- The Darkest Samurai Film Ever Made: Toshio Matsumoto’s “Shura” (October 13, 2025)
What compels a man to descend into madness? At what point does he abandon reason to pursue the unspeakable? Man is never more dangerous than when blinded by his own rage. From such darkness emerge acts so brutal that they expose how fragile the boundary is between humanity and monstrosity. The criminal acts that follow become less a rational decision than an eruption of the unconscious. This idea of unconscious violence is at the heart of Toshio Matsumoto’s terrifying vision about the dark nature of humanity, “Shura,” aka “Demons.”
Gengobe is pursued at night by an unseen force through the village. As he’s running, he constantly glances back. We see variations of the same shot of him looking back over and over again. Each cut is a different take presented from a different angle. Lanterns drift toward him. Their carriers appear hidden in the shadows, as though the flames themselves are hunting him.He breaks into a house in fear of being caught. As he gropes through the darkness calling out for a woman called Koman, Gengobe’s foot strikes something. On the floor lies a severed hand. He looks up and sees a room filled with corpses. The corpses are scattered around an unconscious woman. It’s Koman. We see blood spilling from her mouth. He then sees himself suspended from a noose. The last trace of light is consumed by darkness. Gengobe wakes up. Out of the black, a face emerges. It’s the same woman who was butchered in his vision, only now she’s alive.This is the opening sequence of a film known by many names (“Shura,” “Pandemonium,”, “Bloodshed,” but most commonly as “Demons”) but rarely seen. This obscurity is quite surprising given that it was directed by the great experimental filmmaker Toshio Matsumoto. Matsumoto was a well-established film critic and theorist best known for adapting Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex into the queer masterpiece, “Funeral Parade of Roses”. But to me, his greatest avant-garde work is this one. “Demons”/“Shura” remains one of the most radical films ever made. Its daring techniques continue to astonish even today.
Toshio Matsumoto’s bleak samurai film follows a ronin in love with the courtesan Koman. When he learns that she’s about to be sold into a life she does not desire, he raises a huge sum to buy her freedom. He gives up all the gold he has. It isn’t long before we discover that this was all part of a scheme that she had been plotting with her husband all along. When Gengobe discovers the truth, the story spirals into bloodshed and tragedy. This descent into betrayal and violence is foreshadowed in the film’s opening image. The very first shot of the film is that of a round orb of the orange sun sinking low on the horizon. It is the only burst of color in the entire film. As it vanishes, the world is plunged into darkness, both literal and figurative. Any trace of color is extinguished. Despair seeps into the narrative with this shift to black-and-white.
Unlike Kurosawa’s samurai epics or Kobayashi’s moral tales of feudal cruelty, “Shura” refuses the possibility of dignity. Kurosawa’s heroes often fought for community. They sacrifice for the greater good in films like “Seven Samurai”. Kobayashi’s “Harakiri” unmasked the hypocrisy of samurai codes but still found nobility in rebellion. Matsumoto, by contrast, drains the samurai myth of every shred of romanticism. His ronin is not a protector, nor a rebel, but a man spiralling into disgrace. What we experience is the complete inversion of the bushido code. Here we don’t witness honor in death, but dishonor spreading like a plague. If the genre often served to uphold ideals of loyalty, sacrifice, and justice, “Shura” dismantles them completely. Here, the only code left is betrayal.
The film’s title, “Shura,” refers to the Buddhist asura, which are demigods condemned to a realm of endless conflict. These demons are consumed by envy and aggression. In Japanese usage, the title also implies scenes of horrific bloodshed (shuraba), a battlefield of carnage where violence spirals beyond return. Matsumoto’s choice of title fuses these meanings. This idea of endless conflict shows up in the film’s form, trapping the viewer and characters alike in a cycle of hopelessness and violence.
The film utilizes jarring edits where gestures or movements are repeated across cuts. At first, these repetitions feel like an experimental flourish, as if the director is playing with rhythm and tempo. But soon this effect destabilizes the viewer’s sense of time. We start to see longer sequences being repeated. Only this time, the protagonist carries out entirely different paths or actions. Sometimes these repetitions appear as dreamlike fantasies, while other times they feel like speculative futures where the cycle of violence might be broken.We begin to realize that we may be slipping in and out of subjective perception. The line between reality and fantasy becomes blurred. Time itself bends. Whenever something happens in the film, I found myself completely uncertain if it was actually happening or not, because Matsumoto had already established this disruptive threat of repetition. In other words, the film makes the viewer lose all sense of what is real in the very act of watching. We experience a complete collapse of certainty.
What is the true nature of man’s corruption? Who bears the weight of the unspeakable horrors humans unleash? The samurai’s blade may carve out justice to those who wronged him, yet in each stroke it engraves his own damnation deeper into his soul. In this world, vengeance feeds upon itself like a fire consuming all oxygen. The characters bid for freedom with small selfish acts that only deepen their ruin.
It was based on a kabuki play by Tsuruya Nanboku, a towering playwright of the Edo period. He was known for works steeped in the supernatural and the grotesque. Over his career, he wrote around 120 plays, often blending horror with the ghostly and uncanny. It came as no surprise that he was also the author of Yotsuya Kaidan, Japan’s most famous ghost story. Adapted into film more than 30 times, it shaped the iconic yurei image that influenced J-horror classics like “Ringu” and “Ju-On”. Yet nothing compares to the darkness of “Shura”. In “Shura,” what’s terrifying isn’t the supernatural, but a cruelty so boundless it defies reason.
