The Queen of Versailles (Hulu)
Lauren Greenfield is the award-winning photographer whose work operates at the nexus of super-wealth and sexism – in projects such as Thin and Girl Culture. This 2012 documentary, Greenfield’s second feature-length film The Queen of Versailles, brings her two themes together in the story of former beauty queen Jackie Siegel, who with her mega-wealthy husband David Siegel, constructed one of the largest private homes in the US, a sprawling pile outside Orlando, Florida. Greenfield follows the ups and downs of the build – which grinds to a halt during the 2008 recession. It’s an interestingly humanised portrait of a family who epitomise – in some ways – the American Dream and all the messiness that goes with it; Greenfield’s pared-back style allows some vivid characterisation to emerge – particularly Jackie herself, who has to grapple with the termination of her outsized shopping habit. As a foretaste of Trumpian excess, it takes some beating. AP
Holy Spider (Netflix)
Holy Spider, Ali Abbasi’s hypnotic, deeply conflicted and disturbing true crime parable about a serial killer targeting sex workers in Iran, has grown even more compelling and chilling in light of recent headlines. Women are pushing back at the country’s destructive misogyny after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in the custody of Iran’s morality police. Amini was detained because she wasn’t wearing her hijab the right way. Abbasi’s film is a gripping condemnation of the societal structures and attitudes that feeds and facilitates such violence, Holy Spider revisits the murders – in far too graphic detail – committed by Saeed Hanaei between 2000 and 2001, and the co-sign he got from religious communities who shared in his hatred. Abbasi brings a Denis Villeneuve level of slick intensity and thick atmospheric dread to his unflinching look at moral rot. But like Villeneuve’s cartel thriller Sicario, his film lacks empathy for the victims while being guilty of fetishizing the violence it condemns. RS
Bros (Amazon Prime)
Now that the dust has settled and the discourse has mercifully died down, Billy Eichner’s same-sex rom-com Bros will hopefully be allowed room to breathe outside of the limited space its marketing had given it. Loudly heralded as a landmark LGBTQ+ achievement within the studio system (which in many ways it is), its broader merit as a genuinely entertaining movie got a little lost along the way, leading to a far quieter showing at the box office. It’ll surely find more of a welcoming audience on streaming, a world much kinder to the genre at large, as a smart and sophisticated film about the many complexities that come with falling in love as a gay man in your 40s. While there’s insightful, and usually sidelined, specificity about what it really means to be queer in the 2020s, there’s also a more base satisfaction to watching an age-old formula play out so winningly. BL
Praise This (Peacock)
After all the clamor about Chloe Bailey’s lost innocence in Swarm, this next role sends her back to church. In Peacock’s Praise This she plays Sam, an LA wild child and secular music aspirant sent down south to Atlanta for reforming. There, fawning sister-cousin Jess (Anjelika Washington) recruits Sam to her gospel praise team, as ambitious as it is dysfunctional. Their leader (Birgundi Baker) is insecure. Their male baritone (the internet personality Druski) could break into a crude rap at any moment. Jess could faint from embarrassment. It’s Perfect Pitch meets the Beyoncé-led Fighting Temptations. When Sam eventually makes a joyful noise, she carries the tunes with ease. Migos’s Quavo and gospel pro Jekalyn Carr buttress the film’s superb musical quality. Sure, Bailey’s acting could have been stretched a bit further, but it doesn’t hold back the spirit of Praise This – more to do with sisterhood than saints and sinners in the end. AL
Jesus Camp (Hulu)
Stripped of its specific political context (Bush, Alito, post-9/11 fear-mongering), 2006 documentary Jesus Camp arguably feels even more relevant so many years later, what might have seemed shocking back then feeling far more normalised now. Focusing on the indoctrination of young children into a Christian evangelical way of thinking that demonises others and insists upon a closer relationship between church and state, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s Oscar-nominated film was such a button-pusher at the time that it led to the central camp closing down months after release. Watching it during a period when the far-right are even more consumed with issues of school choice, religious intervention within government and “protecting” kids from fabricated evils, it makes for a disturbingly evergreen watch. BL
