A 4K restoration of Keane, starring Damian Lewis, comes to Lincoln Center beginning August 19
KEANE (Lodge Kerrigan, 2004)
Film at Lincoln Center, Francesca Beale Theater, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center
144 West 65th St. between Eighth Ave. & Broadway
Opens Friday, August 19 www.filmlinc.org grasshopperfilm.com
Lodge Kerrigan’s remarkable third feature, Keane, is mesmerizing, always teetering on the brink of insanity. Damian Lewis, years before Homeland and Billions, stars as William Keane, whom we first meet as he rants and raves in the Port Authority, filled with anger, paranoia, and a twitchiness that immediately sets you on edge and never lets up. He is trying to figure out what went wrong when his daughter was abducted from the area, but he now acts like just another crazy at the bus depot. As he befriends a desperate woman (Gone Baby Gone’s Amy Ryan) and her daughter (Little Miss Sunshine’s Abigail Breslin), you’ll feel a gamut of terrifying emotions rush through your body. The cast also features such familiar faces as Liza Colón-Zayas, Christopher Evan Welch, Chris Bauer, Frank Wood, Stephen McKinley Henderson, and others in tiny roles.
With Keane, Kerrigan, who made a big indie splash with his 1993 debut, Clean, Shaven, has created a brilliant psychological film centered on one man’s obsession that will leave you emotionally and physically spent. Filmed on location in 35mm with a handheld camera (with only one shot per scene) and natural sound, Keane has a taut realism that will knock you for a loop. You’ll love this film, but it will also scare the hell out of you.
A selection of the 2004 New York Film Festival, Keane is back at Lincoln Center beginning August 19 in a brand-new 4K restoration supervised by Kerrigan and TV and film editor Kristina Boden; Lewis and Kerrigan — who has made only one film since Keane, 2010’s Rebecca H. (Return to the Dogs), instead concentrating on directing episodes of such series as Homeland,The Killing, and The Girlfriend Experience — will participate in a Q&A following the 6:30 screening on August 20, moderated by Christopher Abbott.
Interactive experience immerses fans into the creepy world of Stranger Things (photo courtesy Netflix)
STRANGER THINGS: THE EXPERIENCE
Duggal Greenhouse
63 Flushing Ave., Building 268, Brooklyn
Wednesday – Sunday through September 4, children $64 – $96.80, adults $84.90 – $129 strangerthings-experience.com
If you’ve been watching or are up to date with Stranger Things on Netflix, you might have found yourself occasionally having trouble sleeping, especially after certain particularly frightening episodes of the sci-fi horror hit, set in the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana, in the 1980s. Unsurprisingly, the citizens of Hawkins are having their own slumber issues, which is the premise behind Stranger Things: The Experience, an immersive adventure that continues at the Duggal Greenhouse at the Brooklyn Navy Yard through September 4.
The Hawkins National Laboratory (HNL), part of the US Department of Energy, is conducting a sleep study to find out just what is going on in “the Best Small Town in America” — as if they didn’t already know that it has to do with killer creatures and the Upside Down, an alternate dimension where evil, unexplainable events are happening, brought about by the lab itself.
Subjects — er, ticket holders — are led through a series of rooms that begins as a scientific research study into paranormal powers, testing various skills, but quickly turns dangerous. Suddenly the soothing, instructive words of Dept. of Energy executive Sam Owens (Paul Reiser) and HNL head Dr. Martin Brenner (Matthew Modine), affectionately known to his patients as Papa, seem disingenuous as new perils await around each corner.
Beware the demogorgon at Stranger Things experience (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Meanwhile, a group of kids are trying to help, consisting of the goofy but determined Dustin Henderson (Gaten Matarazzo); the always serious Lucas Sinclair (Caleb McLaughlin); the fiercely independent Max Mayfield (Sadie Sink); the deeply sensitive Will Byers (Noah Schnapp), who went missing in season one; Mike Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard), who undergoes the biggest coming-of-age changes over the course of the show; and, at the center of it all, Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), a mysterious young girl with special powers who appears virtually out of nowhere in the first episode. Just as an fyi, you won’t encounter Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder), Sheriff Jim Hopper (David Harbour), Nancy Wheeler (Natalia Dyer), Jonathan Byers (Charlie Heaton), Steve Harrington (Joe Keery), Eddie Munson (Joseph Quinn), Erica Sinclair (Priah Ferguson), or Murray Bauman (Brett Gelman) during the journey, but to say any more would venture into spoiler territory.
