Reminders of Him, 2026.

Directed by Vanessa Caswill.
Starring Maika Monroe, Tyriq Withers, Rudy Pankow, Lainey Wilson, Lauren Graham, Jennifer Robertson, Zoe Kosovic, Monika Myers, Sindhyar Baloch, Bradley Whitford, Nicholas Duvernay, Jillian Walchuck, Hilary Jardine, Skye MacDonald, Rick Koy, Susan Serrao, Anne Hawthorne, Laird Reghenas, and Kevin Corey.

SYNOPSIS:

After prison, a woman attempts to reconnect with her young daughter but faces resistance from everyone except a bar owner with ties to her child. As they grow closer, she must confront her past mistakes to build a hopeful future.

Given that Maika Monroe’s just-released-from-incarceration Kenna immediately desecrates the gravesite of her love Scotty (which is unintentionally hilariously on the side of the road where a tragic car accident took his life) by stealing the wooden cross (with an inner voice muttering that he hated memorials anyway), tells another character she doesn’t like cats, and complains to someone else that all music is sad and that she doesn’t like it, it’s reasonable to get the impression that the latest adaptation from Colleen Hoover, Reminders of Him, is intentionally aiming for an unlikable lead. Nothing says “get the audience on the side of our protagonist” like all of the above.

The reality is that Maika Monroe is capable enough to inject a modicum of emotion and grounded sincerity even into a Colleen Hoover character, but that, directed by Vanessa Caswill (with Lauren Levine writing the screenplay alongside the author), these are all characters stuck reaching for depth far out of grasp in a hollow romance that is less about someone with a criminal record ingratiating themselves back into society after a seven-year vehicular manslaughter sentence and earning the trust of her dead boyfriend’s parents (Bradley Whitford and Lauren Graham), now the legal guardians of her five-year-old daughter, for visitation rights or anything that would force the novelist (this is her third book translated to screen in as many years) to write an actual character, and more a dull push-pull possible relationship with the former NFL star best friend picking up the pieces, living next door to those grandparents, and assisting taking care of the young girl.

Asking the question “what would it be like to fuck your dead boyfriend’s best friend” should be a hell of a lot more morally thorny and emotionally charged than this. Rather than engage with that, the filmmakers need to dedicate 70 minutes to an outrageously contrived setup in which Kenna and that best friend, Ledger (Tyriq Withers, also visibly trying to express some personality and humanity, but is left hanging by the script), have never met before. Yes, you read that right (and yes, those are the real ridiculous names of these characters, although the latter is presumably intended to honor the late great Heath Ledger, who once starred in romantic dramas and made them a hell of a lot more watchable).

Despite being best friends, Ledger not only never met his best friend’s girlfriend, but he apparently had never even seen a picture of her until her mugshot (which he conveniently forgets, never mind that Maika Monroe looks mostly the same seven years removed) following the car accident on Scotty’s (Rudy Pankow) birthday, which he bailed on for fitness exams in preparation for the NFL draft. In the present, he no longer plays, having “blown out a shoulder”, yet appears physically fine and in no pain during the numerous shirtless scenes and a couple of sexual ones. Before the film gets there, he is skeptical of going anywhere near Kenna once he discovers her identity. Of course, that doesn’t last long because these two hot leads are gravitating toward spending time together.

Much of this is, to put it bluntly, airless and lifeless despite an ensemble trying their best to elevate the proceedings, with what feels like significant chunks of the novel cut out; there is a single flashback to Kenna’s time in prison – being taken under the wing of a mentor of sorts on how to survive – and Scotty is allocated such a minimal screen time that he hardly feels like a character and is never allowed to feel like a presence looming over the story and the choices these characters make. For some reason, there is also a friend Kenna makes here with Down syndrome (Monika Myers) who seems to exist as a vessel for comedic relief, which might have sat better if, once again, there were actually a damn character behind that.

One waits and waits for the inevitable moment where, after snowcone dates and playful arguments about music, there is a release of sexual tension. However, the drama resulting from this is childish, dumb, and resolved about three scenes later. You won’t need a reminder that Reminders of Him, like all Colleen Hoover adaptations thus far, is bad, once again searching for a romantic pulse and eroticism at the expense of characters who feel like actual people or anything that gives weight to the attempts at thorniness.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★

Robert Kojder

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=embed/playlist

When Brazilian journalist Tatiana Merlino watched “The Secret Agent” — one of this year’s Oscar nominees for best picture — it felt like seeing scattered scenes from her own life.

