In the 2018 film The Tale, director Jennifer Fox explores a childhood trauma by casting actors as herself at different ages, including as a grownup filmmaker. It’s a fascinating, unnerving bit of meta filmmaking, studying memory’s limits with almost reportorial curiosity. The Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari does something similar with the new movie Blue Heron, a semi-autobiographical piece whose structure loops in on itself, melding fact and fiction into a doleful portrait of a family tragedy. It has a softer touch than Fox’s film, though, and in that way perhaps obscures too much.

The film opens sometime in the late 1990s. A family of five — three brothers, one sister, their Hungarian immigrant parents — move to a new home near the British Columbia coast. This seems like a harmonious enough occasion; the house has light and space, and life appears to settle into a cozy rhythm. Young Sasha (Eylul Guven) is the only daughter, perhaps a bit lost in the rambunctious storm of her brothers, but she quickly finds friends in the neighborhood, embarking on a summer of little adventures and discoveries. 

Before too long, though, we detect a disturbance. Sasha’s eldest brother, Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), has entered into a serious brooding-teen phase — or, perhaps, something worse. He’s aloof and stubborn, seemingly deaf to his parents as they try to coax him back into the family fold. He walks away from a family trip to the beach and barely reacts to his mother’s anger and panic when she finally finds him loitering at a gas station hours later. Other increasingly erratic, reckless behavior ensues, and we peer in on the parents as they have fraught, hushed conversations about what to do with their troubled boy. 

Romvari drifts between perspectives; sometimes we are only privy to what Sasha overhears, in other moments we hover closely around mom (Iringó Réti) and dad (Ádám Tompa) as their marriage strains. He, some kind of artist and photographer, has a tendency to check out, only present for the rare moments when Jeremy is in a sunnier, friendlier mood. That parenting schism is maybe complicated by the fact that Jeremy is the child of the mother’s first marriage; caring as his adopted father can be, there is a certain distance between the men. 

But such contributing factors to Jeremy’s malaise are only lightly prodded at in Blue Heron, which is mostly interested in creating a delicate sense of mood and place, particularly the hazily recalled ramble of childhood. Romvari deftly synthesizes that kind of quotidian flow, days bleeding into one another as something significant foments at the margins of the everyday. The film on occasion calls to mind Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, which did a similarly convincing job of conjuring up the tones and textures of a life remembered in piecemeal, with both fondness and ache.

Blue Heron takes on a more robust intent about halfway through, as Romvari shifts into the present day, when Sasha is grown up (played by Amy Zimmer) and is doing a kind of investigation into her brother’s gradual estrangement from the family. Sasha, like Romvari, is a filmmaker, and is working on a project that involves interviewing social workers who have just reviewed her brother’s case, now decades old. Romvari weaves some documentary into the picture; these social workers, including one who worked directly with her family, are real people. Their voices add a crucial objectivity to Romvari’s recollections; here are the plain facts of the matter: unadorned and, in their way, dispassionate.

If Blue Heron is at all critical of a system that failed Jeremy, it is only subtly so. The film mostly exists as an exercise in further tilling personal earth that Romvari previously traversed in her short films. At times, especially toward the end of this fleet 90 minutes, I wanted something a bit more dramatically engaging. Romvari chooses to tell us what became of Jeremy (in very light detail) rather than show us in any real way. It’s not hard to understand why that decision might have been made, sensitive as the topic is to the filmmaker. But the turn to something like plainspoken didacticism makes Blue Heron feel slighter than it perhaps should. We lilt through Sasha’s past and are then simply given a faint outline of what happened next. The steadily accumulated emotional weight of the film dissipates rather quickly as it reaches its abrupt ending. 

Still, Blue Heron is an affecting, promising debut feature. Romvari smartly uses the stunning natural landscape of the area surrounding Vancouver to lend her film some cinematic heft. Her music choices, mournful and dreamy, also add a sense of significance. Retí’s is the standout performance, cogently mapping a mother’s tenacity buckling under a mounting feeling of helplessness at watching her child disappear into a mystery. One wishes we could be reunited with her later on in the story, but Romvari keeps the mother fixed in the past. Which may be a sad indication of what these sorry events did to each member of her family. But Ramvari doesn’t give us any specifics about that; perhaps some of the story is just for her. 

The tagline for “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” is “Some things are meant to stay buried.” That also applies to the misguided “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy,” which should definitely stay deep underground for eternity.

Let’s face it, Mummy has always been the lamest of the classic, old-school monsters, a grunting, slow-moving and poorly bandaged zombie. Dracula has a bite, after all, and Frankenstein’s monster has superhuman strength. What’s Mummy going to do? Lumber us to death?

Cronin evidently believes there’s still life in this old Egyptian cursed dude, despite being portrayed as the dim-witted straight guy in old Abbott and Costello movies or appearing as high priest Imhotep in the Brendan Fraser franchise.

So Cronin has resurrected The Mummy but grafted it onto the body of a demon possession movie. His Mummy is actually not a man at all, but a teenage girl who is controlled by an ancient demon and grunts a lot.

“Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” — the title alone is a flex, like he gets his name on this thing like Guillermo del Toro, John Carpenter or Tyler Perry? — is overly long, constantly ping-pongs between Cairo and Albuquerque, New Mexico, and after a sedate first half, plows into a gross-out bloodfest at the end that doesn’t match the rest of the film.

Cronin, behind the surprise 2023 horror hit “Evil Dead Rise,” is weirdly obsessed by toes and teeth, and while he gets kudos for having an Arabic-speaking main actor (a superb May Calamawy) and portraying real-feeling Middle Eastern characters, there’s a feeling that no one wanted to edit his weirder impulses, like some light, inter-family cannibalism.

It starts with the abduction of a Cairo-based family’s young daughter, who resurfaces eight years later in a 3,000-year-old sarcophagus, catatonic and showing symptoms of severe trauma. The sarcophagus literally has dropped out of the sky as part of a plane crash.

“She just needs our care and support and time,” the dad (Jack Reynor, remaining good despite the slog) says until his daughter starts moving like a feral creature, doing horror-movie bone cracking poses, projectile vomiting, creeping behind walls and eating bugs. You know, like most teenagers.

He teams up with our Cairo-based cop to unravel the mystery of what happened to his eldest daughter, who starts messing with her family — levitating some, hypnotizing others to slam their heads into wood beams, all with a creepy, sing-song voice. It’s The Mummy as influencer.

“We can’t fix her if we don’t know what happened to her,” says dad, who goes so far as consulting with an expert on the cursive writing system used for Ancient Egypt.

Cronin leans into all the horror cliches — storms, dollhouses, flickering lights, muttered spells, whacked-out cults, bathtubs filled with rotting water, skittering insects and random coyotes — to establish a staid and eerie foundation, only to go over-the-top gorefest at the end, which prompted laughter at a recent showing.

The Egyptian-U.S. detective story grafted onto this monster movie is a nice touch but gets lost, and there’s perhaps the weirdest use of The Band’s classic song “The Weight.” (Cronin also uses a Bruce Springsteen song).

In publicity material for the movie, Cronin reveals that he made his movie after realizing there hasn’t been a truly terrifying version made of “The Mummy.” He’s right. Even after his own offering.

“Lee Cronin’s The Mummy,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release that is in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for strong disturbing violent content, gore, language and brief drug use. Running time: 133 minutes. Half a star out of four.

At first glance, the horde of pedestrians — mostly young women — circling the streets of Santa Monica in late January appeared to be a run club. Indeed, many were dressed for it, wearing tennis shoes and baseball caps to evade the sweltering sun.

Upon closer inspection, though, the clues were visible: the group’s relaxed pace, the bountiful tote bags, the occasional flash of a paperback. This was no run club, but instead the Preoccupied literary social calendar’s Walking Book Club, a monthly L.A.-based event where readers take a 40-minute (or so) stroll with a featured author, followed by discounted shopping at a local bookstore.

January’s pick was Ali Rosen, who was promoting her romance novel, “The Slow Burn,” at one of the more unconventional stops on her book tour. Although these days, as many fan-facing authors know, the “unconventional” book event is becoming increasingly, well, conventional. Driven by Gen Z and millennial organizers eager to shed the isolation of the pandemic era, events ranging from book crawls to silent reading parties are successfully turning time spent with literature into happening social occasions.

The book crawl

When Allison Ambili Kumar moved to L.A. in 2023, she said she was “overwhelmed in a good way” by the sheer volume of local bookstores and authors. But she also noticed that the market was saturated with author panels and conversations while lacking spaces where book lovers could interact with each other more organically.

“I feel like it expands my love for reading and expands my understanding of the stories that I’m reading when I do that in community,” says Allison Ambili Kumar, who coordinates book crawls across L.A.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

This led Kumar to launch a book crawl, inspired by her reading of “The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters” by Priya Parker. In Kumar’s book crawls, a traveling party of literary buffs bookstore hop, usually visiting at least three in one L.A. area. The idea is that readers can connect in a casual, welcoming environment, all the while increasing visibility for independent bookstores.

Kumar hosted her first book crawl in 2024 in Culver City and has since taken the event to Long Beach, Hollywood and Pasadena. Selected bookstores included legacy shops like Chevalier’s Books and Vroman’s as well as newer ventures like Village Well Books & Coffee and Bel Canto Books. (Book crawls are also a national trend beloved by many a TikToker, with last April marking the first synchronized Global Book Crawl.)

Some of Kumar’s favorite parts of the events are the “book hauls,” when, after each stop or at the end of the day, participants share what they picked up, show-and-tell style.

“I definitely think there’s a heightened joy in sharing what we love about the stories we love, and it also allows us a deeper level of understanding, given that you and I could read the same book and love it, hate it, feel differently about it, have different things that resonated with us from it,” Kumar said.