There is one scene that remains among the most horrifying in all of cinema. Gengobe, consumed by rage and humiliation, approaches a crying infant. For a moment, we hope compassion might break through his madness. The baby’s face fills the frame. Then, the dark shadow of a blade slides across its face. The director cuts to a wider frame. The horror lies not in what is shown but in what is heard, or rather, what is no longer heard. The absence of the child’s cry screams louder than any image. It’s one of the most unnerving moments in all of cinema because it shows the precise point at which man’s fury erases the most sacred boundary of all, the protection of innocent life. This moment is horror distilled to its purest form.
In that instant, Matsumoto violates our senses and erases any possibility of redemption for our main character. What lingers is a horrific realization. Once revenge devours all rational thought, it annihilates the very foundation of human compassion. When I finished the film, it took days to shake it off. Its dark nihilistic vision of humanity was overwhelming. It still stings half a century later because its vision of violence is not bound to samurai codes or Edo-period morality, but to cycles we continue to recognize in our own world. Violence erupts, retribution breeds retaliation, and the innocent are always the first casualties. Watching the film now, as a new parent, its sound and imagery felt devastatingly heavy. The darkness born of what is shown and withheld, heard and silenced, was too much to bear. Matsumoto’s “Shura” shows how unchecked vengeance gives rise to unspeakable atrocities. Once violence crosses the threshold of innocent lives, it marks a line humanity must never cross. To repeat the cycle of violence is to extinguish empathy itself. To break it is the only way forward.
- NYFF 2025: The 63rd Edition Comes to a Close (October 13, 2025)
In the second week of the 2025 New York Film Festival, President Donald Trump announced that he would impose a 100 percent tariff on foreign films imported to the United States. As to why this news didn’t cause any comment, much less an outcry or protest, at the festival, it may have had to do something to do with the fact that Trump announced the same thing back in May and didn’t follow through. But there were surely grounds for concern for the simple reason that the New York Film Festival has long been the primary launching pad for foreign films entering the U.S.
For the last three decades, foreign films have represented an ever-decreasing share of box office returns in this country. But when the NYFF was founded in the early ‘60s—the era of Bergman, Fellini and the French New Wave—they were of supreme importance from an aesthetic standpoint, essentially forging the definition of film as art. Their impact on what might be called the Scorsese Generation of filmmakers, attending the festival as high school or college students, can scarcely be overestimated.
This year, 23 of the 34 films in the festival’s Main Slate were of foreign origin. As has been the case for decades, the most prominent among them emerged from the Cannes Film Festival, still the world’s preeminent launching platform for the world ‘s art cinema. Increasingly in recent years, the NYFF has served as a way station between Cannes and the Best International Film Oscar.
In 2025, three Cannes laureates at the NYFF seem the leading contenders for that Oscar. “It Was Just an Accident,” by Iranian master Jafar Panahi, won Cannes’ top prize, the Palme d’Or. Though an Iranian film in setting and themes, it has been submitted to the Oscars by France, something that has upset some filmmakers in both Iran and France. (It wasn’t eligible in Iran because it violated regulations for not being submitted to government censors before filming and for showing women without hijab; it also had French producers.) “Sentimental Value” by Norway’s Joachim Trier won Cannes’ second prize, the Grand Prix, and strikes me as having the greatest commercial potential in the U.S. And the Brazilian entry, “The Secret Agent,” won Cannes’ Best Director prize for Kleber Mendonça Filho and Best Actor for Wagner Moura, a popular choice. (All three of these films are distributed in the U.S. by Neon, which also handles two other potential Oscar contenders, South Korea’s “No Other Choice” and France/Spain’s “Sirat.”)
Although the NYFF has been incredibly valuable in introducing foreign films to American audiences, in recent years it has maintained the very unfortunate policy of not having press conferences for films that arguably most need them. My first year covering the festival, in 1980, I found great value in the press conferences for Akira Kurosawa, Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, and other great directors. The NYFF has always been an auteur-oriented festival, but some years back it began keeping foreign auteurs from the press. (Most directors do appear at their films’ public screenings and have brief Q&As afterwards.)
At this year’s festival, not one director of the festival’s 23 foreign films—including those named above—was given a press conference. Instead, press conferences were held for English-language films containing movie stars—Julia Roberts, George Clooney, Daniel Day-Lewis, Bradley Cooper, et al. Why? One can only assume that these events were aimed at the entertainment press and meant to provide publicity for the festival.
What’s obviously missing in this approach is lots of cultural and political context that foreign directors could supply if they were allowed to speak to the press. Foreign films at the festival almost always leave me with questions that a press conference would give me and others the chance to ask. As a colleague noted, it would be so much more efficient for everyone if critics could question filmmakers as a group, rather than having to chase them down individually. And surely most non-American directors would welcome the chance to engage with critics and explain their work as a way of reaching the American public. (I should add that U.S. directors whose films don’t have movie stars may well feel the same.)
In the case of Jafar Panahi, the relevant context has to do not only with the circumstances of making films in Iran but also with his own career, which has been unusual. He is the only Iranian director to have an international audience before having an Iranian one. His first film, “The White Balloon,” written by his mentor, Abbas Kiarostami, went to Cannes in 1995 and won the Camera d’Or for Best First Film, launching it on a successful career in art houses worldwide (it was the first Iranian film to get a real art-house launch in the U.S.). His third film, “The Circle,” was his first to have a strong political theme and it was banned by the Iranian regime, as were some of his subsequent films, but in a sense, that hardly mattered since all of his output was welcomed by foreign festivals and distributors.
