In James Gunn’s “Superman,” the titular hero (David Corenswet) is joined by an astonishing number of friends and foes. There’s Krypto, the hyper-active dog that aids him in taking down enemies, and Clark Kent’s coworkers at the Daily Planet, who help him expose Lex Luthor’s (Nicholas Hoult) ties to the illegal invasion of the fictional country Jarhanpur. Instead of feeling bloated, each character is given a chance to shine; but nobody comes out on top like Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi). The actor is no stranger to Hollywood blockbusters, or the superhero genre. Back in 2008, Gathegi starred in “Twilight” alongside Rachelle Lefevre and Cam Gigandet as the vampire Laurent, a nomad who split from his coven to help the Cullens save Bella (Kristen Stewart) from Laurent’s coven leader. In 2011’s “X-Men: First Class,” Gathegi starred as Darwin, a god-like mutant whose body can adapt to survive anything that stands in his way.

Despite the strong beginnings for these two characters, by “Twilight: New Moon” (2009) and the second act of “X-Men: First Class,” both Laurant and Darwin had been killed off, the sole casualties in two movies where almost every other character gets to live and continue on into further films in the franchise. Gathegi’s role in both of these franchises felt tailored to the Hollywood system of the 2010s, where Black actors were dismissed or killed entirely in science fiction and fantasy properties. Despite this, Gathegi’s presence in both films is immense, enchanting and magnetic in a way that displayed he was made to dominate our screens, despite the industry’s willingness to cast Black actors aside. 

Now, Gathegi stars as Mr. Terrific, a hero who uses brains over brawn to take down intergalactic monsters and eventually break from his own crew to help Superman take down Lex Luthor, stopping Metropolis from being ripped apart by a seismic world-splitting rift. At first stoic and unwavering to the way Superman deals with citizen saving, Terrific’s shell is slowly chipped away, portrayed with jibes filled with an air of fondness rather than contempt. “Mr. Terrific is not your typical hero, he doesn’t wear a cape or have superpowers; he’s a broken man with a beautiful mind and is unapologetically him,” says Gathegi of his character. His arc reflects the core themes of “Superman,” and what it means to be “punk” in a world so rife with conflict. “You know, ideally, we get kids feeling like it’s cool to be different. Smart, nerdy, awkward whatever. If your heart is in the right place and you try to do good in the world, that’s what makes you cool.”

For years, James Gunn has deftly taken lower-tier comic book characters and turned them into engaging fan favorites who shape up to be even cooler than the well-known heroes and villains. Gunn takes the genius character archetype and flips it on its head, transforming Terrific into a suave and smooth hero who abides by nobody’s rules but his own. “True character is revealed under pressure and the choices one makes,” says Gathegi, “And Mr. Terrific is a part of so much at the heart of the story’s movements.” He fits perfectly into this saccharine world, providing a grounding presence that despite not being completely warped by its dark realities, has clearly been irrevocably changed by it. While Mr. Terrific doesn’t get a backstory in the film, the capacity in which Gathegi plays him hints at his tragic comic background, one that involves the death of his wife and contemplating suicide.

This hardened front slowly melts away as the character becomes more entwined with Superman and Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan). As he spends more time with these two, Gathegi adds some of the best comic relief the film has to offer, delivering each line with precision and an air of well-earned exhaustion. Not many actors can embody all of the qualities Mister Terrific exudes—especially as a side character—yet Gathegi does so effortlessly, standing out amongst a cast that could potentially feel bloated, holding his own alongside Corenswet and Brosnahan as one of the story’s essential heroes. 

While watching “Superman” it’s easy to think back on Gathegi’s previous blockbuster roles, which felt much too slight for the talent he was able to exude in such a short amount of time. Here, each time he’s on screen it feels as if we’re watching magic happen, and it’s a particular kind of magic that Black audiences don’t often get to see. “Watching my people embrace this character and my performance is a beautiful, beautiful thing,” says Gathegi. “[…]As someone who has felt on the outside, I’m in conversation with all people in the margins through my work. I see you and I hope you see me too.”

Gathegi’s star-making turn is boasted by one of the film’s fight sequences, set to a needle drop of Noah and the Whale’s “5 Years Time.” While we know Terrific is a genius, we are quickly shown that he also wields a certain physical capability. Everything feels effortless when Mister Terrific does it; he rapidly re-opens Luthor’s pocket universe, incapacitates an intergalactic monster, and here, single-handedly takes out all of Luthor’s employees at Fort Kramer. As the only one to step up to help Lois, Mister Terrific flexes both his brains and brawn, gliding along the screen with a graceful precision that not even Superman wields, and does it all without breaking a sweat. 

Watching Gathegi on screen is like watching a dancer sweep across a stage. He uses his body to precisely tell the story his director envisioned, which Gathegi says is testament to a set that allowed him to engage with material in a new way. “The working environment was fun and positive in a way that we felt supported to be able to do our best work. And I have to say, I never enter a scene as a kleptomaniac. I enter the scene to do my best and to help my scene partners do their best.” This dynamic on set translates to Mister Terrific’s presence on screen, which in an age where superhero media still tends to sideline Black characters, feels nothing short of a miracle. 

While he may have only had a brief appearance in his previous superhero film, Superman makes up for it by finally giving Gathegi  a chance to shine 13 years later. Just last week, a report from the Wall Street Journal claimed that James Gunn is thinking of a Mister Terrific spinoff, and although what form (TV or film) that will take is unknown, Gathegi’s future in the DCU is unbelievably bright. As someone who has been watching Gathegi’s work for over a decade, and has yearned for him to get the leading roles he deserves, I can only hope that we get to spend more years with Mister Terrific, and the actor’s dynamic presence.

Edi Gathegi wields a type of star quality within this film that we often don’t get in the modern age, using it to boost “Superman” into a grander film, and cementing his portrayal of Mister Terrific as one of this year’s most magnetic performances. In a world that so often diminishes Black roles, Mister Terrific stands out as a character that has been done right by the scriptwriters, director, and helmed perfectly by the actor who portrays him. Gathegi feels the same. “He has true agency. It’s been a gift — the sense that they really care and value the character, and by extension me the artist.”

One month ago, Destiny Outreach launched its Dreams & Destiny® Film/TV Workforce Program – Entertainment Industry Apprenticeship Program. Since then, the program has placed 21 apprentices ages 16 to 24 into union and non-union entertainment jobs in Chicago. Beginning in June, they’ve been selected at CineCity Studios Chicago, Central City Productions’ Stellar Awards, CAN TV, Theater 47 and RGE Entertainment/APC Theater.

The group’s founder, Hollywood/TV producer Danita E. Patterson, has coined the pipeline she’s created through her program as “Midwest Hollywood.”

“I had a vision and a dream decades ago of impacting the next generation. On day one, seeing the faces of these 21 apprentices brought me to tears because my dream has come true full circle,” shared Patterson. 

As part of the program’s 14-part course curriculum, apprentices met with the cast of Showtime’s “The Chi,” accrued 55 hours worth of training, invited IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees) local unions and leadership professionals for career panels, set etiquette, team building activities, which produced two same-day shorts.

The program will stretch until September 13, 2025. 

The wait list for Destiny Outreach’s second Cohort, which will begin November 2025 and continue until March 2026 is already growing too.  

A showcase for the program will occur when on Saturday, July 19, 2025, Destiny Outreach hosts its DO! Media Day from 10:00 am to 3:00 pm at Cine City Studios Chicago, 2429 W. 14th St. The event will include a press conference starting at 11:00 am, which will include grantors, stakeholders and apprentice testimonials to talk about the successes apprentices have experienced during their participation. All available press are encouraged to attend.

