience/consciousness is the throughline of the “Silent Hill” games. In “Solaris,” a phantom alien planet (possibly a lifeform) starts playing havoc with a crew of orbiting astronaut’s sense of reality. When Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) is sent to take stock, the planet begins changing his perception of the world and introduces him to the invincible ghost of his deceased wife (played by Sergei Bondarchuk’s daughter Natalya). Like the protagonist James Sunderland in “Silent Hill 2,” he’s ‘searching’ for his wife and finds her ghost. In “Solaris” the ghost is a projection beamed up from the planet of the title. Not a ghost, but a psychic apparition, which is practically speaking, the same thing (though the orthodox Christian Tarkovsky surely knew which one he believed). So the hero of “Solaris” must decide if what he’s seeing is his mind’s work, a planet’s work, or god’s; a million miles and years from home, where religion is only represented in the natural world he chooses to leave behind. In saying goodbye to the earth’s corporeal suggestion (people, grass, birds, family, art) for the last time on his way into orbit around Solaris, he’s rejecting ‘god’ for science (Tarkovsky himself grappling with it in being a filmmaker constantly filming art and the creation of art as an antidote to war and austerity – the long drive back to the city in “Solaris” his best impression of a world without god), only to discover they can’t describe each other. And film thus is the only way to question god’s absence. What would Tarkovsky have made of a video game like “Silent Hill,” about the search for god in an artifact of pure scientific construction? As “Stalker” has it: “Don’t hope for flying saucers, that would be too interesting.”
On the 21st of May 2020 Team Silent designer Masahiro Ito took to Twitter to answer a question that’s plagued many a fan. “”Solaris” is one of novels which inspired the story of SH2.” Seems the loneliness of the COVID pandemic and the closeness we came to apocalypse finally convinced him to open up. For a moment the whole world was in The Zone. “Silent Hill” the game is an even stranger reckoning with the idea of god. If a movie is the obvious representation of a camera’s viewpoint (canted however the story or project deems fit), a video game like “Silent Hill” suggests that even the camera’s viewpoint is “god’s” viewpoint. A camera left in a field will collect data of the thing that passes before its gaze, including the time that elapses. Time and space in a video game are manmade. A digital time piece is never far from the menu options in a game, to tell you the speed at which you completed it, but also as a way to nudge the player towards the sum total of the work. Never mind a completion of the narrative but a proper showcase for all the work that went into making a sky a sky, and a man a man beneath it. When you have effectively mapped a whole world (a ‘zone’ of bottled incident and an internal clock) why wouldn’t you encourage your ‘user’ to explore it all? And then the game’s interaction with a user creates its own dialectic. God has made the game, but it’s now god with the controller in her hand. So who is in charge?
Tarkovsky died before Chernobyl, missing the fulfillment of his prophecy. The Soviets never got close to succeeding in their mission to impose state atheism on its people, you can’t do it when people already know what belief can mean. For the record a state without religion is the only sane option. People are religious, but a government is not and shouldn’t be, tautologically and morally speaking. People look to the state as the characters do in “Solaris”. To provide answers and get them out of tarrying in the real world. A state cannot be possessive of anything, let alone belief, so the lies are insurmountable before the starting gun has gone off. Further down the line Tarkovsky missed his aesthetic upholstery and theological yearning becoming the centerpiece vassal for a new hierarchy of artistic expression. Between “Crime & Punishment” and “Silent Hill” lay “Stalker” and “Solaris”, and a representation of the moral condition of being alive in a post-theist industrial present (the future, we can safely say, has arrived) is copied and copied and copied. The games have been remade and turned into films which spawned sequels. A manmade god being reproduced by man and vice versa all the way down.
To play “Silent Hill,” about a man’s search for meaning in a zone of his own (split into components: the ‘Fog World’ and the ‘Otherworld’, hell and purgatory; heaven out of reach and beside the point), created by designers as a reflection of an aesthetic philosophy born of an existential condition, is to enter a cinematic dialectic. “Stalker’s” script tells one story, the camera another, and the scenery yet another. All of them wrap around the intangible of Tarkovksy’s terror at God’s silence, per Bergman. “Silent Hill” the game can only be a reassuring riff on Tarkovsky because the world is demonstrably a creation, and creating a world for your users is itself an act of faith. The town of Silent Hill is ‘built’ for each of its protagonist’s individual journeys.
