- Everywhere You Go Has Valet: “Clueless” at 30 (Or Whatever) (July 18, 2025)
Writer-director Amy Heckerling’s 1995 comedy “Clueless” is almost twice as old as its heroine, Beverly Hills princess Cher Horowitz (Alicia Silverstone). It’s a period piece now, which is fine, because it’s also true of its inspiration, Jane Austen’s 1816 novel Emma. The teenage characters all have cellular phones, which were rare at that time compared to today. Mona May’s dazzling costumes, which should have been a lock for that year’s Oscar, are mid-90s fashion run through an MTV glam filter and pumped up on steroids, from the brightly colored, plaid-patterned jacket, vest, and skirt ensembles that Cher and her friend Dionne (Stacey Dash) wear in the opening scene and the baggy jeans and backwards ball caps favored by skater boy Travis (Breckin Meyer) and his buddies, to the Seattle grunge look preferred by Cher’s stepbrother Josh (Paul Rudd).
There’s no everyday Internet usage yet, hence no smartphones, which means the characters get lost while driving, take Polaroids of each other while shopping for clothes, and have to call an operator and ask for the number of a taxi service when stranded. Mark Wahlberg, two years out from “Boogie Nights,” was known as a rapper and underwear model, and is name-checked as Marky Mark.
But in its portrayal of the eternal verities of adolescence, “Clueless” hasn’t aged a day. In that sense, it stands proudly alongside Austen’s novel, which has been adapted many other times for film and TV because it’s so appealing that it’s almost impossible to mess up. (Just a year after “Clueless,” there would be two more film adaptations: a theatrical feature starring Gwyneth Paltrow, and a TV movie starring Kate Beckinsale.) Cher is a reimagining of Austen’s heroine, would-be matchmaker and rich man’s daughter Emma Woodhouse. Most of Heckerling’s Beverly Hills characters have counterparts in the book.
But the end product stands apart from the work that inspired it and is equally quotable, from Cher’s defense of her virginity (“You see how picky I am about my shoes, and they only go on my feet”) to the conclusion of her “pro” defense during a classroom debate on immigration policies (“There is no RSVP on the Statue of Liberty”). Watching it again recently, I was amazed by how tightly plotted and fast-paced it was. The voice-over narration, which has a touch of The Catcher in the Rye, gives “Clueless” the freedom to insert brief, quasi-anthropological observations that are illustrated with delightful images, like Cher’s description of Travis’ subculture appearing over shots of them power-walking across campus with terrible posture: “So okay, I don’t want to be a traitor to my generation and all, but I don’t get how guys dress today. I mean, come on, it looks like they just fell out of bed and put on some baggy pants and take their greasy hair—ew—and cover it up with a backwards cap, and like, we’re expected to swoon? I don’t think so.”
Those kinds of moments are hilarious and ring true, and therefore require no other justification for their inclusion. But they’re sneakily functional, too, in that they add still more definition to the vivid world the film has created, and flesh out characteristics of the school’s subgroups, whether they’re Cher’s band of to-the-manor-born young women (they would be called Heathers or Mean Girls if they weren’t essentially decent) or wealthy Black kids like Dionne who feel pulled in different directions.
It’s a nuanced script that sees things that most high school movies don’t and has the nerve to call them out. Notice that Dionne is comfortable dressing and talking like Cher, but her boyfriend Murray, played by Donald Faison, craves street-level “authenticity,” which leads him to shave his head and say things like “You jeepin’ behind my back?”, sparking rebukes from Dionne, who accuses him of playacting. “Street slang is an increasingly valid form of expression,” Murray insists. (A Black kid in Beverly Hills named “Murray” seems like an additional bit of character-building; even the layers in the movie have layers.)
None of it would work if Heckerling didn’t have a beguiling movie star in the form of Silverstone, who was barely known a year earlier but became a box office name thanks to “Clueless” and has worked constantly ever since. (Just this year she starred in the psychosexual thriller “Pretty Thing.”) You could put her performance as Cher in the dictionary next to “irresistible.” That’s important because, as the script is fully aware, this girl is privileged as hell, and isn’t nearly as self-aware about it as she thinks she is. She thinks “Mexican” is a language, and her defense of a progressive immigration policy is couched in a weird analogy about planning a garden party. She’s a terrible driver who scrapes a parked car during a test and doesn’t stop until the instructor commands it. “You want to practice parking?” Josh asks her. “What’s the point?” Cher says. “Everywhere you go has valet.”
But she truly has a good heart, which is why she’s constantly trying to maneuver others into relationships that might bring more happiness into their lives, and volunteering to give fashion-challenged cohorts a makeover—notably a new girl named Tai (the late, great Brittany Murphy), who’s rough around the edges. Tai fancies Travis but keeps getting steered towards the self-satisfied rich boy Elton (Jeremy Sisto), a cad who wants Cher and repeatedly tries to kiss her in the parking lot of a gas station until she flees the vehicle (and gets robbed at gunpoint soon after).