Future dreamers and apprentices interested in applying for this Dreams & Destiny® Workforce – Entertainment Industry Apprenticeship Program cohort can also look out for open registration and recruitment in October 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.

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.

We are extremely proud to present an excerpt from a new book about “The Crow,” available today. Alisha Mughal, who has written pieces for us about “Fatal Attraction,” “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” and more, has written It Can’t Rain All the Time. Get a copy here.

The official synopsis:

It Can’t Rain All the Time weaves memoir with film criticism in an effort to pin down The Crow’s cultural resonance.

A passionate analysis of the ill-fated 1994 film starring the late Brandon Lee and its long-lasting influence on action movies, cinematic grief, and emotional masculinity

Released in 1994, The Crow first drew in audiences thanks to the well-publicized tragedy that loomed over the film: lead actor Brandon Lee had died on set due to a mishandled prop gun. But it soon became clear that The Crow was more than just an accumulation of its tragic parts. The celebrated critic Roger Ebert wrote that Lee’s performance was “more of a screen achievement than any of the films of his father, Bruce Lee.”

In It Can’t Rain All the Time, Alisha Mughal argues that The Crow has transcended Brandon Lee’s death by exposing the most challenging human emotions in all their dark, dramatic, and visceral glory, so much so that it has spawned three sequels, a remake, and an intense fandom. Eric, our back-from-the-dead, grieving protagonist, shows us that there is no solution to depression or loss, there is only our own internal, messy work. By the end of the movie, we realize that Eric has presented us with a vast range of emotions and that masculinity doesn’t need to be hard and impenetrable.

Through her memories of seeking solace in the film during her own grieving period, Alisha brilliantly shows that, for all its gothic sadness, The Crow is, surprisingly and touchingly, a movie about redemption and hope.

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A depressive episode begins as a slow and steady sinking feeling, like being lowered inch by inch into a grave. I feel it build over the course of a couple of days or sometimes even a week. I grow irritable, and my moods begin to turn putrid as negative thoughts lay roots. As my body grows tired, the thoughts become a forest. The episode has set in.

When I was younger, I was consumed by the muck of sadness, and many times, I almost didn’t make it out. Now I’m on medication, which doesn’t completely stop the episodes but does allow me a remove, a distance from which I can make decisions to help myself. I’ve learned that the only thing I can do is to let these episodes play out, allow them to peak and then fade and then, eventually, recede. This takes time. Sometimes I watch movies as the hours pass.

The first time I watch The Crow is during a depressive episode at the beginning of the summer I turn 29. Scrolling through the horror streaming platform Shudder, I see the film’s poster image one empty evening. It’s still light out, and I hear sounds that never fail to make me feel like the loneliest person in the world: people laughing, children playing. I vaguely recall the film’s association with some kind of catastrophe, which I learned about from online critic Marya E. Gates years ago. In the state that I’m in in my darkening bedroom — my eyes sore and my mouth feeling like it’s stuffed with cotton balls — I can’t recall much else about the film.

As I’m staring numbly at the screen, my sleepy attention is piqued by the poster’s suffocating darkness stained with the red gash of a title: it’s a heavy black relieved only by the lead actor’s name and a steely gray-white light, like a doorway just opened onto something magnificent. “Believe in angels,” the film’s tagline, framed in the light, advises. On the threshold, a small and menacing figure is visible as if in relief, his arms hang as a sentence cut short, flexed at his sides, making him look like a panther about to pounce — he is as dark as the velvety black on the poster’s body. He is walking toward the viewer, perennially. It is a moody image, sinister and gothic, and, on this empty evening, it complements my melancholic insides, so I press play.

A horror overcomes me. I see Brandon Lee’s Eric Draven lying dead on the street after being thrown from his apartment window and then crawling his way out of a muddy grave moments later, screaming and wailing from the pain of a macabre rebirth. When I hear Eric speak for the first time in the movie — he whispers his cat’s name, Gabriel — his voice low and gravelly from the strain of life so recently shocked into him, I turn the film off and weep. I can’t finish it. Not yet.

Lee’s stature, his voice, his rain-sodden hair — it all reminds me of a person I am trying very hard to forget. “It hurts to watch because you look so much like him,” I say when I manage to see him a few weeks later, the first time in a year. The Boy I Was Trying to Forget isn’t exactly the direct cause of my sadness. It’s my own unreciprocated and unbearably heavy feelings for him that leave me feeling unmoored, which then feed into the loneliness that characterizes my depressive episodes. Everything becomes so dire, so tangled, because of and within my mind.

It might seem anticlimactic or boring or unimportant, maybe even anti-feminist, to say that my fascination with The Crow was first sparked by a man who didn’t like me back. But it’s the truth.

Later that summer, it finally dawns on me that he, the person whose loss I ought to be able to deal with, would never change his mind about me. And it is only at this point, when I understand that my hope will not be enough, that I will have to deal with the finality of his indifference to me — that I sit myself down and watch The Crow in its entirety.

And then I watch it again, and again, and again. Every night that I am sad and weeping, every night that I feel as lonely and meaningless as a lace handkerchief lost at sea (so much elaborate intricacy, so much feeling, all wasted), I put it on. The first time I visit one of my dearest friends in San Francisco, I talk her into watching it with me. It is her first time. We suck gin gimlets through puckered lips, and I become teary-eyed watching Eric Draven twirl and charge and weep and wail.

Now two years have gone by, and I’ve come to realize that I turned to The Crow so often that first summer because it was a way to avoid reality, a way to avoid countenancing and mourning and moving on from the end of a connection. The film allowed me closeness with a person who was far away and would never come near. He wasn’t dead, but this was worse, I once thought with self-pitying conviction. When a loved one dies, you at least have the assurance that there had been love. But this, of course, was a false comparison; it is objectively not preferable to lose someone to death. Still, that certainty I once felt was deeply, pleasingly maudlin, a kind of gothic romanticism. Just like everything I love about The Crow.

Directed by Alex Proyas, The Crow is based on a graphic novel of the same name by James O’Barr. It was released in 1994 after a fraught production period beleaguered by time constraints, delays, and mishaps. Hurricanes tumbled through the miniature city Proyas had built, crew members suffered accidents, and, most notably, lead actor Brandon Lee died on set due to a misfired, misloaded, and mishandled prop gun. During filming, in the face of so many accidents, many on set thought the film was cursed.¹ It was well-received by critics, with nearly everyone noting the irony of a lead actor dying during production for a film about a character brought back from the dead. Roger Ebert stated that Lee’s performance is “more of a screen achievement than any of the films of his father, Bruce Lee.”² The critical consensus on Rotten Tomatoes is that the film is “filled with style and dark, lurid energy,” and that it carries “a soul in the performance of the late Brandon Lee.”³

It made a lot of money, was considered a sleeper hit at the box office, and spawned three standalone sequels that are, honestly, very terrible. Today, the film has a devoted cult following. At screenings, some fans dress up as Eric Draven, painting their faces black and white and caping their bodies in a glossy black flowing trench coat. Sometimes, they adhere a prop crow to their shoulder in honor of the talismanic animal that serves as a shepherd and guide and spiritual conduit for Eric’s soul. There are some critics, though, who wonder whether this movie would still have a devoted following were it not for the real-life tragedy.

