Payton McCarty-Simas

3 weeks 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?

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.

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.

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”).

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.