The story of the last ten years, and the next hundred, has been and will be migration.  Political instability, economic privation, civil war, environmental collapse, it all conspires to push people into stable places that often contributed to or directly caused the instability that made migrants and refugees flee in the first place.  Flee is the story of one of these families torn between great powers and cast into an underground morass whose effects linger long after safety has been achieved.  Jonas Poher Rasmussen blends documentary and animation in a film that dissects all aspects of the refugee experience, from the uncertainty to the powerlessness.  People need to get more acquainted with these kinds of stories because they’re not going to stop happening.  

It’s 2010 and David Sirota is working for a progressive advocacy organization and, after a long day stewing over the kid-glove handling of the financial crisis’s bad actors, takes some time to watch a movie that he thinks will be a nice distraction.  Adam McKay’s The Other Guys is showing, and what appeared to be an odd couple cop comedy from the director of Anchorman and Step Brothers gradually reveals itself to be about the financial crisis itself, culminating in didactic PowerPoint charts and graphs about Wall Street malfeasance over the credits.  Sirota imagines those in the theater with him are lapping up the medicine alongside Will Ferrell’s sugary slapstick, and makes a mental note that he could incorporate that same combination into his work.  I’ve heard Sirota on lots of podcasts, and while he is a clear-eyed diagnoser of political problems and a reliable leftist voice, he’s not a funny guy, a description that increasingly can be laid on McKay.  In the years since The Other Guys, McKay’s been stuck on agitprop.  Far away from the improvisational genius of his early film career, his films have taken direct aim at campaign finance, the financial crisis again, and Dick Cheney, to varying success.  With Don’t Look Up, McKay throws aside all pretense and works with Sirota on a naked climate change allegory, throwing himself wholly over to activist filmmaking in a way that makes PureFlix look subtle.  Political messaging in film can be done well, but not when the point is made with all the finesse of a giant rock slamming into the earth’s surface.  

​For the first time in his career, preferer of amateur/non-actors Sean Baker dabbled in big-name casting with his film The Florida Project, netting Willem Dafoe an Oscar nomination in Baker’s most commercially successful film to date.  The lesson he might’ve taken was to make bigger movies with bigger stars, cast alongside whatever area natives and interesting faces he comes across along the way.  With Red Rocket, Baker does cast a lead with dozens of credits, but not exactly ones of Dafoe’s caliber.  For Simon Rex, that might change in the immediate future, because he and Baker combine to produce the best thing either has ever put their name on.  Red Rocket defiantly chases an unrepentant and charismatic narcissist down his Gulf Coast rabbit hole, bringing a porn industry slur and an exciting new talent into the mainstream.