The first time I saw the film in a theater, some audience members laughed during scenes that, to me, were never very funny. At one point, Eric, after arming himself with all manner of weapons at a pawn shop (where he also recovers his dead fiancée’s ring), picks up an electric guitar. The unplugged guitar moans: its strings, as Eric carries it away, vibrate, creating a ghostly boing-oing-oing. Watching the film with an audience, I could see how that scene, the juxtaposition of guns with a guitar, could seem a bit funny — a man arming himself ahead of battle takes only the most important things. Surely a guitar is a bit too extravagant? But at the same time, I wanted to shush everyone. Couldn’t they see that the guitar is important to Eric, a musician, just as much as the ring? To laugh is to misunderstand Eric, for whom nothing is trivial or extravagant, and everything is significant. People laughed nonetheless, and at other moments, too, when things became a bit clunky and ludicrous.

“Very bizarre situations are often darkly funny,” said supporting cast member David Patrick Kelly in a behind-the-scenes interview for The Crow,⁴ reinforcing that the wry humor was purposeful and necessary. The film was pieced together under traumatic circumstances, and this sometimes comedic overwrought-ness is central to its ethos. The Crow is all about a romantic and melancholic pain like an exposed nerve, which the film prods and pokes with the same macabre curiosity that prompts us to press on a tender bruise and can also make us laugh in discomfort or dismay.

In The Crow, there is a pain that is too much; it throbs and glistens with lifeblood, even in and around so much death, appearing on characters in ways that rail against logic’s expectations. The curious thing is that, although this heavy darkness is easy to slip into when sad, it’s not an easy watch precisely for this heft. The film’s pain ricochets through me during every one of my rewatches, reawakening and corralling to the surface all my own fanged memories, which can be, in a sort of paradox, a celebration of life. Pain is messy, emotions are gooey, and they bleed into one another. But ultimately, and most importantly, tears, fear, laughter, and grief are signs that we are alive, a truth that The Crow is a brave and relentless reminder of.

1 “The Crow,” IMDb, accessed May 3, 2024,

2 Roger Ebert, “Reviews: The Crow,” movie review and film summary, RogerEbert.com, May 13, 1994,

3 “The Crow,” Rotten Tomatoes, accessed May 3, 2024,

4 “Behind the Scenes «The Crow» (1994),” YouTube, January 27, 2017,

Excerpted in part from It Can’t Rain All the Time  by Alisha Mughal. Copyright © by Alisha Mughal, 2025. Published by ECW Press Ltd. www.ecwpress.com

“I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to John Williams; without his music, Superman’s powers are greatly diminished. Believe me, if you try to fly without that theme, you go nowhere.” —Christopher Reeve

The above statement, said at a 1993 celebration honouring the composer, applies not only to the actor playing him but also to the character of Superman. Since Reeve flew onto screens in 1978, John Williams’ theme has been synonymous with the most famous hero in DC Comics’ stable, and it continues that legacy in “Superman,” which opens this week. So perhaps it’s time to ask ourselves: Just what is it about that theme that keeps it going beyond the film that spawned it?

“One of the essential things about the film to me,” Williams said in the 2001 documentary “Making Superman: Filming the Legend,” “was that it was fun and didn’t take itself too seriously. The way Richard [Donner] had directed it, and particularly the way Chris and Margot [Kidder] played the parts, it had almost this kind of theatrical camp to it that didn’t take itself too seriously, and if one could strike a level of theatre and sleight of hand and tongue-in-cheek in the creation of the themes, that it might be the right idea.”   

Williams wrote seven different themes for “Superman: The Movie,” including a beautiful love theme and a nostalgic Aaron Copland-esque theme for the sequences in Smallville. But it’s the Superman theme that’s appropriately dominant. It’s made up of two sections: a powerful fanfare acting as a precursor to action and a call to arms, and a big and bright main theme that uses a three-note phrasing that sounds like it says “Sup-er-man.”

So when Clark Kent has to become Superman to save Lois Lane from becoming a sidewalk Jackson Pollock, Williams plays a big rendition of the fanfare as he opens his shirt to reveal that big “S,” creating a truly iconic moment. Subsequently, the main theme plays with exuberance and vigour as Superman catches the falling helicopter, with the crowd beneath him doing the same thing the audience is doing: cheering. And it’s not just the selfless heroic act we react to, it’s the fist-pumping triumphant music underneath it.    

“Like all of John Williams’ great themes,” says Tim Greiving, author of the forthcoming book John Williams: A Composer’s Life, “the Superman theme feels like it has existed since the dawn of time, and feels like it came here with Kal-el all the way from Krypton. A great fictional character theme, like a great pop song, feels inevitable and predetermined while also delighting our ears with a sense of surprise—and Superman’s theme does that in spades.”

Williams’ theme continued to soar across the three remaining Reeve “Superman” pictures and beyond. “Supergirl” came to screens in 1984, with the same producers behind it: the infamous Ilya and Alexander Salkind. Jerry Goldsmith scored the film and wrote mostly new material for the picture, but he also found space to include a brief but reverent quote of Williams’ theme, in a scene where the title character sees a dorm poster of Reeve’s Man of Steel. This continued in both live-action and animation, with Shirley Walker’s excellent theme to the 1996 cartoon “Superman: The Animated Series,” which also utilizes the “Sup-er-man” three-note device. Although, to be fair, that phrasing was first used by Sammy Timberg in the 1941 “Superman” cartoons as produced by Max and Dave Fleischer, so it’s not especially a new thing—Williams just gave it that added oomph.

2006 saw Williams’ theme return to cinema in a big way, courtesy of Bryan Singer’s “Superman Returns.” A pseudo-sequel to the first two Reeve pictures, and featured a number of homages to the films, not least the adaptation of Williams’ themes by Singer’s regular scoring partner John Ottman, who reintroduced the theme in a big main title sequence very similar to the 1978 original. Even Zack Snyder was initially interested in using Williams’ music for 2013’s “Man of Steel.” In 2022, storyboard artist Jay Oliva posted on Twitter that Snyder wanted to use the theme, but Warner Bros. preferred a new approach, eventually hiring Hans Zimmer. “Zack and I loved that theme,” Oliva said, “but the studio wouldn’t let us use it because they wanted something new for this Superman. It turned out to be a good thing because Hanz’s [sic] theme was perfect.” Williams’ theme did appear briefly in “Justice League,” as scored by Danny Elfman, but this was reversed in “Zack Snyder’s Justice League,” which featured music by Tom Holkenborg.

Zimmer’s approach to Superman was admirable, but it was doomed to fail as part of a film that didn’t seem interested in taking the character seriously. The dark and gritty tone that many fans admire is ill-fitting for Superman, and as much as they tell us his “S” is the symbol for “hope,” there seems to be very little of that in the actual picture. As a result, Zimmer’s music is much more enjoyable away from the film. 

Gunn, however, didn’t hesitate to bring John Williams’ theme back. “That soundtrack,” he told Gizmodo in 2024, “was one of my favorite of all time. When I was a kid, the thing I loved the most about the movie was the music. That was the thing I took home with more than anyone else.” For “Superman,” Gunn recruited English composer John Murphy, who had scored “The Suicide Squad” and “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.” But at the time, Gunn had not even finished writing. “He was one of the first people I gave the script to, along with Peter Safran and a couple of others, so that he could start writing music for it. And I said, ‘I want to use a version of the Williams theme, but I want to do our own version of it.’” 

