( recent words toward films ( Perpetrator, The Killer, Fremont, The Unknown Country

Via hyper engaged writing that re-imagines tired time travel and horror fantasies into a very awake grindhouse style teen movie that's progressive in both its reverse reverence and anti-homage, Jennifer Reeder's idea-driven and visually off-road Perpetrator invades and enhances spaces usually reserved for male histories and occupies the timeline thereof by overthrowing the mundanely comfortable with the bizarrely familiar. Kiah McKirnan makes her impossible performance relatable long enough to give it teeth, and short enough to quicken the blood might the heart reclaim its beating. There's so much here that even its revelations play catch-up to the known and the knowing.

I absolutely love Babak Jalali's Fremont. For how it memorializes memory, for how it details and decorates the abandoned time machine of place, for how its characters believe they are pressed for words when they are actually pressed for how to language them, for its inward humor and outward heroics, for the path it cuts for heartbreak, for the space it leaves the unfixed, and and and. And nothing I’ve said really says anything that speaks to what this film creates a voice for. As Donya, Anaita Wali Zada’s performance is both wall and fly, a movement based on a waiting impatience, a look looking for a look back. Visibility is no healer. Witness, no miracle. And yet, you’ll see, if you haven’t already, something new, here. Something wonderfully made. Familiar, far away, whole.

David Fincher's The Killer is either empty male whiteness as deep black comedy, or it's just efficiently smug and hollow and kills everyone but the rich white dude. I am going with the former. But the joke might be on me.

Morrisa Maltz's The Unknown Country is a work of deep location and knowing randomness that has a sweet tooth for the spare feast that is companionship and for the busy desolation that candies the eye. Aimlessness has many churches, and Lily Gladstone finds worship enough in her performance to cut the past with both clenched jaw and soft blink while drawing futures from a withholding present. What an elegant surplus of discovery is found, here, where nothing moves beneath the feet of those called to the body that carries their stillness.