Cher, meanwhile, has far poorer radar for her own prospects than she has for other people’s. Josh is a perfect fit for her, and he’s a viable romantic prospect because even though they grew up together, they aren’t related (this is probably the most 19th-century touch in the movie, besides the use of the phrase “minor ducats”). Still, they are both oblivious to their blatantly mutual attraction. Cher instead chases the handsome transfer student Christian (Justin Walker) even though he is obviously, as Murray puts it, “a disco-dancing, Oscar Wilde-reading, Streisand ticket-holding friend of Dorothy.” On top of Cher’s inability to see what’s right in front of her, Heckerling gets additional comic mileage but assuming that we’ve already figured out Christian’s orientation, if not from the way he walks into Cher’s classroom for the first time–like he’s modeling for a catalog–then from the way he reads William S. Burrough’s novel Junky in class and would rather watch “Spartacus” than swim with her.
Another factor contributing to the film’s timelessness is the relationship between Cher and her father, Mel (Dan Hedaya), a widowed and then divorced Beverly Hills lawyer whose gruff New York facade hides a heart as big as California. Theirs is one of the most appealing father-daughter relationships in cinema. I get a bit misty every time I watch the scene where Cher laments her inability to land Christian, telling Mel, “I like this boy, but he doesn’t like me!” and Mel growls, “How can this be?”
They love each other deeply and know each other well. When Cher reveals that she bargained her way from a C average to a B by relentlessly hassling her teachers, Mel crows, “Honey, I couldn’t be happier than if they were based on real grades!” They’re both kooks who think they’re the baseline for determining normalcy—like everyone else in the movie, really. All great comedies have this in common, and “Clueless” is one of them.
- Meet the Writers: Cortlyn Kelly (July 17, 2025)
Editor’s note: To give you a chance to get to know our writers better, we’ve asked them to respond to some questions. Here’s Cortlyn Kelly. Read her work here.
1. Where did you grow up, and what was it like?
Bouncing between Chicago and Wisconsin, my upbringing was always quite Midwestern: lots of cheese, lots of “opes,” and very sports-centric. Movies have always been a staple for my family; Marcus Cinemas and the Lake Theater in Oak Park, IL were our mainstays. Although I was a competitive athlete for most of my life, education and the arts were heavily prevalent in my upbringing—lots of museum visits, no matter where we were. As an only child, all of the attention was on me; it was great to be so genuinely supported, and the pressure also taught me how to work hard for what I want.
2. Was anyone else in your family into movies? If so, what effect did they have on your moviegoing tastes?
Absolutely. While they wouldn’t quite refer to themselves as cinephiles, my maternal grandparents are very into the movies. My bompa (grandfather) often quizzes me about many movies from the ’50s that I have yet to see, and my dear nana instituted holiday-movie nights from an early age. Growing up, I was one of the spoiled kids who had the privilege of having a television in my room, and we always had a movie playing on our family TV, too.
3. What’s the first movie you remember seeing, and what impression did it make on you?
My first vivid memory at the movies was with my father for “The Incredibles”–I spilled my Buncha Crunch all over the floor, and he explicitly told me I would not be getting another box. The movie was still phenomenal, and unfortunately, to this day, I am still quite a messy eater.
4. What’s the first movie that made you think, “Hey, some people made this. It didn’t just exist. There’s a human personality behind it.”
“La La Land” was the first movie I ever saw alone in theaters. I was 18 years old, and, as mentioned, being an only child pushed me to do a lot, alone, from an early age. While the movie may be corny to some due to the Oscars fiasco, I will never forget how dazzled and dreamy it made me feel. And not having known it was a musical, it was evident from the opening sequence that this was truly a production and a grand effort from all involved. It was the first time I really experienced a score having a significant impact on my emotions, and to this day, Mia & Sebastian’s theme song lulls me to sleep every night. Prior to this, I remember my father showing me “Hotel Rwanda” at a young age, and that was the first time I understood that there are realities that I may never live but can still know about intimately because of movies.
5. What’s the first movie you ever walked out of?
When I was in middle school, my friends and I walked out of “One Day” (2011). At the time we were so angsty, and years later, I came around to watching it in full. I have not walked out of a movie since.
6. What’s the funniest film you’ve ever seen?
It’s easy to make me laugh. I am not confident in these films being the funniest, but they’re the ones I can quote repeatedly and still laugh just as hard as the first time: “21 Jump Street,” “Easy A,” and “Hitch.”
7. What’s the saddest film you’ve ever seen?
I think “Bridge to Terabithia” or “Seven Pounds” were the first movies to make me blubber like a baby. Other films that have left a hole in my heart would be: “Still Alice,” “Dead Poets Society,” and the Netflix series “When They See Us.”
8. What’s the scariest film you’ve ever seen?
To keep it real, I jump a little when the sound gets too loud, so my barometer for being frightened is quite low. My high school softball team and I would watch films like “The Collector” and “Sinister,” and anything that involves devil-like possession is going to get me. “The Lovely Bones” also stuck in my psyche for a long while; I started walking home from school a bit faster.
9. What’s the most romantic film you’ve ever seen?
Romance is perhaps my favorite genre; I find many movies romantic even if they aren’t classified formally as such. “Moneyball,” “In the Mood for Love,” “Lover’s Rock,” “The Age of Innocence,” and “Love Jones.” A romantic subplot sometimes doesn’t make sense in some movies, but the exploration of love is never a waste to me.
10. What’s the first television show you ever saw that made you think television could be more than entertainment?
I’ve always segmented television series as more causal viewing or having an informational purpose—I grew up with the news, SportsCenter, and sometimes David Letterman when I would stay at my nana’s. I suppose it was always more than entertainment, but it wasn’t until the Netflix binge-model that I began to watch shows more seriously, for entertainment, like “The Blacklist,” “How to Get Away with Murder,” and “Gilmore Girls.” My most rewatched series include “The Last Dance,” “Broad City,” “The L Word,” and “Sex and the City.”
