While Sasquatch Sunset isn’t Harry and the Hendersons (and sorry, but that’s the only other Bigfoot movie that comes to mind), it certainly is a Zellner Brothers film. Like Kumiko the Treasure Hunter (2014, solo created by David) or Damsel (2018), their latest effort is completely idiosyncratic in the way it plays with audience expectation and genre. Yes, it features Riley Keough, Jesse Eisenberg, Christopher Zajac-Denak, and Nathan Zellner in full body hair and strenuous make-up as a family of Sasquatch walking, screwing, and surviving in the wilderness. That’s the story. But as one-note as the idea sounds, Sasquatch Sunset also manages to be marginally complex in revealing the universal emotions of the nuclear family.

I typically hate writing plot synopsis, and thankfully, there’s not much to type here. At a brisk 96 minutes, we’re immediately immersed in the environment of these four creatures. They grunt and innately understand one another. There’s a dominance between them with Nathan portraying the “father figure”, whose needs seem to be eating and chasing after the female played by Riley Keough. Most recognizable beneath the layers of latex is Jesse Eisenberg, whose usual mopey stance provides the perfect sense of teenage disassociation his sasquatch seems to deal with every day. The youngest of the group, embodied by Zajac-Denak, shines with the most personality due to his child-like curiosity that gets most of the laughs, such as when a turtle latches itself onto his tongue during a river feeding hunt. But each one is given an underlying warmth that slowly makes us care for them.

As the four traverse around in the woods (charting the four seasons of a year), Sasquatch Sunset barrels through the same wonderment… the same fixation on survival comfort…. and certainly the same danger that any human would encounter along the same route. Savagely funny one minute and then drenched in pangs of sorrow the next, Sasquatch Sunset gets most of its mileage out of the eyes of its actors. The obvious touchpoint of the film is that we’re all the same on this spinning rock of consumerism, environmental breakdown, and the consumption of poisonous mushrooms, and those eyes say everything. We want the best for our families, and so do this troupe. And the scene where they discover a concrete road is one of the funnier things I’ve seen so far this year.

Sasquatch Sunset opens in the Dallas/Fort Worth area on Friday April 19th.

If I had a time machine, I’ve always felt dropping into California in the mid 1960’s would be the most thrilling option. Seemingly the apex of erupting personal freedoms and social reform that would soon sweep the entire country, let’s not forget the bustling explosion of music, film, and overall pop culture nestled within the sun-drenched landscape as well. Haight Asbury. The Los Angeles canyon scene. It’s probably all rose-colored hindsight, but sign me up regardless.

And one of the most pleasurable aspects of Marlo McKenzie and Jonathan Parker’s new documentary Carol Doda Topless at the Condor is the assimilation of footage and ideas during this tepid time of liberation around San Francisco’s North Beach/Broadway area…. a strip of bars, theaters, and adult cabarets that not only fanned the sultry flames of burlesque and pushed the boundaries of stage strip tease, but gave rise to one Carol Doda. Full of wonderfully preserved footage and interviews with many of the people close to Carol. the film is an energetic history lesson about artistic freedom in a city that’s always been way ahead of the cloistered curve.

Though not much is given about Carol’s life up until her cocktail waitress service in the early 60’s at one of the strip’s more popular establishments named The Condor (although a cousin gives hints about Carol’s possible rocky upbringing), the film doesn’t fall into your standard biopic fare of birth to death. From her impromptu dances and stage singing performances as a waitress, Carol’s popularity grew so much, the owners of the club gave her a nightly routine. That routine developed into a nude stage act, complete with a piano that slowly propels down from the ceiling and no ‘pasties’ covering anything. For Carol Doda, it’s all rise, and her unknown past be damned. Carol Doda Topless at the Condor surveys the state of a sexual maverick, and nothing matters but the urgent present.

Charting her rise- and naturally her unavoidable fights with law enforcement throughout her years- Carol Doda Topless at the Condor also opens up and explores the local history of San Francsico’s North Beach area, which looks and feels like something akin to New York’s Times Square in the seventies, except for its sunbaked, ocean-side reverie. Inevitably, it’s a part of town that becomes corroded over time as hard drugs and the lure of commodification enters the scene, but the film earnestly parallels the city’s rise and fall with Carol’s own march through time, including her decline from the choices she made in her early days to stay beautiful and, shall we say, a pointed sexual figure. And though the film loses a bit of its focus when it veers away from Carol during some cultural anecdotal expansions- I’m not quite sure what a brief interlude about the origin of the hit 60’s song “The Swim” really was or the tale of a mob related death towards the end other than to embellish the city’s now swarthy atmosphere – but the film is still an insightful tale of intersecting liberal expression and colorful California history. History that’s rarely heard or seen.

