- Book Excerpt: It Can’t Rain All the Time by Alisha Mughal (July 15, 2025)
We are extremely proud to present an excerpt from a new book about “The Crow,” available today. Alisha Mughal, who has written pieces for us about “Fatal Attraction,” “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” and more, has written It Can’t Rain All the Time. Get a copy here.
The official synopsis:
It Can’t Rain All the Time weaves memoir with film criticism in an effort to pin down The Crow’s cultural resonance.A passionate analysis of the ill-fated 1994 film starring the late Brandon Lee and its long-lasting influence on action movies, cinematic grief, and emotional masculinityReleased in 1994, The Crow first drew in audiences thanks to the well-publicized tragedy that loomed over the film: lead actor Brandon Lee had died on set due to a mishandled prop gun. But it soon became clear that The Crow was more than just an accumulation of its tragic parts. The celebrated critic Roger Ebert wrote that Lee’s performance was “more of a screen achievement than any of the films of his father, Bruce Lee.”In It Can’t Rain All the Time, Alisha Mughal argues that The Crow has transcended Brandon Lee’s death by exposing the most challenging human emotions in all their dark, dramatic, and visceral glory, so much so that it has spawned three sequels, a remake, and an intense fandom. Eric, our back-from-the-dead, grieving protagonist, shows us that there is no solution to depression or loss, there is only our own internal, messy work. By the end of the movie, we realize that Eric has presented us with a vast range of emotions and that masculinity doesn’t need to be hard and impenetrable.Through her memories of seeking solace in the film during her own grieving period, Alisha brilliantly shows that, for all its gothic sadness, The Crow is, surprisingly and touchingly, a movie about redemption and hope.
A depressive episode begins as a slow and steady sinking feeling, like being lowered inch by inch into a grave. I feel it build over the course of a couple of days or sometimes even a week. I grow irritable, and my moods begin to turn putrid as negative thoughts lay roots. As my body grows tired, the thoughts become a forest. The episode has set in.
When I was younger, I was consumed by the muck of sadness, and many times, I almost didn’t make it out. Now I’m on medication, which doesn’t completely stop the episodes but does allow me a remove, a distance from which I can make decisions to help myself. I’ve learned that the only thing I can do is to let these episodes play out, allow them to peak and then fade and then, eventually, recede. This takes time. Sometimes I watch movies as the hours pass.
The first time I watch The Crow is during a depressive episode at the beginning of the summer I turn 29. Scrolling through the horror streaming platform Shudder, I see the film’s poster image one empty evening. It’s still light out, and I hear sounds that never fail to make me feel like the loneliest person in the world: people laughing, children playing. I vaguely recall the film’s association with some kind of catastrophe, which I learned about from online critic Marya E. Gates years ago. In the state that I’m in in my darkening bedroom — my eyes sore and my mouth feeling like it’s stuffed with cotton balls — I can’t recall much else about the film.
As I’m staring numbly at the screen, my sleepy attention is piqued by the poster’s suffocating darkness stained with the red gash of a title: it’s a heavy black relieved only by the lead actor’s name and a steely gray-white light, like a doorway just opened onto something magnificent. “Believe in angels,” the film’s tagline, framed in the light, advises. On the threshold, a small and menacing figure is visible as if in relief, his arms hang as a sentence cut short, flexed at his sides, making him look like a panther about to pounce — he is as dark as the velvety black on the poster’s body. He is walking toward the viewer, perennially. It is a moody image, sinister and gothic, and, on this empty evening, it complements my melancholic insides, so I press play.
A horror overcomes me. I see Brandon Lee’s Eric Draven lying dead on the street after being thrown from his apartment window and then crawling his way out of a muddy grave moments later, screaming and wailing from the pain of a macabre rebirth. When I hear Eric speak for the first time in the movie — he whispers his cat’s name, Gabriel — his voice low and gravelly from the strain of life so recently shocked into him, I turn the film off and weep. I can’t finish it. Not yet.
Lee’s stature, his voice, his rain-sodden hair — it all reminds me of a person I am trying very hard to forget. “It hurts to watch because you look so much like him,” I say when I manage to see him a few weeks later, the first time in a year. The Boy I Was Trying to Forget isn’t exactly the direct cause of my sadness. It’s my own unreciprocated and unbearably heavy feelings for him that leave me feeling unmoored, which then feed into the loneliness that characterizes my depressive episodes. Everything becomes so dire, so tangled, because of and within my mind.
It might seem anticlimactic or boring or unimportant, maybe even anti-feminist, to say that my fascination with The Crow was first sparked by a man who didn’t like me back. But it’s the truth.
Later that summer, it finally dawns on me that he, the person whose loss I ought to be able to deal with, would never change his mind about me. And it is only at this point, when I understand that my hope will not be enough, that I will have to deal with the finality of his indifference to me — that I sit myself down and watch The Crow in its entirety.
And then I watch it again, and again, and again. Every night that I am sad and weeping, every night that I feel as lonely and meaningless as a lace handkerchief lost at sea (so much elaborate intricacy, so much feeling, all wasted), I put it on. The first time I visit one of my dearest friends in San Francisco, I talk her into watching it with me. It is her first time. We suck gin gimlets through puckered lips, and I become teary-eyed watching Eric Draven twirl and charge and weep and wail.