In “Return to Silent Hill,” Gans adaptation of Silent Hill 2, the journey through the radioactive fallout and the warped territory in James’ (played in the film by Jeremy Irvine) recollection, marries “Stalker’s” existential searching (the act of looking replacing decisive action; a country’s ruin as a fantastical dimension where hope can infect one like cancer cells or a drug, depending on one’s outlook), Mirror’s floating continuity of sense memory stitched together through his father’s poetry, and “Solaris’” deranged heartache syndrome at the corridor of experience, guilt, and bargaining. Gans works hard to earn close-ups like those of the gaunt heroes and fulsome wives and mothers in Tarkovsky, whose heroes don’t have control, but are at the Otherworld’s mercy. In Solaris a widower is powerless to stop inviting his wife’s ghost into his bedroom. In “Mirror” a dying man looks back at an active past in which he cannot participate. In “Stalker” a man is addicted to the toxicity of “The Zone”, the colorized netherworld brought about by extraterrestrial intelligence attached to the monochrome real of ‘modern’ Russia. All three films predict Chernobyl (an obvious model for Silent Hill’s noxious barometer); worlds undone by regret and mad science. The personal and political entwined like lovers in reverie. Like James and Mary. The fallout and its ashen skies are always a few hours away.
Perhaps it’s because the Japanese spent the 20th century tallying the cost of material absolutes and demented moral abdication (in World War 2 alone: kamikaze pilots [“The craziest thing about World War 2” -My 9 year old nephew, unprompted], cannibalism and mass suicides in the South Pacific, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Rape of Nanking, Kuril Island, Unit 731), Team Silent needed a model for a psychic intangible like Stalker outside of their own. By 1999 a huge part of Japanese culture had been adduced through American example, as carried over by their conquerors in the years after the Emperor surrendered. American gangster movies, westerns and war movies, jazz, comic books – as when Yasujiro Ozu saw “Fantasia” and declared the US the victor in the war well ahead of schedule, the certainty in a conflict must have spoken to a people who’d had the iron jaw of nationalism wedged open by the crowbar of capitalism. America demanded to be treated like they were at the top of the food chain. And while you can make a good first-person shooter out of that attitude, there’s little philosophical breathing room.
- All is Well in Our World: On Todd Haynes’ “Safe” (August 6, 2026)
Early on in Todd Haynes’ “Safe,” an unwatched television broadcasts a half-heard report on Elizabeth Bouvia, a woman paralyzed by cerebral palsy and stricken with degenerative arthritis. Bouvia became a figurehead for the American right-to-die movement in the 1980s. She wanted ultimate control over decisions made about her body and went to court, and then appellate court, to win it. Even with the help of the ACLU, she was denied it. The hero of “Safe,” delicate, beautiful, WASPish Carol (Julianne Moore) wears a pained look as the Bouvia report unspools in the background.
This is Haynes expressing his thesis. Carol doesn’t have control over her body, either. She’s centered as she will be often throughout the film at the exact middle of the frame. Haynes and his cinematographer Alex Nepomniaschy (“Lisa”) will shrink the environment around her with slow zooms, with doorways, window panes, environmental elements to underscore how trapped Carol is: a prisoner of a society designed to degrade women into specific roles while requiring from them a narrowly-prescriptive appearance constructed from a combination of makeup, the wardrobe of the moment (all those Olivia Newton-John “Physical”/Jane Fonda Workout leotards!) and body modification. Haynes frames Carol the way a lepidopterist preserves pretty butterflies. Throughout “Safe,” she is carefully arranged, posed for undignified post-mortem display, cold and formulated to a frame for all to see in her exquisite loveliness.
Todd Haynes, a poet of women in crisis, first came to my notice as a rumor, a cautionary tale about a brilliant young filmmaker who made a movie that attracted the wrong kind of attention from a major corporation. After his discomfiting queer portmanteau “Poison” (1991) became a minor arthouse sensation, stories about his “first first” film, a “lost” film started making the rounds.