Murphy’s version of the theme debuted with the first teaser trailer in December—a more concise version of the melody played initially on electric guitar before being reprised with an orchestra and chorus. It feels fresh and unique, but still definitively John Williams, a Superman for a new generation, but one that respects where he’s come from. 

“What’s really amazing is how that leads into a lot of other pieces,” Gunn said. “Some of which come back to the Williams theme, but some of which are purely John Murphy. It goes into that, comes back out, and it’s used beautifully throughout the movie. And John has worked almost non-stop for the past almost two years, putting the score together.”

It would appear that John Williams’ Superman theme is not going away anytime soon. Perhaps this is appropriate for a world in so much turmoil, where audiences still require the escapism and symbolism his heroic acts bring, as his comics did during the Great Depression. As George Lucas is so fond of saying, it’s like poetry. It rhymes.

“The Superman theme,” says Greiving, “became permanently glued to the character, not just because the movie was so popular or even because the tune was so catchy, but because it fit Superman like a bespoke blue suit. Williams so expertly forged the right melody for that character, the perfect melody, that we just can’t imagine him without it.”     

“Wonder Boys,” which turns 25 this year, has been accused of bone-deep pessimism, but I’ve never remembered it in this way. Even though the story is about disillusionment and regret, and the fear of uncertainty looms like a shadow over its characters, my memory holds it as a funny and uplifting tale about dysfunctional people, some of whom just happen to be writers. Curtis Hanson’s drama has a way of distracting its audience by hiding its darker nature in plain sight. It achieves this partly through what Roger Ebert described as “an unsprung screwball comedy” but also by making itself more about the uplifting destination than the journey itself—a gentler yarn about writers, or people, rather than something grittier.

Based on Michael Chabon’s 1995 novel of the same name, it has been years since the publication of Arsonist’s Daughter, the book that put both Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas) and his editor Terry Crabtree (Robert Downey Jr.) on the map. Grady is writing his second novel, but the ending keeps getting further away. Now, his wife, Emily, has left him, and Sara Gaskell (Frances McDormand), the university’s Chancellor, with whom he has been having an affair, tells him she’s pregnant. Meanwhile, Grady has a junior literature major named James Leer (Tobey Maguire) as a house guest and is driving around with a dead dog in the trunk of his car. And Crabtree has flown in from New York for the University’s annual WordFest literary festival. He also wants to read Grady’s new novel, hoping it will salvage his floundering career.

The film begins with Bob Dylan’s aged and raspy voice singing “Things Have Changed,” a song he wrote specifically for the film. It’s a song about an inescapable self-awareness of one’s fate and feelings of disillusionment. Dylan returns time and again to the line, “I used to care, but things have changed.” It’s a pessimistic punctuation mark on the song’s thematic mood.

Then Grady’s gravelly voice reads James’ beautiful but somber short story, about a young girl sitting in a confessional. Grady is an occasional narrator, and here, in his opening narration, you can hear how weary and distracted he is—someone who is going through the motions of writing and teaching and living. During the advanced writer’s workshop, he describes James as the “sole inhabitant of his own gloomy gulag,” whose “stories were about as sunny as his disposition.”

From Dylan’s bleak poetry, including an image of the song’s narrator standing on the gallows with his head in a noose, to Grady’s pithy description wrenched from deep in his disillusioned and weary soul, the negativity only escalates. Grady sarcastically prompts the savage instincts of James’ envious classmates, who pounce like predators, ripping into him with razor-sharp words as a substitute for the teeth or claws of a wild animal. One targets the Catholic guilt and repression in his story. “I mean, Jesus! What is it with you Catholics?” Another says, “I hated it. His stories make me want to kill myself.”

In the end, it’s a matter of perspective, and while the opening scene in the classroom has a humorous slant, it doesn’t negate the vicious criticism directed at James. The scene’s dark humor depicts how vulnerability can be preyed upon, but then, the “insightful and kind” Hannah Green (Katie Holmes) suggests the class is missing the point. “He [the author] respects us enough to forget us, and that takes courage.” The scene quickly ends, and we hear the first notes of Christopher Young’s score, a chirpy melody that reintroduces “Wonder Boys” as a light, uplifting, and humorous story. This is an early example of how “Wonder Boys” not only distracts us from its darker nature but also playfully orchestrates a tension between optimism and pessimism.

This tension is apparent in “Things Have Changed” before it comes to fruition in the characters’ interpersonal relationships. The protagonist in Dylan’s song is a pessimistic soul with a long list of gripes. Besides having his head in a noose, he talks about being in the wrong town and “walking forty miles of bad road.” He talks about how he’s holding a losing hand; the mind can only take so much, and how he’s in love with a woman he’s not even attracted to. And yet, the energetic and upbeat melody, which sounds and feels optimistic, lends itself to irony, given the despondent, poetic lyrics. “Things Have Changed” is simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic, making it the perfect choice for the titles and credits, which lead to the film’s pessimistic opening and ultimately put a full stop to its happy conclusion.

Meanwhile, Neil Young’s 1972 song “Old Man” is the perfect complement to Grady and James’ relationship. The lyric “Old man look at my life, I’m a lot like you were” is a subtle way that “Wonder Boys” acknowledges that James is a younger version of Grady, who once stood with the world at his feet. A few broken marriages later, and now a stoner who can’t escape dysfunction, he, like Crabtree, has become mired in struggle and stranded without any idea what his second book is about. These opposing stations in life frame the trio as either symbols of optimism or pessimism. But this is an oversimplification, because neither Grady nor Crabtree has given up on hope—continuing to write is a hopeful act, as is planning to publish your friend’s new manuscript. And James’ tales are deeply pessimistic, as seen in the one he tells Grady about his mother, who worked as a fry cook in the cafeteria of a mannequin factory. Before that, she’d been a dancer—”Whatever kind they wanted her to be.” Nearly tripped up by Grady, who remembers she was Catholic, James trusts in his pessimism and says, “When we fall, we fall hard.” He’s not much kinder towards his father, who smokes cannabis, not for glaucoma as Grady assumes, but instead for his colon cancer.

“Wonder Boys” chooses to be a lighter, funny, and uplifting story, where problems are resolved, a wonder boy takes his first big step out into the world, an editor salvages his career, and Grady loses almost everything but ends up richer for it. Despite the transformative power at its heart, there are remnants of an unexplored but tantalizing narrative. But to see this, we must not allow ourselves to be distracted by the laughter. Instead, we must pay attention to another side of its humanity, and we should ask, what will James’ fate be? After all, he goes to New York with Crabtree to rework his novel, “The Love Parade.” But he’s being steered by someone who is described by the transvestite they picked up on a flight from New York, as someone who is “into collecting weird tricks.” So, is James a weird trick, someone for Crabtree to play with until he loses interest? Is James destined to be a promising but tragic artist, whose personal life is as dramatic, if not more, than his writing?

The roots of this inherent tension between optimism and pessimism may lie in the adaptation of Chabon’s novel. “Wonder Boys” sanitizes and romanticizes its oppressive source material, sinking you into the grime of its characters’ dysfunctional lives. Chabon’s take on Grady is far rougher around the edges. One notable example is how the book’s sexual content is more graphic, with Grady describing how he touches his girlfriend’s pussy and even expresses sympathy for James, who has a small penis. The film has sexual content, but it’s gentler and often inferred rather than shown or spoken about in detail.