Now two years have gone by, and I’ve come to realize that I turned to The Crow so often that first summer because it was a way to avoid reality, a way to avoid countenancing and mourning and moving on from the end of a connection. The film allowed me closeness with a person who was far away and would never come near. He wasn’t dead, but this was worse, I once thought with self-pitying conviction. When a loved one dies, you at least have the assurance that there had been love. But this, of course, was a false comparison; it is objectively not preferable to lose someone to death. Still, that certainty I once felt was deeply, pleasingly maudlin, a kind of gothic romanticism. Just like everything I love about The Crow.
Directed by Alex Proyas, The Crow is based on a graphic novel of the same name by James O’Barr. It was released in 1994 after a fraught production period beleaguered by time constraints, delays, and mishaps. Hurricanes tumbled through the miniature city Proyas had built, crew members suffered accidents, and, most notably, lead actor Brandon Lee died on set due to a misfired, misloaded, and mishandled prop gun. During filming, in the face of so many accidents, many on set thought the film was cursed.1 It was well-received by critics, with nearly everyone noting the irony of a lead actor dying during production for a film about a character brought back from the dead. Roger Ebert stated that Lee’s performance is “more of a screen achievement than any of the films of his father, Bruce Lee.”2 The critical consensus on Rotten Tomatoes is that the film is “filled with style and dark, lurid energy,” and that it carries “a soul in the performance of the late Brandon Lee.”3
It made a lot of money, was considered a sleeper hit at the box office, and spawned three standalone sequels that are, honestly, very terrible. Today, the film has a devoted cult following. At screenings, some fans dress up as Eric Draven, painting their faces black and white and caping their bodies in a glossy black flowing trench coat. Sometimes, they adhere a prop crow to their shoulder in honor of the talismanic animal that serves as a shepherd and guide and spiritual conduit for Eric’s soul. There are some critics, though, who wonder whether this movie would still have a devoted following were it not for the real-life tragedy.
The first time I saw the film in a theater, some audience members laughed during scenes that, to me, were never very funny. At one point, Eric, after arming himself with all manner of weapons at a pawn shop (where he also recovers his dead fiancée’s ring), picks up an electric guitar. The unplugged guitar moans: its strings, as Eric carries it away, vibrate, creating a ghostly boing-oing-oing. Watching the film with an audience, I could see how that scene, the juxtaposition of guns with a guitar, could seem a bit funny — a man arming himself ahead of battle takes only the most important things. Surely a guitar is a bit too extravagant? But at the same time, I wanted to shush everyone. Couldn’t they see that the guitar is important to Eric, a musician, just as much as the ring? To laugh is to misunderstand Eric, for whom nothing is trivial or extravagant, and everything is significant. People laughed nonetheless, and at other moments, too, when things became a bit clunky and ludicrous.
“Very bizarre situations are often darkly funny,” said supporting cast member David Patrick Kelly in a behind-the-scenes interview for The Crow,4 reinforcing that the wry humor was purposeful and necessary. The film was pieced together under traumatic circumstances, and this sometimes comedic overwrought-ness is central to its ethos. The Crow is all about a romantic and melancholic pain like an exposed nerve, which the film prods and pokes with the same macabre curiosity that prompts us to press on a tender bruise and can also make us laugh in discomfort or dismay.
In The Crow, there is a pain that is too much; it throbs and glistens with lifeblood, even in and around so much death, appearing on characters in ways that rail against logic’s expectations. The curious thing is that, although this heavy darkness is easy to slip into when sad, it’s not an easy watch precisely for this heft. The film’s pain ricochets through me during every one of my rewatches, reawakening and corralling to the surface all my own fanged memories, which can be, in a sort of paradox, a celebration of life. Pain is messy, emotions are gooey, and they bleed into one another. But ultimately, and most importantly, tears, fear, laughter, and grief are signs that we are alive, a truth that The Crow is a brave and relentless reminder of.
1 “The Crow,” IMDb, accessed May 3, 2024, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109506/trivia/?item=tr2585918&ref_=ext_shr_lnk.
2 Roger Ebert, “Reviews: The Crow,” movie review and film summary, RogerEbert.com, May 13, 1994, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-crow-1994.
3 “The Crow,” Rotten Tomatoes, accessed May 3, 2024, https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_crow.
4 “Behind the Scenes «The Crow» (1994),” YouTube, January 27, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmaimTyH56g.
Excerpted in part from It Can’t Rain All the Time by Alisha Mughal. Copyright © by Alisha Mughal, 2025. Published by ECW Press Ltd. www.ecwpress.com
- 30 Minutes On: “Nashville” (July 15, 2025)
For this series, MZS starts writing on a chosen film and stops 30 minutes later. On a film turning 50 this year…
Robert Altman’s “Nashville” is a portrait of the United States on the eve of the Bicentennial, but at times it seems to be describing the United States fifty years later. I saw it on a big screen during its fiftieth anniversary re-release and was knocked out again by its audacity and perceptiveness.