Panahi’s fortunes took a drastic turn in 2010. After being arrested for his political activities, he was sentenced to six years in prison and 20 years not making films, writing screenplays, giving interviews or leaving Iran. The enforcement of these restrictions, though, has been variable. Rather than serving his prison sentence, he was put under house arrest and gradually allowed to roam around Tehran and Iran. And he kept making films without government permission, filming them on the fly, editing them at home and then sending them surreptitiously to international festivals. These daring, nonofficial productions only added to his global renown.
“It Was Only an Accident” is the fifth such film he’s made. Since its completion, the Iranian regime has somewhat relaxed its restrictions on him, for example in allowing him to travel abroad. (He has noted that when the film premiered at Cannes was the first time in 17 years that he has seen one of his films with an audience.) This film differs from the previous four in a couple of noteworthy respects. In those films, he was onscreen as a character—sometimes the main character—in the story. The earlier films also foregrounded cinema itself, showing its processes, pondering its meaning.
Dispensing with these trademark aspects of Panahi’s recent cinema, “It Was Just an Accident” tells a straightforward tale of revenge. It begins on a dark highway at night, in a car with a couple (the woman is pregnant) and their young daughter. The little girl becomes upset when her father accidentally runs over a dog. (Mom says it was God’s will; the daughter doesn’t buy it.) Further on, there’s car trouble and the father pulls into a warehouse for help. While he’s waiting, a man working upstairs, Vahid (Vahid Mobaserri), hears him walking around and thinks he detects the sound of a prosthetic leg.
That faint but distinctive noise convinces Vahid that the father is a man named Eqbal, nickname Peg Leg (Ebrahim Azizi), who tortured him when Vahid was imprisoned years before. Enraged to encounter a person he considers a monster, Vahid tracks him to a car repair shop the next day, hits him over the head with a shovel, ties him up and then takes him into the desert where digs the man’s grave.
Even while he’s lying in the grave with Vahid shoveling dirt on him, Eqbal isn’t dead and he begins trying to convince his captor that he’s got the wrong man. Look at my leg, see that the wound is recent, he shouts. Vahid pulls the prosthesis off and it does look like the scar underneath is fairly fresh. He’s still convinced he’s got the right guy, but now an element of doubt has been introduced.
With Eqbal removed from the grave and returned to the back of his truck, Vahid goes into Tehran looking for corroboration. The first person he finds, an older man, counsels him to give up his crusade and live in the present; but he tells Vahid how to contact another former prisoner, a female photographer named Shiva (Maryam Afshari, who appears without hibab). Shiva is taking photos of a couple who are to be married the next day, and it turns out that the woman was also tortured by Peg Leg. With the addition of the bride, groom and another former victim, Vahid has a truck-load of aggrieved passengers. But while there’s lots of passion and vindictive rage in their discussions, there’s no consensus on what to do with their presumed Peg Leg.
“It Was Just an Accident” takes place over roughly 24 hours, and its telling—recalling a classic of Iran’s pre-revolutionary cinema, Farrokh Ghaffary’s “Night of the Hunchback”—is full of Panahi’s characteristic assurance and inventiveness, especially in its mix of tense drama and unexpected humor. Yet I was also struck by things Panahi doesn’t include. Perhaps most importantly, there are no flashbacks; the film remains in present tense throughout. Thus, while we hear the characters describe the tortures they were put though, we don’t see them; they exist only as memories.
Similarly, we know that these torture victims were imprisoned for various offenses, but those are mostly left vague. Vahid says he was arrested for protesting not being paid for several months, a common complaint in Iran’s besieged economy. But we hear nothing of the political activism—like Panahi’s own—that has gotten others imprisoned and subjected to the most dire punishments. (Other Iranian films such as Mohammad Rasoulof’s “There Is No Evil” give a more detailed picture of prison in Iran.) Likewise, an accused torturer like Eqbal has no rationales for his actions except wanting to defend “the regime” and the “Supreme Leader” (that mention alone was enough to get the film banned in Iran, Panahi has said).
What explains these creative decisions on Panahi’s part? I’ve not seen other writers comment on what they think the film means, beyond its excellence as cinema, but my reading is that it is Panahi’s first attempt to envision an Iran no longer ruled by the current theocratic regime. If that government were to somehow fall (as many Iranians surely wish), what would come next? Inevitably, the tortured would confront their torturers. Would that result in a bloodbath similar to the one that occurred after the last Shah’s government was overthrown in the Iranian Revolution of 1979?
Panahi is a filmmaker of extraordinary subtlety, and here I think he is suggesting that, while the passions for revenge in many cases would be justified, they should be controlled and channeled, as much as possible, toward reconciliation. And though his films are always specific to Iran (he has no desire to live or work elsewhere, he has indicated), they also have universal resonances. “It Was Just an Accident” is no exception: It arrives when many countries in the West are bitterly divided politically, with authoritarian tendencies vying against democratic ones, posing the question of how the two sides might ever come together. Panahi’s artistry gives us clues.
