At Home With… April Picks

Jensen Davis selects
Existenz

eXistenZ, dir. David Cronenberg, 1999

eXistenZ has a plotty sci-fi premise: Allegra (Jennife Jason Leigh) is a famous VR video game designer testing her latest game, which is played through a “bio-port” inserted in people’s spines. During a demo, someone tries to kill the Demoness Allegra, and with the help of a handsome trainee (Jude Law), they go into the game to see if it’s corrupted. There’s all the Cronenberg flourishes you want and expect: pus, gaping wounds that must be licked, pulsating creatures. However, the only moment that truly snaps someone out of the movie is when Leigh and Law, deep in the video game, end up at a Chinese restaurant. Law is served a large two-headed amphibian covered in a substance that looks like mucus. His response upon seeing the second head: “That doesn’t look healthy.” He’s hunting down a sinister force corrupting both real and virtual reality. Why would he be concerned about eating healthy?

WATCH EXISTENZ

Jensen Davis is the features editor at W magazine.

Esther Zuckerman selects
Morvern Callar

Morvern Callar, dir. Lynne Ramsey, 2002

Here’s where I admit I wasn’t sure if I was a Lynne Ramsey gal until I saw Movern Callar. With We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) and You Were Never Really Here (2017), I respected the craft but found the darkness and discomfort, one of Ramsey’s specialities, overpowering. And then I watched Morvern. (If I recall, it was hard to stream for a while!)  Dour in many ways, it’s also extraordinarily intimate as it follows its title character (played by Samantha Morton) in the haze following her boyfriend’s suicide. Morvern does not act the way you would expect a woman dealing with such a death to act. She takes her boyfriend’s manuscript, submits it to publishers, and goes on a trip to Spain with her best friend. Half road trip, half meditation, Morvern Callar envelopes you in Morvern’s psyche until you find tenderness for her. 

WATCH MORVERN CALLAR

Esther Zuckerman is a film critic and author whose work has been published in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg, and the Wall Street Journal. Her latest book, Falling in Love at the Movies: Rom Coms from the Screwball Era to Today, is out now.

AUDREY LAM selects
PARTY GIRL

Party Girl, dir Daisy von Scherler Mayer, 1995

Parker Posey’s Party Girl blazes across New York, hurtling down the sidewalk down to her regular falafel cart in much the same way that she sweeps through the downtown parties, jail time, her clerk job at Seward Park Library, her capacious Chinatown loft, and every part of her charmed life: with absolute panache. Party Girl is that fantasy moment in your twenties when you know everything you need to know and nothing about anything you don’t. I’ve read that von Scherler Mayer and Parker Posey were inspired by the forever young Carole Lombard. It’s true that P.P. plays P.G. like the movie star that she knows she is—dazzling, hilarious, inscrutable. Life is for show and the show never stops. The brilliant thing is: P.P. still has it.

WATCH PARTY GIRL

Audrey Lam is a filmmaker. She recently programmed the BAM series Aisles and Isles: films in the library, which included her first feature, Us and the Night (2024).