As is the case with most Altman films, “Nashville” is an ensemble piece, boasting about two dozen recurring characters, and nearly as many bit players floating through. The opening credits sequence mimics TV ads for compilation albums that were popular at the time, with an announcer shouting each performer’s name as their face appears onscreen. The introductory section cuts between musical performances in two studios: jingoistic country-western star Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson) performing a Bicentennial themed song that leans heavily on his family’s military record, and white gospel singer Linnea Reese (Lily Tomlin) recording a song with the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University, a historically Black university. These two characters are among the film’s many indelible creations and stand alone as individuals, but they also communicate the cultural divide separating factions that had been battling for control of the culture of the United States ever since the Civil War, and that are still fighting today. One is reactionary, looking nostalgically backwards at times that never really existed. The other is progressive, looking forward to a truly egalitarian democracy that didn’t quite exist then, and seems even more remote now than it did in 1975.
The movie takes its time introducing all of the other characters and organizing them around a Bicentennial-themed concert that is to be headlined by Barbara Jean (Ronnee Blakely), who is making her triumphant return to performing after surviving what was described to the public as a burn accident but was actually a nervous breakdown. Jeff Goldblum has one of his earliest attention-getting roles as a seemingly mute hippie who rides into town on a gigantic motorbike and is introduced doing magic tricks at a counter in a diner. Keith Carradine plays arguably the most successful musician of the bunch, a singer-songwriter and Casanova who beds several female characters in the cast and lies by omission to convince them that his catchy love song “I’m Easy” (written and performed by Carradine, and the future winner of a Best Original Song Oscar) is actually about each of them.
Altman worked from a script by regular Altman collaborator Joan Tewkesbury, based on her observations from visiting Nashville as an outsider. In time-honored Altman tradition, these ended up serving as more of a set of suggestions than a closely followed blueprint, though some core elements remain, including a pileup on the freeway that causes a traffic jam. You could make the case that the visiting English radio reporter (Geraldine Chaplin) who superimposes her own preconceived notions onto the city is a lightly satirical nod to how the source material came about.
“Nashville” was shot in and around Nashville in the summer of 1974, more than a year after the last American combat troops were withdrawn from a defeat in Vietnam that tore the country apart politically. This was also the summer that then-President Nixon—whose fascistic beliefs had driven the country to the brink of constitutional crisis—got impeached and decided to resign rather than face conviction and removal. (“If the president does it, that means it is not illegal,” he told interviewer David Frost.)
The climax, an enormous concert gathering nearly all of the major characters together, was shot in Centennial Park in Nashville on August 28, twenty days after Nixon quit in disgrace and Gerald Ford, his vice president, replaced him (and controversially pardoned him). We think of the United States circa 2025 as a place that’s violent to the core, with some of the most shocking brutality carried out by agents of the state. But that’s what the late 1960s and early 1970s were like, too, in their way. There were politically motivated bombings; strikes and protests that escalated into violence through police misconduct; assassinations and attempted assassinations of public officials, and a general fear that new horrors lurked around each corner.
This took a toll on the body politic. “Nashville” captures this. Numbed exhaustion courses through every frame of the movie, along with its twin, nihilistic hedonism. People are addicted to alcohol, drugs, sex, attention, and maybe worst of all, hope. It’s all a distraction from misery. A publicity team for a third-party presidential candidate drives through the city in a sound truck spouting self-contradicting nonsense. He’s against the Electoral College, the National Anthem, oil companies, and do-nothing lawyers in Congress, but we never hear what he’s for.
Haven Hamilton’s wife Lady Pearl (Barbara Baxley) sums up the malaise that would define the second half of the seventies, and that originated in the bloodshed and dashed dreams of the sixties, when she drifts into a reverie about Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, one of many representatives of hope who were shot to death during that era. “I worked for him,” she says. “I worked here, I worked all over the country, I worked out in California, out in Stockton. Well, Bobby came here and spoke and he went down to Memphis and then he even went out to Stockton California and spoke off the Santa Fe train at the old Santa Fe depot. Oh, he was a beautiful man. He was not much like John, you know. He was more puny-like. But all the time I was workin’ for him, I was just so scared – inside, you know, just scared.”
The myopia of “Nashville”’s characters is funny and poignant. They’ve been knocked around by life and retreated into themselves—and it appears that the times themselves are partly responsible. The utopian fantasies of the sixties were bludgeoned into submission by retrograde elements of the culture, paving the way for the 1970s, wherein the counterculture’s political fire was extinguished, leaving only lifestyle-based rebellion. It was called The Me Decade for a reason. The politics of resentment are all the characters have, if they want to be political at all. Most don’t, aside from wishing that the world wasn’t so cruel. Barbara Harris’s character Albuquerque, an itinerant singer, warns, “If we don’t live peaceful, there’s gonna be nothin’ left in our graves except Clorox bottles and plastic fly swatters with red dots on ’em.” The closing song, also written by Carradine, is an anthem about giving up and checking out, titled “It Don’t Worry Me.” One of the lyrics is, “You may say/That I ain’t free/But it don’t worry me.”