A final note: Jafar Panahi was scheduled to appear at the NYFF public screenings of his film on Oct. 2 and 3 and to take part in a discussion of his work with Martin Scorsese, also on Oct. 3. However, he did not get a visa to appear for these events due to the current U.S. government shutdown. Fortunately, a visa was forthcoming a few days later and he appeared for public screenings on Oct. 8. His discussion with Scorsese was rescheduled for Oct. 10. He will remain in the U.S. through the opening of “It Was Not an Accident” on Oct. 15.
Alas, no press conference was scheduled at any point.
- You Play Well: Diane Keaton (1946-2025) (October 13, 2025)
“I mean, do I really care if a handful of my poems are read after I’m gone forever? Is that supposed to be some kind of compensation? I used to think it was. Now, for some reason…I can’t seem to shake the real implication of dying,” says Diane Keaton to her unseen therapist, to us, in 1978’s “Interiors.” She’s red-eyed from tears and gripping a cigarette like a life raft. When she’s on screen, she’s the entire movie. That was how it was, even during her last buddy comedies in her final years of life.
Along with “The Godfather” and “Looking for Mr. Goodbar.” “Interiors” was one of her deadly serious 1970s pictures. She wasn’t often called upon to play things completely straight. But her gift was knowing how to take a writer’s construct and make her so specific you can hear her laugh in your sleep, and—more to the point—know exactly how she dresses.
Though tributes from the likes of Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler, Viola Davis, and Al Pacino have already come pouring in, there was really only one remembrance of Keaton I knew I had to read: Stephanie Zacharek’s. The critic for Time, she and Keaton both represent something vanishingly rare in their respective industries: style. Stephanie, a million-dollar dresser herself, once interrupted an Olivier Assayas roundtable with a question about Chanel, for which some of the women in the audience thanked her. I knew she had to have seen in Diane Keaton an aspirational figure and lo:
“Keaton’s…style represented limitless possibilities, and a previously incomprehensible kind of freedom. Today, nearly everyone is hip to the power of thrifting, but in the ’70s, mixing and matching used clothes made you part of a secret society, and Keaton was our clubhouse president. […] There are lots of great actresses who dress beautifully, but in the modern day, nearly all of them use stylists. They may know what they like—when they’re presented with gowns and outfits, they’re perfectly equipped to say yes or no—but you rarely get the sense that what they’re wearing is a true expression of who they are.”
Keaton never seemed to fret over how she was perceived. She took palpable glee in dressing herself and, in so doing, inspired one generation after another to walk their own path.
Jack Nicholson’s easiest barbs in “Something’s Gotta Give” are about her clothes, specifically her turtleneck sweaters. As Zacharek points out in her eulogy, Keaton started wearing them after a battle with skin cancer. Her director, Nancy Meyers, loved her and wanted to capture her joie de vivre and beauty as only a friend could. She and husband Charles Shyer met Keaton after having quarreled with their first muse, Keaton’s “First Wives Club” co-star Goldie Hawn. They made “Baby Boom” together in 1987, then two “Father of the Bride” movies. Meyers saw in Keaton the strength of her early work and the real spark she had to conceal in her tragedies. Hawn called it “fairy dust.”
Whatever it was, her pictures grossed more than a billion dollars over her 55-year career, even as her types of dramas and comedies became broadly unpopular. She made a lot more movies you haven’t seen than ones you have, is my guess, and yet I believe in my heart of hearts that no one reading this has a bad word to say about her.
What I think most impresses about Diane Keaton—aside from her sartorial singularity, which colored her idiosyncrasy as a movie star—is that she never ran from the business, even as it was turning on its women. In the 1970s, she turned a career as a light comedian and Broadway star into a life as a screen ingenue, handily sharing films with heavy hitters like Al Pacino, Marlon Brando, and John Cazale. She took a square look at second and third Wave Feminism, refusing to be a sex symbol on anyone’s terms but her own, projecting strength and ambition and an ingratiating, flighty charm. She was shoulder to shoulder with other performers marching to their own beat like Sigourney Weaver, Sally Field, Jill Klayburgh, and Meryl Streep.
She then slotted herself into the ‘90s trends of romantic comedies and social dramas, always standing out, always centering the experience of women approaching menopause. Then she managed to continue leading comedies, such as the delightful “Morning Glory” and her final film to date, “Summer Camp,” for the last twenty years of her career.
She was always in the spotlight, but she never chased it. It came to her, and she wore it like one of her chapeaus or fanciful eyeglasses. She represented a kind of mainstream progressivism in the film industry that, at times, was bracing in its honesty. Her movies were for everyone, and she took that responsibility seriously without breaking a sweat.
She was born Diane Hall but changed it to Keaton when she joined Actors’ Equity, as it was already taken. High school plays led to college acting classes, then a move to New York to sing in a cabaret act by night and understudy for Broadway shows by day, including the 1968 original run (other replacement cast members included Keith Carradine and Meat Loaf).
Her break, in a few ways, came when she auditioned to play Woody Allen’s love interest in his “Play it Again, Sam.” Allen may have ended up the villain in his own story, but he must be given credit for having given Keaton to the world. They reprised their roles in the 1972 film version of “Sam,” though Keaton’s first role was in the forgotten ethnic farce “Lovers and Other Strangers.” Allen would cast her as his foil in “Sleeper” and “Love and Death” as she began working with Francis Ford Coppola on the “Godfather” movies. She was involved with various co-stars, including Allen, Pacino, and Warren Beatty, for years at a time, though she never married.
