Hateration holleration:
CAST A DEADLY SPELL (1991): Irritating fantasy-noir pastiche, set in 1948, about a hardboiled P.I. named Phillip Lovecraft (Fred Ward), the only person in a magic-dominated Los Angeles who stubbornly refuses to use magic, hired by a rich asshole (David Warner) to find the Necronomicon. Suitably cast, but never as fun or as clever as it thinks it is — the novelty of the premise wears off quickly, and it can't make up for the cliched characters, the nasty transmisogyny, or the fact that the fate of the world eventually hinges on someone having sex with an underage girl! Yuck. CONTAINS LESBIANS? No. VERDICT: A premise in search of a movie.
DESERT HEARTS (1985): Decent though not very faithful Donna Deitch adaptation of a 1964 Jane Rule lesbian novel about 35-year-old academic Vivian Bell (Helen Shaver), in Reno for six weeks to divorce her husband, falling for younger, free-spirited Cay Rivvers (Patricia Charbonneau). I'm glad Deitch discarded the novel's hand-wringing about the protagonist's soon-to-be-ex husband, but the Cay-Vivian relationship is less interesting than subplots about Cay and her stepmother (Audra Lindley), who runs the ranch where Vivian is staying, and Cay's relationship with her older bisexual FWB Silver (Andra Akers), whose fiancee (Alex McArthur) is aware of and apparently fine with Silver's attraction to women. The cautiously optimistic conclusion was fairly groundbreaking at the time, but feels too ambivalent today. CONTAINS LESBIANS? Yes! VERDICT: Much less misery than the usual Lesbian Period Piece, but falls a bit flat at the end.
HIM (2025): Visually arresting, surreal psychological horror film, produced (but not written or directed) by Jordan Peele, about a concussed young football player (Tyriq Withers) whose private training mentorship with a veteran quarterback (Marlon Wayans) goes to some very dark places. Eye-popping visual style and strong lead performances hold your attention, but the bloody climax stops frustratingly short of taking the film's nightmarish vision of professional football to some coherent conclusion, leaving it with a bad case of FIGHT CLUB Syndrome (i.e., glorifying what it thinks it's critiquing). Its attitude toward women is also about on the level of a Motley Crue video, and I wasn't comfortable with the attempt to make very white costar Julia Fox look like Halsey. CONTAINS LESBIANS? No. VERDICT: A great-looking film that lacks the payoff it needed.
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE (2005): Overrated David Cronenberg adaptation of the 1997 John Wagner/Vincent Locke graphic novel, about a small-town husband and father (Viggo Mortensen) who turns out to have a sordid, violent past his wife (Maria Bello) and kids knew nothing about. Sticks relatively close to the comic's plot for about an hour, but from there, Josh Olson's script discards almost all of the graphic novel's convoluted backstory in favor of a disappointingly straightforward bloodbath. Neither version is really satisfying: The comic is plottier, but falls short in both logic and emotional engagement; the film has bigger thematic ambitions, but there's too little meat to the story to tie it all together, and it's severely hampered by the miscasting of William Hurt. Main virtues are Cronenberg's sense of the visceral and Bello's memorably horny costarring role. CONTAINS LESBIANS? No. VERDICT? About half of a decent pulp fiction, but sputters out in the third act.
SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE (2025): Flavorless dramatization of Bruce Springsteen's struggle with his personal demons while writing his 1982 album NEBRASKA. Jeremy Allen White is completely unconvincing as Springsteen — he neither looks, sounds, nor moves like him, and he has none of Springsteen's on-stage charisma — and the dramatization brings nothing to the story you couldn't get from the Warren Zanes book on which the script is based, Springsteen's own 2016 memoir, or Springsteen's Broadway show (which has the benefit of musical performances that aren't lip-synched). CONTAINS LESBIANS? No. VERDICT? Not terrible as musical biopics go, but even as a Springsteen fan, I struggle to see the point.