This was my first viewing of Nashville on a properly large screen (all the other times had been on home video or in a classroom) and the scale not only revealed little details I had never noticed but made me realize I was wrong about its point-of-view. The director has a reputation as a cynic or misanthrope. That’s not right. A friend who saw “Nashville” said afterward it was a more compassionate movie than he remembered. I felt the same way.
- KVIFF 2025: Stellan Skarsgård on “Sentimental Value,” Ingmar Bergman, and Cinematic Empathy (July 13, 2025)
At the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, no honorary award is more prestigious than the Crystal Globe for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to World Cinema, bestowed annually on an individual who has made significant contributions to the art of filmmaking.
Stellan Skarsgård, who received the Crystal Globe at this year’s festival, most certainly fits that description, as his performance in the film he presented Friday to Karlovy Vary audiences—Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value”—so potently distills.
In Trier’s tender and emotionally resonant family drama, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes this year, Skarsgård plays a once-revered director whose efforts to revive his career by making his most deeply personal film to date lead him back to his estranged daughters. It’s another formidable, finely nuanced performance by Skarsgård, whose character struggles to reconcile decades of distance through his artistic process even as his daughters’ grief and resentment over his absence in their childhood force him to excavate his relationship to their family history more deeply.
Few actors have flowed as effortlessly as Skarsgård between arthouse and mainstream, and the Swedish actor has spent decades making clear his talent in films of all types, from his collaborations with Danish director Lars von Trier (“Dancer in the Dark,” “Melancholia”) to his involvement in bigger-budget productions like Denis Villeneuve’s two-part “Dune.”
Presenting “Sentimental Value” in the Great Hall of the Hotel Thermal, KVIFF artistic director Karel Och noted Trier won the Best Director award from KVIFF in 2006 for his debut film “Reprise” and hailed Skarsgård as “one of the most admired European actors.” On stage, Skarsgård called his latest work “one of the more dear films that’s close to my heart” and praised co-stars Renate Reinsve, Elle Fanning, and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas; the latter co-presented the screening alongside Skarsgård.
Earlier in the day, Skarsgård also participated in a KVIFF Talk, during which he reflected on his wide-ranging career. “I wanted to be a diplomat at first,” the actor revealed to an audience in the Hotel Thermal’s Congress Hall during the event, which was hosted by The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg. At 16, a role on Swedish TV series “Bombi Bott och jag” (“It was like a Swedish Huckleberry Finn”) propelled him to local stardom, but it was Skarsgård’s younger brother who’d sent in both of their applications: “I think he was very pissed off. Everyone saw it, including 14-year-old girls. That was a positive for me.”
Skarsgård has never been afraid to speak his mind, and one memorable moment came when he expressed personal distaste for filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, with whom he’d worked on a 1986 stage production of August Strindberg’s “A Dream Play.” The 74-year-old Swedish actor, who has shared similar sentiments over the years, described a “complicated relationship” with Bergman based on “him not being a very nice guy” despite his achievements as a filmmaker.
Indeed, while considered one of the most influential directors of all time, Bergman—who died in 2007, at age 89—was raised in an extreme right-wing Swedish family and attended one of Adolf Hitler’s Weimar rallies as a teenager while spending his summer holidays in Germany, sparking an enthusiasm for Nazism that lasted through the war. “Bergman was manipulative,” Skarsgård explained. “He was a Nazi during the war and the only person I know who cried when Hitler died. We kept excusing him, but I have a feeling he had a very weird outlook on other people. [He thought] some people were not worthy. You felt it when he was manipulating others. He wasn’t nice.”
Elsewhere, Skarsgård defended frequent collaborator Lars von Trier, whose Cannes premiere of “Melancholia” was derailed by provocative comments he made during its press conference; reflecting on his roots, the filmmaker had jokingly called himself “a Nazi” in a wayward aside about Jews and Germans. “Everyone in that room knew he was not a Nazi, that he was the opposite, and yet they all used it as a headline,” explained the actor. “And then people who only read headlines thought he was a Nazi. He just told a bad joke. Lars grew up with a Jewish father, and when his mother was dying, she told him he wasn’t his real father. It was her boss, who was a German.”
Of von Trier’s provocative drama “Breaking the Waves,” starring Emily Watson as a devoutly religious woman whose paralyzed husband urges her to partake in extramarital intercourse, Skarsgård said, “I read it and went: ‘Oh fuck, finally a love story I can relate to.’ It’s about the essence of love. The purity of love.” Helena Bonham Carter was considered for the lead role, but “she didn’t want to be naked with a strange Danish director she didn’t know, and a strange Swedish director she didn’t know,” as Skarsgård bemusedly recalled. They later ran into each other at Cannes, where “Breaking the Waves” won the Palme d’Or, and the actress was understandably rueful at having turned down the role.
Skarsgård also shared his memories of “Dancer in the Dark,” which similarly won the Palme d’Or along with Cannes’ best-actress prize for Björk, who infamously fell out with von Trier on set. “He didn’t get along with Björk and she didn’t get along with him,” he said. “They were two control freaks, used to getting what they wanted.”
