Nicole's Viewing Notes: April
What I watched (and podcasted about) this month
March Movie Madness continues in Boston! Whatever hopes I had that April wouldn’t be nearly as busy for me as March dissipated with the line-ups for Wicked Queer and Boston Independent Film Festival were announced. Then Speed Racer got confirmed for a one-night-only IMAX event. Also Anime Boston happened.1 I’m very tired. Let’s see if I can keep things brief this time.2
Wicked Queer
Erupcja, dir. Pete Ohs
Every major pop star eventually makes the transition into acting. Cher did it. Madonna did it. Lady Gaga did it. Taylor Swift tried. Cynically calculated career move on not, it was only inevitable that Charli xcx would parlay pop stardom into a film career. Charli’s got five movies releasing in 2026: The Moment, Faces of Death, Erupcja, I Want Your Sex, and Cathy Yan’s The Gallerist. Her leading turns in The Moment and Erupcja offer opposing approaches to integrating her persona into film: the former a heightened yet self-deprecating riff on the popular image of Charli as a vain, coked-out party girl (i.e. the overwhelming cultural conception of brat), the latter a deglammed, stripped-down Charli whose existential restlessness hews closer to brat’s emotionally vulnerable core. I was significantly more impressed by the latter.
Drawing from mumblecore, Eastern European New Wave, and Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating, Ohs’ collaborative effort Erupcja is a delightful little movie about two women throwing their responsibilities to the wind to pursue that ground-shaking feeling they only get when they’re together. The kind of subtle sapphism I’ve seen a lot of people (read: straight male critics) dismiss as just “they’re very good friends :)” when Charli’s Bethany is so clearly desperate to wriggle out of boring heterosexual domesticity with a bald man who pees while sitting down. I’m sure I’m not the only one who would have loved to see Charli make out with Lena Góra’s Nel (which you can see if you’re one of the lucky few to pick up a Erupcja prequel comic), but the emotional climax where Bethany recites Byron’s “Darkness” is especially charged. That’s yearning babe! And we sure do love women who yearn for each other!
Side note: “Rock Music” sucks. I’m sorry Charli, but you’ve only succeeded in making a new funny ear worm to rival Ice Spice’s “Big Guy” for me.
Castration Movie Chapter iii. Junior Ghosts—Premorphic Drift; a fragmentary passage, dir. Louise Weard
Wrote a bit about New Trans Cinema, Alice Maio Mackay’s The Serpent’s Skin, and the new theatrical edit of the upcoming third chapter of Louis Weard’s Castration Movie Anthology over on The Arts Fuse. Needless to say Junior Ghosts is now my favorite movie of the year so far, another film that happily tongue-fucks third rails of queer discourse with immensely more insight and empathy than most of what gets called “queer cinema” these days. To my knowledge one of the only movies to broach the topic of “trans widows” and the successive failures of empathy/black mold infestations that lead certain women to go full Rowling. (Avalon Fast even wears a witch’s hat at one point). Every Castration Movie entry has its own all-timer “feels bad man” moment, but the inevitable conclusion to Junior Ghosts had my jaw on the floor. If you’re wondering why we started talking about Mumsnet on the M3GAN episode of Marvelous! it’s because Louise Weard put me in a position where I had to explain to my boyfriend Evan what Mumsnet is. Truly the 10-plus hour film series that keeps on giving.
Independent Film Festival Boston
I Love Boosters, dir. Boots Riley
To paraphrase an unsourced quote from fashion icon and Nazi collaborator Coco Chanel, before you leave the house, take something off. It’s advice Boots Riley would do well to abide by in his next movie, because for all of I Love Boosters (very correct) observations about the nature of neoliberal consumerism, multinational labor exploitation, and how the fashion industry thrives on marked-up cultural appropriation, Riley’s kitchen sink approach and runaway-train pacing doesn’t leave enough breathing room to really ruminate on these issues the way they deserve. I’m a big fan of both Sorry to Bother You and Riley’s critically underseen miniseries I’m a Virgo, so I make this critique as someone who went into I Love Boosters wanting to love it and came away enjoying it but rather exhausted by the end. And Riley’s absurdist brand of Marxist Maximalism will be exhausting for those of you who were never on his wavelength to begin with. Nevertheless, a lot of what does work about I Love Boosters is thanks to Keke Palmer (delightful), Naomi Ackie (always reliable), Taylour Paige (hilarious), and Eiza González (the MVP who I initially mistook for Gabriette). And even if there’s plenty that doesn’t stick, Riley’s a true visual artist whose eccentricities and surplus of ideas give way to bold, creative filmmaking like tilted sets, stop-motion chase scenes, and looks, looks, LOOKS!