11. What book do you think about or revisit the most?
Books that have blown me away in the last six months include I Who Have Never Known Men, and Madonna in a Fur Coat. I don’t quite have my niche in film criticism carved out yet, but I take special interest in book to film adaptations. Some of my favorite books to be adapted are “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Dune: Messiah, The Notebook, and Devil in a Blue Dress.
12. What album or recording artist have you listened to the most, and why?
According to my Spotify statistics, Beyoncé and Future dominate my listening hours. An album (or a few) that I can be caught listened to often: RENAISSANCE, When I Get Home, Plastic Hearts, good kid m.A.A.d city, CINEMA, Discovery, and Mama’s Gun.
I am a strong believer in albums as an art form, especially now more than ever in the age of snippets and sound bites. What keeps me coming back to each of these is their sense of a complete story, smooth transitions, and can get me singing, or dancing, along with my whole soul.
13. Is there a movie that you think is great, or powerful, or perfect, but that you never especially want to see again, and why?
Such a good yet difficult question. My most recent viewing of the “Interstellar” rerelease in 70MM IMAX was so uniquely special, I am unsure if I can watch the movie again in any other way. Chicago, where I am based, does not have the technology (yet) to showcase movies in this way, so traveling through space and time to experience the film as Nolan intended was almost too perfect to replicate.
14. What movie have you seen more times than any other?
As a child, I used to watch the same movie on repeat for weeks—films like “Hercules,” “A Bug’s Life,” and “Sleeping Beauty.” As an adult, “Love Jones,” “Howl’s Moving Castle,” and “When Harry Met Sally,” are viewed at least once per year.
15. What was your first R-rated movie, and did you like it?
Truthfully, I cannot recall. Likely some 2010s comedy or drama!
16. What’s the most visually beautiful film you’ve ever seen?
Almost anything I’ve seen projected on celluloid—“Nope” and “The Searchers” on 70MM are both standouts. I love the Wild West.
17. Who are your favorite leading men, past and present?
Gene Kelly, Denzel Washington, Keanu Reeves, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Pattinson–charisma and commitment is always going to do it for me. Less frequently a leading man in most movies, but Jeffrey Wright always brings a smile to face, too.
18. Who are your favorite leading ladies, past and present?
Bette Davis, Nicole Kidman, Regina King, Emma Stone, and Rachel McAdams. I’d be remiss to not mention Viola Davis and Angela Bassett, and in general look forward to seeing more woman of color land leading roles.
19. Who’s your favorite modern filmmaker?
Denis Villeneuve, Damien Chazelle, and Jordan Peele have never done me wrong. I love the Wachowski sisters and Gina Prince-Bythewood, too. Rest In Peace, David Lynch!
20. Who’s your least favorite modern filmmaker?
Noah Baumbach. No further comment.
21. What film do you love that most people seem to hate?
This may sound a bit out of touch for a cultural critic and film fan, but I don’t pay much mind to what people hate—there is too much good art out there to focus on the bad or what people perceive as bad. Even when I absolutely adore a film, or anything, I welcome contradictions—the best part about movies is that it can reach us all in such a different way.
22. What film do you hate that most people love?
“Hate” is not quite the word I would use, but “Django: Unchained” is not my cuppa tea.
23. Tell me about a moviegoing experience you will never forget—not just because of the movie, but because of the circumstances in which you saw it.
In most recent years, I saw “Twilight” with a sold-out crowd at Music Box Theater as a part of their rated Q programming. While I loved the franchise regardless, seeing it in this setting completely recontextualized the film as camp, as a cultural staple for what it was like to be a tween in 2008.
I also must admit that I gained my movie-going muscles in college by frequenting Marvel’s motion-pictures. After seeing the premiere of “Avengers: Infinity War,” I drove home alone and devastated; riding in silence from the shock. I acknowledge and accept that the MCU is not what it once was, but I am forever appreciative for how it’s part of my butterfly effect towards true cinephilia.
24. What aspect of modern theatrical moviegoing do you like least?
I despise having my ticket on my phone; it’s comparable to scanning a QR code to look at a menu. I detest how cold it can be. Sure, air conditioning is a great modern invention, but does it need to feel like “Ice Age” at the cinema?
25. What aspect of moviegoing during your childhood do you miss the most?
This may be a given, but I really miss my parents paying for my tickets and snacks. As a work around to this adulthood conundrum, I ask for gift cards to my favorite movie theaters. Cell phones also weren’t nearly as common; I miss everyone respecting the one, giant screen in front of us.
26. Have you ever damaged a friendship, or thought twice about a relationship, because you disagreed about whether a movie was good or bad?
No friends lost, but I’ve absolutely stopped dating someone because they “don’t like movies” or they “wait for it to hit streaming.” Luckily, my lover and I convene at the cinema often; I hope forever.
27. What movies have you dreamed about?
I dream mostly of movies unmade, surreal films with plot holes. Movies that make their way into my subconscious are films like “La Chimera,” or anything in the science fiction, sometimes thriller, realm.
28. What concession stand item can you not live without?
Popcorn and Buncha Crunch–with a hot tea if I’m at a hip, independent cinema.