A lighter-hearted highlight in the master-class came when Skarsgård reflected on his recent collaboration with Joachim Trier. “I’ve seen him really see the actors he’s worked with,” the actor said. “He’s become more skilled with each film, and there’s this playfulness that’s very generous.”
Reflecting on his roles in “Mamma Mia!” and its sequel, the actor recalled a delightful atmosphere on set, particularly for himself and co-stars Pierce Brosnan and Colin Firth: “We were the only three men, and we were bimbos. No background, no anything. We were cute and stupid. I finally understood what they meant when they talk about what women usually experience.”
Skarsgård first arrived in Karlovy Vary on Thursday, where he and festival director Kryštof Mucha addressed hordes of fans outside of the Grandhotel Pupp, with the actor dutifully taking photos and signing autographs (including for one fan wielding a life-size replica of the hammer Mjölnir from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in which the actor plays an astrophysicist).
Later on Friday, Skarsgård returned to the Pupp for roundtable interviews related to his Crystal Globe Award, and RogerEbert.com took a seat to speak with the actor about his long-standing relationship to Czech cinema, the role of empathy in cinema, and some of his most memorable characters and collaborations.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
To start with “Sentimental Value,” tell us about the character of Gustav Borg, this film director and distant father, and how you felt toward him.
I feel a lot for him because he’s a very flawed man. He’s an old-fashioned man, with all the male roles that entail. He struggles to express his feelings properly, and I feel sorry for him, but I also see that he’s trying. It’s fun to play someone who is trying something so hard and not succeeding; he’s constantly failing with it. Even in the end, he doesn’t succeed even there, but he’s close to something, and he’s close to his daughter, in a way, but you don’t quite know what’ll happen. It’s not a happy ending in this sense. Nothing is solved. It’s still problematic.
Of course, I’m in the same situation in many ways. I have work that I’m passionate about, but I’m like an addict. Actors or directors, we’re addicts, and we can’t live without our profession, but I have been more successful [than Gustav] in balancing it with my family life. I’ve been home much more, and I’m a more modern man. Pretty early, I made clear to my kids that I’m not good at everything. I’m bad at some things. I’m not on a pedestal up there to be worshipped, as a father. I’m just one of the guys, and that makes it easier. To fail and fail and fail — that is wonderful to play. Of course, in real life, it’s not wonderful. It’s terrible not to succeed, especially when it comes to relationships with people. You try to find a connection, and you can’t.
Across your career, you’ve played roles in blockbusters and independent films. Does it change your approach to a character, working in mainstream commercial cinema versus working in arthouse cinema?
I approach them in basically the same way. It’s a human being I’m playing. But you have to know what film you’re in, and what’s needed of your character to make the film work. With Baron Harkonnen [in “Dune,”] there’s very little of him, even less than was in the script. I made sure of that because he has only one function, and that is to be fucking frightening.
And he is, by his visuals. He’s larger than life. He’s weird—this big thing. If you show him a lot in the film, he will shrink. There was an idea from the beginning that he would have no sort of armor, like a villain would in a Marvel film, because that would make him shrink, too. Show him as he is. Show him naked. Show him in pajamas, and he’s frightening. And of course, I’m not interested in showing his background, or that he was misused as a child, or that he has a tragic background. It’s not important.
In the arthouse, it’s usually about human beings, and you have much more time to describe the person. And you have time to show the contradictions within them. It’s not different, though. You shoot the same way, in some ways. I did “Pirates of the Caribbean” with Gore Verbinski, who is an indie film director and an absurdist. When we worked on that, there were 400 people in the crew, but we were four, five, or more people around the camera, and it was the same as in an indie film. The actors who played in that film enjoyed themselves.
If you look at my Hollywood films, except for Marvel—which was the first film made by a director I really appreciated, and the others were on a contract—I’ve done most of my films with interesting directors. You want your films to be seen by a lot of people, but you don’t want to sell out, necessarily, and compromise too much. That’s what’s hard.
You’ve worked with many brilliant filmmakers throughout your career. In “Sentimental Value,” playing an acclaimed film director navigating complicated relationships with his actors, what did you draw from the filmmakers you’ve worked with, even, perhaps, in terms of philosophy, regarding the best ways for actors and directors to collaborate?
Of course, I used my experience as an actor to understand how I always want a filmmaker to act. [laughs] In “Sentimental Value,” there is an example of my character’s filmmaking, a short scene from one of his films—it resembles, somehow, the Eastern European films of the ’60s, with very long takes that are expressionistic, in a sense. I liked that. I saw that, and I knew that was a director I could relate to. [laughs]
To me, as an actor, it’s all in the art form of being creative. It’s the same as a director being creative, a painter being creative, a musician being creative and obsessed by his music, almost to a fault. That I took from my real life into the film. But, as I said before, I did not end up having as bad a relationship with my kids as he had with his—and he had only two kids. [laughs]
Do you enjoy the presence of obstacles, either emotional or physical, in your filmmaking, as Lars von Trier did within the Dogme 95 movement?