His 1987 “Superstar” is ostensibly a biopic of doomed singer Karen Carpenter, made on a shoestring of a shoestring, an experimental exercise using plastic kids’ dolls to play out Carpenter’s rise to fame and death from anorexia nervosa. I saw it on a bootleg VHS cassette ordered through mail order from a catalog warehouse operating out of Florida. It arrived in a plain, brown, paper package as all the best contraband does. I heard “Superstar” had been suppressed because of a lawsuit filed by Mattel, the company that owns Barbie, a few of which Haynes had progressively shaved down with a razor to stand as the singer at different stages of her emaciation.
In reality, it was the Carpenter estate that prevented the film’s release because of how Richard Carpenter was represented as callous, even complicit in Karen’s growing self-consciousness in the public eye. After all, Haynes argued, most of the dolls weren’t Mattel’s anyway. “Superstar” is a masterpiece. It’s the film I thought of often as the corrective for Greta Gerwig’s well-intended but unfocused “Barbie.” It’s a film about eating disorders that provides neither flesh to fetishize nor behaviors to imitate, and it pinions the role of well-intentioned loved ones who, in their love and desperation, say the wrong things at exactly the wrong times. The road to hell is paved with well-intended loved ones. Haynes understands the crucible of being looked at for women. In our culture, a woman’s value is often inextricable from her attractiveness according to some arbitrary set of goalposts in constant Brownian motion. Impossible to ever truly conform or to conform for long, in our culture, the cruel irony is how the only thing truly unforgivable is to fail to conform.
The first shot of “Superstar” is the discovery of Carpenter’s body through a half-open door. She, like “Safe’s” Carol, is trapped in an architectural element offset within the frame of the film. Even here, he suggests, on this screen with them as the star, they are fragmented by our leering and comparing of their component parts. Haynes, from the start, has been a voice for those yearning to be seen as fully three-dimensional in a culture conditioned to see some only in one, maybe two dimensions.
For his Bob Dylan biopic “I’m Not There,” Haynes plays with our familiarity with the singer’s appearance by casting six actors, including a woman, Cate Blanchett, to portray him as six individual personae throughout the course of his mercurial career. If we stop looking at him, we can finally see him. In “Carol” (2015), he reunites with Blanchett in a forbidden sapphic romance presented as a lush Douglas Sirk melodrama, a bookend to his “All That Heaven Allows” (1955) spiritual remake “Far from Heaven” (2002). Each is about the most vulnerable (not just women, but gay women) being forced into hiding in plain sight. Each is about the rapture of finally being recognized through the disguises you’ve been forced to assume. And the villain of each of his films is the oppressive influence of the “male gaze.”
Godard once referred to watching movies as a criminal act. From a dark place, we peer through a lighted square at the most private moments of people who are helpless but to be observed by us. Haynes understands the irony of making films—a thing to be looked at—about the oppressive horror of being looked at. Watch how Carol seems aware she’s under scrutiny and so is constantly performing in “Safe.” Nervous. Hungry for affirmation. Terrified of disappointing. The demand of maintaining a facade wears her down to a nub.
Carol’s husband Greg (Xander Berkeley) makes her sick. She lies prone and lifeless during sex. She vomits when he pulls her into an embrace. She blames his cologne (he’s not wearing any) or his clothes. Really, it’s just him. Mark the times Carol’s illness flares throughout “Safe.” She has a bad episode after he compliments her new perm. She gets a nosebleed after getting the perm in the first place, the new style an impulsive act while waiting at her spa for a hair appointment and a manicure. She’s done it for herself, but all Greg sees is a new kink for his married libido.
The sequencing of Carol’s attacks (sneezes to rashes to shortness of breath and worse) mirrors the rhythms of Alfred Hitchcock’s cadence of attacks in “The Birds” (1963). In that film, a strong woman, notorious for her disdain for the norms of an abusive patriarchal society, gradually surrenders to them at the beckoning call of domesticity. Like Carol, Hitchcock’s heroine Melanie (Tippi Hedren), aquiline and startlingly beautiful by contemporary standards (she’s introduced in the film with a wolf whistle), is punished by avatars of the environment at every step along the path of her voluntary weakening and assimilation.