- “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” Bears the Franchise Flagship Proudly in Season 3 (July 17, 2025)
It’s hard to believe it’s been two entire years since the last season of Paramount+’s sole remaining leg of the “Star Trek” franchise, “Strange New Worlds,” graced our streaming screens. In the interim, Paramount has swept in and quietly cancelled or cut off at the knees all of its remaining series: “Discovery,” “Picard,” “Lower Decks,” and “Prodigy” are all gone (even if “Prodigy” somehow returns for a third season, it’d be on Netflix). In the meantime, all “Trek” fans have had to nibble on is a deeply disappointing “Section 31” movie that barely felt like the final frontier at all. So it’s natural to crave the comforting, episodic delights of “Strange New Worlds”‘ third season, a show that continues to uphold the ideals of its franchise’s point of origin, even as its swings boldly go nowhere all that deep.
When last we left the crew of the USS Enterprise, they were facing a Gorn invasion of a remote Federation colony, with the Gorn having captured several members of the crew, and a fleet of enemy ships bearing down on Captain Pike (Anson Mount) and his intrepid crew. The season opener, “Hegemony Part II,” concludes this two-parter in exciting fashion, an action-packed and dramatic hour that offers plenty of chances for the show’s top-notch effects work and production design to shine. (That said, I’d be happy for the show to look a little less feature-ready if it meant squeezing a few more episodes into the season order. Ten episodes are just not enough for a season of “Trek,” especially one so indebted to the light, exploratory rhythms of vintage TV.)
More than all the hurried technobabble, explosions, and a surprising surfeit of body horror, though, the premiere sets up a few season-long questions the rest of the season’s first half explores in the background of its otherwise standalone brief. The events of the episode lead to a ticking-clock scenario for Pike’s lover and fellow captain, Marie Batel (Melanie Scrofano, also doing yeoman’s work on “Revival“), whose looming Gorn infection offers Pike more to do than his usual captaining. We also finally get to see some new shades from Lt. Ortegas (Melissa Navia), as her trauma from the Klingon War and her experiences as a Gorn prisoner start to affect her judgment (and her dynamic with Rebecca Romijn’s Number One). And crucially, we begin to fill in more gaps from the pre-TOS crew, with Martin Quinn’s Scotty now joining the ship officially as its jittery new engineer, who can pull off miracles as long as you hold a phaser to his head. (He bounces well off Carol Kane‘s Chief Pelia, though the latter pops in and out of the season more frequently than I’d like.)
L to R Martin Quinn as Scotty and Carol Kane as Pelia in season 3 , Episode 1 of Strange New Worlds streaming on Paramount+. Photo Credit: Marni GrossmanParamount+
But underneath those serialized threads, “Strange New Worlds” remains committed to stretching its legs and exploring wilder tones than the franchise often allows itself; over the course of these five episodes, we see space battles, holographic murder mysteries, sliding-doors romantic farces, and even a horror-tinged pastiche I don’t remember having seen in the franchise to date. What’s remarkable about these whiplashing tones is that showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers, and their own crew of writers, manage to navigate that asteroid field with particular aplomb, letting each episode have its own feel without making it feel like it’s a different show each time.
Take “Wedding Bell Blues,” the season’s prerequisite “Spock farce” episode, which offers plenty of room for gags about dewey-eyed jealousy as he sees his ex, Christine Chapel (Jess Bush), nurture a new relationship with Dr. Korby (Cillian O’Sullivan) (and a mysterious godlike being, played with impish delight by Rhys Darby, who gives him the chance to imagine a different life). Like any good Spock-centric episode, it gives Ethan Peck the chance to demonstrate his exceptional comic chops, as well as his innate understanding of Spock’s roped-in tempestuousness. And it ends on a surprising note of grace for anyone who’s had to let go of the hopes of rekindling an old flame. (That the show continues to prod that wound in future eps remains a weak point, though I guess it’s an indicator that that journey, as the Prophets of “Deep Space Nine” would say, is not linear.)
The rest of the cast get their moment to shine, as well; Babs Olusanmokun’s Dr. M’Benga gets an episode to reckon with his demons from the Klingon War (in the form of a knife fight to the death that recalls his fate at the end of “Dune: Part One“), and Christina Chong’s La’an Noonien Singh gets a rare lighter entry in “A Space Adventure Hour,” which spins a fantasy about a ’60s murder mystery story into a pastiche reflection on original “Trek”‘s early days as a cheesy TV show and its cultural importance. (The cold open for that one gives Kirk actor Paul Wesley the chance to go full Shatner, and it’s a riot.)
L to R Ethan Peck as Spock and Paul Wesley as Kirk in season 3 , Episode 6 of Strange New Worlds streaming on Paramount+. Photo Credit: Marni GrossmanParamount+
Where the season’s still stumbling is in its innate nature as a morality play, something the original series prided itself on and which “Strange New Worlds” has previously emulated. You won’t find big, speechy episodes like season two’s “Ad Astra Per Aspera” in this season’s crop (though that could change as the season develops); instead, the show aims to keep it light, with its darkest moments focused on the emotional whirlwinds of its characters rather than making broad political allegories. The closest we get is late in the aforementioned ’60s throwback episode, where one character gets to opine on the utility of a “Star Trek” show to inspire its audience, to make it look up at the stars and dream of what’s out there. That kind of optimism is what set this franchise apart in the 20th century—and which streaming legs of the franchise like “Picard” struggled to capture.