Obstacles are very good for you. They force you to rethink things, to find a new way of approaching the material. Physical obstacles, as well, are very good; if I do several takes in a scene with a chair, I will usually move the chair, so I have to go another way around it, just to do something new and not repeat myself.
In today’s political climate, do you feel limited in any sense with regard to your self-expression, or see the possibility of offending certain sensibilities as a risk?
There have been a few years of people being offended, and I think that people have to be offended. Everybody has to be offended. You cannot help that. It’s not good for you not to be offended. You leave too much out of the world if you’re not being offended. I’m afraid it’s something from American culture. You cannot say certain words, you cannot behave in certain ways. I’m getting offended every fucking day by how the world works, and I gotta live with it.
[What offends me most is] politics in general. My job is to show the child a human being, to show that he’s not in control of his life. He thinks he is, but he’s not. He reacts like a child. And that is pretty obvious; we can see that in the world today. Politicians react with fear, by frightening others, through aggression, the way children do — and they don’t see it. And that’s frightening. I don’t have to mention names when it comes to [that concept of] a president as a child.
I sometimes say things, politically, that are uncomfortable, but I don’t have the illusion that I will change anything by it. What I hope is that you can have a contribution that’s so minuscule, like a breeze that’s simply blowing in the right direction, by showing people the way they are.
In asking about the roles that have pushed you, either emotionally and physically, one that came to mind was your role in John Frankenheimer’s “Ronin,” especially given the all-time-great car chases in that film.
It was my first good American role, and it was in a film by John Frankenheimer, who was a legend. I loved it. He was as old as I am now; can you imagine what? [laughs] And he was directing the film as if he were making his first film; he was so enthusiastic.
What he had, and what that film had that I liked, was the script. I believe it was David Mamet who eventually rewrote the script, and we got a script that was new by him, and there was almost no dialogue in it! That is filmmaking, to me: no dialogue. It was through looks, and everything was understated. Nothing was explained to people. And I loved that. It is fantastic.
Since the ’50s and ’60s, with the French Nouvelle Vogue and the New Wave in Czechoslovakia, for instance, those films took cinema away from what had been filmed theater before, a sort of literary form, where all was explained in the dialogue—like we have in television today, where you’re supposed to to be able to cook at the same time as you watch a television show, so you have to hear what’s going on, or you can’t follow it. But back then, there was a freedom that came with this [movement]. You started to look at human beings between the lines, and you would see that they were lying, that they were telling the truth, that they were in love. Nobody said anything. It was fantastic.
How do you remember working with Miloš Forman on “Goya’s Ghosts,” especially because your character was, as in “Sentimental Value,” an artist under pressure from various directions?
I loved working with him. He was extremely expressive, and he was very much interested in food, and so am I. For instance, he had the idea that, if you cast well, you have done more than half of your job. When Natalie Portman came up to him and said, “Miloš, I have a problem with my role,” he would say, “What?! What’s the matter with you!? I hired you! It’s your job! Where are we eating tonight!?” I understood Miloš, and I liked him.
Outside of Forman, what has been your relationship to Czech cinema more broadly?
I remember the old Czech films, not only with Miloš but also with Jan Němec, all those wonderful Czech directors. Everybody went to see the Czech films that came out at the time. In Sweden, the students were up to it; they also saw German films, they saw French films, and they saw American films in the ’60s and ’70s. It was a cultural event when it was going on, before the blockbuster era.
But I did not come to Czechoslovakia until it no longer was Czechoslovakia, though I did go to Slovakia, to Bratislava, to shoot a film, and it was the first time I crossed the Iron Curtain. That was sad, because there was very little food in Bratislava at the time. When I came back for the first time, going to get a burger, I was so ashamed.
After the wall came down, I met for the first time Václav Marhoul, then the head of Barrandov Studios. Everything was abandoned at the time, and the people were scrambling to see what they could save of what they had, how they could create a future in this time. And we went out and got very drunk, and he remembers that we had a fight with four drunks that night, and that we won — that we knocked out all four of them. [laughs] I don’t remember that. I think he’s hallucinating, because I can’t imagine myself knocking out somebody, but maybe it did happen.
I didn’t meet him for another 20 years, until he contacted me because he wanted to make “The Painted Bird,” and I wanted to be a part of it, mainly because I wanted it to get made. There was no role in it for me, though I ended up doing a role without lines that took one day to film. But it took ten years, while I was attached. But we got it made, and I think it’s a wonderful film.
Another memorable role of yours was on television, in “Chernobyl,” portraying Boris Shcherbina, a Soviet apparatchik who is complicit within yet eventually confronts the system that made the nuclear catastrophe possible.
He’s not interesting to me in the sense that he was a villain. Not all those people were villains. I mean, not even all the Nazis thought they were villains. Many of them thought it was the right thing to do, and they might be right or they might be wrong, but it’s that urge to do good things. Even the MAGA people, most of them think they’re on the right side; of course, they have their information from Fox News and Trump, and that is not reliable information. But on the other hand, in the last ten years, The New York Times hasn’t been reliable either.
