Original Title: Den stygge stesøsteren

Director: Emilie Blichfeldt / Year: 2025 / Color / Norwegian, Polish, and Swedish languages / English subtitles / MPA rating: Not rated / Runtime: 109 min

During the opening credits of “The Ugly Stepsister,” the camera pans slowly across an abandoned wedding feast, the food gooey and gluttonous. The aging groom has dropped dead and his new wife, Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp), has learned that the fortune she expected does not exist. Instead, she has acquired a stunning stepdaughter, Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Naess), and the immediate need for a replacement benefactor.

To that end, Rebekka’s elder daughter, Elvira (Lea Myren), must marry the picture-book Prince Julian (Isac Calmroth). Unlike Agnes, Elvira is gawky and gauche, her teeth wrapped in metal braces and her body less than lithe. But with the help of a cocaine-snorting plastic surgeon (Adam Lundgren), she can be remade in time for the grand ball where Julian will choose his bride. All that’s needed is a hammer, a chisel and a hungry tapeworm.

Like last year’s “The Substance,” this fleshy folk horror forces us to look — in unsparing, often revolting close-up — at the physical agony of aesthetic conformity. Yet the movie, adapted by the Norwegian filmmaker Emilie Blichfeldt from the Cinderella story, is the opposite of didactic: Slyly funny and visually captivating (the luscious cinematography is by Marcel Zyskind), its scenes move with ease from gross to gorgeous, and from grotesque to magical. One minute, a tribe of maggots is feasting on the expired groom’s rotting corpse; the next, they’re weaving a silken ball gown.

And oh, those gowns! Designed by Manon Rasmussen (a favorite of Lars von Trier), the film’s costumes are delicious. At the ball, mothers display their preening, bedazzled daughters like show dogs; but the camera’s real interest lies in the flesh beneath the finery, in the plump swellings of belly and buttocks and the defenseless innocence of soon-to-be-chopped toes.

Contrasting the freshness of youth with the decay of a world where beauty is the only currency and romance an illusion, “The Ugly Stepsister” strikes gold in Myren’s extraordinary performance. As Elvira’s dreams are dashed and her body mutilated, we feel for her: Like all of us, she just wants to be loved. And, of course, rich.

Nicholas Ray’s once overlooked and relatively unknown Bigger Than Life mesmerized us tonight. Sure… these days, one might have hoped for a darker ending than the one Fox apparently imposed on Ray, but this wasn’t really a deal-breaker for me. In some way it was maybe even a respite from an hour and a half of tension.

Thanks to Annalise for a great suggestion!

In retrospect, it’s remarkable that a major studio like Fox released a film as brutal and intense in its depiction of suburban despair as Nicholas Ray’s long-lost, little-seen 1956 masterpiece Bigger Than Life. At the height of the Eisenhower era, Ray’s film didn’t just paint an unrelentingly bleak portrait of a single unassailable American institution, it put a malevolent spin on nearly all of them. Family, childhood, fatherhood, the suburbs, capitalism, school, community, church, friendship, home, and marriage all take on a nightmarish quality when filtered through Ray’s unsparing lens. In Bigger Than Life, the average suburban home becomes a haunted house, and a devoted family man devolves into a cross between a deranged cult leader and Mr. Hyde.

In a performance that makes his later turn as a debonair pedophile in Lolita look like bobbysoxer-friendly froth by comparison, a frighteningly committed James Mason stars as a teacher who moonlights as a taxi dispatcher in a desperate attempt to provide for his family and subsidize his sad little stab at the American dream. When Mason develops a life-threatening illness, doctors prescribe a new wonder drug called cortisone. Freed from the shadow of death, Mason becomes a new man—healthy, vigorous, and unencumbered by the insecurities that plagued him before. But his newfound bravado quickly takes on a troubling edge as he develops megalomaniacal qualities and transforms his once-sedate home into a dictatorship, and then into something much more ominous.

Mason’s descent into madness and almost unfathomable cruelty is medically and pharmacologically induced, but Ray and his screenwriters (the script includes uncredited contributions from himself; Mason, who also produced; and Clifford Odets) subversively posit it as an outgrowth of the character’s relatable desire to escape the dull, small-minded emptiness of suburbia. In his bid to escape the ordinary and prolong his life, Mason becomes monstrous, but never inhuman. In its harrowing third act, Ray invests his terrifying tale of upward mobility gone horribly awry with the sinister shadows and ominous atmosphere of German Expressionist horror films. Bigger Than Life ultimately pulls back from the abyss, but the ending only qualifies as happy for those willing to ignore the abundant darkness at the edge of the frame.

Review by Nathan Rabin for A.V.Club

Not only was Franck Tymezuk’s beautiful Ibrahima uplifting to watch, but tonight we had the added pleasure of being entertained by Ibrahima’s guitar and singing. It was kinda wonderful.

Ibrahima follows the journey of a newly arrived Mauritanian immigrant in New York. Living in a park with other migrants, he survives by collecting cans to sell across the city while sharing his reflections on displacement, dignity, and hope. Through intimate moments of daily life, the film captures his efforts to preserve his beautiful soul and sense of community amid the harsh realities of migration.