In “Safe,” Carol’s punisher for her surrender to her diminishment isn’t birds, but “environmental illness,” a catchall diagnosis favored by wellness cult leader Peter (Peter Friedman) in whose remote New Mexican retreat Carol institutionalizes herself. It’s her last resort after being patronized and dismissed by doctors; gossiped about and clucked over by her hollow, competitive, and jealous friends; even rejected by a child at a baby shower towards whom she tries to be maternal. Yes, Carol is allergic to her environment. Her environment is the hostile superficiality of the suburbs.
Note how the other patients at Peter’s compound are largely women and minorities—all save gentle Chris (James Le Gros), who represents a softer kind of masculinity that respects Carol’s need for physical space and time to heal. He walks her to the hermetically sealed bubble she’s taken over and doesn’t try to lean in for a hug or a buss on the cheek. He doesn’t force himself on her the way her husband, even though Greg’s proximity to Carol causes her obvious discomfort, does. Chris doesn’t think Carol is irritating. He would never use a word like “hysterical.” He seems to know that Carol’s illness has something to do with her being forced to be something that she isn’t. That’s what she’s sick of.
As Carol, Moore, in her breakout role, is extraordinary. She’s an exposed nerve, twitching with every minor shift in the air. After an aerobics class, her friends marvel that Carol doesn’t sweat, and Carol shrinks as though she’s been chastised. She doesn’t conform to the norm even in perspiration, and non-conformance is wrong. No one can see Carol because Carol is the prettiest girl in the room.
One night, alone in her room, a stone dislodges in her and Carol sobs as though her heart has broken. Another patient finds her, an older woman, and tells her that all the feelings that Carol is feeling are “just fine.” It’s possibly the first time anyone has ever told Carol that whatever she feels is okay to feel. I say this as a child of abuse that the requirement to not feel “wrong” is hardwired into some of us. The need to appease in order to avoid attention supersedes personal care to the extent that it becomes hard to even know what it is you do feel. You start to wonder if you can feel anything at all. Carol is starting to accept herself here. The end of “Safe” is her breaking the fourth wall—a “no-no” in a medium dominated by a male gaze that despises being recognized—and repeating “I love you. I really love you” to, essentially, us, her unobserved observers. In seeing herself, she sees us, too. I wonder if it’s true in the reverse. “Safe” is a prayer for acceptance, you see. For Carol. For us. Amen.
Criterion’s 4K restoration of “Safe” has been overseen by Haynes. Its uncompressed (the real VIP in 4K technology) mono soundtrack haunts with Brendan Dolan and Ed Tomney’s hypnotic, synth-drenched, trancelike score and a diegetic soundscape heavy on environmental effects like traffic in the first hour, nature in the second. A lovely, warm commentary track with Haynes, Moore, and producer Christine Vachon sheds light on the process of Moore’s performance, and some of the philosophy of the film’s deconstruction of personal identity, and a short video of Haynes and Moore in conversation shows off the obvious comfort between the two that has led to multiple, phenomenal collaborations.
Vachon sits for a separate interview that repeats a little of her commentary contribution, and a 1978 short film—“The Suicide,” alas, and not “Superstar” — rounds out the disc. Haynes was seventeen when he made this disquieting montage film about a child (David Blaikie), slight and with a stutter, who’s bullied at his new school. The agony of not being seen. The confused melange of sex and isolation in a boy on the edge of adolescence. It’s uncompromising and uncomfortable. Incredible work. Haynes was already Haynes here. “The Suicide” is a tough watch but a valuable one.
The critic Dennis Lim offers a typically smart essay, written for the 2014 release of this film, in the enclosed booklet. It’s required reading for a survey of Haynes as well as a better understanding of “Safe.” Lim reads it, among other things, as having a “science-fiction sheen,” and indeed, if the pillars of science fiction are time, identity, and space, then “Safe” is certainly those things. He describes Carol’s two homes in the film as “prisons of the self.” It’s a description so fine and incisive that it took a lot for me not to just steal it.