This comparison offers an invaluable insight because Chabon’s novel is comfortable with the characters’ dysfunctional lives in a way that the film never is. Director Curtis Hanson and screenwriter Steve Kloves adapt the novel through a sanitized and romanticized filter. It frames “Wonder Boys” (the film) as naïve and dreamlike, seeking to comfort itself in an uncertain world where dysfunction is an inherent part of the human condition. However, the grittier reality that is repressed still finds a way to creep through and emphasizes the tension between optimism and pessimism that runs throughout the film. And just as Hannah reminds Grady that writers make choices, so Hanson and Kloves make theirs.

When we think of Rob Reiner’s groundbreaking and beloved mockumentary “This Is Spinal Tap,” we remember the customized Marshall amp where the numbers all go to 11, and the timeless observation that “It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever,” and the priceless visual gags involving the disastrously tiny Stonehenge prop and the band getting hopelessly lost in a maze of backstage corridors in Cleveland. All of those Greatest Hits moments, and many more, once again killed when I watched the meticulously remastered and remixed “Golden Anniversary” edition of “Tap,” playing in theaters July 5-7—but I was also struck by the precise and finely calibrated nature of the editing, which upon further review should have been considered for an Academy Award nomination.

No joke.

We know that director Reiner and primary cast members Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer created a detailed outline for the film with virtually zero dialogue, leaving the ensemble cast to come up with some of the most ingenious improvised dialogue in motion picture comedy history—but it was left to Reiner and editor Kent Beyda to sift through more than 100 hours of raw footage and pare it down to a lean, perfectly paced, 82-minute gem. (This was an age of relatively brisk comedies, with “Airplane!”, “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” “The Jerk,” “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure,” and “Police Academy” all clocking in at under 100 minutes.)

One of the delights in revisiting “Spinal Tap” is appreciating how so many scenes are just the right length, often building to a classic punch line just before we cut to the following sequence, e.g., the low-key moment when Guest’s Nigel Tufnel is playing a lovely and understated passage on the piano and talking about how D minor is the saddest of keys. He tells Reiner’s Marty DiBergi, “I’m really influenced by Beethoven and Bach, it’s sort of in between those, really, it’s like a ‘Mach’ piece…” 

Marty asks, “What do you call this?”

[The briefest pause.] “Well, this piece is called ‘Lick My Love Pump.’ ”

It’s just masterful absurdity.

“This Is Spinal Tap” was not the first mockumentary of the modern era. James McBride’s 1967 feature-length film “David Holzman’s Diary,” starring L.M. Kit Carson as the titular character, is a fascinating, fictional, and disturbing work posing as an autobiographical documentary. (The entire film is available on YouTube.) In 1979, Albert Brooks lampooned the PBS documentary series “An American Family” with “Real Life.” Still, “Tap” is the undeniable GOAT of the genre—a multi-layered masterpiece that gently lampoons the rock documentary, most obviously Scorsese’s “The Last Waltz,” while perfectly recreating the structure of such films. Reiner, Guest, McKean, and Shearer teamed up to create characters so ridiculous and yet so authentic that they’ve remained a part of the pop culture fabric ever since their careers were resuscitated when “Sex Farm” became a surprise hit in Japan. The band performed in character on “Saturday Night Live” and MTV in the 1990s, among other shows, and they recorded two follow-up albums to the “Spinal Tap” soundtrack. They’ve performed live here and there, perhaps most memorably at Live Earth London in 2007, where they performed their powerful eco-anthem “Warmer Than Hell.”

Such lofty achievements hardly seemed possible at the outset of “This Is Spinal Tap,” which finds the band amid a rapid downward spiral as they embark on their first tour of the United States in six years. The record company doesn’t want to release their album, “Smell the Glove,” because the proposed cover art is deeply offensive. Whereas they were once playing 15,000-seat arenas, the venues booked for this tour are more in the 1,200- to 1,500-seat range. When Di Bergi asks the blundering but ebullient band manager Ian Faith (the late Tony Hendra, sublimely funny) if this is a sign the band’s popularity is waning, Faith replies, “Oh no…not at all. I just think their appeal is becoming selective.” Poor Ian. We realize he’s drowning before he does.

We’re also treated to a brief history of the band, and how perfect is that faux archival footage! The boys started out as The Originals, had to rename themselves The New Originals, and had come to be known as The Thamesman when they hit the charts in 1965 with “Pop, Look & Listen,” as we see in a gloriously grainy, black-and-white clip, with a pre-dental work group delivering an infectious tune you’ll find yourself humming. Oh, and there’s Ed Begley Jr. as the drummer John “Stumpy” Pepys, who died in a bizarre gardening accident, thus kicking off the astonishing and inexplicable string of tragic demises of stickmen. (RIP to Eric “Stumpy Joe” Childs, who choked on vomit that was not necessarily his own.) Equally spot-on is the clip of the boys singing the flower-pop tune “Jamboreepop,” with director Reiner perfectly capturing the state of pop music and American variety shows of 1967, complete with kaleidoscopic visual effects and the sound of a Coral Sitar. With Guest and McKean leading the way, these performances are funny but also enormously charming because they’re authentic. From the innocent pop days through the spandex-clad metal group roaring through ridiculous power anthems such as “Big Bottom” and “Hell Hole,” the musicianship sells the joke.

There’s such a vibe of gentle affection in the satire of “Tap,” a tone that greatly influenced Guest’s classic mockumentaries such as “Waiting for Guffman” (1996) and “A Mighty Wind” (2003), as well as the brilliant IFC series “Documentary Now!” Even when the band visits Elvis’ grave and claim Elvis was going to do a musical version of “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” or they arrive at the Holiday Inn in Chicago and the marquee reads, “WELCOME NATIONAL COMPANY OF THE WIZ AND SPINAL TAP,” there’s not a mean-spirited element in the film’s DNA.

When the band isn’t onstage, there’s still a musical rhythm to that improvised dialogue, with Guest as Tufnel and McKean as David St. Hubbins taking the reins in most scenes, and Shearer as Derek Smalls knowing just when to chime in with a perfectly delivered, droll tagline. Equally impressive is the work of the day players—some already well-known, some on their way up—who show up for a scene or two and never drop the ball, creating instantly memorable characters. Billy Crystal and Dana Carvey as mime waiters. Bruno Kirby as a limo driver who’s all about Sinatra. Fran Drescher, who essentially created the voice of “The Nanny” with her depiction of the publicist Bobbi Flekman. Howard Hesseman as a condescending manager for another act who says to Ian and the band, “Listen, we’d love to stand around and chat, but we’ve gotta sit in the lobby and wait for the limo.” Anjelica Huston as the artist who creates the mini-Stonehenge stage set. Paul Shaffer as Artie Fufkin, the hapless and unctuous rep for Polymer Records. Fred Willard as Lt. Hookstraten. All of these performances contribute to the creation of a deadpan “Spinal Tap” universe that is utterly farcical yet wholly relatable.

In honor of the film’s golden anniversary (because everyone knows 41 is traditionally the Gold Anniversary), “This Is Spinal Tap” will be in theaters nationwide from July 5-7. In September, we’ll get the long-anticipated sequel, “Spinal Tap II: The End Continues,” with director Marty Di Bergi chronicling the band’s misadventures as they reunite for one last show. We’ve seen reports of celebrity cameos ranging from Paul McCartney to Elton John to Questlove to Garth Brooks to Lars Ulrich. That’s all fine and good, but one hopes those superstars don’t upset the balance of everything that made the original so good—and they better come to play. When you’re sharing the screen with Spinal Tap, you’re in the presence of mockumentary greatness.