Stranger Things: The Experience is like a series of escape rooms, except there is always a way out. The show, created by the Duffer Brothers, has presented thirty-four episodes over four seasons since its premiere on July 15, 2016; each of the uniquely detailed spaces in Duggal Greenhouse is like a new episode, with its own storyline as well as prompts to make sure participants make it through safely.
Although children as young as five are allowed to enter, there are four-letter words, and several of the cool special effects can be legitimately scary for some people of any age, so be prepared. Netflix clearly went all-in on this sixty-minute production, which includes a 3D room that, like the show, makes you question reality. Everything is original to the experience; it does not repurpose existing material. It also knows exactly what fans want, so arrive with an investigative spirit that can lead to a few little bonuses that others might miss. But you won’t be lost if you haven’t finished season four yet. (The fifth and final season is not scheduled to air until 2024 or 2025.)
The experience concludes with a re-creation of the Starcourt Mall, complete with the Scoops Ahoy Ice Cream Parlor, Surfer Boy Pizza, the Time-Out Arcade, a video store, a 1980s-style telephone booth (alas, there’s a dial tone but you can’t make a call), the Hellfire Club merch shop, Rink-O-Mania, the Byers living room (with fab details that need to be seen up close), and the Upside bar, where you can order such drinks as the Demogorgon, the Upside Down, Friends Don’t Lie, the Hopper, and Yuri Gonna Love This and check out a few original costumes and props. There’s also a bonus photo opp room.
Tickets are expensive — $64-$84.90 for standard admission, $96.80-$129 for VIP skip-the-line access, which includes a free drink, a tote bag, and a discount on merchandise — so it’s really meant for the true Stranger Things fan. But for those loyal devotees, some of whom come dressed as characters — everyone is encouraged to dress like it’s the ’80s — it’s wicked fun, a bitchin’, righteously gnarly good time.
To keep up the strangeness, Stranger Sings! The Parody Musical returns to New York City in an updated, immersive, in-the-round production starting September 12 at Playhouse 46 at St. Luke’s. Directed by Nick Flatto and with book, music, and lyrics by Jonathan Hogue, the hundred-minute show features such songs as “Welcome to Hawkins,” “The Dad I Never Had,” “Getting Closer,” “In These Woods,” and “Where There’s a Will.”
Guides interview the deceased in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life
AFTER LIFE (WANDÂFURU RAIFU) (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 1998)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Friday, August 12, $15, 7:00 www.japansociety.org
Japan Society’s Monthly Classics series continues on August 12 with Hirokazu Kore-eda’s second narrative feature, After Life, an eminently thoughtful film about two of his recurring themes: death and memory. Every Monday, the deceased arrive at a way station where they have three days to decide on a single memory they can bring with them into heaven. Once chosen, the memory is re-created on film, and the person goes on to the next step of their journey, to be replaced by a new batch of souls. The way station is staffed by guides, including Takashi Mochizuki (Arata), Shiori Satonaka (Erika Oda), and Satoru Kawashima (Susumu Terajima), whose job it is to interview the new arrivals and help them select a memory and then bring it to life on-screen. Some want to take with them an idyllic moment from childhood, others a remembrance of a lost love, but a few are either unable to or refuse to come up with one, which challenges the staff. Twenty-one-year-old Yūsuke Iseya declares, “I have no intention of choosing. None,” while seventy-year-old Ichiro Watanabe (Taketoshi Naito) is having difficulty deciding on the exact moment, reevaluating and reflecting on the life he led. As the week continues, the guides look back on their lives as well, sharing intimate details, one of which leads to an emotional finale.
After Life explores life, death, memory, heaven, and the art of filmmaking
Kore-eda, who previously examined memory loss in the documentary Without Memory and explored a family’s reaction to death in the brilliant Still Walking, interviewed some five hundred people about what memory they would take with them to heaven, and some of those nonprofessional actors are in the final cut of After Life, blurring the lines between fiction and reality. After Life is also very much about the art of filmmaking itself, as each memory is turned into a short movie created on a set and watched in a screening room. In fact, the film was inspired by Kore-eda’s memories of his grandfather’s battle with what would later be identified as Alzheimer’s disease; the director has also cited Ernst Lubitsch’s 1943 comedy, Heaven Can Wait, as an influence, and the Japanese title, Wandâfuru raifu, means “Wonderful Life,” evoking Frank Capra’s holiday classic. But Kore-eda never gets maudlin about life or death in the film, instead painting a memorable portrait of human existence and those simple moments that make it all worthwhile — and will have viewers contemplating which memory they would take with them when the time comes.
