lgbt

I’ve said before how much I enjoy films about institutional cover-ups and the legal and media process of uncovering them. Hadn’t got round to this one until now. My librarian tendencies will show when I say that the best parts are the archive-digging ones: church directories, the euphemisms in the personnel listings (sick leave, unassigned), four reporters slowly working out just how many names that adds up to. Ruffalo gives Rezendes the right kind of intensity. McAdams does things with greater calm but no less well. Liev Schreiber plays Marty Baron at roughly half the volume of anyone else in the room, and makes me wonder why we don’t see much more of him in big-screen roles.

Saw this at the cinema in 1999 and, I think, never since. Memory had filed it as Rashomon-adjacent, with unreliable narrators and contradiction; on reflection the three strands complete each other rather than compete. A different and altogether gentler trick. Mostly it’s a time capsule of faces I then assumed were headed for bigger things: Scott Wolf, Desmond Askew, Taye Diggs. A very young Melissa McCarthy turns up briefly. And obviously Sarah Polley, whose subsequent career rather outstrips the material here. Watchable, propulsive, thoroughly of its moment. And I say that as someone who considers the turn of the millennium to be a few years ago, not twenty-six.

Three stories, each with a flicker of something that never quite holds. Jarmusch’s deadpan usually finds the warmth under the stillness; here the stillness is mostly just… still. Whatever thread runs through them (family as obligation? as performance?) is far too faint.

I don’t entirely know what I just watched. Perhaps that’s the point. It opens like a coming-of-age film about two kids bonding over a Buffy-esque TV show, then becomes something stranger. The Lynch comparisons are valid. Schoenbrun shoots suburbia soft and pink, and the Alex G score sits underneath everything like static you can’t quite tune out. The broader soundtrack, Caroline Polachek and yeule especially, is great. What stays with me is how patient the film is about not naming what it’s actually about. For anyone working through questions of identity and dysphoria, I suspect this will matter for a long time.

Incredibly affecting. Great performances. The way it deals with memory is stunning; the impact and feeling of the ‘Under Pressure’ sequence will stick with me for a while.

Fiona Shaw and Emma Mackey are both great. Didn’t care for the Vicky Krieps character at all which hampered my total enjoyment.

Excellent. Quiet, subtle, really well observed. Lovely to look at too.

Watched on Friday January 2, 2026.

Chases the Heathers energy but adds a few too many plot twists and minutes.

Sennott’s great. Enjoyed the various power dynamics at play: financial, sexual, generational. They all helped amp up the anxiety levels.

This review may contain spoilers.

Enjoyed the weird little details of the world they’re in, and the final fight scene alone is worth the price of admission.