While Kumar’s book crawls on average draw about 20 attendees each, she said the community that’s formed around them is much larger.

“A lot of our walkers are coming every month, regardless of who the author is,” says the Preoccupied Walking Book Club co-host Morgan Messing.

(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)

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“Events are wonderful,” she said, “but it’s also taken on a life of its own, where people who’ve met on the book crawls are sharing a hotel room together for a romance conference this weekend, and we have our group chat, where people ask if anyone’s going to events at Village Well or the Ripped Bodice, so they can sit together.”

Danielle Dutta, who attended Kumar’s first book crawl in Culver City, began multiple friendships that way: messaging mutual social media connections about whether they were attending an upcoming book event.

“I mean, how else do you make friends as an adult?” Dutta said with a laugh.

The Walking Book Club

Samantha Dockser and Morgan Messing of the Preoccupied launched their literary platform in 2024 to provide a centralized resource for book lovers and authors to keep track of all the “bookish” events, as they call them, happening around L.A.

The duo started their monthly event as an audiobook walking club — a structure which has seen success in other L.A. locales — but quickly realized their attendees were too invested in chatting with their fellow book lovers to maintain the imposed quiet.

“We were trying to think of a structure for an event that would be a low lift for an author and also encourage potential new readers of an author to join,” Dockser explained. With a casual setting and minimal enforced structure, the walking book club format felt right.

Messing, left, and Samantha Dockser, right, interview author Ali Rosen before January’s Walking Book Club.

(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)

Messing said she sees the reading community as “age-blind,” and the club’s attendance reflects that. Still, many regulars fall in the Gen Z to millennial range.

“I 100% agree that the strongest voices in shaping what the book space looks like are people that are in their 20s currently or were when TikTok popped off in 2020,” Dockser said, at least when it comes to fiction.

To that demographic, self-identifying as a reader is about more than “the literal act of reading a book,” she said. It means you see book-buying as a hobby, frequent book events and share a social circle with other readers.

Ironically, those most invested in the in-person elements of the reading hobby often had their first exposure to the book community online.

Early in the reign of social media, Messing said, there was much fearmongering about how these digital platforms spelled the death of reading.

“It’s honestly beautiful the way that TikTok and Instagram book spaces have taken something that people felt shy about and made it a space where they feel comfortable being themselves and connecting with other people,” Dockser says.

(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)

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“It’s actually done just the opposite,” the co-founder said. “It’s given readers community and introduced non-readers to books and even brought people to physical bookstores because people want to post their books on their social media.”

L.A.-based author Joss Richard, who promoted her swoony second-chance romance “It’s Different This Time” with the Preoccupied’s Walking Book Club in October, said events like Dockser and Messing’s are great for reader engagement and bring a welcome dose of fun. And while it can be tricky to navigate these more atypical formats, especially ones that involve parading down local streets with a swarm of buzzing fans at your back, Richard said most attendees of the Preoccupied’s club knew the drill.

“Rarely is it anyone’s first time going to one of those things,” the author said. That’s especially true of romance readers, who are generally regarded as the social butterflies of the book community.

Richard is sure to see many book event frequenters when she speaks on a romance panel at the L.A. Times Festival of Books April 18.

The silent reading party

The first meeting of Martha Esquivias’ reading club LB Bookworms consisted of the club founder and one of her friends casually reading together at a coffee shop. In the months that followed, Esquivias’ pet project grew into a series of what she called “reading picnics.” She and a few others would read outside in a format she credited to the international Silent Book Club, which has several chapters across L.A.

Martha Esquivias of LB Bookworms regularly co-hosts silent reading parties in collaboration with Cool Cat Collective in Long Beach.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

Esquivias liked that the structure diverted from that of a traditional book club, which requires significant commitment and coordination.

“With this option, it feels like it’s less pressure and more ‘come and go,’” she said.

Coming of age during the social media boom, Esquivias said she always felt like she wasted her childhood on screens when she should have been playing outside or exploring hobbies. In many ways, plugging into the literary community and falling in love with reading again have healed that sense of loss.

“After the pandemic, there’s been huge talk about finding third spaces or community spaces. I think people crave that more,” she said, adding that she’s proud LB Bookworms has provided that to so many people.

“This is why I started this bookstore: I love community. I want to create a space where people connect with each other,” Sunny’s Bookshop owner Sanaz Tamjidi said.

(Malia Mendez / Los Angeles Times)

Sanaz Tamjidi, owner of Sunny’s Bookshop in Tarzana, last year hosted a silent reading event in collaboration with the L.A. chapter of “reading party” organizer Reading Rhythms.

Tamjidi, a self-proclaimed “zillennial,” said her bookstore’s events are popular among younger customers, who are increasingly seeking out social gatherings that don’t involve drinking or partying.

When Tamjidi told some older customers about the silent reading party, she said they were perplexed, asking, “Wait, so they would come and sit with each other, not talk, but just read silently?”

“They were like, ‘Times have changed,’” Tamjidi said, “and that’s the beauty of it.”