Lucy Harbin (Joan Crawford) doesn’t take kindly to marital infidelity in Strait-Jacket
STRAIT-JACKET (William Castle, 1964)
Village East Cinema by Angelika
181-189 Second Ave. at 12th St.
Friday, August 12, $20, 8:00 www.angelikafilmcenter.com
One of the posters for William Castle’s 1964 camp classic, Strait-Jacket, screams out, “Warning! Strait-Jacket vividly depicts ax murders!” accompanied by a lurid illustration of an ax swinging down and spraying blood. Indeed, when Lucy Harbin (Joan Crawford) comes home early one night and catches her younger husband (Lee Majors) in bed with another woman (Patricia Crest), she grabs an ax and gives them each a nasty whack. After twenty years in an asylum, she returns to her farm to find her daughter, Carol (Diane Baker), engaged to Michael Fields (John Anthony Hayes), whose parents (Howard St. John and Edith Atwater) don’t particularly approve of the union. Soon heads are rolling, and no one is safe.
The first of a handful of low-budget exploitation films made by Crawford at the end of her career — which also included Castle’s I Saw What You Did, Jim O’Connolly’s Berserk! and Freddie Francis’s Trog — Strait-Jacket has quite a pedigree, written by Robert Bloch, the screenwriter of Psycho; produced and directed by Castle, who had previously made House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler; photographed in black-and-white by two-time Oscar nominee Arthur E. Arling (The Yearling, I’ll Cry Tomorrow); a Theremin-heavy soundtrack by bandleader and composer Van Alexander; and costarring future Oscar winner George Kennedy, Six Million Dollar Man Majors, WWII navy hero Leif Erickson, and Pepsi vice president and nonactor Mitchell Cox. (Crawford was the widow of former Pepsi president Al Steele and was still on the board of directors of the company, resulting not only in Cox’s appearance but also in overt product placement in the movie.)
But most of all, Strait-Jacket has Crawford, who chews up the scenery with relish, living up to Faye Dunaway’s portrayal of her in Frank Perry’s 1981 cult favorite, Mommie Dearest. Just wait till you see her light a match using a record on a turntable and her reaction to a bust of her that her daughter has made — an actual bust of Crawford from her time at MGM in the 1930s. And be sure not to miss the Columbia Pictures logo at the end. Strait-Jacket is being shown August 12 at 8:00 in the long-running Village East series “Hedda Lettuce Presents the Classics,” hosted by the one and only drag icon Hedda Lettuce (Steven Polito); Hedda Lettuce will be back August 26 with the one and only Mommie Dearest.
With New York City sweltering in a muggy, sweat-drenching summer with temps that have stayed in the nineties, Metrograph offers two things to cool you off that usually don’t go together: air-conditioning and swimming. But that’s just what their new series, “Pool Party,” does, consisting of seven films in which characters go for a dip, for good and for bad.
The series kicks off with François Ozon’s beguiling mystery Swimming Pool, in which Charlotte Rampling shows Ludivine Sagnier that she still has it, followed by Jacques Deray’s 1969 erotic thriller La Piscine, in which Jane Birkin shakes things up between Alain Delon and Romy Schneider. Burt Lancaster swims home through suburban backyard pools in Frank Perry’s 1968 adaptation of John Cheever’s 1964 short story “The Swimmer.” Selena Gomez and friends take a wild road trip in Harmony Korine’s 2012 Spring Breakers, meeting up with a metallic-smiling James Franco. Elsie Fisher finds more trouble than she bargained for as a middle school vlogger in Bo Burnham’s bittersweet debut, Eighth Grade. British artist David Hockney makes a big splash in Jack Hazan’s 1974 hybrid docudrama, A Bigger Splash. And Lucretia Martel traces the fall of a bourgeois family in her 2001 debut, La Ciénaga. Below is a deeper dive into two of the films; get those bathing suits on and jump in to beat the heat!
