PopCult Reviews

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Winter 2025 Digest

[Features]
Patron Pick/Matt – Carry On
Patron Pick/Matt – Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat
Book Update – Jan/Feb 2025
Farewell, David

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PopCult Reviews is place to take deep dive into media & culture from a Left perspective. This isn’t content coming from a lofty, complicated, academic point of view but accessible reviews and analysis. We’re here to celebrate the good stuff and put a critical lens to the media that has saturated culture. Patreon is the best way to show your support for the work we do here. More details are below.

Movie Review – Weapons

Weapons (2025)
Written and directed by Zach Cregger

The voiceover of a little girl telling us the story of something she may not have experienced herself, a communal trauma, opens the film. This blooms into a nighttime montage of children running with their arms slightly extended at their sides, set to George Harrison’s “Beware of Darkness.” The song appeared on Harrison’s first post-Beatles album, All Things Must Pass. The tracks were mainly derived from songs the rest of the band had passed on, which in turn became side projects Harrison would play around with until the band inevitably fell apart. “Beware of Darkness” tells us at the outset to stay clear of people who appear fashionable for the moment and to be wary of destructive thoughts that seek to entangle our minds. The final verses of the song become far more specific when they say, “Take care, beware of greedy leaders / They take you where you should not go / While Weeping Atlas Cedars / They just want to grow – grow, grow…” There doesn’t seem to be an explanation anywhere as to what Harrison meant by this, but he does seem to be referencing something specific. He’s dead now, so we’re left to wonder what he was saying there, knowing there will likely never be an answer.

Movie Review – Hard Truths

Hard Truths (2025)
Written and directed by Mike Leigh

In 2024, I did a deep dive into the work of British filmmaker Mike Leigh and fell in love. He has a profound love of humanity, and it comes across in his choice to tell grounded, slice-of-life stories. At age 82, he has given us his latest film, Hard Truths. This re-teams him with Marianne Jean-Baptiste, whom he previously worked with in the wonderful Secrets & Lies. As with all of Leigh’s work, he shows a trust in his actors through the use of improvisational techniques and respects the intelligence of his audience by never passing judgment on his characters. This is a film about difficult people and a refusal to stop seeing them as human beings deserving of dignity; something that feels particularly challenging in our current moment, but also something people have grappled with throughout history.

Movie Review – Universal Language

Universal Language (2025)
Written by Ila Firouzabadi, Pirouz Nemati, and Matthew Rankin
Directed by Matthew Rankin

Universal Language is a hard film to pin down. It has the framing and subtle sense of humor of Wes Anderson, yet it is also informed by filmmaker Matthew Rankin’s love of Iranian cinema, which he discovered as a young man in Winnipeg. That’s the other key element: Rankin’s own feelings about his hometown, a landscape of brutalist architecture and perpetual snowbanks. The languages spoken by the cast are Farsi and French, and almost every cast member is Iranian. If this sounds like an odd mix, you would be right. The humor is offbeat and the world is very strange, while still grounded in authentic emotions, culminating in an ending that will linger with you.

Movie Review – The Seed of the Sacred Fig

The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2025)
Written and directed by Mohammad Rasoulof

Our perception of Iran in the West is not an accurate picture. How could it be, after decades of propaganda that have mixed truths about the fundamentalist government with lies meant to keep the country in a perpetually negative light? Too often, American media frames people in cartoon terms: good guys and bad guys; a reductive take, to say the least. Iranian cinema has grown tremendously since the late 1970s and often produces powerful works of art. Common elements include minimalism, which allows for ambiguity that can skirt censorship; children as moral lenses through which to view society; and a moral complexity that refuses easy simplification. Humanism is always more important than rigid ideology. All of this is true of The Seed of the Sacred Fig.

Movie Review – Soundtrack to a Coup D’état

Soundtrack to a Coup D’état (2024)
Written and directed by John Grimonprez

Being a media-obsessed person for my whole life, I have come to a new understanding since my university days about the United States and the way it uses media as a weapon. Depending on how far along your understanding of the mass media’s purpose and how power becomes gained & is wielded, you might not see the reality just beneath the surface. As Michael Parenti said in his book Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media, “Power is always more secure when cooptive, covert, and manipulative than when nakedly brutish. The support elicited through the control of minds is more durable than the support extracted at the point of a bayonet. The essentially undemocratic nature of the mainstream media, like the other business-dominated institutions of society, must be hidden behind a neutralistic, voluntaristic, pluralistic facade.”

Movie Review – Hamnet

Hamnet (2025)
Written by Chloé Zhao & Maggie O’Farrell
Directed by Chloé Zhao

In 2025, I did a series on Shakespeare adaptations, which was a lot of fun because I got to introduce my wife to several of his stories. She was, of course, familiar with Romeo and Juliet and knew the names of several plays, just not the stories or characters. I got to introduce her to Hamlet, my favorite play, through Branagh’s adaptation and was happy to see her find pleasure in what a rich piece of art it is. Despite having been an English major and taking multiple Shakespeare classes, I didn’t really know much about the author himself. I don’t think that’s too dissimilar from most English majors’ experiences; he doesn’t get as much focus as his work does. And while this film is more fiction than fact, it attempts to bring a human face to someone who has become such a distant, iconic figure.

Movie Review – Plainclothes

Plainclothes (2025)
Written and directed by Carmen Emmi

Who determines what is and isn’t a crime? It feels strange to look back and realize that being queer in public was still criminalized in a variety of ways well into the 21st century in America. The specific crime highlighted in this film was known as “cottaging” in the UK and refers primarily to same-sex sexual encounters between men in public spaces like restrooms or parks. While I can understand the desire to prohibit public sex, since it involves people who have not consented to witness it, the laws were far more focused on marginalizing and punishing gay men for wanting intimacy. The reason so many men used these public spaces was because they were hiding their sexuality, and the reason for that was simple: if their homosexuality became common knowledge, they would be ostracized from society. This leads me to see these sorts of stings as little more than a way to further torment an already persecuted group of people.

Movie Review – Reflection in a Dead Diamond

Reflection in a Dead Diamond (2025)
Written and directed by Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani

The married filmmaking duo of Cattet and Forzani first caught my eye with their 2009 feature debut, Amer, a postmodern homage to the uniquely Italian horror genre of giallo. In that film, they established their signature style: hyper-sensory hallucinations—fragmented, fetishistic collages of giallo, Eurospy, and grindhouse cinema. Narrative is secondary to texture, rhythm, and the ecstatic violence of the images. There is not much dialogue in their work, but you never feel lost because they maintain tight control in the editing room.

Movie Review – The Phoenician Scheme

The Phoenician Scheme (2005)
Written by Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola
Directed by Wes Anderson

There was a time in the mid-to-late 2000s when I was tired of Wes Anderson. I look back on that now and realize I was simply out of sync with what he was doing. I discovered him via Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, and like so many young film fans, I thought a director I liked should keep making things for me. This is where so many of us misunderstand film, seeing it only as a product to be consumed. It seems obvious to me now that Anderson isn’t particularly concerned with making blockbuster movies; rather, he wants to compose images and explore ideas. He’s also the reason I finally sat down and watched Neon Genesis Evangelion after his episode of Le Club Vidéo.

Governing Through Kink: The Fetish Politics of American Power

“The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.”
— Karl Marx

The United States is governed not merely by laws or markets, but by the libidinal economy of its elite. The fantasies, kinks, and psychosexual obsessions of a narrow ruling class seep into everything from legislation to advertising, from architecture to warfare. This is not metaphor. It is the literal operating code of a late-capitalist order whose leaders rule not only through economics or violence, but through desire.