Coppola had liked Keaton’s quirky turn in “Lovers” and wanted that to come out of Kay, written as a hapless witness to her fiancé’s journey into darkness. She’s not billed near the top, but it’s her scenes that take us into and out of the film. As she sits watching Michael Corleone’s family and hangers-on mill about a wedding, she keeps asking questions with a slowly fading smile about everyone’s identity and job. By the end, she knows that there are murderers at every table, though Michael assures her that he is not one of them. He closes the door between them so he can conduct the business of murder himself. Now she’s the one who must say that this way of life is her family’s, but not hers.
In the second “Godfather,” it’s her late movie confession that forever closes that door between them. She may be trapped with him, but she needs him to be trapped, too, so he’ll know her pain, even if he won’t release her from it.
After two forgotten Elliott Gould comedies, Allen gave her a gift that changed film forever. A character study about a murdered woman (though that plot device would be famously left on the cutting room floor) and the boyfriend who remembers her. Her name was also Keaton’s. Diane Hall became Annie Hall.
The film was Allen’s first foray into something more reflective after having lampooned Ingmar Bergman and Tolstoy, and it’s Keaton who makes it all make sense. She’s effervescent, even as she’s mannered and a little cruel (Allen’s neuroses are mostly kept in check, as he tries and fails to replace this woman who so captivated him). She won her only Oscar for the performance, and to this day, a hat, a vest, slacks, and a white button-down is a look only associated with her character, the first signature Diane Keaton look.
She would all but reprise the role in “Manhattan,” and then Allen would take her with him when his pastiche of Bergman became a full-on impression for “Interiors.” If Allen made her immortal, she made him a respected director.
The curveballs came fast after her Oscar win. First was veteran director Richard Brooks’ “Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” which wants to be a cautionary tale about promiscuity, but Keaton keeps making it about the new freedoms of womanhood in a time slowly thawing from rigid misogyny. She dates and sleeps around, Brooks argues, as almost a social experiment, to decompress after her day job at a school for the Deaf lets out, and to flee the confines of her orthodox family.
Keaton doesn’t allow the part to be defined by impulse but instead by curiosity and the need for sensual expression. Her screaming matches with her father linger as much as her risky sex scenes with a raft of strangers, one of whom will violently kill her seconds before the end credits.
She spent the ’80s investigating her own politics and image in carefully chosen films, providing a different sort of role model for her viewers. In Warren Beatty’s “Reds,” she plays the political journalist Louise Bryant, whose earnest sympathy for revolutionary Russia earned her a reputation and a brief marriage to firebrand organizer John Reed (Beatty). The stars bounce off each other with the energy of teenagers.
In a conversation for The Criterion Channel, Ethan Hawke and Vincent D’Onofrio compared some of her line readings to the Meisner exercises she would have practiced in her early days at the Neighborhood Playhouse. (“Why don’t you come?” “What as? What as? …I mean what as?” “It’s almost Thanksgiving, why don’t you come as a turkey?”) Beatty’s eyes were on the revolution. Keaton’s beautiful twitching pupils are affixed on the present.
Her second epic of the decade, Gillian Armstrong’s “Mrs. Soffel,” finds her as a devout prison warden’s wife who falls for a godless prisoner and helps him escape. This role makes perfect sense as a woman wracked by passion, similar to her portrayal in the willful Annie Hall. The film has sadly lost all its cachet, but it’s a marvel, the Australian artist’s answer to “Once Upon a Time in America.” “Why would God give us this short life with all of its troubles and not give us a better one afterwards?”
Unlike Allen’s, Keaton’s spiritual quest was firsthand, sincere, and she played it out in her work. She directed her first film, the documentary “Heaven” in 1987, featuring interviews with everyone from Rajneeshi swamis to boxing promoter Don King about the afterlife. It was not a hit, nor were any of her directorial works. She’d directed a series of music videos for Go-Gos frontwoman Belinda Carlisle, some TV, and three more movies, about family trauma. George Roy Hill’s “Little Drummer Girl” is about an actress drafted into Mossad.
In “Sister Mary Explains It All” and “The Young Pope,” she plays a nun. In many films (“Marvin’s Room“, “Poms,” “The Family Stone”), she’s dying and looking to find the meaning of life, or she magically ages (“Mack & Rita,“ “Arthur’s Whiskey”) to do the same. She wanted to understand her place in the universe, especially when she was confronted with her own cancer and the adoption of her two boys. She may have spent her last decades making light comedies with a coterie of close friends (Beatty, Meyers, Steve Martin, Robert De Niro, Richard Gere), but she never let women her age become the butt of the joke.
The later years were lined with major achievements and minor comedies. 1987’s “Baby Boom” honestly looked at the work-life balance of an advertising executive. Meyers and Shyer put a female face on the job usually handled by Michael J. Fox, James Spader, Michael Douglas, and Charlie Sheen. She was on the cover of the first issue of Premiere Magazine, holding her infant co-star.
The search for life’s meaning is honest, if buried under a lot of juvenile humor (though good grief, watch the way she swings that baby around in the first act; that is what you call risking it all for a laugh). When she’s offered a chance at compromising riches after having been fired from her job, she turns it down. “I don’t wanna make those sacrifices, and nobody should have to!” Shyer frames her in front of dark marble and gold bars, emphasizing the gilded cage she’s giving up and her isolation, as if she were on a stage or a movie character. This was a Keaton heroine for the ages.