No, I’m not going to add anymore thoughts on the now weeks old Discourse about a self-described Marxist making art on Amazon or Megan Ellison’s dime when we should be having a broader conversation about what quote-unquote “independent” American cinema is anymore, or if it even does exist these days. Despite headlining IFFBoston3 (all festivals need tentpole programming), I Love Boosters is what we used to call a “mid-budget” movie at $20 million dollars, and that budget usually doesn’t include marketing. So if Boots wants to name search himself on Twitter and do some posting as self promotion, whatever. Doesn’t effect me. I think we’d all be better off caring less about how people post unless its actively hurting other people (no, being kinda cringe online isn’t doing industry-wide harm). Let the man rage within and against the machine.
Maddie’s Secret, dir. John Early
By no means the first send-up of women’s melodramas wherein the suffering female protagonist is played by a man in a (great) wig, but John Early’s Maddie’s Secret differentiates itself from John Waters’ Polyester by dropping the parodic cynicism entirely and going all in on emotional sincerity in a way I was pleasantly taken aback by! Second only to Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story as far as movies about struggling with eating disorders go. And like Superstar, the film’s conceit doesn’t throw other women under the bus to make a point; rather, by having Early play the titular Maddie (a gifted chef whose dormant bulimia resurfaces under the weight of viral fame), we’re not subjected to the indignities of seeing an actress wear a fake double-chin. I’ll have plenty to say about a certain Sundance movie that does exactly that for my May Viewing Notes. Nor does Early’s approach sacrifice the seriousness of the topic at hand (or cause collateral damage) for laughs; everything about Maddie’s struggle is devastating, deeply personal, and completely devoid of irony.
To get a bit vulnerable for a moment because this is the space where I’ve allowed myself the privilege to do so, I’ve struggled throughout my life with disordered eating and often crippling body dysmorphia. A really awesome thing about being in my thirties is this sudden lack of control I have over what my body does and how it reacts to what I put in it. My stomach in particular has been a sore point of fixation these last couple years thanks in no small part to a psychosomatic PTSD response, a couple cases of food poisoning, and prolonged, unexplainable bloating I’m actually going to see my PCP about. It seems like no matter what I eat, how healthy the food I consume is, and how many calories I count, I still feel burdened by some extra weight in my midsection I can’t shed. I don’t even like looking at pictures other people take of me anymore for fear I see them and am horrified that I look like that. Maddie’s Secret understands the universality of women’s body dysmorphia and the effect prolonged exposure to a patriarchal culture that measures women’s worth according to thinness has on our ability to lead healthy lives.
I Want Your Sex, dir. Gregg Araki
Guys…
GUYS!!!!!!
It is my immense privilege to tell you that not only is Sam Raimi back in form in the year of our lord 2026, but Gregg Araki, the crown prince of New Queer Cinema, has made a glorious return just when we the culture needed him most. As excited as I was to see Araki’s first film since 2014, I went in with tempered expectations. His last feature, White Bird in a White Blizzard, isn’t a bad movie by any means, but it’s more or less a YA retread of Mysterious Skin that has the audacity to dangle Sheryl Lee in front of me while a woefully miscast Eva Green puts on a distractingly anachronistic Transatlantic accent. I also thought Araki struggled to bring his particular filmmaking style into the digital era with 2011’s Kaboom! (itself a reworking of his superior but nonetheless failed MTV pilot This is How the World Ends). Having not seen his Starz series Now Apocalypse, the questions I had going into I Want Your Sex were if a) Araki still had the filmmaking juice after a decade spent in television, and b) if an aging Gen Xer could meaningfully comment on the peculiarities of Gen Z’s sexual habits and attitudes beyond haranguing them for their supposed frigidity.