Content Warning: The following piece discusses issues of sexual assault. If you need help and support, please contact RAINN‘s National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-4673.

The first time it happened, I didn’t tell anybody. At home, I looked at my face in the bathroom mirror. My lips were swollen, as if bee-stung, and my eyes were red, as if all the veins had burst. I’d been choked so hard I almost passed out. I didn’t see it for what it was—sexual assault—until years later, when something similar happened again and I had begun talking, had begun forging meaningful friendships. In talking to friends, I was able to put what happened into context, to understand it. When you make friends, you need to talk. You need to feel okay about talking. 

The first time it happened, I didn’t tell anybody, not only because I didn’t know there was something to tell, but also (crucially), because I didn’t have anybody to tell. “We cannot really risk emotionality in relationships where we do not feel safe,” writes bell hooks in Communion: The Female Search for Love. I had people I could call acquaintances, but didn’t have relationships with them that were deep enough, grounded in intimacy or love enough, to call friendships. Unable to make sense of my own self and life, I was lonely and yearning for connection, and looking for it in all the wrong places—exclusively in romantic relationships.

My erstwhile loneliness and desire for connection were reflected back at me recently with disorientingly intricate detail by Celine Song’s sophomore feature, “Materialists.” A romantic drama about professional matchmaker Lucy (Dakota Johnson), who finds herself needing to make for herself the choices she thrusts upon her clients daily, “Materialists” believes that true love is out there for everybody. This love, though, is uniquely qualified: it is only romantic love. 

In this belief, “Materialists” is much like its spiritual predecessor, “The Worst Person in the World.” At their core, both films believe that the only meaningful union two people can forge is a sexual, romantic one. The films not only discourage friendships, they seem not to believe in them as a viable source of happiness, leaving us with characters—for the most part women—who live atomized, lonely lives, apart from and against other women. 

This is not to say that friendship is completely absent in “Materialists.” (Indeed, it would be unfair to judge a film for something that is entirely out of its purview.) Rather, it is something that, though characters crave it, is denied. “I almost felt like we were friends,” Sophie (Zoe Winters) says to Lucy at one point with disdain. Sophie is one of Lucy’s long-standing clients—nearing her 40s, she feels immense shame about not having found a partner yet, for having hired an “expert” to help her. Lucy sets Sophie up with a man named Mark, who sexually assaults Sophie on their first date. Sophie holds Lucy responsible and feels betrayed and embarrassed. Mistaking the closeness necessitated by the professional relationship between a matchmaker and her client for genuine intimacy and friendship, Sophie is heartbroken by the fact that Lucy would set her up with someone who could hurt her so violently. 

“He was a strong match,” Lucy says helplessly to Sophie during a confrontation. She was just doing her job, in other words. Sophie expresses her sadness, anger, and pain in so many words to Lucy; with sobs hiccupping in her throat, she explains what happened the night of the attack. “I’m a person and I know I deserve love,” she says finally in one of the film’s most affecting scenes. It’s an opening up, a show of vulnerability on her part that Johnson’s Lucy is incapable of returning. Instead, Lucy retorts with silent reiterations of the axioms she has learned on her job. “I know you do, I believe it,” Lucy says, something she says often to her clients: she will believe for them that they deserve love, even if they don’t. Lucy maintains a professional attitude toward Sophie even as the latter melts before her from the heat of her sadness, yearning for closeness and affection. It’s as if a rejection of her plea for a bond, for a human connection.    

The assault is meant to serve as a reality check within the film, as a means by which to express the real danger women come up against every time they go out on a date. Though carried with grace and empathy by Winters, the event mostly reveals the protagonist Lucy’s priorities—it facilitates her professional growth. If anything, it causes Lucy to take pause and consider whether she wants to continue being a matchmaker in a world where people are talked about as though they are commodities. By the end of the film, we learn that she does want to continue, but not before another desperate plea for closeness from Sophie. 

One night, when Lucy is away with John (Chris Evans), her poor theatre-actor ex, she receives a frantic call from Sophie. Mark has shown up outside her apartment and won’t leave. Sophie is terrified and alone and doesn’t know what to do. She has called the police, but they can’t do anything because he hasn’t done anything measurably terrible, not yet. John rushes Lucy to Sophie’s apartment and waits on the stoop outside. When Sophie lets Lucy in, she is obviously exhausted and laughs nervously as if to let out the fear that has been trapped within her all night. Lucy talks to Sophie steadily, telling her that there is legal action she can take. Sophie nods, her eyes glassy. And when Lucy asks her if she would like a hug, it’s as if all remaining energy leaves Sophie; she collapses into the embrace and weeps. 

“You know what I’ve been thinking about?” Sophie says after a while. “I really need to get a boyfriend so I have someone to call that’s not my fucking matchmaker.” She jokes about dying alone, smiling a sad smile. “I promise you you’re going to marry the love of your life,” Lucy says before going on to reiterate, “You don’t have to believe it. I believe it.” Sophie says she’s not asking for a miracle, she just wants someone “who can’t help but love me back.” Lucy stays with Sophie for the duration of the night, leaving for a moment when the sun comes up to tell John, still on the stoop, that she will help Sophie file a restraining order. We never see Sophie again.

It’s an incredibly disappointing scene, an interaction between two women that Song absolutely bungles. Palpable in Winters’ Sophie is an intense desire for reciprocal love and tenderness, but Song never manages to realize or offer that what Sophie is looking for can be found in friendship. It’s as if Song senses through Sophie that friendship can soothe—through the character’s belief that she and Lucy are friends, through her turning to Lucy in a moment of crisis—but the writer/director falls short of seeing friendship as a relationship worthwhile in itself. 

It’s heartbreaking that Sophie repeatedly feels the need to apologize for or take back her feelings of friendship toward Lucy. It’s heartbreaking to hear her say that she should get a boyfriend so she wouldn’t have to turn to Lucy with her pain. The film doesn’t seem to realize that Sophie is turning to Lucy for things people often turn to their friends for. That Sophie misreads her relationship with Lucy initially is totally understandable, because she has put in emotional work in laying herself bare to Lucy; she, as hooks says, has come to feel safe with the woman. We want our friends to see us, to understand us, to comfort us when we need it. Lucy functions as a friend in Sophie’s mind, and the film’s ultimate tragedy is that it does not have Lucy, in turn, see Sophie as a friend; rather, it has her turn away or maintain a professional distance from the other woman. This scene, Sophie’s final scene, doesn’t end with Lucy comforting Sophie as a friend, but as a client, evident in Lucy’s reiteration of her axiom, in a return to terms of her trade. 

It is evident that Song has Sophie turn to Lucy in order that she may learn persistence. It is not because she wants the two characters to become friends, least of all because she wants to telegraph how friendship can allow healing after the kind of trauma Sophie has experienced. This refusal to privilege friendship is evident in what the two women end up discussing: boyfriends. Song doesn’t even seem to want to consider how lonely dating in the modern age has left us; she doesn’t say much about loneliness at all, even as she depicts deeply lonely characters. Rather, she seems to want to make the underwhelming point that we should not give up in our search for romantic love, because it will find us.

In the film’s final moments, Lucy is on the phone with her boss, who tells her that Sophie has hit it off with her latest date. It is suggested that the woman, who has seemed so incredibly lonely throughout the film, has finally found a boyfriend she can call. It’s not suggested that Lucy will talk to or has talked to Sophie again in any capacity other than as a client. The women remain separated by a wall of professionalism, with any friendship they might have had left unnurtured. They don’t talk to each other immediately, Sophie is rather talked about, because they don’t need to anymore, because Lucy’s work is done. The women have found their men and no longer have any use for each other.