She returned for “The Godfather III,” now decked out in her own wardrobe next to a graying Pacino. Her performance in Alan Parker’s shockingly serious “Shoot the Moon” should have netted her and co-star Albert Finney much more attention and plaudits, as they help the film overcome its schematic misery. Ditto her work in “Marvin’s Room,” where she became one of the few co-stars who ever upstaged Meryl Streep.
“The First Wives Club” became a sensation, spawning a musical and a TV show. In “Something’s Gotta Give,” she literally bares it all as a playwright in her autumn years. She and Jack Nicholson, who had once played lovers in “Reds,” have a beautiful shared language born of their advanced years. Perhaps the finest moment in the film finds the pair silently having a conversation as Keaton’s daughter, Amanda Peet, walks around the two of them, complaining about her day.
That’s not just talent, that’s trust, and these two titans could look at each other and share the story of 60 years of life without blinking. It’s deeply moving work, and the film rises to earn it. She and a host of co-stars (Jane Fonda, Jeremy Irons, John Goodman, Harrison Ford) would soon tell similarly unforced tales of getting old.
Keaton made loving fodder of every step of her journey, becoming an artist whose autobiography is written across nearly 70 films. Her true excitement at being able to do her favorite job for a living has made her a legend, even if it was her outfits that made her an icon. She’s gone now, but we’ll be reading her poetry forever.
- Some Things You Consume, Some You Experience: Mary Bronstein on “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” (October 10, 2025)
Until quite recently, depictions of motherhood in cinema were limited to a handful of archetypes: The long-suffering martyr, the angelic caretaker, the fierce protector, perhaps even an absent working woman. That last option was usually presented as negative, if not downright villainous. And darker, more nuanced emotions—ambivalence, doubt, even regret about having children—were not depicted at all.
Mary Bronstein’s film “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” dives fearlessly into a tangled morass of emotions, dramatized in the unsettling, surreal style of a horror movie and punctuated with moments of tragicomic mirth. Bronstein immerses viewers in the perspective of Linda (Rose Byrne), a woman who may as well be a single mother—her husband, perpetually away on business, is heard but not seen—whose relationship with her daughter is fraying under the strain of the daughter’s (also unnamed, but serious) illness and the immense responsibility of her care. And then there’s the massive hole in the ceiling of their apartment that doubles as a portal into the unknown…
Byrne gives a stunning performance in the film, which is based on Bronstein’s own experiences; those who find it relatable will feel seen and understood, while those who don’t would do well to absorb its lessons and deeply empathetic point of view. We met Bronstein in an empty karaoke room above the chaotic Highball bar at this year’s Fantastic Fest, an eye-of-the-storm location that suited the nature of Bronstein’s film.
One thing that struck me about this film is that everyone around Linda tells her that she’s doing everything wrong, but no one offers her any actual help. Can you say more about that?
This is a woman in crisis in every way, shape, and form, yet purportedly surrounded by helpers. Mr. Rogers had something he would say. “Look for the helpers.” That’s supposed to offer you comfort, that there are people there whose job is to help.
In this movie, there’s an abundance of helpers. There’s doctors, there’s therapists, there’s husbands, there’s friends, and she is asking all of them for help. Sometimes literally, and sometimes in ways that people should intuit. Sometimes she’s screaming in someone’s face, “Please help me,” and they’re still not.
There’s a whole thing embedded in that for me, which is this idea of women not being listened to—especially a woman who is in crisis, whether it be physically or mentally in the medical or psychiatric system. “You have to calm down. It’s not that bad. You have to get a good night’s sleep.”
Everyone’s always giving her breathing exercises.
“Take some deep breaths.” This is not helpful. Sometimes what’s helpful (which Linda also doesn’t receive) is you need to have somebody who is just empathetically listening to you without offering a solution.”Yeah, that does suck. Yeah, that fucking sucks. That is unfair. What’s happening to you is unfair.” And she doesn’t get that either. It’s extreme in the film, but when it happens in real life, it feels even more so. And that’s what I was trying to capture.
It all ties in with these societal ideals of motherhood. When you’re a mother, you have to handle everything yourself. There’s a taboo against saying, “I can’t do this.”
There are a lot of taboos when you’re a mother, and a lot of things you’re not allowed to say. And even in the privacy of [talking] one woman to another, who are both mothers, you would never say some of those things. You said, “I can’t do it,” but there’s the other side of that: “I don’t want to do it.” Or “I can’t deal with being around my child right now,” or “I want to get away from my child.” Those are things that mothers are not supposed even to think, let alone say, let alone do. And if you do it, you’re a monster or you’re a crazy person.
[My film] is getting at that. Who does it scare [when you say these things], and why? As with any other life experience, women and mothers should be able to be honest with each other and themselves. It’s not a betrayal of your love for your child. It’s not. But it’s seen that way. Sometimes a friend will annoy you, or sometimes you don’t like something that they did, and you need a break from them. Your relationship to a child is no different than that, but it’s supposed to be [different].
Linda is in a place where she can derive no joy from her child. It doesn’t matter if she put herself in that place by victimizing herself or seeing herself as a victim of her child, or whether that’s actually true. She can’t, because she can’t take her kid to the playground. She can’t take her kid on a vacation. They can’t go to Disney World. She can’t even play with her kid.
Maybe she could, but she’s not in a place where she can derive joy from the relationship. So it does become a burden. And you’re supposed to be able to talk about [difficult things] in private with your therapist, but even that’s considered inappropriate in the film. It’s something that I think is a problem. When you can’t express things, they don’t go away.