Jealousy and envy are at the heart of François Ozon’s sexy thriller
Charlotte Rampling is divine in Swimming Pool, François Ozon’s playfully creepy mystery about a popular British crime novelist taking a break from the big city (London) to recapture her muse at her publisher’s French villa, only to be interrupted by the publisher’s hot-to-trot teenage daughter. Rampling stars as Sarah Morton, a fiftysomething novelist who is jealous of the attention being poured on young writer Terry Long (Sebastian Harcombe) by her longtime publisher, John Bosload (Game of Thrones’s Charles Dance). John sends Sarah off to his elegant country house, where she sets out to complete her next Inspector Dorwell novel in peace and quiet. But the prim and proper — and rather bitter and cynical — Sarah quickly has her working vacation intruded upon by Julie (Ludivine Sagnier), John’s teenage daughter, who likes walking around topless and living life to the fullest, clearly enjoying how Sarah looks at her and judges her. “You’re just a frustrated English writer who writes about dirty things but never does them,” Julie says, and soon Sarah is reevaluating the choices she’s made in her own life. Rampling, who mixes sexuality with a heart-wrenching vulnerability like no other actress (see The Night Porter,The Verdict, and Heading South), more than holds her own as the primpy old maid in the shadow of a young beauty, even tossing in some of nudity to show that she still has it. (Rampling also posed nude in her sixties in a series of photographs by Juergen Teller alongside twentysomething model Raquel Zimmerman, so such “competition” is nothing to her.)
Julie (Ludivine Sagnier) and Sarah (Charlotte Rampling) come to a kind of understanding in François Ozon’s Swimming Pool
Rampling has really found her groove working with Ozon, having appeared in five of his films, highlighted by a devastating performance in Under the Sand as a wife dealing with the sudden disappearance of her husband. Sagnier, who has also starred in Ozon’s Water Drops on Burning Rocks and 8 Women, is a delight to watch, especially as things turn dark. Swimming Pool is very much about duality; the film opens with a shot of the shimmering Thames river while the title comes onscreen and Philippe Rombi’s score of mystery and danger plays, and later Sarah says, “I absolutely loathe swimming pools,” to which Julie responds, “Pools are boring; there’s no excitement, no feeling of infinity. It’s just a big bathtub.” (“It’s more like a cesspool of living bacteria,” Sarah adds.) Ozon (Time to Leave, Criminal Lovers) explores most of the seven deadly sins as Sarah and Julie get to know each other all too well.
David Hockney works on his masterpiece in Jack Hazan’s A Bigger Splash
A BIGGER SPLASH (Jack Hazan, 1974)
Saturday, August 6, 2:30
Sunday, August 7, 5:00
Saturday, August 13, 7:15 metrograph.com
Coinciding with Pride celebrations throughout New York City in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots in June 2019, Metrograph premiered a 4K restoration of Jack Hazan’s pivotal 1974 A Bigger Splash, a fiction-nonfiction hybrid that was a breakthrough work for its depiction of gay culture as well as its inside look at the fashionable and chic Los Angeles art scene of the early 1970s. In November 2018, David Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at auction for $90.3 million, the most ever paid for a work by a living artist. A Bigger Splash, named after another of Hockney’s paintings — both are part of a series of canvases set around pools in ritzy Los Angeles — takes place over three years, as the British artist, based in California at the time, hangs out with friends, checks out a fashion show, prepares for a gallery exhibition, and works on Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) in the wake of a painful breakup with his boyfriend, model, and muse, Peter Schlesinger, who is a key figure in the painting.
It’s often hard to know which scenes are pure documentary and which are staged for the camera as Hazan and his then-parter, David Mingay, who served as director of photography, tag along with Hockney, who rides around in his small, dirty BMW, meeting up with textile designer Celia Birtwell, fashion designer Ossie Clark, curator Henry Geldzahler, gallerist John Kasmin, artist Patrick Procktor, and others, who are identified only at the beginning, in black-and-white sketches during the opening credits. The film features copious amounts of male nudity, including a long sex scene between two men, a group of beautiful boys diving into a pool in a fantasy sequence, and Hockney disrobing and taking a shower. Hockney’s assistant, Mo McDermott, contributes occasional voice-overs; he also poses as the man standing on the deck in Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), only to be replaced by Schlesinger later. There are several surreal moments involving Hockney’s work: He cuts up one painting; Geldzahler gazes long and hard at himself in the double portrait of him and Christopher Scott; and Hockney tries to light the cigarette Procktor is holding in a painting as Procktor watches, cigarette in hand, mimicking his pose on canvas. At one point Hockney is photographing Schlesinger in Kensington Gardens, reminiscent of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, which questions the very nature of capturing reality on film.
