Tag: now streaming

I Watched The Rule of Jenny Pen So You Don’t Have To

Imagine Grey’s Anatomy  if it were written and directed by John Waters at his drunkest, crudest, and most long-winded. Add a deranged John Lithgow singing in a hospital gown, hours of elder abuse, and a loose metaphor for settler colonialism and you’ve got The Rule of Jenny Pen (2024). 

At its most literal, Jenny Pen is about a retired judge (Geoffrey Rush)  recovering from a stroke who is tormented by a psychopathic patient (Lithgow) wielding a hand puppet named Jenny. From start to finish it is only 1 hr 43 min, but it feels longer. A lot longer.

Critic, Katie Rife, blames the film’s tediousness on tonal incongruity but she finds some merit in its offering as “hagsploitation” for men, though it lacks the feminist bent and gothic glamor that give the greatest hag films their teeth. If you can survive the tonal whiplash and the ceaseless cartoon violence, however, there is an allegorical dimension to the narrative: the law’s complicity in the violence it pretends to contain.

The Jenny puppet acts as a stand-in for the bureaucratic mechanisms systems of authority use to outsource cruelty. Dictators don’t get their hands dirty;  they use institutions, enforcers, and puppets. The judge (representing colonial law) is incapacitated, stripped of dignity, and made to endure a system he once upheld. His only ally? A Māori man (George Henare) similarly brutalized by the same regime. Together, they rise in revolution and revenge. 

This film is difficult to recommend. It’s tedious. It’s brutal. There are no women. No queer subtext. And while the actors are top notch, the characters are so grotesque, they’re nearly unwatchable. The only real beauty is in the film’s cinematography, which is wasted on the sterile beige interiors of a dreary old folks home. But it is not totally devoid of meaning. It facilitates a confrontation with the violence and medical gaslighting baked into institutional care, into aging, and into legal systems designed to protect power rather than people.

I’m not sure who this movie is for. But if you make it to the end, and then sit with it, The Rule of Jenny Pen might leave you with something worth unpacking: the haunting realization that the law, like the puppet, is only ever as benevolent as the hand that controls it.

Pretty Lethal Review: Came for Black Swan, Got Sailor Moon on Steroids

If you go into Vicky  Jewson’s Pretty  Lethal (2026) expecting arthouse, ballerina body horror, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. Lovingly dubbed “Die Hard  in  tutus” by Jewson herself, the film is less about the physical and psychological toll of perfectionism than it is about girl power, gushing neck wounds, and god-tier calf muscles.

The story follows a troupe of ballet dancers, each with her own archetypal, Spice Girl–coded persona: Bones (Maddie Ziegler), the street‑smart runaway; Princess (Lana Condor), the spoiled rich girl; Grace (Avantika), the God‑fearing overachiever; Chloe (Millicent Simmonds), the boy‑crazy seductress; and Zoe (Iris Apatow), the protective older sister.

The girls are traveling from Los  Angeles to Budapest for an elite international competition under the guidance of their tightly wound instructor, Miss Thorna (Lydia Leonard). When their bus breaks down somewhere in the Hungarian countryside, they seek refuge in a nearby gothic inn with colorful victorian interiors that feel lifted from Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion ride. They receive a hospitable welcome from the innkeeper Devora, a former ballet prodigy whose cold exterior and unnaturally tight ponytail tell us she is not to be fucked with.

When the inn’s resident pianist plays Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker  Suite, the girls take to the stage to rehearse their choreography. As the music swells, Miss  Thorna (Lydia Leonard), does some nutcracking of her own, delivering a swift kick to the ball sack of a pervert who gets a little too handsy at the bar. Before we know it, Thorna’s got a bullet in her head, and her company of ballerinas is running through the halls Scooby Doo-style with Devora’s goons following close behind. This is when the mayhem begins. Banding together in a fight for survival, the girls use their dance moves as combat maneuvers: leaps and lifts are offensive tackles; extensions and kicks are nose-cracking blows, and distressed point shoes are deadly weapons.

I’ll be the first to say this movie is not for everyone. It isn’t going to change lives, and you can almost feel the generational imprint of screenwriter  Kate  Freund, whose ham sandwich of a script brims with cringey gems like “that toe blade is sick. I must have one” and “What kind of ballerina doesn’t want to make themselves throw up?” — I didn’t have to Google her to know we were born within a year of each other and could both perform the dance sequence from Sister Act II (1993) from memory without missing a beat. But from where I’m sitting, the movie thrives in its millennial camp sensibilities. Unashamed, referential, and earnest in its excess, it meets all the classic hallmarks of an over‑the‑top action flick: ticking time bombs, improbable gadgetry, a  shadowy Eastern European crime ring, and a  final showdown that ends, naturally, in ballet formation.

Still, its critical reception is mixed. Some reviewers praised its commitment to female empowerment and kinetic choreography, others denounced it as a missed opportunity, others call it shallow but “fun.”

*You can see the full spread of opinion in Phantasmag’s positive review, Dread Central’s mixed take, and Roger Ebert dot com’s negative write‑up.

It’s true that poignant commentary on the bloody realities of girlhood are better left to cult darlings of the ballerina genre (Black Swan (2010), The Red Shoes (1948), and Suspiria (1977 & 2018) come to mind). This is a popcorn movie through and through. It’s about screaming, laughing, and singing along to remixes of 90s club hits like “Rhythm is a Dancer” as prima ballerinas take up arms and bludgeon henchmen with toe-blade point shoes, and there’s nothing wrong with that.