As the movie follows Marcelo (played by Wagner Moura) — a professor fleeing from a vindictive businessman during Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985), the story skims through old audio tapes and newspapers, reviewed by a researcher looking into how he died. Like her, Merlino also dug into the past to piece together how her uncle, Luiz Eduardo Merlino, a communist activist, was killed by the right-wing regime in 1971. Though it was initially reported as a suicide, the family soon found his corpse with torture marks in a morgue.

“It became necessary to fight for memory, truth, and justice, because these crimes committed by dictatorship agents weren’t punished at that time, and have not been to this day,” says the 49-year-old journalist, who first saw “The Secret Agent” in São Paulo, and made a career from investigating human rights abuses.

“When a country does not come to terms with its past,” she adds, “its ghosts resurface.”

Recent dictatorship-themed movies like “The Secret Agent” and “I’m Still Here,” which won the Oscar for best international film in 2025, were instant blockbusters back home in Brazil. While both films honor those who, like Merlino, still seek justice for the regime victims, their popularity also got boosted by the country’s zeitgeist.

To many Brazilians, these movies served as reminders of what could have been had former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, himself a retired Army captain and a dictatorship nostalgic, succeeded in his 2022 attempt at a coup d’etat.

On Jan. 8, 2023, encouraged by Bolsonaro, hundreds of vandals stormed into the Three Powers Plaza, a square in the country’s capital, Brasília, that gathers the congress, the supreme court and the presidential palace. Neither he nor the vandals accepted the 2022 election — won by the veteran leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, better known as “Lula.”

The uprising followed the same blueprint as the pro-Trump rioters behind the Jan. 6 insurrection in the United States. Although President Trump himself was federally prosecuted for election obstruction, the case was dismissed after his reelection in 2024.

Unlike the U.S., however, Brazil has charged, judged and arrested the conspirators — including Bolsonaro and members of his staff who participated in the coup plot.

“Bolsonaro doesn’t come from Mars,” said “The Secret Agent” star Wagner Moura to the L.A. Times in February. “He’s deeply grounded in the history of the country.”

In 1964, a U.S.-backed coup enacted a violent, 21-year autocracy run by the military, whose effects still resonate today, says Alessandra Gasparotto, a professor at the Federal University of Pelotas (UFPEL).

“It was a dictatorship that worked from a perspective of building certain legitimacy, keeping the congress functioning, but of course, after purging dissent,” explains the Brazilian historian.

“I’m Still Here,” for example, dramatizes the real-life quest of Eunice Paiva, a housewife whose husband Rubens Paiva, a former leftist congressman who had his tenure revoked after the coup, then disappeared in the hands of the military in 1971. To this day, his body still hasn’t been recovered.

In 2014, Bolsonaro, then just a congressman, spit on a bust of Paiva erected to honor his memory during the coup’s 50th anniversary in Congress.

“The cinema of all countries has the role of preserving memory, so if you take a look at the Holocaust, the American Civil War, or World War II movies, it has this role of almost an ally of history,” says writer Marcelo Rubens Paiva, son of Rubens Paiva and author of the book from which “I’m Still Here” is based. “There’s an old saying: History is the narrative of winners, while art is of the defeated.”

In the case of Brazil, the militaries who led the repressive apparatus of the dictatorship got away with torture and murder through a 1979 amnesty law. It was initially enacted to pardon alleged “political crimes” committed by the regime opposition and allow a transition to democracy — but it was also used to pardon the dictatorship’s human rights violations. Then, in the late 1980s, the military oversaw a slow, gradual shift to democracy, stepping down from power only in 1985.

“This new republic had more continuity than novelty, since many politicians who were central to the dictatorship moved to central roles in the democratic government,” explains Gasparotto. “That’s why they built this pact [to forgive the regime’s crimes].”

For that reason, these movies still feel contemporary. “The Secret Agent,” for example, blends past and future through the records analyzed by a researcher, while “I’m Still Here” highlights Eunice Paiva’s post-regime fight for the recognition of Rubens Paiva’s death; without any corpse to officialize his death, he was just deemed disappeared.

When Merlino watched the movie, for example, Eunice reminded her of her grandmother, Iracema Merlino.

“I’m the third generation of my family fighting for memory, truth and justice,” says Merlino. “It started with my grandmother, who passed away, then it was handed to my mother, who’s now very ill, then to me.”