Given the recent social media dialogue about the revulsion of sex in modern American movies (or is this a fabricated line of thought meant to rile up the us-vs-them film community??) Carol Doda Topless at the Condor features plenty of nudity (both in snapshot and archival footage) but uses the images as proof that sex can be used in a multitude of ways. And for Carol Doda and the now forgotten North Beach scene, this documentary proves that it was used for important reasons, which means entertainment and liberal expression for consenting adults. Now, where’s my time machine?

Carol Doda Topless at the Condor opens in the Dallas/Fort Worth area at the Dallas Angelika on Friday April 19th. Select screenings will include a live pre-show performance from Dallas burlesque dancers led by Mink Mimieux.

War photographers are a unique breed. Asked to thrust themselves into the same type of combat as a trained Armed Forces member but without the means to defend themselves, their point of view is often the most truthful aspect of whatever human disaster they’re covering.

In Alex Garland’s provocative in theme but middling in execution new film Civil War, the photographer is the audience’s surrogate as an unspecified division in our country has led to all out bloodshed between the secessionist “Western Forces’ of Texas and California and the government led by a barely glimpsed President (Nick Offerman). Veteran press corps members Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and Joel (Wagner Moura) are constantly in the middle of it, and their black and white images (the truth) of the violence in front of them are the only reprieve given while bullets and explosions waft around them. From the lifeblood running out of someone’s eyes to the carnal aftermath, Civil War comments most strongly in these images that spray across the scene in silent judgement. If nothing else, the sound mixing in Civil War is highly impressive.

But just capturing these images isn’t enough for Lee and Joel who formulate a self-appointed mission to travel from New York to Washington DC in the hopes of getting an interview from the President before either side wins. Before long, Lee meets a young freelance photographer named Jessie (a wonderful Cailee Spaney) who wiggles her way into their press vehicle the next day and joins the crew (plus veteran stalwart Stephen McKinley Henderson) as they begin a heart-of-darkness descent southward. Our audience surrogate just got even more innocent in the performance of Spaeny, whose lust for a career buckles against the haggard, been-there-done-that attitude of her traveling companions.

Alternating between quiet moments of fraternity/life lessons between the four war correspondents and the wham-bam jump cut of their brave existence to get that perfect shot in-between thudding bullets and deafening explosions, Civil War works best in this middle portion as the group maneuvers from car littered apocalypse main highways to the autumnal backroads where vigilantes seem to hold sway, never sure what type of mayhem or human cruelty they’ll encounter next. In fact, it’s probably for the best that writer-director Garland doesn’t give us any relevant backstory to the initiation of war, instead mixing omniscient tension between every human interaction. Whether it’s someone protecting their gas station or dumping bodies into an open grave, the idea of being an “American” is a virtual dice roll in hell.

But beyond these moments of sustained horror, Civil War is surprisingly hollow. Even though the performances are good, the film follows a distinct pattern of shock and relief, followed by an ending that’s less memorable than it wants to be due to the film’s ambivalent approach to its two-dimensional characters. Plenty of time is spent on disturbingly chaotic images of war timed to expert needle-drops, but we don’t get much else. Yes, Dunst’s Lee tries to give young Jessie some professional pointers, but their relationship hits a high note as they sit in a concrete stadium developing film together, and then not much else before they jog onto the next scene of violent confusion. Numerous films have magnificently espoused the “war is hell” mantra, and this film doesn’t really add much to the rhetoric.

Lastly, and this is just my perception, but I wonder if the muted ideas of Civil War will be lost on most audiences. Yes, it’s a provocative idea and yes, the film wants us to witness the atrocity of brother against brother through the cooly observational lens of a snapshot. Granted, the last 4-8 years have edged us into pockets of division around the country that (hopefully) we can pull out of, and the idea of Civil War is borne from this highly toxic environment of vehement differences. It wants us to be disturbed. It wants us to realize how bad things can get. And it could even be seen as cautionary allegory post January 6th for how little regard people can have for our institutions. However, based on the comments of “get some” an audience member close by me muttered every time someone took a bullet throughout my screening, my heart sank. I highly doubt it’s Garland’s intention to glorify the idea of all out civil violence, but the film also does nothing to really comment on the state of things beyond what we already know. For all the film’s passive emphasis on seeing images behind a camera lense, it does nothing to purge the insanity of how we got to those images.

A24’s Civil War opens in the Dallas/Fort Worth area in wide release on Friday April 12th.