I didn’t see “Safe” in the theater, so this release represents the absolute best I’ve ever seen this film. Shadow detail is intricate in its night sequences, and blacks are crushless. There’s no color bleed. You could maybe argue the images are even too sharp, but really, any complaint about the A/V presentation feels like a quibble. “Safe” has never looked better. In a film about the horror of being looked at, I’m struggling with how to rationalize my joy.
- It’s Libidinal: Hannah Einbinder and Jane Schoenbrun on “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” (August 6, 2026)
In Jane Schoenbrun’s “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” horror, cinema, and desire are intertwined. Though similar in some respects to their previous films, “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” and “I Saw the TV Glow,” in how it explores the complex relationships we develop to the media we consume and the impact this can have on our respective identities, it’s also something more unexpected and expansive for them as a filmmaker. Namely, it’s a horror film of blood geysers and romance where the looming presence of a “little death” is the most important thing.
Set in the Pacific Northwest, the film stars Hannah Einbinder (“Hacks”) as a filmmaker who is tasked with remaking a classic slasher film for a new generation and working with the original film’s star (played by “X-Files” icon Gillian Anderson) who has made her home at the camp where it was shot. As the two begin to connect and grow closer, with plenty of sparks flying, much more than just a horror remake emerges. The film is humorous in how it explores this, but it also doesn’t skimp on the horror, bringing plenty of blood that had otherwise been missing from Schoenbrun’s previous works. It was one of the buzziest films premiering at Cannes and now will release in theaters starting August 7.
Before the release, Schoenbrun and Einbinder spoke with RogerEbert.com about their love for the Pacific Northwest, the joys of making movies you’re passionate about, finding a great collaborative partner in the other, taking a leap with someone you trust by your side, blood geysers, and more.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
I’m speaking to you from the Pacific Northwest and, while I know the film didn’t actually shoot here, Jane, I wanted to start with you on that. What was it that appealed to you about setting it in the Pacific Northwest?
Schoenbrun: Listen, I love the Pacific Northwest.
Einbinder: Yeeees!
Schoenbrun: I’ve got, like, Pacific Northwest lore bleeding out of my ears.
Einbinder: Out the wazoo.
Schoenbrun: Oh my god, Olympia? “Twin Peaks?”
Einbinder: Shout out. Hoh Rain Forest, heard of it?
Schoenbrun: Seattle, grunge. We were in Portland literally yesterday. I love the Pacific Northwest. Where I live in upstate New York, it’s like we’re cosplaying the Pacific Northwest. But I’m gonna be brutally honest with you.
Einbinder: I’m scared.
Schoenbrun: I wrote … I’m gay.
Einbinder: [Laughs]
Schoenbrun: I wrote the film as being the sleepaway camp that I went to as a kid, which was in Western Massachusetts. There and the Catskill region of New York is probably 90% Jewish sleepaway camps. It’s a very specific culture. It’s very unique. I really wanted to film there, but it was cheaper to film in Canada. So we went to Vancouver, which was awesome. I ultimately am very, very happy we shot in Vancouver. But it was like, “Okay, we’re shooting in Vancouver. We’re shooting in the summertime. You’re gonna see a lot of trees. You’re gonna see the landscape of the Pacific Northwest. We can’t fake this for New York.” I had this great joke about how she was going to visit Billy in Buffalo, Buffalo Bill, and then the agent was gonna be like, “Oh, that’s very writerly.”
Einbinder: Yes, I remember that.
Schoenbrun: But that didn’t make it in. So this was a coincidence that I made my first Pacific Northwest movie, but I’m happy I did, and I hope to make many more.
The film, I mean this as a compliment, is both loopy and liberatory to watch.
Schoenbrun: Yeah, thank you.
Did it feel that way, loopy and liberatory, to make it for you both?
Einbinder: I wasn’t feeling totally loopy. Maybe we were feeling loopy when we were off the clock, when it was goof o’clock, which, you know, happened a ton. But I think we were really playful, yet (I don’t wanna use the word serious) I think we were passionate about the subject matter and embracing the themes head-on.
