Swampflix

Film Criticism From New Orleans

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Sand on the Glass, Leaf in the Pitt

A good friend recently lent me a DVD compilation of experimental short films from animator Caroline Leaf, titled Out on a Limb. He kept excitingly telling me that Leaf primarily works with a “sand on glass” animation technique, which I struggled to understand in the abstract. In retrospect, the term is pretty self-explanatory. Instead of working with the ink-on-paper or clay-on-wire or…

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David Bradley's Silent Monsters

The single-screen microcinema Zeitgeist Theatre & Lounge has been hosting weekly silent movie screenings with live piano accompaniment every Sunday afternoon for months now. I know this because I happened to see a flyer for the series while catching another movie there. While other local repertory series like Prytania’s Classic Movies and The Broad’s Gap Tooth program are regularly well attended,…

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Die Nibelungen: Siegfried's Death (1924)

I really had no idea what to expect when I put a hold on a library DVD copy of Die Nibelungun. I just wanted to watch some more Fritz Lang. When I opened the case, I found two discs inside and, upon examination, discovered that they were two halves of a single story (or a film and its immediate sequel; I’m sure there is a distinction, but it makes little difference). I remember thinking to…

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Demonwarp (1988)

Most low-budget genre movies I tend to recommend on this blog make up for their lack of resources with an excess of style. I love a scrappy production that strives to impress its audience in every frame, distracting us from the shoddiness of the acting, sets, and props with an extravagance of over-the-top images & ideas. A major problem with those kinds of high-style, low budget oddities, though,…

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Mr. Monkey's Magic Merry Go Round (2026)

There’s a saturation point with overtly derivative horror movies where, if you make enough of them on a similar topic, they stop being treated as knockoffs and start being treated as a legitimate subgenre. Were there any dedicated fans of Bob Clark’s Black Christmas that initially brushed off John Carpenter’s Halloween as a copycat knockoff in 1978? Maybe, but dozens of Fridays the 13th later,…

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Pretty Ugly: The Story of the Lunachicks (2026)

John Waters’s Desperate Living is, for all practical purposes, my favorite movie. I’ve seen it dozens of times — twice theatrically. This week, I learned something new about one of its most outrageous scenes: the babysitter on acid vignette. It’s a minutes-long gag wherein one of the citizens of Mortville explains that their expulsion from proper society resulted from brutally murdering their…

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Lagniappe Podcast: Ömer the Tourist in Star Trek (1973)

For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the Turksploitation sci-fi parody Ömer the Tourist in Star Trek (1973). 00:00 Welcome02:37 Maisie Was a Lady (1941)06:47 Ringside Maisie (1941)10:56 Maisie Gets Her Man (1942)15:32 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920)18:58 The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923)20:15 The Man Who Laughs (1928)25:11 Die Nibelungen (1924)35:15 All…

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I Love Boosters (2026)

I Love Boosters is many things. It’s a heist movie that takes a sharp left turn into science fiction territory. It’s a jeremiad about the life-destroying conditions of the sweat shops in which most of our clothing is manufactured. It’s a meditation on the material conditions of entry level retail work, and it’s a barely exaggerated take on C-suite self-aggrandization, and it’s a satire that takes…

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Backrooms (2026)

At last! A freshman feature from a filmmaker who made their bones on YouTube that I actually enjoyed! When I walked out of Obsession, I texted Brandon to let him know that, alas, I had hated it. He replied that this meant that “the Talk to Me curse has not lifted,” and I responded that I had loved Bring Her Back, and he astutely noted that this was a different thing: “That one’s elevated Grief Is…

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Ramekin (2018)

The abundance of praise for Obsession is making me feel like I’m losing my mind. Everywhere I go, people are talking about it, well, obsessively. Was I, as my friend Jeb has suggested, simply in the wrong mood when I saw it? Am I simply getting too old and out of touch with, as Brandon has suggested to me, youthful prankster horror? I feel like it was fine, but I’ve seen The Twilight Zone and…

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The Sheep Detectives (2026)

I had zero interest in seeing The Sheep Detectives. Any film that advertises itself as being “from the director of Minions and Despicable Me 3” knows that it is both reaching out to its intended audience as well as forewarning those, like me, who are not part of that number. I also don’t normally bother with family films; I have no children and know almost none, but I got to meet my partner’s…

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How to Make a Killing (2026)

I was intrigued by the initial trailers for John Patton Ford’s modern update on Kind Hearts and Coronets, How to Make a Killing. Glen Powell as the disenfranchised heir to a massive fortune who has to pick off his awful relatives one by one, what’s not to love? Unfortunately, a better question would have been “What’s there to love?”, and the answer is “Not very much.”  The extravagantly wealthy…

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Scream 7 (2026)

I was recently in Illinois, and the flights to and from O’Hare gave me the opportunity to catch up on some new releases I had missed. I had intentionally avoided (read: boycotted) seeing Scream 7 in theaters because of what happened to Melissa Barrera and the utter cowardice with which her morally correct opposition to the Palestinian genocide resulted in her being let go from the franchise. I…

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Is God Is (2026)

I live in a majority Black neighborhood in a majority Black city with its very own four-screen cinema just a few bus stops away from my front porch. In the decade or so since that theater has opened, this week is the first instance I’ve ever noticed that the majority of the movies on that cinema’s marquee were helmed by Black directors and Black leads, which suggests that we’re currently…

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The Currents (2026)

Everyone knows what you mean when you describe a film as “a character study,” but I’d like to expand on that genre descriptor to include a new subcategory: the character mystery. Many festival-circuit dramas operate as alienating character studies of inscrutable people—especially women—that the audience must puzzle through only to vaguely understand. The first time this occurred to me was during…

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Podcast #265: Chess of the Wind (1976) & The World Cinema Project

Welcome to Episode #265 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a selection of films that have been restored by Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, starting with the Iranian familial thriller Chess of the Wind (1976). 00:00 Welcome02:11 Obsession (2026)09:09 Microcosmos (1996)18:42 The Housemaid (2025)25:55 Maya Deren 32:54 The World Cinema…

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Maisie Was a Lady (1941)

For the first time, we open a Maisie picture (this is the fourth) with our leading lady already employed. It’s not very dignified, unfortunately; she’s in a carnival sideshow set up in a contraption with a mirror that makes her appear headless. When troublemaking wealthy alcoholic Bob Rawlston (Lew Ayres) tickles her on stage and costs her the job, he allows her to borrow his car to get into…

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