Why do you think it’s so taboo? Personally, I think it has something to do with this misogynist idea of biological determinism. “This is your natural role. This is what you’re made for.”
Exactly. There’s this whole bill of sale that women are sold falsely, which is that just because you have a baby, you know how to be a mother, and you know what to do. It’s supposed to be your instinct, and you know what to do, and you can just do it from dawn to dusk for the rest of time. Mothers are human beings. My mother was a human being. Your mother is a human being. They had feelings that we didn’t know about, but that was okay. That’s okay. It’s okay. It only becomes not okay if you’re abusing your child, but having thoughts and feelings and expressing them in private is still so scary.
And I think it’s exactly what you said; this is a woman who doesn’t know what to do, and quite literally screams in somebody’s face, “tell me what to do!” And his answer is, “You already know what to do.” No, I don’t!
Does that tie into the cosmic aspects of the film? It’s almost mystical, this rhetoric about mothers “falling in love” and then immediately, instinctually knowing what to do for the rest of their lives.
The portal will have a different meaning for every viewer, and that’s very exciting for me. But certainly, for Linda, it’s a scary place. A lot is going on there. There are a lot of voices in there. It’s the part of herself that she can’t run away from.
When you have trauma, you can try to put it [away] somewhere, but it’s going to get you. It’s going to keep getting bigger. It’s going to keep growing, and you can’t get away from it because it’s inside of you, and you can’t get away from yourself. That’s the existential terror that’s at the heart of the movie, and what Linda has to contend with in order to get to the place [she’s in] at the end of the movie. To get to that place, she needs to have her trauma smack her in the fucking face. “I exist. Deal with me. Deal with it.”
It reminds me of that famous monologue from “Network.” “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!”
The similarity is that it’s yelling into the ether. “Does anybody hear me? Does anything I say mean anything to anybody?”
“Hi, I’m a person!”
“I am a person. Can you see me?” It’s all of that, and the magic of just being heard. The human experience [of being listened to] is so important, and it’s completely absent for this character.
Let’s go back to the hole for a second. The sound design in those sequences is so oppressive; can you tell me about creating that, and what you were going for there?
The voices we hear in those scenes are all kinds of things. It’s the recordings that I did with Rose [Byrne] and my wonderful child actor, Delaney Quinn. It’s the sound of them playing. It’s clips of my own child playing when she was little. It’s clips of other children that I’ve worked with; I went through my phone, all the way back.
It’s also voices from Linda’s trauma. It’s “mom, mom, mom, mom! You’re not doing it! Mom! Mom!!” Plus the voice of her therapist, all of these things swirled together. Sometimes you can hear it clearly, and sometimes you can’t. Sometimes it just creates a soundscape.
The movie has no score in a traditional sense. The score is the sound design. It’s a soundscape. It’s always hyper-realistic, but the clock in her office is a little louder than a clock should be. The birds outside are a little louder. It builds and builds and builds until everything in her mind is surrounding us. When we did the sound design, we used the position of the speakers in the theater as a tool: If something is behind Linda, it’s in the speaker [in the back of the theater]. And if I want you to be enveloped, it’s all around.
Most of a movie’s life exists outside of a movie theater. Its first life is in the theater, and then it goes into different forms. But if you can see it in a theater, you should, because that’s the only time when you’ll get the whole experience. It’s an experiential film.
You’re talking about real experiences, and the events in the film are realistic. But over the course of the film, it reaches this heightened, surrealistic state. How did you achieve that?
The first draft of the script was pure vomiting on paper. Pure expression. Then the refining of it was quite mathematical. The humor I’m using is completely calculated.
I see the movie as a machine. It’s chugging along. And I need the machine to sustain itself for the amount of time I need it to, and to reach the point I need to get to. To do that, you have to release a steam valve. You have to give the audience that little release, and then the audience will go further, go further, go further, go further. Then you’re all the way with me.
Say I made the same movie completely devoid of humor, which could exist—I don’t think an audience would go all the way with me. Because the machine would explode.
Sure. There’d be too much pressure.
It would not sustain itself. And I am a person who, as a human being, will find the joke in any tragedy. That’s my coping mechanism. I grew up that way. That’s how my house was. If you’re going to laugh, you’re going to cry. That is something I wanted to have embedded in the film. And also that it’s okay! Sometimes the right reaction, when something is so bad that it’s absurd, is to laugh. It’s a tricky line, and I hope that I achieved it. But it was the necessary line to tell this story.
For me, the most upsetting part of the film was when Linda is on the phone with the husband of one of her clients, asking him to come pick up his baby —
— Played by my husband, by the way —
And he says, “This is not my emergency.” I was so enraged by that.
Because guess why? It’s not his job to take care of the baby,
To take care of his own baby,
What he says is, “That’s her fucking job. That’s why I’m here working.” It’s not his emergency because he’s not the mother.
In terms of the men and the children in the film, was there a line for you where you thought, “Oh, I’m making them too annoying, too frustrating, too enraging?” Did you ever feel like you needed to pull it back?
No. If somebody feels that way, that’s none of my business. This is the story I wanted to tell, and the way I wanted to tell it. When a movie comes out or any piece of art is released into the world, that’s what you’re supposed to do.
Art is a form of communication, whether it’s a painting, a song, a movie, whatever. That’s how human beings have always used art. So I am communicating something, and then I’m putting it out into the world. I also feel, in a postmodern way, that once I put it out into the world, it’s none of my business. It’s not mine anymore. It’s yours. And I trust you. I trust the viewer who comes to see my movie. I trust them implicitly. That’s why I don’t hold their hand. That’s why I ask more questions than give answers. And if somebody feels like it’s too much, that’s okay. It doesn’t scare me, because it’s okay to be uncomfortable.