Lo and behold, not only is 66 year-old Gregg Araki perfectly suited to the task at hand, but I Want Your Sex is an equal opportunity satire of the cross-generational impulse to perform and commodify sex into shitty art and even shittier content. Araki and co-screenwriter Karley Sciortino intuit that Millennial and Zoomer sexual neuroses are all responses to the same root issues: the messy vulnerability of desire, the fraught conversations around consent, and a cultural landscape where sex without eroticism has warped our own understanding of what pleasure even looks like. I Want Your Sex presents the age-gap employer-employee relationship between Olivia Wilde’s shitty art-provocateur Erika Tracey and Cooper Hoffman’s fresh-faced Elliot as a twist on Sunset Boulevard, complete with a framing device where Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville play anti-groomer cops. None of this would remotely work to the degree that it does if Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman weren’t 110% game for any and everything Araki throws at them, including cuffs, paddles, pig masks, and a dildo up the ass. Hardest I’ve laughed since Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. Felt like I was walking on air when it ended. Nothing quite like the euphoria of seeing a GOAT totally and unequivocally not washed this late in his career.
Hokum, dir. Damian McCarthy
Didn’t see Oddity. Heard it’s pretty good from several people whose horror opinions I trust. But Hokum, McCarthy’s folk horror follow-up, sucks. It’s 110 minutes of flagrantly telegraphed jump-scares and it’s nothing short of exhausting to sit through. Adam Scott plays Stephen King a horror novelist still grieving his parents’ deaths (some much needed middle-aged orphan representation here) whose stay at The Overlook Hotel an Irish hotel traps him in a supernatural maze of cyclical violence. Admittedly there’s not enough here to warrant comparisons to The Shining beyond the “spooky hotel” conceit and your stock Stephen King-type of protagonist. I was also told this was supposed to be about a witch. It’s not. This is an escape-room premise that only invokes witchcraft as a vague metaphor for the nature of suppressed male trauma. Nope, sorry movie, witches are historically spoken for in terms of what they represent! Considering every female character in Hokum is or ends up dead before the half-hour mark, I find the mere invocation of witchcraft ill-fitting for this kind of horror film. I’d be more forgiving if Hokum managed to catch me off guard even a little bit. May the record show that jump-scares can (and do) work on me. I’m a screamer when taken by surprise! But McCarthy signals every single scare with either empty space so something scary can appear in the background or that horribly loud “BWAMP BWAMP BWAMP” score cue that’s beyond hack at this point. Was mildly amusing to see the Sea Bear circle from SpongeBob make an appearance.
In theaters
Fever Pitch, dir. Peter & Bobby Farrelly
I probably shouldn’t even be counting this one considering we only got ten minutes into a pristine new film print provided by VFA’s Gregg Turkington before New Amato barged onto the stage demanding everyone leave the Wilbur so Green Day could perform a private show for Boston elites. The nerve of that guy and his goddamn toupée! (You’re not fooling anyone buddy!) Sadly this Boston popcorn classic isn’t available to stream on any services I subscribe to, so I just went back home Fever Pitch-less and went to bed. The good news is that Gregg managed to negotiate another season of On Cinema at the Cinema out of New Amato (who you SHOULDN’T be voting for if you’re a resident of Arizona — the guy killed 20 people and hasn’t faced any meaningful consequences). Someday I’ll actually get around to watching the decade-plus back catalogue of On Cinema. And maybe I’ll finish Fever Pitch too.
Faces of Death, dir. Daniel Goldhaber
Lotta people really loved this one! I’m a lot more lukewarm on Goldhaber’s meta-remake of the infamous 1978 mondo. Went long-ish on Letterboxd about some of my gripes with a movie that says a lot of very Correct things about the online attention economy and our algorithm-assisted desensitization to violence while being unable to square the circle of what its criticizing. The scariest shit here has nothing to do with a gay germaphobe murdering people for TikTok fame, but the split-screen sequence wherein said gay germaphobe locks onto Barbie Ferreira’s IP address with a malicious URL on Reddit. Brought to you by NordVPN!
In lieu of a real Viewing Notes capsule review, here’s my official “Starring Charli xcx” ranking by overall film quality:4
I Want Your Sex
Erupcja
The Moment
Faces of Death
100 Nights of Hero
Speed Racer, dir. Lana & Lilly Wachowski (IMAX)
Top to bottom my favorite Wachowskis movie, the most visually ambitious and achingly sincere blockbuster of the 21st century that also happens to be a live action remake of an anime only oldheads watched. Very funny that IMAX thought they could get away with a one-off screening on 4/20 when gay people have been screaming for this to happen for at least ten years. Regrettably didn’t partake of anything stronger than a couple of weed gummies. Evan’s got the 4K collector’s edition ordered so I’ll save a shrooms trip for the sanctity of my living room in however many months. I did get genuinely upset hearing people laugh at the Rex reveal. My ass was SOBBING! And to weigh in on some more Discourse: if you don’t fuck with Chim-Chim and Spritle you have a heart of stone and desperately need more joy and whimsy in your life! Get that cynical shit off my track!