Hockney was so upset when he first saw A Bigger Splash, which Hazan made for about twenty thousand dollars, that he offered to buy it back from Hazan in order to destroy it; Hazan refused, and Hockney went into a deep depression. His friends ultimately convinced him that it was a worthwhile movie and he eventually accepted it. It’s a one-of-a-kind film, a wild journey that goes far beyond the creative process as an artist makes his masterpiece. Hockney, who turned eighty-five last month, has been on quite a roll of late. He was the subject of a 2016 documentary by Randall Wright, was widely hailed for his 2018 Met retrospective, and had a major drawing show at the Morgan Library in 2020-21. In addition, Catherine Cusset’s novel, Life of David Hockney, was published in English in 2019, a fictionalized tale that conceptually recalls A Bigger Splash.
Brazilian writer-director Anita Rocha da Silveira follows up her 2015 success, Kill Me Please, about murder, sin, and misogyny among adolescents, with Medusa, which takes similar themes and more to another level.
According to ancient myth, Medusa was a beautiful mortal Gorgon virgin who was cursed after being seduced by Poseidon; she turned into an ugly snake-haired demon, and men who looked directly at her were turned into stone. In Medusa, a group of God-fearing young women prowl the streets at night, wearing white masks, hunting down sinful women and beating them until they agree to renounce their sins and worship Jesus; their confessions are recorded and posted on social media, where they go viral. The vicious group is inspired by an unknown woman who, years before, put on a mask and set on fire the face of an actress and dancer named Melissa (Bruna Linzmeyer) because of her lascivious promiscuity. Neither woman has been seen since.
By day, the mask-wearing gang is a bright and cheery religious singing troupe known as the Treasures of the Lord, dressed all in white, proudly chirping, “The Lord shall make my dream come true,” declaring themselves to be “witnesses of faith.” They are members of a cultlike church run by the charismatic Pastor Guilherme (Thiago Fragoso), who tells his flock, “My brothers, for a long time, the church has been estranged from the nation’s decisions. How much time have we wasted believing that the church shouldn’t decide the country’s future?”
The young men in the church are part of the Watchmen of Sion, self-appointed “guardians of the family, the morals, and the Lord,” a well-trained vigilante mob whose goal is to “crush the sinners.” The objective is that the Watchmen and the Treasures chastely fall in love and marry, creating a next generation of religious zealots to continue their mission to transform the world into faithful legions.
One night, the masked Treasures’ target fights back, scarring Mari’s (Mari Oliveria) face. The disfigurement is embarrassing to Mari, Treasures leader Michele (Lara Tremouroux), and the plastic surgery clinic where Mari works; she is soon fired because of her appearance.
While indoctrinating newbie Clarissa (Bruna G), Mari sets out to get a photo of the original victim, Melissa, and expose her sins on social media. She gets a job at a mysterious hospital that cares for people in long-term comas who are not expected to regain consciousness. There Mari is befriended by coworker Lucas (Felipe Frazão), who is attracted to her. It isn’t long before Mari begins questioning where her carefully regimented life is leading her.
Medusa is a creepy thriller, the eerie spawn of John Carpenter, David Lynch, Claire Denis, Dario Argento, and Brian De Palma as well as Georges Franju’s Eyes without a Face and Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing’s Jesus Camp. Not afraid to let her influences show, Rocha da Silveira imbues the film with a 1970s giallo / 1980s horror aesthetic even though it is set in the present day. It’s a cleverly disguised condemnation of the far-right evangelical movement that seeks to control women’s bodies, legislate their restrictive morality, and convert their country — be it Brazil, the United States, or elsewhere — into a Christian nation.
Mari (Mari Oliveria) and Michele (Lara Tremouroux) attempt to hide their own scars while inflicting pain on others in Brazilian thriller
Cinematographer João Atala often zooms in for close-ups of characters’ faces, exploring ideas of beauty as well as physical and emotional scars; Mari isn’t the only one attempting to cover something up. The women occasionally stare directly into the camera, implicating the viewer for making judgments and hiding their own sins, symbolically threatening to turn them to stone.