By Paramount’s reckoning, “Strange New Worlds” is set to end in its fifth season, with the fourth being filmed alongside this one. No one knows what to expect as this last leg of the “Trek” franchise enters its final frontier. But we’ve got plenty of light-years to go, and we might as well enjoy the genuinely thrilling ride while we’re on it.
First five episodes screened for review. First two episodes are currently streaming on Paramount+, with new episodes airing Thursdays.
- KVIFF 2025: Awards and Wrap-Up (July 16, 2025)
Experiencing it for the first time during its 59th edition, the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival proved—at least for this critic—both formidable and revitalizing. The same can be said for the very best of the films that screened all week long in this scenic spa town in the Czech Republic. Still, there was ample energy to be harnessed even outside of the movies, from goings-on about town to Karlovy Vary’s blend of awe-inspiring architecture and natural splendor.
That thousands of spectators descended each day on the historic city centre, between pop-up tents and colonnades, never quite disrupted the town’s idyllic qualities. However, one can imagine that Karlovy Vary feels very different—less lively, more lulling—outside of the festival. Going to see films each day between the Grandhotel Pupp and the Hotel Thermal, walking riverside beneath vibrant facades of various spas, restaurants, and hotels, I often encountered groups of passerby queued up to sample mineral waters from the city’s springs, alongside others in line to secure free glasses of Prosecco or mugs of Pilsner Urquell that festival sponsors kept flowing. So ubiquitous is the latter around Prague that it’s cheaper here to drink beer than bottled water.
Coinciding with the end of the school year, the festival attracted an energetic crowd of students from throughout Europe, who see Karlovy Vary as an ideal destination to see films, catch up with friends, and party around town—often all in one evening, which accounts for why an ambient buzz of activity subsisted long into the night, every night. Scores of young attendees took advantage of this summer atmosphere and pitched campsites in a designated “tent city” area not far from the promenade. Most of them spent more time watching films than sleeping under the open sky; the day breaks early in Karlovy Vary, and birds had started singing by the time most of these cinephiles returned from late-night showtimes to recharge their batteries.
Each day, ticket offices drew lines that stretched back hundreds of meters; some slept in line to improve their odds. Not all of the cinemas showing films around Karlovy Vary are as sprawling as the 1131-seat Grand Hall in the Hotel Thermal; indeed, three venues in another area of the hotel, which also host press screenings, all seat between 63 to 70, and the hillside Husovka Theatre, a short climb away from the city centre, seats 96 adjacent to a snug outdoor bar. There’s a charming makeshift quality to such venues, all of Karlovy Vary making whatever modifications necessary to amplify the communal enthusiasm for cinema that enlivens this festival.
At Karlovy Vary, Celebrating Film In All Its Forms
As a newcomer to Karlovy Vary, it was striking to experience excitement on the ground for film in all forms—not just Cannes-premiered awards contenders, like Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value” and Jafar Panahi’s “It Was Just an Accident,” or starry retrospectives like “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” presented by producer Michael Douglas and co-producer Paul Zaentz on its 50th anniversary. Here, boundary-pushing works in the Imagina section, from Mark Jenkin’s “I Saw God’s Face in the Jet Trail” to Ondřej Vavrečka’s “1+1+1” (on Super 8 and 16mm, respectively), animated as many discussions as titles in Pragueshorts and the films in Afterhours (a midnight section where 4K restorations of “The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre” and “Hellraiser” screened alongside the likes of “Dangerous Animals”). Others told me they had been devoting their time to watching the works of American actor John Garfield, ten of which were presented in a festival sidebar. (“It’s a pure masterpiece,” one critic raved to me of “Body and Soul,” a chiaroscuro boxing drama of bloody noses and punch-drunk fatalism that Garfield made with Robert Rossen.)
Over 130 films screened during the festival, which has accrued a reputation as a “programmer’s festival” in that it brings together breakout titles from Cannes, Berlin, Sundance, Venice, and more to showcase a veritable cream of the crop. For critics and film-industry professionals alike, it’s an invaluable opportunity to catch up.
Outside of competition titles reviewed in the previous dispatches, I was most enthralled by “Dreams (Sex Love),” the Golden Bear winner at Berlin this year. From Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud, who has made two other films that form a thematic trilogy, this electrifying and elastic ode to the creative process follows a teenager whose hopeless crush on a teacher compels her to spill everything she has experienced into a novella. With her writing related in voiceover narration, truth blurs with fiction, and the reality of what happened is left up to a growing number of readers. While others debate the nature of the heartache she expresses in lyrical prose, “Dreams” reflects on the meaning we create from memories as we make art that turns them into something else entirely.
From Ira Sachs, “Peter Hujar’s Day,” which I’d missed at Sundance, similarly draws seismic emotion from a monologue, as the renowned photographer (Ben Whishaw) tells his friend, the journalist Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall), about the previous day’s events. Mundane and contained though it was, Hujar’s remembrance of one day in 1970s New York becomes an exhumation of that time and place, the people who moved through it, and his own role in their passage: observing, recounting, preserving.