Nowadays, she awaits trial for the third lawsuit attempt of the family to hold her uncle’s torturer, Col. Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, accountable — the two other cases against the accused were dismissed over the years.

Since Ustra’s death in 2015, the Merlino family is now suing his estate for reparations. Yet he still remains a hero to some; in 2016, while Bolsonaro was still a congressman, he shouted a dedication to the memory of the torturer during the voting of the impeachment of Brazil’s former President Dilma Rousseff — herself one of the victims of Ustra in the 1970s, but among the few who survived.

“These films make connections with the present because understanding the past is important for understanding today’s contradictions,” says Marcelo Rubens Paiva. “What happened before interferes in the conflicts a country lives in today.”

So if authoritarians like Bolsonaro don’t come out of the blue, the same goes for other autocratic leaders, like President Trump.

Although founded on democratic principles, the U.S. itself has a long, muddled history with the concept. The authoritarian turn the country is reckoning with is part of a long legacy of inequality that stemmed from the 246-year institution of slavery. Following its abolishment in 1865 came a near-centurylong period of tension marked by racial segregation that we now refer to as “Jim Crow.”

“With some exceptions, the South was governed by a then-segregationist Democrat party — with [rampant] electoral fraud, authoritarianism, use of local police for political repression, and no chance for opposition, even [by] moderates,” says Arthur Avila, a history professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Brazil.

Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ended segregation and granted voting rights to people of all races — signed by then-President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Southern Democrat who broke away from the party’s history to spearhead progressive domestic policy — the decades that followed were ridden with manipulations of the electoral system. For example gerrymandering, or the practice of manipulating electoral district boundaries to favor one political party, is an ongoing, albeit controversial tactic among both Democrats and Republicans.

President Trump himself was federally prosecuted for election obstruction. The indictment alleged that, upon losing the 2020 election, Trump conspired to overturn the results and manipulate the public by spreading false claims of election fraud on social media. It argued that this, in turn, stoked a mob of his supporters into leading the deadly Jan. 6 attacks on the Capitol; but the case was dismissed upon his reelection in 2024.

In the lead-up to the midterm elections in November, Trump has pushed for federal control over elections, restrictions on mail-in voting and the addition of citizenship documents to vote, despite an existing federal law that already prohibits noncitizens from voting in U.S. elections. (He tried implementing the latter through an executive order in 2025, but it was permanently blocked by a federal court; a voter ID bill called the “SAVE America Act” is currently stalling in the Senate.)

“There’s a strong local authoritarian tradition in the U.S. that Trump himself feeds from,” says Avila.

Besides that, according to Avila, the country faces a growing “de-democratization” process from within. This shows in the rising control and dismantling of institutions by reactionary sectors — including efforts to block professional, educational and athletic programs promoting DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion — from what many critics and scholars have cited as lingering resentment from desegregation, he says.

“We may see it as a slow authoritarian turn in North American politics that didn’t overturn the democratic regime yet,” Arthur considers. “But if this process goes on, and that’s a conjecture, in the next decade the U.S. may become a state of exception that keeps democratic appearances but has been stripped of any democracy’s substance whatsoever.”

As movies such as “The Secret Agent and “I’m Still Here” remind us, a great deal of maintaining a democracy has to do with keeping a good memory.

“What can one person do but two people can’t?”

“Dream.”

I knew the 2025 film “Resurrection” (狂野时代) would be elusive the second I walked out of Amherst Cinema and into the cold air, boots gliding over tanghulu-textured ice. The snow had stopped falling, but I wished it hadn’t so that I could bury myself in my thoughts a little longer. But the wind hit my uncovered face, the oxygen slipped from my lungs, and I realized that I had stopped dreaming.

“Resurrection” is a love letter to the evolution of cinematography, the ephemerality of storytelling, and the raw incoherence of life. Structured like an anthology film and set in a futuristic dreamscape, humanity achieves immortality on one condition: They can’t dream. We follow the last moments before the death of one rebel dreamer, called the “Deliriant” or “迷魂者,” as he travels through four different dream worlds, spanning a century in his mind.