Despite numerous plot holes, digressions left hanging, and bumpy transitions between scenes, Medusa is a dark, compelling chiller with a killer soundtrack by Bernardo Uzeda, including classic tunes (for example, “House of the Rising Sun”) with rewritten religious lyrics that provide a false sense of security to their performers. The film, now playing at the Angelika, is a dark cautionary tale about forcing one’s morals onto others in a world where we all debate who the real monsters are.
Alan Cumming stars as Scottish hoaxer Brandon Lee in My Old School
MY OLD SCHOOL (Jono McLeod, 2022)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens Friday, July 22
212-727-8110 filmforum.org
“To rewind your life and be someone different — what would possess someone to do that?” Nicola asks at the beginning of Jono McLeod’s brilliantly eccentric hybrid documentary, My Old School.
Sam adds, “Anything’s possible here. I’m telling you, this guy is a charmer. He’s not what you think he is; he never was.”
In 1993, a new student named Brandon Lee entered prestigious Bearsden Academy in Scotland. Although he appeared to be significantly older than the rest of his classmates, some of whom initially assumed he was a teacher, he continued going to school and even starred as marine lieutenant Joseph Cable in Bearsden’s production of South Pacific. But it turned out that Brandon was not who he said he was, leading to a major scandal.
Jono McLeod uses animation flashbacks to tell strange tale in hybrid documentary
In 1995, it was announced that Scots actor Alan Cumming would portray Brandon in a movie, but it never got made. Instead, nearly thirty years later, Cumming is finally playing the man who eventually got caught pulling off a hoax of epic proportions. But Cumming doesn’t speak a word in the film; Brandon agreed to tell his story to McLeod, who was one of his Bearsden classmates, but he refused to appear on camera. So, sitting in a school desk, Cumming expertly lip syncs Brandon’s extremely strange tale of ambition, deception, and just plain weirdness.
It’s a bravura performance, reminiscent of Deirdre O’Connell’s Tony-winning role in Dana H., in which she portrayed playwright Lucas Hnath’s mother, sitting in a chair as she lip synced the story of an abduction from an interview Hnath conducted with the real Dana. Cumming, a Tony-winning stage actor himself (Cabaret,Macbeth), uses small gestures and movements and his alluring eyes to convey Brandon’s state of mind without ever getting out of his seat; George Geddes’s camera is as curious as we are, exploring his face and body in extreme close-ups as if looking for cracks in his armor.
In his debut feature film, McLeod, a former reporter and current television documentarian, uses multiple ways to share the bizarre chronicle: In addition to interviewing the main subject, McLeod speaks with more than a dozen of Brandon’s classmates, who also sit at school desks as they relate what happened from beginning to end. They do so with both humor and wonder, laughing and smiling as they describe the details of Brandon’s subterfuge; McLeod gets several teachers to go on the record as well.
McLeod presents their testimonials in playful animation (courtesy Rory Lowe), inspired by MTV’s Daria, interspersing real news reports and other archival footage, all seamlessly edited with quirky delight by Berny McGurk. Some of the cartoon characters are voiced by actors, including Clare Grogan as Mrs. Ogg, Joe McFadden as Mr. MacLeod, Juliet Cadzow as Brandon’s grandmother, Michele Gallagher as Mrs. Thomson, Camilla Kerslake as Brandon’s opera-diva mother, Gary Lamont as Mr. MacKinnon, Carly McKinnon as science teacher Miss MacKichan, Brian O’Sullivan as Mr. Gunn, Dawn Steele as Mrs. Nolan, Wam Siluka Jr. as Stefen (who lovingly admits how Brandon changed his life), and, most notably, the one and only Lulu (To Sir, with Love) as mean Mrs. Holmes. Lulu also sings the cover version of Steely Dan’s “My Old School” over the closing credits, during which McLeod pairs childhood photos of the students and teachers with their animated versions.
It’s a tour de force of storytelling, and what a story it tells. The less you know going in, the better, but regardless, it’s one hundred minutes of utter fun and amazement, particularly potent in 2022, when personal identity is at the forefront of so much discussion. My Old School opens July 22 at Film Forum; there will be Q&As with McLeod after the 7:50 screenings on Friday and Saturday night.