What I wanted to do was to show this man as sympathetic, absolutely believing that he did the right thing, and he was defending a system that he thought was just. And in some ways, it was a just system. It was just ideas, mostly failed ones, that were running it. To see him gradually realizing that we created this catastrophe, with this system, and with him as a pillar of this society, he sees it all crumble in front of his own eyes. And that’s interesting.
I’m representing RogerEbert.com at KVIFF this year; the film critic Roger Ebert famously called the movies “a machine that generates empathy,” and so I was curious in closing to ask you what role empathy plays in great filmmaking, for you, as an actor or an audience member.
I met Roger Ebert once, and I liked him very much. He’s right about empathy, and I think it’s not only film. It’s literature, it’s almost all art. Even if the art doesn’t show empathy, necessarily, in all the colors, it still helps you with it, because it gives you another pair of eyes to see with. You see, with a director’s eyes, his version of reality. And it’s always good to see with somebody else’s eyes, so you don’t get locked into your own bubble, as they say nowadays.
The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival was held in the Czech Republic from July 4-12, with Skarsgård formally receiving his Crystal Globe during the closing ceremony. “Sentimental Value” will be released Nov. 7 in U.S. theaters via Neon.
- Our 10 Most Anticipated Films of the 2025 Fantasia Film Festival (July 12, 2025)
The world’s largest genre film festival, Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival is one of the most exciting, not to mention lengthy (it typically runs two, sometimes nearly three weeks), fests in the calendar year. It’s one of my favorites, despite (or perhaps because) of the relative obscurity of its catalog: Here is where you get to delve into some truly weird shit, from sci-fi anime to borderline adult films to action-comedies, thrillers, horror of all stripes from around the world.
Most interestingly, the fest will have one of its most high-profile opening night entries in its history: Ari Aster’s divisive pandemic-era polemic “Eddington,” starring Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal as a small-town sheriff and mayoral candidate feuding over a small Texas town in the summer of 2020. (Curiously, the other opening night film? Chris Miller’s animated “Smurfs” musical, set to a new crop of songs from Rihanna. Fantasia is nothing without its counterprogramming.)
The fest will also be honoring a few Canadian luminaries this year: The Canadian Trailblazer awards will go to filmmaker George Mihalka (“My Bloody Valentine,” “Hostile Takeover”) and “I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing” star Sheila McCarthy. The Cheval Noir Career Achievement Awards are going to animation pioneer Genndy Tartakovsky (whose new film, “Fixed,” will close out the fest) and composer Danny Elfman (who will be in attendance at a screening of Henry Selick’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas“). Troma pioneer Lloyd Kaufman will snag an Indie Maverick Award, just in time for the World Premiere of the new Troma documentary “Occupy Cannes.”
In addition to the many premieres amid the festivals’ hundred-plus titles, some of the most exciting retro screenings include John Woo’s 1990 masterwork “Bullet in the Head,” the 1974 Lithuanian folkloric rock opera “The Devil’s Bride!”, ’70s giallo “House with the Laughing Windows,” James Brolin-starring ’80s crime flick “Night of the Juggler,” and more.
This year’s 29th edition runs July 17th through August 3rd, and we’ll be boots on the ground for much of it, giving you dispatches both in-person and remotely on some of our top picks from the fest’s robust roster of titles. But in anticipation of that journey, here’s a snapshot of some of the films we’re most excited about.
All You Need Is Kill
Those of us who champion Tom Cruise and Doug Liman’s criminally underrated 2014 sci-fi thriller “Edge of Tomorrow” know that its source material, the Hiroshi Sakurazaka manga “All You Need Is Kill,” has the far superior title. Luckily, director Kenichiro Akimoto and animation studio STUDIO4°C have re-adapted the manga as an anime, this time with a twist—charting the time-looped alien invasion story through the perspective of the manga’s secondary protagonist, Rita. It’s got an eye-popping visual style all its own from the glimpses we’ve seen, and I can’t wait to see what it looks like in motion.
Anything That Moves
“All Jacked Up and Full of Worms” was a sexy, gruesome delight in Fantasia 2022; now, director Alex Phillips is back with a steamy, funny spin on the erotic thriller, “Anything That Moves.” Shot in gorgeously grimy 16mm, the film follows sex worker and bike courier Liam as he goes about his day, delivering DoorDash and a quick lay on the side. But his randy routine gets disrupted by the presence of a serial killer whose dangers loom over the city of Chicago. We’ll also see roles from porn legends Ginger Lynn Allen and Nina Hartley, to add a tinge of authenticity to the horny antics on display.
Blazing Fists
It wouldn’t be a Fantasia without some output from the notoriously prolific Takashi Miike, who has a whopping three entries playing at the festival this year. But while legal thriller “Sham” and trippy J-horror anime series “Nyaight of the Living Cat” also pique our interest, my eye is on coming-of-age drama “Blazing Fists,” which follows two young hoodlums who befriend each other in prison and (after an inspiring speech by real MMA superstar Mikuru Asakura), decide to better their lot by fighting in a martial arts tournament. Big live-action anime vibes abound in this thing, according to some reports, and I’m always a sucker for that.
