NEW MOVIES / NEW COFFEE SHOPS

The sacred and profane and the LA-imported.

Last week, I and seemingly everyone else in NYC visited the newly opened Canyon Coffee. Standing in line, deeply hungover (you can thank Oddball bar for that), I ran into five different people I knew, so I’d you were one of them and I appeared some measure of dazed or evasive, or like a raccoon fresh off a night of digging through the trash, consider this a formal apology.

I was eventually revived by a fresh piece of toast puddled with almond butter (and regular butter) from a California brand I’ve never heard of. And they say there’s nothing new under the sun...

Canyon is one of several new specialty cafes in town, including another spot with LA. roots. There’s also traditional and novelty kimbap, beef patties, and the return of an iconic lamb burger.

But first, movies.

In theaters today, ordered from most to least chaotic:

🔔 CHIME + THE SERPENT’S PATH

✨ OUR HERO BALTHAZAR

🐬 JOHN LILLY AND THE EARTH COINCIDENCE OFFICE

🕯️ REVELATIONS OF DIVINE LOVE

💊 Fantasy Life

• Two Kiyoshi Kurosawa films—one new, one from 1998—both organized around the same unnerving themes: violence as a bug or disease, spreading invisibly through society. Screening as a double bill, Chime and The Serpent’s Path both cut to the quick of the Japanese genre filmmaker’s specialty: steeping us in an inexorable, irreversible dread.

  • In CHIME—originally an NFT and never to be streamed online—the tolls of a bell nudge those who hear it to a murderous state. Per usual, Kurosawa works in his language of distressingly odd cuts, angles, and sounds. Nowhere else does the thwack of a raw chicken leave one feeling so exposed and surpassingly anxious, or the line-reading of cassoulet sound so ominous. Kurosawa renders the cooking-school setting, which, as the teacher and student say should bring a kind of therapeutic calm, into something as psychologically menacing as the tropey, abandoned shack in the woods.

  • The mood is only furthered by the film keeping mum on motivations (why is the chef’s wife compulsively and passive-aggressively recycling?) and behaviors (why does this household produce so many cans to begin with?).

• I interviewed Oscar Boyson, director and co-writer, and co-writer Ricki Camilleri about their new movie, OUR HERO, BALTHAZAR—the second (and better) school-shooting fiction I’ve seen this year.

• I went in expecting something Dimes Square-adjacent and self-conscious in its posturing, but it is really neither. Our Hero, Balthazar, sketches characters who are deranged but earnest, a little dangerous but very lost, without fussing needlessly over likability, or its inverse.

  • Between this and the upcoming Chronovisor, American indie cinema appears to be having a good year. Full interview below.

  • This would be my pick for the weekend ✨

More Heart Than a Midnight Movie: Oscar Boyson and Ricky Camilleri on Our Hero, Balthazar

• For a more subdued study of another lost soul, one undone by drugs and a fevered cerebrum, there’s JOHN LILLY AND THE EARTH COINCIDENCE OFFICE.

  • This documentary by Courtney Stephens and Michael Almereyda is a kaleidoscopic portrait of the neuroscientist and self-styled “psychonaut” who pioneered research on dolphin speech and invented an isolation chamber, the basis of the 1980 Ken Russell film Altered States (recommended, streaming on Tubi). He also took a prodigious amount of psychedelics, dosing his dolphins along the way.

  • Built mostly of archival materials and narrated by none other than Chloe Sevigny, whose sweetly offhanded delivery lends a high-key, storybook wryness, the doc is as strange and absorbing as its subject.

• Calmer still: Who knew that one of the more compelling recent inquiries into spirituality would come from Jewish New Yorker Caroline Gollum and her self-described crew of Jews, communists, and queer people? Lovingly assembled with modest means, REVELATIONS OF DIVINE LOVE wears its microbudget proudly on its sleeve and is suffused with intelligent affection for its subject: Julian of Norwich, a medieval mystic who withdrew from society to commune with God.

  • Gollum’s proffers a parallel between the woman’s withdrawal and the creative act—the sense that any true calling requires a turning inward, a kind of solitude that borders on the divine. It's an analogue for filmmaking, and, personally, a gentle corrective.

  • As someone who grew up in the church and is ashamed and alarmed by the fascistic and false contingent of Christianity that has become more prevalent in recent years, Caroline’s film depicts faith as something interior and sustaining, as it should be. The overall sincerity of it is actually quite remarkable and boldly progressive.

• For something Jewish, character and theme-wise, perhaps, watch Matthew Shear’s FANTASY LIFE, which filters the older-woman/younger-man dynamic through neurosis, weighing down their romance with the inertia of managed despair and mental health conditions. I tend to prefer my portraits of affluent depression with a bit more bite or beauty than this placid film. Your mileage may vary depending on your affinity for Amanda Peet, the star of this potential comeback vehicle (mine is low). At least there’s Judd Hirsch, Andrea Martin, Holland Taylor, and Bob Balaban, bringing flashes of life. The grandparents, they’re alright.