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2 weeks ago | 
filminquiry.com | Payton McCarty-Simas
As Stephen Hawking once said, “We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.” It’s in that spirit that every year, for the entire month of April, my partner and I devote ourselves to a screening series unified not by genre, not by director, or actor, or era… but by monkeys.
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3 weeks ago | 
filminquiry.com | Payton McCarty-Simas
Documentarian Courtney Stephens and actress Callie Hernandez came together to make a project inspired by their shared experiences losing larger-than-life fathers. Invention, the film that emerged, is a delicate, quasi-experimental blend of metafiction, archival TV/home movie footage of Hernandez‘ father, and making-of documentary footage on their process that takes grief as its starting point.
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4 weeks ago | 
filminquiry.com | Payton McCarty-Simas
In Invention, an airily shaggy, collaborative piece of improvised, genre-fluid auto-fiction by documentarian Courtney Stephens and actress Callie Hernandez (La La Land, Alien: Covenant), a grieving daughter falls down a low-key conspiracy rabbit hole of the kind we rarely see today.
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1 month ago | 
filminquiry.com | Payton McCarty-Simas
What do you get when you toss Mel Brooks, a Nine Inch Nails music video, early SNL, German Expressionism, cartoons, community theater, your friends’ dreams, and an improbably long finger puppet into an open grave to fester?
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1 month ago | 
filminquiry.com | Payton McCarty-Simas
With his latest film, Secret Mall Apartment, documentarian Jeremy Workman delves into a piece of art that’s the stuff of urban legend: over the course of four years in the early-mid 2000s, Providence artist Michael Townsend and a group of collaborators created a secret apartment in the bowels of the Providence Place Mall, complete with a couch, a TV, a waffle maker, and a DIY cinder block wall with a front door only they could unlock.
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2 months ago | 
autostraddle.com | Payton McCarty-Simas
“What’s the goal?” Night (Erwan Kepoa Falé) asks his boyfriend’s younger sister Apo (Lila Gueneau Lefas) one afternoon, looking over her shoulder at her favorite fantasy video game, Darknoon.
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Jan 22, 2025 | 
autostraddle.com | Payton McCarty-Simas
It’s fitting that Fujisawa Isao’s film Bye Bye Love was long believed to be lost. This liminal, lyrical, genderqueer road movie, rediscovered in a warehouse in 2018, is a tart and singular blend of the filmmaker’s experiences working on both gritty yakuza films and as a member of the cohort loosely labeled the Japanese New Wave, or “Nuberu Bagu” (a transliteration of the French’s “nouvelle vague”).
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Jan 17, 2025 | 
filminquiry.com | Payton McCarty-Simas
As I left my early evening screening of Leigh Wannell’s Wolf Man this week, I overheard several audience members ask one of the most fundamental questions that can ever arise as the credits roll on a film: “Why did they make this?” And indeed, Wolf Man’s lackadaisical cul-de-sac of promising ideas, wildly disparate tones, and dead air begs this question. So before we dig into this oddly dreamy entry into the low-budget creature feature genre, let’s try to answer it.
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Dec 18, 2024 | 
filminquiry.com | Payton McCarty-Simas
“Do I have value to you–– as a director?” theater director Jacob (Antonio Banderas) asks Romy (Nicole Kidman), his high-powered tech CEO wife, in a rare moment of alone time. In Babygirl, Halina Reijn’s deliriously overheated romp of an erotic thriller (her follow up to Bodies Bodies Bodies), this question is an essential one.
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Nov 21, 2024 | 
autostraddle.com | Payton McCarty-Simas
When I was sick recently and looking for a comfort movie, I immediately gravitated to my VHS copy of Junior (1994). Ivan Reitman’s second team-up of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito after Twins (1988) has a bit of a cult status in my queer friend group. Even if you haven’t seen it,, perhaps you know it as the “pregnant man” comedy of the ‘90s.