It can’t be something that I worry about, or else it would impede what I’m doing creatively. If you’re trying to anticipate what people will think while you’re creating, you’re going to get all muddled up. And I was trying in a very pure way not to do that.
How does that tie into what you said about this being an experiential film?
There are some things that you consume, and there are some things that you experience. This film is something you experience. You don’t passively consume it. As a viewer, those are the kind of movies that I love best. And I’ve had amazing responses to [the film], so I think people are up for it.
- Apple TV+ Thriller “The Last Frontier” Gets Snowed Under In Pulpy Action and Cheap Melodrama (October 10, 2025)
It’s easy, watching the first episode of Apple TV+’s new action thriller “The Last Frontier,” to get your hopes up. At least off the back of its action sequences, anyways, and the tawdry fun of its premise: A Con Air-like passenger transport crash-lands spectacularly in the Alaskan forest, letting loose dozens of dangerous criminals who will kill and scheme for their last shot at freedom, and the only guy who can stop them is the dogged small-town sheriff with surprising combat chops. But as the ten-episode season drags on, the pulpy thrills of its action sequences give way to the kind of tedious bloat you can expect from, well, your average Apple TV+ show.
It’s a shame, really, considering the show comes partially courtesy of the kind of hands you’d want to place this kind of thriller in: “Extraction” director Sam Hargrave (a steady hand with ambitious action sequences) and “The Blacklist” creator Jon Bokenkamp (who co-created this show with Richard D’Ovidio). Problem is, it’s a work of network schlock with prestige clothing, and the big-budget dressing paradoxically gets in the way of how silly the show wants to be.
Hargrave, who directs the pilot, sets the table with clockwork efficiency. After the stunning plane crash sequence, a feat of fight choreography amid a flaming, crashing passenger liner, we zoom down to the small town those baddies are about to beset. We meet our aforementioned sheriff, Marshal Frank Remnick (Jason Clarke), a family man trying to put his life together with his wife (Simone Kessell) and son (Tait Blum), after big-city life traumatized them in ways that, when seen in flashback, read as exploitative and deeply clashing with the tone of the rest of the show. They’re looking to slow down and start over, an apple cart which this plane crash naturally upsets. Now Remnick is back in the fight, tracking down one escaped convict after another with the help of a disgraced CIA flack named Scofield (Haley Bennett), who has a personal stake in recovering these prisoners.
From there, “The Last Frontier” flits between two distinct modes, one entertaining and one frustrating: The former is a prisoner-of-the-week procedural, as one colorful escapee after another (Johnny Knoxville, Damian Young are particular standouts) wreaks havoc on the town, and the latter a broader conspiracy involving the plane’s most valued prisoner, a former CIA asset named Havlock (Dominic Cooper), who may be the reason the plane crashed in the first place. He’s got plans within plans, and the season follows the cat-and-mouse game between Remnick/Scofield and Havlock and the unsuing government conspiracy that entails.
Sounds suitably “Blacklist,” right, with Cooper’s Havlock exchanging taunting conversations with Clarke’s Remnick in a snide manner not unlike James Spader’s “Red” Reddington? But “The Last Frontier”‘s biggest liability is that it’s on Apple TV+, which means hour-long runtimes and a bloasted budget/cast list that strains the limitations of the premise. Nearly every episode is a punishing sixty minutes, which means that for every one-take melee with tactical gunplay and creative use of everything from axes to fire extinguishers, we have to sit through tepid melodrama involving Clarke’s history and family, or extended flashbacks detailing Scofield’s surprising past with Havlock. What’s more, every few episodes throws a new crazy twist meant to upset the apple cart, but mostly leaves you scratching your head wondering where this is all going.
The show’s large cast also means it has to waste time giving everyone Something to Do, which is often not as appealing as, say, watching Clarke and Cooper throw hands in a mobile arctic research truck dangling over a snowy cliffside. Alfre Woodard and John Slattery show up occasionally, bickering over inter-agency politics for most of the season, which feels like a waste of both their talents; other side characters, like Remnick’s acerbic partner (played by Native actor Dallas Goldtooth), get so little to do one wonders why they rate inclusion in the show’s hyperactive main titles.
When a show this unabashedly stupid fires on all cylinders, it can be entertaining. And don’t get me wrong, the moments when “Last Frontier”‘s characters decide to stop spitting out airport-thriller dialogue and get down to bloody business, it’s a hoot. There’s just a lot of standing around in interrogation rooms and giving briefings around chalkboards that surround it, and the characters themselves aren’t three-dimensional enough to give their corresponding melodrama any heft. (To say nothing of the broader conspiracy the show unravels, which amounts to “Get this, the government is watching all of us!” Yes, and?)
“The Last Frontier” is the kind of series that will open with a weepy flashback about a child getting gunned down senselessly in a car with her father holding her dying body, then ten minutes later give us a giant, nude, roided-out escapee throwing cops around a warehouse to “Dancing in the Moonlight” before getting electrocuted by a puddle. Unless you’re something like “9-1-1,” those read as two different shows. And this thing takes itself just a bit too seriously to let those conflicting punches land.
Whole season screened for review. New episodes air Fridays on Apple TV+.