In “Materialists”’ world, friendship feels like a mistake; it is something apologized for, or something that is only momentary, a placeholder until a romantic partner is found. No matter that couples break up all the time, Sophie could easily, later on, become as alone and without a person to call as she is during the film. What is important is that she has found a romantic partner, has achieved the goal toward which Sophie’s and Lucy’s energies have been focused. Any friendship that blooms is accidental and left to fizzle. Lucy is just as alone as Sophie, but while the latter craves friendship, Lucy seems to genuinely not want it: at home, she sits alone, and when something terrible happens to her in her career, she calls a man she’s seeing in a romantic capacity. In the way that the opening scene depicts a cave woman moving out and away from her mother and younger sister and toward a man, this film moves away from community and toward heterosexual love.  

Joachim Trier’s critically acclaimed and apparently universally beloved film “The Worst Person in the World,” too, is a film that doesn’t seem to feel that community and friendship are worthwhile pursuits in life. In line with Song’s compartmentalization in “Materialists”—which seems stylistically indebted to Trier’s film—here a person is and can be either alone or in a romantic partnership. The film focuses on four years in Julie’s (Renate Reinsve) life as she tries to figure out who she is, with the four years depicted solely on her romantic and professional pursuits. 

While in “Materialists,” friendship is considered to be deprioritized and then overcome, in “Worst Person,” friendship is impossible. I understand that the film follows a woman who feels inadequate, who feels that she is failing at living a good life; nonetheless, it doesn’t feel part of Julie’s terribleness, or her “worst”-ness, in how she considers other women. Julie is solitary from the moment the film begins. As she moves from one discipline of study to another, she embarks on numerous romantic relationships, but no lasting friendships. “She observed her fellow students,” the narrator says at the film’s beginning as Julie looks over her shoulder at a group of female students talking to each other, being friendly with each other. Julie is sitting markedly apart from them. “Norway’s future spiritual advisors,” the narrator says, intercepting Julie’s thoughts. “Mostly girls with borderline eating disorders.” The next instant, she has an affair with her professor. 

It’s completely unwarranted what is said about the other girls having an eating disorder. Notwithstanding the fact that they have the exact same build as Julie herself, it doesn’t feel as though this is a comment about women’s body images and pressures to conform, so sharply and tersely lodged into the moment as it is. It just feels cruel. It’s as if to say, Julie doesn’t concern herself with her self-image like these other girls, she’s not like them, she’s too busy having sex with her instructor. From the film’s first beats, other women are defined as decidedly apart from Julie; they’re a group with uniform concerns while Julie thinks against the grain, and is troubled by more meaningful problems. Other women aren’t there to be friends with, but there to define oneself against.  

Women other than Julie hardly have a voice in this film, are never shown in a positive light, and are never seen to be living happy lives worthy of being entered into or being curious about. Instead, they live lives a modern woman ought to avoid replicating or fraternizing with. A few moments later in the film, Julie goes on a trip with her current boyfriend Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie) to his parents’ home, hosted by his sister, her husband, and their kids. Julie feels that Aksel’s sister doesn’t like her, and Aksel tells her that she’s just shy. “That’s what you say about boring people,” Julie retorts. Later in the evening, one of the kids throws a tantrum at bedtime, and her mother chases her around the lawn as the girl screams. 

“Don’t make a scene,” the mother pleads with her child, tripping over herself as she tries to get hold of her daughter. Everybody, including the child’s father, just watches them; nobody helps the mother put the kids to bed. A scene is made, and the mother emerges from it looking like the loser. “Kids can be intense,” Aksel says with chagrin, and that seems to be the moment’s message. Not that mothers bear the burden of disciplining their children, nor that the father didn’t do anything to help his wife put his own kid to bed. Just that kids are intense. The lesson Julie gleans about herself from the scene is that she does not want kids; she and Aksel have a fight about this that night. 

It’s bitterly ironic that the next night, over dinner, Julie makes a feminist observation. Society knows everything about men’s problems, she says, but people are too shy to talk about period blood. What angers me about this scene is that Julie doesn’t look to the other women at the table for confirmation of her observation, which is certainly correct; she doesn’t look to them for camaraderie or recognition, and she doesn’t make eye contact with them at all. She only looks to Aksel and his brother-in-law, as if considering only these men as worthy of conversation. “If men had periods, that’s all we’d hear about,” she says before going on to make a point about mansplaining. 

Later yet in the night, they’re all dancing, and Julie tries to get the woman who, the previous day, made a scene with her daughter to dance, but it ends terribly when she hits her head on a lamp and injures herself. The night ends with Julie and Aksel overhearing that same woman fighting with her husband. “Shall we make a baby?” Julie whispers to Aksel with a sly smile. It’s meant to be a knowing jab at the idea that many couples commit to fighting after they have kids, but it feels mean in the way that the earlier remark about eating disorders feels mean. The woman who gets injured has spent what is meant to be a holiday working, taking care of her children, and she’s been hurt when all she wanted was to have fun; instead of making an effort to understand her, to allow her to express her frustration, the film mocks her through Julie.

This woman, with her children and her traditional concerns, tries to enter into dialogue with Julie, but Julie moves away from her. When she asks Julie if she has any friends with kids, Julie says only one, though we never meet them. Julie sees this woman, tired, hurt, and angry, and strives to avoid a fate like hers; it’s a life she can never want nor associate with. For Julie, people with children aren’t meant to be friends with at all; all she’s seen them do is fight and care for kids. Accordingly, she runs away from her long-term relationship. Single women, too, aren’t meant to be friends with; they have eating disorders. The only kind of relationship valued in Julie’s life, as we see it, is a romantic one, and when that becomes an untenable option, she chooses to be alone.   

The film’s final moments depict Julie in her small apartment, working on editing her photographs. The lesson Julie has learned is that she needs to choose herself, to work on herself, if she wants to be happy. The film ends with Julie having found self-esteem, and rightfully so. “Given our early obsessions with seducing and pleasing others to affirm our worth, we lose ourselves in the search to be accepted, included, desired,” hooks writes in Communion. And so at film’s end, Julie discovers herself, but this self-discovery is only conceived of in a professional sense, and comes at the cost of isolation. Julie does not forge community, does not make new friends. According to hooks, the feminist movement “told us that we were better off if we stopped thinking about love, if we could live our lives as though love did not matter, because if we did not do so we were in the danger of becoming a member of a truly despised female category: ‘the woman who loves too much.’”

Julie becomes a good woman according to patriarchal understanding: self-sufficient and self-reliant, she is not a burden on anyone; her desires snuffed, she is focused on making money. While she loved men earlier, by the film’s end, she has gotten it out of her system. She becomes a girlboss, a productive member of society, atomized like Aksel, a traditionally masculine man. Meanwhile, femininity (and all that it carries with it ideologically, things like friendship and community and messy desires) is meant to be absolutely avoided and unwanted; it is the bad life. It’s always haunted me how this film ends, so confined and clean, without desire, without love.     

On the face of it, these films centre a woman’s desires and feelings and internal landscapes. They seem progressive. But the lives they have their women live are endlessly lonely and individualistic, capitalistic in how they leave their protagonists as an atomized unit apart from a lively community. These films don’t seem to consider love as possible within community, in platonic settings, in friendships; it’s as if they are discouraging collectivization, and leaving unchallenged the current systems of oppression. As hooks writes, “female allegiance to males upholds heterosexism,” and in their focus on heterosexual romantic pairings as the only or most important site of socialization, as the sole bond worthy of effort or care or attention, these films implicitly uphold patriarchy. 