Being Bi Gan’s third film after the 2015 “Kaili Blues” (路边野餐) and the 2018 “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (地球最后的夜晚), “Resurrection” follows Gan’s directorial style of creating fantastical, atmospheric worlds. Jackson Yee, known for being a member of the boy group TFBoys, stars as the Deliriant and takes on a different identity in each dream, ranging from a conflicted father-figure conman to an untethered young man looking for love to a hunted vessel with a beautiful voice. His acting morphs unhesitatingly into each role, tailored to the genre of each dream. Of which, “Resurrection” leans into, with practice and precision.

Opening with a silent film that mimics those of German expressionist cinema, “Resurrection” takes the opportunity to explore the genres of film noir, Buddhist fable, neorealism, and underworld romance. The Deliriant’s dreams are situated in the years 1900 to 2000, as we follow the evolution of a century of competing cinematic visions. The characters don’t utter a single word of dialogue in the first twenty minutes, as all exposition occurs through paper-like text cards that yellow at the edges. I was worried it would be like this for the whole film, but I stayed in the theater that Tuesday night, the week before midterms, waiting for the first line of spoken dialogue to hit like the first sip of water after a day of fasting.

Through a massive runtime that spans two hours and 39 minutes, this movie makes you earn everything you get. Gan trains the audience’s patience with a firm hold on precision over the dials of the five senses and the mind.

The dreams may move forward in time through the cultures of the twentieth century, but on a smaller temporal scale, the main setting of each dream functions to tell the story of a day in reverse. The first dream, being a film noir, is told on a rainy night. Without giving any more spoilers, the three subsequent dreams take place at twilight, during multiple sunny afternoons, and then at sunrise. “Resurrection” does not grant sunlight so easily; we are given momentary solace after being deprived of direct sunlight for a solid 70 minutes, until it is stripped from us again and we are dropped into the darkness of pre-dawn – not that I am complaining. I love a movie that knows what it wants the audience to feel. I felt a deep-seated ache as I watched the film, scooting closer to the edge of my seat.

“Resurrection” is a movie that is best watched in theaters, but a home speaker system or padded headphones in a dark room can also suffice. Some of its most gripping moments are controlled by sound. Loud, cluttered echoes of the world, whether from people chatting in a parlor or anxiety in a character’s head, are abruptly cut off with ringing silence and a suspended close-up shot. We are forced to reckon with what the character has just done. I knew I was a world away, but I was convinced and terrified at my own culpability and agency. If I were him, would I have done the same? I could only hear my thoughts fade away as we moved onto the next dream.

Beyond sight and sound, the plot also deals intimately with the senses of taste, smell, and touch, but you will have to watch the movie yourself to find that out.

My high school acting teacher once told us that whenever a character tells a story in a play, they are actually referencing the play’s overall narrative. This exact technique of using framed narratives as vessels of information foreshadowing drives coherence in a seemingly ambiguous, metaphorical anthology film. Instead of easy-to-follow tales that mimic the hero’s journey, we are taken through unadulterated, expansive explorations of characters and their aspirations. We never find out all the details of what or why something happens, as the Deliriant moves quickly through ephemeral lifetimes in each dream, literally dying to move onto the next, but we find closure nonetheless through the parallels between elements and the poetry of it all.

That is why I like to think of “Resurrection” as pure art. It is not bound by structure; it osmoses beyond borders. It is creation in the highest form; it is a movie that I will never be able to watch again.

Perhaps because the dream worlds are so intimate and gorgeous, the exposition for the actual futuristic society feels weak in comparison. We learn that there is a woman whose job is to hunt down Deliriants, but we don’t see the rest of the dystopian infrastructure that runs this system. However, I can understand this as a thematic choice to prioritize dreams over reality. Form follows function, and these omissions of detail compel us to forget the outside world.

What it means to “dream” is up for interpretation, and we never learn the specifics of why or how immortality is achieved. Instead, “Resurrection” compares dreaming to fire. We humans are like candles, the movie claims, with wax that could stand forever if never used. But what is the point in being candles if we are never lit?

The greatest reminder of “Resurrection” is our own mortality. Whether we run from the snow-dipped mountaintops to the back alleyways of rain-streaked Chongqing, we can never escape our own consequences. “Resurrection” gives me a great fear of death, but so does it reignite my conviction to live a life of mistakes and keep dreaming anyway.

Dreaming is nothing without death. Immortality is nothing without love. So, I stumbled back to my dorm that Tuesday night, the week before midterms, thinking about what I loved and feared losing. So few films can channel life and let it go with a gentle hand. I only watch movies to fall in love. I am in love, I am in love. I am so afraid.