Another kind of memorial is Akinola Davies’ debut “My Father’s Shadow,” which relives a day in 1990s Lagos through the eyes of two young brothers (Chibuike Marvellous Egbo, Godwin Egbo) finally getting to know the father (Sope Dirisu) they’re about to lose; it’s a gorgeous, mournful gesture of a film, like a handprint that lingers on skin, reflecting as “Aftersun” did on dynamics of absence and presence in all the agonized, unfinished relationships we share with our fathers.
Hlynur Pálmason’s “The Love That Remains” similarly sees filmmaking as sculpture, and time as its raw clay; working with immediate surroundings, the Icelandic filmmaker cast his children in this tragicomic portrait of a family coming apart, resulting in a film—shot piecemeal over years—that’s as loosely structured as it is precisely composed, with some of the strangest images anywhere at the festival.
“Better Go Mad in the Wild,” “Sand City” Triumph at Karlovy Vary’s Awards Ceremony
Films competing for the Crystal Globe premiered across the week, and the ultimate winner only screened in the festival’s final days. As announced during the festival’s Saturday-night closing ceremony, Slovak filmmaker Miro Remo’s charming docufiction hybrid “Better Go Mad in the Wild,” about two eccentrics in their sixties living in the forests of Sumava, won the section’s Grand Prix, becoming the first homegrown title to earn top honors at the fest in eight years.
Jurors Nicolas Celis, Babak Jalali, Jessica Kiang, Jiří Mádl and Tuva Novotny said in their jury statement that Remo’s “delightfully inventive documentary” doubled as “a funny valentine to the fading art of being true to yourself,” adding, “‘Better Go Mad in the Wild’ feels like a gulp of fresh, woody air, or a quick dip in an outdoor pond, or a moment of contemplation as a cow chews on your beard. In short, it feels like being free.” On stage, joked Remo, “If I knew it would be such a huge event, I would have worn a bowtie.”
A special jury prize, meanwhile, was awarded to “Bidad,” Soheil Beiraghi’s account of a Gen Z singer’s one-woman resistance to Iranian authority. “I thank Iranian women for not being afraid; they taught me not to be afraid,” he said through a translator. “They don’t need to be pitied — they need to be applauded,” he added, prompting a standing ovation. In a surprise twist, the jury split their best-director prize between 33-year-old Lithuanian director Vytautas Katkus for “The Visitor” and 25-year-old French director Nathan Ambrosioni for “Out of Love,” honoring two films “that represent opposite ends of the spectrum in approach yet are each, individually, deeply impressive directorial statements,” per their statement.
Norwegian actress Pia Tjelta took home best actress for “Don’t Call Me Mama,” about a teacher who has an affair with one of the refugees she mentors at a local asylum centre, while Spanish actor Àlex Brendemühl won best actor for “When a River Becomes the Sea,” in which he plays the stoic father of a woman recovering from sexual assault. A special jury mention was awarded to Czech newcomer Kateřina Falbrová, who was first cast in “Broken Voices” at age 12, in the role of a singer preyed upon by her choirmaster. Finally, the Právo Audience Award went to “We’ve Got to Frame It! (a conversation with Jiří Bartoška in July 2021),” the festival’s opening title.
Jurors for the Proxima sidebar section included Yulia Evina Bhara, Noaz Deshe, Nelson Carlos De Los Santos Arias and Marissa Frobes. In Proxima, the Grand Prix winner was “Sand City,” a visually striking tone poem set in the city of Dhaka, by first-time Bangladeshi feature filmmaker Mahde Hasan, while the special jury prize was awarded to “Forensics,” by Federico Atehortúa Arteaga, which uncovers connections between stories of the disappeared in Colombia. Special mention was awarded to Manoël Dupont’s “Before / After,” from Belgium, about two men who bond over their receding hairlines while traveling to Istanbul to visit a hair-transplant clinic there.
At the ceremony, Stellan Skarsgård—star of “Sentimental Value,” which he discussed with RogerEbert.com—was also presented with the Crystal Globe for Outstanding Contribution to World Cinema. “I’m not dead yet,” he joked on stage. “I thought I was too young for this.” Another milestone moment came as the festival bestowed a KVIFF President’s Award on the legendary Czech editor Jiří Brožek—its first such recognition for an editor. Earlier in the week, the festival had him introduce a screening of Karel Kachyňa’s “The Death of the Beautiful Deer,” a Czech classic, in the historic Karlovy Vary Theatre.
Dancing with Ghosts, as KVIFF Comes to a Close
After one final screening of Jay Duplass comedy “The Baltimorons,” the closing-night party got going an hour before midnight, as the halls of the Grandhotel Pupp turned into a free-for-all of food, drink, and festivity. Members of the juries, sworn to secrecy during deliberations, could finally cut loose amid a sea of stars. A downstairs dancefloor at the intimate Bechers Bar—a late-night VIP haunt throughout the week, though all of its tables were exclusively reserved this year for sponsors who largely left them unoccupied, making for a curious visual most nights of the festival—filled up as the night went on, reaching peak capacity around four in the morning.
Empty chairs at empty tables, in another context, reflected Karlovy Vary’s overarching tribute to Jirí Bartoska, its late president, whose death in May hung heavy over the festival. Since 2008, KVIFF screenings have all been prefaced by cinematic trailers featuring past laureates of the festival’s major awards. Czech actor Bolek Polívka appeared in this year’s film, in which Polívka—a long-time friend of Bartoska—sits at a table in a bar and orders whiskeys for himself and an unseen acquaintance. As the camera turns, the audience realizes nobody is sitting across from him, and that Polívka is addressing the late Bartoska, sliding a photograph of the actor across the table and telling him, “to hang it up somewhere, there.” At the closing-night ceremony, Bartoska’s remembrance was met with sustained applause; many were seen wiping away tears.