Every Heavy Thing
Oklahoma-based auteur Mickey Reece has long been a figure of fascination for me; his Lynchian ode to pop-country, “Country Gold,” was one of my most underappreciated favorites of that year. Now he’s back at Fantasia with “Every Heavy Thing,” which follows an office worker (Joe Fadem) who witnesses a murder and becomes embroiled in a strange conspiracy involving a number of disappearances. But knowing Reece, that simple plot synopsis belies a heaping helping of trippy lo-fi aesthetics, meditations on the fragmented nature of the American psyche, and a darkly witty script. Co-stars “The People’s Joker“‘s Vera Drew, Barbara Crampton, and John Ennis.
Fixed
Channelling Tex Avery by way of “Big Mouth,” animation legend Genndy Tartakovsky’s “Fixed” will close out the fest with the tale of a soon-to-be-neutered pitbull named Bull (Adam Devine) who, upon learning his impending fate, runs away from home before he’s set to get snipped. Thus begins what promises to be a literal balls-out adventure as Bull does his level best to keep his family jewels – at least long enough to make it with the sexy poodle next door (Kathryn Hahn). We don’t get enough raunchy animated comedies (that aren’t, like, “Foodtopia”), much less 2D animated films of any stripe; I’m eager to see what Genndy’s got in store for us.
I Am Frankelda
Guillermo del Toro proteges Rodolfo and Arturo Ruiz come to the fest with Mexico’s first stop-motion animated feature, “I Am Frankelda,” an extension of the Cartoon Network/HBO Max miniseries about phantom author Frankelda and her enchanted book Herneval. The character designs look phenomenal (shades of del Toro’s own “Pinocchio”), and the festival description promises a “world of weirdness and wonder.” Either way, stop-motion animation is a treasure to behold on the big screen, and I can’t wait to see how this craftsmanship plays out. (The puppets themselves will be on display at an exhibition early in the fest, as well.)
I Live Here Now
Julie Pacino channels David Lynch, Dario Argento, and the Coens in her first feature, “I Live Here Now,” a pulsing psychodrama (shot in 16mm) about a young woman (Lucy Fry) trapped in a motel room and left to face her demons. Past and present, reality and dreams all converge in what looks to be a nightmarish gumbo of generational trauma and the steady pressure of capitalism. Madeline Brewer co-stars, and it looks to be the feel-bad movie of the summer (if Pacino pulls off her brief).
Lucid
Speaking of young women going on trippy tales, Deanna Milligan and Ramsey Fendall’s 2022 Fantasia short gets expanded into the darkly psychedelic “Lucid.” The film follows Mia Sunshine Jones (Caitlin Acken Taylor), an art student with a mean streak who’s feeling the pressure of her demanding art professor on her next big project. Her solution? Like many an artist before her, she’ll take drugs for inspiration. However, the drug of choice, an elixir named Lucid, may tap into something darker than she’s expecting. Full of punk-art aesthetics and ’90s grunge vibes, as well as live on-set music, “Lucid” feels like it’ll be quite the crazy experiment.
Terrestrial
From the director (curiously enough) of “Hot Tub Time Machine” comes Steve Pink’s “Terrestrial,” a dark sci-fi comedy about a young writer (“Sorry to Bother You”‘s Jermaine Fowler) who experiences a sudden windfall and invites his three best college friends to his new mansion to help him write his first book. As he mines his life for inspiration, the cracks in his self-mythology begin to form, and the friends soon discover they’re in for more than they initially bargained for.
The Undertone
Podcasting meets folk horror in sci-fi author Ian Tuason’s debut feature, which follows Evy (“The Handmaid’s Tale”‘s Nina Kiri) as she investigates a series of disturbing audio files featuring a mysterious man and his wife, linking the story to Evy’s dying mother. I’m a big fan of the way smart horror can use audio media to sell scares (“Archive 81“), so I’m curious how Tuason’s blend of modern technology and psychological religious torment has in store for us.
- Ari Aster Talks with Chaz Ebert About “Eddington” at Music Box (July 11, 2025)
This Saturday, July 12th, Chaz Ebert will moderate a Q&A with writer/director Ari Aster about his latest film, “Eddington,” following a special promotional screening at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre at 7 pm.
A24 describes the film thusly:
In May of 2020, a standoff between a small-town sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) and mayor (Pedro Pascal) sparks a powder keg as neighbor is pitted against neighbor in Eddington, New Mexico.
From writer/director Ari Aster (BEAU IS AFRAID, HEREDITARY, MIDSOMMAR), EDDINGTON also stars Luke Grimes, Deirdre O’Connell, Clifton Collins Jr., with Austin Butler and Emma Stone.
In our review from the Cannes Film Festival, Managing Editor Brian Tallerico described the film as “a challenging film that plays with hot-button ideas.”
“There will be some fascinating discussion around this movie, including people who consider its undeniable ambition courageous and those who think its racial provocations downright irresponsible. I think that’s actually how Aster wants it. He’s made a film about divided communities, and he hopes in his own way to do the same to his audience.”
You can learn more about the sold-out screening (and buy tickets for future showings) at Music Box Theatre’s official website.