Mother Mary, dir. David Lowrey
First thing I did when the lights came up was check the “Personal Life” section of David Lowrey’s Wikipedia page. Just as I suspected, zero homosexual activity detected. I seem to be more in alignment with the generally mixed critical consensus than with my cinephile friends, because the voluble and metaphor-heavy Mother Mary proved to be another let down. On paper, a horror-tinged reimagining of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant with pop stars should be a surefire thing for me! I love horror. I love women. I love movies about pop stardom. Unfortunately, Lowrey not only lacks the propensity for diva worship a queer filmmaker — particularly of the French variety — would bring to this concept, but his vision of the modern pop star feels entirely disconnected from anything contemporary or psychologically interesting about the weight of fame, the burden of personas, or the multifaceted relationships that produce and manufacture stardom itself.
Before anyone takes to the comments to scream at me, Mother Mary is very much a film about the bond between a pop star and a scorned creative collaborator, a chamber piece where two divas try to work it out on the remix by casting out a ghost in the form of the In Fabric dress. And its abundantly clear that Hathaway’s Mother Mary and Michaela Coel’s Sam were more than just good friends and creative partners. The sapphic subtext of Mother Mary is anything but subtle, but man, why relegate any of this to subtext (no matter how explicit) at all? It’s 2026 — we’re well past the point of having to offload queerness onto cliche visual metaphors like hands and vaginal-looking orifices, of which Mother Mary does constantly whenever its not monologuing at you. For God’s sake, just these beautiful women make out! Erupcja gets a pass because Ohs’ free-wheeling approach isn’t beating me over the head with signifiers or heavy-handed dialogue about the nature of it WLW relationship.
All of these problems are downstream from Lowrey’s original sin in choosing Taylor Swift as the template for his titular character. Taylor may be the most powerful pop star on the planet, but she’s also incredibly fucking boring and straighter than a ruler no matter what the Gaylors are fucking on about. I supposed Swift is comparatively popular to a religious deity, but I’m hardly the only person who thinks Mother Monster and her consistent invocation of Catholic iconography is the better fit. Marking this down as another movie I might come around to on a rewatch. Did very much appreciate the Suspiria 2018 homage.
On the pod
Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania
First 75% of the Quantumania discussion is our usual “this sucks” riffing, followed by 25% of me fighting back tears going over the details of how Jonathan Majors abused Grace Jabbari and tons of other women. Not fun!
Back by popular demand and because they require no prep work on my part, our TTRPG series returns with another superheroic adventure starring Boiling Point, Prince of the Moon, and my Crimes of Passion-meets-Cutie Honey magical girl Sailor Honey.
I done went and did a pookie reveal on the show! Despite my distaste for M3GAN, it holds personal significance as one of the earliest dates I went on with Evan, so of course I wanted him to come on the pod and talk about Blumhouse slop with us. I swear I’m not just saying this because I love the man but Evan was a really great guest. Came armed with bits and didn’t bat an eye when me, Stu, and Cole started talking about Mumsnet recommended sex toys for fifteen minutes.
The dolls are dolling!!!!! Chucky and Tiffany wouldn’t be that out of place in a Castration Movie entry.
Whatever you think of James Gunn and the “new” direction Warner Bros. is taking with its DC properties, I really can’t fault the decision to finally pull the plug on the DCEU. Shazam! Fury of the Gods is a death knell for the MCU’s closest competitor, a two-hour-ten Skittles commercial where Zachary Levi prances around doing ageplay shit and going “hey fam!” for seemingly no other reason than to ruin the rest of my day. And guess what? We still have three more DCEU movies to get through this year! God help us!
Which means I ran around the Hynes Convention Center and Prudential Mall dressed as Misato after chugging several White Claws.
Yeah I didn’t do that.
I’ll also be issuing bonus points for bearing witness to Boots trying to mass coordinate a post-Q&A audience photo-op for 20 minutes. Nice to get some insight into how he directs.
And to rank according to the quality of Charli’s performances:
Erupcja
The Moment
I Want Your Sex (nice little gimmick making her play a serious, sexless grad student who is always in bed reading a textbook)
100 Nights of Hero (fine, she gets to play a lute guitar and wear pretty dresses in the only part of the movie that actually worked for me)
Faces of Death (two minutes of Charli doing a bad American accent, won’t hold it against her too much because it is only two minutes of screentime)