In a tragic turn of events, hours after “Better Go Mad in the Wild” won the Grand Prix—Crystal Globe in Karlovy Vary, one of its two subjects—Czech poet František Klišík—was found dead in a pond in the Czech village of Ohrobec, where he’d been celebrating the film’s success. Klišík’s death is still under investigation, but word of his unexpected passing at 62 reached Remo as he returned home the next day, still buzzing from victory. In a public statement addressed to Klišík, a grief-stricken Remo turned to his subject’s words, from one of the poems that featured in their film: “Life is a momentary illusion, a cry into silence, a foolish effort, a cup forced upon you, a sip of delicious taste, a prerequisite for death, which then is our certainty, a prerequisite for life.”
It’s hard to know what to say about a celebration like Karlovy Vary concluding with such stark and successive notes of legacy and loss, other than that reminders were everywhere this week of the role cinema plays in helping us make sense of mortality. At its best, the projector’s flickering light can immortalize; its pictures of ghosts make the past present once more. Paying tribute to a late luminary who made the festival what it is today, Karlovy Vary looked back even as programmers trained their gaze forward, making for a headlong rush of a festival in which it was nevertheless easy to feel suspended in time: savoring every second at the end of one era, caught between gratitude and heartbreak at the onset of another.
- Our Minds Have Been Colonized: Ari Aster on “Eddington” (July 16, 2025)
It may be about time, or perhaps far too soon, to craft a movie that explores the realities of living through Summer 2020. Regardless, director Ari Aster’s pugnacious and genre-pliant “Eddington” is here, and it offers up the best approximation of the unique hell of that time.
Bristling with natural ease, Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe Cross, sheriff of the quaint town of Eddington, New Mexico, who rebuffs the mask mandates and 6 feet distancing that have become mainstays of his town. Skeptical of whether the virus exists and equally doubtful of whether its veracity is worth causing conflict between Eddington’s residents, a disgruntled Joe decides to run for mayor against incumbent Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). Cross’s act coincides with the divisions running rampant across the US at large, as Eddington’s youth begin to protest in the wake of George Floyd’s brutal murder, which puts them in conflict with the town’s meager but combative police force.
“Eddington” acts as Aster’s well-intentioned and imperfect attempt to make sense of the absurdity of life five Summers ago. As he wraps his creative arms around the political unwieldiness and racial tensions of the time, his reach may exceed his grasp, but that’s not a knock on Aster’s filmmaking skill as much as it is an affirmation that even nearly half a decade removed from lockdown, the world still hasn’t found a way to properly process the collective grief, estrangement, and alienation of that time. That the final product is divisively messy is more of a feature than a bug. COVID, as presented here, is the inciting force that shattered any semblance of unity in this country, breaking the last link to a democracy built on the consensus of the most fundamental truths.
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Additionally, across his first three films, “Hereditary,” “Midsommar,” and “Beau is Afraid,” Aster has explored how the capitalist mindset has infected our rhythms of grief. Consider Annie’s (Toni Collette) monologue in “Hereditary,” where she mourns the “waste” of her daughter’s death because it didn’t, at the very least, bring her family closer together. In a world where jokes abound about the ways we have to “get ready for our 9-5 jobs” because we were “too shy to dance on TikTok in 2020,”—as if the disruption of the pandemic was something we had to “take advantage of” instead of just survive—the film is a mournful reminder that the no one was ever equipped to endure the level of tragedy caused by COVID, let alone process it perfectly. When tragedy becomes insurmountable, we often return to the well of capitalist thought to similarly “not waste” our suffering. “Eddington” condemns those defaults while wondering if there’s a better way forward.
Speaking of the ways the characters of Eddington live so proximate to each other yet could not see the world more differently, Aster told RogerEbert.com, “all of these people are kind of living on the Internet and they are sort of all seeing the world through these strange, individualized windows.” Indeed, Aster’s worry is not just that we live in a world divided; there’s a paucity of concern, let alone curiosity, about attempting to mend the split or learn from the past. “Eddington” serves as a poignant and emphatic call for embodied engagement with one another, amidst the temptation to retreat behind a digital veneer.
Ahead of a sold out advance screening of the film at the Music Box, Aster jumped on the phone for a few minutes to discuss his prevailing interest in dolls throughout his filmography, the ways popular music precede moments of violence in his projects, and how the movies—despite being on screens—may be the thing that help us learn to reconnect with each other.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. This interview contains mild spoilers for “Eddington.”
To jump back a bit in time: I know you had toyed with the idea of making a Western for your debut, some eight years before you made “Hereditary.” Watching “Eddington” in its final form now, though, it’s hard for me to believe that a version of this story could have existed since the provocations and questions are so specific.
To be honest, the original version of this wasn’t the most interesting. I grew up in New Mexico, and my family still lives there. For a long time, I’ve always wanted to make a story set there, and I had written something that was something of a Western that was about two feuding locals. I lost interest in it though after failing to get it made, and then in the early Summer of 2020 when I was writing this story, I realized that the basic structure of that old script–with its emphasis on the siloing of communities and breakdown of communication–would be a decent kind of framework for a movie about COVID. Joaquin’s character–even his wardrobe–is modeled after one of the sheriffs I interviewed in preparation for this project.