Schoenbrun: It’s an incredibly ambitious film with the amount of coordinated, sustained focus and labor interdepartmentally. The magic trick of pulling it off in the time we had with the money we had was one of the more challenging things ever. For me, I do think it was liberatory and freeing. More than any other film, on this set I felt not stress, but joy and playfulness. That was a testament not just to how hard everyone was working, but also the deep trust I felt with all of my collaborators, both in front of and behind the camera. I really felt like myself in a way that I think is reflected in the movie. I felt liberated by it for sure.
Hannah, this was your first leading role in a feature film, which you obviously can’t always control how that shakes out, but did you feel that trust as well taking that leap?
Einbinder: Oh my god, absolutely. I mean, Jane and I just vibed from our first conversations. Then when we started to work together, and started to have more deep conversations about what the film was attempting to explore, it just became clear that I was gonna be in a safe environment to explore these pretty heavy and emotional things. It was intimidating, moving from TV to film, even though I think that “Hacks” is a particularly filmic TV show. Like the approach to making it feels like filmmaking. But I do think that shooting on film and having a 25-day shoot and having to tell a story in full in this … I’m describing a movie, totally. It just felt like there was a lot of pressure that I put on myself, but the second that we started to actually do it, it just fell into place, and I felt comfortable.
Jane, so much of this movie is about feeling comfortable within one’s own body, which I really resonated with, but I was curious about, when you were first talking with Hannah, what was it that was on your mind?
Schoenbrun: When I’m meeting an actor that I could potentially work with, I think so much of it is just getting to know a human being and trying to sense what their process is gonna be. I’ve worked with a lot of different actors who want different things, and I’ve learned how to have relationships and collaborations. There’s always going to be an emotional and psychological element to building trust, understanding what somebody needs, and how to build a shared language to get them in tune with the thing you’re trying to make. If I could choose, every collaboration would feel like my collaboration with Hannah, which is working with somebody who is down to be emotionally engaged.
I want to make movies. When I’m making a movie, I don’t wanna feel like, “Oh, this is our day job and we all kinda hate it, but we’re gonna get through it.” I want it to feel like we are doing something that’s important to all of us, and we are exploring vulnerable things together. This is like play and exploration in a space that’s different from reality. And that’s rare, you know, to find somebody who really has the appetite for that and the desire for that and who wants to push together into scary places. It’s not always that you find collaborators who want that. I just knew immediately that that’s the kind of work I would get to do with Hannah, and it was such a treat.
Einbinder: Thanks, Jane.
The image I think of when I think of this film is the blood geyser. It’s this big explosion of violence, but then also an excitement of seeing it. How did you achieve that, Jane, and how did you conceive of that specific visual?
Einbinder: [whispering in a French accent] The geyser.
Schoenbrun: What’d you say?
Einbinder: [louder, again in a French accent] The geyser.
Schoenbrun: [laughs] Hannah’s doing her French accent.
Einbinder: [once more, in a French accent] The geyser.
Schoenbrun: They love the geyser in French. No, the geyser was there from the beginning. It was a foundational idea for this film. My first two films sometimes get called horror movies, but there’s not blood in either of them. They’re very buttoned-up movies in their way. I wanted this line in the sand from the very beginning of like, “This movie is gonna be different, and this movie is letting its hair down, and it’s gonna be excessive and playful and profane and mischievous in a way that you might not expect.” So that image of just like the excess of that blood and also the fact that in no way could that really be what that person’s blood would do, it’s completely fantastic and absurd right off the bat. Yeah, it’s a line in the sand, basically.
We had a lot of fun doing it practically. It’s supplemented with some awesome VFX. In the lookbook I sent the team as reference images for that scene, I was pulling archival photos of, like, striking oil. That’s how I wanted it to feel. It’s like that moment in “There Will Be Blood” at the beginning when it’s like, “Oh!” And you just see it explode. It’s libidinal.
“Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” opens in U.S. theaters August 7, via MUBI.