This is not to say that romantic comedies or romantic dramas are ill-equipped to depict platonic love alongside romantic love, because it absolutely is possible to hold space for both. As “Materialists” and “Worst Person” seem to run away from female friendship and platonic love, Gillian Robespierre’s “Obvious Child” celebrates and honours friendship in the same breath as it depicts a striving for romantic love. The film follows Jenny Slate’s Donna as she deals with the aftermath of a one-night stand and decides to get an abortion, and also nurtures a sweet relationship after the fact with her one-night stand, Max (Jake Lacy). And as it reckons with the idea of abortion without also glamorizing it or sensationalizing it, the film also allows Donna a little community where she can access healing and care.

Donna has friends: Nellie (Gaby Hoffmann) and Joey (Gabe Liedman). And they come together to just hang out, to talk over what Donna has experienced, to gossip, to make jokes, and to share confessions, advice, happinesses, and sadnesses. “Does having an abortion hurt?” Donna asks Nellie one night when the three of them are getting wine drunk. It’s a candid and free question, asked easily and answered easily. Donna is nervous. It doesn’t hurt, Nellie says, but there are cramps afterwards. The procedure only takes a few minutes, and it isn’t scary. 

“How often do you think about it?” Donna asks Nellie. “I think about it sometimes,” Nellie says. “Once in a while. And then I get really sad for my little teenage self.” But she never regrets it. It’s the kind of conversation friend groups have all the time, but it’s depicted in the movie with such ease and calmness, such inevitability and warmth, which is absolutely stunning. Of course, Donna talks to her friends about her feelings, and of cours,e Nellie shares her experience with Donna in an effort to make her feel less alone. It’s the kind of sharing of information that women have been partaking of for ages, the kind that saves lives, literally and figuratively, and it’s rooted in the safety that hooks talks about, that Sophie craves.   

And so even as the film ends on Donna and Max coming together in a romantic union, we know that Donna still has Nellie and Joey. They are, the three of them, still there for each other; they can still stay up all night drinking wine and sharing experiences and being silly, all the while holding each other, all the while loving each other in the way that only best friends can.  

I have been as lonely and starved of connection as Sophie, and like Julie, like any other girl coming of age under patriarchy, I have thought less of other women and of myself as special in an effort to gain patriarchy’s approval. But survival, happiness itself, isn’t dependent on eradicating desires for certain kinds of love, on privileging one thing over another—this is the kind of competitive thinking fostered by capitalism. 

My friendships have saved my life again and again. Making friends allows us to make sense of the world and ourselves, to grow. “Commitment is the ground of our being that lets us make mistakes, be forgiven, and try again,” hooks writes. Such a commitment would have allowed Sophie to feel less guilty about calling Lucy, and might have allowed Julie’s life to still contain love. My friends allow me to move into the world with confidence, and I, like Donna, know that I can return to them at any time and in any state, and they will embrace me. They will show me love when nobody else can. Because of my friends, I don’t have to be the only one carrying the knowledge of my life anymore; I can share pain, stories, and fun. Because of my friends, I don’t have to look at myself alone in the mirror. I can see myself reflected in their gaze, and they reflected in mine.

The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival will pay tribute to Stellan Skarsgård, Vicky Krieps, Dakota Johnson, and Peter Sarsgaard, welcoming the actors to personally present screenings of their recent films, festival organizers for the upcoming 59th edition announced Wednesday.

In addition, while 11 of the films screening in Karlovy Vary’s Crystal Globe main competition had been announced, a 12th and final film—from Iran, and previously kept secret to ensure the safety of its delegation—has been officially unveiled. “Bidad,” from director Soheil Beiraghi, centers on a young musician who sings in the streets, in defiance of religious laws that prohibit women in Iran from performing in public.

The film “was made as an independent production; otherwise, it would never have been approved by the censors because of its critical tone,” KVIFF organizers emphasized in a statement. “Even so, director Soheil Beiraghi was investigated by the authorities during filming. It was necessary to withhold announcement of the film’s inclusion in the festival’s program until he and the members of his crew could safely travel out of Iran. A few days ago, the festival team was overjoyed to hear that they were on their way.”

Stellan Skarsgård—previously a guest of the festival in 2002, to present István Szabó’s film “Taking Sides”—will be presented with the Crystal Globe for Outstanding Artistic Contribution to World Cinema. He will personally present a screening of “Sentimental Value,” which won the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Directed by Joachim Trier, the family drama centers on a celebrated director (Skarsgård) who seeks to make a film with his estranged daughter (Renate Reinsve). 

At the festival’s opening ceremony, Vicky Krieps will be honored with the KVIFF President’s Award. To mark the occasion, the festival will screen “Love Me Tender,” from director Anna Cazenave Cambet, in which a former lawyer (Krieps) navigates a custody battle over her son after coming out as a lesbian. The film premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes this year. 

Dakota Johnson, meanwhile, will be honored with the KVIFF President’s Award and attend the festival to present two of her latest films: recently released romantic drama “Materialists,” from Celine Song, and upcoming romantic comedy “Splitsville,” from Michael Angelo Covino. She will be presented with the award at a “Materialists” screening, closing out the festival’s opening weekend. 

Elsewhere, Peter Sarsgaard will also receive the KVIFF President’s Award at the festival’s opening ceremony. Though the actor was most recently seen in “September 5,” about a sports broadcasting crew that finds itself covering a hostage crisis involving Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, KVIFF will instead honor Sarsgaard with a screening of journalism drama “Shattered Glass,” in which the actor portrayed New Republic editor Charles Lane. 

Others invited as guests of the festival for the Crystal Globe competition include actress Camille Cottin (presenting the world premiere of “Out of Love”), director Bence Fliegauf (presenting the world premiere of “Jimmy Jaguar”), and director Max Walker-Silverman (presenting the international premiere of “Rebuilding”).  

Argentinian actor Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, who won Best Actor at KVIFF just over a decade ago for “All Yours,” returns to the festival with “Kill the Jockey,” directed by Luis Ortega. 

Hlynur Pálmason will be on hand to present “The Love That Remains,” while Sergei Loznitsa will personally introduce “Two Prosecutors,” both filmmakers having previously premiered their films at Cannes. Mstyslav Chernov, an Oscar winner for “20 Days in Mariupol,” will introduce his latest documentary, “2000 Metres to Andriivka,” and Michel Franco will present “Dreams,” a love story that premiered at this year’s Berlinale. Dea Kulumbegashvili will also present her second feature, “April,” which won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival.

Jay Duplass, whose comedy “The Baltimorons” was an audience favorite at SXSW and the Chicago Critics Film Festival, will attend a screening of his film at KVIFF. Italian filmmaker Paolo Genovese will present “Madly,” his latest work, and Italian actor Valerio Mastandrea will present “Feeling Better,” which he directed and stars in. Finally, Mark Jenkin will be at KVIFF for the world premiere of his short film “I Saw the Face of God in the Jet Wash,” to be shown in the Imagina section.

One of the oldest film festivals in the world, and the most prestigious of its type in Eastern and Central Europe, the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) will hold its 59th edition on July 4-12 in the Czech Republic. The festival had previously announced that Michael Douglas will present a newly restored version of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” on the occasion of its 50th anniversary, and the official selection for its two main competitions.