On the note of filling out a framework, you populate your films with characters who are looking for vessels to house their pain. There were dolls in “Hereditary,” and also Emma Stone’s Louise–who plays Joe’s wife–uses dolls to cope with trauma in “Eddington.” What draws you to dolls and figurines as mediums and siphons?
I do like dolls–I designed the ones you see in “Eddington”–and find that craft quite fun. It made sense to include them in “Eddington” because Joe doesn’t have access to Louise in the film. Because the audience is aligned with Joe, we likewise don’t have access to her that we might want or need to fully understand her. For me, a lot of her history and the trauma that she’s processing and trying to work through are evident in the art that she’s making.
I view Louise as someone who was probably put through art therapy at a certain point in her life, and is somebody who has a history of abuse, and those experiences have left her confused. Over the course of the film, we find that she’s being manipulated by Austin Butler’s character, which adds another layer to her attempts to process. Ultimately, though, her artwork was a way of painting a picture of her inner self, from her emotions to her imagination, given that she’s somebody who is removed from us.
Phones in this film, but also writ large, act as a home for humanity’s worst impulses and attempts at processing affliction. Maybe we should switch to doll making.
Well, I tried not to judge any of the characters. If anything, I was trying to pull back as far as I could and provide the broadest possible picture of the landscape. I don’t mean just the physical landscape of the town, but rather also a sense of the ideological sense of the community. All of these people are kind of living on the Internet, and they are sort of all seeing the world through these strange, individualized windows.
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Speaking of the Internet, at Cannes, Austin Butler shared that in the early discussions with you, he approached playing the cult leader, Vernon, as if he were “the embodiment of the Internet.” It’s not lost on me that this religious language is grafted onto this internet surrogate, which correlates in some ways with your reflection of how those ushering in AI talk about it like it’s a God. Was that an intentional parallel?
Vernon is a Pied Piper figure. He’s someone who sees what is happening, especially in America, and is capitalizing on it; there’s no telling how sincere he is. I’ve talked to some people who saw the film, and they viewed him as being sincere, which I found very interesting. But he is someone who, in some ways, collects people. Louise is somebody who has a very ugly history, and he’s providing her with answers. Really, in the end, he’s a salesman, and he’s a good one.
Very much like a traveling preacher in some respects. I noted how Katy Perry’s “Firework” here operated similarly to No Genre’s “Sledge Hammer” and Modeselektor’s “Dark Side of the Sun” in that these songs not only evoke the tortured interiority of your protagonists but often precede moments of violence.
It’s funny because the first song that we used there was Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ “Empire State of Mind.” That really made me laugh, given that it’s a New York anthem that’s being played at this fundraising party in this tiny town of New Mexico.
We weren’t able to secure the rights, and I really wasn’t expecting to because it’s such a huge song, but then we spent a lot of time experimenting with different songs in that scene, and “Firework” just fit.
I didn’t know it after all my years of listening to it, but Perry was inspired, in part, by Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” for that song. “Firework” is just as Americana as “Eddington.”
That’s interesting. I didn’t know that. In the end, I was just trying to find a song that felt emblematic of the culture and sounded like American pop music right now, which, as a genre, has a sound that hasn’t changed in a long time. It’s a great song, and it evolved perfectly with the scene. It’s a song that’s very heavy on the bass, and that was important because we cranked the bass in that scene so that you would feel it in your chest and your stomach. When you push the bass on that song, it makes it queasy, which worked for my purposes.
I hope the official soundtrack comes with the bass-boosted remix of “Firework.” You’ve cited Nietzsche, and how we’re living in a time now where the oversaturation of our history leads to detached spectatorism instead of actual engagement. Where do you see the role of cinema as a way to help people re-engage with each other?
I appreciate that. There are a lot of movies, more on the tentpole side, that encourage a retreat from reality. Even thinking about social media, that’s designed for a type of disassociated consumption. Hollywood has always been about escapism, and I believe in escapism; I hope my movies are fun and enjoyable, and don’t just feel like work.
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Thinking of what Roger Ebert said about movies being empathy machines, the medium of cinema can be a way to foster a more intentional engagement than the way something like doomscrolling might do.
The thing is, I don’t see movies as the problem, for those reasons you described. I see something insidious about the way social media works, and in the way it keeps you siloed off from your neighbors, and just the way it functions as an echo chamber. The reasons for this system are not particularly sinister, but the results are. Social media is all about keeping your engagement and attention, which is how money is made. Our minds have been somewhat colonized, and so, if anything, part of making “Eddington” was about underscoring just how divided all these people are and how artificial the process of connecting through the screen is. It’s also kind of about how the virtual tends to make reality more fake. This is what it means to be a people who live on the internet.
What you’re saying reminds me in some ways of the ending of a film you produced: Kristoffer Borgli’s “Dream Scenario,” where our very dreams become invaded with unskippable ads; there’s this sense that once we commercialize that space, we can become further siloed in our sleep.
Yeah … that’s sort of our situation right now. I think any film that’s trying to achieve any sort of modern realism has to contend with our division and how those voids are only getting wider.
“Eddington” opens in theaters on July 18th from A24.
